loglog

I know these little critters are considered a pest, and are regularly classified as rats, but at least they are busy and beautiful rats.

This one literally dropped dead in front of our house. She didn’t seem to be ill and had a gorgeous coat and tail. Since I found her straight under a transformer in the electricity pole my guess is that she was electrocuted while touching the high voltage while grounded. Or maybe she just missed when she jumped from one tree to another. Even circus trapeze artists sometimes miss.

I picked her up, put her in a bag (”See, Buy, Fly”, from the Dutch airport tax free shops; I thought that was appropriate) and walked towards the passing garbage truck and put her in there myself. She was very stiff, and heavier than I expected.

Where are adults allowed to play with mud, and, on top of it, getting paid as well? Only in the bathroom and shower construction trade.

I’m doing a so-called “mud job”. It involves shaping a lot of mortar —a mix of cement, sand and water— into a shallow bowl so when you take a shower all the water flows toward the drain. The client has chosen fairly irregular slate tiles, so the pitch has to be more pronounced than normal. After the cement dries, I’ll apply a waterproof membrane, so the shower isn’t going to leak, and on top of that the tiles will be laid. An convoluted process, but it will result in a shower that last a long time. Unlike many Québec tunnels and bridges these days, whose concrete starts to crack and crumble.

The last couple of days I told Linde that there is not much crime here ó after which she promptly forgot to close the guestroom window when she went away.

But I spoke too soon, because last night someone smashed in my car window. He (let’s assume it wasn’t a she) only stole a $40 iPod charger, and cut the cord that went into the cassette player, but the damage done was much bigger. The back window is also scratched, and is loose in it’s fitting, so I might need to replace that as well.

I made a tour along the alley and at least three more cars had smashed windows. I talked to one of the owners and she had 10 CDs stolen. It looks very much like a junkie who needed easy money.

So now I have to go to the police to file a report, and to the car window company to ask for a quote. I have a deductible for the insurance, so it probably won’t be worth it to claim the damage. Grrrr.

Update: Police rapport filed (they even helped me 10 minutes before their official opening time). Window will be replaced today. Total replacement cost 550$.

Update 2: I just noticed that the thief also stole a packet of dropjes (Dutch liquorice) that I kept in the car. And the window replacement guys found a ring, that isn’t mine nor Alison’s so might have been of the thief. He has big fingers and a bad taste in jewellery.

We’re having a lot of Dutch visitors lately. Last week my sister Aagje and brother-in-law Steven came by to have supper with me, before they continued their “Eastern North America in 3 weeks”-tour. We sat in the garden, listened to the crickets and my sister told me that they had visited Montréal’s highlights by luxury coach that day but both the driver and the tour guide got lost in the “no left turns” Montréal traffic situation. If your map says to turn left and the traffic signs forbid it, navigating our city can be quite hard. The next day they were heading for Ottawa (half a day) and Toronto and so forth. I couldn’t travel that way, it would be too superficial, but they like it. They’ve seen a lot of the world this way over the past ten years.

And yesterday Linde arrived. She’ll stay a bit longer in Montréal, about 4 months. She’s going to be an exchange student at McGill University, and is the daughter of one of my readers. Through a comments on loglog she ended up in our guestroom. (So if you want to be our guest, you know what to do next.) Linde won’t stay for 4 months in our guestroom, she’s looking for a room to rent. Today, her first day in Montréal, she went out and already saw several rooms. She even said yes to one of them. But now she has buyer’s remorse and is in doubt if she shouldn’t look at a couple more rooms in shared apartments.

It’s difficult for Dutch people to do these things: in the Netherlands finding a room (or a house for that matter) is really hard, so if you find something you immediately take it. Here you can be a bit more picky.

The dogs like her, and she’s an excellent guest. Alison suggested, over the phone, that we should adopt her.

During the week I’m working on clients’ projects and in the weekend on our own house. The joys of homeownership!
Our neighbour, a fellow woodworker, also knows his metalwork. So I hired him to fix our metal fire escape in the back. He braces the undersized pole that holds up the whole structure (that needs to be replaced with a bigger one in a year or two) and welds some holes here and there.

