what i learned in the past 7 weeks on my summer vacation.
1. living in the same house for 45 years or so means that you accumulate a lot of stuff. when it comes time to move that stuff, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to sift and sort before you start moving the stuff that floated to the top.
2. if you don’t exercise, helping to move your mom from one house to another over 5 weeks is bad for your back, and your arms, and your legs… in fact, it’s bad for just about everything.
3. a professional massage therapist knows how to fix a bad back, and arms and legs…
4. my french is not as rusty as i thought. at least as much french as is required to make conversation during a massage.
5. orange rum liquor is bad for a macbook pro keyboard.
6. when you spill orange rum liquor in a macbook pro keyboard, it takes more than contact cleaner to repair all of the damage.
7. the cursor keys from an old white 12″ macbook with a russian keyboard fit on a new 15″ macbook pro, albeit upside down.
8. i used to use my cursor keys a lot.
9. it’s harder to replace the keyboard on a new macbook pro than it is on my first powerbook titanium.
10. the sunrise at cape spear is pretty spectacular on a good day.
11. montreal has grown up since i left. there is now a dedicated bike path on de maisonneuve running through the middle of downtown.
12. even after 7 years, canada (and montreal) still feel like “home”. and even after 19 years, so does newfoundland.
13. traveling trans-atlantic with two small kids is not as bad as i thought it would be.
14. life is cheaper in canada than it is in denmark, but pretty-much-everything (from houses to roads) is more poorly made by people who are either lazier or just trying to cut too many corners.
15. my relatively-ecologically-responsible life in denmark is infinitely more ecologically responsible than a life that is possible to lead in canada. this statement may not be strictly true, however, it is certainly infinitely more convenient to lead an ecologically-responsible life in denmark than it is in canada.
16. when push comes to shove, i can throw an amazing amount of stuff in the garbage. however, there are some strange things that i cannot.
17. i come from a long line of pack rats.
18. new houses in montreal are disgustingly ornate. there are silly brick mini-castles stuck next to each other in suburbs all over the west island. they all look like someone ate, and subsequently threw up a legoland set. new house design in denmark is much more new.
19. stuff is still much, much cheaper in canada than it is in denmark. even stuff that is exactly the same (like a lowepro camera bag or a pair of ecco shoes (oddly enough), for example…)
20. 185 gb is not nearly big enough for a laptop hard drive when you have a new camera on vacation and you have a propensity to experiment with hdr photography…