Timber!

Charlie the tree climber and his mate came this morning and took down the two poplar trees ('widowmakers' as Charlie called them). Bill will turn up tomorrow to cut the trunk into smaller pieces, which will eventually end up in our woodburner. Someone finally came to take our hay bales away this morning too. There were 40 of them in all.

We're getting obsessive about watching the weather radar and calculating how soon it will be before we get rain and how long it might last. At the moment we're down to nine inches of water in our cistern, which is effectively only four inches if you take off the width of the outlet pipe. Both wells are dry so I'll be trying to learn how to do a rain-dance soon.

Water works

Thought I'd better post an update on our smelly water situation. Here's a picture of the solution to the problem. The white unit is our filter, which takes out any solid particles in the water. Next to it, on the left, is the reverse osmosis unit, which subjects the water to high pressure and forces out the dissolved solids which make the water hard. It's been two weeks since the system was installed and it has taken that long for the hot water tank to finally be free of the old water and the sludge that had built up in the bottom of it. So now we've got lovely clear, non-smelly water and there are no excuses for the children not to have a bath. Well, apart from the ongoing lack-of-water scenario, that is.

One thing that has helped us conserve water a bit is our new washing machine. You can't tell from the picture, but it is huge. It holds at least twice as much washing as our old machine in the UK, so I'm having to run it half as often. I know it's a very dull and mundane thing to get enthusiastic about, and this may be a reflection of how quiet my life is now, but I actually look forward to doing the laundry so that I can use it - it's got neat little sound effects, whizzy lights and a countdown feature which make it seem quite space-age. There's a matching tumble dryer too, but I haven't used that yet and hope I won't have to for some time.

Thanks to the voltage difference we've had to buy loads of electrical devices on moving here. In time we'll be able to preserve our house as a museum of the Canadian home in the year 2007.

...and I'll give you the key

Well OK, it's not quite a combine harvester, but our mini-tractor arrived today and Mike's already tested it out on the grass of Barnyard One, the route into the woods behind the big barn and the grass around the house The thing on the back is a heavy-duty rotary cutter which is suitable for cutting down rough grass. There's a lawn mower attachment underneath the tractor for shorter grass. So basically what he achieved in a week or two with the strimmer in the barnyard has taken about 20 minutes with the tractor and its attachments. That's impressive.

We'll be getting a rotary tiller attachment to go on the back too, but they didn't have it ready to deliver today. The same was the case with the snow blower attachment, but I'm rather hoping we won't need that in the next few weeks. It's a relief to finally have the grass cut - we've been in the house nearly seven weeks without having the tool for the job. The lack of rain, while problematic for our water supply, has at least stopped the grass from growing too much (although there were some pretty beefy weeds).

Black and white

The children met our nearest neighbours this evening, chatting over the garden fence. There seemed to be a mutual fascination. I have designs on the waste products of these creatures for my vegetable patch and plan to negotiate with their owner, Janice, about that. Actually I'm running low on milk too, come to think of it...

No prizes...

... for guessing the name of this frog.

Yes, you've guessed it: Lithobates clamitans. It was having a nap on the inner side of the barn door this morning when Mike went out there. Quite nice to see a live frog for a change: the dog has developed an uncanny instinct for finding dried up dead frogs and using them as puppy chews. I've only just got over a phobia of dead insects and now I'm having to get used to extracting dessicated frogs from the dog's mouth. Urgh.

Trees

I continue to be impressed by Mike's ability to turn his hand to new skills. Today was his first go at using the chainsaw that he bought last week. It's been fairly overcast, so not quite as hot as it has been of late. He started off by removing a dead bough from the Silver Birch in the front garden, then progressed to cutting down some of the dead Eastern Juniper (aka Red Cedar) trees in the barnyard (I'm assuming that they were killed by the cows that used to be housed there). He's made a good start on our wood supply for the winter. I love the colour of the freshly-cut red cedar logs - they look a bit like cartoon depictions of legs of ham.

The tree-climber member of the tree surgeon's team which will be cutting down the poplars came round earlier and they'll probably be bringing those down later in the week, so that will give us even more wood, although poplar doesn't burn particularly well, so it might be better to leave that for a while to season. My new bible, John Seymour's New Complete Self-sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers agrees with most other sources that ash is the best wood for burning. There's an ash coppice up by the pond, so we're well set up in that respect. According to John, if you cut the trees down at a diameter of nine inches, they'll regrow and be ready to cut down again in 12 years' time. Sounds ideal to me - then you don't feel like you're destroying something.

Veins and vines

Managed to get a photo of a Monarch at last yesterday evening, on our walk up to the hay field. Apart from its size, the main difference between it and a Viceroy is the lack of a black vein cutting across the lower wing on the Monarch.

