December off to a bad start.

The first week of December seems to be cursed.
I was thinking this on Tuesday as I drove home from visiting Parrsboro, the town where I grew up and where my parents still live. I went for a funeral of a friend's grandfather. Listening to the radio in the car, I realized that it was the anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal 21 years ago, where 14 women were deliberately killed and others wounded as they attended classes.
It was also December 6th that the Halifax Explosion occurred in 1917 killing 2000 people, wounding about 9000 more and devastating much of the city.
Last week, before I left for the funeral, I got an email from a friend who had had a very bad day where she ran out of heating oil, had to give away some ruined produce, lost some cash, had a car accident and needed to wallow.
Just last night another friend recounted her first week of December saying Monday she had a flat tire, Tuesday she hit a deer on the road, Wednesday her computer hard drive died and she lost everything, Friday her sink backed up and her vacuum blew up just before dinner guests arrived.
Today I opened my email to find two obituaries.
I'm sure there are good things going on somewhere, but it does appear that the first week of December is a rough time.

Chapter and Prose

Lots to talk about, so longish post. Here goes with titles so those of you skiving at work can skim.

Pottery

Last weekend my friend Natalie came over for a pottery session. Natalie is a pinch potter that I met in Newfoundland at the Craft Council Studio. She is spending the next year going back to school to get an M.Ed, and so she is going to get her clay fix with me. The bonus to having her here is that she motivates me to do things too. So while she continued working on a pinch pot that she started the week before, I actually made some butter dishes and got the studio a little more organized. Here is a lovely little pinch pot she made in a mere 6 or 8 hours. And I thought coiling was slow.


Studio Upgrade

My tiny studio is feeling a little small lately. The first week Nat came, we potted outside on the patio until it got dark, but this week it got dark just that little earlier. With Natalie being here, and my friend Susann occasionally too, and Colleen across the street waiting to fire some things I was getting short on shelf space. So carpenter man built me some cubby holes into a space that will eventually be a window when the studio is eventually a sun porch. If the spaces seem small understand that each shelf is removable to make a taller space as needed, and each shelf is just the right size to double as a bat on my wheel. Clever.

Bye Bye Binky

We have decided that we are not motorcycle tinkerers. Both our motorcycles are 30 years old and need constant tinkering to run well (or at all) I like riding a bike, not repairing one, and between gardening and swimming and PhD ing they just doesn't get the tinkering time they really need. Therefore we have listed both our motorcycles on KIJIJI to sell this fall with the plan that we will buy one newer more reliable and less problematic (hopefully) motorcycle to share between us. It is sad to see Binky go, he was a good first bike, I think a person becomes attached to these things like their first car or teddy bear. Peter is not so find of the Cherry Red Virago, but it has always been a problem child.

R-U-N-N-O-F-T

While I am left alone to reply to motorcycle inquiries, Study Boy has flown to Ottawa for a Canadian Association of University Teachers Conference until Friday. In my head I pictured getting lots of stuff done while he was away, but tonight is my first day without him and I am realizing just how much stuff he does that I now have to do by myself. Like walking the dog, feeding the dog, shocking the pool, making dinner and watering the greenhouse. So much for getting other stuff done, it is now 23 minutes past my bedtime and I still have to put gas in my bike for tomorrow and water the greenhouse.

Speaking of Water

The long wait is nearly over, last week we signed up to get the new municipal water service coming through our community. We still haven't booked a contractor to dig the hole and lay the pipe to the house, but we are at least started. We have until December to hook up, but hopefully we can get to it sooner than that. Knowing that we dug a trench last February though, I'm not holding my breath or anything. The county has organized a loan to people wishing to sign up because the cost of installing the line and service is $6000 for each homeowner, but this means you will get an $850 bill every year for the next 10 years. We have great water but we are at the mercy of power outages so we decided to do it now rather than later when the cost would be even more after December. I met one man who said his water was good too, but all his neighbours' wells had gone bad from seawater infiltration and he figured that his will eventually go too. Two years ago they tested all wells and found that 25% were unacceptable because of seawater or farm contamination. Water security is a big issue, so I think we are being prudent in spending this kind of cash.

