Lump to Professional in 60 Seconds

I'm now in my third week at my new job, and I am hopefully adjusting relatively well.

I've found myself spending what to me feels like a LOT of money getting ready to really settle in at this job--I'm trying to treat it like a career where I will be here for the indefinite future, which means one thing: clothes.

Before my first day, I went through my work clothes, such as they are, and threw out everything that was just too old, dingy, or stained to wear to a new job. This left me with exactly one pair of pants, maybe 4 skirts, 4 tops (not the band, sadly), and a dress or two. This may sound like a decent amount of clothing if you are a dude, but not everything GOES with everything else, and I also have a sad lack of decent shoes to go with everything. Lots of my pre-existing shoes have proven to be life-ruining blister-causers and shopping for shoes is an enormous pain...

The strangest part about this is that I usually try to tell Ben what I am spending money on, and so I have found myself explaining a lot of generally unexplained, unspoken, gender-coded rules for professional women. Ben doesn't expect me to update him every second I spend money, but we both have the habit of just letting the other party know if we spent or are planning to spend, say, over $100 on something--it's just to make sure we both have a handle on how much money's in the system.

Here is what I have figured out:

1. Professional women wear separates. This one's less of an unspoken rule because I specifically remember my mother telling me this years ago. If you're wearing a dress, then you need to be wearing a cardigan or a blazer or something.

2. Professional women wear outfits. This means that you've got shoes and jewelry that coordinate with what you're wearing.

3. You can't wear the same thing every day.

4. What this means is that you have to set yourself up so you have a working rotation of clothes (up to 3 pieces if you're wearing a jacket, shirt, and pants or skirt), shoes, and jewelry that all go with each other. Plus stuff like tights and stockings and whatnot.

So right now I am working on putting together a collection of crap I can wear to work so that I send the right kind of messages about myself to my students and coworkers. It ain't cheap, especially because I generally mail-order a lot of my clothes because I am both a chunk and particular about what I wear.

Anyway, I have been shopping a lot more than I am accustomed to, a fair portion of which consists of me putting things into online shopping carts and then never buying them because I really hate getting stuff when it's not on sale. The silly part is that we have the money for me to do this--with our salaries together we're certainly comfortable enough for me to spend some money to make sure I am presentable at work.

I wish I didn't feel quite so neurotic about this whole being able to pass as a Professional thing, because then I probably wouldn't feel the urge to write about it in my blog. But job stuff is what I've been doing recently, so there you go.

Mom vs. Blog

So this blog sort of has two things going on--two things that war. They can kind of be summarized as Mom vs. Blog.

So one of the main reasons I started this up was to share pictures and stories of what I am up to with parents and other people who are concerned with how we are doing here in Montreal. To that end I feel like I want to tell stories of things that I did and then add context within Montreal and all that sort of thing. That part is "Mom."

The part that is "blog" is the bit where I want to treat this as a blog and write about the things that I want to write about because it is my blog. Initially this was going to be a B & me kind of undertaking, but I've got more time to write these days and stuff is really starting to ramp up on the Mass Effect 3 release. I think Twitter has ended up being more of his speed, anyway. The "Me" aspect of the blog is the part where what I really want to do is to write about me, me, me.

So anyway, I think I am going to work on a bit more of a balance between the two M's. More complaining, less tour guide, but overall more writing so hopefully more of both.

So one unifying theme I've found since we moved here (other than things dying) is not one that I expected: blisters. Since we arrived I have been getting horrendous blisters. Heel blisters, top-of-toe blisters, bottom-of-toe blisters, bottom-of-heel blisters, ball-of-foot blisters. Now, I am doing a lot more walking here in Montreal than I used to, but I've found that I have been getting blisters over periods of time and activities comparable to things I did in DC.

For example: today I put on some low-heeled cute dress shoes I got a few years ago and went to a mostly-a-formality interview with HR at Dawson College. I walked a block to the bus, walked a block around the corner, into a building, up some stairs, and arrived. Feet began to hurt. I was like, "Craaap...I have worn these shoes before but now they are giving me a zillion blisters." After the interview I needed to go and talk to the dude who will be my boss and I probably said something awkward because my feet hurt, I don't even know, and I started to SWEAT like nobody's business.

Luckily, across the street is a mall where I hobbled to attempt to find some sandals; the shoe store I went to had apparently gotten rid of all of its sandals for fall and I wasn't going to cram my poor throbbing feets into a boot, so I got some of those foamy flip-flops and just wore them with my suit. I was all sweaty and probably looked like a hot mess at this point, but I couldn't go home because I needed to do some banking stuff with B.

The stupidest part of this is that this isn't the first time I have done this frantic hobbly quest for shoes at this same mall. A few weeks ago I went to meet B for dinner near there and threw on some old comfy ballet flats I hadn't worn since last summer, and promptly had all of the skin abraded off of four of my toes. I hobbled into a Zeller's (it's like a crappy Target) and picked up some black flip-flops which did not match my outfit but also did not cause me to experience excruciating pain.

So I don't know why the hell I keep getting blisters but I wish it would stop. I am not at a weight that exceeds where I was the last time I was wearing those shoes, so it's not like I'm too fat for my old shoes, and the shoes are not particularly worn out, either.

What it means is that wearing close-toed shoes is going to be painful for the next couple of days, right when my parents are coming to visit and I have just started to make progress on an exercise regimen.

All in all, this has been a year of crap-ass stuff and stressful stuff that I have had no control over happening: moved to a new country, dog died, dad died, and ONE ZILLION BLISTERS. There's probably something else in there but I don't feel like thinking of it because there's no call to angry up my blood if I don't have to.

For what it's worth, though, I am sailing through with flying colors. But my feet hurt.

Good news and bad news

The good news is...well, I don't know what the good news is.

The bad news is that Nemo has to go back to the good folks at the rescue. He started manifesting some of the problems that Penelope experienced, and we're just not ready to deal with that right now. I think he'll make someone else a good pet, but he's not for us.

For once, it's not the cat's fault, either.

A new addition to our family

This is Nemo:



Nemo is a rescue greyhound.

He is very calm and well-mannered, to the point where someone asked me the other day if he was old. No, I said, he's three.

Getting Nemo has been like having a puppy with a large bladder--he's never lived inside a home or been by himself (greyhounds live in kennels when they race) so he's housebroken and hesitant to be by himself.

The first few days with him were HELLISH. Ben and I had both gotten sunburnt while visiting the rescue kennel, he didn't sleep at all that evening and cried and cried, and then the next day we were both feeling sick. We both also missed Penelope something fierce.

Since then he has calmed down and begun to sleep through the night, although Ben accurately accuses me of having "separation anxiety anxiety." I worry about him getting stressed and barking or crying while we are gone and disturbing the neighbors.

So far I have been working on "away training," where I leave for just a minute or two at a time, to teach him that yes, I am in fact coming back when I leave. Ben wanted to go across the street for breakfast this morning, and I was too worried to go out :/

He is a very sweet pup, though, and I think in the long run it's going to be worth it.

So it looks like I might have found myself a job tutoring at Dawson, a local Anglo cegep. More news will be forthcoming when I have it. Academia gets a touch of the South about it in the summer, when things get ruhl slow-like and things will get done in their own sweet time. Y'want some iced tea?

