Snow!

I thought it might be appropriate to post some pictures of the snow in Sackville since everyone in Austin is freaking out about the inch of snow they received Thursday night. These pictures were taken last week. We got an additional foot of snow this week, so it is even higher now, but I am too lazy to go out in the cold and take more pictures.

D and Nova in the snow

Nova balancing precariously on a snow bank, trying not to fall through

Front of the house

Closer view of the icicles

I must say that my first real Canadian winter hasn't been so bad. I am actually enjoying all the snow. That being said, I am still very excited for my trip to the desert next week. Arizona, here I come!

My Mini Polar Bear Swim

At long last, I have finally found the time to blog about my 2011 Polar Bear experience. The Polar Bear Swim is a Ham Fam tradition dating back to 1977 when the first group of my relatives headed down to English Bay to jump in the ocean on New Years Day. From that time it has evolved into an event full of traditions in which the family and their friends hop onto a rented school bus, sing songs, drink themselves silly, and jump in the ocean. I have been participating in this tradition since New Year's Day 1996. I missed a couple of years due to theatre productions (98 & 99) when I was a stage manager and one year (I think 2001) when I was sick but have attended all other years since 1996. This year, I was stuck on the wrong side of the country and could not participate with my family, but I made sure to have my own mini polar bear swim in my part of the world, complete with Ham Fam traditions. (Also, if anyone has pictures that will compliment the ones I took this year - such as polar bears drinking Fireball - send them over!)

First I donned my traditional Polar Bear attire, which generally consists of fun socks, long johns, boxer shorts, long sleeved shirt, and a Polar Bear shirt over top.

Some Polar Bears have much more creative costumes, but I generally stick with my traditional attire.

Next, I had a mini bottle of Baileys to make myself the traditional Polar Bear Coffee and Baileys.

The traditional liquor of choice for the Polar Bear Swim, as represented on the t-shirts, is Southern Comfort. Elder Polar Bears still shudder at the mention of its name and have largely stopped drinking it. In more recent years,  the new generation of Polar Bears has christened Fireball Whiskey as the drink of choice for the swim. Several bottles are generally purchased and then are passed around the bus and shared by all. I purchased a mini bottle of Fireball for my own mini polar bear experience.

You can also see the "SC" on the Polar Bear's glass on my shirt - for Southern Comfort

So with my supplies ready, I hopped into the car and headed to McDonalds, as we have done every year on the way to the swim since 1996.

Me in Sackville McDonald's

The boys in the Vancouver McDonald's.

After we chow down in McDonald's we always take the traditional picture of the whole group in front of the bus.

So I took my picture of me with my "bus."

Then it was off to the swim! I made sure to get in a shot of Fireball before getting out of the car.

We arrived at the lake and found that since it was such a beautiful day they had the biggest turnout ever for this swim. Most of the people are spectators, but there were about 30 swimmers, up from their previous record of 10.

It was still a very small crowd compared to the thousands that flock to English Bay.

In keeping with the theme of "mini," instead of running into the giant ocean, this Polar Bear Swim required participants to jump through a small hole in the ice.

There was no chanting , no singing, no ceremony at all really. Just a woman with a bullhorn calling our names as we jumped three by three into the hole in the ice.

At the Polar Bear swim at English Bay, we often go back in for second or third dips, and then hang around and chat for a bit before heading to the change rooms to get into some warm, dry clothes. Since there was no change rooms here, I just took off my wet clothes and hung around for a while in my bathing suit and a towel.

All in all, my mini Polar Bear Swim was a fun experience, and I am glad I got to do a "real" polar bear swim in ice.

 
Hopefully next year I will be back to celebrate my favorite day of the year with Ham Fam Polar Bears in Vancouver!

Brain Freeze!

One of the things people warned me about before I moved to Sackville was the wind. I was worried about getting used to the cold and the snow, and everyone said that cold and snow alone would be no problem, that it would be the wind that would get me. So far there hasn't been much snow, although it has been very cold on a few days. And the wind is DEFINITELY the worst part of the weather here.