Robbery in the Park

Sad news. Yesterday while I was working in Waterfront Park I was robbed. Truly. I left the park to get a rake from my truck, I was gone only three minutes but when I came back my tool belt was gone. Admittedly, I left it on the grass, because it didn't occur to me that anyone would want to take it. My tool belt has very sentimental value to me, my Sweetie made it for me in 1995 for my birthday in Vancouver when I was still a sound technician. Over the years it was adapted to be a gardener's tool belt. Off came the flashlight and pliers holders and on went the pruners and digging knife. Most of the tools were issued at work, but the belt and the original gak bag were mine. So was the Gerber multi tool, another Sweetie birthday present, from about 1998 I think. I looked everywhere for it, including the garbage cans and the mud flat bottom of the harbour but it is gone. The Mounties don't expect it to turn up, but I spent a half hour today with a nice constable who took my formal statement for the file.

Homework

School work is coming to an end. The students are finished their part of the deal and now I have marking to do. I brought it home with me yesterday. It's homework.

I started taking a class last week at the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design. I'm not fond of glazing so I enrolled in a glaze class hoping to pick up some tips or at least become more comfortable with the process. My last glaze kiln was a complete disaster. Of 9 pieces, only 1 is semi passable, and the rest exhibit every problem there is. The most disappointing was a bowl that would have been beautiful except two bits of ceramic stuff cracked off my pyrometer in the kiln and fell into the bowl while it was firing. Bugger.
The glaze class is mostly focused on making and testing glazes, but I figure it can't hurt to force myself to glaze more. It's all practice. I have to make at least 36 test tiles for next class which I did yesterday. It's homework.
I was called back to work at the Town of Wolfville parks dept. starting Monday. That's a week earlier than I thought and now I'm scrambling to find my work clothes and water proof my boots. There were some other things I was hoping to get accomplished before I went back, like rototilling the vegetable garden and getting a new back tire on my motorcycle, but these will have to be relegated to weekends now. They're homework.

February Blahs

It happened a little late, but I think I have the February Blahs. It didn't happen when we had lots of snow and cold weather, it happened when we got the February thaw. All the snow melted and the muck got me down. I take full responsibility for the rain storm and melting snow. We bought snowshoes two weeks ago which pretty much guaranteed no snow for the rest for the year. We did get 10 days in before the big melt. Now they hang sadly by the door in hopes that the winter will come back.
When you have a dog, spring muck is not your friend, and Willow has learned the routine of paw cleaning for treats every time she comes in. Between the rain and trench we dug in the drive she can't help but be a dingy retriever.
Attempting to banish the February blahs today, I gave up on trying to decorate pottery which has defeated me for a week now, and I began spring garden clean up instead. I pruned the fruit trees and tried to start a fire of the dead wood that didn't get burned last fall. The fire didn't light, which is just as well because the pruning didn't take that long and I came in much earlier than expected.

No Comment

I am experiencing a technology hiccough (this is how to spell hiccup apparently). All your comments seem to have disappeared. It's not that I don't love you. I love you all. All three of you. But today my blog got a spam comment and in trying to erase it, I think I erased everything. Blogger tells me this isn't the case, but the comments are gone. Sorry.
Now you will find that you have to type in a wiggly word from the box in order to post, you know the drill, so that should get rid of the spammers.