We also noticed that the wild grapes (Vitus riparia) are swelling well in the hedgerows around the field. The hedges are mostly Blackthorn and there are lots of sloe berries forming on them. So I've started looking up recipes for sloe gin and sloe jelly. Apparently the wild grapes can be used for wine and jelly, but I'm not sure there will be enough of them for the former. The early missionary settlers round here used them for communion wine when they ran out of the stuff they'd brought with them from France, so it might be worth a try...

POSTSCRIPT: I was wrong about the hedges - the tree with black berries is Common or European Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), which is (a)invasive and (b)a killer of native trees. Nice...

Weather watching

Today's fairly substantial job was to put up our weather station. As we're planning to generate our own energy from the wind and the sun, it is going to be useful to have some record of the amount of both that we can expect here. Mike decided that we should put the anemometer as high up as possible, so we had a 30 foot pole to put up. We started by digging a big hole at the back of the small barn, then attached the anemometer to the top of the pole and the weather station a bit further down. The pole was very heavy, but Mike managed to get it into place and then attached it to the edge of the barn roof with two brackets. We concreted the base of the pole into its hole and the entire edifice seems pretty sturdy now.

The weather station transmits information to a data logger which is attached to my PC and downloads every 15 minutes. It's really neat - measuring sunlight, wind speed and direction, amount of rainfall (I wish!), temperature, humidity, UV, well, you name it really. You can get various views and reports of the data, with the ability to upload it to a website. The main weather display is a bit lurid (and looks like it hasn't been updated since about 1995) but it gives you a useful summary of the current conditions.

P.S. Finally got the upload sorted out - you can see the weather we're having at the Weather Underground site.

P.P.S. And now there's a weather station sticker on the blog too. I love this stuff - such a geek!

Beside the lakeside

The last two days have been really hot and humid, so yesterday evening we decided to head for the beach. North Beach is our nearest Provincial Park, 10 minutes' drive away. We got there at 5pm and I suppose there may have been a total of 50 people on the beach, which is a natural sandbar about a mile in length. The water of Lake Ontario was really warm (which was not the case a month ago, when we first visited the park and only the kids braved the water), so we all went for a swim.

You have to pay to get into the park ($11.00 per vehicle per day), but you can get a seasonal pass for $80 (about £10 each for our family), which represents good value and ensures that we go there regularly! We couldn't get over how quiet the beach was - contrasting it with any sandy beach on an August evening in the UK when the temperature is hitting 28°C (82°F). We also realised that we'd never all been swimming off a beach at the same time before: in the UK one of us always ended up sitting on the beach because we'd be worried about people nicking our car keys/money/phones. We had no such worries last night and it was really liberating. The only strange thing is that you're swimming in fresh water, when the lake is so big that it feels like you're at the seaside.

Opportunities blossom

Last Wednesday I had an interview for the post of part-time archivist at Deseronto, a small town about 40 minutes' drive from our house. The town's previous archivist had been based in the library, looking after various deposited collections and he retired in March. The town council is anxious to make proper provision for its municipal archives (indeed, is required by law to do so), which had not previously been part of the archivist's responsibility. They are currently held in a very dirty vault in the basement of the Town Hall (which was once a bank) and nobody really knows what's down there.


Today one of the (five!) Town Councillors rang me up to offer me the job (assuming my references are acceptable). I had been a bit unsure about whether to even apply for the post, but now that I've seen the place and the sorry state of things there, I can't turn it down. It'll be a challenge!

I've noticed that many of the people who live here have more than one job (a bit like Local Hero or Northern Exposure). Well this will bring my number of current jobs up to three, so I feel like I'm integrating nicely. This will be my first local job though - which I think will be a good thing, as I will be working with and getting to know people who actually live here. There is a slight danger that I'm now taking on too much, so I'll need to be very careful about allocating my time, but we'll see how things go.

Signs of High Summer

We've been seeing lots of Monarch butterflies in the garden - but they never stay still long enough for me to take a picture of them. Those are the ones with an amazing migration journey to Mexico and back every year. The picture is of a smaller butterfly which mimics the Monarch almost perfectly in its colouring but, unlike the Monarch, consented to sit still for a few seconds so that I could take its picture. It's called a Viceroy.

The other insect we've been hearing but haven't yet spotted is called a Dog-Day Cicada or Harvest Fly. The male's song is an incredibly loud and fairly high-pitched shrill buzz which sounds like it's coming from a power cable or electricity sub-station. Apparently they live under ground for 2-3 years and then emerge to mate before dying off. They're not the same as the ones that all emerge at the same time every 17 years, so these ones can be heard every summer.

