Wednesday 28th March

At last all our worldly belongings have been delivered. We drove to the customs house in Kingston on Monday morning to get it officially into Canada (although it's been in Montreal for a week or so), then the lorry with the container on the back followed us home to unload everything. We put our car in the garage so that the lorry had plenty of room to get off the road and into the drive. The driver, however, had a much better plan. Simply by backing the lorry across the bit of grass we have at the side of the house they could cut down the heaving distance by, ooooh, 10 yards. So he maneuvered the beast back over the grass so the trailer door faced our side door, leaving almost half a lane of the road free for any traffic that happened by, and strode out to break the seal. It was almost three minutes before an OPP officer rolled up and asked him if he would mind moving the thing because it was an obstruction. So he put it in the drive after all, leaving some very fetching tyre marks in the rain soaked grass... imagine a cross between the Grand Canyon and a Connemara bog and you'll get the idea.

It's an odd thing. We've been rattling around in this whopping big house for two weeks. It's seemed pretty empty. Loooaads of space all over the place. Add to that the fact that we got rid of much more stuff than ever we shipped over; skip loads and boot fairs and auctions full of stuff were left behind. So how come, now it's here, it fills the bloody place and we've got nowhere to put anything? It's just uncanny. Where on earth did it fit in Cambridge Avenue? All that aside, though, it's lovely to be reunited with things. Surprising things, too. The times we've dragged some insignificant bit of junk from the bottom of a box and squealed, "ooooh, I'd forgotten we packed that!" would bore you rigid if I listed them. So I won't. Angie is just delerious about getting her craft stuff back.

The snow has pretty much disappeared now apart from the odd diehard lump here and there. Spring has well and truly sprung and the bird population seems to have multiplied to plague proportions overnight. They do a very nice line in black birds. There's a red-winged blackbird which, on the ground, just looks like it has a thin white stripe on its wing, but as soon as it takes off you can see a bright red flash above the stripe. Then there's an iridescent black bird with a long tail called a grackle, with a voice like a rusty hinge. There are hundreds of those biffing around the garden knocking seven bells out of the bird feeders we've hung on the trees. There are more sparrow varieties than you can shake a bag of birdseed at, nuthatches, and a little black and white woodpecker that's had a go at our clothes line pole. I'm told we get turkey vultures in the summer (which would make sense, because we saw the odd flock of wild turkeys strutting around the wood at the end of our garden in the winter). We looked them up in the bird book, and they're ugly perishers. Angie says she's seen some vulture like birds circling over the main highway on the school run. It might be them. Ominous! Obviously breaking down is not an option in the summer either. Also, apparently, if we put a humming bird feeder out we'll almost certainly get one of those visiting. It's all very counter intuitive, having just survived a Canadian winter with temperatures down to -30, to expect anything quite so exotic. We shall see.

Oh, yes... the road kill is starting to get interesting again. Haven't seen a porcupine yet, but certainly seen a few skunks. I'll let you know if anything really exciting turns up.

Thursday 22nd March

Yes, I know! I know! Almost two months and no entries. But look, we spent a couple of weeks trying to live in one property and work in another (the one with no water) - and then it turned out that the house we were living in was let from mid February, so we had to decamp to a third property. So we shifted everything, including all the work and computers and stuff that was at the defunct floating chalet, to this third home. And lo, we did ring the internet provider and we did ask unto them, :What about shifting our high speed internet access to this place, then?" And verily they did say unto us, "No chance sunshine - you can only do dial-up at that address". And THAT, my friends, was the problem. There is just no incentive to try and maintain a website at dial up speeds. It drains the soul. We lost the will to live waiting for emails and things to dribble in. On one occasion (and I am not exaggerating for comic effect here) I waited 40 minutes for an email with an illustration attached to go through, only to realise that I had sent it to myself my mistake (I replied to an email in the 'sent' folder , not the inbox, if you must know). I then had to wait 40 minutes for the message to be delivered back to me. Then I sent it to the right address, another 40 minutes, and guess what? Their inbox was full, and I got it sent back to me again. I waited another 40 minutes while the thing trickled back, and I STILL had to send it again (you guessed it - 40 more minutes) or they wouldn't have had it at all. That's over 3 hours to deliver one illustration. I could have sent it by pony express in that time. Well, OK, the pony would have to be fitted with water wings because the illustration was going to the THES in London, but you get the point.

