logloglog

If you ever need to cross the Canadian-USA border with ten kilos of drugs, a couple of guns or a dead body in the trunk, I have a tip for you.

Do as we did.

There was a long line for the border crossing, apparently we weren’t the only Canadians who thought that spending the Canada Day long weekend in the US was an excellent plan. The line in front of the customs stretched out all the way to the toll bridge. So since the road was on an incline I turned off the engine and when the cars in front of us moved I just pressed the clutch down and let the car move by gravity. This went on for more than an hour, but the final part of the line was on flat terrain so I had to start the engine in between the long periods of waiting.
Just when we were the first in line and it was finally our turn to approach the booth I tried starting the engine but it didn’t do a thing. The battery was completely flat. O shit, I forgot to turn off the lights and we were listening to the iPod so the lights had completely drained the battery.
I stepped out of the car, and started pushing. Immediately four US Immigration officers ran towards me. O shit, I though again. But they didn’t jump on me but instead went to the back of the car and started pushing until it was in front of the little booth. Four officers! No wonder those lines are so long.

Arrived at the booth the immigration officer refrained from all the questioning and the “trying-to-make-you-nervous”-spiel (that usually works with me) and just asked us where we were going and after we answered we could go. The same four officers gave us a push to a parking space a bit further along the road, I went inside to get my visa and to be fingerprinted (foreigners are all criminals) and that was it. That was by far my easiest border crossing ever.

After I received my visa, Alison single-handedly pushed the car (Okay, it helped that the road went down a little), I kick-started it into gear and we went on with our journey.

Please take advantage of this tip while you still can. I’m sure that when the US authorities read this loglog entry they will close this loophole immediately.

What do you do when you are in the U.S. and Apple just introduced a new gadget?

You head to the Apple store and let your inner geek out. This photo was taken with an iPhone by myself so it’s a bit wide-anglish. I then mailed it to myself because that is the only way to get stuff of the phone.

iPhone itself is quite impressive. If I was into cell phones, had money to burn and lived in God’s own country, I might have been seriously tempted to buy one. But neither of these pre-requisites are met so I’m safe. But still it was nice to play with the thing for half an hour.

In the store there was a big table with 15 iPhones all logged in to the Wifi network so the connections were fast. The internet browser is absolutely fantastic and I can see you can actually read whole web pages. You can easily zoom in and out and scroll over any webpage just with your finger tip.

Christmas came early here. No, actually it came very late. Alison gave me a Wii as a birthday present on April Fools. For the uninitiated, a Wii is a game console; a box you attach to your TV and play games on.
These boxes however are really in short supply and it took us a couple of months to acquire one. Unlike in Europe, were friends of my, just put their name on a list and received their Wii [link in Dutch] six weeks later, here you have to visit the shops every day and ask if they have Wii’s. Or buy one on eBay or Craigslist for 100 dollars above the normal price.

We didn’t do that, because we are cheap, patient and not very close to a electronics stores. So we scoured the Internet, put the Wii product-pages of a couple of internet shops in our browser’s bookmarks and reloaded them every day a couple of times. And lo-and-behold, after many, many weeks, Tuesday one of the shops (I’m reluctant to tell you it was Futureshop, since I try to avoid them as the plague) had Wii’s in stock. Sixty of them when I started my order and nervously punched in my credit card number, and they had only 15 left after I received my order confirmation.

This morning the letter carrier (I can’t use the word “postman”, Alison will flog me) rang twice and handed me a big box. Inside was a much smaller box and I’m dying to open it but I’m going to wait until Alison returns from Toronto tonight.

After all, it’s my birthday present from her.

Update: she came home, tried to wrap the box, I stopped her because I knew that access to the wrapping paper was kind of blocked (that part of the basement is still a mess) and then she sang me Happy Birthday and the French equivalent.

And then we played boxing, bowling and tennis for a couple of hours. It was fun! Even though Alison beat me at bowling.

Can you believe it that this is the first game console I ever owned in my life? And that I used to make all my money making games?

This day a year ago we bought our house. Today is also the hearing in our rent-increase-case at the Régie du Logement. I amassed all the paperwork I needed to proof that the rent increase is justified and even dug up my dusty briefcase from a moving box in the basement. I was prepared.

The meeting was a disaster. One of our tenants showed up in person and started a litany on how bad the shape of their apartment was. She forgot to mention that I actually spend the most time fixing their apartment. Even though the judge told her to shut up since this hearing was not about that it set the tone. I was the evil landlord and the judge was clearly against me. She didn’t buy my argument that we should be able to include the cost we made installing an alarm system, since it lowered our insurance premium. She also didn’t want to look at the amount we actually pay for the insurance but copied the amount from the policy, which didn’t include 250 dollars tax and service charges.

I also needed additional documentation on the amount of taxes the previous owner paid, and gave me two weeks to cough up those documents.

One positive point: Our tenants probably have to to pay the cost of the review by the Régie.

I left quite discouraged but fortunately after a while that feeling went away. We’ll see what the outcome will be, and how much we can actually raise the rents.

It’s hot today. About 34 °C and a high humidity so it feels more like 40 degrees.
Nevertheless I went for a walk to the park with the dogs.

Pepe is watching from the hill, Poupoune makes some runs after the ball, but then they settle down and lie next to me while I smoke a cigar and make a contribution to the smog alert.

Global Warming is on the rise.

This is the best way to clean those cheap plastic chairs. Just throw them in the pool, and the bleach will do the rest. Of course we don’t have a pool, but Alison’s parents do, and they happen to have their yearly barbeque (with real coal) today.

We help setting up the garden and preparing a lot of skewers with saumon, shrimp and scallops, mushrooms, bell pepper, onion and cherry tomatoes.

We brought Poupoune with us and happily vacuumed the grass under the guests. Whenever they dropped something (Mmm, salmon!) she was there to catch it.

Pepe was staying at Alison’s ex and sprinkled pee everywhere in the appartment. Bad dog.

I finally finished cleaning my workshop. Well, not only cleaning but a reorganization as well. I added 300 square feet of wooden floor, painted the new and the existing floor, made a so-called outfeed table for the table saw, a dust hood for the chop-saw and added some shelves, electrical outlets and work-lights. O, and I installed a double sink.

I also spent almost a day on sorting out a couple of drawers and boxes full of junk, and many screws, nails and nuts & bolts. So now I can actually find stuff that I need, which will make working in the basement more pleasurable.

A Mean, Clean Fetching Machine.

She can’t get enough of it.

We visit a dance performance by various Native Canadian dance groups. I don’t know much about the original inhabitants of this country, before we stole it from them.

I need to change that. This was a start.