Speaking of things being Southerny, it is hot as 3-syllable Hell (hay-ell-uh) here this week. It got up to 35C/95F yesterday, setting a daily record for Montreal. Luckily today looks like it will be more in the 31C/88F range, which is much more bearable but still pretty unusual for Montreal this time of year.

Nick and Sara visited us at the beginning of July, and I felt guilty because we got hit with another heat wave, albeit slightly cooler than this one. They were hoping to come up here and get some of our gloriously temperate summers, but no luck--of course, in our defense, it was like 10 degrees F hotter in DC that weekend.

After one night of roasty-toastyness during their visit, we went out and bought an air conditioner. It's relatively small in the grand scheme of things, and while it doesn't keep the apartment super cold, it does cut down on the humidity and cool things off on days like today. Last night we ended up moving out onto the futon in the living room to be cooler, and were able to sleep well. Except for the cat playing with her crinkly ball at 4:30 am. I solved this issue by putting it under my pillow when she wasn't looking and she mellowed out. Such is cat.

Yesterday, some people from greyhound rescue came and did a home visit, which a lot of rescues (dogs especially) require before you can adopt. They want to come and make sure that you're not a crazy pet hoarder who is going to let their dog run off-leash and eat the neighborhood cats and the contents of the medicine cabinet.

I busted out with some dog-savvy lingo and they announced that we were the easiest home visit they'd ever had. She asked if the dog was going to be allowed on the couch or bed and I was all blah blah blah resource guarding and she was all like have a zillion of our dogs please. See how I let you in on a variety of secret tips and tricks in my blog? Also, rubbing alcohol is really good for getting the chrome on your bathroom faucet really extra-spotless. Try it--it's fun!

I was 17

My father passed away sometime last night.

It's funny--I've spent the past couple of years working on remembering the positive things about my childhood instead of the negative ones, but I had not thought to remember anything good about my father.

So here is something:

I don't remember when it was, but at some point, when I must have been in my teens, my father and I went to Fallingwater, about two hours away from Pittsburgh. I wonder if the only reason I even remember this is the photos that I have of it--he wore a bright pink Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.

My father had esophageal cancer. A little over a year ago, I accompanied him to a lot of his treatments at the VA hospital in DC and Martinsburg, WV. They were able to remove the cancer, but it eventually spread into his liver and, as I said, he died last night.

I did not have much of a relationship with my father over the years.

Now that my relationship with my mother is no longer so fragmented, I can think of a vast sea of actions and moments that point to the fact that she cared very much about me and did the best she could, despite both of our defects. The best I can come up with for my father is my hazy memory of our trip to Fallingwater. I remember being surprised at how ugly the faded orange furnishings were after having baked in the sun for years and years of nobody living there.

I traveled back to the US at the end of June, in order to sell our car and visit with my father before he died. We spent maybe three hours together at a restaurant in Western Maryland. He had become...small.

Perhaps I am too practical, but it seems to me that if I was only going to be able to make one trip down to Maryland, visiting my father while he was still alive did him a whole heck of a lot more good personally than going to his funeral. This, and all of the other decisions I made concerning him in the past year and change, are now mine alone to remember and negotiate.

Kitty stories

Kitty has arrived. The day she was scheduled to come, I packed up a lot of Penelope's things into a smaller box and missed her so bad I cried.

We talked over prospective cat names for a couple of days and settled on "Ada," after Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and possibly the world's first computer programmer. Here are some cute things if you're interested in reading further about her. I also considered "George" after George Sands and George Eliot, who were both awesome historical babes, or, as Ben elegantly phrased it, "misbehaving women."

Ada is slowly settling in, I think; she wanders around making meows and meeps and wants attention. She has been eating the food we bought for her--say what ye will about its exorbitant price, but the stuff we put her on means smaller and less smelly poops so I think it's worth the $$.

Sadly, the stress has made her a little sick, I think--the cat lady told us she'd been adopted out previously and returned because she got a kitty cold. What she has is basically kitty herpes, and it's like the canker sores I get in that it flares up when I'm stressed or sick. She had a few sneezes and then today has a sad goopy eye that is essentially kitty pinkeye. After chatting with the cat lady on the phone, we got some eye ointment from the pharmacy and I smeared it at least in the general vicinity of the eye. As you can imagine, Ada was not amused, but she was gracious enough to not hold it against us and immediately wanted to get pets and purr afterwards.

On Saturday, Ben and I went up to the Plateau to check out a meet-and-greet that the local greyhound rescue was holding. We are still thinking of getting another dog, and I'm considering a greyhound because they are 1) ridiculously lazy and enjoy living in apartments and 2) ridiculously healthy and can live to 12 or 14, which is insane for a big dog. Unlike a lot of other dog breeds, they still do what they were created to do, which means that there's no room for hip dysplasia. Their main disadvantage for us is that they can have a very strong prey drive, which means kitties could be in danger. We spoke a bit to the rescue people and were told that maybe 10% of greyhounds could never live with a cat, while the rest of them seem to be able to distinguish between a cat in the house and a cat outside of the house. Cat in the house is not for eating or chasing, but cats outside are apparently free game.

I still don't know what to do about getting a dog. Penelope proved to us that mutts can be just as unhealthy as purebreds, and I don't want something that's going to be a cancer factory or a refugee from a puppy mill with distemper and who knows what else. Those dogs need homes, don't get me wrong, but as I tried to explain to the cat lady when we discussed potential animals with FIV (kitty AIDS), we'd be maybe interested in a compassionate adoption further down the line--an older animal, or one with a treatable disease or disability--but right now, my heart just can't handle it.

pets & neighborhood stuff

I have had a grand total of two job interviews while I was here, both for http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwriting-related positions, and hopefully I'll hear back from some of the other places I've sent feelers. Ben continues to do well at work; the game he's working on was shown last week at the big industry trade show, and looked pretty good!

Ben and I have started looking into getting a cat and a dog, now that we are settled in and feeling more secure here in Montreal. Last weekend, we walked along Rue Sherbrooke to a local pet store who was having an adoption event. The cat people were running late, so we spent a couple of hours walking around.

Rue Sherbrooke is one of the main east-west streets in Montreal. Sherbrooke runs through Westmount and into Notre-Dame-de-Grace (NDG); a nice shopping district with a grocery store starts on the other side of the park from us. There are lots of little boutiques and coffee shops and such--Westmount is a pretty bougie neighborhood, so most of it is pretty high end. There are a couple of boulangeries --bakeries, patisseries--sandwich/deli-type shops, and even a poissonnerie--fishmonger (a poissonerie is not the same as a poisonerie, which is what I typed initially and I guess is where you go for poisons).

One thing that every neighborhood here in Montreal has is a depanneur. There are different assortments of depanneurs, but they're somewhere between a New York City boedga and a convenience store. We have one across the street from us, which we go to if, like, we are halfway through cooking something and realize we don't have any pasta/eggs/milk/bread/canned peas. If it's a staple, there's a good chance it's at the dep. And yes, we do call it "the dep."

Anyway our walk down Sherbrooke was fun because there was some sort of sidewalk festival going on, so there was lots of street food and stuff on sale and people to watch. There was even a bouncy castle/slide, and anyone who knows anything will tell you that a bouncy castle = a party. The whole day was cloudy with some small drizzles now and then, but the weather really held until maybe 4 or 5. Ben theorizes that since the winters are so harsh here, that Montrealers feel they really have to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts, which might be an explanation for why there are so many festivals and such here during the summer. It might also be because the weather isn't super hot so it's a nice place for everyone else to visit.