Anyway - the important news is that we are now living in Lansdowne and settling into the house we've bought. It's very splendid, and we love it to bits. AND there's high speed internet. Wooohoo! It's a sobering thought, though, that this is the fourth place we've lived in since we got here 6 months ago. I really do hope it will be the last for a while.

We had a minor moment of panic when the thaw began, because the underground pipe that drains the outpourings of the sump pump was blocked (probably iced up) so the water was draining back into the basement and flooding it. We had to do a bit of cowboy plumbing to get the water away down the garden - it seems to have worked, though, because the basement's lovely and dry again now. It's chucking it down with rain at the moment, so I think I'll wait for the good weather before I attempt to make good my botching.

I've just had a look on the Guestbook page, and it seems that some spam has infiltrated. That can't go on, so I've pulled the page while I see if anything can be done. You can always send me complaints and chivvies by email, though. (You know who I'm talking to). (Arthur!).

Oh, here are a couple of better photos of the house. Don't ask me who the tart in the pink hat and gloves is; I've never seen her before in my life.

 

Monday 5th February

What a week! This has been a bit of a rollercoaster, and that's why the entries have been sparse to the point of non-existence. As ever, my apologies.

Angie and I between us are having trouble remembering what day precisely it was (I think it was Sunday, just after the last entry) - but as I was washing my toothbrush and the water fizzled out. The tap was dry. By the morning, all the taps were dry and the cisterns were not filling. The plumbing was frozen solid. We let the stalwart Randy know, and he immediately biffed round with an armful of possible remedies. Anti-freeze was administered to various parts of the system; heaters with the intensity of a small blast furnace were installed in the cupboard with the pump and the pipes; plumbers were ignited. The plumber found that the pump had burnt out, and replaced it immediately. With no water to pump, only ice still, it made no difference. The plumbing at the floating chalet had, once again, kicked us in the grollies. We did the time honoured de-camp to the four-bedroom house at the bottom of Randy's garden. All the computer equipment, and my drawing board, and the telephone line remained here - as did the cats - so we have to keep coming back to check and feed the cats, and to work (trying hard not to think about our bladders - which is at least helped by the fact that we can't make a cup of tea or anything, because there's no water). So far, so good.

On Wednesday, the various experts were lined up to make the inspections of 2, Beatty Street. The building, the heating and the chimney were all going to get the once-over. Our work was suspended, and we slogged across to see what the verdict was. The building inspector hadn't realised that the house was so big, and had to postpone his next appointment. He wouldn't, as expected, be able to complete the report and talk us through it that afternoon, he would have to come and see us Thursday morning with it. The chimney bloke came and found that the chimney was fine, but that the fireplace itself was more or less for decoration. The people who came to check the heating arrived just as a power cut hit the whole of Lansdowne, so they couldn't do the inspection at all. We were asked to come back Thursday at 1pm. Another day of disruption!

We saw Nash, the building surveyor, with a very comprehensive survey report at  10am on Thursday, then heaved ourselves off and got to Lansdowne at 1:10pm - a little late,  BUT,  BIll (the selling realtor) had been there since five to one, so that wasn't a problem. We thought!  We waited... No heating inspectors. Bill put a call through. Apparently, they had come at ten to one, found no-one at home, and gone off to do another job. They would be back in half an hour, we were assured. They eventually turned up at about 2:30! Anyway, the upshot was that all the reports on The Beatty Mansion were good.

The reports on the floating chalet, however, are not. We have to move out permanently - not to the house at the bottom of Randy's garden (which is let from February 14th), but to a stone house that he owns. He has very graciously arranged to have all our calls forwarded, and generally been an all round good bloke. As a landlord, we couldn't have done better and we recommend him highly. We're moving to the stone house tomorrow, and then we HOPE we will be clear of disruption and able to settle back to work again properly. Fingers and toes crossed! (And, since we are all at the floater right now, legs too!).

Sunday 28th January

The nutters are on the ice 2 - THE SEQUEL!

