Monthly Archives: July 2007

Jul 28 2007

Cart

cart

A client asked me to make a cart. She’s handicapped and her caretaker has to carry her twice a week from her bed to her bathroom for her to take a bath. Her caretaker, however gets older and suffers from arthritis so hauling somebody is getting harder and harder for her.

So I made this cart to make the trek to the bathtub a bit easier.

By • english, montréal, work •

Jul 19 2007

Lost

[no picture]

I went with a client on a hunt today for a bathtub. He’s quite tall and wants me to make a new, larger bathroom for him, but he has a hard time finding a bathtub that fits his frame, one that is actually big enough for him to lie in.

After visiting a number of stores we both have to pee. But asking “Do you have a bathroom?” in a bathroom store is kind of awkward, and pissing in the showroom toilets is generally frowned upon (apparently it does happen though, at least that’s what I heard). So we head to a Tim Hortons nearby and have a muffin and an orange juice. Coincidentally we order exactly the same muffin and the same kind of juice.

Afterwards we drive the long way home and even though a lot of people are on vacation, there is still a lot of traffic and it takes quite a while. I drop of my client, and when I arrive at home I can’t find my bag. I search the car, but it’s a big red bag and not easily overlooked.

The dogs are barking around me while I try to concentrate and think where I remember I had my bag the last time. I think it was at the Tim Hortons. I get the Yellow Pages, but can’t find them. Wait, the internet! But on the Tim Hortons website there is no restaurant finder. Canada411.ca. No Tim Hortons in Montréal on that street. O wait, Pierrefonds is de-merged and is a separate municipality now. Yes, there it is, in the long list of telephone numbers. I call the number and start talking to the woman who picks up in English. They all speak English in the West-Island so I’m surprised when she asks “French, please?”. I repeat my question (“Have you found my bag?”) in French, she goes to look in the place I tell her I was seating and then she comes back: “Non monsieur, votre sac n’est pas là…”

Fuck.

It now really dawns to me. I lost my bag. My really nice red bag. With my camera in it, and my cigars. And my brand new MacBook Pro laptop.
I thank the woman for watching and give her my phone number just in case. Just before I hang up I ask if there are any other Tim Hortons in Pierrefonds? She answers me that she’s not in Pierrefonds but in Côte de Lièsse. OMG. I called the wrong restaurant! Yes, it is the telephone number just below the one we visited. I get new hope. It’s not even an hour ago since we left. I call again, making sure to call the right number this time.

Unfortunately my hope proved futile. My bag hadn’t been found. I call all the bathroom stores we went to, one at the time. No luck.

Shit.

I call Alison and she has no idea what to say to cheer me up.

I hang up, and I don’t know what to do. I haven’t even paid off my credit card bill of the new laptop and I already lost it. Visa will be happy. Then I remember that my bank just recently upgraded me to a new credit card that included an extended warranty or something. I frantically try to find the leaflet that came with it. Yeah, there it says: “The Purchase Security Plan protects most purchases made with the card for ninety (90) days from purchase.” I quickly try to find the line that says what is meant with that word most. I’m sure I will find a line saying that “computers are excluded”. But there is no such line. I call the toll-free number, and someone takes my card number, address and the value of the item I lost. Thanks to Apple’s online invoices I can still find that information. She’ll send me a form that I’ll have to complete. Wow.

For the first time in an hour I can sit and calm down a bit. There is a possibility I didn’t lose a huge pile of money, but just some.

I eat a cracker with cheese and try to recall what I’ve lost, what haven’t I backed up yet.
Some photos, obviously. But for the rest I just lost the changes I made today and last night to the drawings of my client’s bathroom. Just a couple of hours to re-create those, so that’s not too bad. A good thing I worked on woodworking projects the past week and that I make regular backups. But not daily, even though I bought a new hard drive just for that purpose. But I haven’t had time to set it up yet.

I even manage to look at it from the bright side: I now have an excuse to replace my 6 year old camera.

By • canada, english, story, tech, various, work •

Jul 19 2007

& found

tim hortons crew

An hour later the phone rang.
“Um, is this the person who lost his bag?”
My heart skipped two beats. “Yeah?”
“We’ve found it.”
I almost started to sob. I asked her until when she worked (“until ten”), called Alison with the good news and jumped, high on adrenaline, in the car.

First I drove to a cinema and then the whole 35 kilometres back to the Tim Hortons in Pierrefonds.

I gave all people working a cinema gift certificate (Not all of them could pose for this picture). They were happy and surprised about my generosity. I felt good because giving away things is fun. I still don’t know what exactly happened and why it took so long to find a bright red bag in an almost empty Tim Hortons but I don’t really care. Everything is still in the bag, and it doesn’t seem that anybody touched my computer since the same application is still active when I wake it up from sleep-mode.

