Friday, April 08, 2005
Aaand, we're back.
Having arrived back home on Wednesday evening, I am finding it difficult to get time here at work to write about my adventures over the week we were in Quebec. So I’m making time. I am taking valuable time out when I should be making calls to utility companies, developers and contractors and unit owners, to write this blog. Appreciate it, y’all.
Last Wednesday, we embarked on our travels. We got up at the ungodly hour of 4a, got ourselves together, fed all the animals and told them to be good, and made our way to the airport, via my parents’ house. We are not people who take cabs to the airport like the rest of you. No, that is not for us. Instead, we drove the Jeep to my parents’ place, where we transferred to my mother’s minivan, and were chauffered to the airport. We made our flight.
Usually, and not that I travel all that much by air, I sleep on the airplane. I find it extremely difficult to stay awake under the lulling effects of the engines’ dull roar and the pressurized air. In fact, typically, as soon as I get on the plane, I close my eyes, and when I open them, I’m in a new city. It’s great!
However, on this particular flight, we were seated directly behind two small unruly children, both boys. Their mother, after shepherding them through takeoff in what can only be described as an irresponsible manner, traded seats with her equally inept husband and went to sleep. Ostensibly used to being exposed to the little demons’ incessant screaming and yelling. I found myself completely unable to sleep. I was forced to read my book and glare at the row in front of me. At times, I had to hold myself back from whacking my book across the head of the deficient husband when he not only endorsed the yelling, but gave the demons a noisy electronic game to play. The parents in this case were entirely to blame. They were without a doubt BAD parents. I could go off on how it’s unreasonable in our society that you need a license to drive, a license to get a dog, but not to have a child. Or many children. Many children who will grow up to be serial killers or perhaps politicians.
When the flight was mercifully over, we collected our bags and obtained a rental car (at a good discount!) and set off to the townships. We did have to stop for lunch, however, and Rob had been told he had to experience Poulet St. Hubert, Quebec’s answer to Swiss Chalet. Rotisserie chicken. After that brief interlude, we were back on the road and we made it in to Magog at around 5p, where we shopped for groceries.
I will elaborate as to why we needed to get groceries. It’s not that my grandmother is a bad cook. Neither is my mother. However, if I’m going to either of their houses, I need to bring my own food. They are vegetable-lovers, and cookers of expired foods, so if you want to eat well, you have to pack-in fresh goods. It’s the only way. Also, the meals on the menu for the stay would have been good old home country fare, from back in the day before you had modern markets with pre-packaged foods and fresh bread, like pot roast (using possibly expired meats), cooked vegetables (carrots and broccoli that disintegrate at the touch of a fork), moist hams, etc. And truly, it’s not that I’m knocking that sort of thing, I just can’t personally stand to put a forkful of that sort of thing in my mouth, chew it and swallow. The process fails somewhere short of swallowing. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
So, fully loaded with groceries for the rest of the week, we made our way to the farm (about 20 minutes further into the countryside), where we were met with a fully-cooked dinner (the aforementioned roast of some sort of unidentifiable beef, which tasted alright, but I was already stuffed from eating lunch at 2:30p).
We were informed that a raccoon had been in the shed the night before and had gotten into some pies. The farmhouse was constructed with a shed to the side and rear of the house, and the back door of the house leads into the shed, which then has a door to the exterior along with a wood pile for stocking the wood stove. In the shed, there are two extremely large freezers that probably weigh more than my Tiny Car empty, and probably weigh more than the Buick when full. They are always, always full. There are probably things in those freezers older than I am.
My grandmother has always been a dog person. So much so that she has professed to hating cats most of her life. I know, I know, I’m not sure how that could be. But you’ll be glad to hear that has changed. The barn cat had kittens last year, and on a previous visit, my mother worked at domesticating them, and that seems to have worked to an extent. They come into the shed to eat, and one of them even comes into the house to be petted and played-with. They are extremely cute and furry, one is a tabby sort, and the other is a tortoiseshell that Rob says looks like a wookie with all that fur. The tabby is Charlie, and the wookie is Felix. They were recently spayed (trapped and taken to the Frontier Animal Society to be spayed for free), and Felix remembers the incident clearly and is distrustful of strangers, which makes her all the more attractive and interesting to Rob, who just wanted to see her up close all week. Charlie is friendly and came into the house a lot for food and games all week. My grandmother loves these cats.
However, in order for them to get into the shed at all times and gain access to their food, she leaves the shed door propped open with a little wooden wedge. This, of course, is not at all selective about what gets allowed in, so the raccoons were able to get in as well, and if you’re not too familiar with raccoons, they’re cute, but extraordinarily mischievous and can cause a lot of trouble with their little hands and opposable thumbs.
The first evening was short, we were tired, and went to bed early.
