Queenie is alone tonight. With no pressing tasks to fill the silence. For the first time in seven weeks.
No visitors from anywhere.
No packing to do.
No furniture to find.
Apart from a table and chairs.
But they’ll happen someday.
Of that I have no doubt.
Himself and Tina and Martin, being from a place where possessions are recycled and handed around to those who need them and not thrown away until actually broken, went on Mission “Furnish Queenie’s House” last night, after we spotted a lovely, original 1960s wall unit on our way home, just sitting on the kerb waiting for the bin men.
It being Sunday night. Which is garbage night in the prosperous South end of Halifax.
Yes, I know this is being posted on Tuesday. Home internet access will be resumed on Wednesday, after which time blogposts will be timely again.
As quick as anything the unit, which needs a little bit of work but not much, was in the back of the van, being hauled round the rotary at breakneck speed and up the hill to the apartment, where it was dropped off with Queenie, who had to cook the dinner while the intrepid visitors went off scouring the south end for more finds.
Just as I was draining the pasta to go with the Bolognese sauce I’d slaved over for an hour, the van pulled up – great timing I thought – and was emptied, before speeding off again.
What????
I went downstairs to investigate. Martin was sitting guard over a pile of stuff that included:
A sun lounger
A sun parasol
Two garden chairs
Two beach chairs
Two red fold up chairs, one plastic, one leather
A stereo unit thingummy on wheels which fits underneath the fish tank perfectly and which means I no longer have a problem changing the water, having only to wheel the tank into the kitchen and park it alongside the sink
A brand new pull-along garden hose thingummy, replete with brand new hose
Three sets of shelves
A little wire vegetable rack on wheels, which contained a brand new apron, two oven gloves, two pot stands, a chopping board, and a packet of bag clips (I swear)
An interesting looking beige footstool with claw legs, which is exactly the right height for resting your legs on, upon which my legs are resting while I type
Two tall uplighters, neither of which appear to work unfortunately
A big bright blue plastic thingummy, the use for which Queenie still cannot ascertain, despite having stared at it for a long time
A desk in perfect condition
A wooden six-drawer bureau that will need to be sanded and stained to put in the spare room (along with the futon and the seafaring chest and the mirror) for all the visitors that will be coming to visit hopefully
A Wilson golf bag (minus the strap which is presumably why it was on the kerb)
Why a golf bag?
Martin and I sat and looked at the pile of stuff, not having yet realised that we had locked ourselves out of the apartment, and reckoned it must be an Aquarian thing, this passion for other people’s rubbish.
Himself and Tina both being Aquarians, d’ya see.
Having said that, once I get the uplighters, the golf bag and the big blue thingummy back into the garbage collection on Wednesday night it will have been a good haul.
And when you add that haul to what Himself had already Aquaired for us - a sofa and chair, a rocking chair, a huge chest of drawers for our room, an end table and a futon mattress – as well as what I have purchased – the biggest bed in the world, three seafaring trunks we got for fifty bucks the lot at a yard sale, and the makings of a pretty well-stocked kitchen and linen cupboard, and then add allathat as Gypsy used to say when she was little, to the free tv and microwave I got from Missy and Shazz, and my amazing basket of stuff which Jersey Girl and her BH gave us when they were here, which fuelled my ongoing amazement at the generosity of people - Queenie is back in the possessions game.
Sigh…
And to think I arrived a little over a year ago with two suitcases and a computer bag.
The one thing keeping me sane throughout all of this is the fact that the whole lot cost just over $1,000, of which $600 was for the King Size super deluxe Sears-O-Pedic bed with twin boxspring and soft-top mattress.
FOKO/ Ikea/ European Living/ Habitat can go and stick their over-priced Burmese teak futon with Egyptian cotton weave mattress thingummies up their own arse, boys and girls.
Also, note to self, Accent Monkey and anyone else who has ever bought furniture in Ireland – when the furniture people in Canada say they’ll deliver your bed between 12 and 5 on Saturday, which is two days after you buy the furniture, they apologise for the delay in delivery, turn up on time on the day and don’t moan about the stairs. Even if you only bought the furniture because it was being practically given away in the discount depot at the back of the shop.
I have learned two things this week.
The Sears Discount Depot in Halifax is the best shop in the world bar none.
One man’s rubbish is an Aquarian’s idea of a good time.
Anyways, so Martin and I started hauling the loot upstairs, only to realise that we had locked ourselves out of the apartment. Martin got quite anxious. But those of you who know me know that I tend to lock myself out of my apartment quite a bit. So it only took a minute to break in because I had already cased the joint because I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to break in. But we got in before the Aquarians got back, more importantly. And then we all sat around and ate pasta and drank Hemp beer in honour of the occasion and agreed where the new furniture should go.