If they can do it, so can we. So we got our snow shovels and we cleared a patch on the river for a skating rink. It lacks the smooth finish of the official indoor rink, but it's not too bad if you avoid the really bumpy bits. (It's all a little bit bumpy, in fact you sound a bit like a tractor rumbling along when you skate on it, but there are certain areas where it's very difficult to get your body and your skates going at the same speed. You hit a slow patch, the skates slow down, your body hurtles on at the same speed and unless you're really quick with the adjustments you end up flat on your face). We let Hattie and her friend, Guin, go on it first to check that it was safe. They survived, so that was encouraging. Then, when they went off for a coffee at The Scorpion (local restaurant), we had a go. Our dignity is frail. We didn't want witnesses.

Here's an observation: I think there may be a provincial by-law - it may even be a federal law - that you MUST HAVE, somewhere in your house, an elliptical trainer, a treadmill or an exercise bike. We looked at lots and lots of places while we were house hunting, and always, always in the basement, cellar or a disused back bedroom there was an exercise torture machine. Now, considering all the snow the average Canadian has to shovel for half the year, I can't see why anyone would need a machine for doing even more physical work. I am only a mere Englishman, an incomer who doesn't fully understand these things, plus I am a lazy beggar who certainly doesn't understand the need for any kind of exercise whatsoever, so I simply offer this as an observation. That's all.

Here are some pics of our private ice rink.

 

Saturday 27th January

The nutters are on the ice! Hooray! We looked out of the window this morning and there they were - a couple of ice fishing huts and a few blokes drilling holes to fish through. It was, of course, snowing a blizzard. It's stopped snowing now, and the men seem to have gone home. The huts are still there. It's entirely possible that they are in the huts but there is no sign of movement. Perhaps they are frozen solid? No, no! That's foolishness; Canadians are impervious to the cold. They take precautions. (I, myself, for example, am sporting a very fetching pair of fleecy, long underdrawers beneath my trousers. No frostbite in the nethers for ME!).

Here are some photos. There are some very nice ones of the view of Cardinal, and the sunrise from the deck, a dreadful one of some idiot shovelling now, and (of course) the ice huts.

 

Thursday 25th January

The big news is: we have finally found a house. It's been a bit of a game, charging round the countryside looking at one house after another to find just the right one. Canada, as we keep on discovering, is a big place.

We had to give up on waterfront property because it's just too expensive; on our budget we could buy a waterfront shed, in need of renovation, but not a lot else. In the end we narrowed it down to two very different properties: an almost brand new log home on 7 acres of land, quite close to Cardinal, and an old (1870) property in Lansdowne, about an hour west of here. In the end, although the log home was lovely and we were reluctant to put distance between ourselves and all the fantastic people we've met hereabouts, we plumped for Lansdowne. It only has 0.8 acres of garden (only!), but it's much, much bigger inside. Since I work at home, and we have all sorts of people who are threatening to come and visit us (you know who you are!), two bedrooms just wasn't going to be enough. We've put in our offer and it's been accepted; the finance is in place; we are ready to go! Well, at the end of March we'll be ready to go. Oh, and it's on municipal water and sewers. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate why THAT will be a boon to the weary traveller.

Randy held our hands and steered us through the operation very patiently. He refers to the house in Lansdowne as 'The Beatty Mansion'. Well, it is quite an impressive red brick building, with a two story veranda on the front. It has a large blue sign in the front garden telling us that Elizabeth Rabb-Beatty, a missionary and one of the first women doctors in Canada, lived there. The house is on Beatty Street. I'll ferret around for some photos and try and post them tomorrow. Or maybe later this evening - you never know.

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Later that evening...

I found a couple that I used to email a couple of people. They're not brilliant; taken at night and the exterior shows the SIDE entrance, but it will give you the idea. The banister, by the way, is seriously spectacular in real life!

 

Saturday 20th January

I was dragged from my slumber this morning by an animated Angie. She'd spotted a cardinal in the tree opposite Hattie's bedroom window. Hattie is away on a birthday party sleepover in Merrickville, otherwise no-one would have had access to her bedroom until about ... ooh... 2pm... Sunday.  So, I reeled from the bed and staggered to the window and there it was, slightly bigger than I had imagined them to be; a bright, scarlet cardinal with a splodge of black round the beak. Angie managed to get a photo, but it was through glass, at a funny angle and with the camera zoom on full - so it's not a stunner. However, here it is as proof. A cardinal. IN Cardinal. What are the chances of that?

