Monthly Archives: October 2023

Autumn

29 Sunday Oct 2023

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Or: “Fall”

I’ve said before that we’re lucky to live where we do, and the Autumn, or Fall, is a great time to be here. Certainly, it’s not Maine, or even Algonquin, but when the trees start to change colour it gives the whole area a new look. The picture is Rondeau Provincial Park, this year, mid-October.

We took a run out yesterday and noted that the leaves are really falling now, so the trees are starting to get bare. The rush to rake leaves from the lawn has just begun, not for us of course as we’re big on leaving them where they fall, but for many in the suburban parts of town it’s an annual ritual. To be fair, things have changed during my nearly fifteen years in Canada, due in no small part to the City limiting the number of leaf bags it will remove in its weekly curbside collection of garbage. There is a “leaf yard” where you can take them yourself, but there has been a growing movement to maybe just mulch up the leaves with a mower, or rake them to a another part of the garden and let them rot down. The lines of paper sacks full of leaves, left next to the garbage can, have largely gone and which is a good thing in my view. I’ve always thought leaf raking to be a pointless exercise anyway, so the trend to leave them where they are, to aid the natural over-wintering for many beneficial critters, suits me just fine.

Out in the country, trees drop their leaves and there’s no one to rake them, like in Rondeau Park, but to see the vivid yellows and reds now forming a colourful carpet is all part of the scenery. Also in the country, the crops are being harvested. Tomatoes, peppers and Soy Beans are all in now and the fields have been ploughed. Much of the corn is in as well, although there is still plenty still in the fields, and some won’t be taken off for a few weeks yet, that’ll be weather dependent of course. I love to watch the land change throughout the year, and Autumn is a busy time for the farmers. Again, it all adds to the scenery.

A word about the word, Autumn that is. In the UK, nearly everyone will use the word Autumn for this time of year, and it’s origin is obvious given the French word Automne. Fall is the usual term used in North America, and it’s very descriptive. If you say “Fall” I think you miss out on the word “Autumnal”, but then that’s just me, they both great words.

I’m also looking forward to winter!

Bridging The Gap

24 Tuesday Oct 2023

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Or: “From One Side Of The River To The Other”

The Gordy Howe Bridge is taking shape here in Southwestern Ontario. It is being built to add capacity to the busiest land border crossing between the USA and Canada, currently the Ambassador Bridge across the Detroit River, about a mile or so upstream towards Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario.

The Ambassador Bridge was opened in 1929, and really reached its capacity some time ago. The truck traffic between the two countries is immense, and amounts to billions of dollars annually, so being stuck on capacity has been an issue for quite a while now. The problem has been that the Ambassador Bridge is privately owned and operated, and the owner has spent the last twenty years trying to prevent the new bridge being built, with one injunction after another. The new bridge was eventually approved and work started about two years ago. It’s funded in part by the Government of Michigan, and mostly by the Canadian Federal Government, and tolls will be collected by Canada. Tolls apart, the private ownership thing has been such a limiter over the years, but in anticipation of the new, publicly funded structure, Canada has extended Highway 401 right to the new bridge, and Michigan is building a new link to the North/South I75 Highway, so access is going to be so much easier. Trade, and therefore money, should increase significantly, and the benefits are already being seen on the US side of the river, with significant rejuvenation of Detroit’s south side already happening.

Because taxpayers’ money has been involved, there are plenty of detractors saying the project is a white elephant, but if you’ve ever had to use the Ambassador Bridge on a weekday, you get some idea of how important the extra capacity is going to be.

The project itself is amazing, with the two towers that will hold the cable stays for the bridge deck rising 220m above the river, meaning you can see it absolutely miles away. Here’s a link to the project website, as that has all the real data: https://www.gordiehoweinternationalbridge.com/en

We went to have a look at construction a couple of months ago, and it’s seriously impressive. The thing is, progress is so fast that the project has moved on significantly since then, and what we saw is quite different to how it looks today.

The new bridge is due to open in late 2024, although I have my doubts that will be achieved. However, 2025 is still a good target.

When the bridge does open, we will be there to use it. I doubt I could persuade anyone to come with me, but there’s a foot and cycle path being built into the structure. How great it will be to stand above the centre of the Detroit River!

I may do another piece about the bridge, perhaps when the spans meet in the middle, which won’t be too far off now. The picture at the top is taken from drone footage, recorded during the week ending October 19th, but even in a weeks time, you’ll see the changes. Exciting times. Well, I think so.

