Say Hello/Goodbye

So we're back in Brighton for two days... It's busy, busy, busy, I've seen many people, so many hellos and goodbyes, a rollercoaster of emotion! Happy/sad/happy/sad!
Fortunately so many friends will be at the wedding we are here for, we can see all of them next weekend!
Still it reminds us what we left behind, but we also see why left!
Ellie's having a brilliant time with her best friend Esme, Thomas is getting on excellently with Hugo (apart from an attempted drowning in the bath incident a few minutes ago..). And this afternoon Ellie got to spend some "quality time" with Edward, still her boyfriend despite the miles between them (you wouldn't think they were four would you? Well Edward is five now)! Pictures will follow when I have a little more time.
My attempt to convince all of my friends to emigrate and live in the same street as us proceeds slowly.

MC to Quebec...

Oh dear, we got a call from MC's mom yesterday - her sister was moved into ICU after suffering some sort of post-birth attack during the night. We were very worried and bundled MC and Thomas onto a plane and off to Quebec during the afternoon. Ellie and I remain in Halifax and were to go to England on our own on Thursday, fortunately Kathleen has made a dramatic recovery and could even be discharged shortly. MC should now return on Wednesday to repack and get back on a plane on Thursday! Ellie has moved into my bed - last night I had about 12 inches of the 6-foot superking bed, Ellie took up the next 12 inches with her toys enjoying a very spacious night in the remaining 4 feet of the bed! LOL. She is such a great girl, today she proclaimed that she would still live with me "even when she's an adult, for ever and ever..." If only! We went to see Wallace and Grommit this afternoon - too wet to do anything else! Great diet of popcorn, sweets and coke, I now have to try to get Ellie to eat some proper food!
Oh, on Friday I had a rather discouraging conversation with the Department of Education when I asked for the requirements to convert my teaching qualification - I was told to get my universities to submit my past marks directly - I went to Uni 16 years ago! Still I emailed them and wait to see what sort of thing they can provide. I was also pointed to a 49 page document describing my new requirements - I'm not going to worry about this anymore until I get back from England! I'm sure it's not as complicated as it sounded on the phone!
Speech writing tonight... Honest.

Time flies...

I don't know where the time has gone this week - since the MG went to Middleton on Tuesday, I can't remember what I've done...
We went to town on Thursday to get some bits to take to the UK with us and failed miserably - we ended up eating in a restaurant (Thomas only creating minor disturbances this time!), then it was off to the "play boat" that Ellie loves on the harbourside, then we came home... hmmm...
Then it was off to Chapter's bookshop where Thomas terrorised another small child briefly.
Friday was housework day, crawling around with the vacuum cleaner, mopping, all that good stuff!
I still haven't written the (best man) speech I have to give on 5th November, but am going to try to knock it out this week.

One nephew becomes three...

So I went to bed with one nephew and got up with three! Olivier and Raphael (spelling to be checked) arrived at 1:30 (EST). Congratulations to Kathleen and Jean-Francois...

Bye-bye MG and hello Digby...

So my MG went off to hibernate for 6 months in a friend's barn about 140km from here and we went on to see Annapolis Royal and Digby afterwards. Essentially, there is very little in either place, but they are very picturesque and Digby has a coffee shop which sells incredible triple chocolate cake and apple strudel coffee cake. Digby is on the bay of Fundy, that big bit of water between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It's famous for its scallops which I've eaten in Halifax and are delicious. The Bay of Fundy is known for having the highest tides in the world, read all about on the Valley Web, we didn't have time to plan tide watching into our day, but apparently it's amazing as the tide appears from nowhere in no time and disappears as quickly... When we collect the MG maybe... So here are today's pics... Ellie in Digby...

