Two days ago I bought Alison a hammock for her birthday. I had no idea how I came up with that gift, she never asked for it. Then I saw this photo, taken 3 years ago, that I used for our calendar. Subconsciously I must have been inspired by it.

Unfortunately it rained and thunder-stormed all day yesterday so Alison couldn’t try it out. (Fortunately it cooled things down a bit, after a week of sweltering heat with temperatures of 30-35 and high humidity)

She likes it. She stole my iPad and just read the whole Internet. And Plume likes it too, just as Poupoune did before. She eats her Kong toy and enjoys the rocking motion of the hammock.

Plume is slowly taking over the special place Poupoune had in our lives. I still love Poupoune, but she’s getting older and isn’t as active anymore. She still goes on walks, but usually not in the morning when she’s too stiff of arthritis. She seems reasonable happy although she’s a bit jealous of all the attention Plume gets. To keep her busy we gave her a Kong for own and that seems to have helped.

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Alison asked if she could use the ladder: “I want to remove the vine out of that almost leafless tree so maybe it will do a bit better.” I went into the basement to get the ladder, which took some effort since I really should clean up, and put it up against the tree for her. Then I went inside to continue my work on the computer.

A few minutes later Alison came in. “Uhm, I think the tree fell down.” I asked if she was okay and then went outside to see what had happened. The tree had snapped off at its base, just below ground. Apparently the reason it didn’t have much leaves was that it had rotted away, probably because the strangling vine had deprived it of nutrients. Fortunately it didn’t fell all the way to the ground which might have injured Alison, but just fell a metre until it rested against the neighbour’s garage. I hate that garage, since it takes away a lot of sun from our garden, but for a change it proved useful.

I interrupted my work, got my electric saw out of the garage, and went up on the garage’s roof to cut the tree in pieces. That went pretty quick and a few hours later the whole tree was in my car and I was underway to deposit it at the Eco Centre at the end of our street. Usually when I come here to deposit debris of one of my renovations it’s very busy with contractors. But today it was Sunday and there was hardly anyone. So I was relatively quick back to work.

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If you wondered why it was so quiet here: I was very busy renovating one of our apartments. Among other things I redid the plumbing and the electricity, and re-enforced the kitchen floor. None of that will be visible to the new tenant. But she they will see and hopefully enjoy the gorgeous new kitchen and bathroom. I went a little overboard so it took 3 weeks longer than I had planned. It’s hard to be your own client for a perfectionist like me.

Update: We found tenants through CraigsList, our friends’ network didn’t yield any interested. Let’s hope things work out and they are good tenants.

More photos:

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Bixi is Montreal’s new shared bike system and it was recently rolled out. Not all bicycle stands/stations were installed immediately but according to this sign they were going to install a Bixi station 150 meter from our house last Saturday. These stations install very fast. They are solar powered and after they are lifted of a truck they require just a few bolts and that’s it.

But somebody in the street thought it was wrong and glued this note on both of the signs:

Saturday came and went and no Bixi station was installed.

Sunday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

Monday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

Tuesday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

But finally, on Wednesday, a big truck came and dropped off this station. The bikes were added today. It is not installed in the original location (which would have cost two parking spaces) but, just as the note asked/said, on the other side of the intersection. So now it’s 170 metres from our house. We have many stations nearby, another one is 200 metres in the other direction, and there’s a third a bit further away, almost 400 metres, near the park.

This weekend I’m going to convince A. to make a test ride. And if it’s a success she might get a Bixi pass for her birthday. Or a bike.

If you have an iPhone or iPod you might want to check this site to get an interactive map that you can load in Google Maps which shows the location of all 300 stations and how many bikes (or free spots) are available at every station. Because some stations are at times totally empty and others are totally full, which is a problem when you either want to get a bike or want to drop one off.

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It’s getting cold and I’m feeling lonely. I jump on the bed. Nice and warm under the duvet. I crawl towards the top of the bed, past the giant. Wait! What’s that? There is somebody else in my bed. A little white fellow. I growl ferociously at him and he backs away. Good. That’ll teach him who’s boss around here.

I turn and snuggle my back against the warm belly of the giant. I slowly rest my head on his knee and close my eyes. I hope the giant won’t twist and turn as often as he did last night. That really annoyed me and if he does it again I have to growl at him as well. There can only be one alpha dog in this bed.