The two worst experiences I have had were Sunday and Tuesday of this week when I walked the dog in the morning. Both days I was reasonably bundled up with a toque on my head and things were going just fine until I turned into the wind or rounded a corner into the wind. Both times my face and head were blasted by an icy wind that felt exactly the same as having a brain freeze from drinking a slurpee too fast. Except it wouldn't go away until I was completely out of the wind. It was so painful!  In all my years of skiing and snowboarding, I have never felt anything like that. I guess when I am on a mountain on a cold and blistery day, I cover my whole face and have googles and stuff. I think I need to invest in a balaclava if I want to make it through this winter.

Flood!

 So, as mentioned in a previous post, from time to time, when it rains, the basement of our house floods a bit. Today when I went down to do laundry, I realized that the entire basement was seriously flooded and was under about 2-3" of water!

 My first plan was to use the shop vac to suck it all up, but after a couple of buckets full of water, I realized the shop vac was no match for this flood. We had been talking about getting a sump pump for the basement and now seemed as good a time as any to get one. D went to the store and came back with a submersible pump and a hose.

First we directed the hose into the sink, but the pump worked a bit too well, and the water came rushing through the hose so fast that that the sink couldn't really handle it.

This is when D decided to drill a hole through the side of the house, much to my dismay. We ran the hose out to the ditch beside our house, and pumped the water into there. Der then started sweeping the water our of the laundry room.


Flood from LDH on Vimeo.



Most of the water was gone in about 10 minutes. The basement was still soaked, but at least it wasn't splashable any more.

This house was clearly built to flood, since everything in the basement is about 6" off the ground. You can see the hot water heater in the pic above perched on a 6 in tall block. The furnace, chimney, and oil tank are all also about 6" off the ground.

Once we had gotten all the major water out of the house, it started to seep back in. I was surprised since it hadn't been raining for a few hours, but I guess the ground was still really damp. We decided to leave it for an hour, and then I went back down with the shop vac to clean up the new water. It wasn't very effective, so now we are waiting until later in the evening to hopefully do one last vacuum of all the remaining water. Then we will start a fire in the wood stove to attempt to dry it out a bit. We still haven't bought a dehumidifier. We should probably get on that.

The Damn Weather

For most of July and August, the weather in Sackville was unbearably hot and humid. Ever since the hurricane/tropical storm swept through, it has been bloody freezing. Somehow we completely skipped over Fall and went straight from summer to winter. Last night there was a frost warning. For the past several days, I have had to walk Nova with gloves and a toque on. How is this possible in September? It also doesn't help that our heating systems are not as automatic as the electric and natural gas heating I have been used to all my life. I actually don't even know what kind of heat the main heater is at my parents' house, all I know is that it is controlled by lever on a thermostat and is easy.

Here in our old house in our small town in rural canada, we have two options, neither of which seem particularly easy to me.

One is an old (1959) furnace.

Powered by oil, which is stored in this tank.

The other is an old (god knows how old) wood stove.

Powered by, well, wood.

Both of these sources of heat require maintenance before using them for the first time after not being used all summer. In addition to the basic maintenance, our chimney, which houses the output for both the furnace and the wood stove, is in shambles. So that needs to be repaired and hopefully it will be done soon since it also allows water to leak into the basement when it rains.

Today, since D has a visitor in town to assist him (apparently I am not good enough), he is cleaning out the chimney for the wood stove.

Which is apparently quite dirty. At last check, there was this much soot that had been banged out of the pipe.

 I am also happy to report that when I went outside to take pictures, I realized that it is actually kind of warming up today. It is about 19 degrees Celsius (66 Fahrenheit). I guess we might get a couple of decent days before winter fully sets in. Also, this weekend is the Sackville Fall Fair, and since today is the perfect day to be outside, I think that is where we are heading.

Hurricane/Tropical storm

Well it appears that I have survived my first real hurricane, or maybe not. I arrived in Texas right as Katrina was happening, but it was too far away from Austin to have much of an effect. Next came Rita and she was supposed to come right through Austin, but then ended up not coming anywhere near. The closest I have been before this, I guess, was Ike in 2008, which passed over Austin after it caused fairly severe damage in the Galveston and area along the gulf. It was downgraded quite a bit by the time it got to Austin.