So finally the cat lady showed up and we looked at cats. There are a surprising number of polydactyl cats here in Montreal, which is just kind of strange. Did Earnest Hemingway come through and not tell anyone? Or is there a Quebecois author I've never heard of who had an enclave of chats up here? Who can tell.

Long story short, we're getting a cat! Her name is currently Sara but it will be changed when she arrives, as we know and are related to far too many Sara/hs for us to keep the name. Yay!

I've never had a cat that wasn't a barn cat, so I am still totally freaked out when someone tries to hand me a cat. I feel like...a 24-year-old male asked to hold a baby. Like, "What am I supposed to do with this?" You don't go around picking up barn cats; it's just a bad idea because they are working cats, not housepets. I like the idea of a cat coming and sitting on me or wanting attention, but the thought of picking one up feels disrespectful AND foolish. I am also not as used to the idea that having a cat means you have a box of poop in your house (or a box of delicious treats if you're a dog), so I am going to have to establish some new habits, as well as do some general research on good cat products.

boring update

We're having our first set of visitors come up towards the end of this week, which hopefully means that we'll be more motivated to go and do things out in Montreal. And, you know, set up our futon...

Tomorrow I have a job interview to look forward to. A couple of ladies I've met have connected me with this place, and while they don't have any actual positions available now, something might open up before the beginning of the fall semester--it's academia, so sometimes a job that is a sure thing just evaporates because of funding, and sometimes money is found in a closet and a job materializes. The goal is to go in tomorrow and make a good impression--it looks like it will be the same kinds of things I've done in face-to-face tutoring, with things like study skills and note-taking thrown in for good measure (which is fine because I was already working those things in with the kids I tutored).

I got an application out for some online tutoring last week, which involved having to edit 3 sample student papers. I took a couple days and worked on them on-and-off until they were finished and I was okay with the work I'd done. The day I needed to mail them out, my computer did some kind of system restore and ate them, so I had to redo all three in the span of about 4 or 5 hours.

It's funny how things are all relative--I was stressed about applying for this job, I was stressed about losing all of my careful work, I was stressed about re-doing them in time. About half an hour before my self-imposed deadline, I got a message from my aunt telling me that my father's health had taken a turn for the worse, and that I needed to get in touch with him. And suddenly, all of this job stuff was a piece of cake. I finished the papers up and emailed them back, and I haven't stressed about it since.

Changes

I checked the mail last night when Ben and I got back from hanging out with some friends; I got a letter from the City of Westmount. I figured, oh, it's just a reminder that I got a ticket or something, but no.

The city finally had gotten around to mailing me Penelope's dog license.

We moved to another country and left our friends behind and Ben got a new job, but our dog being gone is still the biggest upheaval of all.

This morning I woke up and my computer had done some sort of system restore that meant I lost all of the work I'd done on a few sample essays for a prospective job. As soon as I realized this, a jackhammer started right outside of my open window.

The good news is, it started raining so I guess they went away. I know better to go outside because at this rate my umbrella would turn inside-out and I'd get splashed by a car.

So anyhoo, I'm at 2/3 papers and my brain is pretty darn fried at the moment.

In more cheerful news, B and I are maybe going to play some board games this evening. We took a nice walk last weekend that I'll post about, but a friend took some nice pictures so I thought I'd wait until then.

Spring!

The weather has improved! Our last bit of snow was in early April, but spring in Montreal is coming a lot later than I'm used to. To illustrate, the tree outside our window has just gotten enough leaves to be able to block the sun from coming in. It's a maple, and the leaves are still sort of droopy and soft-looking, like when a butterfly is waiting for its wings to dry out.

Healthcare-related post

Last Thursday, I started feeling...not right. My nose was doing that thing and the back of my throat was all that way--I presume that you probably have those personal warning signs that your body sends you when you are potentially going to get sick. That's what was going on with me. So some friends were having people over for board games but I let them know I wasn't coming because I felt like I might have a cold.

Over the next two days I first lost my voice and then developed an incredibly painful sore throat. By Sunday, it hadn't gotten better, so I hauled myself up and Ben and I walked over to the local Urgent Care-type clinic in Westmount. It turns out that their doctor had called in sick, so we had to hoof it further downtown to another clinic.

We walked in and this place was totally packed and blasting a radio station playing what I presume were the best hits of the 70's, 80's, and early 90's. The line to the counter was so long that it kind of blocked off the entranceway, so the sick people coming in had to squeeze by the sick people who were already in line. It wasn't a disaster area, but it looked like a crowded non-emergency waiting room, the kind of place that if you walked into in the States you'd know you could be there upwards of 4 or 5 hours.

"Okay," I thought, "if this is terrible I have to be honest about it and tell people on the blog in the interests of semi-journalistic semi-integrity."

As you're probably aware, one thing I was interested in checking out while I was in Canada was the healthcare system. I'm in favor of single-payer healthcare, where doctors and hospitals and such do their thing and the government takes the role of the insurance company and takes on the part of the bill that they're responsible for, as well as negotiating rates and all that.

Have you ever NOT had health insurance? Do you know what that's like?

I wrote a big long bit here describing what it's like to not have health insurance, but then I erased it because a) I'm not going to convince you of anything new and b) if you ever didn't have health insurance, you probably don't want to think about what that was/is like. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Anyway, because I didn't have health insurance for a particularly desperate portion of my life, I think that the world would be a better place if people did have health insurance. I'm willing to entertain something less-than-fabulous, or something half-broken, or something with death panels; I don't care.

So here I am, sitting in this germy waiting room in some of the worst pain I can remember, and I think, "Yeah, this might end up being terrible."So we sat there and paid our $120 cash (we're not on the gov't insurance just yet so we have to use Ben's work insurance, which means getting reimbursed after the fact). Ben went across the street and got me a smoothie from a Tim Horton's. I wrote him little sad notes on the back of a pap smear pamphlet they had lying around.

To my surprise, we were really only there for maybe half an hour before my name was called. I went back, hopped up on the bench, he took my temperature, asked me a few basic questions, wrote me a prescription, and I was on my way. Took maybehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif...4 minutes?

I went back out--Ben was surprised to see me so soon!--and we got the prescription and caught a cab home because we'd already done so much running around.

In retrospect, now that I'm not deathly ill, I am okay with the experience I had at the clinic. Doctor didn't actually tell me what he thought I was sick with, he just gave me some antibiotics and got me out the door. This isn't particularly awesome healthcare, but I also didn't have to sit in the waiting room for a good 4 hours until he saw me. All in all, it got the job done and that was good enough for me.

We went home and Ben made me lasagne the way I like, with bechamel sauce. Hasn't been until today, really, that I've felt human again, which means I was out for nearly a week. Of course since Ben was taking care of me and I wasn't doing my usual around-the-house stuff, there may or may not still be a bit of evidence lying around...

On a more positive note:

It's useful to remember, I think, that no matter how screwed up my country is (possibly because of how screwed up we are), we make AWESOME art. I was feeling kind of alienated there for a second, but then I remembered that we're also responsible for Angels in America and jazz.

Here are some daffodils I arranged last weekend in NYC at my friend Rose's place.

