May 23 2008
After
(Now I have to clean the rest of the house; lots of sawdust there…)
A.
May 13 2008
Finger
You really have to entice Pepe to start eating the special low protein food he gets to prevent his kidneys to deteriorate . Mix the food with peanut butter and water. Heat it up in the microwave. Dip your finger in it, put it in front of him. He looks elsewhere. Try again. Wipe some food on his lips so he licks it off. Sometimes he start eating then, sometimes he doesn’t. If not, try harder. Often we present two kinds of food so he has another choice and can decide that food A is worse than food B so he’ll eat some of food A, gets into it and then also tries food B.
If after that he still doesn’t want to eat we put the food away so Poupoune doesn’t eat it and try again in a few hours.
All in all he’s doing quite well on the new regime. He gained some weight and in general seems to be happy and in good health.
Apr 19 2008
Walk
Everything is brown and grey now the snow has melted and the trees and shrub are still leafless. Everything except Alison!
Apr 6 2008
Candles
44 candles, and I managed to blow them all out at once but one.
Alison baked this cake, a Gugelhupf or something. It turned out to be very bready, so I suggested to top it with icing. That worked well and the result was delicious. A really sweet birthday cake.
My mood has lifted today (Yay!), so Alison invited (and instructed me to invite) some friends to come and eat the cake. Of course it was very last minute, she had to see if I was feeling well enough to cope with visitors. On top of that it is beautiful, almost-spring weather so we just left a lot of messages on answering machines, hoping that at least somebody would show up. Two people did and we had a good time.
Mar 5 2008
Camera
My camera, after almost 7 years, gave up the ghost. It fails intermittently, sometimes with beautiful results but this wasn’t exactly the photo I wanted to make.
We were at the yearly Nuit Blanche, an all-night event during which a lot of places like museums, cinemas and other venues are opened for free until 05h00. There are also many special events like almost free wine tasting (one glass Chianti for me, water for Alison) and this dance show by students of the UQAM.
It was very busy and for almost all events there were big lines of people waiting. We are not so big on waiting so we just left the lines as they were and went only to a small number of events but walked a lot through the snow. Unfortunately I had made a terrible shoe choice, having spent mostly indoors for a week working on a computer application. So my low sneakers were soaked quite fast by the puddles of melting snow.
The spectators for the dance performance were located in a courtyard and most of the dancing took place behind the windows of the university building surrounded the courtyard. Very nice, even though I was standing in deep snow with soaked shoes.
The dance show appeared to both of us as a homage to the dancing lady that was on display a couple of blocks away from the dance show venue. It was a perpetually projection of the silhouette of a naked dancing woman, as an advertisement for a strip club. That building is recently razed, and the seedy projection will be missed by many.
We didn’t stay that long, after 23h00 Alison was tired and wanted to go home. I begrudgingly complied.
A new camera is ordered, my birthday present. Alison bought it at Amazon in the US where it was almost half the price of a very discounted model at Future Shop. Plus free shipping and no taxes. I’ll pick it up at a forwarding service just over the US-Canadian border.
No, I didn’t go for the DP1, but for a Panasonic Lumix with a 10x Leica zoom lens. It will be a huge improvement compared to my current Canon camera with 3 seconds shutter lag and 1 inch screen. You’ll see the results here soon, I hope you will notice the improvement.
Nov 21 2007
Cones
Pepe & Poupoune (and Alison) make their first appearance on another website.
The context of these cones can be had here and here from the archives.
Sep 30 2007
Escape
Instead of resting on our laurels and enjoying the nice fall weather we’re spending most of our weekends lately scraping and painting our fire escape stairs. There is a lot of rust, but on the whole its metal is in better state than I had feared. Still there are a lot of nooks and crannies to scrape the rust out and a lot of it is only accessible on high ladders. I strapped myself into my climbing harness (so it gets some use after all) and work all day with my arms in the air until they are really sore. Wearing goggles so I don’t get rust chips into my eye. Or paint.
Of course Alison is also scraping and painting but to her dismay I shield her from the “hanging-upside-down-under-stair-experience”. She doesn’t know anything about ropes and carabiners and I don’t want to worry if she’s going to fall of the ladder and break her neck. “But teach her the ropes!”, I hear you thinking, but I can’t do that without spending a lot of time supervising her. And she is kind of allergic to supervision. And there is so much work ahead.
Sep 29 2007
West
We try to find access to the west side of “our” lake. This view is from a neighbouring hill, but steep cliffs prevent us from descending. Later I (and Poupoune) manage to bushwack around the hill, but it certainly isn’t an easy approach. I think I’ll hack a path towards the lake next year and put up a sign “lake access”, so the path gets really defined when many people are using it.
All the shoreline on the right of this photo will soon be developed for rich people. For the land alone the developer asks already around 300,000 dollars per plot, and your architectural plans have to be okayed by a commission before you can buy. Not for us mere mortals. And even if we had the money we wouldn’t want to live in an enclave of rich people. Why can’t they make cheap apartments near lakes?
Aug 10 2007
Toys
The real reason for my presence in Toronto is that Alison has a team building meeting with all the members of her team. And the partners were expressly requested to come as well, and dogs and children also. I left Poupoune and Pepe at home though, since they’re not allowed in the train and I didn’t want to drive that far after a busy week at work.
The meeting was held in one of Alison’s colleagues’ cottage in the Muskokas, a two hour drive north of Toronto. We rented a car and upon arrival we found that everybody brought their toddlers, so there were enough small creatures. And they all swam, canoed, kayaked, barbecued, tanned, and chatted. So now I can put faces to names when Alison mentions her colleagues. Halfway I started to order the huge amount of toys that belonged to the son of our hosts. All cars and bulldozers (O, I wish I had those Tonka trucks when I was a kid) in a row, all the spades together. And the balls, the buckets, the fishes, the rings et cetera, et cetera. In the end I made a huge and very unstable tower of a few toys that were hard to categorize. It stood upright for a couple of minutes, until a breath of wind cased it to tumble down… People enquired if I suffered from OCD, and that made me laugh. They should see the mess in my office.
Jun 17 2008
City
We walked a lot, doing a couple of walking tours.
Today we spent exploring Harlem. It was a very strange experience for me to be surrounded by non-white people. I didn’t see any Caucasians for over two hours.
I wasn’t afraid or felt threatened or something like that. I just felt slightly uneasy. Being the odd one out. It made me understand a bit better how black people must feel when they are surrounded by whites. And I wasn’t even oppressed or treated badly.
Alison didn’t have any of these feelings. She lived in Africa for 4 years, and simply doesn’t notice race.
By mare • A., english, travel •