Back to Lethbridge, and Winter in Alberta

We left Lethbridge in a week when it was -40, so we really appreciated Hawaii. Unfortunately, the return home was correspondingly traumatic. We went from this:
Sunset at our condo on Maui

to this:
Our patio furniture in Lethbridge


But we quickly discovered that there is no sympathy available for "jet lag climate syndrome".

"You had two weeks in Hawaii?! We were stuck here in 40 below and 3 feet of snow the whole time! I had to shovel for three hours to clear my driveway, and I still couldn't go anywhere because the streets weren't plowed." And so on. One of the worst winters in Lethbridge in a long time...so a good time for us to have been gone.

But we've discovered that our kids don't really understand cold. In my generation (I'm old, so think two generations ago), kids walked to school. (Okay, okay, I lived across the street from my school, but other kids walked up to 15 blocks to school). Today, we drive our kids to school, even though Tigana's school is only two blocks away. And since Mary and I pretty much hate cold and winter sports, we haven't exactly encouraged tobogganing or etc. So my kids don't really get that -40 is not just a number, it's a death sentence if you're out there too long. We found Tigana and Kasia out in the backyard one evening in their pjs. "What the H___ are you doing?!" Mary shouted out at them (having no intention of going out there herself). "What?" Tigana asked innocently enough. "We put on our socks!" There followed a round of hot chocolate and a two hour discussion of what would have happened if Mom hadn't discovered them within 30 seconds of their setting out. "Flesh freezes in 2 minutes at that temperature. People die at that temperature. It's different than 20 below."

It reminded me of my life growing up in Edmonton. At least once each winter, somebody would be found frozen to death because they'd just worn a 'car coat' from their heated house to their heated garage, and the car had broken down on some deserted road before they got to their heated destination. People forget how cold -40 really is, and that you can't take chances in this climate. I know my brother twice saved people's lives because he stopped and picked them up when they got themselves in trouble. One was a native man whose car had broken down on Connor's Hill, and no one would stop for him -- perhaps 'cause they thought he looked menacing, though how menacing is a guy shivering to death? I doubt he would have made it to the top of the hill if Doug hadn't picked him up when he had. Another time we were half way across the High Level Bridge when we saw a guy stumble on the sidewalk. Doug stopped and we pulled him in. He was a grad student I knew vaguely from UofA. He had crossed the bridge dozens of time on the 'short' walk from his apartment to campus during the fall, and hadn't fully appreciated what -40 meant. He'd worn a light fall coat, but being from Nigeria, he thought that was a winter coat. Walking that distance in Nigeria, piece of cake. Walking across the High Level Bridge in the middle of a blizzard -- exposed to the wind blowing full force down the North Saskatchewan -- pretty much suicide.

And my own story: My first Christmas in Lethbridge I was still working on my dissertation, so going into work on campus over Christmas. Winter, I had been told, was much milder in Lethbridge, but it turned out to be a particularly bad one -- worst I can remember until this year. I had been working late, and came out to find that my car had frozen solid. I'd forgotten they'd turned the plug ins off over Christmas holiday, since no one was supposed to be working that day. I tried to go back into my office to phone for a cab or tow truck (this was before cell phones), but the building's outside door was now locked, it being after hours on a day campus was officially closed. So I started the long walk up the hill towards home. About a quarter-way to the main road I knew there was no way I could make it all the way home in this cold. So I changed course for the gas station or the Dairy Queen on the corner -- slightly out of my way, but a lot closer than home. Even getting there was going to be touch and go, but I made a determined, tough Northerner heroic effort. When I finally got close enough to see the buildings through the blizzard, I realized that they were closed -- because of the blizzard. So I turned around and set for home again. There are no houses on that road until I would be almost home, but I'd already decided I would knock on the first door I got to, if I made it that far. I was sure I had lost my feet for good when a car finally drove by -- and fortunately for me -- pulled up and offered me a lift. The guy earned my undying gratitude (I still shop at the store whose logo was on the car) and the moment I got home I immediately put myself in the bath, so in the end, only had mild frostbite. I was very lucky. But another man died that same evening trying to walk across the bridge leading to the road I had been on.

