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Alison has been making new dog outfits for Pepe and Poupoune so they’ll survive the cold winter to come. She drew up special patterns derived from a doggy T-shirt we bought at some point, but adapted to the shape and size of our little four-footers.

She uses scraps fabric that she has laying around so now we enter Paris Hilton territory, when both Alison and Pepe are dressed in matching outfits. Since Pepe is often found on her lap or carried around on her arm the match is quite obvious.

(Click for big version, a nice desktop/wallpaper)

A nice view of a pond during a winter walk. Quit, cold, but no snow yet.

Finally our kitchen’s range hood got and exhaust pipe to the exterior. It wasn’t easy to make, because our telephone company has its main telephone cable (8 cm thinck and wrapped in metal) running right in the corner of our kitchen. By using a small exhaust I just could fit it in.

Unfortunately the range hood’s ventilator isn’t very strong so not all the cooking smells are sucked out. I guess I’ll have to buy a stronger one at a later time, maybe when we replace our aging cheap stove.

My client painted the desk I made for them and she thinks it’s gorgeous. And I must say that I’m quite happy with the result as well. They were going to paint it white first, afraid that red would be a too bold statement but it turned out pretty well. And even the underside looks pretty.

(I’m also very glad I didn’t painted it myself; firstly because I couldn’t do it with my bruised ribs, but secondly because she put 9 coats of paint on it! The paint turned out a totally different colour than the sample, and she decided to restart with another colour.)

We have visitors from the US this weekend, Alison’s friend Ina and her daughter Esmée. We were at Esmée’s adoption ceremony a couple of years ago. In the meantime she grew a lot and became quite an explorer. So Alison went with them to the Biodome and they saw, besides a lot of other kids and grown-ups, a lot of animals.

Esmée was pretty pooped out when they returned.

The walls at the back of our house are in not so good shape. The whole wall has to be re-pointed at some day, but not this year, since it’ll cost a few thousand dollars. Repointing involves removing the cement between the bricks with a grinder and putting in new cement. Also cracked bricks should be replaced and the brick is sand blasted or cleaned with a pressure washer. I theoretically could do this myself, but I don’t feel like it since it’s a dirty and awkward job, better left to people that specialize in it. Maybe Alison’s brother Steven can help me, he is a stonemason. But he lives in England at the moment, and we’ll see if/when he comes back.

The few rows of brick that are just above our back porch are in really bad shape. I suspect that people (Alison lives in this house for 10 years now) didn’t remove the snow from the porch for many years and that eventually the melting and re-freezing of the snow caused the damage. The grout is missing, the bricks are cracked and they crumble when you touch them. So on this patch Irt of the wall needed to do something now to preserve the wall for a couple of years until we do the real job, and replace all 20 or so of those bad bricks.

And because it’ll get too cold to do any brick work soon, it had to be done now. I had postponed it for a couple of weeks already, but now I was home, so I went to work. Yes, my ribs did hurt, and sometimes even a lot, but according to the chiropractor doing things won’t prolong the healing process. It just hurts.

The job is done now, and I only need to seal the edge of the porch with caulking tomorrow and we’re ready for the winter.

[Photo taken with my phone, and isn’t of good quality, but it was wirelessly transferred to my computer while the phone was still on the kitchen table. Technology is so great, sometimes…]

Alison was in Toronto last week so I had to be my own nurse the last couple of days. That was probably okay because I would have kept her awake with my swearing, moaning and cries of pain.

Tonight she came home and when she came in we experienced a scene straight out of a play. I told her that my pain was much less today except when I coughed, laughed or sneezed. She smiled and I couldn’t help myself to start laughing. That was very painful so I started to cry as well. Not cry with tears, but cry of pain. In the meantime the whole situation was so absurd and comical that I couldn’t stop laughing. It was like I had taken too much drugs and had a laughing fit that wouldn’t stop, even though I wanted it very much to stop. I send her away in the kitchen and the things eased out a little an the ordeal finally stopped. But as soon as i saw her again the whole the sequence of laughter and pain started again and it repeated itself a couple of times during the evening. Very absurd and very painful.

Still I’m happy that she’s back, but I try very hard not to be too happy.

I fell from the stairs today and bruised some ribs. It happened before I started work. I ran up the inside stairs in the apartment we are working in. I always run up stairs, never walk. The door beneath blew open because a gust of wind, so i turned a ran down in the same movement. The next thing I know is that my feet slid away under me and I fell backwards, banging the back of my head on a stair. My rib cage hit another stair and for a few seconds I was gaping for air, unable to utter a sound. After that I started to yell, so loud that somebody came all the way from the park at the other side of the street to see if I was okay. I tried all limbs and they seemed to still work. I then slowly got up and that also worked, although it was very painful.

And now I’m lying in bed and every movement hurts like hell. After I get in or out of bed I literally have to catch my breath from exhaustion. I went to see a chiropractor this afternoon and he told me that a couple of ribs were slightly bruised and the muscles that keep your back together were very tense. He said it won’t take too long to heal though. Let’s hope he’s right. Alison is in Toronto so I have to take care of myself and the dogs. I’ll manage, but with difficulty.

After spending a couple of evenings after work making a shelving unit that goes on top of the desk I finally delivered the desk today at the client’s house. The desk is so big it doesn’t fit in my car and I didn’t want to put it onto the roof-rack because it might crack. So I rented a cheap UHaul truck that turned out to be fairly expensive after all, because it consumed almost 1 litre of gas for every kilometre driven.

I decided not to paint the desk myself because I’m just too tired after a full day of work to spend an hour painting every day. So one of the clients is now going to paint it, but they can’t make up their mind what colour it is going to be. We’ll see.