The next morning, however, the birds were singing, the sun was shining and we got up to venture outside. After a breakfast. A hearty breakfast. I’m immune to breakfasts because they mostly contain a lot of fruits or fibres, both of which are not on my list of foods to eat, so I just get a breakfast shake. Rob, on the other had, had porridge. And toast. And fruit. And juice. And coffee. After that, we went outside to walk around the buildings, see the farm and maybe wander up to the forest North of the pastures.
We made our way over to the greenhouse to start our tour. Halfway there, I yelled “SKUNK!” because there was, get this, a skunk. Just ambling along. Not all that concerned with our presence. We followed him at a distance, and saw him go underneath a pile of wood and corrugated metal that has been there for years. We could not get him to come back out, not even with me jumping on the pile of stuff. After a while, we grew disinterested and started exploring the buildings.
We went into the barn – a big old three-story structure, that housed cattle in the bottom back in the day, hay and a chicken coop on the main floor, and above all that, there was a ramp up to the upper story so you could unload the haywagons (when everything used to be in use). The barn is now home to a lot of old furniture and stuff people kind of want to keep, but not at their own residences.
We went into the old toolshed, where Rob looked at the tools, and the machine shed, where we looked at the machines. We walked over to the henhouse, which used to be two stories, but since the top floor has collapsed down onto the bottom one, it is only one story. The collapse was quite spectacular, as I understand it, with the supporting walls just giving right out and the top compressing them neatly down, so it looks like it was created as a single-story structure. Everything inside the top floor seems intact, right down to the places where the hens used to nest and lay eggs. This is where the cats live, mainly. There are usually three or four cats around, and with the addition of Charlie and Felix, there should be about five or six, but we never saw the black tomcat, or the other gray cat, and we only saw the mother coon-cat on the second-last day of our visit. It’s spring, so presumably the males could be out carousing, but you never know. There are lots of wild critters around that could eat cats. And we did find the body of a cat, probably one of the older gray cats that had lived on the farm for years.
Sloughing off that tragic find, we ventured out farther and farther. Spring had just come, and the fields were still covered with snow. It was a nice day, though, so we didn’t care – we just trudged our way through them across the brook on a little bridge and up to the forest. It was wild and cool in the forest, and we saw raspberry canes and fallen trees. It sounds ridiculous, but that forest is alive.
Back to the farmhouse for lunch, where we saw the skunk again. He seemed unconcerned we were there and trundled off over a hill. We lunched and went into Magog so my grandmother could nap. She’s nearly 93, so she needs the afternoon naps to stay sharp for dinner. In Magog, we wandered and shopped a little and found ourselves a little bar where we could have a beer and relax and talk. It’s so comfortable being there. I mean, it’s not that I’m not comfortable here with Rob – I am – it’s just that the whole place out there really feels like home, and I really feel like a kid when I’m out there.
Dinner that evening was pretty good – we cooked, although my grandmother couldn’t resist adding in some scalloped potatoes to accompany my chicken and pasta meal (they’re good, but they don’t necessarily go together). And after dinner, we opened the shed door to see if Charlie wanted to come in to visit us, and sure enough, there was a skunk out there, probably the same one we had seen several times throughout the day, eating the cat food. SKUNK!! IN THE SHED!! We hoped he’d just leave (I “shoo”ed at him a bit), but I guess he came back overnight and camped-out under the house. The smell of skunk was so strong in the house, we decided we’d have to get the live trap from my uncle and try to catch him. This probably would have worked, but there were some complicating factors.
The first day we set the trap out, we caught Felix. My grandmother let her go, though, while we were out and about, so Rob missed seeing her up close. Then, that evening, we caught Charlie. Man, she was not happy about that. We set it back out that evening and before bedtime, we caught a raccoon.
The raccoon was small, and his mask hadn’t fully formed, so maybe he was a juvenile. Rob had never seen a raccoon up close, and I have to admit I don’t think I’d seen one alive that close either, and man, those things are cute. Little pointy noses with lots of whiskers, and little hands and lots of fur. We took him down the road about a mile or so, and let him go. We documented the entire affair with pictures, and as he escaped to relative freedom, he made a quick break into the darkness of the forest. We trained our flashlight on him, and Sploosh! He fell right into a little stream, probably entirely unexpected, then dragged himself up onto the bank and out of sight.
We got back to the house, and could hear coyotes up in the back woods. Coyotes are an eerie sound – they sound like insane people screaming. It was eerie, and dark and I wanted to go back inside because it had started to rain. Rob said to me “Why don’t you meet me around back of the house? You go that way, and I’ll go around this way to set the trap.” I just looked at him. I mean, had he never seen a horror movie in his life before? I don’t watch them that much, and even I know better than that. As soon as he realized what he’d said, he laughed at me. We stood in the rain and the dark and laughed about how silly we are.