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The weather is still good (two weeks of sunny weather and it seems to stay nice the coming week as well! Maybe this summer won’t be that bad after all…) so I also redid the front balcony on the second floor. I hung the balustrade in mid-air, because there was no room for it in the garden (the porch balustrade was still there) and now the whole thing looks like a deconstructionism art installation. Passing contractors stop their trucks to gaze up.

After 5 balconies I’m getting quite good at this, but if a client would ask me to do it for her I’m not sure I would. It is dirty and stressful work and after applying the polyester I’ve so many little fibreglass pieces in my skin that it itches for a couple of days.

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Our house currently resembles the ruins of an ancient Greek temple. I removed the columns that support the front balcony and now they are standing at odd angles in the garden, supported by buckets. Several people already stopped their car to see what had happened. Disaster tourism we call that in Dutch (but we weren’t featured in the “Journal de Montréal”… yet.)

I removed the balustrade around the porch so I can demolish it. The porch is all rotten and before the main beams have to be totally replaced I had to go in and do something about it. I will replace the porch with polyester and fibreglass so it can survive a few decades without maintenance, just as I did in the back. My plan was to do this in the early summer but the weather never agreed with me. But now it seems to stay sunny for a few days so I have to use this opportunity. Even though I don’t feel like it.

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Some cats bring their owners presents. Dead birds, mice and other small animals are favourites.

Poupoune is not a cat, but nevertheless she brought me a present. She had found it in our pantry and left it in front of the door of our bedroom in which I was still sleeping.

Now I was wondering if she was commenting on my eating habits? And if so, was it a reproach (”You shouldn’t eat this crap”) or a recommendation (”Look boss, you should be having this for lunch.”)

I chose the latter and had it for lunch! And so should you when your pet brings you a present.

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For a couple of weeks now I’m busy cleaning the house. I started with the basement, which had accumulated a lot of stuff since Alison moved here and even more when I moved in with her. But then I moved up to my office that basically hadn’t been cleaned up in five years. Yes, I know, I’m a slob.

Anyway I threw away many things and brought a couple of car loads of basement crap to the EcoCentre and stuff that was still useful to Le Chaînon.

I also sold three old computers and cables, drives, etc. on Craigslist and Kijiji for a couple of dollars. A Mac I bought 6 years ago for $6000 made me a whopping $40. I hope the new owner will get some use out of it.

It was easy though to part from it since I never used it anymore. I brought it over from the Netherlands to work on a project that required Mac OS 9, but that project is now finished so the computer could go.

But now I’m nearing the finish line and the decisions are getting tougher. What to do with a box full of love letters of past girlfriends? This dates from way back when, when people wrote postcards and real letters instead of e-mail. I only have a couple of postcards from Alison, but I received a ton of e-mails from her. Don’t worry, I’ll keep those, actually I keep all my e-mail.

But I digress. What to do? On one hand it is extremely unlikely I will read them all again, but on the other hand doing so will be a blast from the past, and will certainly bring back —sweet and bittersweet— memories just like photos from that era. Why can I keep the photos and not the letters? What would you do?

I also ‘found’ a box of letters from my father. I glanced through them and found a poem in French he wrote for me. Reading it made me almost cry. It was written when both he and I were in bad break-ups. Here it is, verbatim.

Tu es mon fils aîmé,
du très bon marque Mark.
Moi : seulement ton père,
plutôt ton frère aîné,
qui t’ai fait tant d’misères.
Mais comme au ciel un arc
se lève (fin d’orage)
je te donne en gage
mes intentions (”sous sage”)
de rendre heureuse ta mère,
Marguerite ma chère femme,
de nous deux belle flamme.
Tu m’aideras? “Si, si !”
Merci ! Ton faible père,
qui pour finir la chasse
t’embrasse.

Karel.

Rotterdam, ce 25 juillet 1988

That box stays.

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Ever lived on the wrong side of a crime scene tape?

I do now.

Don’t get too alarmed though, it’s (un)fortunately not as “Journal de Montréal” as it sounds. I heard a big bang in the front of the house. High winds preluding a thunderstorm had broken off a big branch of “our” erable and it had landed smack on our and the neighbour’s fence. It was just small enough that I managed to move it aside since it blocked the sidewalk. Then I went inside because it started to rain heavily. Ten minutes later the police had put up this tape. I thought it was overkill until I investigated the tree overhead. There is another branch broken off and the only thing that keeps it from falling to the ground is the power line entering the neighbour’s house. So that crime scene tape is maybe not such a bad idea.

Why we don’t have subterranian power lines like in Europe (also in Scandinavia! so don’t give me the snow argument) is of course another topic of discussion.

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