Just Keep Telling Them You Are From France

I remember once sitting around with some friends and someone made the comment that it felt like we were living in a bad modern day version of La Boheme. They meant we were all youngish, artsy-ish urban dwellers living in grotty apartments who were always just on the edge of something good and then tragedy would strike and a set back would occur. Nobody ever died though.
That was several years ago, and we have all moved on to being not so youngish, possibly more responsible parents and spouses with lifestyles to match. If I had to characterize my life now as a play, it would undoubtedly be a Chekhov play in the way that nothing much happens but all the characters have at least 3 names.
I won't torment you with all the saccharine things Peter and I call each other, but the list of epithets that the dog will respond to is astonishing, and revealing.
His formal title is Jake the Dog. Not Jake Harrington or Jake Little as the vet insists on filing him.
He also responds to Little Dog (a play on words that) and Silly Dog and Bud. Evil Dog makes his tail wag because he knows he's been naughty but he's not going to be punished for it.
His Auntie Susann calls him Stinky. So does his cousin Lester. Occasionally we label him Farty Dog or Poopy Bum.
When he employs his talent for lying down in the most inconvenient place he can find we call him Speed-bump or Dead Dog.
Grumpy Dog and Growley Dog make their appearance more often than I would like, especially at the vet where his file is marked CAUTION! in red ink.
Last Thursday, Jake the Dog had an emergency spleenectomy to remove a large growth which may or may not be a malignant tumor. In light of that fact, we have (at least temporarily) stopped calling him Dead Dog because not even our humour is that bleak.
While we await the test results on his spleen and he recuperates from having his tummy sliced open and his innards stirred around we have given him a new moniker, Mr Conehead. Just keep telling them you are are from France, Bud.

How to Make Newfoundland Screech.

"Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses." Author Unknown

There is a link between Newfoundland and molasses, and I'm not just talking about the screech.
I spent last week sorting out insurance. Auto insurance it seems is not automatically transferable between provinces, and my underwriter does not insure vehicles in Newfoundland. My broker in Nova Scotia is also not licenced to find insurance here, leaving me to do everything myself. This is why they call Insurance a service industry. Finding insurance in Newfoundland is not really the problem. There are lots of brokers in St John's and some of them even return a phone message shunted through the Automated Press One For English telephone system. Well, one did. Eventually.
And that is when I learned that auto insurance in Newfoundland is roughly double the price in Nova Scotia. I asked the woman on the phone if it was because there were more moose to hit here. She didn't see the humour.
It gets worse. At home, all our insurance needs were covered by one company, and for that we apparently got a discount. But because we could no longer insure our car and truck with them, they refused to continue covering our motorcycles. Well, we left them in Nova Scotia so we are not riding them anyway, but we could not insure them as property sitting in storage either. Something about them having a Registration, so a lawnmower and a snowblower are OK but... For those of you who don't know, it can sometimes be a little tricky to find insurance for motorcycles and I anticipate this being a bit of a headache when we go home.
It gets worse. To get vehicle insurance in a province, the vehicle must be registered in that province. I didn't know this. We weren't going to bother to change our registration, but apparently if you are living in Newfoundland for more that 90 days it is required anyway. To get a vehicle registered in Newfoundland, you must have a Newfoundland driver's licence.
You are starting to understand the molasses comment aren't you?
On Monday, we spent 2 hours at the DMV doing the paperwork. We had to appear in person because there is no online form for provincial transfer and we needed new pictures on our licences. (To be honest, my new picture looks much more glam than the last, so I'm not complaining) We very nearly didn't get our motorcycle classifications transferred but we managed to catch that one at the wicket. We didn't catch that Peter's name was omitted from the car registration though. I suppose that is OK because my name appears twice. Unfortunately I only noticed that once we were home.
Home. Let's talk about home insurance. Having all our insurance with one underwriter means that now they are flagged to the fact we are not living in our home. We are considered absentee landlords, and while I'm sure that our friends Chris and Shelia are taking very good care of the place, the insurance company is convinced that they are irresponsible hoodlums planning to trash the joint and then set fire to it. The insurance company did however agree to continue coverage for more than double the price but only if we had the woodstove disconnected. I would like to point out that our woodstove is a cast iron, low emission Jotul, 8 months old and professionally installed by a WETT certified technician and is in compliance to all building codes. Apparently that is not good enough for this insurance company though. They are afraid of fire. I asked our broker if water damage from rain streaming into the kitchen from a hole in the roof was covered. She didn't see the humour.
Happily our new insurance underwriter is a national company and they are willing to cover our house in Nova Scotia as it is, at only slightly more than quadruple the original cost. Isn't that nice of them? So that holiday in Greece we were planning next month has been put on hold.
But the molasses was enough to make me screech.

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.