Ex-patriotism

Today is a strange day, because of a combination of events.

In case you've been living under a rock, there has been some pretty big news coming out of the States. Most of my Twitter and Facebook friends have had things to say about this; there were things I agreed with and things I did not, but I will keep such opinions to myself as everyone else has already said everything I may or may not have wanted to say.

Mostly this has made me think of where we were as a country and where I was personally ten years ago. On one hand, we've begun to wrestle in the public arena about things like whether or not you should be able to get married to anyone you want, which I never ever thought would even happen in my lifetime. On the other hand, there's a lot about being American that I don't care for anymore--it makes it difficult to feel patriotic and proud of your country when you get accused of being un-American when you dissent. I am morally repulsed by the idea that American lives are somehow more valuable than the lives of people who happen to live somewhere else.

On Friday, my friend Louisa (I HAVE A FRIEND GUYS) and I went to see Gore Vidal speak at McGill. Gore Vidal has always been a blowhard and a bitcher, which I respect, and he seems to be one of the last people I know of who have that odd, laconic, aristocratic American accent that seems to have denoted education and class at one point. If I were to describe to you a news broadcast where William F. Buckley (another person who has this odd accent) and Gore Vidal call each other a "crypto-Nazi" and a "queer" respectively, I doubt you'd think it would sound as unhurried as this does.

Long story short, Gore Vidal's various political opinions appear to have condensed themselves into "I don't care, I'm old." It's kind of discouraging that Gore Vidal, allegedly one of the greatest living thinkers, is fed up with thinking about any kind of solutions to America's problems, and is content to let us all go rot because he is old and has given up messing around with us. Not that I am alone in this. Mr. Vidal also disregarded requests for opinions on the Quiet Revolution and the Canadian election, and refused to conjecture at all about the future of politics, the world, or most anything.

Finally, today is Election Day in Canada (whether or not Gore Vidal cares, it's still happening). We played board games with some of our usual crew last night, and the Canadians were jazzed about going to be able to vote the next day.

One of our crew was a francophone--I told her to enjoy voting and to be sure to vote for me too, and she seemed uncomfortable to tell me that she was going to vote for Giles Duceppe, who is with the Bloc Quebecois, who in turn advocate for Quebec succession. Personally, I don't have a dog in this race, and I know for a fact that the guy and his party have quite liberal politics that I can get down with. I totally took a quiz and it said I should vote Bloc Quebecois! But I am an anglophone so I suppose it made her hesitant. Then she gave me and Ben a hug which was nice because I was raised by engineers and don't know when it is okay to hug people.

So here I am: I can't vote in the Canadian elections and there's all this sociopolitical stuff going on that I still don't get and am going to offend someone about if I haven't already, there's a big patriotic ruckus in the US going on that I feel separated from not only emotionally but geographically, and Gore Vidal, a Great American thinker, now thinks all Americans can burn hell for all he cares because he's moved to Italy and is old.

So I guess this might be part of being an expatriate--disconnected from old home, disconnected from new home. Glaring example of difference between old and new? We're unsure that we can find a bar to watch election results come in with some of our interested Canadian pals.

Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips

Last night, while hanging out with some attractive people and rolling some Platonic solids, I was offered some of these:

These, as you can probably tell from the picture, are Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips. "All dressed" isn't really a phrase applied to food in the States.

I encountered "all dressed" when we were trying to figure out how to order a pizza to our corporate housing. The top choices for toppings were Hawaiian and "All Dressed." Hawaiian is what I thought it would be--ham and pineapple, and closer inspection of All Dressed revealed it is pepperoni, green peppers, and mushrooms.

I assumed that this particular chip flavor would be similar, but based on the packaging, it has vinegar, onion, and tomato flavors. One thing I have not been quite able to bring myself to eat here has been ketchup flavored potato chips (saying "here" is a bit off because you can get them in Virginia and I didn't eat 'em there, either), so when my companions told me that they were a lot like ketchup chips, I had my doubts.

Anyway, the all dressed chips weren't too bad! They reminded me in passing of my favorite chip in the Whole Wide World, the Utz Carolina Style Bar-B-Q chip:
The Washington, DC area was right on the Carolina/Crab Line, where in some stores the specialty chip flavor was Crab Chips (Old Bay flavored) and in others it was Carolina Style.

Carolina Style chips are kind of like vinegar 'n' barbecue, and the All Dressed chips were kind of comparable, although they didn't have the near-painful kick that Carolina Style do. I will probably keep my eye out for other All Dressed chip brands to check out differences.

In case you were worried, I'm not planning on turning this into some kind of hyper-focused food blog where I review only Quebecois potato chips, but I have been feeling the urge to cook for people recently. I always had to restrain myself from feeding REAL American food to my ESL students (restricting myself to maybe writing the words "soul food," "tex-mex," and "creole/cajun" on a notecard I gave them). I'd always ask, "have you tried some American food?" and they'd say, "Yes, pizza, spaghetti, hamburger."

But I would like to cook interesting things for people. Maybe I need to find a Canadian counterpart who wants to cook me Canadian food and we can switch off every other weekend or something. I mean, I like poutine, other people should enjoy biscuits and gravy, right?

Delicious tree juice & my birthday

I turned thirty three days ago, and received two very nice birthday cards, both of which mentioned how much the card-senders had been enjoying reading my blog. But there hasn't been an update to my blog in ages, you might say! How could they possibly continue to enjoy it if you don't update? So update I shall.

Well, a couple of things have happened in the last while. Penelope died. I turned thirty. I unpacked more stuff and worked on my resume. Ben and I registered for new drivers' licenses (they took away our ugly Virginia ones) and for Medicare (the Canadian, everyone-gets-it kind of Medicare).

On my birthday, we went to a sugar shack, or a "cabane à sucre"--I prefer the second one because it sounds a lot less like a strip club or a sorority house, and more like a place where maple sap gets turned into maple syrup. Basically you get a bunch of things that last the winter well--beans, pickled whatnots (beets, cucumbers, cauliflower, tomatoes), ham, eggs--then you pour maple syrup all over these items and eat them.

I adore maple syrup, so I was already predisposed to like this sort of thing. A couple of miles down the road from the farm I grew up on was a place that in retrospect seemed to have made its entire living off of trees--they sold cut-your-own Christmas trees in winter and made maple syrup in early spring.

Canada wins at maple syrup: about 75% of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec. A maple leaf is on the Canadian flag, and maple syrup is delicious. On the other hand, you have American pancake syrup, which is racist and flavored with fenugreek. The internet tells me that Quebecois call it "sirop de poteau" or "pole syrup" because it's apparently what you get when you tap a telephone pole.

Anyway, a big yellow school bus marked "special" picked us up at Ben's work in the afternoon on Thursday and drove us over with all of the folks from the EA Montreal office. Ben's coworkers are all cool people, and a lot younger than his previous job--someone brought a baby and the dudes in their mid-twenties were surprised. Before it was sort of strange that we didn't have any kids, now it's kind of strange that we're married.

As usual, I hope I didn't say anything horribly offensive to a fairly multicultural group. I know a lot of folks view it as a badge of honor to not be PC about these sorts of things, but I guess I'm just the sort of person who worries more about being a jerk. It's just a large shift from being safe and comfortable at home to a place where I actually have an accent. Me, who's always sounded like a newscaster! Thrilling!