It feels strange to see somebody else working hard, and not being able to help. My tools aren’t here, and I would just be in his way. So while I hear the sound of his grinder I’m writing this post. My hands itch but I have to contain myself.

When he’s done we can start scraping the stairs and balconies, and then painting them. That’ll be a major job, involving many, many weekends.

For all readers who wants to read loglog in their RSS reader I’ve now enabled full feeds. You now not only get the photos but also the words, so you don’t have to click through anymore. If there are any problems please let me know.

Update 29 September, 2008:

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The bathroom renovation is going fine, albeit slow. Along the way we found a lot of things that also need to be changed or updated. Like the plumbing that had so many turns in them that it would be very easy to get clogged (and really hard to unclog). So I replumbed the toilet, the shower, the bath, the washing machine and the wash basin.

All of this will be under a slate tile floor, so it better be good. I hope I didn’t make any mistakes. That’s what I don’t like about plumbing, you’re never 100% sure if it won’t start to leak after a couple of weeks/months/years. The only way to fix it then is through the ceiling of the downstairs neighbours. They usually don’t like that.

The nice thing of bathroom (and kitchen) renovations is that you have to wear so many hats. Some days I demolish something, frame a wall, fish electricity cables, plumb a bathtub and lay a floor. Very varied work indeed.

The real reason for my presence in Toronto is that Alison has a team building meeting with all the members of her team. And the partners were expressly requested to come as well, and dogs and children also. I left Poupoune and Pepe at home though, since they’re not allowed in the train and I didn’t want to drive that far after a busy week at work.

The meeting was held in one of Alison’s colleagues’ cottage in the Muskokas, a two hour drive north of Toronto. We rented a car and upon arrival we found that everybody brought their toddlers, so there were enough small creatures. And they all swam, canoed, kayaked, barbecued, tanned, and chatted. So now I can put faces to names when Alison mentions her colleagues. Halfway I started to order the huge amount of toys that belonged to the son of our hosts. All cars and bulldozers (O, I wish I had those Tonka trucks when I was a kid) in a row, all the spades together. And the balls, the buckets, the fishes, the rings et cetera, et cetera. In the end I made a huge and very unstable tower of a few toys that were hard to categorize. It stood upright for a couple of minutes, until a breath of wind cased it to tumble down… People enquired if I suffered from OCD, and that made me laugh. They should see the mess in my office.

The first time I arrived in Montréal was by train from Toronto. And now, almost 6 years later I took the train to Toronto. I hadn’t been there in the past six years and since Alison was already staying there in the Royal York hotel, it was not that expensive. Through Alison I also got a free upgrade to VIA 1, so I travelled first class, with free wine and a meal. Nice. It’s so nice to be able to stare out the window and watch the landscape going by. When I drive I can never do that, since I’m never a passenger, and always have to watch the road. Maybe it’s time that Alison gets a drivers license.

(O, and on the way back I forgot my laptop again. But two days later, when the Lost & Found office opened on Monday, I had it back again. I’m so lucky. And stupid to keep testing the honesty of Canadians…)

When I immigrated to Canada I put only a few food items in my shipping container. Lots of dropjes (Dutch Liquorice) of course but also a box with twelve tin bottles of this sirup. It is grapefruit flavour (100% concentrated juice and sugar) and it’s the best sirup I’ve ever tasted. And I can’t get it here. Sure I can buy various sirups in the import stores but they’re all the regular flavours like lemon, berries and mint. But no grapefruit. And this sirup, with some water or soda water makes a perfect drink. Not too sweet and with just a hint of bitterness.

Over time the stash was used up but some visitors brought new bottles and I also brought back a few bottles myself every-time I went back to the Netherlands to visit my mother. My suitcase was usually quite heavy.

Today, when I opened a new bottle I was in for a bad surprise. It stank. And the reddish liquid had turned all brown and gooey. I checked the “best before” date and it said July 2004. Oops. I checked all five bottles I still had in stock and they all had the same date. Quintuple oops.

Apparently I had put all the newer bottles in front of the original batch of 2003 so those bottles had plenty of time to go bad. Darn. Now I have to go back to the Netherlands soon, I only have one bottle left. And my suitcase will be very heavy.