Digby harbour...
Thomas in Digby and increasing layers of clothing...
Ellie in Digby again...
Humorous shop name of the day... Yes, that's me filling up the van. Somehow we ended up 230km from home at nearly 6pm, whoops, still as there is no traffic to speak of here, we were still home and eating pizza by 8:45 having completed all of the previously mentioned detours on the way home.We also had a fruitless (for MC) drive through Kingston, where Anne (formerly of Green Gables) went to college in her third outing, Anne of the Island. We couldn't find the old town where her college days were based so we'll be off there again I guess, it's a matter of supreme indifference to me might I add, but as Marie-Claude reminded, I dragged her to Hadfield (aka Royston Vasey from The League of Gentlemen). The Anne tour will kick off for real next year I fear when we head up to PEI (Prince Edward Island) on our hols, I think there is a trail to follow much the same as the LOTR (Lord of the Rings) trail in New Zealand, I know which one I'd rather be on, but then again, I did drag MC to Hadfield... LOL.
Finally we scurried on to Kentville, home of the "pumpkin people", somewhat like the scarecrow festival of Mahone Bay... At this time of year, everyone makes people with pumpkins for heads, unfortunately we got their at dusk (and a dark dusk at that due to the Kingston adventure - this is a developing story, more on it at the end of the post) so I couldn't take pics this year. Personally I'm glad there are some many other things to do with pumpkins other than eat them, they taste disgusting.
Also on the drive-through this time - Windsor the birthplace of Hockey (Ice Hockey if you are in the UK), didn't look round there either... More hockey this week btw, friday night out with other expats at the Dartmouth Destroyers.
Listening to: The Killers, All the Things That I have Done courtesy of 1 FM www.1.fm (the Alternative Rock Mix), my two discoveries of recent days are the aforementioned 1 FM and radio Wazee (www.wazee.org), I prefer Wazee, but it seems to have connection problems tonight.
Anne of Green Gables update: She didn't actually go to college in Kingston, she went to Kingsport which meant we were in the wrong place by about 57km according to GoogleEarth. Oh and by the looks of it, if there's a college there, that's about all!
That's my 100th entry in this blog... Pat on the back for me.

Here is the news: Tuesday...

Today's main stories, not quite the insulation-fest of yesterday, but...
Seems I have to eat my words, there is a crime wave in north Halifax, two people have been shot in the same incident but not fatally (although, I think this makes a total of two people since we arrived in the city). But it seems like "normal" crime to me (if there can be such a thing), not the sick stuff I was accustomed to hearing about before I left the UK.

Here is the news: Monday...

This week I thought I'd give an idea what the news is like over here.... So I'll pick a story or two from the front page of the Herald (the biggest paper here) every day. As far as we can see, nothing happens here, but that appears to be no reason to trot out some tired old rubbish about celebrities...
Today's pick (from the front page remember):
Energy Efficiency: the new hot trend, Donald Dodge (an energy efficiency specialist) is insulating his house. "I've done all my air sealing, my basement's finished . . . so the last step is the attic".
Apart from that there some stuff about reducing fuel tax for the winter, dodgy going's on at the treasury and fisheries department.
This is the sort of news I'd rather read, no one has been murdered, Posh and Becks (I would say "or the Canadian equivalent" but there is no Canadian equivalent... Apart from maybe Celine Dion and her husband?) are nowhere to be seen, neither's Rooney/Colleen, Jordan et al. It's rather nice...

Go Mooseheads!

