Am I Blue?

I am trying desperately to be blue. Blue is the local term used here to refer to recycling and water conservation, but with apologies to Kermit the Frog, it's not easy being blue.
St. John's doesn't have recycling pick up with garbage. There are depots that you can take your refundable containers to, but they don't take non refundable items. So containers like juice jugs or pop cans can go, but soup cans and milk cartons for example are just tossed into the regular garbage stream. Plastic shopping bags can be taken back to the grocery stores, but plastic packaging is garbage. I gotta tell ya, after nearly 15 years of recycling indoctrination in both Vangroovy and Nova Scotia I am having a serious moral crisis about this.
At first there was denial. "Somebody must take these items somewhere" I thought. So off I go to a depot, and most of my material is kindly rejected by the ladies who do take some of my bottles and give me 75 cents in return. They didn't want my cardboard. "Nobody is taking cardboard, dear" they said.
So I drive around for a few days with all the boxes we used for moving in the back of the truck wondering what to do. As luck would have it, the neighbours got a new washer and had to dispose of the old one last week. If you have large items like this, you can call for special pick up. Old appliances are called white goods, and two guys in a big truck came by to do a white goods pickup. Interestingly enough, when the truck appeared, all of a sudden people were emerging from their houses up and down the street with other large metal things to go too. It was like the "Bring out your dead" scene in Monty Python movie. Broken metal chairs, tables, rods, you name it appeared and went onto the truck. One guy tried to get rid of a mattress, but the driver stopped him saying that was a different pickup. He looked at me and said "It took 50 years but they are starting to sort it now."
I thought, "this guy will know where I can take my recyclables," so I asked.
He didn't know. He suggested a depot on Elizabeth Avenue.
So off I went again, thinking maybe it was a different kind of depot than I had been to already.
It was mayhem. People were lined up waiting to be served, as every container is counted and sorted by a depot employee for people to get their refund. This takes some time. Adding to the confusion that day was a sign posted on the door that said 'Not Taking Glass Today, Sorry for the Inconvenience'
While I am waiting in line, a guy comes by to empty the paper bin. He sees my paltry collection of metal glass and plastic and says "We don't take any of that. That stuff is recyclable everywhere else in Canada, but it is not recyclable here. We're 20 years behind everywhere else." He is outraged. So I ask him about my cardboard. "No cardboard, just paper" he said.
I decide that this is absurd, so I go to the main municipal depot thinking I can at least get rid of it there. When I get there I realise that the main municipal depot in St. John's is not really accessible to members of the public. It is only for those big trucks that drive around doing pick ups. Having come this far though, I put on my biggest ditsy-girl smile, drive up to the kiosk window and using the thickest Nova Scotian accent I could muster, ask where I can drop off my cardboard. The guy inside didn't know. But my charms must have worked a bit because he offers to make some calls and find out. Seven calls later, (and with three large trucks lined up behind me as I block the entrance to the depot) he gives me an address of a recycling centre that will take cardboard.
Off I go.
Depot #4 is also mayhem, and it also has the sign that states No Glass Today. An employee directs me to where I can dump my cardboard on the floor, but it isn't like I can back the truck up to a door and unload. I am parked in the only free spot across the parking lot, and to deposit my cardboard I have to weave though the lines of people waiting for their refundables to be sorted.
I arrive at the same time as a woman in a mini van that is packed full of large plastic bags stuffed with bottles and cans. She is accompanied by a teen in a soccer uniform who is practicing her bored look. We take turns walking in and out the door several times. Interpreting the hundreds of containers and the surly helper as clues, I ask if she is with a group, thinking that she is co-ordinating a bottle drive fundraiser for the team. The woman gives me the look that is usually reserved for hairy men in dirty singlets and says, "No." A guy in line snickers.
Ok then.
More trips, back and forth, in and out.
Finally she warms up to me, and starts to chat as we pass. "They don't make it easy to actively recycle here. "
"No kidding," I think.
She points to the No Glass sign, "Some days it's no glass, sometimes it is paper or plastic."
I tell her this is my fourth attempt to get rid of cardboard.
She tuts her disapproval.
I'm finished. I don't have to wait for a refund so I leave her, waiting in line with her 9 large bags of recycling at her feet.
Now I'm in the resignation stage. I still automatically wash out a can, and then wince when I toss it in the garbage, along with the food that can't go into the backyard composter. There is no green bin pickup here either.

