I received this letter today. It is an invitation to take the Oath of Citizenship. I’m finally becoming Canadian!

But. Is it really necessary to make this notice so menacing? It looks like I’m summoned for a trial. I know there is a judge involved, but this is a nice trial.

It would be so much nicer if this letter was a congratulatory one. Something like this:

We are pleased to inform you that you passed the Citizenship test and that there is only one step left in becoming a Canadian Citizen. Therefore we invite you to take the Oath of Citizenship. You can bring friends and family to this joyful occasion.

It is going to take place on

Friday 06 February 2009 at 1:30 PM.

at
Collège de Maissonneuve
2700, rue de Bourbonnière
Montreal QC H1X 2A2

The way it is currently there is only one “happy” word in it: the letter starts with “Please”. But the joy is over very fast since it is immediately followed by a command: “appear”…
At the bottom there are 5 check-boxes ordering me what documentation to bring, what will happen if I don’t show up, and a big block labeled WARNING with legalese about the do’s and don’ts of obtaining Canadian Citizenship.

Then there are two more pages; one is a media release form because there might be people taking photos and another with details about parking (paid!) and a notice to use only this particular entrance of the school.

However one piece of essential information is missing: if and how many people I can bring. Since it isn’t mentioned I presume it isn’t limited so I hereby invite you all (well almost all, you know who you are). Afterwards we can grab a beer, or something non-alcoholic if you prefer. The first drink is on me.

I took Wim (who does a lot of stereo-photography) to the Sami’s fruit and vegetable store. He was amazed by the giant mountains of veggies and took some stereo pictures of me. This one if while buying some bunches of Cilantro. Click the image for a bigger stereo 3D image. Red/Blue are glasses required to see the stereo effect.

(On a related note: I just read that Cilantro is the most profitable vegetable you can grow. So now you know.)

We went to the US for the second time this week, this time to visit the annual Fourth of July barbecue at Alison’s uncle’s house in Cortland, upstate New York.

We booked late but nevertheless got the most spacious suite to sleep in: the gorgeous attic. Despite it being very hot during the day, at night it was remarkable cool and we slept very well.

Alison has a huge family (her grandparents had 11 children) and a lot of them (more than 50) travel from all over the country, from Hawaii to Cleveland, to attend. After 5 years I got to know them a bit so the whole reunion is not as much an ordeal as it was the first few times.

The owner of this attic is reading loglog so leave a comment and tell him what you think about his attic. Please keep it positive otherwise we aren’t allowed to book it for next year. Note the upside down hanging lamps he made for over the huge conference table at the right. Very original and nice.

The blocks were a huge success!

Susan’s son Hugh proved not at all too young for the blocks as I had thought but what do I know about babies. He immediately started to play with them and was particulairly interested in the round ones, that rolled back and forth. He took them out of the box himself, threw them on the floor, put them in his mouth and often had one in each hand. He was happy and I was happy too.

He’s an easy going baby, with very big ears. I called them Budda ears and Susan said they called hem like that in the orphanage as well.

He didn’t build a tower yet, but I’m sure that’ll come with time. However destroying the tower we tried to build gave him great pleasure. He learns new things every day. Since a few days he can stand without support of a chair or a leg and he showed it to me and I snapped the first photo of it. Alison (she knows a lot about babies) told me him standing like that was very early for a baby of not even 9 months. Susan must be proud of him.

A friend of mine, one of the group I watch ER with, recently adopted a boy. Tomorrow I’m going to see him for the first time and I went a bit overboard with the welcome gift.

I made a set of wooden building blocks for him, enough to build a big tower or castle. It was a bit more work than I had calculated but the result is quite nice. Not perfect, but made with love.

He’s a bit too young for building towers, but for now he can throw them around the room or at his mother. To prevent major damage I didn’t use heavy hardwood but just used pine. Well, actually it was a request by Alison who, as a kid, preferred pine blocks over their more solid counterparts.

We’ll see what little Hugh thinks of them. I for one, almost couldn’t stop playing with them. I made another set for another friend, also from ER, who also adopted a baby. But those blocks aren’t sanded yet, I’ll finish them later.

It’s my birthday today but I’m totally not in the mood for a party. Alison is in Toronto, and I’m invited by friends to celebrate my birthday with them. Even though i didn’t feel like it I reluctantly went. It costs a lot of energy to appear human.

The supper was great, the cake was lovely, the company pleasant, but nevertheless I wasn’t able to really enjoy it.

This depressive episode lasts a couple of weeks now and I’m want it to be over. I can only see the negative side of things, the house that needs lot of maintenance, the tenants that refuse the rent increase, my lack of friends, clients that didn’t pay my invoices etc. I even shout to the dogs.