We're running low on water again, although today we're having the new water cleaning system installed, so at least the water we have will be clearer and less stinky than it was before. Then we'll have to improve the actual supply - perhaps by drilling down a bit further in the existing well. Our neighbours told us that their well is 35 feet deep, so perhaps we should try and aim for something similar. It's a bit frustrating when you can see the lake in front of the house, there are frogs gambolling about in our pond a couple of hundred metres behind the house and we yet have to ration water use indoors. I keeping thinking about Jean de Florette, but trust that our water situation never gets quite as bad as his did. In the short term we will just have to hope for some decent rain in the next week or two.

Another frog on the blog

There were two Northern Leopard Frogs hopping around the garden the morning after I wrote the entry about frogs. Managed to get some photos without attracting the dog's attention to the frogs too much - he's grabbing anything he sees in his mouth and I didn't want to see the frogs being dismembered!

Rrrrrbit

This little chap is a Gray Tree Frog. It was snoozing on our back door this afternoon. We've noticed loads of frogs: around the pond, where you'd expect to see them, but also in the fields and around the house. Most of them are Northern Leopard Frogs. Apparently in this area we can apply for a Commercial Frog Licence to harvest the northern leopard frogs and sell them as bait to fishermen.

But I don't think I'll be doing that.

Oh, and remember the bat problem that we originally thought was a squirrel problem? Turns out it is a bat and squirrel problem - Mike saw a squirrel going into the roof space yesterday. So the wildlife removal expert who was sure that squirrels and bats would never share the space turns out to be slightly less expert than I thought.

Screen test

I've never made home videos of the children, and here I am, posting a very amateur 40 second home video of my dog on the web. Oh dear - am I turning into the sort of person who values pets over family? Or is it simply that my digital camera and the Internet make it incredibly easy to do this kind of thing now, which it wouldn't have been when the kids were tiny? Or perhaps it's more that I don't think Toby will ever reproach me for doing this...

P.S. In case you were wondering, the big concrete cylinder behind the dog is our well.

Grass again

Walked up to the hayfield this afternoon to see how the guys had done. They were baling the hay on Sunday and we counted 38 bales standing in the field today. In the barnyard, Mike has almost finished clearing the long grass from the largest of the three enclosures (Barnyard One), which we estimate to be around a third of an acre. Which is about the size of four standard UK allotments, if I've got my measurements right (gulp). Next step will be to decide how we're going to divide up the space and bring it into cultivation.

In between looking after the puppy, making meals and washing up I spent much of the weekend taking it in turns with Mike to read the last Harry Potter book. The kids weren't particularly interested, although I have read all the earlier books to them. Think this one might be one that they have to read for themselves when they're a bit older. I knew I'd have to finish it on Sunday or I'd be unable to do anything approaching work until I had.

Got a dog licence for Toby yesterday. For our $20 we got the licence itself, which lasts until the end of March, and a metal dog tag (yes, literally) with the number of the beast on it - 660 in this case. We also registered him with a vet in Trenton. We haven't managed to register the humans with a doctor yet though.

I had a bit of crisis of confidence about this blog the other day. I remembered those horrible round-robin Christmas newsletters that some people send out - the ones that tell you how wonderfully people you've often never heard of are doing in whatever they turn their hands to - and I wondered if by writing this blog I was doing the same sort of thing. I resolved my crisis by deciding that mostly I'm writing this blog for myself and those people I think might be interested - I'm not actually forcing anyone to read it if they don't want to. But that's the same for all blogs and bloggers, I suppose. I've just noticed that the spell-checker built into Blogger doesn't recognise the words blog, Blogger or bloggers. How strange.

The Promised Puppy

One of the deals we made with the children about emigrating was that we would be able to get a dog in Canada. Or was that one of the deals I made with Mike? Anyway, he spotted an advert from a dog rescue centre this morning for eight-week-old German shepherd/labrador puppies. They just happen to be two of his favourite breeds of dog, and I was keen to get a rescue dog and not particularly enthusiastic about getting a pure-bred one.

We drove up to the rescue centre, which was north of Madoc, about an hour and a half away. There was another couple there who had already chosen one of the eight puppies. Alsatiadors? Labrasheps? They were all mostly black, with small amounts of tan. It seemed as though it was going to be impossible to choose, but then Mike picked up one with white paws and a white chin, who snuggled into his arms in a really placid way (and who seemed less inclined to chew everyone's fingers than his siblings). So we chose him.

On the way home he sat in the cardboard box we'd brought with us really quietly. Occasionally he whimpered a bit, but would quieten down if I stroked him. We discussed what we were going to call him. I suggested Tetley, as it was a Tetley tea box, but we all ended up agreeing on Toby instead. And here he is:



We've made up a little bed in a box in the mud room for the time being and he's flat out asleep in there at the moment. I think it's going to be an interesting few weeks.

Neighbours

Last night one of our new neighbours offered us some irises that his wife had been dividing. I said 'Yes, please'. Then this afternoon I spent an hour or two clearing weeds and overgrown perenniels to make space in the front garden for them. That made room for twelve, with about 30 small iris plants remaining in the carrier bags, unplanted, and making me feel inadequate and somehow ungrateful.

