Sohry I’ve not been posting recently, been having some health challenges. Ready to get back up to speed now! Here are some flowers. Hope you’ll forgive me.
Some of these health problems were not so much caused by our bug-out to Montréal (though that was exhausting) but by the place we moved into.… [Read More]
Things are busy. Manon and I are both taking six hours of French classes per week, along with homework and the usual quotidian grind.
Summer is a glorious but brief season, so Montréalers are anxious to be out and about when the weather’s good.… [Read More]
The summer season is short here. You can see the changes in things from day to day. This week, it’s the butterfly’s time.
Up at the top of Mont Royal, it was a hot and very very humid day.… [Read More]
At approximately 3 pm today Canada’s population reached 40 million people (according to Canada’s population clock, which really looks more like test tubes….disturbingly).
By comparison, California has a population of about 39 million packed into a lot less geographical space–lookee here**:
This is one of the many reasons we’re in Canada.… [Read More]
Montréal has many, many churches. So many that one of the city’s nicknames is “ville aux cent clochers” (city of a hundred bell towers). Images Montréal, a website dedicated to documenting architecture in the city, lists 437 buildings in the “Churches” category.… [Read More]
I went to The Village recently to hunt up some nougat for a friend and dropped into a place I discovered last year, Pouding Cafe. Nice proprietors and staff, yummy sandwiches and coffee, and this sign.… [Read More]
The spring is coming on hard with temperatures waggling all over the place, even on the same day; cold and icy one minute, summery and 70s the next. The daffodils are dead but the little violets and vincas are beaming purple and prolific dandelion blossoms punctuate the greenbelts with brilliant yellow polka dots (in MTL there’s a movement to leave dandelions untouched when they’re flowering to feed pollinators.… [Read More]
Growing up in Southern California, I was often annoyed by the people who griped that “there are no seasons here.” Of course there are seasons, they’re just more subtle than elsewhere.… [Read More]
After six months in California laboring to reduce our load of possessions and make an all-encompassing list of them for the Canadian government (required for settling in Canada), weeks of getting our new tenant installed and repairing newly-discovered defects in the ADU, and days of cleaning, schlepping, and shuffling all our household and personal items around to pack and make way for the caretaker, we finally got to sit still for five hours on the plane flying us to Montreal for the summer.… [Read More]
What a weekend! Our grueling travel day back across the border was endured, the post-COVID-booster-and-flu-shot side effects weathered, and now it’s Monday and back to business for us both!
So much business–mountains to climb, tunnel through, and raze for new foundations.… [Read More]