The Art of Yard-saleing

I'm convinced that Peter and I would make a good Road Rally Team. We have perfected the art of city yardsaleing. On Saturday morning the alarm is set for 7:30am. This is not for Peter, as he gets up with the sun around six, but for me who could happily sleep until well after the radio shuts off.
One of us gets the paper at Coleman's, the local grocer's and perambulates the pooch at the same time. I say one of us, because it is not always him, but well yes, it usually is him.
I call out the names of streets from the list of yard sales in the classified section while Peter hunts for them on the large map of St. John's. When he finds the street, he writes the house number on the street and the time the sale starts. It is an interesting local fact the some don't start until 10am. Anyone who knows the art of yardsaleing knows that most everything worth getting is got by 10am, so the late starters can allow for more location hits if you can navigate them correctly.
We don't mark down all the sales. We weed out the ones too far away to be practical; Paradise and Conception Bay South for example. We also weed out the ones that are only Sunday (another St. John's oddity) and we discount those that are advertising kid's toys as we know from experience that kids stuff and clothes is all they are really likely to have. We're not in that market.
Once we go through the list, we survey the map to decide which areas of the city are most likely to have the best cast offs. The cardinal rule is; Always yard sale in a better neighbourhood than you live. Rich people get rid of better stuff than poor people. In St. John's we live in Rabbittown, (inner city) but we yard sale in Mount Pearl and the west side (middle class suburbia) Of course there are swanky neighbourhoods right in the city of St. John's itself, but the concentration of yard sale per neighbourhood is much lower than out in the burbs. I'm convinced that the urban elite just give their stuff to black tie charity auctions, or maybe they just pawn it off on their less fortunate relatives. ("We were going to take the Spode to the cottage the next time we went but if you like it...")
Once we have a plan, off we go, usually by 8:30am. Today we had a late start due to the fact that I didn't hear the alarm until the dog jumped on my head. We always use the truck. It holds way more than the car and you never know what you will find. I drive, Peter navigates while keeping an eye out for bristle board signs advertising yet more sales along the way. St. John's is an old city, and the streets are every which way, making route planning and navigation a challenge to the newbie. Once we meander into the suburbs though, the one way streets and cul-de-sacs designed to calm traffic are a different navigation nightmare.
I have an idea that "The Yard Sale Challenge" is the next Reality TV hit. Take teams of 2 people, not necessarily couples, but the bickering that ensues is bound to be funnier. Send them to a city in which they don't live, give them a list of items to buy and a set amount of cash in small bills and change. The fastest team to get the most on the list, with the least amount of money wins. Everything must be in working order to count, extra points awarded for bargaining down. Shooting it would be tricky, but a camcorder on a headset might work.
Today, we hit about 15 sales. Our haul included: a filing cabinet, a CD rack, a desk chair, a floor lamp, a microwave, two book cases, a boot tray, and a cookie tin. Total cost $32.50. Our last purchase was about 10:38am, meaning the whole spree last about 1 hour 45 minutes. I bargained down on the book cases, but the floor lamp doesn't work. We bought it at a church sale. Go figure, we were burned by the Jehovah Witness and we weren't even driving the car with the Darwin Fish on the back. Peter wants to buy a $20 multi-meter to figure out why it doesn't work, but I figure we can buy 4 more lamps for that and one if them is bound to work.