So I decided to start planting them along the edge of the front garden. As I did so, another set of neighbours spotted me and turned up to introduce themselves. They live in the next property along (number 97 where we are number 59 - the numbering is something to do with building lots which I don't yet understand) and are also British ex-pats, but they moved to Canada in 1965 (Québec originally). They've only lived in this area for 18 months and seemed amazed (jealous, even) that we'd managed to pick this area to settle in - "You've really lucked out" was the phrase used. I think that means moving here is a good thing...

It was interesting that their accents became increasingly English during the hour or so that we talked to them: to begin with I wouldn't have identified them as being originally British. Joan did pronounce tomato as 'tomaydo' towards the end of the conversation, so I wonder how long it'll take me before I do that. At the moment I think 'never', but that might change.

Once they'd gone I got on with planting the remaining irises, behind the house this time. The soil under the fence at the front of the barnyard proved to be wonderfully rich, soft and easy to work (courtesy of the cows that used to live there), so in the end I got them all planted and now feel that I've done my neighbourly duty (although the stiff muscles in my back disagree). If the soil in the rest of the barnyard is of the same quality as that stuff then I'll be an extremely happy gardener.

Good news and bad news

The bad news this morning was that the robins' nest had fallen off the light and there was no sign of the baby robins. Child #1 was a bit sad (so was I), but it did give her a chance to get a close up look at a (partially de-constructed) birdsnest (complete with mites, yuk).

The good news was that the rocket seeds I planted on Monday morning in the flower bed in the front garden had germinated this morning. It seems to be hard to buy anything apart from Romaine lettuce here, so getting a range of leaves in the ground seems like a good plan.

I bought a load of bird seed designed to be revolting to squirrels (they're coated with chilli powder). Our squirrels seem to be completely unaware that they're not supposed to like chilli...

Cutting things down

Yesterday the first of our hay was cut by a couple of cattle farmers who were keen to take it off our hands. They used to cut the hay for Jerry, the previous owner, too. They reckon they'll get 40 bales off the field - and they're going to pay us for the privilege, which is great. First they had to cut their way to the hayfield, as the path up there had become very overgrown and their hay cutter was 14 feet wide.In the end they only had time to cut a first swathe around the edge of the field yesterday. In the evening we had a family expedition up there and walked around the field for the first time. It was a lovely warm evening and we had to keep pinching ourselves as we walked - does this really belong to us? Of course the answer to that is 'no' - we're just looking after it for a while. But, all the same, it still seems amazing, after our 100 metre square back garden in England. Child #1 spotted a cricket in the cut hay and then I noticed a praying mantis just nearby (which proved impossible to get into focus!).
 :

The other visitor yesterday was a tree surgeon who is going to trim the branches of the ash tree which are resting on the roof at the back of the house. He's also going to cut down two lovely poplars which are entangled with our power lines. It's a shame, but we will be able to burn the wood so at least they won't go to waste.

Fire and water

This morning was focused on utilities. Mike talked to a man about improving our smelly water, while I chatted to the chimney sweeps. What we thought was going to be a straight-forward job of sweeping the two chimneys turned into a several-thousand dollar bill as we discovered that neither chimney met current regulations. The chief sweep refused to touch such badly-put-together items. So the steel flue for the woodburning stove is going to be replaced and the stove itself re-seated on a hearth-stone that is the proper size. In the living room we're having the chimney lined with a new flue and a new wood-burning fireplace fitted. Ho hum.

Getting the water fixed is going to be pricey too, but that really needs doing - at the moment the kids are really objecting to having a bath as the smell of hydrogen sulphide from the water is so strong (and the water is grey!). Bubble bath helps a bit, but the resulting combination of smells is almost as bad as just the hydrogen sulphide. The new system should get rid of the smell as well as the lime and iron. In the future we will be able divert the reject water (which would otherwise go into the septic tank) through a grey water system which will fill the toilet cisterns and can be used for watering the garden.

More new arrivals

We noticed this nest when we looked around the property in April. It's on the spotlights above the garage doors. This must be the second brood - there are at least two baby American Robins whose heads you can sometimes see wobbling about as they wait for food. You can just see the mouth of one of the chicks in this picture.

Unpacking heat

We met the guys and the container at the Trenton air force base, where we had to complete the documentation for customs. It was all very relaxed and friendly - as usual we were teased about the amount of snow we can expect here in the winter. Obviously the English inability to cope with snow is famous world-wide. At the moment I'm looking forward it, but by the time it arrives I might have changed my mind.

We drove back with the lorry following us. It then took the men forty minutes to actually get the truck up our drive. Once they got it in, they were very quick at unloading and had finished in a couple of hours, which was very impressive considering the heat and humidity they were working in. I spent the whole afternoon unpacking the kitchen boxes and trying to find space for all the stuff in a kitchen which has fewer cupboards than our old one. So the kitchen is pretty much straight now, but the rest of the house is full of boxes still.

