english

Poupoune is not feeling well. She stays very close to me, so close that once I run over her tail with my chair on castors. At the end of the day I here here vomiting. But instead of the small vomits she once in while leaves behind, this one was a gigantic pile of sick. When I made a picture of it –since I didn’t want you all to miss this– Pepe immediately started to eat it, but I locked him up in the kitchen and then cleaned it up. Even my grossness tolerance has its limits.

(This is a bit geeky. You can also just skip this and jump to the next paragraph.)
As I wrote here earlier, I had a lot of problems with my laptop. A couple of months ago the hard drive started to fail, so I got a new one because when I bought the PowerBook, I also bought an extended warranty of three years. Then the S-Video port, that we use to watch, ehrm. downloaded videos, on out TV stopped working. Another trip to the repair centre and a couple of weeks later -yes, this repair process usually takes very long, since all parts have to be ordered from Apple in the US, during which Alison and I share her aging computer- they handed me back my PowerBook with a new motherboard. Unfortunately this “new” motherboard (which was probably not new but so-called refurbished, taken out another machine) had some other problems. It didn’t see my external screen so I couldn’t use that, and it also stopped noticing when I inserted my camera’s memory card in the card reader. But is was two weeks before I went to Europe and I didn’t want to take the risk of not having it back yet. So I wrote the repair shop what was wrong and that I would hand the machine in when I came back. And so I did. But this time the repair took longer than usual. I called and they told me that they were waiting on another motherboard but that Apple had no idea when it would arrive. After a couple of weeks (after which I really hated Alison’s slow and unstable computer) I called again and the ETA for the part was still not known. But they suggested me to call Apple directly because I could complain and they couldn’t. And so I did.

After spending lots of time with a tech support guy and on hold (with awful music, as if they don’t have a music store full of nice tracks…) , he connected me with someone from Apple Customer Relations. This guy said they still have no idea when the new motherboard will arrive, and that this was all taking too long. And so he offered to exchange my 3-year old machine with a brand new 1.67 GHz Alu Powerbook with DVD writer, bigger screen and faster video card! It was an offer i couldn’t refuse. Of course I have to buy new memory and new battery packs (I have three) but I’m not complaining. It also means I can hold off buying one of the new MacTel units, and wait until they are stable.

I just exchanged the machines, because it arrived much sooner that they had told me, and it is indeed really, really fast. I transferred my old data (still plenty of room on the much bigger hard drive), re-installed some utilities, and now I’m bragging about it on my log. Yay!

(BTW, sane people call it aluminium.)

Hallo’Ween is wildly popular in Québec, even though it is an Irish and later English custom. Quebeckers are usually not doing the Anglophone holidays like Thanksgiving, but for Hallo’ween they seem to make an exception. Grown-ups are dressed up on the street and in shops, houses are transformed into scary places with carved pumpkins and lots of fake cobwebs and there are lots of parties. And of course there are the children, who dress up in a nice costume and go door to door to collect candy.

This tradition is totally unknown to me. being Dutch but Googling learned me that children who do ‘Trick or Treat’ are part of a long tradition.

“The custom of ‘trick or treat’ probably has several origins. Again mostly Irish. An old Irish peasant practice called for going door to door to collect money, bread cake, cheese, eggs, butter, nuts, apples, etc., in preparation for the festival of St. Columbus Kill. Yet another custom was the begging for soul cakes, or offerings for one’s self – particularly in exchange for promises of prosperity or protection against bad luck. It is with this custom the concept of the fairies came to be incorporated as people used to go door to door begging for treats. Failure to supply the treats would usually result in practical jokes being visited on the owner of the house.”

Since I don’t want practical jokes (ah well, maybe I do) I gave all children that dared to ring at our door and didn’t run away when the dogs started barking (and of course Pepe escaped once) a box of Smarties. A small box (it contains 11 smarties) but still I hope their dental insurance will be good. I don’t want to be a schoolteacher though. The sugar-high that all those kids have tomorrow will be too much to handle. Some carried garbage bags full of candy. Not these kids in the picture, they had small bags and were just doing it for the fun. I was happy to see some coloured faces in our mainly white, Francophone neighbourhood. And no, I don’t mean make-up.

Here you can read more about ‘trick or treat’.

Cleaning the house from all the dust that accumulated during the duration of the renovation. Even though I’m a clean worker building always causes some mess. And now we have regained control over the house again.
Next project: Bookcases, so my books can finally leave the boxes that they’re in for already more than two years. I want to design a nice looking, modern bookcase that is practical as well.

Well, not exactly, I still have to add some small tiles under the closet and do some caulking, but it’s 99% done. So we moved all the bathroom stuff into the bathroom and into the new closet and I moved all my tools out of the living room. Finally…

Last night Alison suggested I sleep on the other side of the bed. I never sleep on that side, never did in my life and for some reason the result was that this morning my knee was really painful. The left meniscus of my right knee hurts, but only when I’m inactive. So in the morning or after I sat for a while.
I wasn’t sure if I’d go to my dance class today, but after I bought this knee brace, I went with the intention to stop when it would hurt. However I had no pain at all, and made even a couple of big leaps and jumps. Afterwards Alison and I had supper and then it started to hurt again. Hopefully it isn’t serious, I’ve spend already too much on physiotherapy this year. And the ski season is coming soon!

Finally the bathroom is ready to paint.

I spend the last couple of days making a new bathroom closet. Made from plywood, because my normal choice of material, MDF or Medium Density Fibre board, wouldn’t survive another leakage.
The choice of doors was a hard one. Sliding doors would be awkward because half of the entry to the closet would always be blocked. But folding doors would stick out too much and would potentially be ruined when they hit the bathroom door. So I made two folded doors and had them slightly go into the closet so they don’t interfere with the bathroom door. Things turned out pretty well.

The temperatures are falling and it becomes time to start heating the house. We live on the ground floor and our apartment has a hot air furnace. I don’t like that at all. It’s expensive because very inefficient (and our furnace is 40 years old, so even more energy goes up in smoke), it causes allergies because of the dry air and all the dust it pumps into the air.

So this year I decided to clean the ducts. Fortunately there were already holes cut in the ducts to access their insides, probably from previous cleaning. I opened the panels, started up my very powerful woodworking vacuum cleaner, and dug in. Later, inspired by this picture, I made and extension stick, with a brush and a flashlight attached to it, so I could vacuum and see what I was doing in the darker regions of the ductal cavities.