Sunday 16th September

 

Mid September, and it’s like someone has thrown a switch. The trees are just beginning to turn and, although the sun continues to shine at least some of the time, the air temperature has dropped. Fleeces have been broken out, and the big duvets won’t be far behind. The nights have got a definite nip about them. No one is tempted to use the pool, so that will be closed and covered very soon. We haven’t had to turn the heating on yet, but it must come soon. I feel it in my bones. I’ll attach a couple of ‘trees on the turn’ photos to this entry. I’ll try and add some ‘trees in full autumn blaze’ photos for comparison when the time comes. One point that warrants a grumble: see that big tree next to our balcony? See all those leaves on it beginning to die? Every one of those perishing leaves is going to end up on our lawn. My lawn-raking arm is starting to ache just thinking about it.

 

I’m not sure if I mentioned the cinema in Gananoque in this blog. We went there yesterday and, because of stuff to do in the afternoon, we decided to eat at Good Time Charlie’s first, then catch the 9pm showing of ‘Stardust’. So we did, and breezed into the cinema at about five to nine and handed over the 18 dollars necessary to get us in. The young chap behind the counter (he looked about 16, but I’m not very good with ages so he might have been all of 17) took the dosh and handed over our tickets, explaining that the first showing hadn’t quite finished yet because it’s quite a long film. That was OK, we said, and we waited. We had noticed that there weren’t many cars in the car park, but there seemed to be one or two people mooching about in the foyer so we assumed a trip to the cinema was just a walk for the locals. Anyway, Angie and Hattie decided that they needed a drink to take in with them, and selected a couple of cans from the fridge. The chap on the counter had disappeared, so we left the $3 for the drinks on the counter. We met him marching purposefully down the short corridor that led to the auditorium, and he said the film was ready now, and we said we’d left the money for the drinks on the counter, and he said that was fine. So in we went, and we noticed him beetle into the projection room just behind the auditorium and start the film. We were the only people there. The film was being shown for the three of us. There was another auditorium which should have been showing another film, but I don’ t think there was anybody at all in that one. The film was moderately enjoyable: we liked Robert de Niro’s character and hated all the bimboid females. When it ended we saw the lad cashing up. He was obviously the only one on duty, and we were obviously the only customers so I asked him whether, had we not shown up, he could have gone home early. He said yes, he could; but this way he got paid more hours. I felt a bit embarrassed, apologised and slunk off into the night.

 

Here are a couple of photos. The change isn’t spectacular yet, but it’s definitely on the cusp.

 
 

Saturday 8th September

On Monday we took Lucy, Victoria and Bessie back to the airport for the flight home. We went the American way, south of Lake Ontario, so that we would pass Niagara Falls. We stopped and spent several hours there; we even had time to do the 'Maid of the Mist' thing, where they did their level best to humiliate everyone by making us wear blue bin liners and herding us onto the boat like a bunch of sheep. The falls are spectacular, there's no doubt about that, but the experience is not enhanced by the milling throng of people doing exactly what you're doing. Still we did it, bought the required selection of tat from the gift shop to prove we did it and ticked it off mentally on the 'things to do before you die' list. We got to the airport safely and in good time, and waited with the girlies until it was time for them to pass through the magic barrier into duty-free land. Everything had been fine up to that point. We had smiled and laughed like people on holiday together and probably hadn't given the act of parting too much thought. But as soon as it's on you, as soon as the barrier is reached and half of you are about to cross it and the other half stay behind, the floodgates open and legs go to jelly. Angie hugged Lucy, Hattie hugged Bessie and the tears fell freely all round. Then they parted and moved towards the gate, only to hug again and part again, and then all over again several times. Poor Angie was tearful for the entire journey home. Hattie cried herself to sleep eventually. We got home at about half past midnight, and fell exhausted into bed. Hattie started her new school on Tuesday morning.

Hattie seems to be enjoying school. She says it's harder than it was at GCC, but more fun. She's making friends (one or two she already knew from riding school and pony club), and that's probably the most important thing.