I'd been in full winter regalia at that. So finding the kids had ventured out in night gowns, pretty much blew our minds. "Don't you know how cold this is?!" But how could they? Aside from recess, they're never outside, and they don't go out for recess any more once it hits -20 C. If you've never experienced -20, how can you possibly imagine -40?

We'd tell people in Hawaii that it had been -40 when we left Alberta, and they'd look at you as if you were insane. "What's that in Fahrenheit?" is the inevitable question.
"It's the same -- the scales cross at -40."
"Then why would you -- why would anyone -- live there?"
A question my five year old keeps asking us, and one we're having a hard time answering. I'd move to Hawaii tomorrow if it weren't that (a) we're Canadian and Hawaii is American (why we didn't think to buy it from the British when we had the chance, I'll never know) and (b) the salaries at UofHawaii are about 1/3 what I currently make. (Supply and demand, I guess, and there is pretty much a steady supply of profs wanting to work in Hawaii.)

We like Hawaii so much we thought we might see about going in the off season when it would be cheaper -- only there is no off season. We had assumed that summer would be cheaper, since who wants to leave Canada in the summer? But of course, our summer is exactly when people from Texas and Arizona go to Hawaii to escape the heat....
I hear +40 is hot enough it can kill you if you're not prepared.

Our House from Space

Ours is the house on the lower left. I can actually pick out our garbage can (grey smudge, middle right margin). Interesting view, but little worried about privacy issues. Not that you can tell too much from our picture, but the looking at the larger picture (from which this was cropped) is the first time I knew the neighbour two doors down had a pool.

Edmonton and Cancer Run

So for the last four weekends I've gone up to Edmonton to sort through Doug's stuff and get his condo(s) ready for sale. Counting the six hour trip each direction, I manage to put in three 18 hour days each time, so it is pretty exhausting.

It is also kind of depressing disposing of all his stuff, much of it treasured family memories. But Doug had a lot of stuff, and neither my family nor my remaining brother have need or space for all this material, so in the end, most of it has to go. In keeping with what I am sure would be Doug's wishes, I tried to ensure as much as possible went to good homes. So the Provincial Museum took three boxes of stuff (they told me it is unusual for them to take even a single item from an estate, because they have only limited storage and so have to be pretty picky -- but Douglas had not only saved a lot of the everyday things most people through out, but had kept detailed written records of each purchase, giving them the providence for various suits and household items, which is very rare. "We live for finds like these," the Director told me.); the University of Alberta took 78 boxes of books for the library; the Edmonton Public School Board took 23 boxes of my brother's papers for their archives; the ATA took two boxes for their archives; two boxes for the UofA archives; four boxes for the City of Edmonton Archives; and I have two more for the Edmonton Public School Board of stuff I found after my initial shipment.

After spending about four months sorting, packing and donating everything I could to these various archives, and throwing out stuff no one wanted (e.g., his extensive video collection -- but just stuff off TV, not prerecoreded), these last few weekends have been about taking truckloads to Value Village (an okay place to recycle unwanted furniture, clothes, small appliances, etc.) and getting the guys from 1-800-gotjunk to haul stuff away the big stuff. But it is killing me to watch the couch and chair from my childhood being dragged away to the dump, even though these are not in sufficiently good shape for even Value Village to want.

One of the archivists who came to pick up stuff (my brother's Gestetner duplicating machine among other things) spent about an hour going through helping me identify what was antique and what was just junk...and recommended an antiques dealer I could help me take care of the good stuff. But when I phoned the antiques dealer, turns out that he had essentially retired and was now only interested in those sorts of pieces that you see on the Antiques Road Show. He spent a long time on the phone with me explaining that all the antiques dealers in Edmonton were gone out of business and that there was no one left in Calgary either. The problem is that the value of furniture has fallen so dramatically over the past decade that dining room sets that used to go for $3600 to $4500 were now lucky to sell for $400. And because the value had dropped so preciptiously, the dealers have had to raise their commissions to compensate to make it worth their while to sell pieces -- with the result that it often cost more to truck a piece to auction than the owners recovered at auction. So the market has essentially collapsed.

