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...).

Top of the ladder

A letter requesting that we send our passports off to the Canadian High Commission arrived on Saturday. We posted them off today and will expect to get them back, complete with shiny visas, in a few weeks' time. Then we'll have to officially land in the country sometime before the end of August next year. So we've finally got to the front of the long queue (or somewhere near the front, anyway).

The stepladder-top pictured belongs to my father-in-law. I love the way it shows how much painting he's done over his lifetime, in a restrained-Jackson Pollock kind of way.