Today there has been another event over the road at the Lansdowne Fairground, and Angie was asked to help out with the free breakfast they were serving to all comers. She blithely agreed, and asked what time they wanted her. "Oh, any time after 6 o'clock," they said. 6 am, that is. Six in the morning. Angie swallowed hard and tried to look casual. We are not good at early mornings. Still, she did it and they made her cook scrambled eggs all morning. Great buckets of them. I did my bit, I feel, by sauntering over at about half past eight and eating some of them - and some bacon and pancakes and sausages and a bit of bread pudding and a doughnut. And some orange juice. And a coffee. After breakfast was finished Angie demonstrated spinning with some lovely carded fleece she had got from Upper Canada Village.

I've been meaning to mention the insect life hereabouts. The first one to pull me up short was a beastie I noticed scuttling across the kitchen floor one night. It was greeny brown, maybe a couple of inches long, with an unfeasible amount of stripey legs that sort of radiated all the way round its body. I couldn't decide whether I found it repulsive or oddly beautiful. I think, on balance, it's pretty repulsive. Certainly that's what Angie and Hattie tell me. Anyway, I didn't want to write about t until I had a picture to show you. I looked it up, and it's a house centipede. I still don't have a picture, unfortunately, but as soon as I do I'll post it on the blog and you can all make up your own minds. Outside we have quite a few wasps. We have the little yellow and black ones that you get in the UK, but also there are bigger, black ones with very smart, fine yellow stripes, and some that are completely black and shiny. The interesting thing about these particular wasps is that we often see them, in flight, carrying bits of grass maybe three times as long as they are. We have some metal frame deck furniture, and here and there in the hollow moulded tubing there are small holes, about 3mm in diameter. The wasps climb into the holes with their bits of grass. I have no idea what they are doing in there, but I fear the worst. Nesting! The bastards! If, one fine morning when I am sitting on the deck, all the metal parts of my chair start to buzz I will be up and legging it for the house before the first one of them gets out of the first little hole. Our back door has glass panels, so I can watch what happens from the other side of it. And talking of glass panels on the back door, it was on one of those very glass panels, just this week, that I noticed a particularly splendid insect. A stick insect. It was pretty big by most insect standards, and just amazingly like a stick. It moved with an awkward precision, almost as if it had a clockwork mechanism driving it. We put it in a bucket so that Hattie could see it when she got home from school, and then let it go again. But this time did get a photograph, so it's posted below with a couple of others.

So here are the pics. A couple of group shots; one I couldn't resist of Lucy, who was so horrified when she saw the double chin she insisted on another photo where she stretched the spare chin out of existence; another group shot wearing the bin liners; Angie doing her thing at the Fair across the road; and the stick insect, who had moved off the glass panel but who was still on the back door at the time.

 

 Thursday 30th August

We have had the odd rodent visitor in our time here. Beezer (cat) is very good and has saved us from most of them, but we have still felt the need for the odd mousetrap. We had been using what looks like a cardboard sheet covered in a solid glue, which sticks the beastie to it when it walks over it. The application of oil then unsticks it - and you do that at a suitable distance from the house so the perisher can't find its way back. However, this morning we checked the sheet, and found a few tufts of mouse hair, some mousey footprints in the glue, and a small area where the mouse had eaten all the glue around where it was stuck, thus freeing itself. The glue is non-toxic. Of mice there were none. The sheet, by the way, was under the sink in the kitchen. Even squeamish people will, I hope, understand why you can't have mice charging around the kitchen dropping mouse poo everywhere. So we broke out the nasty traps - the ones that go snap - and put one of those under the sink.