We had our tea sitting at the kitchen table, which was absolutely delightful after a fortnight of eating off plastic plates on our laps. As we've put the dining room dresser next to the table in the same layout as it was in Manchester, it felt rather as though we and the furniture had all been picked up from the old house and dropped down into the new one. I'm sitting at the table now - it's a lot easier to type than it was being crouched on the floor! It still seems amazing to me that all our possessions made their way here at all.

Shortly after the men left we had an almighty thunderstorm, which dropped the temperature down nicely for the evening. By 8.00pm I was completely exhausted and went to bed - before the children! They were watching Doctor Who, which is showing a couple of months behind the ones in UK, which is handy as they missed lots of episodes of the latest series.

Furry friends

As soon as we moved in we became aware that we had former tenants still in residence. At night as we went to bed we could hear scuttering noises in the roof space. We thought that it was probably squirrels and we called in a wildlife expert yesterday to investigate for us. He went up into the loft and I waited anxiously to find out whether they'd made a complete mess up there. He couldn't actually see any evidence of them, but could hear something. He went up to the hole in the soffit on the west side of the roof and couldn't see any evidence of squirrels or racoons or birds, but decided that it was possibly bats, living in the space between the side of the house and the aluminium siding. He told me that we can't do anything about them at the moment (if it was bats), as they would have baby bats there and it isn't considered to be good practice to disturb them at this stage (although they're not officially protected here in the same way as bats are in the UK). He recommended that I watch the gaps at dusk to see they were bats.

So I did, and they were. As the sun set I saw them leaving from a gap in the eaves. I'm actually quite relieved that it's bats - they're not damaging the loft space and somehow the idea of bats is less disturbing than squirrels. The wildlife guy will come back later in the season, once the babies are able to fly, and put in a one-way door that will let them leave but not come back. I hope they'll just take up residence in one of the barns instead. Looks like they are the imaginatively-named Big Brown Bat.

Oh, and the wildlife guy's name is Hunter.

Home nearly here

Heard today that our container should turn up on Monday. Thank goodness - fed up of sitting on the floor and eating off plastic plates! I gave in and bought some wine glasses last week because I couldn't bear drinking out of plastic cups any longer. Our beds arrived on Tuesday, so we don't have to sleep on mattresses on the floor any more, which is a great improvement. Bought duvets and pillows yesterday. Child #2 had set his heart on orange bed linen (he's going through a bit of an orange phase at the moment) which I thought might prove tricky, but Sears had a lurid Harley Davidson set which fitted the bill perfectly.Mike is getting on well with clearing the farm yard of grass, although it will take several weeks to get the whole thing clear. On Tuesday he started looking at tractors. I was given A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by a friend at the conference in Kingston, so I was able to tell him a bit about John Deere.

We've still got issues with water, although there was rain yesterday which should help a bit, and there's been more today, which is typical, as I've put two loads of washing on the line.

We treated ourselves to a meal out last night. It felt slightly surreal as Wimbledon was playing on the TVs in the restaurant.

Tomorrow our new fridge should arrive, which will be a big help, as we've been coping with the tiny one that was left in the house up to now, which isn't really fit for the needs of a family of four in a warm summer.

26 June 2007

I forgot to mention the weirdest thing that was left in the house. The kids think it’s horrible, and I did too, at first, but I’m beginning to feel quite fond of it, though I prefer the little robin that my aunt gave us as a leaving present.

There were a few instruction books left in the house too, which have revealed that the previous owners were called Jerry and Mary. The wood-burning stove only dates from 2004, so that’s fairly new. A farmer we spoke to yesterday reckons the house has been empty for a couple of years, although there was a tenant in here when we looked round it in April.

I can’t believe that we’ve only been in the house for 48 hours. Seems like we’ve been pretty busy most of that time – mainly discovering things that need fixing. The biggest problem we’ve had was to do with the water. When we moved in on Sunday afternoon the hot water stank of hydrogen sulphide and we were running out of water in our back-up cistern, so we got the pump guy to come round today and he spent three hours here putting in a new pump. It’s been quite an education for me, learning about plumbing from one’s own water supply. It is our first real bit of self-sufficiency, even though the system was already in place, so probably doesn’t count.

The pump guy’s mate had switched the supply over to the cistern last week, as the pump was struggling to get water from the well, but we had nearly run out of water in the cistern. This is just a huge square plastic container in the basement, about three metres square, which is fed from the rain water which falls on the house. The pump can either run off the well or off the cistern. Wells can run dry here (and there’s been little rain for several weeks (in contrast to the UK!)), so the cistern acts as a backup, and also has softer water than the well. The old pump dated from 1989, and was fairly knackered, so was probably due for replacement. It’s such a relief to have a water supply again – we’d been being incredibly mean with the water yesterday and this morning, which wasn’t much fun. I was trying to plan meals that didn’t involve boiling water.