I will close this with an exciting list of Things I Could Eat a Nearly Unlimited Amount of (but not together because that would be nasty):

1. Maple Syrup
2. Deviled Eggs
3. Oreos

(Pictures thanks to Ben's coworker and amateur photographer, Gary Stewart.)

Politics, Religion, Sex

So you know how you're not really supposed to talk about politics in polite conversation?

Yeah, living in DC for a couple of years made me forget about that, too. In college most of my friends were interested in politics and activism and that sort of thing, and moving to the Washington metro region didn't exactly help me kick the habit. Most of DC's economy rests on the government, so even if you don't work directly for the gov, you're most likely working for an association or a group that lobbies or you work in a non-profit that is trying to squeeze grants or whatever.

So when I came up here, I did some looking around and some research on the Canadian government and the kinds of social issues Canadians are interested in. I'd taken a sociolinguistics class a few semesters ago with a prof who'd taught here at Macgill for a while--the same one who gave me the tip about the pretzels also gave us an overview of the kinds of identity politics that are going on in Quebec and Canada as a whole.

But nobody wants to talk about it. Canadian citizens--both anglos and francophones--either jump at talking shit in a completely unproductive way about the other side, or they get uncomfortable and change the subject. I personally am interested in what's going on with the Quebecois identity and how that's tied into the French language and Canadian politics, but nobody's talking.

I decided to stop trying the other day; Ben had his yearly "don't harass people" workshop at his job and apparently talking to someone about Quebec sovereignty is on the same NO list as sexual harassment and threatening people. So rather than harass people about politics, I'll stop. It's just frustrating when I take a "who should you vote for" quiz online and that is where I find out that Canada has a Senate that might get dissolved.

I am apparently suited to the Bloc Quebecois, even though I answered every Quebec-related question with "I don't know."

Passers-by, not passer-bys (& Stevie Wonder)

Our street sees a reasonable amount of through-traffic considering that it runs for only about 3 blocks.


View Larger Map

Avenue Melville runs between Rue Sainte-Catherine O and Rue Sherbrooke O (the O stands for "ouest"), which are two major east-west (est-oueste?) streets in Montreal. Several of the local universities are located along Sherbrooke
and Sainte-Catherine runs parallel to it, and has a lot of entrances into the underground city when you get downtown. When I walked to meet Ben at work the other day, I went straight down Sainte-Catherine for maybe 40 minutes and I was there.

We sit on the eastern side of Westmount Park, which means that if someone wants to cut between Sherbrooke and Sainte-Catherine, Melville is either the last street before the park or the first street after the park. This means that a lot of people use my street to cut through, and they drive down it at a million kilometers per hour despite 2 or 3 speed humps (I wish I knew the word for that in French).

So, for whatever reason, this results in a lot of running-of-red-lights and squealing-of-tires. Maybe the idea of having to wait for several blocks to cross from Sherbrooke to Sainte-Catherine is enough to test the patience of a Sainte and people just lose control. Most people who cruise through, however, obey the traffic laws. Since we're right on the corner, we can see the traffic light through our window, resulting in strange red and green reflections. Luckily we are a bit above ground-level, so occupants of cars can't see us and we can't see them when we are sitting in our living room.

What does filter up, however, is noise. Our old bedroom window faced out onto Route 50, so we got a reasonable amount of road noise in Arlington. It was mostly white noise, though, and we often used it to tell what the weather would be before we got out of bed--wet roads sound different than dry ones. Since we're right next to a school, sometimes louder school buses come by, but I don't find that to be particularly distracting.

What IS distracting is the music. People cruise by my apartment blasting their jams all the time, and the angle must be such that the sound waves go right into our windows.

What really gets to me about the music, though, is the fact that I can't recognize most of those songs. I've always been relatively skilled in playing name-that-tune, but as time has progressed I've paid less and less attention to popular music and mainstream hip-hop. It makes me feel old and out-of-touch, which I am--in just a few more years, we will buy a house that will have a lawn that I will yell at kids to stay off of, and I'm looking forward to that.

Anyway, the whole point to this long story was simply to tell you that I finally heard a car blasting a song I knew, and it was Stevie Wonder's "Cherie Amour."



See, it's kind of funny because the title is in French. And it's a song about someone never noticing you. And who the hell blasts, "Cherie Amour?"

Stevie Wonder songs I would not blast:
"That's What Friends Are For"
"I Believe"

Songs I initially put on the above list and then removed:
"I Just Called to Say I Love You""

I am embarrassed to say that I remembered this as a Stevie Wonder song:

Mystery screws

Ben and I had an odd moment a few weeks ago when we went to the Home Depot to pick up screws for our curtain hardware.

Almost every single screw in the store had a square hole in it. We looked around and found a few Philips head screws, but in very limited numbers that meant we couldn't get what we needed.

I thought, "What the heck?"

Had some revolution in screws been implemented since I'd last been in a Home Depot (probably only a few months ago)? Had I just not noticed this seismic shift in the screw world? I consider myself a relatively crafty lady; although I'm generally not building things, tools and such are at least on the periphery of my consciousness. And I mean, contractors shop at Home Depot too--could the entire construction industry have picked up and changed when I wasn't looking? It's hard to see on this page, but most of the screws appear to be the ones with the square holes.

We asked the man about the Philips head screws we wanted, and he said, "oh, well, why don't you want these square head ones?"

"Well," I said, "I've never even seen this type of screw before. We don't have a screwdriver that will work on it."

"Really?" he said, "These screws are a lot better than Philips head. You just put the screw on the screwdriver and it doesn't fall off!"

So B and I decided to give these screws a try, since our options beyond them were extremely limited, and because it gave me an excuse to buy a pink screwdriver, which is fly.

The man was right--you put the screw on the screwdriver and it doesn't fall off, meaning that you don't need to use two hands (one to hold the screwdriver and one to hold the screw). I have the sneaking suspicion that these screws might be better than what I'm used to, although I don't know how they stand up against stripping and that sort of thing.

It turns out that these are called "Robertson" screws, and they're mainly used in Canada. Turns out this guy Robertson invented a screw so awesome that his competitors did some underhanded stuff that almost made him lose his patent. When Henry Ford came along and wanted to license the screws to use on his Ford assembly line, the suspicious Robertson declined and Ford went with Philips head screws instead.

I suppose he's lucky that Thomas Edison didn't find out and steal his idea.

So apparently Canada has been holding out on a better screw head.

The city I live in

I haven't ever really lived in a new city since my family moved to Richmond when I was fifteen, and then I wasn't really able to take advantage of the full depth of the city as I was often too young for things or later, didn't have a car.

DC was not entirely new--while I only found out that Arlington was more than a cemetery when I met a friend from there my freshman year of college, my grandparents had always lived in Silver Spring (Exit 33B off of the Beltway until they changed the way the exit was set up). Visits to DC with my parents when I was young mainly impressed upon me the importance of telling the driver what lane to be in to avoid doing something crazy like getting off on the 270 spur. I have nice memories of making a day at the museums with my mother, having lunch at some of the Smithsonian cafeterias, and gawking at the mangy mammoth in the Natural History Museum.

DC has certain things that it believes about itself. Maryland and Virginia drivers both believe that the other state has the worst drivers in the country. On the Metro, you stand right and walk left, and get out of the way of people getting off the train and THEN get on; if you do not do this you are an immoral person.

