Fire Hydrant Signs?

One of the first oddities I noticed when I came to Sackville to look for a house was that all of the fire hydrants have little fire hydrant signs beside them.

I had never seen this before, and I am not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, so it took me a while to figure out the purpose of the sign. To my credit, it wasn't like I was sitting there trying to figure it out; I just noticed that it was different and made some casual semi-conscious assumptions.

At first I assumed that it was because New Brunswick is bilingual and it makes more sense to just have a picture than to have words in French and English.
Then I thought maybe it had something to do with some sort of disability - like braille or something. (I repeat, I am not the sharpest tool in the shed.)
But then I thought, WAIT, why would you need a picture of a fire hydrant when the fire hydrant is right there in plain sight? This made no sense.
That is when, to my horror, I realized that at some point the snow was going to be so high that all the fire hydrants would be buried!!!! The sign is there so that firefighters can find the hydrants when they are covered in snow.

I am not going to make it through this winter if the snow is higher than fire hydrants.

A day of randomness

Saturday was a very random day filled with some New Brunswick randomness. Me and D headed to Amherst to do some shopping. We had both been lounging around in sloppy clothes and went and fancied ourselves up for the trip "to town." For D this meant changing from his tattered lumberjack coat into a hoodie. While in Amherst, it seemed like everyone we encountered had very strong east coast accents. I mean most people here say their "a"s like east coasters and have subtle hints of "oot" and "aboot," but these people had the full on accent. I was wondering if it was because it is Thanksgiving weekend and all the country-folk had come into town to be with their families.

On the way back from Amherst, we noticed a couple of overpasses with cars parked along them, which was weird. D figured they must be waiting for something to come down the highway. Right as he said that, we saw a bunch of flashing lights ahead and an entire convoy of big rig cabs covered in pink decorations. There were over 50 trucks all in a row (I stopped counting at 50), all driving down the Transcanada Highway with a police escort. Turns out we had driven right into the Convoy for a Cure.

Later in the evening, we decided to go to the truck stop restaurant in Aulac, which is the town next to us. People have been telling us about the truck stop restaurant and the Schnitzel Haus in Aulac since we have been here. I was hesitant to try the Schnitzel Haus, being a vegetarian and all, but I do love me a greasy spoon truck stop restaurant. While there, I ended up having their famous chocolate cake with boiled icing. I had only recently heard of boiled icing from a friend here, so I have decided that it must be a Maritime thing. Google has informed me that boiled icing is made by pouring hot sugar syrup over stiffly beaten egg whites. It basically is a slightly softer version of meringue. I had not googled boiled icing before I went there, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't expecting the piece of cake to be so huge, nor was I expecting there to be 2-3 inches of icing on top! This picture really doesn't do justice to the hugeness of this cake.

Normally I don't like frosting unless it is chocolate, but this was really good. It was much less sweet than normal cake frosting, which I liked, and it was beat so smoothly that it had a really  good, creamy texture. And because it was so huge, I got to eat the leftovers again the next day!

Garbage, trash, rubbish

Since living in Sackville, D and I have had some difficulty figuring out what to do with our garbage. In previous places we have lived, the rules have been pretty simple and similar from place to place. In previous places (Vancouver, Surrey, Austin) glass, plastic, cans, and paper products can be recycled, and everything else goes in the regular garbage.  In Sackville, garbage is separated into wet and dry. The first day we got to our house, we found this nice laminated list of trash items that are wet, dry, hazardous household waste.

You would think it would be fairly straight forward, but honestly, I don't think anything has ever caused us this much confusion in our lives. First we had to go get the appropriate coloured bags. Green for wet and blue for dry. Then we had to try to remember which one was which. When I first set them up in our dual garbage cans, I put all of the wet stuff in the blue (dry) bag. So then I had to take the blue bag and put it in a green bag. There was no threat of fines if we got it wrong, like I have seen in Ontario, but I was still worried we might get arrested by the garbage police. Okay, so we had our bags and we had the colour system figured out. Then came the debates over pretty much every thing we put in the garbage.

Some things were obvious. Paper goes in dry. Banana peels go in wet. What about a juice box? The dry list said, "Dry waste must be clean to ensure it can be recycled."  A juicebox could not be rinsed out because the hole was so small and there was usually a tiny bit of juice left behind. So it wasn't really dry and clean. But D was convinced that the wet garbage should only contain compost materials, so he wouldn't let me put it in there either. He thought that there must be a third type of bag that we should use for non-compostable and non-dry garbage. I looked it up online, and it seemed like there were only 2 categories - wet and dry.

Every time we went to put something in the garbage for the first few weeks we had to check the list. Old socks?  Dry.  Paper towel? Wet. Broken dishes? Dry. Pencil shavings? Wet. Tim Horton's coffee cup? I say wet, D says dry. You can see how confusing it might be.

The other day at school, I saw a sign that clarified things a bit more for me. It said, "If you wouldn't put it on your head, it's wet waste." Ha! I have been using that as my reference point. And it does seem to help...a bit.

Style crisis

I desperately need a hair cut. And a visit to the esthetician to keep my Hamilton eyebrow under control. But I am afraid of what might happen to me if I get beauty treatments up here in New Brunswick. I know that sounds horrifically snobby, and I am sure anyone who lives in New Brunswick and sees this will tell me I am ridiculous. And it is ridiculous because I am certainly not very stylish myself, but I don't want to be meeting new people rocking a mullet and red splotches all over my face from a bad wax job. I am not basing my fears on anything real or anyone I know (although one of my neighbors has a serious mullet). My fears are mostly derived from the show Trailer Park Boys, which is actually based out of Nova Scotia. But it is rural, and it is in the Maritimes, and people look like this:

My fears also stem from the decor in some of the houses we saw in the real estate listings. Flowered wallpaper, flowered couches, and wood panelling abound. It is like people are in a time warp to the 70s and early 80s and not in a cool, vintage way, but in a scary, it-wasn't-even-fashionable-then way.

I am going to ask for recommendations from people I know. And I am sure it will be fine. I just wanted to express my concern in case I do end up with a mullet, so you will know it was not my choice. 

McLobster? Really?

Really?

I saw this sign while getting gas, and had to run over an take a picture.