Angie, Lucy, Victoria, Hattie and Bessie all piled off to Brockville this afternoon. Hattie needed stuff for school, which starts next Tuesday, and Bessie needed to buy all the various things you have to buy on holiday to prove you've been to... wherever it was you went. The other three just need to be in shops. It's a woman thing. They left me cooking and working, and that's fine. I knocked up some tomato soup, dirty great cauldrons of the stuff, to try and use all the tomatoes that keep growing on my tomato plants. The ruddy things just don't know when to stop. I picked a huge bowl of them last week, gave any amount of them away, and there were still more than we could eat before they got soft. This week there was another bowl full, and the plants aren't done yet. Our neighbours run indoors if we head towards them carrying tomatoes now.

Anyway, they all piled back in time for the soup and the chicken and the roast spuds that I'd cooked, and we all sat down to fill our faces. Round the kitchen table. So what's the worst sound when you're half way through your soup, do you think? I put it to you that an almighty SNAP from the cupboard under the sink is up there with the winners. And the worst sound to follow said SNAP is the sound of a mouse trap being dragged around. The trap had evidently not completed the job. What do you do? Hattie, realising it was NOT a humane type of trap, rushed from the table in tears. The rest of us tried to ignore the rattle and scrape of mouse trap and finished our soup. In the end, we moved to a different room for the chicken and spuds.

We had no idea what to expect when we opened the door under the sink, so we did it gingerly. Maybe it was dead now? Maybe those were just desperate death throws we were hearing. Sure, there were twenty minutes of them, but ... well... We peered in. There was another desperate clatter of trap and, when we had peeled ourselves off the ceiling, we saw the blasted rodent with a leg caught. It had very beady, piercing eyes. Beezer arrived, noticed the mouse, and made for it. It rattled its trap at her and she retreated fast, but she wasn't done. She grabbed the thing, trap and all, and scooted off through the house. And what's the sound that's least welcome when you've just found, on the back stairs, the empty, mouseless trap? The sound of squeaking, that's what. Beezer had the mouse at bay at the bottom of the main staircase, and she was not having it all her own way. The mouse, limping a bit on three legs, was letting her have it whenever she got too close. It was a stand off. Enter me, with my plastic waste paper bin and my bit of cardboard. I managed to drop the bin over the mouse, slide the cardboard underneath it, and then take the thing over the road and free it.

This was not an episode that covers anyone in much glory. Except perhaps the mouse. The poor little perisher was only doing what it needed to do to survive. I know that. Really I do. But you can't have them in the kitchen. One thing, though - I looked at the trap after I let the mouse go. It had eaten all the bait. Every bit. It was peanut butter, smeared on the underside of the bit that comes down SNAP, which means it had its head right inside the jaws. They know a thing or two, those ruddy mice. It is NOT an unequal contest.

 

Saturday 24th August

All the visitors arrived safely on Tuesday. Dawn, Pete, Megan and George, the Hackneys, have been and gone. Lucy, her friend Victoria and Hattie's friend, Bessie, are still here and settling in for the long haul. Hattie didn't know Bessie was coming; we managed to keep it a secret right up until she showed up at the airport. There was, I kid you not, a palpable tear in Hattie's eye. We got there nicely on time, but inevitably the bit of the journey up to Toronto breezed by so we were convinced we were going to be ludicrously early, then we hit the snarly city bits and they seemed to drag on forever. In the event we got there with about a half hour to spare, which was probably about right.

Since they arrived, our guests have spent most of the time at the house in the pool (well, the kids have. The grown ups are just too cool and sophisticated for that sort of thing). It's all a bit embarrassing, though, because they all came over here precisely to escape the dire English weather and get some of the sun we've been bragging about for weeks. And it's been horrible; overcast and rainy. Oh, it's been warm, but that muggy warmth that has you breathing heavy and dripping sweat.

They (I say 'they' rather than 'we' because I had to stay behind and work. 'Twas ever thus) all visited the Skydeck on Wednesday. If you know the CN tower in Toronto, or the Needle in Seattle you will have a rough idea of the Skydeck: tall structure with a slightly wider platform at the top. What you have to imagine, though, is that Blue Peter have made a CN Tower out of the insides of bog rolls and some sticky back plastic. You get a great view of the Thousand Islands, but there's always that nagging doubt that the glue won't hold.

