FLOOD UPDATE

In a recent post, I wrote that my building had a major flood. This flood necessitated an building-wide shut off of the water for nearly six hours last Friday. Today, I saw one of the elevators was locked off for a move between 9am and 5pm. This is a massive amount of time for one of the elevators to be dedicated for a move.

On my way back from lunch, I saw the building manager and asked him about this lengthy move. He told me that two units are moving out because of the flood. There was enough water damage that those units are not fit for living in and I’m guessing repairs are just easier with all the furniture and people out of there.

He also confirmed the affected units are on tenth floor, which is the lowest floor in this building that has residential units, everything below is either common property, parking, or commercial. The floor right below the tenth is the amenities room, storage lockers, and gym. This whole building is lucky that the leak happened on the tenth floor and the water went down to a non-residential floor, otherwise we’d probably be dealing with more people moving out.

I can’t imagine what a pain in the ass it is for those living in those two units. Not only is your home flooded, now you gottta move your ass elsewhere. I can only hope their insurance is covering all this. Even if it does, what an upheaval to your life.

WATER SHUT OFF

I recently wrote about how my building had to shut off the water supply to all residents for about eight hours during a weekday so they could do some repairs. Well, they’re gonna do it again. In my last post, I detailed how a major water leak in one of the apartments caused extensive flooding in the lower floors. I imagine they were only able to make temporary repairs because on Friday evening they’re going for a more permanent fix. The water will be shut off on Friday night from 10am to 4am early Saturday morning.

In the meantime, there have been multiple flood restoration vans parked outside the building all week since the leak began. These dudes must be working all day drying stuff out. The amenities floor, which includes the weight room and sauna, and our storage lockers have been off-limits to residents as well. Oh wow, I totally forgot about my storage locker. Well, they didn’t say the storage lockers were affected, so I can only hope everything is ok down there. I better go check now.

LEAK

In the early evening, I needed to pop down to the drug store downstairs. As normal, I took the stairs because it’s a good way to get some easy exercise. On the way down, around the eighth floor, where the parkade floors begin, I noticed the air felt damp, like it was really humid. I also noticed water pooling near the landings of the stairwell. Then came the most obvious observation, the concrete walls of the staircase were wet. There was clearly something wrong.

When I got back from the drug store, I posted some photos to the building’s Facebook group. I was told by the group admin that the issue was that a unit in the building had suffered a very severe water leak and what I saw was the water from that leak. I cannot imagine how bad the leak was that it was able to leak through the concrete walls between floors. This is bad for the concrete, right? At the very least, it can’t be good?

I have no idea how the leak happened or what the circumstances were behind it, but the owner of that unit is gonna be in for a world of hurt both financially and practically. I hope they have enough insurance to cover this leak because if they don’t, this could potentially ruin them.

WARM THANKSGIVING

It was warm enough to wear shorts on the Sunday of this Thanksgiving long weekend. If weather reports are to believed, it was about 22 degrees Celsius on Sunday afternoon. I was outside on that day and I wore shorts and in the direct sun, it was warm enough to make me sweat. I could tell people did not expect it to be that warm because I saw many people holding onto their jackets or wearing their jackets wrapped around their waist.

In the years past, I’ve written about the relatively new phenomenon of wearing shorts for your Thanksgiving dinner and having the meal out on your patio or deck. If you had your family meal on Sunday, that was definitely possible this Thanksgiving. While on my Sunday walk a couple older folk were remarking how warm it was for a mid-October afternoon and how wonderful it was. In the moment, sure it’s great but I’m thinking the reason why it’s hot in October is the same reason why we just saw the extreme weather in Florida and North Carolina recently.

Anyways, the crazy thing is, in a month, it’s quite possible the temperatures will have dropped enough for snow to fall.

NO WATER DAY

Today was the day they were supposed to shut off water access all day to do some plumbing repairs. I can only imagine they did the repairs because I had water all day. I had enough water to poop twice and flush as much as I needed to, as well as wash my hands with hot water. In fact, I washed up several times during the day while I was cleaning and prepping to eat.

If I had to guess I was using the residual water that was left in the tanks and there was so little demand during the day that it never ran out.

Anyways, I hope the repairs went well. During the day, I was thinking what is more an inconvenience: no water vs. no electricity. In the short term, not having power is way more of inconvenience. Without electricity, you basically can’t do anything in this modern world, whether it’s fun stuff or doing work. In the long term, water becomes more important as you can’t live without water.

TERRIBLE

I was on my daily walk today to the local waterfront park. I entrance I take to the park allows me to get into the park via an elevated walkway that passes over the children’s playground in the park.

As I walking over the playground area, I saw a flash of movement. When I looked down, I saw a small, tiny human rolling down the bank of a sloped portion of the playground. From the top of this hill to the bottom was about six feet at least, probably seven feet, and it was fairly steep incline. This tiny baby was not in control of their body and should not have been rolling down this large hill. I was shocked to see this. It was so bad that a man who was having lunch near the bottom of the hill rushed over to pick the baby up.

When he did so, I could see this child was probably not even a year old. I can remember when my niece was one and she was bigger than this baby. If I had to guess, the kid was about eight months old. At the top of the hill was this older man, who was scrambling to get down the hill. He made it down to take the baby from the kind man and at the same time, an older lady had made her way over to the baby as well.