Building Withdrawl

The first week we were here, both Peter and I suffered from Building Withdrawl. We were both so used to visiting the Canning Maple Leaf everyday (twice and three times on some days) that we found ourselves gravitating towards those Godless box stores here in St John's just to get our fix. By the second day we had already sussed out Home Despot and Cambodian Tire on Kenmount Road ( a strip we call "Not the Blip")
Pictured above is Peter installing a transition strip on the floor between kitchen and living room. Ho Boy! Do we know how to live! But wait it doesn't end there. We also purchased a Yakemshelf for the kitchen (because we needed more room for our Stuff of course.)
What is a Yakemshelf?
A long, long time ago, in a province far far away... Vancouver in 1994 in fact.
Our first apartment was the ground floor granny suite of a Vancouver Special. We rented it from an elderly Ukrainian couple that lived in the main part of the house upstairs. They were the Yakemchuks; John and Olga. As I type I realise that he is almost certainly dead now as he was mostly dead even then, and I am sad. The kitchen in that apartment has almost the exact layout, counter and cupboard space as this one. Read: Inadequate for our meal preparation style. I introduced Peter to the art of yardsaling way back when, and though slow to warm up, he was converted the minute he scored several pieces of plywood which he proceeded to make into a shelf unit for pot storage in the Yakemkitchen. (It was Vancouver, we had a lot of pots)
The plywood also became a bookshelf, a micowave stand, two tabletops, a desk and a plant press for my school herbarium project. It was a lot of plywood.
Skip forward a few short years. Almost as soon as we arrived here, Peter deemed it necessary to have a Yakemshelf in the kitchen. I understood right away what he meant. Scary isn't it?
Lady Catherine deBourg would approve I think.

What's a Fluvarium?

Fluvarium. Sounds like one of those made up words like Phytotron doesn't it? Making up new words for tourist attractions must work because we went last week.
A fluvarium is the name they gave an interpretion centre attached to the Rennies River reclaimation project. Rennies River runs right round St John's. (Well through it actually but that is not as alliterative) Apparently it was dead and toxic in the 70's because, well, because it runs right through a city. They cleaned it up and have restored the natural ecosystem and now they do waterway management education. I am not all that facinated by fish or aquaria normally, but the displays were well presented and the basement of the fluvarium has glass windows that look out into the actual stream giving you a fish eye view of the habitat.
They feed the fish everyday at 4pm, we didn't stay for that, but I'm thinking it would be hilarious to have an accomplice on the bank outside with a worm on a hook and line about the time an interpreter is doing their tour. Just to ramp up the suspense a little. Think of the photo op.
We also visited the Johnson Geo Centre last week. It is about rocks on the Rock. It was intersting for about 6 minutes and then it was just about rocks. Compared to fish, rocks don't do much. The Geo Centre is very modern and has swanky expensive displays and interpretations, but it lacked the creative use of materials the Fluvarium displays employed. It was like the difference between watching a mega musical and a good fringe show. I'll take the fringe everytime.


A fishing shack is used to explain the lifecycle of a salmon at the Fluvarium.

This Urban dispay highlights environmental pressures on waterways in cities.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning...

We had a 2 hour
delay at the
ferry in North
Sydney. So we
took a photo.
Look closely
and you can
tell how
stuffed the
car and
truck are.
People around
us were laugh-
ing at us.
That seems to happen a lot.

This is a synopsis of the trip from Habitant to St.John's.
Yeah, I know that it is 2 week old news, but like the song says,
"Let's start at the very beginning..." This is from an email I
sent to some of you when I was back online, if you've already
read it, too bad.