The temperature hit 30 celsius today, so Mike and the pump guy were in the best place, as the basement stays nice and cool. We found some spare louvre doors down there today, and a whole load of Mary’s glass bottles and bottle-tops which may well come in useful next year if I end up pickling anything. Mike spent the morning with his new petrol-driven strimmer, clearing some of the grass from the fenced area next to the small barn. He’d started yesterday with a rechargeable electric strimmer, but it wasn’t making much of an impression, so he’s gone for the more industrial version and is making some headway with that.

I phoned my Dad last night and heard from my aunt and mother-in-law today. The phone connection is fine – hard to believe that they’re so far away. The only thing I keep forgetting is the time difference. We also had a call from the estate agents in Manchester yesterday – to tell us that someone has put in an offer on our house there. Hurrah! So we’ve accepted it and are hoping that will progress quickly. This house needs a new kitchen and bathroom, and the sale of the Sale house would come in handy for that.

P.S. Turns out that the high speed internet connection was a mirage, so we're back on dialup and today is our first day of connectivity. Only 482 emails to catch up on. Will try and post a more up-to-date update soon...

Networking

I'm at the Association of Canadian Archivists' conference in Kingston, where I'm giving a talk tomorrow. It's my last bit of official work for the Archives Hub. It's an excellent conference and it's been a great introduction to the Canadian archives community for me, so early on in our emigration journey. I have been having occasional pangs of guilt at leaving Mike alone with the children and the new house to deal with (particularly as the water pump decided to stop working today, so he had to call someone out to fix it).

Our possessions are now on Canadian soil - they are now on their way to Toronto from Montréal and hopefully we'll be able to usher them through customs some time next week. The couple who own the cottage we're renting this week lent us some spare mattresses and bedding, so at least we'll have something to sleep on while we sort out the beds.

We noticed a nest in the smaller of the two barns when we looked around the house on Tuesday, but we weren't sure if the birds in it were alive or not (they were completely immobile). But apparently they were flying round the barn today, learning how to fly, so that was a relief. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more wildlife here than we've encountered before, somehow.

The green green grass

We took possession of our new house this afternoon. Hurrah!

The grass around the house has been kept short, but beyond that the farm looks very overgrown indeed - a scythe might be a useful tool to start work with. It all seemed a bit daunting to me, but Mike seems keen enough to start work on taming the jungle.

Inside the house we'd been left with a strange assortment of things - two sets of curling tongs and a packet of cous-cous, for example. There is a small fridge, complete with dodgy-looking portions of processed cheese and a very iced-up ice box. In the basement there's a lovely big chest freezer, which needs a clean, but will be great for all those vegetables I'm planning on growing next year.

Getting the electricity supply transferred into our names was pretty quick, but getting a phone line took ages as the previous occupants hadn't cancelled their one. But we got there in the end, and by next Monday we should have high-speed internet to the house too.

Next stage is ordering some beds, so that we can actually move into the house properly. We're still in the cottage we rented in April for the time being.

One of the other things we did today was to enrol the kids in their school. The school secretary showed us around and introduced the children to their new classmates. We registered them so that they would be collected by a school bus and signed them up to go to school from next week. It's the last week of school before the summer break, so it shouldn't be too onerous for them. The school covers the grades between kindergarten and grade 8, so the children will be there for a few years yet. It's got an impressive amount of green space around it and its own soccer pitches, gym and science lab - none of which their previous school in south Manchester could boast.

We also swapped our UK driving licences for Ontario ones. That was straight-forward, although the sight test was a bit scary - even with my new glasses, the second set of numbers I had to read were teeny-tiny. There's no way I'd have seen them without my specs.

It's been quite hot and humid today and it is now raining and thundering outside. Yesterday was hot and sunny too, but there has been a nice breeze off the lake which has taken the edge off the temperature.

We've only been here 48 hours but it feels like we've achieved an awful lot in that time. Only trouble is that the 'to do' list is still growing - even faster than the grass on the farm.

All packed up

Can you tell we've had a load of removal men in the house for the last two days?

I was at work, but Mike did a grand job of supervising the packing up of the house contents and the removal firm did an amazing job of wrapping everything up and shoehorning it into the container. We now have two folding chairs, our beds and a few lamps left in the house. The 'export wrapping' was incredibly thorough - all our furniture looked like ghosts of their former selves in their white casings. We've already realised that we packed the only key to the windows of the house - I'm sure there'll be other things that we will have sent off on the boat that we'll wish we hadn't. It sails on Friday and we're not quite sure when it is arriving at the other end.