Hockeytown

23 Monday Oct 2023

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Or “What On Earth Is Happening?”

This was my second exposure to American professional sports, Detroit Redwings versus Calgary Flames in the National Hockey League (perhaps that should be International, given the protagonists). It followed on from my evening a few months back watching the Detroit Pistons basketball team get beaten by the Denver Golden Nuggets.

You have to understand that I grew up in the UK, where professional sport doesn’t, or at least didn’t, attract the kind of money that American sports do. Football (Association Football to the uninitiated) was the only popular professional sport with mass appeal, and there wasn’t the money in the game that there is now. Ninety-two professional league clubs across four divisions in England, and players in the lower leagues were earning pretty poor money. I mention this because there was never seen to be the need to invent reasons to generate income. Gate receipts and advertising were the key income generators, and while gimmicks were tried, they never came close to changing the weekly trek to watch your local side play, and it was good on-field performances that sold more tickets, not dancing girls, blokes playing organs, or giant video screens. Indeed, military bands appeared to be the chief entertainment, pre-match and at half time, although there was a bloke at Arsenal who used to sing “Born Free” every week.

But I’m not really a rube and I am aware of the amazing amount of money that swills around American professional sport, and the super-human efforts made all the time to do stuff that increases the money flow. I’m also aware that the average sports fan here has so much sport to choose from, even if they only follow, say, two teams, that they have lost much of the tribal instincts of watching their home team (there are not that many “Home Town Teams” now, just big teams in big cities), and don’t have much of an attention span as a result. I pitched up at the Little Caesar’s Arena in downtown Detroit expecting the game, Redwings versus Flames, to be only part of the evening’s offering, and I was right.

The Arena is modern and well stocked with food and drink places, and there are “Merch” shops everywhere, so no surprise there. Inside the Arena, though, it’s just non-stop attention-grabbing. Music, light shows, videos on the big screens, competitions, and even a bloke playing an organ. I think we were spared too much of a floor show given that the floor was made of ice and not only would be dangerous to dance upon, but it needed constant attention to smooth it out with not just the famous “Zamboni” ice smoothing machines, but fleets of enthusiastic young things on skates, armed with big snow shovels.

Hockey is a fast and furious game where they play three twenty-minute periods and swap players on and off the ice, two or three at a time, every few minutes. When the music stopped and the play began, it was relatively quite inside the arena. People were watching fairly closely as there were a few “Ooohs” and “Aaaahs” as the action developed. Two minutes in and the home team scored, cue massive amounts of noise, horns blaring and lights flashing, which was all good stuff. Then I noticed that at every “Face Off”, when the play stopped, in came the music, the video screens lit up and we were visually and audibly assaulted for the next twenty seconds or so, until play resumed.

At the period breaks, people headed out to restock on Pizza, beer and whatever else they needed, while the music kept up and video screens were busy. We had a pair of shouting comperes in between all the fun and games, and it only really settled down when the hockey started up again.

It was a good night for the home team as the goals rattled in, but I noticed that people were losing their attention to the play, myself included. Every break in play and we were back to that assault again with the music and the videos. In the final period, there were so many breaks in play that I kind of lost interest all together. I did see the the final goal (6-2 the eventual score) go in, but the delay between that and the fans cheering led me to realise that they had only been alerted to the goal by the horns sounding. That, I guess, is what happens when there so many other distractions.

It was definitely a better evening for sport than the basketball, and that I reckon was down to the limited use of the ice and the lack of a floor show. The seats were cheap enough (US$40 for a centre-ice seat), even if the beer was very pricey. I bought some merch and listened to the crazy drum band, and actually had a good time. But for an Englishman who likes to watch the sport, I was left somewhat disappointed. I don’t like to have my attention dragged away, but even the most laser focused people would not have been able to concentrate on the game after two hours of assault and battery. Give me ninety minutes of football any day, where breaks in play are not rewarded with crashing music and light shows, and I can come away at the end of the game remembering much of the play.

Still, when in Rome and all that. I’d imagine if I go to see games often enough, I’ll get used to everything and maybe I’ll be able to zone it out and watch the damned sport!

Winter’s Around The Corner

16 Monday Oct 2023

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Or “Where Am I Going To Put All This Stuff?”

