Going to Canada eh ?

Generally things are quite up to date over here but then occasionally you see something and think. Hey we used to have that years ago.

For example there is a game show called “Wipeout”. No its not the one with Paul Daniels. This has teams of people trying to complete various bizarre obstacle courses, just like It’s a knockout the bit with out Eddie Waring and Stuart Hall.

Also in the supermarket  we saw a couple of old familiar products. The Pilsbury dough  boy with part baked bread and cakes and the frozen concentrated fruit juices. Both of which are big runners her but both died long ago in the UK.

A number of other things appear to be straight out of the 70’s era. Like glass coasters with design and colours from the TV series Space 1999.  Also lava-lamps and kids toys to match.  We’ve also seen plenty of bake-lite early plastic stuff.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been installing a webcam so we can see who is at the front door. This is the same camera we had in the UK so one problem was to create an extension lead that had a UK socket on the end to provide power. Then we had to run the signal cable back to Lin’s PC. We had brought the interface card with us and fitted it to the PC . Using a mixture of ready  audio  and TV coax leads we ran the signal from the front door under the house and then drilled a hole in the bedroom wall to feed it into the PC.

This was our first excuse to get in to the crawl space under the house. We found we couldn’t crawl all the way across because all the waste water pipes were below the floors, but Pete was able to feed the cable from one side so that Dave could grab it on the other side.

Drilling the hole also proved to be a challange as the walls were over 8″ thick so Pete had to buy a drill specially for the purpose. It is all set up now but we still have to fine tune the software as there is some flickering of the images

Pictures from the Blackfalds Parade showing some sights you would never see in England.  Dave had 2 invitations to take part one from the cubs/wolf pack and one from the boy girl club.  He chose the boy girl club possibly because he didn’t want to walk.

Despite sleat and snow today and yesterday, the parade went ahead.  As you can see it cleared up and was in the end, quite bright but cold.  Unusual weather in June you might think, but not apparently here !

This weekend marks the first anniversary of our landing at Calgary airport and acquiring the status of “landed immigrants”.  One might ask, what do they call those who haven’t landed or who get stuck trying to land ?

Over the past 12 months we have learnt a few things…….just a few !!!

Dont trust Vodafone, private landlords, and tenants that promise to pay something on account next week.

We now know why not many people sell spring bulbs for the garden…they dont come up!

But we dont know why people over here say take a boo when they mean take a look unless it is some derivation of peek-a- boo.

Last weekend we went to see the new Star Trek movie/film. This is a prequel so we get to see how the orginal team met up though this was lost on David and James, so Lin had to do some explaining during the film. One point that Pete picked on(anorak on standby) was that in the original series.  No one knew what the romulans looked like until the Enterprise strayed across the neutral zone in one episode and discovered they looked like Vulcans.  Yet the first time we see the bad guys everyone says oh they are Romulans.

That aside it is an exciting film, there is a town south of Calgary called Vulcan and they had asked if they could host the Canadian premier of the film. They were turned down, maybe because they did not have a theatre/cinema but after Leonard Nimoy intervened, the film company agreed to bus 300 of them to Calgary for the premier. This they attended complete with pointed ears etc.

I guess some day we need to visit there but probably only so we can get our picture taken standing next to a sign saying Vulcan xxxx inhabitants.  Incidentally, the town was named after the original star trek series, not the other way round.

We are now in our 51st week and have just had Victoria Day which was a public holiday. This made the May Long Weekend abbreviated to “Maylong” by the locals.

Lin and Dave helped out at a friendship dinner at their Church on Sunday morning before Mass, so they had an early start to help prepare over 100 dinners for the homeless and poor in Red Deer. Then as they went in for mass they were both co-opted for extra duties Lin into the choir and Dave as a candle bearer for the procession.

The previous owners of our place had dumped loads of shingle sized stones (rocks they call them here) over an area they had failed to cultivate which included the path to the front door. This made it difficult for Lin to keep her balance and so we shovelled up all the stones and were putting down grass seed. We finally finished this last Saturday and started watering it twice daily. However the heavens opened on Monday and it was all covered in 4″ of snow. Good job we hadn’t bought our tomato plants.

The other week we changed from Telus to Shaw for our phone service. Shaw already provide the cable and internet feeds up a coax cable into our place so they then added a VOIP modem to separate out a telephone signal which they then feed into the house’s exisiting telephone wiring. They also supplied a battery back-up unit for this mode so that in the event of a power cut we would still be able to use the telephone for emergency calls. Some of the features of the Shaw service are quite good.

We can block calls from people who hide their numbers and if we get a nuisance  sales call we can block any more calls from that number by using the block last call feature. At first we thought this would not be necessary as we had signed up to the national do not call list but this only applies to firms in Canada so we were still getting the odd call from US based companies.