Posting under duress

Sometimes you have to get things down in writing even though it's the last thing you feel like doing. Not that anything has gone disastrously wrong - just that I feel in a state of continuing low-level stressedoutedness which isn't particularly comfortable. Neither of us is sleeping very well and there seem to be innumerable loose ends to tidy up at work and at home that are becoming overpowering at times.

The removal firm is going to be packing our stuff up on Monday and loading it into a 20 foot container. The ship leaves Liverpool on Friday 8th June - the same day that we leave Manchester. The children had their last day at school on Friday and today a man came to take away my little car. :(

I've had trips to the optician, doctor, dentist and blood donor clinic in the last few weeks as I attempt to get up to date with everything. They won't take blood from me in Canada, as I'm obviously riddled with mad cow disease, and to give blood here you need to have been in the UK for 28 days after any trip to Canada, so that might be my last time ever for giving blood. Annoying really. Maybe I'll have to cultivate some leeches...

Progress

Looks like we've come to some sort of agreement on the price of the property in Canada, so now we've just got to sort out the various things that are the conditions of the sale. This includes getting the water in the well tested, the house surveyed and the minor point of getting the finances in place.

We've had a couple of representatives of international mover firms round to give us quotes for packing up our stuff and sending it off on a boat. It'll take a little over a month for the container to get to our new house. We're hoping to complete on 19th June, so we will for a time be proud owners of a house with absolutely no furniture. It'll be like it was when we bought our first house in Aberdeen, back in December 1988, when we had a truly ghastly lime-green and brown bed-settee and pretty much nothing else. We can't take beds out to Canada anyway, so will be buying new ones as a priority for our first week I should think.

I'm thinking that I'll need to take out a basic set of kitchen utensils/pans/cutlery in our luggage so that I'll be able to prepare simple meals in the new kitchen. There is at least an oven there, so we'll be able to cook. One of the big selling points of the house for me was this lovely woodburning stove, also in the kitchen, which was a really welcoming sight the first time we saw the house (when the snow was coming down horizontally outside!):


Mind you, there was a bird in the chimney when we went back to the property for our second visit, so another priority will be putting a bird-proof cap on the chimney!

Back in Blighty

Got back at 6.00am yesterday. The children slept until 9.00am today, which made a pleasant change. Felt odd seeing the green of an English spring after the very brown landscape in Canada.

We found a property that we all really liked, but I'm not posting any details until the purchase is definite. I'm not generally superstitious like that (and would normally scorn any kind of superstitious activity) - but no-one wants to thumb their nose at fate.

Lots of financial things to sort out in the meantime, as our house here is not yet sold, so I think this option on the oven in the kitchen of the cottage in Canada was very apt.

... I am a free man

Or woman. But we've got our Social Insurance Numbers now, so feel like we're part of the system.

Met our realtor today and spent nearly an hour with her, going over our various requirements for property. We'll be spending next Monday and Tuesday with her, looking around various places in Prince Edward County. She reckoned we could do ten each day. I'll be frankly amazed if there are ten in total that come anywhere close to our needs, but I'll be happy to be proved wrong.

At least all the schools in the County are very good, so we don't need to worry about catchment areas. Nearly everyone we talk to tells us how great a place this is to raise kids, which is helping to convince us that we're doing the right thing. Makes a change from being told how brave we are, which is what a lot of people back home keep saying (and which just makes me think of Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister).

Had another drive around this afternoon, covering the north-east this time. Very little traffic around and lots of lovely views of the lake.

Permanent Residents

Well we're back in Canada again, and now we're officially immigrants. We 'landed' at Toronto on Saturday 7 April. This was a remarkably straight-forward process. We were off the plane very quickly and got straight to a passport-checking point. The woman there examined our visas and asked "Are you landing today?". She then marked our customs form with pink highlighter pen and red pencil and sent us off to the immigration section. Here all our paperwork was checked. We had to start up the computer at this point as we'd realised on the plane that we didn't have the address where we were going to have our permanent residents' cards sent (my father's fiancée's brother's house). But that was all fine - just had to sign all the paperwork and have new photos taken. Bet they'll look lovely - we'd been travelling for ten hours and were shattered!

Then we were given a bunch of information for new immigrants and sent off to the baggage reclaim section. Our flight's cases turned up about five minutes later, so the whole immigration process was really quick. We had to go through a special customs section with our lists of 'goods accompanied' and 'goods to follow', and that took another fifteen minutes or so, but the woman on the checkpoint was very pleasant and very complimentary about the neatness and completeness of our list of goods to follow.

Picking up our car we found we had to fire up the computer again to get an attachment to our car hire confirmation email printed off. We had nearly left the printer at home, so were very glad we hadn't. The car itself is pretty hideous - a Dodge something or other. We left Toronto at around 7.00pm and drove up the coast to Prince Edward County, arriving at the cottage at 9.00pm. Of course by then it was completely dark (and snowing!), but our hosts were very welcoming; half emptying their fridge so that we'd have something to eat for breakfast the next morning (supermarkets are shut on Easter Sunday here too).