We have really nice summers here in South Western Ontario. Warm from May to September, often thirty degrees Celsius or more, and not too humid most of the time. As a result, we all like to have a nice yard to use, and with that yard comes an awful lot of stuff. Tables, chairs, plants, bird baths, fountains, and much, much, more. The only problem is that most of that stuff isn’t going to survive too long if we left it out during the winter.

Winters here are, by Canadian standards, very mild. We don’t normally get much cold weather before Christmas, and while we can go six or eight weeks below zero in the New Year, that’s rare, as is us getting much in the way of snow. But that would still be enough to trash anything left exposed to the elements.

So, come October it’s time to pack everything away. The pool gets closed by professionals (at huge cost!), but I still have work to do prepping, then getting the poolside furniture put away. This year we have two rain barrels, and a heap of children’s toys to be stored, that latter item expanding with every year as the grand-baby gets bigger. The patio furniture has to go in the shed, as does a growing arsenal of garden tools and sundries we now have to maintain the garden. It all has to be cleaned off, too, which is isn’t fun.

Then there’s the garage, used in the summer months to store camping gear, well one side of the garage anyway, and that all has to be shifted so that we can get two of the three family cars stored under cover. The garage this year was also an auxiliary potting shed, and a store for Charlie’s bike, scooter, go-kart, and strollers, so there was even more stuff.

Our shed isn’t packed up yet, rain stopped play when I was working on the task today, but the basement, is packed to bursting with seasonal accoutrements ranging from camping gear to pool pumps.

We have at least stopped prepping the garden for winter. Our native plant array loves to be left where it is, and that allows all manner of beneficial creatures to over-winter with us. We don’t mulch or rake the leaves anymore, either, as the bugs like those as well.

But the packing up process is a chore, and gets more involved every year. I don’t mind, though, as it’s always an inversely proportional pleasure getting it all out again next Spring. Thank goodness for retirement.

Dealing With The Government

13 Friday Oct 2023

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Or “Struggling With The Feds”

I’ve had occasion to deal with Service Canada, or the Feds, just recently, and as ever it’s been like wading through treacle. It’s not difficult, and the people are really nice, it’s just the processes are labyrinthine in nature and glacial in progress.

I’ve been trying to apply for my Canada Pension Plan (CPP) payouts for a while now. One thing the Feds are quite good at is running a good online system, but not on this occasion. Each time I went into their website and logged on successfully, the system told me that the CPP applications system wasn’t available. I tried it on various browsers, in various operating systems, but each time I hit “Error 500, System Unavailable”.

Eventually, I got around to visiting my local Service Canada office to see what was going on. The very nice people there scratched their heads for a few minutes then, after a delve into their computers, said what no one wants to hear, “You’re not on the system”. Bugger, I thought.

This was all a bit perplexing, though, as I had logged into the Government system using my Insurance number, and been recognised. I had in the past applied for and received Employment Insurance benefits from the very same people that handle the CPP. What on earth was going on? Then came the next thing you never want to hear, “You’ll need to apply using a paper application form”. Bugger (again), I thought.

They gave me a sheaf of papers and said I could fill the form in there, but it required more information than I had to hand (actually my banking details, the same details they had used to pay my other benefits). I was on the point of giving up, at least in the Service Canada office, when the nice lady came over and gave me another sheaf of forms, this time for Old Age Security (OAS, a benefit automatically payable to oldies like me, which is supposed to happen without input from me). “You’re not on the system” she said, “So you’d best fill this in as well”. Bugger, I thought, for the third time.

Of course, the second form asked for all of the same information that the first for asked for; God forbid that “the system” could pull details that were identical from one application to another.

I did say to the nice lady that I must be on the system because I’d used it a few times, but all she could say was “Different systems”.

Then it dawned on me why I couldn’t apply online. The system wasn’t unavailable in general, just to me. Ah, you live and learn.

So, I brought the forms home, filled them in, and returned the completed articles to the nice people at Service Canada. Of course, processing paper applications takes far longer than the online application, so I guess I shall have to wait.

The ironic thing is that both my CPP and OAS payments are going to be miniscule. But, I’ve paid into both schemes, so I want my return, but what a lot of unnecessary work.

Of course, I’m really not complaining. It’s great to live in a country that has such good Government sponsored schemes that are not at the mercy of commercial interests, and “the market”. I just wish the processes were a wee bit more swept up.

Highways and Byways

13 Friday Oct 2023

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Or “You Want Me To Drive This Bus Where?”