The problem, of course, is that my brother's generation are all passing or moving into nursing homes, leaving their antique furniture as a glut on the market. For example, the caretaker in my brother's building told me that she has fabulous furniture, because people in the building keep moving into nursing care, and their relatives have to clear out their condos in a weekend or two, and so keep offering her diniing room sets or living room furniture, and she and all her married children now have all they can take. So people literally cannot give this stuff away. (She did take my brother's car -- a 1982 Toyota Tercel -- off my hands for one of her sons, though.)

I'm dreading what to do about emptying my Mom's place (which is up next, since she blind and bedridden so never leaving the nursing home again) because she had the majority of the "good stuff". I'll try phoning around to the relatives to see if anyone wants any thing, but the truth is, most people don't have the room for other people's antiques, and even if they did, shipping costs on the larger items may simply prove prohibitive.... A generation or two from now, these items will again no doubt be in high demand, but who has space to store them in the meantime. It is a dilemma.

Anyway, I was working away diligently this Sunday packing up Doug's place when I kept heard noises that sounded a bit like a group of people talking over the sound of the podcasts I was listening to on my ipod. But I'd check the spyhole and there would be no one out in the hallway, so I'd shrug, and get on with my cleaning. But the noises get getting louder, so eventually I figured out they were coming from outside. And this is what I saw:

Doug's condo is just near that end of Jasper Ave where the Cancer Run turns around and comes back on the other side of the road, so what I was hearing was the first runners to complete the first leg of the circuit turning round and greeting people coming the other way.... By the time I got my camera, there was quite an impressive crowd going by!

I paused in my work for about ten minutes to watch and I could not help but be struck by how powerful a sense of community and solidarity presented by such a massive gathering of like-minded people. Of course, the next thing that occured to me is how sad that the only thing Edmontonians would turn out for in such massive numbers is the Cancer Run, rather than, say, political protest. Yeah, everybody, let's protest against Cancer! That's a tough one to rally the troops for! But really, if this many people turned up on the legislative grounds over anything, the next day, the law would be changed....




Monday, the 1-800-Gotjunk guys came and hauled away the last of the stuff from Doug's two condos, and I set off for home. The only two redeeming elements of the weekend was that the six hour trip home I got to listen to my own CDs for a change (no Barney for Kasia, no Canadian Idol winners for Tigana) and to admire the scenary. The Edmonton - Lethbridge corridor is painfully boring to drive -- once you've seen one set of cows, you've pretty much seen 'en all -- but the last two weekends have been glorious fall colors, and surprisingly attractive. The two photos below (snapped with my cellphone out the car window as I was driving, so no chance to even aim, let alone compose decent pictures) give a poor indication of how beautiful and peaceful the drive really is this time of year. Next time I go up, I know it will all be bare grey trees and flat rolling countryside, but at least this time I got to decompress a bit on the way home from these physically and emotionally exhausting weekends before having to throw myself back into teaching.

Hawaiian Shirts, wasps, and the wet chair

Our trip to Hawaii being one of the few bright spots in an otherwise downbeat year, I have taken to wearing Hawaiian shirts as my summer default. They're comfortable, longer than most other shirts, and distinctly non-academic.

But yesterday when I went out to supervise the kids in the backyard, I found myself surrounded by wasps the moment I plunked myself down in the patio chair. After several minutes of coping with hysterical kids screaming "wasps! wasps!" I got them to calm down by pointing out that the wasps were not following them, but sticking pretty close to me. "It's your shirt," Tigana suggested. "They think those are real flowers!"

At about the same time I realized the chair I was sitting in had just been through one of the several freakish hail storms that have been plaguing our region, and the seat cushion was soaked through. Dripping from my now soaked pants, I retreated with the kinds back into the house to change clothes, leaving the wasps behind.

