Still waiting for the workers

The roofing contractor apparently is still laid up from his knee injury, and so we are still waiting for him to recover.  We originally expected him at the beginning of October, and have had multiple delays.  The particularly frustrating thing at this point is that we already paid him 35% of the cost.  Even if we wanted to hire another roofing contractor, the delay before they could begin would likely be several months, so we really have nothing to do but wait.

At least we have a little bit of good news: the wood stove and chimney liner will be installed next week.  The stove contractor had asked a specialist at chimney lining to do the work, but because of the age of the roof tiles he wanted to coördinate with our roofer, just in case any roof tiles were cracked during the installation.  But I have found some replacement tiles upstairs and have told the installers that we want to proceed without any further delay.  We now have confirmation that the stove will be in on Thursday or Friday of next week (November 23 or 24).  I expect that it will make a big difference in our sense of comfort this winter.

Yesterday I had a longer run here in Wavre.  I'm really happy that Maggie discovered these trails very close to our house.  Yesterday morning I set out to run the usual 7km trail but found my way blocked close to the trail start.  Yesterday there was some sort of hunting activity going on, and obviously you don't want people or dogs wandering around the woods in the vicinity of people firing guns.  So instead I set out to run the route backwards, and ended up having to try cutting cross-country, which scratched me up pretty badly with brambles and stinging nettles.  I ended up running to the end of the route and then ran back the way I had come, so managed to get in a fairly quick 14km.  The conditions were cold but but fairly bright, which cleared my head and made me feel much better.  The shorter days in November can be a bit of a drag in Belgium, and our new house is very luminous, which helps a lot, but there's nothing like field and forest time to wake you up.

After the other activities of the day, I managed to meet Maggie after school and do a yoga session with her group, something which always feels great after running.  They say that the more stretching you do after a run, the better it is for preventing injuries and encouraging flexibility and recovery.  Perhaps I'll be able to find a good route to her school from here, and join their yoga class every tuesday... I've only run home from St. John's International School one time, and most of that was unfortunately on tarmac or concrete paths, which are too hard and flat to be much fun, so I need to do some more research.

I've been doing some warming up today already, and will do some rehearsing this afternoon.  I don't have any new material to learn for the Christmas season concerts this year, with the exception of a new recitative and aria for the Bach Cantatas concert on December 17th, but I do have to get the Mendelssohn Paulus and the Christmas Oratorio back into my muscle memory.  Those rehearsals will start next weekend (November 25th) and then I'll have a very busy couple of weeks.

I've been sending out additional requests for auditions, so there's also my opera audition repertoire to maintain and improve.  I sang a ton of auditions with this repertoire last season, so there will be no surprises there either but it makes sense to keep exploring new things.

Remembrance Sunday

"Canadian Gunners in the Mud, Passchendaele" (1917) - Alfred Bastien (1873–1955)

Today was Remembrance Sunday, and Maggie, Duncan and I came into town to attend services at St. Andrews.  It was wonderful to see her memorial tapestry up there again; I forget how effectively she executed it, and how powerful the piece becomes, hanging in this memorial church.  A number of people mentioned it to us after the service, so it's really a great honour for Maggie to see her artwork on display every year.

The Choir during the Anthem: The Souls of the Righteous (Marchant)

This Sunday very nearly coincides with the centenary of the end of the third battle of Ypres, known as the Battle of Passchendaele, a moment of great sacrifice by Canadian soldiers.  Reverend Andrew Gardner made Passchendaele to title of his sermon this morning, and told us a number of details about the context of the battle.

Andrew preaching the sermon

The final of three battles for Passchendaele Ridge was decisively "won" - insofar as any real victory was possible during the war - by the Canadian Expeditionary Force on November 10th.  It ended with the capture of the Passchendaele Ridge, but at a heavy cost: the Canadian Expeditionary Force suffered 1094 casualties on that day alone, including the 420 soldiers who died.  And these numbers apply to only the last day of the battle: in the fighting in October and November of 1917, fifteen thousand Canadian men were killed, wounded or reported missing at Passchendaele.  But those numbers are really just a drop in the bucket when you add in the other countries' casualty lists: all told, the Allies suffered about 300,000 casualties during the Passchendaele assault, for an advance of only four and a half miles.  Winston Churchill described it as “a forlorn expenditure of valour and life without equal in futility.”  The German forces suffered similar losses.

