Although I am an impatient person, I am finding that with persistence, most things can eventually be achieved, when there is not a restrictive curb on ambition and personal achievement. Gradually I am discovering what it is to have a true mind of my own, to make my thoughts heard, and to be able to reap the rewards of my own work. Not yet being in employment is frustrating, and I am finding life in the house to be rather restricting and stultifying, so the more memorable experiences are those I experience outside of the house. In particular, the visits to downtown Montréal are the most memorable, mini adventures that perhaps make more cynical souls smile to read of. So be it, this blog is a record of my thoughts, feelings and experiences as seen through my eyes.
Finally, last weekend, Sylvie and I managed to get to a multiplex that showed Star Trek in the original English! It was a first for me; I had often gone to the cinema in company with friends, and even more so on my own, but never taken a girl to the movies. I hope Sylvie excuses me for describing her so, but it was a pleasant experience to watch a movie with her, then drive home on the quiet highways (we had to travel a few km to find an English showing cinema) before picking up a takeaway, the wonderfully filling poutine, this time with chicken in! I am discovering the best variants and the best sources of this very indigenous dish, which is a wonderful hunger solver. Thankfully our most local source (excepting McDonalds) serves the best poutine for some distance around.
We also got the lawn seeded over the last weekend, as the weather was imperfect to say the least, but with a holiday on Victoria Day, we had more time to throw at the rather hotchpotch project. We hired a tiller the first day, which merely scratched the hardened turf on top to slivers, and almost broke our backs. Rain stopped play, as the machine was simply digging itself into the sludgy, heavy soil. The next day, Sunday, we had better luck, as the hire firm had a more professional rototiller, with blades that contra-rotated with a drive wheel, to make it less back-breaking. The machine did a fairly good job, although I viewed it with some trepidation, as it was committing most of the sins of such machines: merely slicing up weeds and not burying them, leaving a track between the blades, and polishing the bottom of the cut, making a water barrier under the tilled earth. I am no expert gardener, but the old advice from my father appears to have soaked in during the days in which we kept an allotment and a large garden. After this effort, on a thankfully much drier day, we hired a roller to attempt (rather unsuccessfully) to take the bumps and ridges out of the lawn. It was somewhat of a lost cause, as the rotovator had missed a good proportion of the weeds, and not turned the soil at all. We raked as level as we could the next day, and also raked out some of the few weeds that had been turned, but the soil still looked immensely piebald. I decided to sow in any case, and solve the smaller bumps when once the turf had germinated and made a start.
The weather and the work meant I was past my best for Monday, in fact the first time I felt really ill since I arrived. We had indulged in takeaway rather a lot the previous week, and the delayed action results on my whole metabolism were making themselves apparent. Add to this holding back an enthusiastic rototiller, and rolling the lawn with a water-filled garden roller, almost without assistance... not a big achievement, but with a garden of our size, one needs more self propelled machinery!
On Thursday came a welcome interlude, as I decided to finally take the bull by the horns and have a haircut. I stood a better chance of an English-speaking barber if I went downtown, so I travelled in with Sylvie and her dad. After some wandering around I decided to go to the barber in the Central Station, right opposite Sylvie's workplace. After all, if the hairdresser assigned to me needed a specification in French, I could always get Sylvie to paint a word picture via my cellphone! Thankfully the man who cut my hair turned out to be a Sicilian, who had not only learned French and English to stay in the country for 40 years, but who had been living in Germany in his late teens. He gave me some very fatherly advice on settling in, some of which I stored for later. More importantly, he produced a tolerable haircut: my first haircut in another country!
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