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Sunday, Alison and I did a quiz from the book “The seven principles for making marriage work” (It’s written by John Gottman, who is also featured in Malcom Gladwell’s book “Blink”.)

It was a simple questionnaire about what you know about your partner’s preferences/likes/dislikes et cetera. One of the questions was “What is your partner’s favourite dessert?”. I answered “CrËme brulée” (that was easy), but Alison couldn’t name my favourite dessert. I couldn’t name it either, because I like a lot of desserts, but decided finally on the Dutch “Griesmeelpudding met bessensap”. Of course that’s just a bout of nostalgia, because my mother never made it and I only got it when I stayed at an aunt. But I remember I fondly liked it there.

But nevertheless, today Alison surprised me by making “Griesmeelpudding met bessensap” the North-American way: Semolina Pudding with Currant Sauce. It tasted pretty yummy, only the “bessensap” was a bit too sweet to my taste.

It’s Labour Day and Alison celebrates that by going in to work. She has a presentation tomorrow and needed to get all her data ready.

It’s 2:00 AM in the morning now and she’s still not home. I’m going to bed.

[Update: The meeting of the presentation was postponed to Friday, the day Alison would have taken off to compensate for working on Labour Day. This makes the whole thing even more silly.]

It rained a lot today and the fibreglass seems to work fine. The water just forms beads on it and rolls of it effortless. The old porch just soaked ahlf of it up in its rotting planks.

I found a supplier for fibreglass and decided to tackle the back porch myself. Covering it in fibreglass reinforced polyester will make it weather resistant for a couple of decades or so, without it having to be repainted every two years.

I had some experience with polyester since I built a couple of windsurf boards when I was young and later we used it to manufacture parts of the climbing walls we built. But still it’s a messy and stressful undertaking. You have to work fast because the polyester will cure and then you can’t continue. And you shouldn’t topple over a full container with your foot, like I did. Fortunately it dripped on the new soil that I’d put there a couple of weeks ago and not on the concrete. Now it will just harden and then we can throw it away. My shoe is now also completely blue-grey and my foot was too, but I cleaned it with acetone. Can’t use acetone to clean the shoe, because it’s made out of foam (they’re Crocs, made in Québec) and it might dissolve in acetone.

The result looks quite nice, I mixed the colour myself because their standard colours were quite dull.