When I rebooted this blog, I promised some school bus tales, so here goes.

Training to drive the bus wasn’t too difficult, despite the obvious differences between it and a car. Off-road training and on-road training, as well as many hours in the classroom, had me set up to pass the Ontario B Class licence tests without too many issues. Of course, all that training really didn’t prepare me for the bulk of the challenges to come. There were students to consider, schools, and the thousands of little roads in and around the school district, most of which I’d never heard of.

On my first day driving a bus route, I did have the benefit of an experienced driver come with me. It was a dark and very cold January morning that I headed out to Townline Road, a gravel track out towards Lake St. Clair. I had my map (not easy to read in the dark), but I had never been this far west of the City, and had hardly driven a bus in the dark at all, so it was all very challenging. Add to the mix that my fingers were frozen (buy some decent gloves, I thought) and the fact that I was pretty nervous, and it all added up to a tough start. I do still remember picking up my first student, though, and she was still smiling when we got to school so I must have been doing something right.

The next day I was on my own, and my route timings were terrible. Being new, I did everything slowly, and ended being late to school for the first run, then late for the second run’s start, and even later to that school. In the afternoon, the drivers waiting at my second run school were radioing to find out where I was, so late was I. It wasn’t that I got lost or anything, but until you get into the routine of it, and get to know your route, it all seems to take way too long.

With the added distraction of the students, mostly well behaved I will admit, I let some of that training I worked so hard at, go by the board, and worked on speeding up some of the processes, like loading and unloading. It was a case of concentrate on a few things then, when you’ve mastered them, work on a few of the other things. It took me a while to remember to check that tail swing on the corners, because I was so busy with the other stuff.

But it started to come together. I bought some better gloves, a light for my maps, and even some variable-focus lens glasses as reading the maps wearing my fixed focus glasses was difficult. I also started to find out about the locale. I had no idea just how far the school district extended, and for the longest time I was driving out on country roads that I really hadn’t known existed. Things were not helped by the fact that I couldn’t learn a specific route because as a new boy, I was put onto covering other people’s runs, so I had new maps and new places to drive all the time. Fortunately, map reading, and finding my way around, comes easily to me, so it wasn’t too long before a run out to Duart, or to Florence (relatively remote farming communities, both), were becoming a lot easier. Indeed, the Dispatcher had me doing different routes almost daily as I was both effective at covering them, and I was keen to learn and to take them on.

The first few weeks were also complicated by the Canadian winter, with ice and snow to deal with, and such cold that I hadn’t experienced before. The buses were heated, of course, but the for the first twenty-five minutes or so, it was like driving a freezer. More than once I had to stop the bus to hack ice off the windows, the mirrors and even the Stop sign. That said, as my abilities and knowledge improved, so did the weather, and by June and the summer vacation, I had the school district down, my route timings were where they should be and I had never been lost, nor had even the slightest of collisions, which wasn’t too shabby for a newcomer. Dealing with the students was another issue, though, and I tended to leave them to their own devices, especially as I had different routes most days. The little ones were noisy, the middle schoolers at the French language schools were difficult (not because they spoke French, they didn’t while they were on the bus, but it was more to do with a perceived entitlement, I think), and it took me a lot longer to get to grips with having to cope with kids running around the bus, and to drive the darned thing at the same time. I quickly came to appreciate the high school students as generally, if left alone, they just kept themselves to themselves.

I had a couple of wobbles when driving, at least early on. Getting called in to work very early (a consequence of my being overly helpful, I think) on a dark and snowy morning and having to drive out to Ridgetown in an old and rickety bus, had me questioning why I was doing this, because the pay was definitely not stellar given the effort required. A couple of times when students were being very difficult also had me thinking that it wasn’t worth the hassle, at least given the poor compensation. Then on other days, particularly when the mornings were lighter and the weather was warmer, it did seem like a pretty good job. Like the time I had some high schoolers from Wallaceburg laughing like drains and leading me on a circuitous round around Sombra, trading on my unfamiliarity with the place, having me drop them at their homes rather than their actual stops, all because I was struggling with the map. You lose some, you win some.

Even in those early days, though, I was getting the warning signs that the company I was working for were operating on a shoe string. Not that the buses were dangerous, or too many operational corners were being cut, but there was definite lack of investment, in equipment and drivers, that didn’t bode well for the future.

That’s for another day, though.

