Summer's end draws near

Not much new to report around here... the band rehearsal went pretty well; the police did not pay us a visit, but I am investigating how to muffle the sound of a kick drum, as it is incredibly loud.  It seems clear to me that we need to contact a specialist in acoustical insulation as part of our renovation plans.

Maggie had her first day with students yesterday, and all went pretty well.  We welcomed her home with my famous Montreal Bagels!  I made six with sesame seeds, and six with homemade za'atar spice.  This worked really well, so I'll be sure to do that again.  (If you need the recipe for the bagels (they're dead easy) just send me an email.)

As I wrote last time, I pulled a muscle in my lower back loading plants onto the trailer, so I've had to take it easy since then.  The boys have finished planting the rest of the currants and raspberries and rhubarb, and the bay laurel.  The garden is looking good and I'm happy about having it.  Interestingly we seem to be on a migratory route for geese, as they regularly fly over the house in formation at a fairly low altitude, so there is likely some sort of pond or water source nearby.  It's a nice feeling to be sitting outside in the evening, listening to the carillon of the Church of St. John the Baptist ringing out, and hearing the geese honk as they pass over.  Where I grew up in Belleville it was much the same, although instead of the carillon we usually heard the bagpipes being played by the Davis boys down the street, or it was the sound of the train whistle from the railyards a kilometer or so away.

currants and raspberries

This morning Malcolm and I went in to do some final sanding and lacquering work on the guitars and necks, but the three coats weren't quite ready to be sanded or buffed; they need another couple of days to cure.  So we brought everything home and hung it up here to solidify completely.

Ben and Sophie are coming for dinner on Monday, so he will come a little bit earlier and we can do some delicate sanding then, to prepare the guitars for a final "flash" coat of lacquer.  Then another couple of days to really cure the lacquer, and then assembly later next week (I hope).  We have almost every part required to assemble them; I am only missing the pickguard for my telecaster, but am ordering that today.

A few small things have just come in for September... I received an invitation to sing at another Canada 150 reception, this time in Luxembourg, at the end of September... I will have to add Luxemburgish to my list of languages, I guess!  As well, my friend the classical guitarist Ayman Jarjour has invited me to perform something with him at a concert in late September.  He's a wonderful musician; here is an interview from 2010.  I'm very interested to pull out some Bach and Schumann and Schubert pieces for voice and classical guitar that I've had in my library for years, but never have performed before...

Back to work for Maggie

Maggie went back to work on Monday for a few days of preparation in advance of the return of students.  There are a lot of big changes going on at St. John's International School: the school was founded but an order of nuns, the Faithful Companions of Jesus, but was sold last year to an international independent schools group.  This has already brought some changes but more are certainly on the way, and as Maggie holds several positions of additional responsibility she will have a lot to keep her busy over the coming year, along with her normal roles of teaching a new crop of History/Geography sixth-graders.  As well she is planning another week-long sailing trip to Bretagne in the second week of September, and with all of the scheduling changes it's being a bit difficult to get sufficient staff to accompany her.  I would go along with the class again this year but the trip will happen during the resumption of school for both Malcolm and Duncan, with all the attendant stresses and uncertainties, one parent needs to be here.

Duncan passed everything, so he doesn't need to start class until the 3rd or 4th of September, but Malcolm will need to go to Boom on Friday September 1st to pick up his schedule and his books, and then his full-day classes will begin on Monday the 4th September.  We still haven't found him permanent housing yet, but will have him stay in a short-term furnished room/apartment closer to Antwerp until he meets some students who might want to apartment-share.  Duncan is going to continue at Jean Absil for now, and that means taking a bus from Wavre every morning at 7:17.  It should be manageable for him to commute; we'll see how it goes.  He's had a couple of sleep-overs with his friend Arthur, and yesterday he went along with Arthur's family to Walibi, the amusement park in Wavre.  It's like living only 3 km away from Canada's Wonderland, so maybe Duncan can save his pennies and buy a season pass next year.

We've done quite a bit of entertaining so far in the new house.  We had our Canadian friends Brian and Leanne and their two kids, stopping in while in the midst of a big European tour; then we had Bryan and Kiana and their kids come by for a drink and dinner prior to their departure for the south of France; then this past weekend an old friend from Canada, Phillip Addis, dropped by for dinner and stayed over.  Phil is a fellow Canadian baritone whom I met at Queen's, where we both studied singing with Bruce.  He's singing Pelleas in Pelleas and Melisande at the Ruhr Triennale in Bochum, Germany, and had a few days off.  The assistant staging director lives not far from Wavre, and Bochum is less than three hours' drive away, so he came for a visit.

Last night we had the Edwards family over for a bbq and socialising late into a beautiful summer evening.  So far August has been pretty miserable with lots of rainfall, but yesterday it was really nice: sunny and a high of 27 degrees.  Earlier in the day Malcolm and I had taken advantage of the nice weather to go into Brussels and begin the spray lacquer coats on our guitars.  Ben put three coats on yesterday, and it should cure by tomorrow, at which point we should be able to do a light sanding and then a last flash coat of lacquer.  Then we are pretty much ready to do the assembly, assuming that all the little bits and pieces have made their way to the shop.

