Going to Canada eh ?

I am writing this blog by using Dragon Naturally Speaking which means that I can dictate straight into the computer and not have to constantly correct my typing which is, let’s face it is appalling. Some of the mis-types that the software does, are quite amusing as I just said appalling and it showed the word Paul.

I recently read the newsletter from Terry Pratchett in which he said that he was using this software to write his book.  As he put it, if they did on Star Trek and we never invented it, what was the point of Star Trek. Okay so I was paraphrasing that a bit but it’s certainly a very good development.

This weekend’s main task is to put transparent film over most of the windows.  It is a sort of third skin of glazing, we put a piece of tape all round the window frame and then stretch industrial strength clingfilm across the window.  Apparently we then have to heat it with a hairdryer to make it taught and it will reduce heat loss through the windows.  We are not quite sure how long we have to leave it on maybe April or May, or whenever the snow is gone, so I guess it could be up to 6 months of the year.

Although, we have only had one night temperature below 10°C this autumn, it certainly looks like winter is on it’s way.  But fortunately we have not had much snow yet. This year I have got proper block heater extension cords.  These are the extension leads that run from the outside socket to the block heater on the car’s engine. Last year I used the ordinary PVC covered cable and as soon as temperatures got too cold the plastic insulation cracked.  You’d think after all the years working in the connector cable industry I would have known better.

The begining of October saw the first snow fall and we thought Oh Dear here we go again. However after only 2 or 3 days the temperatures rose and the snow melted. It was a timely reminder to top up the screen washer bottles and clear up the garden. On reflection tomatoes were a waste  of time as very few ripened. Nest year we try them in th eseats under out bathroom window. It is a South facing bed  which should help them ripen but we dont walk past it every day so they may not get watered often enough.

Pete has started reading books by Beverly Connor. The stories are good but there are some remarkable similarities to the Kathy Reichs series. Both heroines are forensic anthropologists, divorced with a boyfriend in the police. They keep getting over involved in the investigations when they only supposed to be gathering the evidence. Beverly’s heroine runs a museum with a crime lab attached, in the TV version Kathy’s heroine works in crime lab attached to the Jeffersonian Institute.

Lin has been suffering with what she thought was an earache. The first Doctor she saw suggested it was an allergy and he prescribed and anti histomine. The second one said take muscle relaxant. Third try she went to the Dentist and spent 5 hours in the chair being treated for an absys. Then last Friday night the temporary crown fell out. Fortunately she was able to call an emergency number and the Dentist opened up specially to re fit it. Today the permanent one was fitted and hopefully that is the end of that saga.

We are passing the one year mark of living at this address but cannot seem to shake off the old one.

Last week while David and his friend were playing in the garden, they somehow managed to let Penny escape. Lin knew nothing of this until she got a call from the animal shelter in Red Deer. Apparently Penny was found wandering in the childrens play park that is in the middle of the  park we live in. She has an animal licence tag so the man who found her contacted the Civic Centre (Town Hall) to ask where she came from. They gave him the old address and when he went there, there was no one home.  So he took her to the shelter, it then cost $81.50 to get her back.

Had the Civic Centre given the finder the correct address, all that trouble would have been saved. Not to mention the aggravation of having to drive quickly into the city to reclaim a cat.  Both of us trying to get there before closing time, otherwise further $20 charges made for overnight stay.

Unsurprisingly, Pete dropped them a line asking them among other things, how they could reconcile having Penny at 101 Silver Drive while her owners were paying property taxes on 1 Broadway Village.

The authorities are now considering a refund.  Lin says, wouldn’t you, if you had Pete on the warpath after you ?  He can be soooo scary. Our 22 year old cat is now the only member of the family, to ever hold a criminal record.  The fine we paid to get her back was only part of the problem.  She now has a first offence against her, and a second would cost us $100, but a third is by far the worst.  She could lose her life.

Last week we upgraded the thermostat on the central heating. The old one had no timer and kept the heating on all the time, and we didn’t dare turn it off for fear of pipes freezing during the night. Unlike the ones we were used to in the UK, this one has 4 different periods so we can save heat during the day when we are out and at night when we are in bed. It also has different settings for weekends. I guess technology has moved on since the place was first built.

The first frost has hit and killed off the remaining  flowers and vegetables and put ice on the windscreen for the first time. Pete got the usual blank looks when he said that at work. Windscreen ? Yes its that piece of glass next to the bonnet.