Family Tree

08 Sunday Oct 2023

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Or: “How Big Does This Thing Get?”

I’ve been dabbling with my Family Tree, both my dad’s and my mum’s sides, for a while now, but only really took a serious interest when I was contacted by another member of my family doing the same thing. It was an unexpected contact, too, because it came from the United States, and I had always believed that both branches of my family were firmly rooted in the UK. My cousin on my dad’s side (4th, and once removed), for that was who it was, added an extra line atop my findings and all of a sudden I discovered an entire branch of the family in the US, and another in South Africa. Canada features in there as well, although not quite so directly. I had fondly thought that they’d never found their way out of Yorkshire.

I use Ancestry, expensive though it is, as my tool for compiling the tree. The links to various sources are almost instant, and are mostly correct. My relative count this year went from around a hundred to over a thousand, although the direct lines count for far fewer, of course. I’ve traced my dad’s family not only out of Yorkshire, before the bolder relations headed overseas, but to Exeter in Devon (UK), where my mother’s family come from, which is so much of a co-incidence. The oldest birthday for a traced relative is one Thomas Mayne, born around 1650, in Surrey, England. I haven’t been able to go so far back on my mum’s side, but there’s time for more research.

It’s quite exciting to delve into where the family has been. I vaguely remember my dad saying something about a relation coming from Silverton in Devon, but I dismissed it on the assumption that Yorkshire was the family base. He was right, though, and there is indeed a link to Silverton (now part of Exeter). I wish I’d not been so quick to ignore that hint. The bulk of the Maynes were in Victorian Leeds, many in the boot and shoe trade. They were poor and lived in some pretty squalid back to back houses in Leeds, and many died very young. Addresses are listed in census and burial records, but I could never find them on modern maps, especially since Leeds has gone through a few major urban renewals over the past one hundred years. That was until I discovered the National Library of Scotland’s online historic maps, and all of a sudden the streets that had long been swept away, reappeared and could be superimposed on modern maps. Schole’s Yard, Thomas’ Yard, and the rest, suddenly became real.

I also discovered the Leeds University project that has digitised the nearly 70,000 burials in the old Burmantofts Cemetery, now part of the University campus. I have found some detailed, and quite sad, records of my family there, like my Grandad’s three very young siblings who didn’t even make it to two years old. They weren’t visible through Ancestry either, probably because their births were not recorded, but the burial records are clear and accurate.

Finding out about the American branch of the family was fun, and I find that the city of Huntington in Indiana is where many of them made a name for themselves, and are buried in various local cemeteries there. There’s even a Mayne street. That’s only a few hour’s drive from me now, so next year I will head over there to explore.

The South African branch was successful, although the original Mayne who landed in Durban in 1849 came back to Leeds and died there after his wife died in South Africa. The bulk of their children stayed, though, and while most were farmers, some became involved with the DeBeer’s diamond mining operation and fairly made their fortunes. Curiously, one who certainly did well married into English money and spent her adult life at various smart addresses in London, including a big house on Portman Square. She died in Kensington, in the shadow of the Palace, and now rests with many of her family in Brompton Cemetery in London. The number of times I have been past that place and have known nothing of her.

Tracing your family can be all consuming, and you really have to keep a lid on things so you don’t fall into too many rabbit holes. I have joined forces with some other family members who are building trees like me, and we’re compiling quite a picture. I’m headed off to Leeds in a few weeks time to do a bit of family tree research, and to find a few of those graves so carefully catalogued over the years. I was born in Leeds, but have never really been back (except to get a cheap breakfast in IKEA), so it’ll be a voyage of discovery I think. I’ll also be in London, so I guess the Portman Square connection should be checked up on as well.

It’s all good fun, but beware if you’re limited on time, those family rabbit holes are everywhere.

Camping In The Rain

07 Saturday Oct 2023

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Or “Ark/Airstream”

We do like our camping, and in September 2021 we headed out to Science Hill Golf Course, close to St. Mary’s in Southern Ontario. We’re not golfers, but the place has a nice campground in rolling countryside, and it’s fairly quiet there, as well as being well located for doing some walking or exploring.

You can’t tell what the weather’s going to be like when you book, and when we arrived, the owner said that he thought we were in for some poor weather, despite it being quite nice at the time. He said we could camp on any free site and while I was about to pick one a little apart from some of the other trailers, I did note that the ground looked a little soggy, so I sought out slightly higher ground. How prophetic that turned out to be.