 

Thursday 18th January

I am an idiot! But of course you know that already. I put the temperatures as degrees F, when they were actually degrees C. However, I have sneakily replaced all the Fs with Cs, so no-one need ever know. Shh! Don't say a word!

The river behind the spit, where we are, has frozen over and there's a very interesting ice formation on the surface. It looks like a lot of small, snowy pom-poms scattered on the ice. I'll try and get a photograph and attach it here later today. It's very pretty.

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No sooner said...

(click on the tiddly pics for a bigger version).

 

Wednesday 17th January

So much for the warm snap! Winter has arrived and it has vengeance in its soul. Yesterday got down to -15 degrees C. The snow fell and settled, and we had to spend a couple of hours shovelling the stuff from the road down to the floating chalets (The road MUST, MUST, MUST be kept clear or the lorry that empties the poo tank can't get down and... well, I'm sure you get the picture). It was bloody hard work, and we got quite a sweat on even at that temperature. We emptied a couple of bags of salt on the road for good measure then slumped indoors, aching in every joint and muscle but somehow euphoric in the glow of a good job jobbed.

A few hours later, we heard a chugging outside the house. We were curious. We peered through the blinds. The chap that lives in the end chalet, who we thought had left for the winter, was outside on his ride-on snow blower. He was chugging over the bits we'd missed, clearing the snow away effortlessly - this machine just sucks it up and then vomits it out to one side via a tall spout, something like you get on a combine harvester. They have moved out for the winter, he told Angie, but he was happy to come back when it snows to clear the road so not to worry about doing it by hand.

All that shovelling!! If only we'd known a few hours earlier!

This morning it is -27 degrees C. Thankfully there has been no more snowfall, so the road is still clear, but we begin to see what everyone was banging on about. Brass monkeys are starting to look nervous. Angie has just slogged off on the school run. It took some rare elbow grease to clear the windscreen of ice - the stuff just seems to infuse itself into the fabric of the glass. I get this slight sinking feeling that we are about to pay for all the mild weather we've had up to now. It'll probably be like this until August!

Friday 12th January 2007

I know, I know! I've been neglecting the blog and I am a reprehensible human being. But that leaves a lot of stuff to catch up on, and it all divides neatly into three sections. So here we go:

section 1: Christmas. That was great. Lucy and William came over from the UK to spend three weeks with us. William came down with some form of raging lurgi for the last week, but that aside it was a jolly time had by all. I got a cheap but splendid drawing board for Christmas, and a dubious sachet of coffee that was apparently eaten and then vomited up by weasels before being packaged and sold as a delicacy. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll be sure and write it up when I do. It may be a revelation.

We have been warned, since our arrival more or less, that we must 'be prepared for the Canadian winter'. This, by all accounts, is a fearful thing that results in temperatures down to -40 and your eyes weep ice and the snot freezes in your nose. Layers! That's the thing! Warm, thick layers and millions of 'em. And huge snow tyres on your car, so that if necessary (if, say, you get stuck on a snowed-up road) you can leave the car and shelter in the treads. And don't go thinking that 'All Weather' tyres will do the job. Ooooh, no! Snow tyres! We duly had them installed and we waited, with our big bouncy tyres with treads rivaling the Grand Canyon, and our scarves and hats and gloves and big boots and our several hundred layers of clothing. The snow stayed away until boxing day, then it looked very christmas cardy for a couple of days (long enough for the whole family to leap to the boxing day sales and invest in snowboards and sledges and stuff) before melting back into greenness again. Wills was deeply disgruntled. Then he got flu. We've had the odd cold day. Yesterday, for instance, the whole of the water inside the spit was frozen over and it snowed very prettily. This morning it was all melted, and it's raining again. We're still waiting for the REAL winter to kick in, and it's getting bloody hot in all these clothes.