The next evening, the kids dragged me outside again, so I waved them off into the yard while I plunked my tired old man self down on the same chair, having briefly checked this time that it was dry.

Again, cloud of wasps. "I really have to change shirts before coming outside," I think to myself. But the wasps are landing on my legs even more than the shirt. And they don't follow me around the yard, just when I am sitting.

In that one chair.

So to make a long story short, it eventually occurs to me to look under the chair where I find this fully developed wasp nest:



Well, duh! Not the best place to sit then....

Infestation

photo of our roof, showing replaced cedar shakes

Regular readers know that we have had problems on a couple of occasions with field mice; we've also had to deal with ants on an ongoing basis. But our current infestation is completely different. As we came home one evening, I happened to look up at the roof of the house as we drove into the garage, and saw that about 10% of the roof tiles were gone. Not just gone, but replaced with new cedar shakes. I stopped the car, got out, pointed up to the roof, and announced to Mary and the family the only possible conclusion: "Oh my, we have elves!"

Yes, hard though it may be to comprehend, we have an infestation of elves. This isn't the first time they've shown up either, On a previous occasion, we'd returned from summer holidays to find the garage doors re-painted, and the doors to the garbage bin replaced. And about half the time during the winter, my sidewalks are shoveled before I even get home, and the garbage put out on garbage day before I get up.

Well, okay, it's possible the sidewalks and the garbage are my retired next-door neighbour, Ralph, or the neighbour on our other side who often seem to trade off taking turns shoveling -- it's that sort of neighbourhood. I try to keep up my share and do their front walks whenever I happen to be out there before them (usually requires a continuous snowfall where I've gotten home after they've already each had a go, but it's a couple of inches deep again.) But painted garage doors? Redoing the cedar shakes on the roof? That is clearly beyond mere neighbourliness.

Okay, it's remotely possible that these home improvements are orchestrated by Joe, the previous, previous owner. Indeed, Joe originally built this house for his own family and as the showplace for his contracting company. He loved this house. He still thinks of this house as his masterpiece. So, since I am as handy as a Homer Simpson, and am basically incapable of even recognizing when something needs attention, we've told Joe that if he sees work that needs doing, to just go ahead and do it.

But while that sounds like a reasonable explanation -- at some point one would expect a bill to show up. But the roof been fixed for months and no bill has appeared...so how could that be the contractor? I'm telling you, we have elves. It's the only explanation.

Object Lesson

Mary and I discovered Kasia attempting to climb over the babygate that protects her from the stairs last night. Kasia had pushed a box up to the gate, and was using it to provide the height necessary to scale the gate, though it was unclear to us how she expected to get down the other side, which is not only a steep staircase, but tiled. We bought our home from a master builder who had used it to demo his tile technique, so there are 3600 square feet of tile in our house, which is great right up to the moment you drop your first glass on it and watch it turn to dust. Tile appears to be an even more unforgiving surface than straight cement, which we had not taken into account when choosing to move here when Kasia was born: baby safe it isn't.

So the thought of Kasia falling down our staircase is one to fill our hearts with dread, because it would be way worse than just falling down carpeted or even normal wood or linoleum stairs.

Mary, realizing that we had to convey the danger to Kasia in a way she could understand, decided on an object lesson. She took an egg out of the fridge, carried it to the top of the stairs, and explained to Kasia the similarities between the egg and Kasia's noggin. Satisfied that Kasia got the analogy, Mary proceeded to toss the egg over the babygate and we watched as it went "splat" on the stairs. "Do you understand now?" Mary asked. Kasia nodded gravely.

Then Kasia solemnly proceeded to the fridge to get another egg so that she might participate in the apparently very serious, albeit mysterious, 'Egg over the Stairs' ceremony. Which was not exactly where we were going with this....