WE have joined a mail order video rental club which works by you choosing a list of DVDs you want to borrow. They send you the first one that is available, you watch it and post it back. When you post it, you can also tick a box on their website and they send you the next disk before the other one gets back to them. So far this worked well and we are averaging about 1 disk a week for about $11 per month ie half the price of the store in town and much better selection. Pete and Dave like TV and Films, but Lin is not like the rest of us.  She doesn’t like fiction or films and thinks adverts are brainwashing everyone, and says “bring on the BBC”.

The season of the artist’s palette is here again, natural and not so natural colours abound everywhere.   I’m trying not to get too poetical like John Keats with his ode to autumn, but I do like this season and as the russians say красивйе осень it also means beautiful.

We english call this time of year autumn, but the locals call it fall.  Often you can see why, when lots of leaves fall to the ground.  But other signs of autumn like fruit or tree nuts and misty mornings or mushrooms and pine cones or rainbows and scudding clouds or jewel spiders and straw bales, seem to contradict the name fall.  Anyhow, Lin took some colourful photos last week, so here are some for your enjoyment from the colour palette.

Click on image to enlarge.

Yes we sort of miss motorway service stations. For our Canadain reader(s) they are located every 30-50 miles on motorways (main highways) and are places you can stop to get gas (petrol) and fast food (more gas). There are also small shopping malls and restrooms (toilets). They were the butt of many jokes about expensive products, stale food and surly staff, but they meant that people on long journeys could get to the essentials without leaving the motorway.

Here in Canada they are not very common and instead you have to break the journey by driving to the nearest town.  Always hoping you can spot a gas station that won’t mind you using the loo (washroom) and then find your way back onto the highway. Not always as easy as it may sound.

We harvested the rest of our potatoes this weekend. Not exactly a bumper crop, and several were damaged by the fork but we did grow our own, and Lin is making cottage pie for dinner tonight.  We also grew peas, lettuce, a few radishes, spring onions and a few larger onions for pickling. The veg we tried to grow in pots on the deck were a complete failure. I guess the bags of top soil we bought were not as fertile as the grow bags we are used to.

The news from home about our bungalow is depressing. The non paying tenant has theoretically been evicted, but left furniture and lot of mess behind. The Estate Agent says it is all fixable and the costs of doing so will be recovered from the tenant. It seems that after a year of rental we have a house that is now worth less than it was a year ago and we still can’t sell it.

This has been the September long weekend and many families went away for the last time in their RVs and 5th wheels (= caravans). This produced an unusual bank holiday traffic jam in Blackfalds. The caravans were queuing up to empty their septic tanks at the disposal point . Apparently it is the only one for some miles around, so is very popular in the camping season.

Watching a video the other day it dropped out of pause and we saw on the screen British cars in a british street. Suddenly we realised it was Coronation Street what a shock. Pete reckons the last time he saw that show it was in black and white and the Rovers return was full of characters like Ena Sharples, Alf Tatlock, Annie Walker, Len Fairclough and Minnie Caldwell. You will have to look up Wikepedia to work out when that was.

In a further attempt to explain British humour to his work colleagues Pete found the Two Ronnies sketch “Fork Handles” on Utube and circulated it. Most said they enjoyed it but had not been born when it was first performed in 1976. Funny it didn’t seem that long ago, and Lin says I sound more like my parents everytime I say it, and they are 85 years old !!  Is she trying to tell me something ?

We finally have an eviction date for getting our non paying tenant out of the bungalow, but are now concerned what state it will be left in for the next tenant.

Lin has just come back from a silent retreat with some Franciscan monks at a monastry near Cochrane. She enjoyed it apart from the silent bit.

Dave is just about to go off on his last camp of the year back to Alexo for his fifth visit. He is enjoying it and each trip builds his self confidence.

We seem to have come full circle with the academic year and are now buying supplies for his new school. This has been less traumatic than last year as this school just asks for 10 packs of pencils whereas last  years school was very brand specific. The only stumbling block this year was 2 packs of duo tangs, the ones we found were sold in singles so how many should we get ?

A few other  word plays we have noticed.

From the bilingual labelling on products the French for paper clip appears to be trombone. So what is French for trombone ? Paperclip ?

We were looking to underseal Lin’s car but could not find any underseal paint…because here it is called undercoat. So what do they call what we used to call undercoat ? Answer primer.

