12 of 12

Woke up early since I had to work. Yes, I worked on a Sunday. It was my last day with the truck drivers which we'll get to later. Serge has been sleeping on the sofa a lot this week which is fine by me. The farther away the snoring is, the better yours truly gets his beauty sleep.

After years of hemming and hawing and window shopping, we finally got some nice chairs for our dining room table. Goodbye cheap plastic Ikea chairs, hello tasteful seating. We were taking my cousin on a walking tour of the Plateau where Mont Royal street was closed and we passed by a second hand furniture shop where they had dragged out some of their wares to the street. These six chairs caught our eye. I asked about the price and when they said $350 for the six, I said, "Including tax and delivery?" The answer was affirmative so we bought them on the spot and they were delivered a couple hours later. Sweet.

When I have to work on the weekend, I soften the blow with a little breakfast sandwich at Mickey Dees. You can see how the Canadian logo includes the maple leaf. It was a rainy day which makes going to work less heinous.

As I said, it was the last day with the truckers. They all did so well and improved enormously over the last 9 weeks. I never did out myself with them though I'm sure there wouldn't have been a problem. One of them invited me to go along for a day to see what the life of a trucker is like. I think I will take him up on that if I give another course. Sounds like fun.

For our last day in class, we ordered pizza and watched this movie. One of the guys brought beers too, so for the first time, I drank during class. They loved the movie even though it's old.

When I got home, Serge showed me the letter the lawyer neighbor brought us. It seems he wants to do some more work to stabilize his foundation and some of the work includes the common wall we share. The problem I have with this is he wants to do it in three weeks. I plan much farther in advance for $6000 jobs (our half if we agree) and since the problem is basically on his side, I'm not very excited about doing it. My question is is it really necessary. After all, he will have driven piles down on three sides of his building as well as the support columns on the interior. Won't that prevent more movement? I think I'm going to play around with some dirt and toothpicks to see.

Of course I had to give Georgie boy some love when I got home after I got over the shock of that letter.

Okay so I'm cheating a bit. After I got home, I went to pick up my cousin who had been visiting since Thursday night. This picture is actually from Friday, the only nice day during his visit. I took him up to the top of Mont Royal to get the bird's eye view of the city.

He had a few hours to kill before going to the airport so I popped in a couple of movies. We didn't quite get to finish Paper Moon, but I filled him in on the ending while we were in the car driving to the airport.

It was a pretty wild ride to the airport. We made a pretty big detour to avoid a notorious bottleneck by crossing the St Lawrence river twice. This shot was taken by my cousin on the Champlain Bridge. There were heavy showers and thunderstorms yesterday afternoon and it was fun when Stormy Weather came on the jazz radio channel we were listening to.

When I got back, Serge was making din din. Spaghetti with tomato sauce and snails. It was yummy, especially since I was starvating.

Finished off the evening hanging out with Georgie and Serge and watching the boob tube. Pretty uneventful all in all. If you'd like to see what others have snapped on this twelfth of the month, you can click here.