Kasia is a much more cautious child than Tigana ever was, but far more tenacious, so is sometimes harder to dissuade from dangerous course of action than was Tigana. This same demo worked successfully with Tigana at that age -- she totally got that if you fell from the stairs you died. Of course, in Tigana's case we found her hanging off the banister over the atrium (of our previous house) two days later, and when I asked had she not understood the danger, she somewhat cavalierly explained that even if she fell, she had two more lives to go. Shocked at this reply, I inquired what gave her that idea, and she explained how on the videogames at Daycare you always had three lives, more if you did well.... "So if I die, I'll just start over as a baby again, right?" Fortunately, Mary pointed out that althougth that may well be true, there was no guarantee that she would be coming back as our baby... that she only got one shot at being 'Tigana' and next time round she would be someone else's kid, probably in another part of the world.... Tigana has been more respectful of heights ever since...

Did I mention the mouse?

Oh, and about 10 days ago, a mouse ran across Mary's foot as she was nursing Kasia to sleep, with predictable results. Not having seen the mouse myself , I'm afraid my reaction was somewhat ineffectual: I got a soup bowl in which to capture it and stared intently at baseboards. "You've never actually seen a mouse, have you?" my wife asked. Well, no, I've never had to deal with this problem before. This went on for several days, and then yesterday, I saw the mouse (well, a mouse) leaving via the backdoor. It was huge. I mean, I could no more have captured it in a soup bowl than Godzilla. So I switched to one of those giant salad mixing bowls.

Mary was not impressed. She did not share my optimism that since I had seen a mouse leaving, that the problem was solved. She pointed out that the mouse I had described was the wrong color, and that there was no reason to assume that we were dealing with a lone mouse. In any event, when I came down this morning, the back door had been left wide open all night (a problem with the latch, so yet another required repair) so no doubt any number of addtional mice could have wandered in. Sure enough, a/the mouse ran across the floor in front of Mary again this evening, and I was directed to go to Home Depot and buy mouse traps. I am extremely squeamish about hurting fellow mammals, and protested that traps were inhumane. Mary, grumbling about people who can't kill mice but have no problem eating steak and porkchops at the same sitting, got out Tigana's butterfly net and started stalking the mouse for a capture and release program. She complained that everything she'd read said that if you released the mice too close to the house they would just come back the next day. I suggested that we take it with us on our trip to Kananaskis and relase it there, where it could never find us. She gave me one of those "is it time to have him committed already?" looks, until I explained that if it got loose in the hotel,we could call the manager, and maybe they'd comp our room.

In the end, it became obvious that capture and release was unrealistic, since we were not doing so well with the 'capture' portion of the program. (Particularly annoying here was the sighting of the mouse walking past the dogs, whose only reaction was to move so as not to be in the mouse's way.) So Mary set out a couple of traps, on the understanding that I woull retrieve these when Kasia first wakes (around 5:AM), before our toddler can be allowed to wander down stairs, lest we hear a 'snap' followed by howls of pain; and to avoid too many penetrating questions from our vegan 7 year old (Lisa Simpson having nothing on Tigana). About an hour later, the first trap had caught a mouse. Mary took one look and said, "Okay, now I feel guilty." This one looked much smaller than the one I had seen earlier, and may or may not be the same one that has been driving Mary crazy, since they probably look much bigger when in motion. But darn it looked cute. No wonder there are some may storybooks featuring mice. But not so many with the dead mouse in the trap illustration. I keep thinking of the Gaham Wilson cartoon with a certain hollywood mouse caught dead with suit and brief case in a giant mouse trap.

And the boiler is still not fixed -- though they are supposedly coming to finish tomorrow, along with the locksmith for the doors.

A Train Wreck Week

So last week we had the dog into the vet for bladder problems. He'd recently taken to relieving himself on the frontroom carpet, next to the picture window. He's getting old, 14 years, so there is some concern that it may be time for him to 'move to the farm', but he is a key family member who has saved my wife's life on at least two occasions, so we are anxious to keep him around for as long as he has any quality of life. (Besides, as I am so much older than my wife, I am not keen to set any precedents about what one should do when incontinence starts to become an issue....) So we fork over the $450 in vets bills to check for bladder problems and hope for the best.

