english

One of the people I went hiking with last week had a good tip for a secluded lake in the Laurentians that had no cottages on it, no boats and hardly any people. We found it, after some driving around, and it is indeed very nice.
While swimming I see a hidden canoe on the shore. I borrow it and make a short canoo trip with Poupoune (on this picture still swimming with a stick). Unfortunately there is no real paddle, but only a makeshift contraption made of a stick and a plank, held together with some fishing line. It’s very heavy, and doesn’t give much forward motion, so more than a short trip is out of the question. Poupoune doesn’t mind, she doesn’t like long boat trips anyway.

Mark, Mary, Pat, Bertie, Alison, Karen, Anne, Susan.

To ‘celebrate’ the departure of our friend Anne, one of the ER-gang, to Los Angeles (she will be sorely missed) we have a little barbeque in the garden and after that we watch the first ever appearance of ER on a screen.

The 90 minutes long pilot episode is interesting because it is so slow. Apparently in 1994 they weren’t used to the frantic pace of the current show. Is that the influence of videoclips?

Today I made another small step towards eternal fame and prosperity.
We strolled near Saint Laurent to fill some time before our movie was going to start, and I saw a film crew. We took a closer look, and somebody approached us and asks what they were filming. We didn’t know either. Then some production crew comes by and asks the woman if she wants to participate in the filming. She declines and then Alison pushes me forward saying that I’m game. I reluctantly agree and so I ended up acting in a Juste Pour Rire television gag.
These gags, filmed with a hidden camera, are aired almost every week nation-wide on Canadian television. Unfortunately they are never really funny and often quite mean. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The situation: A courier van approaches innocent bystander who walks on sidewalk (me). The driver asks the innocent bystander if he could deliver two packages because he can’t stop his van. The innocent bystander accepts. Seconds after he puts the first package in the mailbox the mailbox explodes. He looks at the mailbox, then at the package. He decides to put the package down and step back from it. A man approaches and asks what happened. The innocent bystander explains and points at the van. The man starts to laugh, gets a transmitter out of his pocket and presses a red button. The van explodes and boxes are flying out. The van driver gets out of the car walks towards me and together with the other guy they point out the hidden cameras.

I played all of it in one take, and they filmed it with three “hidden” cameras. And of course I knew 75 percent what was going to happen, because they had briefed me. On the picture the director, with red cap, points out where the hidden camera is located. It will be aired in January 2007, so if you happen to see it, watch me. Sorry if I spoiled the brilliant joke for you. Who writes these things? The jokes are so infantile…

But nevertheless, an Oscarô is waiting for me. The only thing is they forgot to pay me, so the prosperity has to wait a while.

Sunday at 9:00 it finally stopped raining. We packed our wet stuff and hiked in half an hour back to the car. By then it was beautiful and sunny, just as they had promised for yesterday. And we decided to hike up another four-thousander (in feet, not meters), aptly named Giant.

About three-quarter up to the top, I decided to not go any further though. My left knee, cause for problems in the past, acted up again, and hiking the 600 metres down would be enough. No need to add another 400 to that. So I enjoyed the view, thanks to a fire 40 years ago, this mountain was much more open than others, smoked a cigar, and then went down slowly. After I had reached the car, still in one piece, I went for a swim in a nearby pond, waiting for the others to come down from the top. Yesterday’s rain was forgotten and we all agreed it had been an enjoyable weekend.

The weather reports were wrong. Instead of the beautiful sunny weather they had promised we got a drizzle that turned into a lot of, seemingly never ending, rain. So our little group of four, hiking a mountain in the Adirondacks, got really soaked. To the bone, and our boots were saturated and made splutter noises with every step.

Nevertheless we hiked about 8 hours up Dix Mountain, 21 Kilometre and 1000 meters elevation change. Still, the rain hadn’t stopped, so we made supper under a small tarp and then went to bed early. A cold and damp bed in my case, since I didn’t have much warm and dry clothes with me. Bad preparation, yes, it sometimes happens to me as well.

The last couple of weeks I’m helping someone renovating a big house. A big job, that won’t be finished before September. I’m fixing the windows that are rotten and putting in double paned glass and fancy brass weather-stripping. I’ll post a picture soon; I keep forgetting to make one.

Today I took a break from that project and I installed a kitchen in another house. It’s just and Ikea kitchen, but I added some details like the very narrow cabinet to the right. It’s only 12 cm wide and very cute. The thing on top of that is a box to hide a water pipe. I’d have re-routed the water pipe but the owner of this house was saving some pennies there. Ah well, there’s only so much you can do to convince someone.

The kitchen is a bit too ‘woody’ for my taste, and it looks like there are dirty patches, but it’s just colour changes in the wood, but the client likes it, so that’s good.

After a very hot day (34 ?C, 44 ?C with humidex) I finally tried to swim in one of the rivers that surround Montréal. I’ve never seen anybody do it, but I’ve read the water quality has improved dramatically over the last couple of years and that it is now generally safe.
So I took the plunge and jumped into the RiviËre de Prairies, between Montréal and Laval near the Papineau bridge. The water seemed fine to me, although I didn’t ingest much of it. The most important fact was however, that my body temperature went down a couple of degrees. And that was good!

Alison is also working on the house. Yes, I forced her.
She is meticulously removing all rust from our metal fence. She also nags me about what colour the fence will be painted. I don’t know yet, it has to be something that goes well with the red brick, the green garden and the, also not chosen, colour of the decks and steps.

I also removed the metal stairs that will be replaced with wooden stairs that look a bit better.

BTW, this is the second picture of me with a grinder on loglog, the first one was almost three years ago, in the first log. Líhistoire se répËte.

“Uhm boss, how do we chase the cats without a porch?”

The big house repairs are starting. I was going to replace some rotted boards in our back porch. Somewhere on the street somebody also did that but he also took out the good boards. So I brought 20 of those home because they’re very thick, much thicker than boards you can get nowadays; 80 years ago wood was much cheaper so they used lots of it. But, as it goes with these things, it turned out that the beams underneath were also rotting and a lot more boards were bad than previously thought. I didn’t have that many replacement boards, so the decision was made to replace them all with plywood, just as the guy on the street. Later I’m going to cover the plywood with polyester and fibreglass to make it really weather proof. And while we’re at it, I also replaced all beams that had rotted, and will replace the rusted metal stairs for wooden ones. A major operation, enough to fill a weekend. Or two.