On Thursday they all biffed off to Upper Canada Village. This is a great place, where people wander about in 19th century clobber pretending to live and work there. There are workshops, mills and stuff, where all the machinery is powered by water. They loved it. They got to milk a cow by hand and had a photo taken in costume. I'll paste it at the end of this entry so you can see. They all look as miserable as sin, but apparently that's what the photographer was aiming for. It took several goes before they could get a shot without them all corpsing and guffawing at the crucial moment.

One bizarre incident: apparently the LCBO won't serve alcohol to anyone under... pause for dramatic effect.... 25! Lucy went in to get some beer and they wouldn't serve her because she had no proof of age with her. I am absolutley gobsmacked by this one. Luckily Angie was with her so she could do the honours, but when Lucy went to hand some money to Angie in recompense the cashier said, "I'm not allowed to see that. Can you do it outside." This is just daft. I can imagine your average 18-24 year old over here on holiday from the UK would get pretty cheesed off at not being able to buy a beer or a bottle of wine. Lucy, in any case, is 26 next month. It's bonkers!

Here are some photos...

 

Sunday 19th August

It's just one never ending procession of perishing visitors this month. Last week (or was it the week before...? I lose track) our friends from Lincoln, Patrick and Sandra Bourke,with their sons Matteo and Josh, came to stay for a couple of days in their exploration of Ontario. It was great to see friendly faces from home, and it's amazing how quickly and easily you click back into familiarity. It's like they'd popped round from West Parade to Cambridge Avenue for a cup of coffee and a biscuit, like in the olden days when we lived round the corner.

On Tuesday we fetch Lucy and her friend Victoria (and another mystery person, who I'll tell you all about later in the week) from Hamilton airport (4 hours each way), and also on Tuesday the Hackney family from Skellingthorpe, Dawn, Pete, Megan and George, foist themselves upon us for a few days. I mean, how far away do you have to move to get away from all these people? We might have to buy another fridge.

We hadn't seen a humming bird or a chipmunk for weeks, not since Sue and Terry,  my sister and brother-in-law, visited  us a few weeks ago (I'm not sure if I even got round to mentioning that one). We thought they'd all pushed off to wherever they go for the winter, which would have been disappointing. We look forward to being able to waft a casual arm and say to all these visitors, "Oh, look - there's a humming bird in the walnut tree..." and stuff. Anyway, we were lounging about in the swing seat on the deck on Friday and there one was, flitting about the garden like it owned it. It fed from the humming bird feeder which hangs on the garage, pushed off, and then came back again ten minutes later. It kept coming back. We're wondering if we should get some humming bird repellant, just in case it starts to make a nuisance of itself. We'll keep an eye on the situation. Oh, and yesterday, as she was mowing the lawn, Angie saw the chipmunk. I think it had come out to complain about the noise.

It was Hattie's birthday on Thursday, 16th August. Of the umpteen invitations sent out, we got two takers for the party, and one of those didn't arrive until 10pm because she was playing football (soccer, they call it here) in Belleville. It was a sleepover, so that wasn't too serious. We made them sleep in a tent in the garden. Like the tremendously organised parent that I am, I had agreed to do the comment cartoon in The Guardian that day. I had to get up at 4:45am to start gathering the day's news, and the deadline was 1pm Canada time (6pm in the UK). Went reasonably smoothly, though (except I forgot to put my name on the ruddy thing! What an idiot!), and I had the whole afternoon to devote to my darling daughter.

Even if I was completely knackered.

We've ummed and ahhhd and ummed again over where to send Hattie to school in September. I think we've decided that, all else being equal, the most sensible thing is to send her to the Thousand Island Secondary School. It has the merit of being about 300 yards up the road, which will cut out about two hours travelling every day. The music and art provision is not good, but that seems to be the case with most of the schools we've looked at. They all favour sports. Bastards! But Hattie will still be in the string group in Kingston, so there will be music for her, and she gets plenty of artyness in her home environment so I don't think it will matter for a couple of years. ( After all, I didn't do art at secondary school at all until the fifth year, and then I had to go after school on a Monday. Wasn't until the 6th form that I got to do it in proper school time. Now I do it for a living). After that, she will have to move schools again anyway and start senior high.