We have been making extensive use of the local library’s DVD collection. Lin to revisit Michael Palin David Attenborough and others. Pete to catch up on missing CSI and Stargate Atlantis episode. They also have a Dr Who episode from the Tom Baker era 1979. The release date must have been much more recent as all the bonus features on the disc were emphasising the Douglas Adams connection and reflecting on whether he would have rejoined the writing team on the new series.

Well its been a busy week. We took David to Edmonton to be tested for Irlen’s syndrome. This manifests itself by the subject experiencing difficulty in reading black print on white paper causing reading problems. They found that if Dave has a coloured filter over the page when he is reading then his reading improves. The next step is to get him coloured lenses in his glasses. The down side of this is that none of it is covered by Alberta Health or the private health insurance that we have, but if it improves his performance then it would be worth it.

This Saturday we volunteered to cook hot dogs at Sears to raise money for the Youth and Volunteer Centre. They are the organisation that runs the The Youth club and Camp Alexo that David goes to. Things got off to a bad start when the gas Barbeque would not light. They went and got a new gas bottle but the built in piezo electric lighter didnt work either, so we had to fall back on the burning tissue method to get it going. Fortunately some one was a smoker and had a lighter otherwise we would have been stuck. Sears provided all the ingredients and float we just had to cook and sell the hot dogs which were actually large smokeys.

Some other things to note. Over here we have bank charges and pay for cheque books. The mobile phone companies not content with charging for receiving phone calls have now started to charge users for in coming text messages.

You may remember we commented a while ago on the caboose that seemed to move up and down a siding by the level crossing without  really going anywhere. Well now we have found out where it goes. The siding it is on runs 5 -10 miles into Red Deer from Blackfalds and serves the heavy industries at Edwards Industrial site on the west side of the city. Because there are no run around faciliites the locomotives have to push the wagons when going south and the caboose is put on the front of the train so that the guard (conductor?) can keep a look out. We saw this the other day and were amazed to see 3 mainline diesel locos pulling a train consisiting of one oil tanker and the caboose. Talk about over kill.

There were several petrol (gas) shortages this week. There had been problems with a refinery in Edmonton after a storm took out their power.  So our local FasGas and others had run out of fuel. This was particularly ironic as they were able to see the Fas Gas terminal the other side of the highway that loads large quantities of oil in to railway tankers on a daily basis. I guess as they say it was the wrong type of gas ?

Talking of storms, that funnel cloud we talked about in an earlier blog entry.  It touched down in central park, right by our friends. Well the weather people have looked at the damage and upgraded it to F1 status.  Which means it really was a tornado, and they think was the 1st one of the season.  Thank goodness no one was injured.

The North American concept of sending the kids to summer camp first came to Pete’s attention by listening to ” Hello Muddah Hello Faddah” on Junior Choice with Ed (Stew pot) Stewart in the 1960’s.

Pause here while older British readers say “Oh I remember” and ” I wonder what ever happened to him”. Everyone else shake heads, smile politely and wonder when its time for his nap.

The idea is to send the urban and sub-urbanly raised children off for a week or so to get closer to nature. Getting them out of the house and preventing the I’m bored chorus from driving parents up the wall during the school holidays is an added bonus.

Lin had booked Dave in for several weeks at Camp Alexo and had volunteered to drive the bus for the Family Camp which was being held one weekend at the same place. The timing meant that Dave came back from one camp on the bus Friday afternoon, met us in Red Deer and stayed on the bus to go back again. This time with his Mum driving. As a precaution we had brought more clean clothes for Dave whether he wanted them or not.

The camp was well organised and on Saturday the CITs (Councilors in Training) served  dinner to the parents who were relieved of having to supervise their children for one meal time. Entertainment that evening was singing around a camp fire. Song books were handed out and we were amused to see that the songs included Camp Granada.

Alexo was formerly a mining town but the mine closed down in 1955 and all the buildings were demolished but you can still see where the narrow gauge coal trucks ran down from the mine to a tippler that loaded the coal into the standard gauge wagons. With the higher mountains in the background and abandoned mine workings the area was very reminiscent of North Wales with its old slate mines and narrow gauge railways.

Dave thoroughly enjoyed his weekend though Pete and Lin found the communal bunk house a bit noisy as the group included a few snorers. There was the option of sleeping in a real native teepee complete with wood burning fire in the centre to keep warm but we declined  fearing a change in the wind could smoke us out. These fears proved to be well founded when we met some other campers the next morning.

