logloglog

A month ago I was still skiing, and today I had my first swim. Welcome to Québec, where winter right goes into summer.

The water wasn’t very cold, I’m not a hardened swimmer. It was just nice to cool off after the walk. Poupoune also went in, so she was definately feeling much better.

Loglog almost killed Poupoune.

During a walk in the forest Poupone disturbed a big toad that hopped from the path into the leaves alongside the path. After the first hop, the toad played dead and Poupoune couldn’t find it, even though it was right in front of her. Apparently toads don’t have much of a body odour.

I wanted to take a picture of both the toad and Poupoune for loglog, so I took my camera out of my backpack and aimed. But then the toad moved again, and Poupoune, very close now, grabbed it. She started shaking her head ferociously and both Alison and I thought it was an ex-toad. But the toad was already far away. The real reason Poupoune was shaking her head so violently was that she had her mouth full of toad poison.

She immediately started foaming from her mouth, licking her lips, and then trying to throw up. But not much came out of her, just some white foam. I tried to give her some water, but she wouldn’t drink. We went along but she kept vomiting foam and later some bile. She also started to have diarrhoea in the brightest green I’ve ever seen. After we had a rest and she vomited a couple of more times we went back to the car.

Alison was very worried, but I even made jokes like “I guess Pepe is going to outlive her”. Anyway, as you might have guessed, she survived, otherwise you would have found an obit here.

When we were near the car she was almost her old self again. She went into a puddle and drank some water and smiled again with her big happy smile.

When we went home I googled for ‘dog poisoned by toads’ and found we’ve been lucky. If we had lived in the American Mid-West or in Australia the toads would have been much more poisonous, and Poupoune might not have survived the ordeal.

I hope she has learned from this but I fear she hasn’t. She is, after all, a hunting dog. Well her terrier part, Chihuahuas don’t hunt, they just yap.

From an article in Der Spiegel:

Now, the average Dutchman is six centimeters taller than the average American.

This of course is not the case with this Dutchman, who’s fairly short for Dutch standards. Fortunately francophone Quebeckers are on average much smaller than their English speaking counterparts in the West and South, so I still am pretty tall here. Very useful in the Metro (when they’re not on strike).

I usually go to see a movie on Tuesday, because it is cheaper and because it’s sort of a tradition. It derived from the “Sneak Preview” back in Rotterdam where we went every Monday night to see a not yet released movie. Usually the movies weren’t very good (the distributors didn’t know if and how they were going to release the film, and needed our reaction to guide their decision) but we had beer (well, not me) and cigars (well, not them) afterwards and usually we left at closing time.

Here, in Montréal, it’s different. There are no pre-release screenings of small movies, even the pre-screenings of big movies are currently on hold because Montréal apparently is the centre of illegal movie recording. So Alison and I are going to ‘normal’ screenings although I often don’t tell her what movie we’re seeing so it’s a surprise for her.

Unfortunately, with her new job she’s almost always away on Tuesday, in that dreadful Toronto. So I have to go to the movies alone. And although I don’t mind too much it sometimes is more fun with more people.

Which brings me to the question of the day: Who wants to go see a movie with me tomorrow evening (the 22nd) around 7? The choice of movie can be negotiated, or I can choose for you, to keep in style. Since public transport will be problematic because of the strike of transit staff we have to go by bike or car.

Over the past weekends, Alison has been busy with gardening. Planting new shrubs (yellow, red and pagoda dogwood, hostas and ), moving others (raspberry, ferns) and even planting some annuals (impatience). The previous owner of this house left the garden as follows. A lawn with one path towards the end made of concrete tiles. The lawn was planted on maybe 10, 15 cm of soil and underneath that is a solid layer of gravel. Not exactly a nice underground for plants. Over the past 10 years Alison planted shrubs and trees, but since we have a lot of shade some plants doesn’t do very well.

I hate gardening, a dislike that originated since my early childhood, when my parents bought a house in the country with a lot of land that needed to be turned into a garden. So they spent enormous amounts of time (and money) in the garden and not playing with me. Or something like that.

