Going to Canada eh ?

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.