It was clear these two older folks were the grandparents of this unfortunate baby. The grandfather had somehow lost control of his grandkid and allowed it to roll down the hill. By this time, the child was crying but not too badly. The grandparents quickly made their way out of the area, with crying baby.

I try not to judge parents and grandparents because kids are tricky but watching this man lose control of his grandkid, a mere baby, and have it roll down a large hill was crazy. I am sure the child is fine now but I wonder if he told the parents later today.

POOP WATER

My building needs to shut off all water next week for one day, from 8am to 5pm. They are doing this to enable some repairs of the plumbing system. They have done this before, when I was also working from home.

Not having water all day while you work from home means you need to plan out your day. I guess it makes sense to do attempt to do all the water-related things for the day before it’s shut off in the morning. That means brushing your teeth, pooping, showering, and so forth. The problem is I don’t get up until around 10am on most workdays.

If I poop while the water is shut off, I can time it so that there’s gonna be enough water in the tank for one full flush. After that, there’s gonna be nothing. If I just pee for the rest of the day, that should be fine. If my body decides it needs to poop again, well that poop is gonna sit in the bowl all day until 5pm.

For drinking water, I have a hot water dispenser, so that will last me all day and then some. Beyond that, I don’t need to do my dishes during the day. Washing my hands though will be a problem. As I mentioned, I’ll get one full flush after a poop, but what about my poopy hands? I have wet wipes that I can use or perhaps I can fill a jug of water the night before and use that as my cleansing water.

It’ll be a hassle next week but I’ll adapt and survive.

NEW ITALIAN RESTAURANT

A local pub that had been in business for decades closed a few months ago and an Italian restaurant popped up in its place. It’s in a prime location, by the water, with a huge patio area. I had to try it since I love Italian food. I picked a sunny weekday afternoon to have some lunch.

On that particular day, I wanted to try out their “seafood bowl”. It turned out to be pretty good but I didn’t think it was worth $28. While the broth was delicious, there wasn’t enough seafood, in my opinion, to warrant the $28 price tag.

Anyways, when I got the bill, I noticed the very unfortunate spelling mistake that was programmed into the point of sale computer. I pointed it out to the waiter but he said the staff were well aware of the issue. He further divulged that it was misspelled like that in the actual menu for about a week. How terrible. No menu should ever have that word in it.

I think I’ll go back just to try some of their other items but I’m wary of the prices.

AIRPORT PICKUP

On Sunday evening I went to pickup my Mom from the airport. She had been in Montreal for several weeks to visit her sister and help take care of her mother, who is experiencing some health issues. Of course, these are my aunt and my grandmother to me.

My Mom’s flight was supposed to arrive just after 11pm, which is quite late in the evening for a flight. The flight was delayed, however, which is a common occurrence these days. The delay wound up being an hour and a half long, which apparently due to a mechanical problem. That’s a long delay and my poor Mom had to endure that by herself.

I left my place around 11:45pm, to give myself time to drive to the airport, get a cart ready, and be present to greet my Mom. I have to say, if you have to drive to the airport, doing it near midnight on a Sunday is a good time to do it. Traffic was very light and I got there in almost record time.

My Mom’s flight touched down around 12:30am. It took several more minutes for the plane to get to the gate, several more for the plane to deboard, and even more for her to walk from the gate to the luggage carousel where I was waiting for her. I got her seated while I got her luggage because she was exhausted after almost eight hours of travel, if you include the flight, the delay, and the drive to the airport on the Montreal side. By the time we got her luggage, loaded it up in my car, and started driving to my parents’ place, it was after 1am.

Even with no traffic, it still took about 40 minutes or so to drive from the airport to my parents’ home. I helped unloaded my Mom’s luggage and brought it inside. By then it was almost 2am. I didn’t want to leave right away because I hadn’t seen my Mom in several weeks and it’d been about a week since I last saw my Dad. I had a quick chat with them and my Mom had brought me some food from Montreal. I got some bagels and some Montreal smoked meat, which was quite kind of her. My aunt also gave me, via my Mom, some vegetables from her garden.

By the time I finally left my parents’ place it was after 2am, which was quite late for me. It took me about 18 minutes to get home, which is incredibly fast because even on a weekend, it takes me about 30 minutes to do the same trip.

After cleaning up and getting ready for bed, I didn’t roll into my bed until 3am. I had a 9am meeting the next day, so it was gonna be an early day for me. Now I’ve had productive work days on six hours of sleep before so I didn’t think it was gonna be that bad. When I woke up at 8:50am the next morning, I was feeling rough. I’m not sure if it was all the driving I did the night before but I woke up feeling exhausted.

I somehow managed to get through the work day fine. I took a nap around 6pm for around thirty minutes. Now usually if I take one nap after work, I’m good for the rest of the evening but around 9pm, I feel asleep on the couch again. I must have been extra tired that day.

Despite the fatigue, I feel like if you have to pickup someone from the airport, a Sunday evening is a pretty good time. There’s almost no traffic, parking is easy, and the terminal is nearly empty.