The next morning... that's when we saw the view from the back of the cottage. The children came rushing up to me to tell me that "Lake Ontario is in our back garden!". They've spent ages outside playing at the water's edge already, and the temperature is barely above freezing.

Yesterday we saw a fair bit of the County, often through a fine snow which was being blown about by a biting westerly wind. We had lunch in Trenton and drove along the waterfront to Belleville before coming back across the bridge to potter along the road through Rednersville and then back to Consecon. I watched a movie with the kids while Mike talked to our hosts about our plans and got a few more contacts from them, to do with banks and mortgages. Once the children had gone off to bed we enjoyed our first ever bottle of Prince Edward County wine.

Today we stocked up at the A&P supermarket in Trenton. Got there bright and early at 7.40 (still mostly functioning on UK time), so pretty much had the store to ourselves. I was impressed by the range of food on offer - seemed better than the Safeways we shopped at in Calgary when we were staying there. Except for potatoes - they were obviously waiting for a delivery of those, so we will have to do without them for a few days!

Went back to Picton and Mike talked to a banker while I took the children to the park to play for an hour or so. Horizontal snow at times, but they didn't seem to care! Had a lovely lunch at the café next to the Regent Theatre. Will cook a meal in the cottage tonight, but as this kitchen is better equipped than my own (there's even a parmesan grater, for goodness sake) I don't think it is going to be too much of a challenge.

[Postscript - actually there are two parmesan graters in the kitchen. Oh, and although Canadian road distances are measured in kilometres, their ovens are calibrated in degrees fahrenheit (wondered why the chicken wasn't cooking very fast...). So cooking in this kitchen is harder than I thought. Oh well, at least the kitchen metaphor is holding true!]

Tomorrow we'll get our Social Insurance Numbers and then we've got our first meeting with a realtor, so hope we'll be able to start getting a better idea of the sort of property we might end up buying here. Then it's back to the bank again on Wednesday to open our accounts, get credit cards and so on. Feels like we're achieving quite a lot, considering we've not even been in the country for 48 hours yet!

Next big step

The house is now on the market - had our first potential buyer round today.

I wanted to make some hot cross buns this morning, but then wondered if I should, as the potential buyer might think I was trying the old trick of filling the house with baking smells to help sell it. Went ahead anyway (they were only proving in the oven when she came round, so she probably didn't notice at all).

I've developed a kind of spring-cleaning frenzy and wondered whether I'd hit a new obsessive level when I found myself cleaning the overflow hole on our basin with a cotton bud this morning. Hope the house sells quickly, I'm not sure I can keep this up.

Yew trees

Watched the BBC programme 'The Trees that made Britain' last night, on the subject of yew trees. It follows two tree experts from Kew Gardens on a tour of interesting trees around the UK.

The answer to the question 'Why do we find yew trees close to churches?' turned out to be 'because pagans thought of yew trees as their churches, so the early Christians built their churches next door to them, to tempt the pagans indoors'. What a fantastic piece of marketing. In a wet country like this, people were bound to go for the religion with the indoor venue.

The C word

Today my husband broke the news about our planned departure to his mother. He's down visiting her as his dad is back in hospital and in a bad way. Sounds like she didn't take it too badly, and he's already sorting her out a new passport so that she can come and stay with us.

"I mentioned the C word", he told me.
"What, Christmas?" I replied, rather stupidly.

I had no idea he was going to tell her about it. They've agreed that there's no point in telling his dad, who has maybe two months left of life at best. It's a great relief that Mum knows now, as the children kept mentioning things about being in Canada and nearly giving the whole thing away every time we saw them (we didn't dare tell them not to mention it, as it would be bound to have the opposite effect!). There never seemed to be a good time to tell them, particularly after the cancer diagnosis. I've told quite a lot of other people now, including my boss and immediate colleagues, although I have to say that I haven't put the news on any of the Christmas cards that I wrote this week - it seems better to tell people face-to-face, somehow.

At the parents' evening the other week my daughter's teacher asked us about our plans. She was pleased that we won't be going until next summer, as she didn't want to lose her from her class. She also was confident that she'll settle in well to a new school and a new country, which was reassuring.

Cartæ visæ

Our passports, complete with their visas, arrived back on Saturday. Very exciting, but then you begin to think about all the things that you need to do before you can actually leave the country, and start to panic.

We made a start by clearing a car-load of rubbish from the garage on Sunday afternoon and taking it to the tip. A small start, but as least now I can park in the garage without it being quite such the precision exercise that it has been for the last month or two.

We're getting some mixed reactions from friends and family. Most think we're making a sensible move, but some admit to being in a state of denial (probably because they're not daring to believe it's true...).