english

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 16 2007

Feeds

For all readers who wants to read loglog in their RSS reader I’ve now enabled full feeds. You now not only get the photos but also the words, so you don’t have to click through anymore. If there are any problems please let me know.

Update 29 September, 2008:

<a href=”https://loglog.peghole.com/feed“>Full entries feed</a>

<a href=”https://loglog.peghole.com/comments/feed“>Comments feed</a>

By • english, tech, web •

Aug 15 2007

Plumbing

plumbing

The bathroom renovation is going fine, albeit slow. Along the way we found a lot of things that also need to be changed or updated. Like the plumbing that had so many turns in them that it would be very easy to get clogged (and really hard to unclog). So I replumbed the toilet, the shower, the bath, the washing machine and the wash basin.

All of this will be under a slate tile floor, so it better be good. I hope I didn’t make any mistakes. That’s what I don’t like about plumbing, you’re never 100% sure if it won’t start to leak after a couple of weeks/months/years. The only way to fix it then is through the ceiling of the downstairs neighbours. They usually don’t like that.

The nice thing of bathroom (and kitchen) renovations is that you have to wear so many hats. Some days I demolish something, frame a wall, fish electricity cables, plumb a bathtub and lay a floor. Very varied work indeed.

By • english, reno, work •

Aug 10 2007

Toys

ordering 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.

By • A., canada, english, outdoors, travel •

Aug 9 2007

Toronto

Via first class with wine

The first time I arrived in Montréal was by train from Toronto. And now, almost 6 years later I took the train to Toronto. I hadn’t been there in the past six years and since Alison was already staying there in the Royal York hotel, it was not that expensive. Through Alison I also got a free upgrade to VIA 1, so I travelled first class, with free wine and a meal. Nice. It’s so nice to be able to stare out the window and watch the landscape going by. When I drive I can never do that, since I’m never a passenger, and always have to watch the road. Maybe it’s time that Alison gets a drivers license.

(O, and on the way back I forgot my laptop again. But two days later, when the Lost & Found office opened on Monday, I had it back again. I’m so lucky. And stupid to keep testing the honesty of Canadians…)

By • canada, english, travel •

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

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 •

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