After church we came home to Wavre, but brought along some poppies... there are seven Commonwealth graves just up the hill from our new house, and so Duncan and I went up to visit them.  As All-Saints' Day was less than two weeks ago, the entire cemetery was decorated with chrysanthemums; the Belgians make a big deal about visiting their ancestors' graves around this time of year and leaving these flowers.

Someone had also gone today to the graves of the Commonwealth soldiers buried there and placed a red rose upon each one; perhaps it was the Commune of Wavre that arranged this, or perhaps it was the Commonwealth Graves Commission.  But we added our poppies to the roses.

quiet holidays; everyone back safe and sound; guitar completed; first frost

frosty morning in Wavre

Yesterday morning was the first time the temperature dropped below zero, and the back garden was covered with white hoarfrost.  I had moved all of the outside plants in earlier in the week after doing an extensive repotting.  I had forgotten to move in some aloe vera plants in window boxes, but these were ten feet off the ground on the veranda railing, and seem to have escaped freezing.  The back veranda is a nice luminous indirect light space for keeping plants over the winter; my only concern is that it might not stay above freezing if the temperature gets really low.  We'll have to see how things go this winter...

To pick up from my last blog post, the rest of the Toussaint holiday unfolded pretty quietly.  Malcolm and I did a few things around the house over the course of the week.  We started by dismantling and moving of all furniture from the attic room which he was using as a bedroom, and I used some reclaimed pallet hardwood and thick plastic sheets that I reclaimed from IKEA packing material to construct a sort of "airlock" that will, I hope, keep most of the dust from falling down the stairwell into the living areas of the house while the demolition, replacement and insulation of our attic goes on.  Malcolm and I put up a scaffold ladder and had a look at the ceilings that are currently in place over the stairwell and his attic room; there isn't very much material there to remove, and the demolition shouldn't be terribly difficult, I don't think.

Hallowe'en night we had a nice raclette dinner with Ben and Sophie.  They both commented to me later that Malcolm seems much calmer and happier than he was last spring and summer; they have the idea that he's feeling a good sense of accomplishment in his work at the lutherie school.  I had a chance to talk to him about it during the week; he says that he is very happy with the atmosphere of his school, of his teachers, and with the work itself.  He is now one of only six students in the first year of guitar-making, and he is the easily furthest along in his first classical guitar project, and so is spending some time with the second-year students, as well; he says that none of them were as far ahead with their guitar-building projects at the same time last year, so I think this makes him proud.

Malcolm's guitar top with sound-hole rosette inlay, cut to shape

One advantage that he has is exemption from the academic subjects, having completed his secondary school diploma already.  Unlike some students who would use that extra time for entertaining themselves he usually goes into the shop and takes advantage of the access to the tools and machinery to move ahead on his work.

Thursday we had a plumber come in and do some repairs and consultation on our hot water boiler in the bathroom.  It seems to have a regulatory problem, so that the thermostat doesn't shut off the gas flame after the hot water tap is turned off.  It is this that led to the fracturing of the cold water pipe, because of back-pressure from the boiler, and other problems like hot water bleeding back into the cold water feed.  I managed to replace the shutoff valves and flexible cold water feed myself without any leaks, but we have to be careful with the boiler; we light it each time we want to use the bath, and then shut it off afterwards.  I hesitate to sink a lot of money into it as it is an older non-compliant model, and we plan to take it out any day now anyway.  But we are still waiting for our plumber/furnace/bath installed to come back with his estimate for the new bathroom installation...

Speaking of waiting for workers, I am astonished at how poor workers are at communicating with clients in this country.  My plumber/furnace guy was very good to us in Boitsfort but we have been waiting since August for him to give us an estimate without any news.  I have tried to get other furnace/plumber installers to come but no one answers their phones!

We had similar experiences with shipping containers: Bryan and I purchased about 30 m3 of firewood for a very low price; after multiple telephone calls and text messages and emails, and two verbal
conversations on the phone, and assurances that he would go and drop off a container to transport the firewood, Fred at FS containers stood us up for the second Saturday in a row.  As well, I contacted another construction/shipping company just up the road from me to rent a container for the building refuse that will need disposal after the roof work on our house.  They encouragingly responded within minutes, and agreed to come and inspect the driveway on Saturday to see what size container could be placed there.  However I was here the whole day, and saw no sign of them!  Did they come and measure?  Who knows?

