logloglog

— Hello?

— Yes.

— Is this the complaints department?

— It is.

— I want to file a complaint.

— You’re at the right address.

— I have a very bad day. It’s the aniversary of my mother’s death today.

— I’m sorry to hear that.

— I was going to go cross country skiing with a friend.

— …

— But first I had to dig out the car from under the pack of snow and the thick layer of frozen snow, soaked with freezing rain. Then I found out that the second-hand snow blower we bought this fall —together with our neighbour— doesn’t want to start. It worked fine last fall, but now it doesn’t want to budge.

— I’m sorry to hear that.

— The I started to remove the snow by hand, hit a large plaque of frozen snow and then the handle of the snow shovel broke off.

— Sheesh.

— I removed the handle, re-attached it —it’s 15 cm shorter now— and went on removing the snow off the car. The car is covered in a thick layer of ice. I have to run the engine and the heater for a while to be able to remove it.

— Yeah.

— But first I have to defrost the doors because they are frozen shut. And then I found that Alison had left her door open the last time we used the car (2 weeks ago). So the battery is completely dead and possibly really dead. And I had just bought a new one a month ago.

— O my.

— So now I have to defrost the door, get into the car, try to open the hood, remove and try to charge the battery and then start the engine, defrost the windows and hope for the best. O, and I still have to dig out the car as well.

— Wow, that’s a genuine complaint. I’ll pass you on to my superior.

— I don’t think we’re going to ski today.

Next to the Montreal General Hospital they are building an addition to the hospital. Or maybe it is just a parking garage, I don’t know. Since this is literally in the mountain they have to remove a lot of rock. When I passed they were just finishing up drilling deep holes in the rock with a giant drill, mounted on a crawling vehicle.

Then the covered the just drilled hole with these big grey mats. Suddenly it dawned to me and my suspicion was confirmed when I saw this sign.

Continue reading »

In a couple of weeks there is yet another election. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of those elections, especially since my citizen application is going nowhere, and I can’t vote myself. A friend who also applied for Canadian citizenship but a couple of months earlier heard that it takes 2 months longer when you live in Québec.

But I digress. There are a lot of election banners in our riding. The incumbent candidate of the Parti Québecois apparently isn’t too confident he will be re-elected because he literally covered the streets in election banners. Not only the main arteries and intersections, which I see in other ridings, but also the residential streets are plastered with PQ banners. On our quiet street almost every hundred meter there is a banner attached to a tree or pole. What a waste of good plastic.

Maybe there is a reason for him to be worried, because one of the competitors for his seat in the Assemblée Nationale is one of the spokespersons (they have two and don’t call them party leaders because that sounds to undemocratic) of Québec Solidaire. In last year’s elections —we seem to throw them like birthday parties— she managed to get 26% of the votes, without much of a campaign. So this year she might actually beat him.

So a few days after PQ’s banner action the Québec Solidaire also put up banners in our street so now we have even more banners. More good plastic wasted.

But I must admit that it’s much more fun to vote in a contested riding. Here is a link to the Québec Solidaire website so you can read their program, but it is all in French. They apparently don’t want any anglophone voters.

I agree with almost all their points (except the separation issue but who takes that serious) so they might get one anglo vote. But only if Alison follows my advice and checks the box in the voting booth.

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.

Since a couple of months I’m regularly visiting a workshop in Improv Theatre.
Improv theatre is a form of improvised theatre were people go on stage without a script and react to each other and create spontaneous scenes.

The basic rules of improv are “Be positive” and “Don’t block other people’s ideas”. Both are things that I’m not very good at in real life. So it doesn’t come natural to me. But —maybe because of that—I like it a lot and I’m slowly improving. So maybe I’ll be performing on stage soon. I won’t tell you exactly when that will happen because it sure will make my stage fright even worse.

The workshop is held every Sunday afternoon and afterwards there is a show with around 12 performers, most of them participants of the workshop. The performers ‘compete’ —in a very gentle way— with each other by playing scenes together that are rated by the audience. One by one they are eliminated until there is only one left, who is then declared the winner.

So even though you won’t see me performing yet, I’ll invite you to join me as an spectator and enjoy the other performers, some of them are very good and outrageously funny. It is much more fun than hanging in front of your TV all night.

Sunday Night Improv
Théâtre Ste. Catherine
264, rue Ste. Catherine E. (between St. Laurent and St. Denis, Metro Berri-UQAM)
Every Sunday at 8 PM until 10-ish
Admission $5.

Hope to see you there soon! (All three of you.)

O, and here is an article from Montreal Magazine about the event.

When I cycled to my doctor yesterday on the Maissoneuve bike path I noticed this sign when I entered the borough of Westmount. Apparently cyclists need to wear a helmet there, I’ve no idea since when.
Now I do think wearing helmets in Montreal’s traffic is generally a good idea. I always wear mine especially since my accident, but I do think it is a good idea to introduce this requirement in all the boroughs on the island of Montreal at once.

In the current situation Westmount is an island, and legally inaccesible by the majority of cyclists that don’t wear a helmet.

Of course I saw a lot of people breaking this by-law and I’ve no idea if it is enforced. But having laws that are just laws is worse than having no laws at all.

