loglog

We have visitors from the US this weekend, Alison’s friend Ina and her daughter Esmée. We were at Esmée’s adoption ceremony a couple of years ago. In the meantime she grew a lot and became quite an explorer. So Alison went with them to the Biodome and they saw, besides a lot of other kids and grown-ups, a lot of animals.

Esmée was pretty pooped out when they returned.

The walls at the back of our house are in not so good shape. The whole wall has to be re-pointed at some day, but not this year, since it’ll cost a few thousand dollars. Repointing involves removing the cement between the bricks with a grinder and putting in new cement. Also cracked bricks should be replaced and the brick is sand blasted or cleaned with a pressure washer. I theoretically could do this myself, but I don’t feel like it since it’s a dirty and awkward job, better left to people that specialize in it. Maybe Alison’s brother Steven can help me, he is a stonemason. But he lives in England at the moment, and we’ll see if/when he comes back.

The few rows of brick that are just above our back porch are in really bad shape. I suspect that people (Alison lives in this house for 10 years now) didn’t remove the snow from the porch for many years and that eventually the melting and re-freezing of the snow caused the damage. The grout is missing, the bricks are cracked and they crumble when you touch them. So on this patch Irt of the wall needed to do something now to preserve the wall for a couple of years until we do the real job, and replace all 20 or so of those bad bricks.

And because it’ll get too cold to do any brick work soon, it had to be done now. I had postponed it for a couple of weeks already, but now I was home, so I went to work. Yes, my ribs did hurt, and sometimes even a lot, but according to the chiropractor doing things won’t prolong the healing process. It just hurts.

The job is done now, and I only need to seal the edge of the porch with caulking tomorrow and we’re ready for the winter.

[Photo taken with my phone, and isn't of good quality, but it was wirelessly transferred to my computer while the phone was still on the kitchen table. Technology is so great, sometimes...]

Alison was in Toronto last week so I had to be my own nurse the last couple of days. That was probably okay because I would have kept her awake with my swearing, moaning and cries of pain.

Tonight she came home and when she came in we experienced a scene straight out of a play. I told her that my pain was much less today except when I coughed, laughed or sneezed. She smiled and I couldn’t help myself to start laughing. That was very painful so I started to cry as well. Not cry with tears, but cry of pain. In the meantime the whole situation was so absurd and comical that I couldn’t stop laughing. It was like I had taken too much drugs and had a laughing fit that wouldn’t stop, even though I wanted it very much to stop. I send her away in the kitchen and the things eased out a little an the ordeal finally stopped. But as soon as i saw her again the whole the sequence of laughter and pain started again and it repeated itself a couple of times during the evening. Very absurd and very painful.

Still I’m happy that she’s back, but I try very hard not to be too happy.

I fell from the stairs today and bruised some ribs. It happened before I started work. I ran up the inside stairs in the apartment we are working in. I always run up stairs, never walk. The door beneath blew open because a gust of wind, so i turned a ran down in the same movement. The next thing I know is that my feet slid away under me and I fell backwards, banging the back of my head on a stair. My rib cage hit another stair and for a few seconds I was gaping for air, unable to utter a sound. After that I started to yell, so loud that somebody came all the way from the park at the other side of the street to see if I was okay. I tried all limbs and they seemed to still work. I then slowly got up and that also worked, although it was very painful.

And now I’m lying in bed and every movement hurts like hell. After I get in or out of bed I literally have to catch my breath from exhaustion. I went to see a chiropractor this afternoon and he told me that a couple of ribs were slightly bruised and the muscles that keep your back together were very tense. He said it won’t take too long to heal though. Let’s hope he’s right. Alison is in Toronto so I have to take care of myself and the dogs. I’ll manage, but with difficulty.

After spending a couple of evenings after work making a shelving unit that goes on top of the desk I finally delivered the desk today at the client’s house. The desk is so big it doesn’t fit in my car and I didn’t want to put it onto the roof-rack because it might crack. So I rented a cheap UHaul truck that turned out to be fairly expensive after all, because it consumed almost 1 litre of gas for every kilometre driven.

I decided not to paint the desk myself because I’m just too tired after a full day of work to spend an hour painting every day. So one of the clients is now going to paint it, but they can’t make up their mind what colour it is going to be. We’ll see.

This flight home to Montréal is the first time Alison and I fly together in the same plane. Because I often stay a bit longer in the Netherlands and buy my tickets far in advance we always travelled separately. But now we sat next to each-other and I could actually bend over her and peek out the window once in a while without getting slapped in the face. What a luxury!

Because we were early and close to Winnipeg’s airport we had some time to visit Lower Fort Garry. This was the basis the Hudson Bay Company used for their exploration and exploitation of Northern Manitoba. It’s also the place were Treaty Number One was signed, a treaty with the Native tribes of Canada that turned out to be far more profitable for the white Westerners than for the original inhabitants of Canada.

It’s still hard for me to grasp that most of Western Canada was owned by the Hudson Bay Company and later sold to Canada.

The Hudson Bay Company that still exists today and has a large chain of department stores (think “Bijenkorf” for the Dutch readers of loglog) was recently sold to an American investor.

We had almost given up hope. It was getting dark, it drizzled and we were cold and exhausted. So we decided to leave the wild life viewing spot and hiked back to the car. And then there was a noise in the woods and a big moose crossed our path. He was very close and didn’t pay us much attention but just kept going its way. Our hearts were pounding, it was the first moose for both of us.

Too bad this photo was taken in The Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg and the moose in the previous paragraph was non-existant. We saw a lot of geese but no meese. Hecla island was almost deserted, the season was definitely over. The campsite closed, all shops closed and we couldn’t even find the hiking trail that was on our map. So we walked in a slight drizzle that later turned into rain along the shore over boulders and pebbles. We did see a couple of American Bald Eagles though, but they were pretty far away. Huge birds with a wingspan of 2 metres. And even though we had a bear cannister we didn’t see a bear either.

In the evening we decided to head back towards Winnipeg and camp somewhere there so we wouldn’t have to get up at 6 in order to catch our flight home.

Yesterday we checked out off the expensive hotel and went to a Provincial park that has a march where a lot of geese gather every night to spend the night. The geese are loading up food to prepare for the big annual trek South. I took some pictures, but it was very dark and you don’t see any geese. Last night we camped for 11 dollars. I must say slept just as good on my Thermarest mattress in our tent than in the soft hotel bed. It’s thanksgiving weekend and this camp site is in another provincial park very close to Winnipeg. So there are lots of people with big pick-up trucks full of beer and firewood who had a party last night. One of our neighbours was snoring very loud but still I slept very well.

Today we’re heading north to an island in Lake Winnipeg to hike and maybe we’ll see some moose. Unfortunately the weather has changed and it is grey, rainy and cold. In combination with the totally flat landscape it really reminds me of the Netherlands. No, I’m not homesick…

While walking in a shopping mall in Winnipeg I encountered this shop. First I thought it was a porn theatre but then I found out that they just sold tobacco products. No advertising of any sorts, blinded store and a big age restricted warning sign: Apparently tobacco is the true source of evil in Manitoba, the first step towards crack-cocaine and chrystal meth use.

On the other hand in Québec you can buy cigarettes at every depanneur, magazine store and supermarket.