Thanks to Kathleen and Heather for organising the weekend and Lin for getting us there and back safely

The other week we were invited to go camping with friends Lin works with.

“We haven’t got a tent” she said. “Don’t, worry they replied we have 10 berth 5th wheeler you can sleep in the garage”.

At this point some translation is called for. Over here there are several types of RV’s (Recreational Vehicles). The self propelled camper van often the size of a small coach (Winnebago). The “normal ” tow along trailer with ball and socket towing hitch. The sort we would call a caravan in the UK, (here a caravan is a large MPV people mover). The third variety is the fifth wheel. This is a bit like an articulated lorry where the RV couples with an adaptor in the middle of the load space on a pick up truck. The trailer is couple and un coupled from the truck by means of electrically operated jacks that raise and lower the nose. These jacks are also used to level the trailer when it is sited.

The rear part of this RV had a fold down door like a horse box, into which you could drive quad bike, jet skis, generators etc. Once empty an electric hoist lowered two double bunks from the ceiling and this is where we slept.

As we were setting off they said “we will be stopping to put gas in the trailer”. We thought at first they meant getting a new propane tank, but no this was petrol. The trailer had a petrol tank and pump built in. This was to supply the fuel for the generator, chain saw and quad bikes without which no outdoor trip would be complete. Another useful feature was the external shower head that came out of a compartment on the side of the trailer and was used for washing the mud off the quad bikes (and David) after a particularly muddy ride along the trail.

We stayed not on an organised camp site but on a patch of grass by the side of an unmade road/trail in the middle of nowhere, half way up the mountains. We shared the pitch with another couple Tom and Erin who in addition to trailer, pick-up and quad bike, had also brought the stones and grating for the fire pit over which we would toast mashmallows and Wieners.   Tom also cooked a very good bacon and eggers over the open fire for breakfast.

On one ride out on the quads they found a fallen tree that had been weakened by termite damage. They went back to it with one of the pick up trucks and towed it back to the camp site by wrapping a chain round the tree trunk and pulling the tree behind them. This was later cut up into manageable chunks and added to the wood pile for the next campers who used the site.

The only worrying point of the weekend was when the radio announced that a Tornado had touched down north of Red Deer in the Blackfalds area. Fortunately it missed us but brought down some trees in the Central Park area.

After returning home, Lin picked up a local paper and found the front cover was a colour picture of our friends climbing on fallen trees.  Which had been ripped up by the tornado, or as they call them here, funnel clouds.  Scarily, they had been watching the damage from their basement.  Best place to be in that weather.

Still David was pleased that our ancient cat Penny had made it unharmed.

We sometimes refer to our house as a caravan or trailer but in fact it is in many ways closer to a Canadian house than a static caravan you would find in the UK.

Most houses round here are sort of one and a half stories high. The Basement is usually cast concrete and sticks up out of the ground far enough to have some short windows to let light in. Here you find the utilities like furnace, water heater, washer and dryer and some living space as well. The upper story is wood construction and this part is built with the same materials and methods as our “trailer”.

The main difference between our trailer and a house is that houses sit on basements while ours just sits on blocks.  But as we are very much attached to our house, we might take it with us, if ever we decide to buy land.  Not something a regular house owner can do.

We have mentioned before that the heating and hot water  systems are totally separate. The furnace supplies hot air which is then blown through ducts and out into each room, sometimes out of several ducts per room. The advantage this has over radiators is that in the summer it can be set to blow un-heated air into the rooms. OK not as cooling as air conditioning but still cooler that ambient due to “wind chill”.

The hot water supply had been woefully inadequate barely producing enough hot water for a bath. It was suggested to us that there may be a problem with the cold feed pipe inside the water heater. This proved to be the case when Lin called in a plumber to look at it and a couple of other things that needed doing.

The only outside tap was on the blind side of the house nowhere near the main garden areas or either of the doors.  So we had another one put in by the main door on to the deck.

We also asked him to look at the cistern in David’s bathroom as it was very slow to fill, and always noisy. At this point we discovered that despite the amount he was charging ($80 per hour) some things passed him by. He decided to cut the cold water feed to the cistern below the isolator valve so he could replace the valve.  At this point the pipe fell down the hole into the void below the mobile and he had to fish it out. As he also lives in a mobile, we thought  he would have known that would happen and clamped the pipe to stop it happening.

Anyway as a result of all that we now have enough hot water for several baths and can water the garden without taking a long slog around 3 sides of the house to turn the tap on and off.