The tagging virus is doing the rounds again and Frank tried to infect me. Since I’ve not much else to write here I happily tag along.

According to the rule-book:

• Link to the person that tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

Okay, now we’ve got that out of the way, here we go, in no particular order:

1. I generally don’t eat meat, but I’ll sometimes make exceptions for lamb or venison. I did however eat dog once. I was in a market in rural Vietnam and taking pictures of two tied-up dogs. Someone came to me and gestured to come with him, intermittently pointing to the dogs. We ended up at a stall on the market with a big boiling pot of soup with chucks of meat in it. He took a big spoon, fished out some meat and held it in front of my face. How could I refuse somebody who offered me a part of his feast meal? It was quite tasty and tasted like wild pig. I do eat fish but will spare you a gruesome story.
2. I hate the fact that men’s clothes are almost all in subdued, dark colours. I like to wear bright colours, the world is already grey enough. (There was a period in my life that I only had grey clothes, but that was when I was in art school…)
3. I almost always sleep with something in my mouth. A plastic mouth guard, because I grind and clench my teeth during my sleep; and a Dutch “dropje” (liquorice) in order to keep my saliva going and thus preventing a dry mouth and a resulting sore throat; and sometimes also my right index finger to be able to breathe because my nose often clogs up completely. However, and maybe the result of the above, I do not snore.
4. I am not circumcised, but I did have a vasectomy. I had some complications after doing that procedure so I’m not sure if I can recommend it. Even though it’s good for bringing down the growth of the human population, so maybe we can have another generation before the resource wars will start.
5. I learn very fast but I’m also easily bored. So I never become a real expert in something because when the learning curve flattens at the top, and improving things costs too much time, I tend to move my attention to something else. As a result I’m good in doing many things, but don’t excel in anything particular.
6. I’ve never knowingly slept with a Mac user.

O, and now for the hard part. Find six blogs that haven’t been tagged. Of course that is impossible, like with every pyramid scheme. The number of bloggers that already have been tagged goes up quite a bit with every iteration.

Six, forty-two, 258 (more people than I know that have a blog), 1554, 9330, 55986, 335922, 2015538 (more people than there are living on the island of Montréal), 12093234 (more people than in Québec), 72559410 (more people than living in the Netherlands and Canada combined), 435356466, 2612138802 (almost half of the earth’s human population), 15672832818 (we really have to teach animals to blog now)…

This whole tagging thing is totally unsustainable. All I can do is break the rules. Either by tagging less than six people or by tagging people that have already been tagged, but haven’t written a “6 random things about me”-post.

I just tag one person, and I’ll force her to write something so the chain isn’t broken because we all know that means bad luck. Without further ado I hereby tag Alison, who writes much better than I do on her Transparency blog.

(I’m so going to regret this.)

A whole group of bloggers visited Jonas, who had major cancer surgery last week. He is making a fast recovery. I wish him well.

We’re having a lot of Dutch visitors lately. Last week my sister Aagje and brother-in-law Steven came by to have supper with me, before they continued their “Eastern North America in 3 weeks”-tour. We sat in the garden, listened to the crickets and my sister told me that they had visited Montréal’s highlights by luxury coach that day but both the driver and the tour guide got lost in the “no left turns” Montréal traffic situation. If your map says to turn left and the traffic signs forbid it, navigating our city can be quite hard. The next day they were heading for Ottawa (half a day) and Toronto and so forth. I couldn’t travel that way, it would be too superficial, but they like it. They’ve seen a lot of the world this way over the past ten years.

And yesterday Linde arrived. She’ll stay a bit longer in Montréal, about 4 months. She’s going to be an exchange student at McGill University, and is the daughter of one of my readers. Through a comments on loglog she ended up in our guestroom. (So if you want to be our guest, you know what to do next.) Linde won’t stay for 4 months in our guestroom, she’s looking for a room to rent. Today, her first day in Montréal, she went out and already saw several rooms. She even said yes to one of them. But now she has buyer’s remorse and is in doubt if she shouldn’t look at a couple more rooms in shared apartments.

It’s difficult for Dutch people to do these things: in the Netherlands finding a room (or a house for that matter) is really hard, so if you find something you immediately take it. Here you can be a bit more picky.

The dogs like her, and she’s an excellent guest. Alison suggested, over the phone, that we should adopt her.

After a lazy Sunday afternoon supper at Dorothée’s, I tried to get Poupoune in the hammock and thought she wouldn’t like it. But she just jumped on it, no problem at all. To get a nice photo of her we repeated the jumping on and off twenty times or so. We go through great lengths to produce loglog: we even torture our dogs. Not that she didn’t like it.