montréal

Aug 22 2007

Crime

broken window

The last couple of days I told Linde that there is not much crime here ó after which she promptly forgot to close the guestroom window when she went away.

But I spoke too soon, because last night someone smashed in my car window. He (let’s assume it wasn’t a she) only stole a $40 iPod charger, and cut the cord that went into the cassette player, but the damage done was much bigger. The back window is also scratched, and is loose in it’s fitting, so I might need to replace that as well.

I made a tour along the alley and at least three more cars had smashed windows. I talked to one of the owners and she had 10 CDs stolen. It looks very much like a junkie who needed easy money.

So now I have to go to the police to file a report, and to the car window company to ask for a quote. I have a deductible for the insurance, so it probably won’t be worth it to claim the damage. Grrrr.

Update: Police rapport filed (they even helped me 10 minutes before their official opening time). Window will be replaced today. Total replacement cost 550$.

Update 2: I just noticed that the thief also stole a packet of dropjes (Dutch liquorice) that I kept in the car. And the window replacement guys found a ring, that isn’t mine nor Alison’s so might have been of the thief. He has big fingers and a bad taste in jewellery.

By • english, home, montréal, rant •

Aug 21 2007

Visitors

Linde

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.

By • english, friends, home, montréal, netherlands, travel •

Aug 18 2007

Welding

welding

During the week I’m working on clients’ projects and in the weekend on our own house. The joys of homeownership!
Our neighbour, a fellow woodworker, also knows his metalwork. So I hired him to fix our metal fire escape in the back. He braces the undersized pole that holds up the whole structure (that needs to be replaced with a bigger one in a year or two) and welds some holes here and there.

It feels strange to see somebody else working hard, and not being able to help. My tools aren’t here, and I would just be in his way. So while I hear the sound of his grinder I’m writing this post. My hands itch but I have to contain myself.

When he’s done we can start scraping the stairs and balconies, and then painting them. That’ll be a major job, involving many, many weekends.

By • english, home, montréal, reno, work •

Aug 6 2007

Sirup

grapefruit sirup

When I immigrated to Canada I put only a few food items in my shipping container. Lots of dropjes (Dutch Liquorice) of course but also a box with twelve tin bottles of this sirup. It is grapefruit flavour (100% concentrated juice and sugar) and it’s the best sirup I’ve ever tasted. And I can’t get it here. Sure I can buy various sirups in the import stores but they’re all the regular flavours like lemon, berries and mint. But no grapefruit. And this sirup, with some water or soda water makes a perfect drink. Not too sweet and with just a hint of bitterness.

Over time the stash was used up but some visitors brought new bottles and I also brought back a few bottles myself every-time I went back to the Netherlands to visit my mother. My suitcase was usually quite heavy.

Today, when I opened a new bottle I was in for a bad surprise. It stank. And the reddish liquid had turned all brown and gooey. I checked the “best before” date and it said July 2004. Oops. I checked all five bottles I still had in stock and they all had the same date. Quintuple oops.

Apparently I had put all the newer bottles in front of the original batch of 2003 so those bottles had plenty of time to go bad. Darn. Now I have to go back to the Netherlands soon, I only have one bottle left. And my suitcase will be very heavy.

By • canada, english, food, montréal •

Aug 2 2007

Tiles

tiles

I’m currently working on a big bathroom renovation and the client has a hard time deciding what tiles he wants on the floor. So he keeps going to the tile stores and buying more and more samples. His living room now looks like a tile showroom.

He still has some time to decide, I’m not in the tiling stage yet…
First I have to do lots ofplumbing, a new subfloor, bath podium, shower pan, running some electricity wires and more…

By • english, montréal, work •

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

& 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 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 •

Jun 28 2007

Wii

wii

Christmas came early here. No, actually it came very late. Alison gave me a Wii as a birthday present on April Fools. For the uninitiated, a Wii is a game console; a box you attach to your TV and play games on.
These boxes however are really in short supply and it took us a couple of months to acquire one. Unlike in Europe, were friends of my, just put their name on a list and received their Wii [link in Dutch] six weeks later, here you have to visit the shops every day and ask if they have Wii’s. Or buy one on eBay or Craigslist for 100 dollars above the normal price.

We didn’t do that, because we are cheap, patient and not very close to a electronics stores. So we scoured the Internet, put the Wii product-pages of a couple of internet shops in our browser’s bookmarks and reloaded them every day a couple of times. And lo-and-behold, after many, many weeks, Tuesday one of the shops (I’m reluctant to tell you it was Futureshop, since I try to avoid them as the plague) had Wii’s in stock. Sixty of them when I started my order and nervously punched in my credit card number, and they had only 15 left after I received my order confirmation.

This morning the letter carrier (I can’t use the word “postman”, Alison will flog me) rang twice and handed me a big box. Inside was a much smaller box and I’m dying to open it but I’m going to wait until Alison returns from Toronto tonight.

After all, it’s my birthday present from her.

Update: she came home, tried to wrap the box, I stopped her because I knew that access to the wrapping paper was kind of blocked (that part of the basement is still a mess) and then she sang me Happy Birthday and the French equivalent.

And then we played boxing, bowling and tennis for a couple of hours. It was fun! Even though Alison beat me at bowling.

Can you believe it that this is the first game console I ever owned in my life? And that I used to make all my money making games?

By • A., english, home, montréal, tech •

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