The results of the last elections here in Quebec, late on Monday Oct 5th, has got my spouse and I thinking about moving out of the province again. We are fed up with Quebec’s language laws and even though, for the most part, I speak fluent French and I write it decently enough, and the same goes for my spouse, but we just don’t like the fact that it’s being shoved down our throats. The party that won the election, The “Parti Quebecois”, has at its very core of their platform, the separation of the province of Quebec from the rest of Canada. I for one am completely against this, I am a proud Canadian and Quebec is better off staying in, and being part of Canada, period! I love Montreal, where we live, in fact I’ve lived most of my life in this city except for four years where I lived in the Toronto area. My spouse, who was my fiancee at the time moved down to the greater Toronto area in 1998 and we tied the knot in Mississauga in March of 2000. We both missed Montreal very much and about a year later we decided we’d try to go back to Montreal. Lucky for us both are jobs were flexible enough to allow for this. I must admit that even back then, 25 years ago now, I wasn’t really excited about going back to Montreal, I had started making a life in Ontario and had started coming to grips that I would make my life elsewhere. You see, I had moved to the Greater Toronto Area, specifically, a little sleepy town of Burlington, nestled between Oakville and Hamilton a year or so before my ,then fiancee, had joined me, so I kind of got used to living away from Montreal. Now as we are both looking down the tunnel to retirement we’re both wondering if we should move to a smaller, more rural town for peace and quiet. For many years it’s been in the back of our minds but with the PQ winning the election and talks of a separation referendum looming again, we are seriously starting to think about moving.
In part 2 I’ll look at the cost comparison between Ontario and Quebec, and the feasibility of moving.
Category: Misc.
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Moving to Ontario – Part 1, The Trigger
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Wait…where did Summer go?
Holy smokes, Oct 8th already, what happened to August, wait…what happened to June?! Wow, I can’t believe how fast the Summer came and went, I had so many plans, so many projects, things I wanted to do, things I wanted to see, and now we are in the colourful foliage of yet another Autumn, which mind you, is my favourite time of year, and then another long Montreal Winter.
I’m not complaining really, as it has been a productive Summer, I finally got to work on regrading the Eastern side of our land next to the house and raise it so that it formed a proper swale between our house and the neighbors which will hopefully mitigate the water flow coming from the back yard, which was turning and dumping straight into our garage drain and into our sump pit in the basement, and threatening to flood said basement as it has done on several occasions. The last time this happened was the last straw and I told my spouse, enough of this, I’m going to regrade the land and see if I can cut the water drainage by at least 50%. I’m happy to report that after all the work of building a small retaining wall and back-filling it with dirt to create a positive gradient away from the garage and the drain, the water drainage I believe has been mitigate by more than probably 75%-90%, so I’m ecstatic.
With this almost finished now, I only have a few paver stones to finish installing and levelling, I’ll be able to bring my project indoors where I have the basement walls to finish covering and some time during the Winter I’m going to start replacing the kitchen floor and the countertop.What else is on the horizon? Well, I’m currently working on launching or perhaps re-launching my slandi.net page, which used to be my main domain and is still the domain for my email. Several years ago I came up with a neat acronym for that domain, Stefano’s Laboratory of Analog and Digital Inspirations, it fit the letters perfectly and also one of the ideas of what I wanted to do with my website/blog long-term, use it to share some of my passions, be it electronics, computers, photography and music. I say both analog and digital, not only because it happens to line up with the letters in my domain/name but it also encompasses my dual-love of what is digital and also what is purely analog, be it technology from simple tools to art forms such as painting, sculpture or woodwork. In fact, I used to love to carve wood but haven’t done so in many many years, so it may be something to re-discover in the years to come. As for the Analog side of things, I’m thinking of getting back into simple discrete electronics and have started re-reading some old electronic books that I got from Radio Shack more than 45 years ago now.