Winter is coming - 12:22, Monday 1 September 2008 |
| The furnace was on today for the first time in months, so that can only mean one thing! Which actually isn't too surprising as when we moved in just under a year ago I was huddling around an electric heater in the kitchen because they forgot to connect the gas up that day. I've also been getting on with the pre-winter DIY that we hadn't got around to yet, like improving the seal around the front door where we were getting a bit of a draft last year. |
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One year - 07:21, Monday 4 August 2008 |
| Well, I've been in Canada for a year now, aside from a few days back in England recently clearing out some of the junk in my parents' house and meeting up with some friends. Though it was one day less than expected because the Air Canada plane wasn't working and most of the passengers got transferred to flights the next day; at least they paid for a hotel and food, so it wasn't a total loss. I also managed to sort out the other window well over the holiday weekend, and paint the bits around the garage door, and a bunch of other things we'd been putting off since we moved in! |
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Security Clearance #3 - 12:28, Wednesday 16 July 2008 |
| Finally came through after about six months; although it's a Secret clearance, as expected I'm not cleared for 'Canadian Eyes Only' material due to not being a citizen. But it does show that only being a resident and not a citizen isn't an impediment to a clearance if the employer wants to do it and can live with restrictions. |
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Windows - 11:37, Sunday 13 July 2008 |
| When we moved into this house, the previous owners said that one day when there was heavy rain they'd had a leak from a basement window after the window well filled up; the window is roughly at ground level, so the builder put a well around it that sticks up a few inches above the ground to keep surface water away. Problem is that being cheap, all the builder did inside the well was leave the dirt level with the windowsill and throw a bit of gravel on top. From what I've been able to find out, there's supposed to be a six inch gap below the window, and then at least six inches of gravel below that, preferably with a drain tube at the bottom going down to the drains around the basement. So I've spent most of the afternoon digging out the dirt and throwing a couple of hundred kilos of gravel into the hole; we still don't have a proper drain from the well, but we don't often get really heavy rain here and water sprayed on top vanishes into the gravel and will eventually drain away from the bottom through the soil. I figure that if we get a foot of water in the window well, we'll probably have worse things to worry about! Of course this does mean that in a while I have to do the one on the other side of the house too... |
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Check Engine... - 01:25, Friday 11 July 2008 |
| So anyway, a few days ago I was driving my girlfriend's car and the 'check engine' light came on. Given it's been a bit unreliable at times, I stopped off at Canadian Tire and picked up a code reader to find out what the computer was complaining about; plugged it into the socket by the brake pedal, and out came a 440 error code. Looking that up on the web, I discovered that a 440 code in a GM vehicle means about 80% of the time that that petrol cap is loose. And lo, it was so; the guy who filled the car with petrol at the weekend can't have put it on right. So a quick tighten of the petrol cap and a reset of the error codes in the computer and the light went away and hasn't come back. Just thought I'd mention that as taking the car to the garage and paying $100 for them to tighten the petrol cap and turn off the light would have been a bit embarrassing and maybe knowing this will save someone else a few bucks :). I guess this is another example of GM's great vehicle design in North America... |
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Storms - 01:10, Wednesday 2 July 2008 |
We've had a bunch of storms lately, probably due to the hot weather we've been having for the last couple of weeks. Here's the sky as it was a couple of days ago:   And here's the thunderstorm that arrived soon after. Not as big as the one we had last week, but still quite noticeable :).   |
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Photos - 02:01, Saturday 21 June 2008 |
Hambo the hamster was going psycho chewing the bars of his cage, so while he's running around the house in his plastic ball to burn off some excess energy I thought I might as well upload some photos from my travels over the last twenty years; they'll mostly not be from Canada and almost entirely not from Saskatchewan!   My Photo Gallery |
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Painting - 01:09, Saturday 21 June 2008 |
| I'm on painting duty this weekend while my girlfriend is away; one of the bedrooms in the house came in 'Barbie Hell' pink and we've been meaning to repaint it but she didn't want to be around when I did it in case she had an allergic reaction to the paints. I think I underestimated the amount of time this takes, it's midnight and I've spent most of the evening patching up the dents and holes in the wall, cleaning off some of the pencil and crayon marks (it's amazing how much of a mess a little girl could make in the two years she lived here before we bought it) and sticking masking tape around everything that needs to stay the color it is. Looks like I'll be at this all weekend! |
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Crime - 12:58, Thursday 19 June 2008 |