So we've been to the hockey, notice I no longer call it Ice Hockey! When in England we had Hockey and Ice Hockey, in Canada you get Field Hockey and Hockey. Anyway, it's not the NHL, more a sort of college-age league with players ranging from 16 to 20 years old which acts a feeder for the NHL.
As a sporting spectacle it's somewhat different to "soccer" in England, every games starts with the Canadian national anthem, which is observed and taken seriously by everyone. There is no swearing and certainly group, synchronised, musical swearing (the sort I'm sure was non-stop in the Villa-Bham game today) is unheard of. Good natured booing is about as far it goes. There's music, popcorn, hotdogs, fries etc, just a good couple of hours out for the family. The only violence anywhere in sight is between the testostorone laiden teenagers on the ice. We have a couple of good fights today involving all ten outfield players, one of which resulted in 6 players in the sin bin!
First impression is that we have adopted a particularly dirty team who played for the majority of the match with less men than the opposition due the continual 2 minute penalties incurred by most of our players. On top of this we got a 4 minute one and one guy managed to be binned for 5 minutes after which he was not allowed to take any further part in the game.
It wasn't a great start for as the Halifax Mooseheads lost to the Cape Breton Eagles 1-0. One a better note, Thomas was better behaved than expected apart from one sandwich throwing incident with a chap in the row in front of us... Without further ado, a few pics of proceedings and then I'm retiring to bed with my book (currently, "Be My Enemy" by Christopher Brookmyre).

A very good day...

We've had a busy day today - who am I kidding, we don't even work, how can we have had a busy day? What I should have said is that we had a very longer potter around! This morning we went over to Lawrencetown, the area we thought we'd like to live ultimately and were shown some places by another expat and we LOVED it. Two acre plots with big houses on them, 5 minutes from a couple of big sandy surfing beaches, 15 minutes from the city centre. I think we'll be starting our house or land search proper as soon as we get back from the in November.
After that, lunch in Pizza hut then shopping and the prospect of waterproof, heavy duty winter boots for Ellie and Thomas, naturally Ellie has nice pink ones, totally inappropriate for handing on to Thomas. He got some blue ones which will undoubtedly slow him down a bit for a while as they almost come up to his knees. Finally a dash into the Metro Centre to pick up our first ever Mooseheads tickets for their Sunday afternoon game against Cape Breton.
I keep forgetting to take my camera out with me, I'll do my best for the hockey!

Busy, busy...

It's finally stopped raining so we dashed out to Point Pleasant again for our usual walk and dose of fresh air.
We've been very busy since the last post; this time though, not just shopping! We met up with two other expat couples on Monday and another on Tuesday. Subsequently we've arrange to go to our first hockey game next weekend. Apparently a very family oriented outing with plenty to entertain Ellie and Thomas - we'll see just how entertained Thomas is when we get there!
I've finally completed all our business with the vehicles for this year by getting the caravan MVIed, it feels like a real triumph having all the right bits of paper...
Oh, more good news for me... I got a speeding ticket in the UK a few days before leaving, I paid up but could not submit my licence as I swapped for a canadian one. Well, I heard nothing for ages and was expecting to be arrested at Heathrow in October ;-) but finally West Mercia Police have written to me warning me not to do it again and returning my £60.
Finally for today, my shiny new PR (Permanent Residence) card arrived today, very nice it is too, makes the swish looking visa very ordinary!

It never rains but it pours...

Fortunately this is not a metaphor, it has been raining here for nearly two days without a break but at least the fog has gone now; looks more of the same for tomorrow... What a great Thanksgiving weekend! Good job every day's a holiday for us! We roasted a turkey and had the traditional meal...
We've been in the house three weeks now and it almost sorted now, we finally have time to watch TV after the kids have gone to bed and can you believe they have everything here we watched in the UK? Yes, CSI, Law and Order, Desperate Housewives, Lost etc!!! ;-)
We're trying to catch up with the Soprano's from series one... They are showing episode 59 this week here, we're watching episode 17 as I type so we still some way to go...

Cleaning day...

How novel. We cleaned a house today for the first time in living memory. Anyway it gave me the chance to take some pictures with it more tidy than it every ought to be! So a week after the furniture arrived, this is what it looks like now. It still looks a bit bland as we haven't put pictures up and all the rooms are the same colour. We've got some 3M hooks to stick up at some point then some of the lighter pics can go on the walls.
Upstairs first, our bedroom...
Ellie's room.

And Thomas' place.

And the downstairs...