So as the arrogant interloper, I had to laugh when I got here and was informed of a few things:

1) It gets really hot here during the summer. (Some times it gets up to 79F!!)
2) Traffic is REALLY bad. (Heh)

Some additional things I noticed, which mostly have to do with driving:

1) Everyone LOVES to honk at each other here. You hesitate at the line, you'll get honked. You turn too slow, you get honked. You don't run a stale yellow, you get honked.

My favorite was the time a dude came blazing around our corner and considerately honked to tell pedestrians NOT to cross because he sure as heck wasn't going to stop.

2) I have seen so many people just pop their car into reverse and cruise back an entire block or two to take a missed turn or nab a parking space. It is disconcerting when cars whiz by in the wrong direction. When I am walking it makes me wonder if it is me who is doing something wrong that has somehow upset the fabric of the universe for a second.

3) Nobody waits for train occupants to get off a Metro train before trying to get on. This, to me, amounts to the total breakdown of society.

So all in all, I don't think the driving here is nearly as bad as it was in DC, but it's a strange blend of bad-in-a-different-way that I wasn't expecting. I suppose these aren't things that people think to warn you of if they're normal habits...I wonder what tips I'd give people about DC now that I'm gone from there and have some other-city perspective.

Still living in another country

KFC is called PFK.

Where the posts at?

I sent this email to a few friends a couple of days ago. It basically sums up what I've been concentrating on for the last couple of weeks.

Dear Friends of Miss P:

Penelope hasn't been doing well for a while now, and her ultrasound yesterday turned up several masses and nodules in her liver, small intestine, pancreas, and lymph node. She is a very sick pup, and while we're still waiting on results from some cells they aspirated, it looks pretty certain that it's bad, and probably cancer.

She's lost a lot of weight and doesn't have much energy, but she's still as happy and waggy as ever; she just takes more naps and goes on shorter walks. She mostly seems tired and wants to lay around.

We don't have a real diagnosis or anything yet, but I think it's safe to say that there's not much we'll be able to do, and that her time with us will be limited.

Anyway, since you are Penelope's best friends in the whole wide world, I thought I'd let you know.

Love,

Conner

Today I am going to see a different vet to see if there's anything else that we'll be able to do for Penelope. I've been treating the situation like on any morning I could wake up and she'd have passed in her sleep, but she might have another couple of months if we change something. So I'll pay a little bit more for a second opinion and some peace of mind.

Somebody must hate these cans

Man, I totally had it worked out. I took this picture before I actually cut open the box and looked inside, but the plan was to post this on the blog to point out how silly it was that we have enough spices to fill up this box. But in a smug foodie sort of way, where I know that other people who are interested in spices would look at my enormous box and say, "My goodness, If Only I Had That Many Spices!" And I would chortle.

I am sharing this less-than-flattering look into my inner monologue (although I would be surprised if anyone I know has an inner monologue that casts them in a favorable light and if so, what a bland person!) because, you will be glad to know, I got SMOTE. I was HOISTED on my own PETARD.

I've always loved that phrase, because while it mostly means "to be blown up by your own bomb," the word "petard" also has links to a Latin word that was the verb for "to fart." So being hoisted on your own petard is kind of like being made to smell your own fart.

I digress.

The real point of this story is that the box marked "Spices" was actually full of cans, each individually wrapped in packing paper. The box was deep for someone of my stature, so I found myself reaching down, grabbing a 1/2 lb. lump of paper & can, unwrapping it, and putting yet another can of black beans in the cabinet. It took me about an hour to unpack this box. It was awful. So that is what I get.

Ben and I spent some time last night measuring the rooms and our furniture so we could make a little map of the rooms to figure out where the best place to put things would be. This approach is pretty painfully non-Information Age, but I've never found a piece of software that's been able to supplant graph paper and a measuring tape.

We've now moved the couch and entertainment center (or as B likes to call it, the "edutainment center") into the smaller of the two rooms and hooked up the Xbox, so now I can play Stacking, which is much better than actually having to stack more cans.

Underground Adventures

On the 26th, we went to the Blanche Nuit festival, which is an annual arts festival that happens here in town. We wisely chose to attend Art Souterrain, which took place entirely in the Underground City.

You can go and read about the Underground City at the above link, but essentially it's a series of underground malls and metro stops connected by tunnels that is located in the downtown area. When Ben takes the Metro into work every morning, he gets off at the McGill metro station and can walk to his work at Place Ville Marie without going above ground. He can also walk to say, Eaton Center, which has a huge food court (including a place to get bahn mi, joy of joys!)

The Underground City generally closes up in the evenings, so it was kind of a special treat to go there around midnight and wander around looking at art. We saw some pieces that we liked--the one in this photo is actually painted on a series of clear acrylic panels that are suspended at the edges, giving it a 3d effect.



This is a moebius strip made out of photographs of the Place Ville Marie area, right near where Ben works.

This is the artist dressed up as a clown, doing portraits of people as clowns (the subject of this one was particularly thrilled to receive a hobo clown portrait of himself), in front of a loop of scary videos featuring clowns. One of the movies had Crispin Glover; I'm not sure what he was doing there.

We might have done more walking around outside--the festival had lots of routes you could walk through the various districts of the city to look at all of the art--but unsurprisingly, it was just too darn cold to do that. Either that or, as I suspect might be the case, I wasn't nearly as drunk as anyone who thought it was a good idea.

Unpackings

The process of unpacking has begun. In terms of square footage, I don’t know if this place is larger or smaller than our last apartment, but the bedroom is significantly smaller, which is just fine with me.

Having a bunch of people come and pack your stuff up initially seems like a good idea, but one downside is a lot of the tossing-out that generally comes with a move didn’t happen this time, since we weren’t supposed to pack anything ourselves. I’ve opened several boxes that were just full of…stuff that had obviously accumulated in a drawer in the kitchen or on a shelf and hadn’t been sorted through in quite some time.

A few weeks before we moved, I went through and got rid of a lot of books that I hadn’t touched in years, partially at least to prove to myself that I’m not a hoarder-in-training. More of that is going to have to happen on this end, too, because while we have a nice set of IKEA shelves that hold all sorts of things, we’re overall going to have less closet storage space and less cabinet space in the kitchen.

There are a lot of things about this apartment that simply aren’t as nice as the old apartment, but this place feels a lot more our speed than the wall-to-wall cinderblock joint in Arlington. The landlord appears to be pretty hands-off, with all of the benefits and disadvantages that come with that. I’m sure we can get away with doing almost anything to the apartment and it won’t be a thing, but we also have to deal with a refrigerator that’s crappier than previously anticipated. We may end up just picking up a better compact fridge on Craigslist for $200, but learning to live with less fridge space probably isn’t a bad idea anyway.

Yesterday, catastrophe struck: a bottle of fish sauce leaked onto the surrounding packing paper. If you've ever had Thai or Vietnamese food, you've probably eaten fish sauce--it's an important flavor; you might use it the same way you'd use chicken stock to improve the body and flavor of a dish. You also don't ever use very much of it at a time, because it's strong, salty, and smells like fishy death. My fear was that the dog would manage to eat up all of the contaminated paper, but luckily I was able to get it out of the box and double-bagged fast enough that she hadn't pieced it together. I tossed out a few spice containers that had been wrapped in the damp fish sauce paper, but our belongings mostly escaped unscathed.