Section 2: New Year's Eve. This was great. We went to a bonfire-and-skating party. The bonfire was duly lit on the shores of a pond in our friends' garden as soon as it got dark. It was reluctant to burn (I think it was special, fire resistant wood) but nothing a gallon or so of old engine oil couldn't solve. Fantastic stuff! You pour it liberally over the logs and it sticks like treacle and burns huge and hot. Looks just like the wood itself is burning, and gives off a raging heat for several minutes before it burns away and you get back down to the flame-proof wood again. Then you pour a bit more on. Kept us happy for hours.

The skating was slightly hampered by all the warm weather, but half the pond was frozen so they skated on that. The adults walked on it and jumped up and down to test the frozen half, and the kids, Hattie included, cleared the snow away and skated on it.  Seemed to work fine. Then we went in to drink hot punch and Bailey's and stuff until midnight (I was driving, so I stuck with the warm, spiced, non-alcoholic cider), when we toasted each other and the new year, bundled kids into cars and went home. It had decided to rain while we were in the house, and being midnight and winter the rain had frozen as soon as it hit the roads. We drove home very, very slowly on the back roads. No traffic to keep the ice melted. We probably could have skated home. Scary journey.

Section 3: The plumbing! This one's a belter! It began with a slight difficulty flushing the downstairs bog. You had to get the plunger to it, and the water refused to go down in the pan any faster than, say, an hour-glass might. We resolved to use the upstairs loo only. We knew that the problem was NOT to do with the tank being full (it's a holding tank - which means the consequences of our lavatorial activity just sit in the tank until we get a man to empty it all away. He had been a couple of days before, so the tank should be practically empty). All was well until: horror! The upstairs bog started playing up as well. It would not flush, and plunging it just seemed to bring stuff back; stuff we had hoped never to see again. Ever! Worse - the plunging caused leakage somewhere and ominous brown liquid was appearing from the back of the pedestal.

We decamped to a different house temporarily, courtesy of our brilliant landlord, because you can only exist so long with your legs crossed. Lucy and Wills were still with us, so five of us with our legs crossed, and Lucy and Angie both with lentil sized bladders... well, you get the picture. So we decamped, and Randy (Randy North, our landlord and good friend) and I returned at the dead of night to try and sort the problem out. The pipe runs behind the fridge, he told me, and there is a release outlet. Hmmmm! We rolled the fridge away from the wall to reveal the ominous black pipe, then we poured ourselves a couple of glasses of whisky (another Christmas present), donned our rubber gloves, carefully lined up our bowls and buckets and taped a huge tarpaulin to the wall around the pipe. We were set. We unscrewed the outlet, gingerly and with fearful anticipation, prepared for a deluge of unmentionable stuff. There was a watery brown trickle for 2 seconds, then nothing. We waited... tense. Still nothing. Randy produced his flexible plumbing rod. It had failed to shift anything from the top down, but from the bottom up, who knows. We fed it up the pipe and broggled about. Still nothing. We removed it, and tried again. Several times. Innumerable times. Occasionally there would be a new trickle of the thin brown liquid but no, as it were, motherload. We sat, after an hour or so of broggling, feeling dejected and staring at the pipe. It was obvious that, assuming there was a blockage, we did not have the equipment to deal with it. We had another whisky, with loads of ice, and then we resigned ourselves to calling in the professionals. We stacked up our receptacles, and peeled the tarpaulin off the wall. The duct tape brought the paint off, but that was the least of our worries. We did this before we put the cover back on the release pipe, but hey! Nothing was shifting. We had another whisky. Without any warning whatsoever, the pipe gurgled and the deluge began. Randy was quick with the first bucket. He shouted instructions to get the next one ready, and then started counting down....3....2...you need to just grab anything!... 1...  right, go, go, go! He stumbled out the door, trying not to retch, and emptied his bucket into the St Lawrence. There was nowhere else. Meanwhile, I had begun my own countdown...3...2...that's it, it's full! We swapped places again. And again. Randy poured us another whisky. I was occupied with my bowl, but he kindly held the glass for me while I drank some. Just as well, my gloves were split and absolutely covered in crap. Eventually, the flow stopped and cleanup operations began. It's amazing how far splashes can travel.

We got the place cleaned and disinfected, but the downstairs toilet STILL refused to play. It all seems to be sorted now, but we had to stay away for about a week in the end. I just came back to work and check the email occasionally.

And that's it. We're back now and I'll try to update a bit more frequently. Honest!