It only dawned this past weekend, when I was helping Alison by digging some holes, there is another reason for disliking gardening. I’m a perfectionist and after you’ve planted new plants it looks so bad. So unfinished, so untidy, with these small plants surrounding by ugly patches of dirt. It takes long before things grow a bit and then they die again, are covered with snow (I like snow, it makes everything tidy :-) and then the next year they return all brown and with some luck they have survived the winter.

But that being said, I think our garden has improved immensely the last couple of weeks. It helps that we have competition: our new neighbour is also spending copious amounts of time working in her garden. Of course her gardening ideas are totally different from ours óshe has mulched beds with one plant every 50 cm, nearly all of them different speciesó but the competition works anyway.

I’m more happy moving the tap for the garden hose to another place, or building a fence. At least those things are finished when they’re done, and aren’t subject to the whims of mother nature.

It’s time for a picture of Poupoune. She’s still very happy when she can run and fetch the ball. And grumpy at other times, especially when Pepe is near her.

My brother-in-law Matthew is ill. Seriously ill, so serious that he is admitted to the hospital. He has been nauseous for a long time, trouble with eating and has been vomitting regularly. After several visits to the Emergency they finally recognized the seriousness of his condition.

The theory now is that the vomiting has caused a hole in his esophagus, so there is food and air leaking into his chest cavity. That is potentially a very dangerous thing because it can cause a serious infection. But so far everything is under control, the only thing is that he is not allowed to eat or drink for the next week, so his esophagus gets the rest it needs. After that they’re going to do tests and hopefully find out why he is so nauseous, because that’s not clear at all. They suspected the medication he’s taking for his schizophrenia to cause his vomitting, but apparently that’s no longer the case, since he’s back onto it right now. Which is a good thing.

We went to Ottawa to visit him, and he was happy to see us. We got him some DVDs because he’s very bored, being on a hospital with many old people that just lie in bed, while he can move around with his IV-drip on a wheeled pole. It’s beautiful weather, so we take him outside to sit in the sun.

Update: The day after this picture he was released from the hospital since new tests revealed the hole had apparently closed. He is allowed to eat again, albeit only fluid food for now. I hope they’re going to research him a bit further and find out what has caused this.

It was fun to see you all at “The Smoking Room”, thank you for coming!

(For the uninitiated, this event started out as a discussion on the Smoking Section weblog, hence the name. Only three people actually used the designated smoking room; I was one of them.)

The people who decided not to come don’t know what they’ve missed. But don’t despair, there will be new events like this (intimate gatherings of bloggers) held in the future.

It was cold and windy, so we didn’t spend much time outside. But the fence is finished so all is good.

We both worked hard in the garden to make it a bit more presentable. Alison planted a lot of plants which is really hard because our garden only has 15 cm of topsoil on a bed of rock and gravel. So you really have to dig hard to make (oversize) holes to put the plants in. We actually should dig out the whole garden but that is too much work and will destroy all existing plants and trees.

I myself worked hard on a new fence between us and our neighbours. The new neighbour removed the big hedge dividing our garden and for the past year there was only a bare metal fence. Not exactly a very intimate situation. And now with the lovely weather (26 ∞C yesterday) and we’re both sitting and dining outside it’s nice to have a bit of privacy and not see every move they make. And vice versa.

A reason to finish it, is that tomorrow we have a webloggers meeting in our house, and being it such nice weather we probably want to spend some time in the garden. Deadline, I love deadlines!

We had a water heater tank break down a couple of weeks ago, I had to clean up the basement to make room for the repair people of Hydro-Solution, the company that rents water heaters. Since I had put everything away anyway, it was a good time to lay a new, level, wood floor over the ondulating concrete. So I added 30 square meters of floor to my basement workshop. That’ll give me a lot of extra room to work and build nice things, because the old situation was kinda crowded. I need to make some extra racks for tools and material storage, and then I’m all set.

Now we only need to get rid of the heating vents because they’re very low and I already bumped my head twice. But that requires major changes in our heating system and we haven’t decided yet what we’re going to do about that.