Thinking we had met all the language differences Pete was surprised when he was asked at work to buy some fantastic. He phoned the originator and asked “what is fantastic ?” expecting the reply “I am ” or You are”. However it turned out to be a brand of cleaner for bathroom counters.

This 84 seater school bus has been nicknamed the Titanic by Lin and Dave. It is one of the buses Lin has driven recently while providing relief cover for one of the other drivers. It’s really huge with 9 escape hatches including 1 door halfway up the sides and is accessed by folding up the bench seat in front of it, and another 1 is the full width of the bus at the back, which is where the engine is. It also has very grabby air-brakes, Lin says it’s good for silencing over 80 screaming kids.

This week Lin attended a breakfast meeting for drivers from Red Deer and during a lull in the conversation was heard loudly to say “I have two very handsome bosses and one of them is here today” At this point the gentleman in question went bright red and tried to hide, difficult when you are 6 ft 7 tall.

The past couple of weeks has seen very changeable weather, we went to a garden centre the other week in bright sunshine and left it ten minutes later in a snow storm. By the time we got home it was raining and soon after it had stopped completely.  Sometime during the day, we had 5 different types of weather including rain, hale, wind, snow and sun.

Dave went to another cub camp last week this time at Fort Edmonton. Fortunately another parent offered to take him which saved us a lot of driving. When Dave came back he was exhausted and very hungry. Apparently he didnt like the food served so preferred to go hungry. Next time he goes Lin is planning to send food parcels. He also had to do a fair amount of walking and other physical  things wore him out. Revenue Canada gives a tax allowance for any physical activity that gives children exercise but for some reason that doesn’t include cubs. I think they are out of touch on this one.

Dave has also been on a couple of outings with the local youth club. The club which does not charge membership is able to provide transport to these events and has its own minibus. Cubs who do charge for membership, however, do not have a bus which seems a bit odd.

The council has been cleaning up all the debris from the gritting lorries that has accumulated over the winter. The sweeping machines spray water in front of them and then sweep up the stones as they pass over them. When full the top of sweeper raises up on hydraulic arms and tips all the stones into a waiting lorry. Presumably for re-use next year.

One worry has been the aftermath of disposing of Pete’s old car. He gave it to someone at work who said he wanted it for the kids to ride round the farm in. However he then gave it to someone else, who put it back on the road with another license plate on it. Neither of them had registered the car in their name, so it was Pete who got the phone call from the RCMP one Saturday night and subsequently received a letter from the local government office that dealt with abandoned cars. He sent a copy of the bill of sale to the office and is hoping that it will resolve the problem.

This is where the UK system is better because it allows the seller to register the transfer of the vehicle whereas here it is the buyer that does it. And an unscrupulous buyer can easily run-up trouble for the previous owner.

Also on the car front we had to renew the registration of the Plymouth this month. This happened not on the anniversary of when you first registered the number plate but spread throughout the year in alphabetical order of the drivers surname.  Of course Lin’s surname is before Pete’s in the alphabet. The fee is only $70 and instead of a tax disc in the window you place a small coloured sticker on the number plate. (Remember there is only one and it is at the back).

When we got this “wagon” Lin had visions of wooden wheels, hoop and canvas top, pulled by something with a tail.  Lin was pleasantly surprised it was like her english estate car, only they don’t call it that here.

I was not happy with the brakes, so Pete and Dave (the millwright from Pete’s work place) replaced the front discs and rear brake drums and rear wheel bearings.  They also bled the brakes 2 or 3 times, and this gave a big improvement.  It was fortunate that they were able to use the workshop at Pete’s work out of hours as this enabled them to work in the warm and dry.

We are still trying to find a spare key, we had one cut but didn’t realise they need to have an embedded chip otherwise they won’t start the car.  The original spare key was posted to us from the dealer, but got lost in the post.  Yet another feature of Canada Post ?  How much of this can we believe ?  No matter what you think of Royal Mail in UK, it’s never as bad as Canada Post.

Easter weekend we thought we had seen the last of the snow. (Wrong) So we decided to do something about the vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden. There were two small raised beds separated by a shed that looked as though they may well have produced vegetables in previous years but when we arrived last year all they had was a promising crop of couch grass.

We started by making a tour of the garden centres to see what was available. We got seed potatoes and onion sets from Canadian Tire. ( This chain of stores does not have a uk equivalent as on one side of the shop they fix your car and on the other side they sell diy goods. I suppose the nearest would be if B&Q and Halfords merged under one roof).

Potting compost and mini greenhouse came from the Co-op but we couldn’t find conventional seed trays so we ended up with the sort that are sub divided into modules. Ok but twice as fiddley to fill with compost as the open plan type.

