Corner of Bourbon & Division

Work is chugging along merrily today. Consistently busy, but not crazy. Shift change is now (the night shift overlaps with the swing shift), so I'm taking the opportunity to update a little bit. I have been closing calls all afternoon and evening (which essentially means that I'm writing up the summary of what happened during an alarm, assigning it a number and putting it in the client's call history). I have done about 200, which accounts for about 60% of the day's calls. Not too shabby.

Had a marvellous weekend. Got up at oh-my-God o'clock on Sunday morning and caught a lift with ulvain, his brother, and our mutual friend Janik all the way to the Godforsaken Howling Wilderness. We grabbed a quick breakfast at Tim Horton's, and spent the time in the car catching up on news, since I hadn't seen any of them since August.

We visited a property in which ulvain and his brother were interested in order to build a hippie commune survivalist compound in the relatively near future. They're looking at properties in the area and in rural Quebec, having both received the shock of their lives a few weeks ago when they found out about the peak oil crisis. I've been thinking about this myself for a while, and I've always wanted to live in the country, but it seems my sense of urgency isn't nearly as developed as theirs. The property was lovely, 119 acres of land, a barn and a small farmhouse, but the buildings were in such a state of disrepair that I doubt the nice lady will get anything close to her asking price. If she knocked $50K off her price, I'd be knocking at the door of my bank asking for a mortgage. As it is, though, it's not really feasible.

Spent the afternoon with fearsclave and his lovely spousal unit. I had a long heart-to-heart with Carolyn (the spousal unit in question) about her work, where she's having some communication issues with her boss, while fearsclave took the others out for a crash course in the Safe Handling and Shooting of Firearms. When they returned we partook of Glogg, which wasn't as strong as last year's (see fearsclave's LJ for the details on what he puts in his Glogg -which is essentially mulled wine) but still very tasty.

While fearsclave went off to buy dinner with ulvain's brother, Janik, ulvain and I remained in the living room, drinking more Glogg and succumbing to fatigue, singing silly songs (including the theme to "Passe-Partout," which was a French-Canadian kids' show we all watched growing up, and many different ABBA tunes). 'Twas much fun.

Carolyn went off to visit her mother while we consumed the pizza and discussed the fate of the world as we know it, and then Janik and I left the boys to their own devices in the living room and had our own heart-to-heart about what's been going on with her in the past few months, sitting happily on fearsclave's kitchen floor.

The day came to an end all too soon, and it was very reluctantly that we all piled into the car to head back into Montreal. I hope that much less time will elapse before my next visit up to the GHW.


( Cleaning update # 27,963,105,410 )

Saw the little man from Paradoxe today, and he and I don't speak the same language in person either, but we managed to get our points across. More to the point, he seems to make everything ten times more complicated than it has to be, and doesn't seem especially organized. However, he promised to have both my estimates ready by the end of the week, so I'm cautiously optimistic.