License to deceive

I read last week how the city is planning to pass a bylaw making it illegal for a company to bid on city contracts if they've sued the city. While I realize that this meaure is meant to prevent Siemens from bidding on the light rail contract based on their recent legal scuffle with the city and I understand where the city is coming from with this; I can't say that I would be all that enthusiastic about giving my cash to an organization that had just sued me and won to boot, it strikes me as a sour grapes policy. You signed a contract and then reneged on it. Why shouldn't they stand up for themselves? They could very well end up as the best bidder but they won't be allowed to even bid. In a larger sense this policy could end up rewarding the city for screwing over its suppliers. Imagine that you are a local firm supplying services to the city. The city could quite easily take advantage of you by not paying or underpaying and taking them to court for redress would cost you the opportunity of ever bidding on another contract again. Here's a thought, maybe the city should honour its obligations or face the consequences of the legitimate actions that its behaviour brings on.

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One of the benefits of having been on strike for all that time is that it gave me an opportunity to meet all those colleagues that I ordinarily wouldn't have had a chance to meet. The drawback is that I didn't all of a sudden acquire a better memory so I'm no better at putting faces to names than I used to be except that now I'm expectedto know the names of all these people and I just keep drawing blanks


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Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome...

Part of the reason why we were so frantic to get everything put-together for the holidays is that her daughter will be coming to town for Christmas break and staying with us for a month or so. It was important that the house be finished, or mostly so, in time for her arrival so that she could feel at home here in what is her mother's house. I'm a little nervous about it frankly. I didn't have kids and mostly didn't want them but she comes with a family which, in a manner of speaking, makes them my family too, now. People in my house up til now had always been guests or maybe hostage-takers. I'm having a hard time separating the family-residents from the guests in terms of how I treat them. Generally speaking, guests in my house get waited on hand and foot and entertained, a situation, by the way, that the residents are more than happy to take advantage of. The wrinkle here is that guests leave eventually, residents don't, at least not for longer periods of time. I'm having difficulty turning off the guest setting in my brain and letting them live and let live, to borrow a phrase. For some reason I can't seem to stop making up menus and planning activities for my guests and for some reason it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when someone goes poking through the fridge or showers here; that's awfully familiar behaviour for a guest isn't it? But they're not guests, they're family. Man, this is gonna be tough...

I'm back, in more ways than one...

It's been a stultifying dozen weeks or so; much has happened and at the same time virtually nothing happened. The strike's over, it turned out to be considerably longer than I had expected it would be and was mostly, mind-numbingly boring. I fear that over a number of weeks my brain was slowly turning to mush. So, to those of you who had wondered why I was not posting, I've basically been in purgatory (I would have said limbo but apparently the Pope's declared limbo to be non-existent, one more foreclosure I suppose) for the entire fall and let's just say that had the strike not ended when it did I would have been forced to face a decision that I didn't want to have to confront. I may speak more about it when it has faded a little more.

On another note, things have been happening at a frantic pace. You see, when we moved into this place we had the intention of replacing the seriously destroyed carpeting for hardwood but getting a contractor was another story altogether. I had hoped that we would be able to have the floors done while we were in the bridge-finance window, living downstairs/empty upstairs. That proved to be a exercise in delusion; a decent contractor without 3 months notice? As If! So, in order to get the right guy for the job we decided to wait until he was available which turned out to be more than 2 months. Given that we had nowhere to store stuff while he was working we sold off the stuff we didn't want and postponed buying the new stuff until the job was over which entailed living for 2 months with little more than an easy chair and a coffee table. Let's just say that the 10-second rule took on a religious observance. The contractor, bless his soul, did a phenomenal job (I know, contractor and phenomenal job in the same sentence!) and once he had cleared his tools out came the almost daily pilgrimages to IKEA and the almost nightly cursefest associated with assembling Scandinavian furniture using little more than an allen key and following instructions that resemble nothing so much as Egyptian hieroglyphics. 5 hours for a daybed? WTF!?!

Anyhow, we've managed to mostly get ourselves put together in time for Christmas; sanity, line-of-credit and relationship notwithstanding. Want a challenge? Try moving, renovating and being on strike at the same time. It makes for a most potent cocktail I assure you.

On Strike...
Things have gotten rather complicated and rather dull all at the same time. For the past 4 weeks now I've been on strike. Not from this blog but from my actual job.

Complicated in that being on strike involves a series of issues and rumours and tactics. Dull in that it mostly involves being on the picket line walking around in circles for hours at a time. It's like an extended smoke break when you don't smoke. I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of being on strike, because, well, I barely care about them so how could I expect you to, but I've noticed a couple of odd things have happened because of this.