Exactly seven years ago the iPod was introduced. It was also the morning after the first night Alison and I spend together. We didn’t realize then that both events would have so much impact and longevity.

Happy anniversary iPod and Alison! May the seven-year-itch be gentle on all of us.

A while ago I bitched about the exorbitant surcharges of ticket monopolist Admission. I eventually went ahead and bought my tickets for Sigur Rós at a small music shop in town, and they charged me a much lower price. But even on their tickets Admission put a 2 dollar fee.

And today was the day of the concert. Since Alison didn’t want to go I’d tried (albeit a bit late) to sell my second ticket to someone, but nobody wanted it or they had already made plans for tonight.

So I bluntly told Alison she had to come and she grudgingly complied.

I learned a couple of things tonight:

• Sigur Rós does not have a female lead singer. He just sings at a very high pitch.
• Sitting far away from the stage on a stand does not improve your connection to the performance, but is more comfortable.
• Even though Sigur Rós plays very quiet music on their albums, live on stage they are much louder.
• Sitting far away does not protect to said loudness.
• A last-minute visit to Jean Coutu to buy earplugs and cough drops proved extremely worthwhile.
• A prohibition to bring alcoholic beverages also means that water bottles will get confiscated.
• Water on sale on the premises is $3.75 and will be delivered in bottles without a cap to promote spillage.
• A prohibition to bring cameras doesn’t mean there isn’t an abundance of cameras (I didn’t dare to bring mine, hence the bad iphone-made picture above).
• Meeting a familiar face in the audience does give a lone soul a sense of belonging.
• I had a good time.
• To her surprise Alison liked it also. She even wrote about it.

I missed the 5 year anniversary of loglog on the first of September. My first post on loglog —which I wrote in Dutch back then— was about the preparations for my move to Canada. I moved 11 days later, on September 11, 2003 and that date was not chosen by coincidence.

Without the events of September 11, 2001 I probably wouldn’t have been in Montréal today. I was in Toronto that day, investigating if I could relocate to Canada. My plan was to spend a 3 month period to see how living in Toronto would be and to find out if there would be any work for me.

I had just attended the wedding of Dolph and Mansa, a Dutch friend-of-a-friend of mine and his Canadian wife, and the first couple of weeks I could stay in their apartment while they were away on their honeymoon. The apartment was on the 14th floor in the flight-path of Pearson airport and I could actually see the pilots when they started their landing.

The morning of the attacks on the WTC, I was checking my email when I received an email that a plane had hit a building in New York. I ran to the TV and ten seconds after I turned it on I saw the plane hit the tower. I thought it was a replay but from the commentary I soon understood it was a second plane. I didn’t stop watching TV that day. New York City felt so close, even though I had never been there.

The week after that Toronto, with some sort of delusion of grandeur, was afraid to be the next target. No planes were landing anymore, the CN-tower was closed and I was all alone in a foreign city with nobody to talk to. My meetings with prospective employers were cancelled and I decided this was just not the right time for a try-out. I already hated it for its americanism and urban sprawl, and now everybody was very tense and it was even worse. I wanted to go home.

Dolph, coming back from his honeymoon, convinced me to pay Montréal a visit before I would fly back to the Netherlands. He said it was good to just experience Montréal so I could decide if it was worthwhile to come back later.

And so I travelled on the train to Montréal with all my luggage. Way too much luggage.

When I arrived in Gare Centrale and schlepped my luggage from the railway station to the Metro ówho designed all those narrow passages and stairs?ó I noticed the atmosphere was so different than in Toronto. It was more European, the people friendlier and less stressed and I felt like in a warm bath. I spent two nearly sleepless nights in a youth hostel and met a guy there who knew a place were you could rent a room per month. I decided to stay a little longer than originally planned. I got myself a small room, installed telephone and ordered an internet connection. All for only one month, but I wanted to see how it would be to live in this city, and not just being a tourist.

Via my Internet connection I kept in contact with friends in the Netherlands, with some clients and even did some programming work for a client in Montréal. But I didn’t know anybody and felt rather lonely, so I put up an ad on an Internet dating site.

Alison was the only person that replied. We met for lunch and she fell in love with me over a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. My first bagel ever.

Partly because the encounter with Alison I ended up staying for almost two months in Montréal. While waiting almost two years for my visa I visited many times. In the end of August 2003 I finally got the green light and it was not a hard decision to pick September 11, 2003 as the date of my official arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant. Just to make that date a bit less evil; to give it also a positive side.

Since then lots of things have happened. I wrote about some of them on loglog, but many things I kept to myself. Sometimes because I was too lazy, sometimes because I didn’t feel like it and sometimes for such trivial reasons as lacking a suitable photo.

Five years in Montréal is a good occasion to make up the balance. What is my current life compared to what it was 5 years ago? What has changed? What is still the same? Which of my expectations have come true? Which haven’t?

I’ll write about that in the next post.

That post may contain Too Much Information, in which case you should just skip it. It also might just vanish from this site someday, in which case I got either second thoughts, cold feet or was abducted by aliens.

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.