I don't have any photos for you in this entry. Sorry. But I promise I'll take some later this week, after the world and his wife arrive on Tuesday. Watch this space.

Thursday 2nd August

You know your integrating when you you're asked to go on a float in the local show. When Angie and Hattie go on one float each (and Hattie is asked to go on a third, but is already booked), that feels like acceptance.

The Lansdowne Fair is a pretty big event round here. The funfair arrives with the usual heart stopping thrill machines, there are craft and art exhibitions, baking contests, flower shows and people exhibit their runner beans. Angie volunteered to man the gate on the first morning, and Angie and Hattie both entered all sorts of stuff for craft and art competitions, and guess what?... they won some of them. Hattie hauled in about $15 in prize money, which nicely offset the hundreds of dollars we seemed to shell out on fair rides and hot dogs. Hey ho. Angie won the cardmaking class, which is as well given her status as card designer to all the best craft magazines. The weather, of course, timed itself to perfection. Warm and sunny for the weeks leading up to the fair... then the day of the fair, chucked it down stair rods. Poor old Angie. No one was interested much in visiting the festivities in the downpour, so she just had to sit in the little sentry hut at the entrance gate being ignored and rained on (there is a roof, but it's tiny and open sided). She went unnoticed by the people working in the big building where the exhibitions were. In the end I had to take her a mug of coffee myself, poor old trout. I put a cork in the top from one of our storage jars to keep the rain out. She was pathetically grateful.

Fortunately, the deluge only lasted into the second day, Friday, and then the sun put in an appearance. By Saturday, the day of the parade, the sun was blistering the tarmac and all was well with the world. Angie was on the Agricultural Society float (they run the fair. I think she qualified because of volunteering to help; surprisingly, I don't think my rows of peas and spuds in the garden helped her agricultural credentials at all) and Hattie was on the Pony Club float. She had also been asked to go on the Library float, too, but I think it was a good job she was already engaged because their vehicle broke down and they ended up doing the parade on foot. The parade passed right by the house, and I got some nice photos from our balcony. I've included a couple below of A and H on their parade floats.

There were loads of interesting events. Seeing great big horses harnessed in teams of two and pulling a sort of sled weighed down with hefty concrete blocks was amazing. They just keep adding to the sled until the horses can't shift it any more, and the team that's left is the winner. That was great. And the western riding, with the big cowboy saddles, was interesting; all stetsons and chaps and ridinground barrels twirling a lasso. Hattie wanted to go in for the greased piglet wrestling, but I don't think we got around to that. Angie did, however, buy a ticket in the Cow Chit Bingo, and if anyone is trying to raise a bit of cash, this is a lulu. A field is divided into 200 squares. Those squares (represented on a bit of card or paper) are bought at 10 dollars a throw. Then a cow is let into the field, and everyone waits. Whatever square the cow craps in is the winner, and gets $1000. Angie didn't win, but hey! It was funny so who cares?

This week, Hattie has been on a horse riding summer camp at the stables where she rides on a Saturday. She's had a great time, and comes home smelling of horses and hard work. We make her have a shower before she leaps into the swimming pool to cool off. Her proud boast is that, just this week, she has learned to get on a horse without having to use a mounting block. Progress indeed.

On a more serious note, we learned on Monday that the school Hattie has been going to, Grenville Christian College, has had to close because of dwindling numbers. Hattie was very happy there, and we were happy with her progress. It's a bit of a blow. We're going to try and get her into the school in Lansdowne, which is a fairly new school with a biggish catchment area including Gananoque, a much larger town south west of us. It's close and will mean a lot less travelling, but the class size will more than double.

Here are those photos, taken from the balcony of the Parkins Palace as the parade passed by...