The kids are half way through their summer break, well just under 1/2 way with about 5 weeks to go. So far the weather has been pretty great, mostly humid and lots of thunder storms so we've had the air con on a bit. The new street is kids heaven with the Davis kids constantly ringing the door bell to invite our mob to swim in their pool. Needless to say that they're over there a lot of the time but we've become good friends with Liz and Eric and they don't seem to mind at all. All the people we've met in the street are really nice and have really welcomed us. We've been on a day trip with our next door neighbours, Lyn and Henry and their kids, down to the wineries at St Catherines followed by a BBQ near Niagara. And Eric and Henry let me borrow their lawn mower and assorted tools so I can deal with our outdoor chores.
Our original reason for coming to Canada, working at Bell, is finished. My last day was almost a month ago and I'm missing the place, and the regular work schedule. I've caught up with the boys since though, we're a pretty close bunch socially too, and we're playing touch football on Tuesday afternoons whenever our schedules work out. With Bell done you might think we'd be coming home but IBM would like to continue to build a practice around the compensation skills our team has here so as long as we get some more work we'll stick around a while longer. The assignment we're here under has changed though, from a short term to a long term arrangement, and this has meant a few changes. Most importantly we don't rent a car anymore, we had to buy one. We had looked at taking over someone else's existing lease as it can be really cost effective. But we had some problems with the finance company being stupid over our temporary residency status so we told them to shove it.
We checked out some Infiniti's, the FX35 is pretty awesome, but the more practical choice was the FX35's more sedate cousin, a Nissan Murano. We got a decent deal on a 2007 model with 30,000k's on it and decided not to lease it as buying it gives us more flexibility to sell when we leave Canada. Unfortunately we could only get a loan for a 2 year term, cos IBM is only planning on keeping us until 2010 at the longest, and that means pretty large monthly payments. The size of the payments, plus the high cost of auto insurance here, has effectively eaten our whole budget for cars so rather than getting two we're still stuck with one.
The other change in our assignment is that we don't have to swap our trips home to Aus for car rental. So we'll be taking a trip around Christmas/NY and probably another later in 2009. Qantas is starting to run the A380 so we're hoping we can come home on that, should be fun. I'll look into booking this shortly, I expect that time of year is busy and we don't want to miss out, stay tuned for confirmed dates, we're looking forward to seeing you all!
Our problems with our previous landlord are continuing. After we moved out he sent us a ridiculous letter from his lawyer claiming $3000 in damages. This guy just doesn't let up, he thinks he can put IBM over a barrel and the company will keep paying. Of course the liability is ours, not IBM's and we're fighting the prick. Jo has hit back by scheduling a Tenancy Board hearing claiming illegal increase in rent (our issues of last year) and we have the hearing this Friday, wish us luck.
This time last year we rented a cottage from a colleague, Terry, at Bell and this year we did it again. The cottage on Lake Cecebe is right on the water and has room for another family so we had two families come up to visit us for a few nights each. Kent and Aleks and their kids Mel and Jackie came up last year and they arrived on Saturday for a couple of nights. Kent is a great bloke and his margaritas went down very nicely as we watched the kids in the kayaks and pedal boat. Jo and Aleks talked tennis
all the time :-). Then we had a few days to ourselves and the weather ended up being pretty variable, but it didn't rain much. Back in Oakville the rain just kept coming down, the wettest summer in Toronto since the 1930's, so we were lucky to be 3 hours north of that.
On Wednesday Shaun and Leslie arrived with their boys Ryan and Kyle and we playing RockBand until 2:30am, needless to say Thursday was a little on the slow side. I hired a ski boat on Friday and although the weather was supposed to be bad for the next few days we got exactly the opposite and it was sunny all day. We didn't do any skiing this time, just tubing for the kids and diving off the boat for a swim in the middle of the lake. We saw heaps of wildlife too, when you're that far north you're gunna see some critters. Last year we saw loons every day but this year we also saw a crane fly past the windows. We had a deer jump across the road in front of the car and there were flattened grass near the driveway one morning where it looked like a whole lot of them had spent the night. The highlight would have to be two beavers who we saw on two occasions. The second time we jumped in the kayaks and managed to get pretty close to them before they smacked their tails on the water and disappeared in a dive, that was sweet!
Andy, out.
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