There are a few things that you're not supposed to discuss in company; politics and religion, right? Maybe we should add organized labour to that list because you certainly find out where people stand. People who you would think are fairly liberal and open-minded turn out to be junior republicans. And intractable. It seems to be one of those issues that people have long-standing and immovable opinions on. Discussion with them is pointless and your announcement that you're on strike seems to spark them to broadcast their point of view with a certain vehemence.

I was sorta lukewarm on the whole going on strike thing in the first place, mostly because the stuff that's at issue doesn't really apply all that directly to me but I'm a union member and I toe the union line. I figure that I was due anyway; I've managed to go almost 20 years in the union without having to walk the line, it was inevitable that it would happen eventually. Despite the fact that I was not all that committed I have found myself defending the strike and organized labour generally. It's odd how the person on one side of a conversation who veers dramatically to the right inclines the one on the opposite side to veer farther to the left regardless of their level of passion for the issue at hand if only to add some balance to the discussion.

I'm going to let it go at this especially since it's taken me the better part of a week to post this.

Where'd the summer go?

You know, I had really intended to post updates like I had promised in my last post but things had just gotten a little insane over the past month or so and, well they still are, but I would be remiss if I didn't keep all my reader happy and filled in on the goings-on in my hectic last month or so.

Ok, so where did we leave off? Oh yeah the house for sale thingy. When last you heard from your intrepid reporter he was in realtor imposed exile from his own apartment so that showings could proceed. Over the next couple of days there was something like 17 showings. My realtor was wise enough to allow for offers only the following day. Such is the dearth of available condos (at a reasonable price I might add) in my neighbourhood that I was the only one within probably a mile radius, hence, all the activity. By Friday noon, a whole 30 hours after the initial showing, I had an offer and a decent one at that and rather than shooting for the moon and trying to stage a bidding war that may never happen I figured an offer at asking was too good to turn down. I know what you're all saying "An offer of asking price within the first 2 days means that you weren't asking enough". That may be true, but I also didn't want to be waiting out a better offer given that I only had about 4 weeks to sell in order to make the bridge financing work. Besides I made a pretty sweet return on a 3 1/2 year investment. I got the old place sold in time to make the trek to Thunder Bay without it hanging over my head.

What to say about Thunder Bay? I'd been there before, back in 2002 for a shoot but that was in March and the ground looked considerably different in August. The 17 and a half-hour drive wasn't too bad and there's certainly some spectacular scenery along the way but there's no lack of featureless nothing along the way too. We were mostly there to help Deb's daughter get set up in her new apartment so after arriving followed a few days of visits to home shops, installing shelves and building bookcases. We did take a nice leisurely tube ride down the river whose name I couldn't pronounce and Deb got to be the Mom for a few days.

Other than that, just work and prep for the move/closings. We finally closed on the one upstairs last Friday and spent the weekend painting and installing closet organizers. I think installing closet organizers may be the theme for the summer of 2009, I'm at 6 and counting for the summer. Overlapping the moves may be the smartest thing I've done in a while; having 10 days to get everything ready and move a piece at a time is definitely the way to go. It will be some time before I paint anything again though...

Relying on karma...

There is some truth to the old maxim that you only find what you're looking for when you stop looking for it. The whole house hunting thing had been an education in managing one's expectations and we had resolved to stand pat right where we were and in fact had grown to be happy with the resolution. While we had stopped looking for a place we were continuing to receive the updates from the realtor just in case by some strange confluence of events we happened upon the perfect place.

Well, some two weeks ago that's exactly what ended up happening. An email with the details for another apartment in my very building landed in my mailbox. About two months ago i had spoken to the folks at the condo board and asked them to keep their ear to the ground about any available apartments in my building and they gave me the name and number of someone who had expressed an interest in selling their 2 bedroom unit. I had called and never gotten a reply. Turns out it was this very person who was now listing their place. So we saw the place the next day and given that we are both interested in staying in this building jumped at the chance to buy it. So we made an offer right away; and thanked my stars that I'd had the foresight to speak to both my mortgage broker and lawyer some time earlier, and following a short bidding war ended up with the place.

So, my building 9 floors up on the same side with 2 bedrooms as opposed to the one I have now. All this means that now I have to list my place, in spite of all the recommendations to just keep it and rent it out(couldn't be less interested in being someone's landlord). Which all leads to this particular post. My place went up for sale yesterday and I'm sitting in a coffee shop because I can't get back in to my place for all the viewing appointments. I'm hoping it all gets resolved within a couple of days because we leave for Thunder Bay bright and early Monday morning and I'd like to not have to do all this over the hotel fax up there.

More news as things develop...