Monday night I'm running a bath for Kasia, and there is no hot water. I go down to the boiler room and find an inch of water on the floor and no burners on -- the boiler is kaput and leaking. I phone our contractor, and first thing Tuesday morning it takes Joe only three minutes to pronounce the boiler dead at the scene. We haven't had the nerve to ask what this is likely to cost, but neighbours gestimate the $3500 range. Monday and Tuesday are the coldest days all summer, and with no boiler, we not only have no hot water, but no central heating.

The replacement boiler and a pair of plumbers and an electrician arrive Wednesday morning along with the heaviest rain storm of the year...and we discover problem #2. The rain is coming in through leaks round the front room window (well, it's the window if we're lucky, the roof if we are not...) The contractor doing the boiler work promises to look at the leak the next day. In the meantime, we're left apologizing to the dog as it now obvious that the spots in the front room were from the leaks all along -- we just never get enough rain to correctly diagnose the problem before.

Wednesday night there's more bad news (#3)-- when the plumbers went to connect the boiler to the water heater, they've discovered the heater is broken. Indeed, it now appears that it was the ruptured water heater that resulted in a five fold increase in pressure within the boiler, blowing it out. And the contractor breaks the bad news that this kind of heater costs $1000 wholesale before he adds on his retail and labour.

Thursday I wait around for the plumbers to show up but about 5 the contractor tells us the specialized heater tank we required is being shipped in from Edmonton, and there is no hope for hot water before Monday.

Saturday, I go out to the deep freeze in the garage to get a loaf of bread, and notice it is not frozen. The door was left open, all our frozen food is gone. Bill, probably another $600 down the tubes. So much for savings through bulk buying.

We drive out to the store to pick up a few groceries. We get back to the car, and Mary asks, "What's that puddle under the car?" Well, judging by the smoke coming out from under the hood... So, towed the car to the garage, a week after paying $375 for tune up and check etc. So hopefully it will turn out to be a hose, not the radiator, but... well, weekend without the car. and waiting for the other shoe to drop -- what next?

And the hell of it is, I know what lead to this run of expensive bad luck -- about a week ago, I turned to Mary and said, "You know, another month, and we'll have cleared off our credit cards....." One should never say something like that out loud, lest the gods take it as a challenge.

But shrug, the kids and Mary are okay, so it's really not anything to get depressed about. No one likes taking that many financial hits in a row, but I'll take a busted boiler over something wrong with one of the kids any day.

New House

My wife having obtained a tenure track position at the UofL, she decided she should celebrate by buying something big for the family -- on the grounds of, what's the point of working this hard unless there is some kind of payoff?

So, she went out and bought a second 'house' for the kids.

As you can see, this thing is enormous! Bouncy house combined with slide, obstacle course, basket ball hoops, and punching bag. It's pretty cool.

Only complaint so far is that the manufacturer has to be kidding when they include directions for how to fold it up to fit back into it's carrying case. I know this is physically possible because I saw it come out of said case, but putting it back in....well, we can't even fold maps back up, and they are just little pieces of paper, not an enormous balloon house. But that aside, we're pretty happy with this.

New House: Month Three

This week is the third month anniversary in the new house, and we have discovered another drawback: the custom-made, under-floor heating intermittently sounds like a series of American attack helicopters coming through our bedroom. This is not a particularly soothing sound at 3AM. Although the noise seems continuous while we are holding the pillows over our heads in a futile attempt to dampen the noise and get back to sleep, it is sufficiently intermittent that it never performs in front of the repairman. "Now I've bleed out all the air, it should be perfectly quiet." But that night, it's another showing of Apocalypse Now…

So I am at the doctor's with complaint about pain in my feet, and his diagnosis is bone spurs. "It is a common problem for people who have to stand or walk on cement all day. Did you change your work patterns so that you are suddenly walking on cement more?" "No, no! Nothing has changed at work. It is a complete mystery to me." Then I go home and look at the 3600 square feet of tile in my house (well, my house isn't that big, but the tile is also on walls and ceiling in a lot of places) and realize, "Doh!". ? *Sigh*

But I still love this house….

