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Hallo’Ween is wildly popular in Québec, even though it is an Irish and later English custom. Quebeckers are usually not doing the Anglophone holidays like Thanksgiving, but for Hallo’ween they seem to make an exception. Grown-ups are dressed up on the street and in shops, houses are transformed into scary places with carved pumpkins and lots of fake cobwebs and there are lots of parties. And of course there are the children, who dress up in a nice costume and go door to door to collect candy.

This tradition is totally unknown to me. being Dutch but Googling learned me that children who do ‘Trick or Treat’ are part of a long tradition.

“The custom of ‘trick or treat’ probably has several origins. Again mostly Irish. An old Irish peasant practice called for going door to door to collect money, bread cake, cheese, eggs, butter, nuts, apples, etc., in preparation for the festival of St. Columbus Kill. Yet another custom was the begging for soul cakes, or offerings for one’s self – particularly in exchange for promises of prosperity or protection against bad luck. It is with this custom the concept of the fairies came to be incorporated as people used to go door to door begging for treats. Failure to supply the treats would usually result in practical jokes being visited on the owner of the house.”

Since I don’t want practical jokes (ah well, maybe I do) I gave all children that dared to ring at our door and didn’t run away when the dogs started barking (and of course Pepe escaped once) a box of Smarties. A small box (it contains 11 smarties) but still I hope their dental insurance will be good. I don’t want to be a schoolteacher though. The sugar-high that all those kids have tomorrow will be too much to handle. Some carried garbage bags full of candy. Not these kids in the picture, they had small bags and were just doing it for the fun. I was happy to see some coloured faces in our mainly white, Francophone neighbourhood. And no, I don’t mean make-up.

Here you can read more about ‘trick or treat’.

Cleaning the house from all the dust that accumulated during the duration of the renovation. Even though I’m a clean worker building always causes some mess. And now we have regained control over the house again.
Next project: Bookcases, so my books can finally leave the boxes that they’re in for already more than two years. I want to design a nice looking, modern bookcase that is practical as well.

Well, not exactly, I still have to add some small tiles under the closet and do some caulking, but it’s 99% done. So we moved all the bathroom stuff into the bathroom and into the new closet and I moved all my tools out of the living room. Finally…

Last night Alison suggested I sleep on the other side of the bed. I never sleep on that side, never did in my life and for some reason the result was that this morning my knee was really painful. The left meniscus of my right knee hurts, but only when I’m inactive. So in the morning or after I sat for a while.
I wasn’t sure if I’d go to my dance class today, but after I bought this knee brace, I went with the intention to stop when it would hurt. However I had no pain at all, and made even a couple of big leaps and jumps. Afterwards Alison and I had supper and then it started to hurt again. Hopefully it isn’t serious, I’ve spend already too much on physiotherapy this year. And the ski season is coming soon!

Finally the bathroom is ready to paint.

I spend the last couple of days making a new bathroom closet. Made from plywood, because my normal choice of material, MDF or Medium Density Fibre board, wouldn’t survive another leakage.
The choice of doors was a hard one. Sliding doors would be awkward because half of the entry to the closet would always be blocked. But folding doors would stick out too much and would potentially be ruined when they hit the bathroom door. So I made two folded doors and had them slightly go into the closet so they don’t interfere with the bathroom door. Things turned out pretty well.

The temperatures are falling and it becomes time to start heating the house. We live on the ground floor and our apartment has a hot air furnace. I don’t like that at all. It’s expensive because very inefficient (and our furnace is 40 years old, so even more energy goes up in smoke), it causes allergies because of the dry air and all the dust it pumps into the air.

So this year I decided to clean the ducts. Fortunately there were already holes cut in the ducts to access their insides, probably from previous cleaning. I opened the panels, started up my very powerful woodworking vacuum cleaner, and dug in. Later, inspired by this picture, I made and extension stick, with a brush and a flashlight attached to it, so I could vacuum and see what I was doing in the darker regions of the ductal cavities.

With the McGill Outdoors Club I went for a hike in the Upper Laurentians, about 250 km North-west of Montréal. It rains during the long drive but when we start the hike it miraculously dries and even the sun comes out. After a couple of hours we get a few showers but it is never totally awful.
And when we set up camp at a camp site, just after it got dark, and we start cooking meals on three stoves in three groups. I’m in the vegetarian group, and we even prepare a vegan meal, because one of us is vegan. While we are eating our couscous with vegetables and tofu we look in amazement to the stuff that comes out our fellow backpacker’s backpacks: someone brought a cook-set of pots with glass lids. Another thought she really needed a whole pound of butter, and we also spotted a full bottle of Tabasco.

No wonder they were so slow when going up the mountain. I, by far the oldest, and also one of the heaviest, was certainly not the slowest. Nobody even noticed that I was so much older, as they almost all asked what I studied.

I thought another tooth than the one that broke a couple of days was the target of today’s visit to the dentist but I was wrong. So the tooth probably felt it was about time it got a Cerec. A Cerec is sort of a filling/crown that is made from a ceramic block. The ceramic they use is almost identical in properties as the natural tooth and because of that it is extremely strong and will stay in my mouth for many decades.
The block of ceramic material is milled to the right shape in a mini robotic milling machine to the exact shape and size of the hole in my tooth. To define the shape of that hole the dentist took a picture with a special camera with 7 lenses. The computer then makes a 3-dimensional image of my tooth and the dentist forms the shape of the top of the filling on the computer screen, in a sort of 3-dimensional Photoshop application. It’s really easy (it’s done in one session with only one freezing), really fast (the whole procedure takes 2 hours) and very expensive (CAD $ 900).
Fortunately our dental insurance pays a part of that.