Having it back saves me a lot of time and stress not having to recover files from backups and re-create stuff that I made today and yesterday on a current project that I hadn’t backed up yet… That is well worth the reward.

It’s funny how happy you can be with something you had a couple of hours ago that wasn’t particular special at that time.

Just losing things makes you realize how much you care about certain things. Maybe I should lose things more often. But I almost never lose things. Fortunately.

I have my camera back so I don’t have to buy a new one. And my bag! And my cigars, water-bottle and my dropjes! O… and my MacBook Pro too of course.

By • english, montréal, story, various •

Jul 15 2007

Developments

lac de la cabane

Our nice tranquil lake, with boats nor cottages, surrounded by pristine forests, dotted with majestic boulders, with its beautiful sandy beaches, its coconut palms…

Okay, I’m carried away a bit. But our very nice secret lake, an hour from Montréal but almost never frequented by any other living creature than deer, moose and otter… Oops, there I go again. Anyway, that lake is going to be spoiled. A developer lay its filthy hands on it and now he’s going to build cottages around it.

We went there today and found big signs with “Domaine Privé” and “Défense de circuler”. We ignored them for now, since it’s construction holiday and also to investigate. The lake is just as pristine as ever, but there was doom in the air. The doom of big trucks, by and builders coming in, to build monstrous houses. (For some reason people who can afford a second home in the Laurentians have no taste.) Followed by loggers on a mission to create lake views for the owners by logging all the trees between the lake and said houses.

It’s only weeks before they put big steel fences around it and declare it a real No-go area.

So I’m going to spill the secret and give you all detailed instructions how to get there. Rent a car and enjoy this really nice lake while you still can get in, albeit by ignoring some signs. If somebody tells you to go away tell them you come here for years and nobody ever told you to go away. They probably tell you that things have changed but I bet you can stay for the day if you tell them you came all the way from Montréal.

How to get there

First locate the lake on this Google Maps map. Follow the included driving instructions from highway 15 North to the parking area in Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard.

From there:

  • Park your car at the parking area on the Chemin de Val de Loire. It’s a rather big parking, for around 20 cars (so all readers of loglog can go at once; plan car-pooling in the comments), at the North side of the street, on the map above at the letter D (of “De-Loire”), just right of Lac Morgan.
  • Get out of the car, pack your things (sunscreen!) and enter the area by going through the big gate at the east side of the parking lot.
  • Turn left (NW) and follow the wide path. At a crossing there is a small cabin for cross-country skiers (there are not many of those around) and an orange plastic barrier.
  • Ignore the signs, walk around the barrier and continue on the narrowing path. Enjoy the nice ferns at both sides of the trail.
  • Cross a almost destroyed bridge (I bet one of those fat builders tried to cross) over a small stream.
  • You now approach an open area, with on your left a pumping station for the municipal water supply of Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard since our lake is their main reservoir. To the right you see the newly constructed road that leads to the new cottages, surrounded by big boulders.
  • Continue straight ahead, ignore another sign and follow the slightly sloping gravel road.
  • We’re almost there now. After a slight bend you’re at the highest point of the road and the magnificent “Lac de la Cabane” is right in front of you.
  • Follow the road 100 metres and there is the beach. Soon it will be a private beach, no longer accessible by us mere mortals, without hundreds of thousands of disposable dollars.
  • If you follow the path that starts at the other side of the beach you can go to a nice private rock.
  • A few hundred metres from the beach there is a large boulder, slightly hidden under the foliage.
  • Just before it is a small path passing on the left side of the boulder, and leading to a magnificent flat boulder that is an excellent starting point for a nice refreshing swim in the crystal clear (the whole village is drinking it) water. Clothes are entirely optional. A pillow or mattress might come handy however, since the rock is quite rough on your bum/back.
  • Enjoy your stay, don’t get sunburned, and please leave only your footprints.

Lakes should be public and not private. They’re part of the land that our ancestors stole from the natives. Well, maybe not my ancestors exactly, but you get my point.

If you don’t get my point you can always go to the developer’s site and buy one of the lots and have your dream house built. Be quick, they’re going fast. If you do, please invite me over once in a while. In return I can do some maintenance, I’m quite good at that. Then at least I can lay my eyes on “our” lake once in a while.

If you have access to other lakes please do not hesitate to email me.

By • canada, english, outdoors, rant, travel •

Jul 10 2007

Joint

joint

Invariably one of the first things people ask me when I tell them I’m from the Netherlands is if I smoke. I tell them I smoke cigars, but that wasn’t what they were interested in. They wanted to know if I smoked marijuana or hashish.