Our first night was wet, and got wetter. We’re not unused to rain, but after a slightly rainy start to the following day, thing went seriously downhill. It rained and rained and rained. I took the limping dog out a couple of times for her exercise, but she was sick and didn’t enjoy either the exercise or the rain (it turned out that this was to be her last but one camping trip as we had to have her put to sleep a few weeks later). We didn’t go out at all, just stayed in and watched the rain. It was hard to think that it would get any worse, but it did.

The rain became worse, the wind picked up and we were fairly rocking through the evening, and not in a good way. I’d left the short street side awning out to stop water ingress through the cooker exhaust vent (which turned out to be cracked), but the wind whipped at it and snapped it partly shut, thankfully with no damage.

The following morning I watched as the flood waters rose, the three pictures at the top show the progress of the water. We were on a hill for goodness sake, but a wide river was forming a few feet away from us. I didn’t know at the time, but a storm drain had been blocked and the water that was supposed to be underground, wasn’t. I’d never seen anything like it.

When the rain did subside later in the day, so did the flood. The campground owner was out and about and told us that he had unblocked the drain, which was why the water disappeared quickly. The flooded area, though, was still very boggy and I was glad that I had decided on a slightly higher site. We hadn’t moved off the campground in two days, and the dog was in pain; it hadn’t been a great trip.

My mind moved to how we were going to get off the site without going through the bog, but come leaving day I moved the fire ring and made a sharp, inelegant, left, not skidding on the wet grass and not getting bogged down. That untypical tow vehicle of ours had come to our rescue again, with its front wheel drive and gentle transmission easing us away rather than digging in, as bigger vehicles might have done.

We haven’t had such a wet trip since, and given that it was also the dog’s last but one run out in the trailer, it was memorable. We haven’t been back to Science Hill since, and I have to say that I’m understandably nervous about doing so!

As a sort of postscript, we went to Rondeau Park a few weeks later, and while we had fine weather for most of our stay, the last night there was stormy and again we had to rely on our non-standard tow vehicle to haul us out of a mini-flood. Camping; don’t you just love it?

Houses

07 Saturday Oct 2023

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Or “From The Ground Up”

In my old persons way, I like to watch the construction of new buildings, and there’s been a lot of that around here lately.

Houses are not built the same way here as they are in Europe. Most will have a basement, or cellar, and the wooden frame of the house will be built on top of that. Where you see bricks, they’ll just be an outer skin with no serious weight bearing going on; that’s the job of the wood.

The footings of the house will be much the same though, as the top picture shows, with the exception of the steel rebars, and the fact that they’re normally in a hole six or seven feet deep. The land inside the borders of the footings is often filled with gravel because later, concrete will be poured in on top to form the basement floor. there’s also a sump, or small well, built into the basement floor, and water pipes that collect groundwater from around and under the house will feed into it. This keeps the basement dry, but only if you have a pump set up to remove that which gathers in the sump. There’s a whole debate, for another day, about the utility of a basement sump.

The basement walls are formed on top the footings and make use of the exposed rebars for strength. The formers for these walls are often dropped in from a truck and are stacked in a handy dandy crate with a big loop at the top so that the truck’s crane arm can just drop them into the hole in the ground. When the formers are finished with, they’re stacked back in the crates and lifted out, to be reused on another house. The second picture shows the formers in place, but those don’t look like the little modular things that I see being used. Either way, you can see the walls being formed. The third photograph shows the walls without the formers.

Once the basement is in, the house quickly goes up as a wooden frame. There’s sometimes some steel to hold up the floor on the ground floor (or first floor if you’re a North American), but other that it’s all wood. Wood is cheap here, probably cheaper than cinder blocks and bricks, and the house look skeletal as it’s going up, as the fourth picture shows. When the house is just a frame of wood like that, it’s really simple to install the services like water, waste water, electricity and gas. Internally the walls and ceilings are added using plasterboard, or drywall as it’s known here, and the floors are double sheets of plywood, that’s before any other surface like tiles or laminate flooring is added. Roofs are also interesting with the normal method being sheets of marine plywood that are nailed in place and are eventually covered with shingles, actually strips of roofing felt made to look a little like slates. The advantages of this this system are that they are cheap and come in a whole range of colours and styles, they’re also very light compared to European style clay or cement tiles, or even traditional slate. The disadvantage is that the shingles will need replacing every fifteen to twenty years, which is why steel roofs are becoming more popular, often fixed straight on top of the old shingles if it’s a retrofit, as they mostly are. Steel isn’t as light, but it comes in different styles and colours, too. Even steel, though, will need replacing eventually as it will rust in time.

