loglog

Alison is baking a big cake for tomorrow, but this picture is merely here to proof to a Dutch friend of mine that we still have, and use, plastic milk bags around here. In the Netherlands they discarded those in the 70’s.

I’m going to help renovate someone’s bathroom next week and today she took me along to shop for a bath tub. She wants one of those old bath tubs with lion’s feet and she had been looking for a nice one (wide and long, but not too long for her bathroom) for a while. She thought she had found the ONE in a shop very close to our house so I went along for inspection. It looked alright to me, a bit pricey but she was not too bothered by that. The tub will be refinished with new email and repainted on the outside. When it returns from the re-finisher I’ll install new taps, a shower head and a shower curtain. But before that we have to remove the old bath first.

Too bad the tub doesn’t have lion claw feet but pigeon claw feet. If you ever been on the Dam square in Amsterdam you know why.

It’s pretty awful when, as a landlord, you have to go to the Régie du Logement (the rental board of Québec).

Our costs went up considerately compared to those of the old owner because the value of the building is much higher now so both our property taxes and the insurance premium went up considerably. We’re paying more than twice the premium as the previous owner, partly because she was underinsured.

Since we want to be good landlords we used a online form provided by the Régie to calculate exactly how much we legally could raise the rent. And even tough I showed them the calculations and I was willing to show them all our bills, all of our tennants refused the proposed rent increase. That is their right but still.

Our tenants pay a really low rent. We know, because we also enjoyed such a low rent when we were tenants. When I tell people the rent our tenants pay for their apartments they always shake there heads in disbelief. It could be easily twice as much.
The problem is that the rents were so low that the owner couldn’t afford the maintenance anymore. So we really have to increase the rent in order to be able to do some major repairs to the house. We don’t have much savings left and some things just need to be done in the next couple of years.

So to the Régie I went, expecting to encounter long lines of other disgruntled landlords. It was raining heavily and their offices are in an office building in the Olympic Village. So I wasn’t in a good mood when I finally got there. But no, there was nobody before me and a friendly man helped me with my application. He was handicapped and filling out my forms went rather slow so I asked him if I could help. “Yeah, sure!,” he replied, so I ended up copying the alterations he made to one of the forms to the other 11 forms.

Then they all got a big stamp on them, and I had to pay almost 200 dollars in fees.
Now we’ll have to wait for the day of the hearing, when the Régie will decide what the new rents of our tenants will be. I hope they will be high.

It’s difficult to be an evil landlord, but I’m getting better at it every day.

I stumbled over an entry at Wikipedia’s style guide on the use of weasel words:

Weasel words are words or phrases that seemingly support statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources, lending them the force of authority without letting the reader decide whether the source of the opinion is reliable.

The funny bit comes after that where they take Montréal as an example:

The emergence of weasel-worded statements often has its roots in biased or normative statements, e.g. “Montréal is the best city in the world”. Often, people who are convinced that some statement or other is true naturally want to see it mentioned in the articles where it is relevant; however, statements such as these tend to jump out at the reader as obvious opinion-stated-as-fact and quickly get rooted out. The problem of the weasel words starts when an editor realizes this and attempts to remedy the situation by modifying the statement to at least admit that it is not necessarily factual, e.g. “Some people say Montréal is the best city in the world. ”

I’ll try to avoid weasel words in the future even though Montréal is the best city in the world.

For our last day of cross country skiing we head out very far North, because it is supposed to be cold there. Unfortunately it turns out there is much less snow there that in the region more to the South. But it is too late to go back so we go out on the trails anyway. The major trials are indeed very icy, but when we take the difficult trails that go steep up (and down) the hills the snow is sufficient and barely threaded. On one trail we are even the first in 5 days or so and we have to break trail. Only some animals have gone here before. We don’t know what kind of animal though. The tracks are to small for a bear so may be it was a wolf or just a feral dog. Anyway we enjoy the skiing, even (or especially) the adrenaline inducing descent.

We have lunch is a hunting hut, perched high in the air between two trees. Anne also practises rock climbing (although I met her in a different setting) so climbing up the steep slightly overhanging ladder poses no problem.
We enjoy our “lunch with a view”, but don’t see any deer, bear or moose.

In the Laurentians there is not as much new snow as in the region of Québec City, but enough to have a really nice time. Paul, my Dutch friend who lives in Montréal, joins Anne and myself, so we form a genuine Dutch Ski Team. Here its starts to snow while in the Netherlands, it’s 15 degrees and raining.

When you come back after a snowstorm you don’t have to dig out your car, but you do have to dig out your parking space.

The Plains of Abraham, once the location of numerous battles that changed the history of North-America, is now a park with a couple of cross-country trails.
With the 30 cm of freshly fallen snow, we really enjoy skiing there.