Well, that’s it for now – I really have to get some work done before I leave for the day (it’s Friday, come on. I’ll be out of here by noon). I’ll have to tell you about the rest of the trip next time. Until then, watch out for skunks and raccoons…
Last Wednesday, we embarked on our travels. We got up at the ungodly hour of 4a, got ourselves together, fed all the animals and told them to be good, and made our way to the airport, via my parents’ house. We are not people who take cabs to the airport like the rest of you. No, that is not for us. Instead, we drove the Jeep to my parents’ place, where we transferred to my mother’s minivan, and were chauffered to the airport. We made our flight.
Usually, and not that I travel all that much by air, I sleep on the airplane. I find it extremely difficult to stay awake under the lulling effects of the engines’ dull roar and the pressurized air. In fact, typically, as soon as I get on the plane, I close my eyes, and when I open them, I’m in a new city. It’s great!
However, on this particular flight, we were seated directly behind two small unruly children, both boys. Their mother, after shepherding them through takeoff in what can only be described as an irresponsible manner, traded seats with her equally inept husband and went to sleep. Ostensibly used to being exposed to the little demons’ incessant screaming and yelling. I found myself completely unable to sleep. I was forced to read my book and glare at the row in front of me. At times, I had to hold myself back from whacking my book across the head of the deficient husband when he not only endorsed the yelling, but gave the demons a noisy electronic game to play. The parents in this case were entirely to blame. They were without a doubt BAD parents. I could go off on how it’s unreasonable in our society that you need a license to drive, a license to get a dog, but not to have a child. Or many children. Many children who will grow up to be serial killers or perhaps politicians.
When the flight was mercifully over, we collected our bags and obtained a rental car (at a good discount!) and set off to the townships. We did have to stop for lunch, however, and Rob had been told he had to experience Poulet St. Hubert, Quebec’s answer to Swiss Chalet. Rotisserie chicken. After that brief interlude, we were back on the road and we made it in to Magog at around 5p, where we shopped for groceries.
I will elaborate as to why we needed to get groceries. It’s not that my grandmother is a bad cook. Neither is my mother. However, if I’m going to either of their houses, I need to bring my own food. They are vegetable-lovers, and cookers of expired foods, so if you want to eat well, you have to pack-in fresh goods. It’s the only way. Also, the meals on the menu for the stay would have been good old home country fare, from back in the day before you had modern markets with pre-packaged foods and fresh bread, like pot roast (using possibly expired meats), cooked vegetables (carrots and broccoli that disintegrate at the touch of a fork), moist hams, etc. And truly, it’s not that I’m knocking that sort of thing, I just can’t personally stand to put a forkful of that sort of thing in my mouth, chew it and swallow. The process fails somewhere short of swallowing. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
So, fully loaded with groceries for the rest of the week, we made our way to the farm (about 20 minutes further into the countryside), where we were met with a fully-cooked dinner (the aforementioned roast of some sort of unidentifiable beef, which tasted alright, but I was already stuffed from eating lunch at 2:30p).
We were informed that a raccoon had been in the shed the night before and had gotten into some pies. The farmhouse was constructed with a shed to the side and rear of the house, and the back door of the house leads into the shed, which then has a door to the exterior along with a wood pile for stocking the wood stove. In the shed, there are two extremely large freezers that probably weigh more than my Tiny Car empty, and probably weigh more than the Buick when full. They are always, always full. There are probably things in those freezers older than I am.
My grandmother has always been a dog person. So much so that she has professed to hating cats most of her life. I know, I know, I’m not sure how that could be. But you’ll be glad to hear that has changed. The barn cat had kittens last year, and on a previous visit, my mother worked at domesticating them, and that seems to have worked to an extent. They come into the shed to eat, and one of them even comes into the house to be petted and played-with. They are extremely cute and furry, one is a tabby sort, and the other is a tortoiseshell that Rob says looks like a wookie with all that fur. The tabby is Charlie, and the wookie is Felix. They were recently spayed (trapped and taken to the Frontier Animal Society to be spayed for free), and Felix remembers the incident clearly and is distrustful of strangers, which makes her all the more attractive and interesting to Rob, who just wanted to see her up close all week. Charlie is friendly and came into the house a lot for food and games all week. My grandmother loves these cats.
However, in order for them to get into the shed at all times and gain access to their food, she leaves the shed door propped open with a little wooden wedge. This, of course, is not at all selective about what gets allowed in, so the raccoons were able to get in as well, and if you’re not too familiar with raccoons, they’re cute, but extraordinarily mischievous and can cause a lot of trouble with their little hands and opposable thumbs.
The first evening was short, we were tired, and went to bed early.
The next morning, however, the birds were singing, the sun was shining and we got up to venture outside. After a breakfast. A hearty breakfast. I’m immune to breakfasts because they mostly contain a lot of fruits or fibres, both of which are not on my list of foods to eat, so I just get a breakfast shake. Rob, on the other had, had porridge. And toast. And fruit. And juice. And coffee. After that, we went outside to walk around the buildings, see the farm and maybe wander up to the forest North of the pastures.