Pete set to digging one patch and successfully ruined his back for the rest of the day but managed to get two rows of potatoes planted. David attacked the other one with his spade and before we could stop him had buried the onion sets 6 inches deep  and then smothered the the whole plot with ant powder.

The next weekend we visited a nursery looking for bedding plants etc  and were advised by the owner not to put anything out until after the long weekend in May as up until then, frost was a real possibility.

We had thought of growing tomatoes in grow bags on the decking but hadn’t seen any in the shops. Pete asked friends at work and was met with comments like

A what ?

What do you do with it ?

Why not just put the plants in the soil ?

Yes you guessed it. A Google search confirmed the grow bag has not made the trans-atlantic leap.

Instead Pete has constructed a plant trough out of a discarded packing case from work. This impressed David as he did it without reading the instructions.

Without a frost free greenhouse or conservatory we can not do any more preparation, its a case of hurry up and do nothing until Victoria Day. Which incidentally will be 51 weeks since we landed here.

Travelling between Blackfalds and Red Deer is a bit like driving through someones very large model railway. There are lines all over the place running down both sides of the road crossing the road by one (not very) level crossing and then a few yards later by an over bridge.

There doesn’t appear to be an equivalent to OS maps here (probably because there is much more ground to cover) and so for a while we were stuggling to make sense of it all. In the end it was Dave who showed us how to do it. He found our home on Google Earth so with some panning and zooming Pete was able to follow the tracks.

We are at a cross roads so to speak where the Canadian Pacific Railway running North to South crosses the Canadian National Railway running East to West. There is a triangular junction on the CN with a line leading down from the embankment to some exchange sidings that allow traffic to pass from one railway to the other.

A pair of CN diesels are stabled by the level crossing and cause havoc when shunting as they pass back and forth over the crossing holding up traffic for 10 or more minutes. Incidentally they did not seem to have problems starting on cold mornings it was probably the right kind of snow (old British Rail joke)!

There is also an old caboose in one of the sidings. I think it is used by the staff as canteen. It never goes out on a train but moves up and down the siding  as a barometer depending on how many wagons are in the siding.

All the main lines are single track but we have yet to discover where the North and South bound trains pass each other. It cannot be far away as they run about 10 minutes apart and travel very slowly. The strangest formation we have seen so far was one freight train pulled by 7 locomotives.

Another ice age draws to an end. The glaciers are retreating and most of the snow has gone.  On the roads near the kerbs and down the center line are piles of stone chippings that were used to grit the road. They seem to be waiting for some enterprising soul to hoover them all up and sell them back to the council ready for next year. Some car parks still have mini icebergs in the corner where the scrapings have been piled up and not yet melted away.

Green shoots have yet to be seen and we are wondering what we can grow in our veg plot during what we think may be a compressed growing season.

The main thing is we survived what people are telling us was a particulary hard winter .We learnt a few things like don’t eat pink snow its where the transmission fluid from Pete’s car had leaked.

If you drive into someones snow covered drive way and cannot get enough traction get your husband to sit on the bonnet over the driving wheels.

Don’t use ordinary PVC extension leads to power your block heater . It gets so cold the insulation becomes brittle and snaps very easily.

For some time we have been trying to get our phone tv and internet connections all from the same company. They have even written to us asking  us to let them supply our telephone but everytime we called them they say “we don’t cover Blackfalds”. This week we found our neighbour had just had a Shaw telephone line installed so Pete rang again, got the same story as before but this time was able to say ” but my neighbour has one of your phones please check her number and then explain why she can have it but I cannot ?”  embarassed silence then “Oh yes we can do your phone let me take some details and someone will call you back”…I am still waiting and wondering if we have made the right choice. They cant all be as bad as Vodafone can they ?

A few more words that caught us out

birdie =  shuttlecock the thing you hit in Badminton

baseboard = skirting board

wagon (as model of car ) = estate car

take a boo = take a look

vest= waistcoat or sleeveless body warmer or gilet or tank top

top = t-shirt or shirt or polo shirt

roll neck = polo neck

• shoes = court shoes, ballet shoes, stillettos, sling-backs, wedges, platforms
• runners = trainers (they have trainers, but don’t ask for them, usually top end of the market)
• sneakers = plimsoles, pumps, gym shoes
• loafers = hush puppies, deck shoes, espadrilles, slippers
• moccasins = sandals, flip-flops, gellies
• boots = ankle boots, knee boots, thigh boots, moon boots, hiking boots, biker boots, wellies

roadside turnout= layby

parking lane = hard shoulder

helper= in a work environment= assistant but not in a shop (store) here they have sales associates.

helper= on the railway a helper is a banking engine (one at the back of a heavy train pushing it up a steep incline)

helper= in food a Hamburger Helper is a packet meal added to minced beef to make a pasta dish

aid = carer for disabled passenger on bus or plane

pop = any carbonated drink ie fizzy drink