Also this week Malcolm and I went to the garden allotment and pulled out all of the plants that we are taking with us.  We have already transplanted seven white, black, and red currant plants, a blue spruce, a bay laurel, and half a dozen lavender plants, and have about twelve raspberry canes and six rhubarb plants still to put in the ground.  It is really nice to see the plants responding well to their transplantation.  The back garden is full of light and the soil is healthy and well-drained, so I'm looking forward to growing good things!  But I'm letting most of the digging be done by Malcolm this week as I seem to have pulled a muscle in my lower back lifting the plants onto the trailer.  It's frustrating, because I have been doing longer training runs with Lawrence over the last ten days or so, but there will be no running for me until my back feels better.

With all this entertaining we realised that our little folding garden table wasn't sufficiently large for us to entertain with, so we found a larger garden table on the Brussels Facebook for sale page.  While going to pick it up, we stopped and picked up this little beauty pictured below, which a nice old lady was leaving out on the curb for someone to take:

Each of us is coveting it... the drawers have little dividers in them, so it could be used for sorting tools, or screws, or LEGO, or sheet music, or guitar pedals and cables, or sewing thread, or quilting fabrics... 

Maggie and I have been going together to her school so far this week so that I can keep use of the car during the day.  It turns out that she only needs to travel on the E411 for a couple of exits, but gets off at Overijse, and then goes cross-country through La Hulpe and then on to Waterloo.  It turns out that the area she travels through was once famous for its greenhouses, and especially for grapes.  There are still little family farms that grow tomatoes and other vegetables and fruits.  On our way home yesterday we stopped at one of those little roadside stands and picked some up!

I just finished a meeting with the woodstove installer.  He came to give us an estimate of the cost of a Jøtul woodstove, much like the one that Bruce has in his Toronto house.  They will first to a survey of the chimney to make sure that the chimney liner will fit; that has to happen next week.  If all goes well we will install the liner, a steel plate under the stove to protect the floor, and then put in the stove.  It's silly but the cost of the stove itself is not even half the cost of the whole installation.  We have a couple of stoves in mind: The Jøtul F100 or the F3 (like Bruce's)...

They both take more or less the same size logs, but the one stove is slightly smaller than the other.  The living room is a nice size, so it can handle the larger of the two, but the main reason to have a wood stove here is for the aesthetic, not so much to try to heat the whole house.

That's about all I have to report.  Right now Malcolm's friends Victor and Lucie (the other members of Psychic Sasquatch) are upstairs in his attic room rehearsing.  Lucie is trying out the Gretsch drum kit for the first time, and Victor is playing around with the different guitars and pedals.  They were making some noise but they've been quiet for a while.  I have to leave here at around 17h, so if they want a ride back into town then they'd better hurry up and get their practicing going...

Happy 20th Wedding Anniversary

For those who were there for our wedding ceremony, and for those who were not, we send you our greetings on the 20th anniversary of our wedding, in Cloyne United Church, August 16th, 1997.

Today was a relatively homebound day.  We tried to do some business at the Hotel de Ville, but due to their summer hours they were closed at 11:30, so we'll have to return tomorrow instead to get our administrivia accomplished.  Instead of administrivia we did a lot of gardening, tearing out the rough and wild plants in the front of the house, and burning weeds out from among the paving stones with a torch.  We were happy to plant the wisteria, a blue spruce tree, and several lavender plants, some of which that have been with us in containers for many years. Our efforts are making the house feel much more like a home...

Likewise we are drawing some positive attention from our neighbours.  For example, Christophe and Isabel, just next door, noticed that we were cutting the hedges and lawn, and asked if they might hire Malcolm to take care of their garden.  (I wish that I had been asked, as he made a pretty penny cutting out all of the overgrowth with a hedge trimmer and then string trimmer, and going over everything with a gasoline mower.)  Bernadette and Maurice have also taken note of our zeal, as have Tomas and Veronique (to name a few of our neighbours), so I'm confident that we've made a positive impression as people who will take care of their house... definitely a good thing.

Some photos of this evening's celebration of our wedding anniversary... they may be rather "artistic" as they are viewed through the lens of our oldest son.

Ok, to be fair, these last couple of shots have been different: the first one is of me scraping the paint off the ivoroid binding on my telecaster.  Malcolm and I are getting close to finishing our guitars, and we are approaching that moment of clear coat lacquer.  We are presently occupied in devising the appropriate logos for the headstocks: these have to be designed, printed and applied prior to the clear-coat lacquer application.  This past week, yesterday and today, I spent time scraping off the red paint from the ivoroid binding.  If it sounds painful and agonising, then you have the right idea.  But it seems pretty much done, and I'm happy with the results, even if they necessitated magnification goggles and japanese straight razors...

I leave you with one image from our dinner out this evening, at a fish restaurant about 700m from our house...

Maggie really liked the shrimp main dish!

Getting settled in Wavre

A quick post about our move: it's been a challenge.  Ten years in Belgium, and nine in the apartment/house on Avenue de Visé means that we have accumulated a lot of stuff.  It's frankly astonishing to us now that we managed to store everything in "the old place", as our former home is now referred to.

But we have managed to get much of the public area settled, and while the kitchen is not ideal, with some kludges it is now workable.  A lot of extra pots and pans and pantry items are now downstairs, but that's not a grave hardship.

I haven't much time to write but here are a few photos of the living areas as of today:

tree stump table: good craftsmanship

outdoor kitchen

football

kiki "making friends"

kitchen island

setting things up

fish tank

dining room

glassware collection

view from the living room

waiting for the woodstove

living room in progress

first dinner party in the new house