Naturally, it's no where near this tidy now! We are still waiting for the proper TV cabinet so the coffee table is filling in at the moment! I set up the surround sound thing today - I had to put a microphone where my head would be and then the amp decided how to set itself up with a 10 minute ear shattering array of static. Still I think the THX is quite impressive although I ran out of cable and need a new subwoofer...The kitchen.
The dining room.

Plastic Bags and Recycling...

When I first went grocery shopping here I was horrified to have my stuff packed for me in what seemed like a hundred plastic bags having bought into the reusable bag thing in the UK...
Eggs get a bag of their own as do soft items like bread so that they don't get broken/crushed. Same thing goes for cleaning products, veg, bottles etc.
Later I registered for a bin with HRM (Halifax Regional Municipality) and discovered the lengths this place goes to to recycle. We have a big green bin into which we can put anything organic, garden waste, food (peelings, leftovers, meat, veg, egg shells), used paper towels etc. So that's the green bin, then there are the blue bags, these are for tins, bottles, tetrapak, the (hundreds of) plastic bags, 1PETE and 2HDPE plastic containers. Paper is bagged every week, cardboard is bundled (specifically into 2' by 3' by 8" packages!!!). Infact the list of what is actually thrown away and not recycled is smaller that the recycling stuff.
Of course lots of things are refundable (about 5 cents an item) - glass bottles, plastic bottles, tetrapak and who knows what else. As a land of enterprise, every Tuesday morning a man comes around (before the official recyclers) and take all of the refundable stuff out of our bag and presumably collects the 5 cents for each thing. I look forward to seeing this in the snow!

Roku update...

My Roku has been running for about three days now and MC and I have (on and off) been ripping CDs since then, so far we have copied 1713 tracks and are about half way through our CD collection. This thing is brilliant, it's programmed for internet radio stations and takes play lists from my Media Server. Maybe by the end of the weekend we'll have all of them done. I recommend this thing 100%.

Quiet...

Not much to report today, more shopping, dull stuff though, cutlery, glasses, oh and an expresso cup for my coffee machine... The other day I bought a new oven glove - gripping stuff eh - anyway it's made of rubber (well silicone), it's pretty much indestuctible. So today I bought a new baking tin (also gripping stuff), I have no real use for it, but it is also made of rubber (well silicone) and it can take temperatures up to 300C, 580F, the cooker can't get that hot!
Watching: CSI, Vegas, still the best, we seem to have missed a series during the emigration though and can't work out who is the boss now. As we are on Atlantic time all the US prime time shows are on from 10pm - midnight, there will be late nights I guess.

That'll teach me...

So we left home for the beach and it was hot and sunny, we got to the beach and it was colder and fog was around, still we got an hour and half in but had to abandon the picnic!

A just a quick one...

...we're off to the beach again! even warmer than Monday - we can't believe our luck! Crystal Crescent today again, then maybe Martinique tomorrow that's 5 miles of white sands which is usually deserted as it's nearly an hour from the city! Tropical name, not tropical water, but maybe we'll see about that...
Sadly the unseasonally good weather means that all the turf is too dry so no one is cutting sods at the moment, so no garden for the time being... We'll live.

Techno House...

Gradually I'm getting on top of my new technology (amplifier, HDD/DVDR, Roku). It's getting harder to get these things to work properly, I'm 36 now, reaching that age where I can't always set them up without the manuals and Ellie (4) and Thomas (1) aren't quite old enough to take over these crucial responsibilities. LOL.
Anyway things seem to have moved on somewhat, the old coax connectors have been replaced by optical fibres and they are cool, one link instead of six and awesome sound. I remember ten years ago when I was installing early Local Area Networks thinking how great they were, now I run a radio network in my house, all my CDs are on a PC in the basement which broadcasts the album I want to listen to the Roku. Glorious. Meanwhile my Zen mp3 player syncs the same albums for mobile "enjoyment".
Six more speakers to attach and then we can see how the THX stuff works.
Needless to say, there will be no Techno on my Roku, or House for that matter!
Goodnight folks.
Currently watching: Soprano's Season #1, we missed it in the UK and as the local video library rents box sets so we can indoctrinate ourselves well and truly into the odd decent bit of TV over here. For someone with all the Goodfellas and all of the Godfather DVDs this had to be a winner for me!