Well, I did. But not very often, and ever after I was kicked out of art school I smoked maybe 2 joints (and that was in the strict sense of the word, with others) a year. And I didn’t inhale. Okay that’s a lie, but when I inhaled I started to cough loudly, and that never went away, not even when I blowed (that’s the term used in the Netherlands for smoking softdrugs) regularly at art school. It always made people laugh, but I hated it since it prevented me from keeping the smoke in and getting high. Maybe I should have built a water pipe but that was just too much of a hassle.
So no, I’m not a pothead exactly. And I don’t know many people in the Netherlands that are, even though you can buy the stuff at almost every corner “coffee shop”.

To give an example, this joint we recived from Alison’s brother (the other brother, not the one that has pot-induced schizophrenia) as a Christmas gift, has still not been smoked, a year-and-a-halve later.

I figured I’m still not yet assimilated to Canada, when I read the following:

Marijuana use in Canada is the highest in the industrialized world, far higher than in the Netherlands where it’s legal, and more than four times the global rate, a report by the United Nations has found.

So it’s about time we smoke that joint.

By • canada, english, health, netherlands •

Jul 7 2007

Run

adidas

Hushhush. We’ve started running. Alison and I follow this “couch-potatoe to 5K”-schedule and so far it goes pretty well.

I’ll let you know when we’re going to run a marathon. Alison’s father just did that and also her cousin Lucy, who had never ran before, managed to finish the New York City Marathon after only a couple of months of preparation.

But it’s not our intention to run that far, it’s just to get us a bit into shape. Doing it together helps, we’re less likely to skip a scheduled run. Okay, we’re a bit behind the schedule already, but that’s not a big problem. Is it?

By • A., english, health, montréal •

Jul 5 2007

Crack

cracked marble

Sometimes, fortunately not very often, I get so mad that I break things. I rather break things than people so it could be worse. But it’s not exactly something I’m proud of.

This time it was a marble slab, used in our kitchen as a counter top. This piece was very old, older than I am, because it was the top of my baby dressing table.
I, and maybe all of my brothers and sisters, lay bare-bottomed on this marble when my diapers were changed. It was well cleaned before its new use as a kitchen table, don’t worry.

I also used it as a prop in “Musca“, the animation film I made nearly twenty years ago, and that I’ve recently put online.

And now I broke it, and not even by having wild sex on it. If only, then at least I had some fun while doing it.

I’m going to try to glue it, it’s a very clean crack.

By • english, home, montréal, movie, netherlands •

Jul 4 2007

Adirondacks

newt
Red-spotted Newt (Notophthalmus viridescens)

We both thought this was a salamander, that crossed our hiking trail in the Adirondacks, but after some research (thank you Google images) I found out it was actually a newt. I had never heard of newts, which is not so strange since names of animals in English usually don’t resemble the ones in Dutch. I often have no idea what to call the little and big creatures we encounter during our hikes. or so I looked for more information.

Newts are small, usually bright-coloured semi-aquatic salamanders of North America, Europe and Asia, distinguished from other salamanders by the lack of rib or costal grooves along the sides of the body.

So it was salamander after all. By googling the Linnaean name I found out the Dutch name is “Canadese watersalamander” which you can probably figure out without a translation. So this newt was in the wrong country. As many people are right now, but I digres.

Newts have the ability to regenerate limbs, eyes, spinal cords, hearts, intestines, and upper and lower jaws. The cells at the site of the injury have the ability to de-differentiate, reproduce rapidly, and differentiate again to create a new limb or organ. One theory is that the de-differentiated cells are related to tumour cells since chemicals which produce tumours in other animals will produce additional limbs in newts.

That would be so practical, especially for woodworkers. If you’ve seen Sicko you know why.

Many newts produce toxins in their skin secretions as a defence mechanism against predators. Taricha newts of western North America are particularly toxic; the Rough-skinned Newt (Taricha granulosa) of the Pacific Northwest produces more than enough tetrodotoxin to kill an adult human foolish enough to swallow a newt.

Mmm, a good thing Poupoune is not here, but is staying with the dog sitter.

This was the first time we went backpacking since a loooong time. We had the lean-to (a hut that is open on one side) for ourselves, even though it was the night before the 4th of July, American Independance Day.
We were afraid that all the nice spots would have been taken by Americans but we didn’t see a living soul (apart from the Newt) for two days.
Which was nice. Away from the busy job, the overdose of family the last couple of days and generally from it all. Relax a bit, even when that means hauling a heavy pack over hills. We should do this more often.

But with all Alison’s travel she’s glad to be at home once in a while. And we have to plan these things well in advance so we can reserve a spot at the dog lady.

Excuses, excuses, excuses…

By • A., english, outdoors, travel •