Tonight I am meeting someone from Craigslist to buy a countertop dishwasher. I wasn’t able to get anything else move-related done today because the car had to be un-stuck from the ice while it was only -14, and the dog had to go to the vet because her tummy is still upset and she hasn’t gained back any of the weight she lost (about 8 pounds at this point). She’s also been drinking water like there’s no tomorrow, so the vet is running tests and we’ll see what is up. Hope it’s just stress and not something underlying that.

Once this place is set up and the dog is feeling better, then it is going to be a lovely home. I need to keep working on both of those for a while, and we’ll get there. I just wish I'd remembered to set aside the can opener, instead of allowing it to be packed in one of the twenty boxes labeled "kit. ware."

I am a grown-up (sort of)

Today I sat in the vet's office, waiting to pay a bill for a variety of tests and an x-ray of my dog's tummy. A woman walked by; she was wearing the gorgeous $200 snow boots I've been coveting for a month.

Every day I check online to see if they've gone on sale so I can justify their purchase, and I've worked hard to cook at home and eat out less so buying these fabulous boots wouldn't be a huge strain on our finances.

I paid my $300 and drove home, thinking about how all the expendable income had gone into figuring out what is wrong with Penelope, and how being responsible sucks.

So I stopped off at a high-end boutique I'd eyed a couple times on Rue Sherbrooke. Just my luck, they had the exact thing I was looking for, so I was irresponsible and splurged:

His name is Huey Hedgehog. He is a Hardboiled Softie, Penelope's favorite toy in the whole, wide world.


He squeaks. I bought him for no other reason than to make my dog happy. Take THAT, fiscal responsibility.

To and Fro

Today we are going to drive over to Lachine, which is on the west part of the island. We need to take care of some customs things so that our stuff can be delivered when we move into the apartment on Monday. So we drive 20 minutes to Lachine, 20 minutes back to a couple of blocks near our apartment in Vieux-Montreal (that means Old Montreal, I'm trying to think of things with their French placenames, and yes, it's the place with the building that is draped with a picture of itself), and then back again to Lachine. And then back here.

One thing we didn't end up having to take care of in customs is our car. Poor Civic has some miles on her now and a bit of an underbite; it's from an unfortunate run-in with a larger station wagon on a rainy day on 66. We're thinking of driving the car back to Virginia sometime around Easter and attempting to sell it.

I'm worried that getting rid of the car again will mean that I'm limiting myself to certain jobs--when I already am limited by my language handicap--and won't be able to get access to services that I might need, like a doctor I actually like or a vet for a sick Penelope.

That being said, everyone in NYC lives without a car just fine. I didn't particularly like the doc Super Size Me, but one part that made an impression on me is that New Yorkers basically walk more than anyone else in the US. If you want to go somewhere, you walk and subway there.

And let's face it--I've never been particularly svelte, but after I quit smoking, I gained a LOT of weight. Being motivated to walk around will do me a lot of good. Ben will be able to bike, although my cycling skills mostly involve being able to not fall over on a bike. Biking in the city scares me, mainly because I'm just not very good at it.

After I quit smoking, I had to learn to live my life at a different sort of pace, and it was tough. I think that making the adjustment to not having a car is going to be a similar sort of process, but at least it won't make me gain weight!

We're going to sell the car. Even if we decide to get another vehicle, it'll be something like a Subaru that can actually drive around in the snow. Again, it's the waiting that is killing me, giving me time to think and be anxious about the decision, when if I had my 'druthers it would already have been gone by now.

Oh, and cellphones in Canada don't come with voicemail; you have to pay $7 extra for that. So basically if you miss a call, there's no way of telling who it was. I think I'm just going to give up and do it myself:

This is like...a whole other country

I will admit that when we moved here, I was primarily prepared for language- and culture-based changes from living in the DC Metro area. A lot of what has surprised me, however, has been things that I took for granted as part of the service you receive when you get a cell phone plan or a bank account.

We searched around with all of the mobile phone carriers and were unable to find either a Canadian or US company that would work without enormous fees on both sides of the border. I haven't figured out a way to have a US number that our friends in the States could call to avoid long-distance charges that would forward to a Canadian number, but we at least have Canadian cell phones now so I can give out a phone number that won't be going away when we move out of temporary housing.

The odd part of all this is that Caller ID (which comes on every phone I've ever seen in the US) costs an extra $8 here. This means that you can't just assume someone can call you so you'll have their number, because if you haven't paid extra, the phone just says "Unknown."

The next thing that was odd was that our bank account didn't come with a check card--you know how you get the thing that looks like a credit card and you can run credit or debit with it, right? Here you just get an Interac card, which works like a debit only you have to pay $1.50 every time you use it, and you can't choose to run it as credit instead of debit, or use it at credit-only businesses.

Heck, we opened a checking account, and now I'm wondering if I need to make sure that we're getting sent actual, physical cheques. I was expecting to find that banking was different because the word is spelled "cheques" here, but instead it's feeling fairly different. I kind of know the rules, but if I take things for granted or assume something, I might get screwed, and nobody will think to warn me!

Patience is the hardest virtue

So the situation with the move-in housing has thankfully been resolved. After we told our relocation lady that the 25th wasn't an option, she was able to successfully lobby the EA people into paying for two extra days in temporary housing. What this means is that we'll have a 2-day overlap between moving out and moving in, and we won't have to frantically pack our car and try to make everything in one trip.

Penelope got sick a few days ago. She'd had whatever the dog equivalent is of the stomach flu a few weeks ago, right after she'd been visiting Susanne for a while in Charlottesville, and we figured it was because she'd eaten something she shouldn't have while running around the back yard. This is a thing that dogs just do.

She wasn't able to keep food down and had to go outside almost every hour through the night, so Ben and I didn't get a ton of sleep. She'd started to look really emaciated--we keep her weight low for her hips, and the previous sickness and trip hadn't helped her keep the pounds on--and was poopin' out blood, so we took her to the vet. By the time we got her to the vet, she weighed 51 pounds, which is terrible; her usual slim-and-trim weight is somewhere around 58.

The vet hooked us up with some things for her tummy and the visit was significantly less expensive than it would have been in DC, so that was a pleasant surprise. We'd been referred to this vet by our real estate lady, who said that they were probably the best vets in Westmount, so it was nice to see that they were pretty affordable.

So now we are feeding Penelope white rice and ground beef in painfully small amounts, and waiting to move into our new apartment. I am bad at patience.

The Waiting Game

Right now we are doing some serious logistical juggling to ensure that we have a place to live right up until we move into our place to live...what an enormous pain.

Basically, we have to be out of our corporate housing by noon on the 26th, which is the same day we have permission to move into our new apartment. I'd really like to have some time cushion, but I'm not sure what time we'll be able to pick our keys up on the 26th. Hopefully this doesn't involve repacking the entire car and driving over to the new apartment and sitting outside of it for two hours.

Here's some kid arguing with a pineapple in French. Does anyone else remember this?



My favorite part is when Jacques starts nailing Ananas back into his crate after trying to logic him out of existence.

Ben appears to be settling into his new job well--he's learning new things and I think that's important for his happiness. I've heard in several places that the only place someone who speaks absolutely no French at all can work is a call center, and I'm just not doing that.