Victory is ours...

On our fifth visit to the DMV (Dept of Motor Vehicles) we finally had all the various bits of paper, card, ID, stamps and stickers to complete all of our outstanding business with them! The MG is registered, the Dodge's registration has been transferred to Nova Scotia and has new plate, a bonus, our cars now have sequential plates, 853 and 854 (can't remember the letters though). We also have our official Nova Scotia driving licences having exchanged the Ontarian ones which came in the post yesterday. I feel like this has taken more energy and caused more stress than the whole immigration process!

Crystal Crescent...

Well, remarkably (apparently) it's still in the low 20s here on 3rd October which is unheard of in these parts. Still not to miss the opportunity, after collecting Ellie from school we headed to Crystal Crescent, a provincial park of beaches about 25 minutes south of us. Big surprise when we got there - beautiful white sands, (icy) blue water, trees (obviously!), granite rocks, walking trails... We'll be spending plenty of there next summer, infact we'll be going there again tomorrow if the forecast is right.

Four weeks...

So we've been here four weeks - it seems much longer though! Finally things are getting back to normal now, there are still a few boxes to unpack and the house is still a mess, but we have done well since moving in I think. I have not missed anything from the UK since arriving here (apart from my parents obviously but that goes without saying really). "Embrace change" the Dalai Llama says, he's right.
The Britsh Expats forum has lots of people alternately praising and moaning about Canada. "Oooh, the bacon's rubbish here", "Walmart/Zellers sells terrible clothes" and so on... Well, IMO, the bacon's not rubbish, it's different, Walmart and Zeller do indeed sell some peculiar clothes, fortunately buying them is not compulsory ;-) These shops actually sell EVERYTHING and you can lots of great stuff there. They are not my cup of tea, but I do end up in them all the time at the moment as I know I will save money there... I'm prattling now so I'll stop.
For myself, I am adjusting to the canadian way of life quite well I think. I have said "aboot" (canadian pronunciation for about) twice already without thinking about it, but most importantly of all - I drove from Zellers to Sears At Home - these shops are next to each other...
The weirdest thing to get used here compared to the UK is the overwhelming majority of people follow the laws of the country and I mean all of them, from speed limits to waiting for the white man for crossing the road. I spend a fair amount of time wandering if I'm breaking some odd little by-law (and there are plenty of them) and what will happen when I caught!!

"Idiot stuck on rock at Peggy's Cove"

Just an excuse for one more look until next visit! It was rather further down that I expected after clambering up there.

Peggy's Cove V...

Words would spoil this picture...
Look at them all... trouble!
Finally, sensible arrives...
MC, Ellie and Thomas with Gareth...


On and on...

Peggy's Cove IV...

Can't get enough of Peggy's Cove... Not much too add, just more skillfully taken pictures hiding the fact that there were loads of people around.

Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, Peggy's again...

Squashed a lot into today - one of my best friends, Gareth, is bravely visiting at the moment and living amongst the boxes with us. We've known each other for twenty years having met in the GCSE English retake classroom at King Edward VI sixth form college in Stourbridge. Anyway he came over from Montreal for a few days (a little 20 hours train journey).
LOL, so today we went to Lunenburg a little town about 100km south of here and then stopped at the Mahone Bay and the 'Mahone Bay Scarecrow Festival'. I thought it would be a few stuffed shirts... obviously it was a little more than that...
We're off to see the wizard...
Not sure who this pair are...
Dora the Explorer the... scarecrow...
Hogwart's crows...
And Einstein...
So missing here are the terracota pot scares, the Rolling Stones (times 2), Ray Charles, the Royal family (inc. the newly accepted Camilla scarecrow - obviously I could take plenty of cheap shots here, but I won't because I actually like her). Next Peggy's Cove IV...