We had a really lucky trip. We packed the car and
truck on Saturday afternoon, and only had a few other
odds and ends to stuff in on Sunday morning during
that torential rain storm. We had planned to leave
about 10am, but we didn't actually get on the road
for Sydney until 2pm, so we had good clear weather
until Truro. This was good as both cars were so full,
we had no rear view mirror and neither of us could see
to shoulder check. Heavy rain would have made the
drive so bad. We got one spot of heavy rain outside
Bible Hill and then we seemed to be ahead of it again.
Our late start meant we arrived in North Sydney about
9pm, just before dark, and we got lost looking for the
motel, and got caught up in fireworks, but made it
there eventually.
We were also a day after the bomb scare, but that
mostly interferred with the other ferry timetable, and
we were only 2 hours delayed. We didn't even know
about it until the morning we were going to the ferry
as we hadn't heard the news while we were driving to
Sydney. I was sitting in the line for the ticket gate
with Peter in the truck behind me wondering why there
was such a big line, and starting to get worried that
we wouldn't make our reservations when the radio
announced that there were backups at Marine Atlantic
due to a bomb scare. Then I watched a boat leave the
dock and wondered if it was mine, and I asked a worker
if I was going to miss my boat because I was still in
line when I should have been checked in, and he just
laughed and said my boat wasn't even at the dock yet.
The Port Aux Basques boat was so backed up because it
runs back and forth every day, and apparently they
were loaded with people when the threat was called in.
During the delay to search the whole terminal, they
had to give the people on board free food and that
meant they didn't have any food for the return trip.
All the stores are loaded from Nova Scotia so the
ferry was delayed even more in NL while they sourced
food for the trip back. The Argentia ferry only
travels 3 times a week, so the 12 hour delay wasn't a
big problem with schedules. We did luck out, all in
all.
The ferry was fogged in the whole trip, but the seas
were calm and the temperature was warm. Mostly I
slept, after serval days of last minute house things
and packing and the stress of trying to stuff it all
in the vehicles, sleep was what I needed.
At this end, we had reservations in Placentia for a
motel because we were meant to arrive about 9:30pm and
I didn't want to drive to St John's and arrive at
11pm. We actually got off the ferry at 12:30am, so I
was really glad we had opted to stay there for the
night and travel in the morning. A lot of people
though seemed to be driving straight through, and it
was a dark, foggy, winding twisty road. I was very
glad I wasn't part of that traffic.
We arrived here the day before the Big Rain storm that
washed out the Placentia Highway and rerouted the
ferry to Port Aux Basques so we were very lucky to not
have to deal with that headache. It was a beautiful
day when we got here and we unloaded the car and
truck, and then the next day it poured rain. But we
live on top of a hill, so no flooding.

Home Improvement - The Bathroom

The apartment we are renting is small for us. We have Stuff. We like our Stuff. We are Stuff people. And over the past 12 days we have been accumulating more Stuff. Mostly it has been in an effort to organise and make the small space we have work for us. The kitchen and bathroom had inadequate spaces for our Stuff.
The bathroom had one small towel rack large enough for a hand towel and a facecloth, and two corner shelves of wire designed for clean towel storage I think; but only if the towels are the minicule type they give you at tourist class hotels.
The bathroom is about half the size of our laundry room at home so there is not a lot of room for anything else, but we did shoehorn in 2 stackable shelf units 12x12 inches square and 6 feet high for the bathroom Stuff. Thankyou Home Depot.
Towel racks were a problem. No wall space for a start. Peter is an Engineer at heart though and we had several tries at solutions.
1. We looked for an over the door towel bar but no one makes those it seems.
2. We attempted to make an over the door towel bar using 2 over the door hooks and a dowel between them. We discovered that the door wouldn't close, and the door was so narrow it only allowed one towel anyway.
3. We tried to use the above device on the top of the shower stall frame. Frame too thin to hold the hooks properly, and the dowel would fall off when the towels were touched. We used the over the door hooks for our bathrobes in the bedroom and abandoned the dowel idea altogether.
4. Yesterday at a yard sale Peter scored one of those chrome, floor to ceiling spring loaded towel racks with the rings that everyone had in the '70s. Perfect. Compact. Holds 4 towels. Unfortunately we have a suspended ceiling in the bathroom and the ceiling tiles would not stay put to hold it in place. Hmmmmm.
5. Today, under the heading "Box, what box?" Peter erected the "floor to ceiling" rod as a "wall to wall" rod, proving once again that my sweetie is at 90 degrees to the rest of the world.
Yes, this is the whole bathroom. Shower is behind the door.