My birthday was on Friday, and as it was just the two of us here we had a pretty quiet day.  In the afternoon we cleaned out the coal room, located underneath the front step: it has a "window" which communicates with a grate on the front walkway that was used for the coal deliveries back when there was a coal stove in each room.  I ran into the former owner of the house this weekend; she remembers when central heating was installed in 1972.  That means that the coal that we shovelled out of there today - 8-10 buckets worth - hasn't been touched in 45 years.  We also were excited to find some old newspapers used to stop up some holes: this Wavre Local Edition shown here dates from May 21st, 1954, and has advertisements for "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Merry Widow" at the local cinema, as well as a great Vespa ad that proclaims that "after eight years of experience, and 1,000,000 customers, choose Vespa!".

For my birthday dinner, I had requested Sachertorte as usual for my birthday cake, and Malcolm obligingly prepared some for me... as it was the Feast of St. Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, it seemed only fitting that we have venison steaks, forest mushrooms, roasted carrots and parsnips, and shredded brussels sprouts fried with bacon and garnished with Worchestershire sauce.  Before dinner it was clear and fairly warm so we had a fire outside, and I enjoyed a good martini and a Cohiba which my friend Nicholas from the Brussels shop Boire et Fumer had given me as a housewarming present.

fire outside with a nice martini and a cigar

birthday dinner

Kiki: "I can has Sachertorte?"

Picking up Duncan on Saturday and Maggie on Sunday mornings went pretty well; on the weekend the drive from Wavre to Zaventem is less than half an hour.  As well on Sunday morning Maggie and I drove the 6km to Louvain-la-Neuve to pick up Nancy Hunt, her cousin, and we had a nice brunch together in our new house.

Nancy visits

Nancy is in Brussels delivering a lecture series on social anthropology of the Congo at the University, and so we were happy to have the first family visitor in our new place!  She will be back and forth quite a bit over the next year, so we hope to see her again, and when the attic rooms are completed it will be our pleasure to have her as a guest.

Sunday afternoon we had a nice big dinner with the beef curry that I had made a couple of days earlier.  It was great to have everyone back in the house again; Malcolm's Monday classes don't start until the afternoon, so he finds it easiest to take the train from Wavre on Monday mornings, while Maggie and Duncan do their usual commute.  In the evening after dinner we piled into the car and drove a short distance to Leuven to see Bill Frisell play with three other musicians on violin, viola, and 'cello.  It was a really nice concert, about 90 minutes long, and they interpreted several popular songs, including Buffalo Springfield's "Stop, Children; What's That Sound?" and Bert Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now" as well as many more experimental jazzy numbers that we hadn't heard before.  It was great to see him again; the last time Maggie and I saw him play was at the Phoenix on Sherbourne in Toronto, back in 2004.

On Monday I was invited by Ben to go into Brussels to work on my guitar, so I drove Maggie to work, had a brief doctor's appointment, and then drove into town.  It took a little extra work yesterday to finish off all the details, but I'm happy to say that the project that started on April 3rd with shopping for maple for the necks finally ended yesterday, November 7th.  I'm really happy with the result: a heavily customised "Zadowcaster", based on Leo Fender's 1950 Broadcaster, the first commercially produced solid-body electric guitar.

There were much easier routes to building a guitar, had I stuck with more standard specifications, but I had a very specific vision.  The silver 1920s style Oahu lap-steel pickup (inspired by Ry Cooder's favourite pickup, used on his two customised Fender Stratocasters) gives a shimmery bell-like tone that breaks up progressively if you attack the strings more aggressively with your fingers, while the cream P-90 pickup in the middle position with large pole magnets provides a deeper, rounder complementary tone than the usual Fender lipstick pickup, but still rocks very hard.   The unorthodox pickup size and placement meant that I needed to buy a different pickguard and rout out the pickup placement myself.  I couldn't order a pre-made fingerboard and neck as I wanted one that is flat like a classical guitar (not radiused) and wanted an unusually wide string-spacing for a solid-body electric; it's the same as my 1935 Silverbody M-14 Regal Dobro, so required planing and shaping and cutting, which added more time to the project.  Here are some photos of the finished product!

 

reinstalling the tuning machines after final lacquering of the headstock

stringing up

checking string height

filing the nut to accommodate the strings

adjusting the bridge pickup

ready to go

test drive at home