So here I am, fully furnished, backside ensconsced in Himself’s mother’s former suite, legs resting on the new footstool, looking at the fish swirling around the tank which is resting on its mobile stand.
I feel like Del-boy Trotter. Before he hit the jackpot.
Although the apartment is a little nicer than his.
It’s the second floor of a three storey house.
The floors are all wooden, as they always are here in Nova Scotia. I think it’s real wood though, not laminate.
All the walls are a very boring shade of yellow but Himself is going to paint it when he gets a chance. There are many winter projects in this apartment, sanding and painting and staining, which will be good for both of us as we get a bit restless when the long evenings draw in and there’s nothing to do. Canadian television being awful.
The guy is coming on Wednesday to hook up the internet/phone/cable package. I ordered it today. He’s coming AFTER I GET HOME FROM WORK, so I don’t have to take a half day. He’d have come on Saturday, like the Sears guy, but that didn’t suit me.
Of course it’s probably like this at home now. So I should stop gloating. I just have such dreadful memories of ‘getting things done’ in Dublin. It always involved having to take a day off work and then spend an hour on the phone giving directions to someone who grew up in Finglas which was just down the road, or having to listen to some boring Dubliner millionaire carpet layer bang on and on and on about how he had to live in Carlow because it was so expensive living on the Northside now (because all us culchies were buying up property I supposed, I never used to take the bait) and how the wife didn’t really like it because she always had to drive home from the golf club instead of getting a taxi, but he needed to have a few scoops after all the commuting so he wasn’t going to go halves now ya know ...
The front door is up a narrow set of stairs. When you enter the apartment, the room that will be a study/dining room is on your immediate left. The living room and kitchen are both off of this space. The kitchen has tall white cupboards and a “Canadian Auto Workers circa mid-eighties productivity go slow” fashioned stove and fridge. Think Impact members making laptops – that’ll give you some sense of what level of innovation I mean.
The kitchen window looks out onto the street, which is residential and tree-lined. The living room looks out over the garden, which is mostly just grass, through the trees to the lake. The winter view will be nice I think.
Off the right-hand side of the hall, there is a large master bedroom, the bathroom, which is small and needs some work, and the spare room. Of which I am inordinately proud.
Because I know in my heart of hearts that if I had been able to afford to buy a nice apartment with a dining space and a spare room, instead of a rabbit hutch, I would probably never have left Ireland.
That’s the thing about Queenie: I never really wanted much. Just a nice place to live that I could afford, and a meaningful job with some nice people (part of which I had), and not too many traffic jams, so I could get to the countryside at the weekend. And maybe a nice person to share it all with (although I wasn’t allowed to admit that of course because that would have meant I wasn’t ecstatic about my life, which appeared to be verboten in Tigerland, although hopefully that’s not the case anymore)
But for some strange reason that I will NEVER fathom, that was not possible in the land of possibilities.
And now the fuckers have put my (Irish) mortgage up by $200 a month. Just to remind me of how insane it all is.
And Eddie Hobbs says I should put my SSIA money, what I’m counting the days down to getting just to see the number and translate it into Bahts or whatever, Eddie Hobbs (who the hell went postal in RTE and put the Del-Boy of the NGO sector in charge of the common man’s finances, although I suppose it’s better than that Trot they used to have – what was his name?) Eddie Hobbs told my mother that I should put my lovely SSIA money, which is for following my dream, that I should put the money into the gaping, yawning, greedy, panic-inducing chasm in my potential happiness and Sears-O-Pedic king sized comfy sleep at night that is my rabbit hutch of an Irish property investment.
My ass I will. The difference it would make? Fuck all, boys and girls.
Here, if whisked across the sea by the magic interbank transfer device (which I of course know how to operate, having had to explain it to the lady in the bank some months ago, along with the concept of overseas) and translated from strong EUROs into some of their Canadian dollars, I could use it to buy four acres of land by the sea, and still have enough left to go to Cuba for six months.
Or build the off-grid straw bale cottage with the organic toilet that’ll be flushed by the solar panels we’ll find on the kerb some night no doubt on the land, and just go to Cuba for two weeks.
Living the dream, eh?
I guess the trick is to try to live one. Not three or four.
But those of you who are getting yourselves sorted already know that, don’t you.
It’s difficult though, isn’t it? Managing expectations.
Why is it that we spend each of our decades extricating ourselves from the crap into which we got ourselves in the previous one?
By the way, when I was sitting on the doorstep thinking about what I was going to say this evening, the title of this blog was to be ‘Whereupon our hero emerges from the wilderness’.
And it was to be a contemplative piece on the concept of heroes. More particularly, an update on the hero for whom this blog was originally established. I mean one Percy, or Sir Perceval as he’s often known: Knight, Dragonslayer, Poet. Who has disappeared off the face of the earth for quite a while now.
But I got talking about myself. as usual.
Tomorrow.
I promise.