Hurrican Earl was my 4th "almost hurricane." It appears that it was not actually a hurricane when it came to my part of the world. The news reports were up and down about whether it was a hurricane or a tropical storm. On Friday night it was declared that it would come inland in Sackville as a Category 1 hurricane. Overnight, it was downgraded to a tropical storm, but then it was upgraded to Category 1 again in the morning. It didn't end up hitting Sackville as directly as anticipated, and although it was windy and rainy, not much happened. In fact, I was taking a nap when it hit. I woke up, looked out the window at the sheets of rain blowing across the road, thought of videotaping it, but decided that napping was more important. So that explains the level of scariness of the storm. Pretty underwhelming overall, which is probably a good thing.  

The (lack of) customer service Pt 2

One evening, D and I went into Moncton to get some stuff at Home Depot. We decided to grab some fast food because we are broke, and encountered what is becoming the signature lack of customer service in our region. We decided to go to Wendy's because it satisfies my needs as a vegetarian and D's needs for spicy chicken sandwiches. We went into a Wendy's in north Moncton, and both of us had to pee. Thus began our exposure to the most disgusting bathrooms outside of a truck stop. I had to pee SO BAD, so I had no choice, and the bathroom smelled so strongly of pee that I gagged the entire time I was relieving myself. Apparently the men's bathroom was equally as disgusting. The whole experience turned us off the thought of eating there, so we decided to go to Tim Hortons. Pretty much the only food item Tim Horton's serves, besides doughnuts, is sandwiches. Unfortunately, when I ordered my sandwich, I was told they were out of bread! At a place where they bake bread and doughnuts on a regular basis! This wouldn't have been as annoying if the exact same thing hadn't happened at a different Tim Horton's location a week earlier. Clearly there is a running-out-of-bread epidemic that needs to be addressed. We ended up at A & W, which was also filthy, and there were two people working the cash registers, and one guy just standing there staring into space. I think his job was to fetch the soft drinks, but I only saw him do that once. The rest of the time was just spent staring. Even when I told him that the ketchup dispenser was out of ketchup, he just sort of stared at me, and certainly did not attend to the ketchup.

When we walked in to A & W, there was no one in line ahead of us, but there were about 8 people waiting for food. We both ordered veggie burgers and were told that those might take a couple of minutes because no one ever orders them. Twenty minutes later, we had our food. I have officially decided that there is no such thing as fast food in this area of the world.

And don't even get me started on the town coffee shop. I have never seen such slow moving, high-on-pot-looking people. The coffee shop does have good coffee, good food, and a cool atmosphere that reminds me of Austin coffee shops, so I keep going back, but ordering anything more than regular coffee there takes absurd amounts of time. Ds mom commented while she was here, that no one else seems to mind waiting in the long line just to order and then waiting for 10 minutes for their drink to be made. Maybe we are just jerks.

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.

Town events

I have decided to take a break from complaining about customer service in order to talk about some of the more fun stuff that goes on in Sackville. There are a surprising number of festivals and events throughout the summer, and I am trying to take advantage of them - especially the free stuff!

On Canada Day there were two different concert venues set up around town. During the day we went to the kiddie stage at Bandstand Park.

There was also a stage set up around the corner for night time, big people music, but we didn't last that long.

Right now the Festival by the Marsh is happening in and around Bandstand Park. We have gone down to a couple free music events, and meant to go down to see Much Ado About Nothing that has been playing almost every day, but I just realized right now that today is the last day. Whoops. Tonight we are going to the Campbell Carriage Factory Museum to see a concert and a movie - weather permitting. Lots of the Festival events are "pay what you can afford," which is nice.

Tomorrow is the beginning of OK Quoi? - an arts festival. I am planning on attending several of the movie events, and some other stuff as well. I like it because most things are free! At the end of the week is Sappyfest, an indie music festival. I was really hoping to be able to attend, but the cost may prevent that since I am pretty broke. There is always next year!


Overall I am pretty impressed with my little town.

The (lack of ) customer service Pt 1.

I hate waiting. I think I hate it more than the average person. Even if I am violently craving ice cream, if there are more than 2 people in the line at the ice cream shop, I will not wait. I have considered not going to see bands or entire music festivals because I don't want to stand in line for the bathroom or food. I plan trips to the amusement park around the days I think the lines will be shortest. You get the point.