We made our way over to the greenhouse to start our tour. Halfway there, I yelled “SKUNK!” because there was, get this, a skunk. Just ambling along. Not all that concerned with our presence. We followed him at a distance, and saw him go underneath a pile of wood and corrugated metal that has been there for years. We could not get him to come back out, not even with me jumping on the pile of stuff. After a while, we grew disinterested and started exploring the buildings.
We went into the barn – a big old three-story structure, that housed cattle in the bottom back in the day, hay and a chicken coop on the main floor, and above all that, there was a ramp up to the upper story so you could unload the haywagons (when everything used to be in use). The barn is now home to a lot of old furniture and stuff people kind of want to keep, but not at their own residences.
We went into the old toolshed, where Rob looked at the tools, and the machine shed, where we looked at the machines. We walked over to the henhouse, which used to be two stories, but since the top floor has collapsed down onto the bottom one, it is only one story. The collapse was quite spectacular, as I understand it, with the supporting walls just giving right out and the top compressing them neatly down, so it looks like it was created as a single-story structure. Everything inside the top floor seems intact, right down to the places where the hens used to nest and lay eggs. This is where the cats live, mainly. There are usually three or four cats around, and with the addition of Charlie and Felix, there should be about five or six, but we never saw the black tomcat, or the other gray cat, and we only saw the mother coon-cat on the second-last day of our visit. It’s spring, so presumably the males could be out carousing, but you never know. There are lots of wild critters around that could eat cats. And we did find the body of a cat, probably one of the older gray cats that had lived on the farm for years.
Sloughing off that tragic find, we ventured out farther and farther. Spring had just come, and the fields were still covered with snow. It was a nice day, though, so we didn’t care – we just trudged our way through them across the brook on a little bridge and up to the forest. It was wild and cool in the forest, and we saw raspberry canes and fallen trees. It sounds ridiculous, but that forest is alive.
Back to the farmhouse for lunch, where we saw the skunk again. He seemed unconcerned we were there and trundled off over a hill. We lunched and went into Magog so my grandmother could nap. She’s nearly 93, so she needs the afternoon naps to stay sharp for dinner. In Magog, we wandered and shopped a little and found ourselves a little bar where we could have a beer and relax and talk. It’s so comfortable being there. I mean, it’s not that I’m not comfortable here with Rob – I am – it’s just that the whole place out there really feels like home, and I really feel like a kid when I’m out there.
Dinner that evening was pretty good – we cooked, although my grandmother couldn’t resist adding in some scalloped potatoes to accompany my chicken and pasta meal (they’re good, but they don’t necessarily go together). And after dinner, we opened the shed door to see if Charlie wanted to come in to visit us, and sure enough, there was a skunk out there, probably the same one we had seen several times throughout the day, eating the cat food. SKUNK!! IN THE SHED!! We hoped he’d just leave (I “shoo”ed at him a bit), but I guess he came back overnight and camped-out under the house. The smell of skunk was so strong in the house, we decided we’d have to get the live trap from my uncle and try to catch him. This probably would have worked, but there were some complicating factors.
The first day we set the trap out, we caught Felix. My grandmother let her go, though, while we were out and about, so Rob missed seeing her up close. Then, that evening, we caught Charlie. Man, she was not happy about that. We set it back out that evening and before bedtime, we caught a raccoon.
The raccoon was small, and his mask hadn’t fully formed, so maybe he was a juvenile. Rob had never seen a raccoon up close, and I have to admit I don’t think I’d seen one alive that close either, and man, those things are cute. Little pointy noses with lots of whiskers, and little hands and lots of fur. We took him down the road about a mile or so, and let him go. We documented the entire affair with pictures, and as he escaped to relative freedom, he made a quick break into the darkness of the forest. We trained our flashlight on him, and Sploosh! He fell right into a little stream, probably entirely unexpected, then dragged himself up onto the bank and out of sight.
We got back to the house, and could hear coyotes up in the back woods. Coyotes are an eerie sound – they sound like insane people screaming. It was eerie, and dark and I wanted to go back inside because it had started to rain. Rob said to me “Why don’t you meet me around back of the house? You go that way, and I’ll go around this way to set the trap.” I just looked at him. I mean, had he never seen a horror movie in his life before? I don’t watch them that much, and even I know better than that. As soon as he realized what he’d said, he laughed at me. We stood in the rain and the dark and laughed about how silly we are.
Well, that’s it for now – I really have to get some work done before I leave for the day (it’s Friday, come on. I’ll be out of here by noon). I’ll have to tell you about the rest of the trip next time. Until then, watch out for skunks and raccoons…