The outer walls of the houses are thoroughly insulated before an external cladding is added, sometimes siding (wood, metal or vinyl), sometimes brick, usually a mixture of both. As I said before, the outer brickwork has little load bearing ability.

Windows were a bit of a shocker for me. As there isn’t much depth to the walls here, window sills don’t really exist. The windows themselves are usually double or triple glazed, although much to my surprise, many of the new houses being built are just single glazed, which is a travesty given how cold it can get here, and how important insulation is for keeping heating and cooling costs down.

Most new houses here are heated by forced air, pumped around ducts by a furnace in the basement. It’s not the most efficient method, but is easily switched to cooled air in the summer. Most heating furnaces will use Natural Gas to heat the air, and we haven’t really caught onto heat pumps yet.

Back in the basement, people use them for many things, including laundry, workspaces and a favourite here, TV and games rooms. Given that most of the basement is below ground level, they are ideal for cozy TV rooms, for sure. Many new houses are sold with “unfinished” basements, just the bare concrete walls and the service machinery, but you can “finish” them yourself to your own specification, which could include stud walls, carpets and the rest. It is possible to have someone live in the basement, assuming you can get waste water away effectively, although with new places, you need to include an escape route, and that can mean a lot of work for an already finished basement. Whatever you do down there, just make sure that you have an effective sump pump, and a backup should the power go out (as it so often does).

Your average North American new build is still significantly bigger than its counterparts in Europe, space being the key, I think. Mind you, they’re getting smaller here as well, which is more guided by profit per square foot than availability of land.

Which do I prefer? Well, North American house are bigger, and that basement is a plus, but they are comparatively flimsy and I doubt our house, now forty years old, will still be here in a hundred years’ time like so many of their more sturdy European counterparts. I don’t like the shingle or steel roofs here, but even quite major work on timber-build houses is quite cheap and easy. I don’t know, I’m happy wherever I’m living!

Safety First

03 Tuesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Opinion

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Or “Who Said This Was A Good Job”

One of my tasks while working full time at the bus yard was to attend any collisions or mishaps that happened while buses were out on the road, and make some preliminary investigations. I thought this picture would be a good illustration as the collision was minor, but did force the bus into a snow bank. Also, there were students on the bus, but no one, driver included, was hurt, in what was an odd collision. Shortly after I took the photo, the Police arrived, cleared the scene for recovery, and the second bus took the kids home, just in case you were concerned.

This was on a quiet back road one winter’s afternoon and the driver was dropping the last few students off. He’d been motoring at just below the speed limit (GPS records this at three second intervals) and was approaching the intersection that crossed his road. Visibility was good and the driver of the bus saw the pickup truck approaching his road, from the left, at right angles. Knowing there was a Yield sign for the truck, although not for the bus, our driver did slow, but the truck kept coming. It didn’t stop, and shot out in front of the bus, with the bus front left side catching the truck, but the evasive action our driver took led him into the snowbank. The truck driver got out of his vehicle, came over to check everything was OK, got back in his truck and drove off!

That was odd, but odder still was the fact the the truck driver dropped his wallet as he got out of his truck, and that his drivers’ licence was still in it. There’s nothing like leaving evidence at the scene. Once the kids had gone and the recovery truck had hauled the bus out of the snow bank, I had to drive the mechanic’s truck back to the bus yard. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven a pickup truck with a massive snow plough blade on the front, but believe me when I say that it’s a strange sensation.

Pulling all the data together afterwards, we felt that our driver wasn’t to blame, although he could possibly have avoided the collision with a little more caution given that the approaching truck was clearly visible, even if it was supposed to yield. The Police rounded things off by saying that the truck driver was probably drunk, although by the time they caught up with him, they couldn’t prove it.

That was one of many similar incidents I had to attend, most of them thankfully minor. The investigation was never fun, though, and sometimes ended up with our driver getting into trouble. Our drivers would often leave details out of their accounts, embellish their account and sometimes outright lie about what happened, but I guess it’s natural to be defensive when you’re likely going to be blamed. Still, we never had to fire a driver, just retrain them, and guess who had to do that!