There's a local language academy that has a TESOL certification program that consists of about a month of full-time classes and classroom teaching. The program runs around $2500CN and takes up a lot less time overall than a lot of the certifications at other places, which run part-time and are completed over the course of a year.

Right now I am trying to decide if I want to take full-time intensive French lessons or get the TESOL Certification. What it boils down to, of course, is time and money; I can't afford to do both of these one-after-another. What I'm really interested in doing is working in a field where I can use both my writing AND ESL skills, but there's not a certification or graduate degree up here comparable to the Masters in Composition and Rhetoric that existed at Mason.

Deneigement

I've been learning some French words here and there, whether by puzzling them out myself or asking a Francophone friend in the States. Once you start knowing a few words, it makes new ones easier to figure out, and there are a lot of suffix and prefix cognates from English to French.

canneberge--cranberry
neige--snow
sauge--sage
tasse--cup

This leads me to my favorite French word so far, which I first saw on a TV news report: "deneigement." De-snow-ment? Oh, like snow removal!

Montreal is serious about its deneigement. For one thing, I noticed on this news report that there's a guy whose job is "directeur de l'Unité de déneigement." So the Montreal urban area (l'Unite) has a director of snow removal, and I guess its this guy's job to think about snow removal all year long, even when it isn't snowing.

Once we started learning about deneigement, a few things came together.

First of all, the sidewalks are incredibly cleared considering it's just been snowing and snowing and snowing since we got here...maybe a foot or two. If you check this video out at about :30, you'll see the little thing responsible for it.



Then there was that...odd noise at night, that sounded like an air raid siren--and believe me, after our exciting fire drill our first night here, I was on alert to any subsequent alarms for some time. Turns out that it is the tow truck warning siren. Before the parking area of a street is plowed, the deneigement people put out a sign with times that the street should remain clear so it can be plowed. Then this truck comes along the street and makes a really loud noise to remind everyone to move their car...then, just minutes before the tow truck comes, the noise truck goes and sits beside each car and blows its horn for like 5 minutes in a last-ditch attempt to get someone to come move the car.



And since there's too much snow to simply push it off the road--the sidewalks need to be clear too--where does the snow go? Behold:



So these big trucks with plows underneath come and push all of the snow to the center, then this other truck with this grabby bit sucks the snow up and shoots it into a truck driving parallel to it, and then the snow is taken away to outside of town!

People complain about snow removal here just the way they do anywhere else, but compared to where I'm from, this is a well-oiled machine.

Curling and Cheques

Oh, and we watched curling last night.

I should look to see if I can find an expat-Canadian blog where some Canadian yuppie has moved to the US and is all:

Dear Diary:

Today I ate a cheeseburger. The word "cheques" is spelled "check" here.

Love,

Etienne

We could be, like, sister-blogs and I could tell him to go eat some cheese grits and introduce useful words such as "soul food."

I am looking forward to scratching the surface a bit more here, beyond the list of cliche things that I'm Supposed To Do in Canada. Overall, I don't feel particularly out of place, exactly--I think there's a good chance I'd experience more culture shock if I moved to California or somewhere else where nobody wears black all the time. Here, there's all of the identity politics stuff in Quebec going down, but most everyone has been nice after I say "bonjour" and they seem to want to do things like smile at you and watch sports and wear black which are all things I am totally down with.

One small thing I noticed when we were in Canada last time was the Nanaimo bar. It's a layer of squished crumbs, then some nice-tasting icing, then some chocolate melted on the top. My past experience of no-bake cookies in West Virginia was nothing but horrible. If an alternate name for a confection is "Boiled Cookies," stay away. Nanaimo bars are delicious and not boiled at all, I assure you.

We found an apartment!

Here's a Google Street view of the place where we just signed a lease, 223 Avenue Melville in Westmount, QC:


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Ours is the first floor of the brick building you're looking at. To the left and down the street are a school and Westmount Park. We're close to a Y and the library, as well as a lot of shops and restaurants a couple of blocks away.

Overall we are a good 7 or 8 blocks away from both of the the closest Metro stops, Station Vendome and Station Atwater. This amounts to about 15 minutes to a Metro station, but on either side of the street are buses downtown. Ben can catch the 24 bus all the way down to 2 blocks from his job.


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If anyone in town asks where we live, we will probably tell them that it's Victoria Village, which is the district of Westmount we're in.

What is this "Westmount?"

Montreal is on an island of the same name. Back in 2001, the "One Island, One City" ("Une île, une ville" rhymes in French) initiatives started, which basically sucked in the 27 separate independent municipalities and made them part of Montreal. The reason my mailing address is Westmount is because Westmount tried to back out in 2004, and was able to regain some of its autonomy.

Here's how the real estate agent explained it: rich Anglophones live in Westmount, rich Francophones live in Outremont--until they get really rich, and then they move to Westmount. So we're living in a neighborhood that should be relatively easy to negotiate in English, but it's also ground zero for a lot of the identity politics that are being worked out in Quebec. for example, the last time Quebec attempted to secede from Canada, parts of Montreal--Anglophone parts of Montreal--voted "No" to independence. 50.56% of the voters voted "No," and a lot of people blamed Anglophones in Montreal. Check out the map in the above link--I live in the dark red section of the island now.

Where we have ended up is a neighborhood with a lot of money and a lot of English speakers. We looked at apartments in trendier neighborhoods like Mile End and Plateau Mont-Royal, but it's at that stage in gentrification where the apartments are still kind of crappy and have "personality" but cost a LOT. I'm down with a funky apartment in a cool neighborhood, but not for those prices. So overall we're living in a neighborhood with a lot of young professionals that is within walking distance to downtown, and paying significantly less rent than we did in DC.

Apartments in this city are advertised by how many rooms they have, so you see listings for 2 1/2, 3 1/2, etc. This system doesn't make a ton of sense sometimes--the 1/2 is for a bathroom, but the number doesn't change if there's an additional bathroom. We looked at 4 1/2 apartments, in the hope of finding something that has two bedrooms so we can have room for crafts and visitors (that's you, Dear Reader).

What we've ended up with is a 1-bedroom 4 1/2, which means that we sort of have a kitchen, then a dining area, then a living room with no doors. Here's a shot from the dining area:

For a bit more perspective, here's just the room on the right:So you can see that there is a lot of light coming into this apartment, which was a big factor. Nothing but hardwood floors in this city, so same here. There's also a filled-in fireplace with an electrical outlet in the middle, so we have a mantelpiece and a place to stage some form of fake fire.

The good news is that while we don't have a second bedroom, we have a futon courtesy of Will & Susanne, and the room closer to the kitchen will probably be turned into an expanded kitchen/craft stuff/computer room/guest area. We'll keep an eye out for some screens and I think that will do well for dividing the room up to accommodate visitors.

We move in on the 26th of February.

Montreal City Hall

I tried to describe this to people after we returned from the visit to Montreal for Ben's interview, but I don't think I did it justice.

Imagine a building that is undergoing renovations, and on the outside of the scaffolding on the building is...a slightly larger picture of that building on fabric. And the real building underneath doesn't look like the cloth version of itself anymore because it's being renovated.

Surreal.

That's Montreal's City Hall, which usually looks like this, but when we saw it in November had been completely encased in the picture that's partially up here.