New House: Month Two

Today is the two month anniversary of our move into the new house. We are still not completely unpacked, and we are still discovering new things about our new home, most of them pleasant surprises.

One minor problem is that we still haven't figured out which light switches are for which lights. There are a lot of lights in this house with two and three switches each, so one can, for example, switch on or off the main stairwell light from upstairs, downstairs and the landing. Potentially quite convenient, but it makes it a bit confusing. And it is a big house with lots of lights, so I am still learning which ones are which. I actually stopped to count them today, and there are 71 light switches in our house. Is that normal? I don't think that's normal....

Still Moving

Following ten days of frantic packing, the movers arrived, took one look at our house, and phoned into the boss that they were quiting. He responded by sending a fourth man out to help with the move, but even so, it took them nine hours and two truckloads to move us, and that was after I had designated a bunch of stuff to be left for me to take myself. Consequently, I have spent the last 7 days moving all the things the movers missed. I finally brought over the last load last night. Of course, we still left 4 desks, 2 office chairs, a couch, a hide a bed, a kitchen table, a work table, an amoire, 3 paintings, garden furniture and a stack of dishes for the new owner. (I sold the house to a colleague who only had enough furniture to furnish one room of his two room appartment, so he was glad to get some left over furniture, and we were glad not to have to move or dump it.) And we threw out even more garbage than my earlier estimates. In the end, we produced 85 67-litre bags of garbage; 24 92-litre bags of donations to Diabetes Association's charity drive. It has all been kind of mind-numbing how much stuff we had crammed into our house.

Of course, we now have the challenge of unpacking. Currently, two thirds of our three door garage is filled floor to ceiling with boxes waiting to be sorted and correctly placed in the new house. I estimate another 20 days labour....

We have officially voted never to move again; or at least until we retire to Victoria in 23 years.

Moving

I have spent the last ten days, 10 to 14 hours a day, packing for our move to a larger house. Mary's expecting, and so can no longer bend or lift, so all the packing comes down to me. The movers come tomorrow to move the heavy stuff and as many boxes (about 200 at this point) as they can do in one day; I'll move the remainder myself for the week or so we still have the house afterwards. But the packing has been interesting.

We were living in a three story house, but had essentially abandoned the basement to storage. I had a house full of furniture when Mary moved in with her house full of furniture six years ago, so we moved all of the junkier stuff (which, as it turned out, meant all my stuff apparently) into the basement. Then Mary inherited most of a house of furniture from her Aunt. So we had three houses of furniture in one small house, and we kept buying new stuff. (Mary is one of those people who has to go out at least once a day and there is often no where to go in the Winter in Lethbridge except the Mall, so we end up buying a lot of stuff. Which meant, more stuff shuffled into basement storage.)

Sorting through the basement took a long time. Much of what I discovered down there we hadn't seen for years. There were boxes of stuff the movers had brought from Mary's former home which had never been unpacked and examined. (Mary had been away at grad school when she sold her house and had the furniture sent to my place, so she never got to do the usual pre-move purge.) There was an entire backroom devoted to Gestetner printing equipment (four machines so I could run four different colors to produce the equivalent of a four color press) and supplies, which I had lovingly purchased second hand just after the process had become completely obsolete with color photocopying/computer printers. I had a complete photography darkroom set up which I was sure to get around to using again any day now, except I have tossed all my film cameras and gone completely digital. There were the bookshelves of Social Studies reference materials in case I ever wanted to teach social studies again (yeah, that could happen!) and the ten years supply of food, purchased at significant savings in bulk from Costco etc., which had stale dated sometime in the late 1990s. There were the two Osborne computers, both broken, which I intended to fix by cannibalizing the one to fix the other so that I could read the 700 diskes of obsolete research data piled next to them. And so on. Given the impending move, I had no difficulty throwing all this stuff out, and had to wonder why much of it had ever seemed worth saving. But without the deadline imposed by movers, there is always something more pressing then cleaning out the basement, and always some good reason why this or that might come in handy at some indefinite time in the future.