| At least we don't have to worry much about crime around here; back where I lived in Surrey there was a lot of petty crime, we'd sometimes get people breaking into the office where I worked and the local chavs would set parked cars on fire in nearby residential streets for a bit of a laugh. Saskatchewan theoretically has a higher crime rate than Surrey, but around here the only crimes we've had are people stealing building supplies -- which the builders leave lying around in the open all night -- and once case of kids spraying graffiti on a sign a few months back. Most of the houses in our area have remotely-monitored security systems which 'phone home' if there's a burglary, fire, flood, etc (or, at least, most have signs outside the front door saying they do). In our case it costs about $30 a month for monitoring, but there's a discount of about $20 a month on the house insurance for having it, so after the installation it's practically free... and ours came with the house, so we didn't even need to pay for it to be installed. |
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Warm - 10:26, Wednesday 18 June 2008 |
After the freezing winter we've had a few weeks of OK temperatures and a few days of rain, and now it's starting to get hot; I'm glad I have a car on loan at the moment so I can travel to work with air conditioning, but the hamster is spending the days in the basement so he doesn't fry! Though he prefers playing in the hole he dug in the back yard. |
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Five months - 08:56, Friday 6 June 2008 |
| Well, I've been working for five months now and haven't been sacked yet :). Still no sign of my security clearance though. |
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Camera - 12:19, Monday 26 May 2008 |
| Just bought myself a digital camera, so I might actually be able to post some decent pictures soon :). Weather still can't figure out what it's doing; we've had 20+C days most of the last week, and now we have a frost warning tonight. Also, about half the population of Saskatoon seem to be suffering from some annoying cough/flu thing right now! |
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Not from the flat part - 11:15, Thursday 15 May 2008 |
| While I was tidying up my PC, I came across some old images from a trip to the Rockies a few years ago and thought I might as well include a few to contrast with the never-ending flatness of Saskatchewan :). These are actually stills from my old (non-HDTV) camcorder, so the resolution isn't great, but they're still rather bumpier landscapes than I've seen in quite a while.      BTW, the weather is now finally warm enough that I'm going to stop wearing my big fat winter coat to and from work :). |
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Weather #2 - 09:13, Tuesday 22 April 2008 |
| The worst of the storm missed us, but we still have blowing snow with 50+ km/h winds this morning; I'm glad it's only -7 and not -37! |
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Weather - 11:15, Sunday 20 April 2008 |
Well, the 40cm of snow this weekend turned out to be less than 10cm then 5C weather with rain and now below freezing tomorrow to ice everything up. Hopefully I can get from the house to the bus stop to go to work in the morning! The image was taken around 1AM with my camcorder in 'night vision' mode, so you can't really see much other than the snow stuck to the window :). |
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Snowy nights - 01:49, Saturday 19 April 2008 |
| After the warm weather last weekend, we've now had about three inches of snow in one night, just to remind us that it's not summer yet :). The forecast is up to 40cm of snow by Monday, though they're now predicting that the worst of the storm is going to miss us and stay more on the West side of the province. |
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Credit #2 - 07:55, Tuesday 15 April 2008 |
| Oh, Amex finally got around to giving me a Canadian card based on my UK credit record, so I now have something that I can use to buy more than the week's groceries or a couple of DVDs. Of course it would all have been a lot easier if they'd just given me the card back in December, when I first asked for it! |
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Sunny days - 05:57, Sunday 13 April 2008 |
| Well, we actually sat out in the garden today; after sub-zero temperatures some days in the last couple of weeks, this afternoon it was up to 20C and most of the snow has gone. The garden was a bit of a swamp for a couple of days, but even most of that has evaporated; given the amount of snow around the place I was surprised that it disappeared so fast and left so little behind. |
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Housing bubble #2 - 01:11, Tuesday 8 April 2008 |
| House prices here seem to go ever higher; the asking price for a house like ours appears to have risen about $15,000 since the last time I posted about it, though I've no idea whether they're actually getting that much. I guess it's still a good deal by British standards, but crazy by Saskatoon standards... quite a few people have moved here precisely because it was a cheap place to live, and it certainly isn't anymore. |
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Credit - 01:11, Wednesday 26 March 2008 |
| After the hassle with Amex refusing to transfer my British cards to Canada, I did get a PC Financial card recently, though the credit limit is a small fraction of the amount I have in my savings account with them! I suppose one downside of an Internet-only bank (OK, they have pavilions in their stores, but they're basically just sales staff and can't handle credit applications themselves) is that you can't take a UK credit report in to badger them into giving you a decent limit. Not that I really need a lot, but enough to pay for a return air ticket to Britain would be good! |
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