Here in New Brunswick, especially in small-town Sackville, however, waiting is the name of the game. When I came here for my interview, I stayed at an inn/B&B. I had read online that they had unbelievably bad service in the restaurant, but I had no idea how bad it could be. On my first morning, I was nervous, but didn't want to go without eating. I decided to go into the restaurant to get some toast. I allowed 45 minutes for this excursion, assuming that would be more than enough time. When I got to the restaurant, I stood beside the "Please wait to be seated" sign for about 5 minutes. Finally I asked one of the two other people sitting in the restaurant if anyone was working. The man said, yes and she should be back soon. So, the owner comes in and seats me, asks me if I want coffee and then wanders away for another five minutes. She comes back, drops the coffee and then disappears again. Ten minutes later she comes back out, and I call her over and ask for some toast. "Oh," she says, very surprised, "You don't want to see a menu?" Well, maybe 20 minutes ago when I got here I might have wanted to see a menu, but now I just want to leave. I finally got my toast and then had only about 5 minutes to get back to my room and get ready for my interview.

I figured that this place was an anomaly because it was owned by an older couple and it was an independent establishment in a small town. What I wasn't expecting was for even the chain, fast food restaurants to operate at a snail's pace. I have worked at a fast food restaurant, and I know that head offices are constantly trying to make things better and faster, and implement new systems whenever they come up with something that is faster. One example of this speed in action is Tim Hortons. (Why is there no apostrophe in the name? It drives me crazy.) Most people go to Timmy's for coffee and most locations have their coffee providing system finely tuned. A few years back, they even developed a new system where your order comes up at a little counter away from where you ordered it. This way, you move along and do not block the next person who orders. Also, most Timmy's don't take debit cards in order to avoid slowing down the line by having someone typing in their PIN.  (In Canada debit cards cannot be swiped like a credit card, you must always enter your PIN.) Tim Hortons is always really fast, even when you order food. NOT IN SACKVILLE!

Oh my god, it makes me want to gouge my own eyeballs out with a spoon every time I go there. First of all, they do not seem to be understaffed, but they do not follow the established Tim Hortons system. The person who takes the order seems to be the person who also makes the order, and that can take a very long time if food is involved. There always seems to be an excessive amount of staff hovering around the drive-thru window, but they don't seem to be doing much either. So for people like me, who don't have vehicles to use in the drive-thru, the only option is to stand in a really long line for coffee and try to keep our heads from exploding.

I just don't understand how it can be so slow. Tim Hortons is busy ALL THE TIME. That is why every other Timmy's on the planet has developed these really efficient ways of getting people their coffee. It can't be that hard!

As I am writing this, I am realizing how much I am acting like my father. That's scary.

I do try really hard not to show my impatience when interacting with the Tim Horton's employees. I don't want to look like some obnoxious city girl, and I assume that everyone else here doesn't notice how f&@*ing slow the service is. Perhaps if I stay here long enough, I will get used to the slower pace. Perhaps I will even enjoy it, and then when I go to the city I will say things like, "Wow, people sure are impatient here." But probably not. I am my father's daughter after all.

Oh, the humidity!

One of the reasons I was excited to move from Texas to New Brunswick was to have an enjoyable summer free from stifling heat. When we first arrived here, it was pretty damn cold, and I was pretty damn excited about that. Now it is not so cold. In fact, it is pretty warm, and coupled with that warmth is an extremely high level of humidity (between 94-99% over the past week). Combine this warm weather and high humidity with a lack of air conditioning in both my house and office and you have a summer that is so much worse than Texas!

First of all, I am just sticky all the time. Second, because we have to have the windows open to cool the house down, EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE IS WET! The bed is wet, the clothes hanging in my closet are wet, and in the garage, the floor is wet. Papers and wood are curling and warping, skin is constantly perspiring, and I cannot even explain how disgusting it feels to crawl into a soggy bed at the end of a sticky day. Ugh.