Physically getting rid of all this trash was a different matter. Half of it went during Lethbridge's annual spring cleaning day, when the garbage collectors carry away anything, including stoves, fridges and printing presses, that people want to get rid of. I don't know of any other city that does this, but it is a great service. The other half I had to put in green garbage bags and throw out with the weekly trash. As the deadline for the move came closer, I had to up my output from a couple of extra bags a week, to a mountain of trash. Which was a problem, because normally the crew only collects two or three bags per house. So, faced with a stack of 26 bags of garbage last week, I was at a bit of a loss what to do. I piled the garbage into two different stacks, one on the far right of my property line, the other on the far left. Since we lived on a cresent and our pie shaped lots met at the street, it wasn't always clear which pile of garbage belonged to which house, and with my two piles, I hoped to make it looked like they were collecting from two houses rather than one. Then, still faced with a gigantic surplus I moved up and down the block adding a bag or two to each of my neighbours piles filling up their quotas.

Garbage collectors were not that easily fooled, though. One has to acknowledge that they are professionals in their own right. They took about 10 of my bags, and left everything else, including all the bags smuggled into neighbour's piles. (Mine were a slightly different shade of green, and had tie tops, which apparently are less popular with my neighbours, so the garbage staff just ignored my bags.) I had to quickly collect back my bags into my pile before my neighbours got wise. So I just left the pile lying out front for the next round of collection, but the next week, the garbage guys only took one bag, and started to drive off. A neighbour who was out there started to argue with them, and by the time I had run out to join him, the garbage guys had called into their foreman to complain about how much there was. But my neighbour kept at them and eventually they took everything, including a number of new bags I hadn't had the nerve to put out on the street. I told my neighourbour he should have been a lawyer, he was talking so fast.

Of course now I still have another twenty bags or so to go, but dare not put out more than three or four a week. I still have the house for another two weeks, so that accounts for say 12 bags....but being too cheap to rent a bin or pay the dump fees, I'm going to have to take my garbage with me and put it out at the new house at three bags a week until it is all gone.

Well, back to packing. One day to go to movers. They are going to freak when they see how much stuff is still to be moved.

New House

So Sunday, Mother's Day, I'm out in the Park with Tigana while Mary takes a nap. In the Park Tigana runs into Evyn, a friend from school. I end up talking to the Mom who I have not met before because Evyn's drop off and pickup times are different than Tigana's so our paths have not passed until now. We have a typical parents' conversation, and 2437 hides and seeks later, go home.

Monday, our real estate agent phones to say she has found the perfect house for us. Mary is at work, but I go with the agent to see it. (The agent says "no" when I suggest waiting until the next day -- the house has come on the market at noon today, and she needs us to see it today while it is still on the market.) Ten minutes into the tour I am saying, "How do I sell Mary on this house, because I have to have this house!" The agent drives me home just as Mary arrives. Back we go to the house as I try to constrain myself from prejudicing Mary. Five minutes into her tour, she is saying, "I have to have this house." We go home and write up an offer with the agent. Tuesday they accept the offer pending inspection. Wednesday we join the Inspector going through the house and the news is mostly good.

Half way through the tour I pass the kitchen fridge and happen to notice a piece of kid's art identitical to one of Tigana's. I do a double take, and a moment later realize that this is Evyn's house. I meet the Mom Sunday, buy her house Monday. Weird small world sometimes. (And of course can't help thinking that had the conversation turned to houses, we could have saved ourselves a sales commission, but hey, it's okday to keep things professional.)

By Thursday we have signed the final papers. We take possession August 1. We can hardly take it all in, but suddenly we're moving.

For those interested, here are pictures of the house. Patience, I've loaded way too many photos on this page.