Thar She Blows!

We're the red pushpin.

Tropical storm Irene, that is. We watched the weather as Hurricane Irene moved up the coast and came inland, making a bee-line for Montreal. L was kind of excited, as he'd never seen a storm of the magnitude that we were expecting. Sunday morning we made sure all of our flashlights worked and stored a pitcher of water in the fridge... And waited. By mid-afternoon we had a pretty good storm. It was like a bad summer storm (without thunder and lightning) that lasted all day.  It's amazing how fast you can go stir-crazy when you know you're stuck inside. After a few hours, Little man decided to wear underwear on his head and mismatched socks on his hands. Then he headed outside to fill his squirt gun. We considered locking Captain Underpants outside.

When the power went out at 5:30 I immediately offered to go out to get pizza or chinese, or dog food if it would get me out of the house. Of course, it was still raining and windy...and it was eerie not being able to see the city of Montreal (approx. 3.5 kilometers across the river). I thought maybe it had blown away, but it was still there when we ventured out on Monday after spending all morning cleaning the leaves out of the pool.

Trois popsicles.

We also finished our soccer season (the day before Irene hit). The boys played a great season, and they all improved a lot. They only won one game (because we didn't have enough players and the other team gave us their "ringer"-and he scored goals against his own team), but they all had good attitudes about the whole thing. I learned some new french words, but not as many as I had hoped. Here they are, in no particular order:

advance!
bravo!
pied
balloon
goaler
The mix of english and french being spoken was confusing. I heard a lot of, "ok, le boys" and, "GO les Gris!" and an occasional, "Oh my god!"


School starts tomorrow for Captain Underpants, and as he pointed out tonight, this will be his fourth school (including preschool/daycare) and he's only in the second grade. He's handling it pretty well, though, considering he's entering french immersion, where 70% of his school day will be in french. However, he'll be with other english speaking kids, so I'm sure he'll be fine. I'm not really looking forward to the first couple of frustrating weeks, though. I'm also not quite sure how I'm going to help with his homework. Luckily some of our francophone neighbors have taken pity on me and offered to have their children help us....


I haven't given up on french yet, but I'm getting to the point where I don't even think about it most of the time. Yes, the language barrier prevents me from reading some community event flyers, but chances are I wasn't going to understand the event if I went anyway.

If we choose to watch TV at night we have three english options (besides Netflix)...the "anglo" CBC news, the Game show channel, which sometimes shows movies, or  "The Accessible Channel", which is targeted for those with poor (or no) eyesight, and has "described detail". The movies they show are usually ok, but it's mildly disturbing watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie while someone you can't see is describing every action in detail. "He pulls the knife from a hidden pocket and slings it at the attacker, who doubles over and falls to the ground, dead".  And the description is usually just a second before the action on the screen, which really dampens the suspense....the new shows for September are "Matlock" and "Battle of the Blades".  Hmmm...maybe they should put Matlock on ice skates...?