I was so excited to live without an air conditioner and be able to feel the nice breeze through my open windows. And at first, that was nice. I almost wrote a blog post about how much I love opening the windows in the house and feeling the fresh air blow through. I am glad I didn't because right about now I would sell my right pinky finger for some central air!

I am sitting in my office right now, dripping with sweat. My formerly straightened hair is frizzy and wavy. I look like Monica from the episode of Friends where they go to Barbados and her hair turns into an afro. My co-workers tell me that this level of humidity is not normal, and that it will be better soon. Somehow I doubt that in a place where we are surrounded by water. Sackville is on the Bay of Fundy, has the Tantramar River running through it, is surrounded by marshland, and is also home to a decent-sized lake. According to various sources that I found by googling "Where does humidity come from?" it depends on the source of the humidity as well as various other weather factors. All I know is that right now, it is gross.

I am off to purchase a fan for my office and several dehumidifiers for the house and garage.

Some Pictures of Sackville

I posted some pictures of Sackville around my neighbourhood on my running blog http://bicoastalrunaholics.blogspot.com/2010/07/some-sackville-scenery.html

Yes, it is true. I have no life.

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. 

Moving Day!

Moving Day was officially June 15th, but I have been slow to get up to day on this here bloggy-blog. Now the moment you have all been waiting for, pictures of the new house!

But first, a story. On the big day, we rushed to check out of our hotel and head to Sackville. We were supposed to meet the realtor at 8:30 am for a walk through of the new house, and then await the official closing. We got there a bit late, and that was just the beginning of our annoyingly annoying day. After walking through the house, we were supposed to call the lawyer and let him know that everything was okay, and that he could start the closing process. I tried to do that, but when I called the lawyer's office, the phone was just dead. No ringing, no nothing. I called D's phone, and it worked just fine, so it seemed that something was up with the lawyer's phone. Fortunately it is a small town, so we just drove down there to see them in person. We handed over our certified check, told them everything looked good, and the lawyer's assistant said it should take about an hour for the mortgage money to be deposited into the account. We went to the bank to open an account, and then walked the dog around for a while. After about an hour and a half, the lawyer's assistant called to tell us that the money was still not there and that she had a call in to the mortgage company. Since we now knew it might take a while, we headed down to the local lake so Nova could play in the park. It was a really windy day, but the sky was mostly blue. It looked really cool down at the lake.

Also, Nova was kind of scared of the waves, which was funny.


Nova at the lake from LDH on Vimeo.


Soon it was after noon and the lawyer had originally said everything would be done by noon at the latest. I called over to the lawyer's office and was told that the computers at the mortgage company had gone down this morning, which is why they had not yet transferred the money. But don't worry, it will be sent right now!!

Because we had the dog with us (and that's a whole other story - we were supposed to drop her off at a friend's, but kind of forgot) we couldn't really go anywhere that involved being inside for too long. So aside from going to the lake, we spent most of the day sitting in the van in various parking lots around town. Tim Hortons was sort of our home base, but we also sat in the grocery store parking lot and the liquor store parking lot.

By 3:00, after 6 hours of waiting, we still hadn't heard anything, so I called the lawyer's office again. This time I was told that there seemed to be a problem with the wire transfer, so the assistant had called the bank to put a trace on it because it had been sent, but had never arrived (I am not really sure how these things work). So, more waiting.

Finally, at about 4:30, we got the call that we officially owned the house, and we could come pick up our keys! Thank Jeebus!

So, here are some pictures:

Master Bedroom (We do have actual sheets on the bed now, but this was the first day. Also, we had to saw off a piece of the boxspring to get it up the stairs):

Spare room (for all the visitors we hope to have):

My soon-to-be-awesome home office:

Stairs and hallway to the enclosed front porch (My camera doesn't do justice to the colour of the walls, which are lime green):

The front porch (soon to be populated with chairs):

The kitchen (complete with human dishwasher):

The living room (before we moved in because right now it is a disaster):

A bad picture of the dining room (I will post another when we get our new table):

Downstairs bathroom and mudroom (also taken before we moved in):

And Nova's favorite place (not including the 1.7 acre yard), the back deck:

Time to celebrate!

That last picture took about 5 takes to get. Clearly we are not gifted in the realm of self-portraits.