aMMusing

It’s quite remarkable how, perhaps moreso now than ever, we can find that we are somehow connected to one another, however loosely. Last weekend, while The Quad was in Montréal from Fredericton for some vacation R & R, I found a very indirect but nonethelesss fascinating connection with fellow Montréal blogger Tornwordo.

It has to be understood that The Quad, whom I’ve known since I was 12, is perhaps the most gregarious person I know. As a result, I suspect it’s impossible for him to travel incognito. No matter where he is, he is bound to come across someone he knows while minding his own business on just about any street in any Canadian city. Or, if not, he’s meeting someone who likely will be added to his vast repertoire of people he’ll unexpectedly bump into weeks, months, or years later. In fact, it’s through The Quad that I met Jain (a.k.a. The Pastry Monster), whom I had called the weekend before to urge her to come to Montréal while The Quad would be visiting, which she did.

While in Montréal, The Quad went to dinner with someone he befriended about a decade ago at some rather extraordinary event in which they were called upon to participate. Before dinner, he told us how she was a very interesting, knowledgeable, sophisticated and successful lady who works extremely hard but who, for some reason, has had a great deal of difficulty learning English despite expending extraordinary time, effort and money to learn the language. He was going to meet her for dinner after she got back from spending several hours with a private tutor in her continuing effort to parler anglais. Another attempt by this lady to perfect her English consisted of spending considerable time in Nova Scotia, whereupon Jain thought, but couldn’t confirm, that she may have met her and even spent some time in a car with her, going from some town to another.

Around 11:00 that evening, The Quad met us in the Village after his dinner. At one point, he mentioned how she spoke very highly of her English-language tutor, and he proceeded to give a description I instantly recognized.

I asked, “Would her tutor’s name be Tornwordo by any chance?” To which The Quad added, “…who’s married to this Québécois named Spouse? You know them???”

We were all floored.

I think it was about four years ago while still living in Halifax that I stumbled across this blog by a guy from California living in Montréal with the guy to whom he’s now married. I took a liking to his writing and, one night, I even read everything back to the beginning of his blog, enjoying his little video montages and the accounts of his travails with one he dubbed Nude Dancer. Afterwards, aside from comments on each other’s blog, we very occasionally e-mailed, like the time he had an apartment to rent just days before I would be coming to Montréal to apartment shop. (Turned out he rented it out within hours of posting an ad for it, so that didn’t work out.) Other than that, we met in person precisely once, for perhaps 3 minutes two summers ago, when I recognized him and Spouse walking down the closed-off street in the Village. Thus, it’s probably fair to say that ours is more a case of knowing of each other than truly knowing each other.

But still! I can’t help but marvel at these kind of connections or coincidences. Like, how was I to know that day in June 2001 when I switched Web host that one of that company’s owners would move to Nova Scotia to marry one of my now best friends who, in June 2001, I had only met once and would be staying on my couch a few weeks later as she would be beginning her new job in Halifax? Or when, during one of my stays in Chilangolandia, my now-estranged spouse introduced me to one of his friends who needed no explanation of what or where “Moncton” is because he’s been doing his master’s degree in Aix-en-Provence where one of his classmates is an Acadian from Moncton. After all, it would be reasonable to expect someone from Mexico never to have heard of that speck-on-the-world-map called Moncton!

So, allow me to indulge in a little kumbaya moment without Kumbaya…

I had a friend back in Moncton some 25 years ago who had a wicked sense of humour. Whenever you’d say something a little salacious or off-colour, he would look at you with feigned disgust and declare you “Trash! Pure White Trash!” before turning his head the other way, nose pointing up. His delightfully campy delivery made it amply clear that he was only joking, just like the time he poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot that had been on the hotplate far too long, and he looked up and asked, pretending to be puzzled, “Who made tar?”

I’m reminded of this friend because of how I’ve been feeling recently about my apartment. I LOVE it! It’s huge, and the fact the building was built in 1936 ensures it has huge rooms and tons of character. However, increasingly, part of the place’s character is the janitor and her offsprings — Irish Canadians originally from Montréal’s Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood, which until recent decades was slummy and very white trash, divided by a train track where on one side lived the Irish descendants and the other side the French Canadians.

Don’t you just hate it when a group of people live up to their group’s ethnic stereotype? You know in your heart and mind that you shouldn’t be stereotyping, but then some people come along and you simply can’t avoid it. In this case, as the sterotype goes, every member of this family is loud, combative, intolerant of other ethnicities, and indisputably alcoholic.

Shortly after I got off work yesterday, the fire alarm went off, so I put on my shoes, grabbed my wallet and my ciggies, and vacated my apartment. And sure enough, by the time I reached the main floor, smoke was billowing out of the basement apartment where the janitor’s rough and worn looking 48-year-old daughter lives — clearly smelling as if a pot had been left unattended on the stove and all the liquid had evaporated. This was the second time in as many years that such an incident was happening.

A lovely lady she is — NOT! Back in December, she bilked me by “selling” me for $15 a $25 gift card at a local grocery chain, the proceeds of which sale were supposedly going to some charity for homeless youth. I gave the card to Cleopatrick since I figured he could use it and there’s one of those grocery stores just around the corner from where he lives. But when he tried to use it, it didn’t work because it hadn’t been properly activated. Therefore, we think the goods she was “selling” may have fallen off the back of a truck.

Coincidentally, she moved out of the building in the days following this sale and I would only see her around occasionally. I never confronted her about how she bilked me, chiefly because it was for an insignificant amount and, well, I just don’t do confrontations. Then, one evening last spring as I was heading to the garage in the basement, I saw her and there were two police officers standing outside (what I’ll still refer to as) her apartment. When I came back a few hours later, there was still one cop standing vigil just outside her door. But just like the character of Sergeant Schultz in the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, I said to myself, “I know nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” — nor did I want to know.

Afterwards I noticed she was around more often, and about 3 weeks after the cops’ visit, she acosted me in the garage and gave me the whole story: that the man who remained in the apartment was in fact her husband; he was in poor health and died quite suddenly in the apartment, thus why the cops had come that night; he was a hoarder worthy of being featured on Hoarding: Buried Alive and that’s why she had moved out last December — “Because I couldn’t continue to live like that.”

My apartment is located inside the U-shape created by how the building where I live is connected to the building next door. Lately, she and her new boyfriend, who seems to have been plucked directly from the other side of the tracks of Pointe-Saint-Charles of old, have been working on (possibly planning to move into?) an apartment in the building next door. When they do, not only do they put a radio in the window; they direct the speakers towards the outside and set the volume very high, therefore causing the sound to reverberate throughout the neighbourhood and particularly all apartments facing inside the U-shape. At one point she took a break by sunning herself, t-shirt pulled up just below her tits and the legs of her short pulled up just enough to cover her vulva. By that point, I realized I was witnessing the crossing by a country mile of that line that delineates white trash from everyone else.

At any rate, back to yesterday’s fire incident: by the time the firefighters arrived, there was no fire but tons of smoke, so their job consisted of ventilating the place out. We were told we could go back inside in about 10 minutes. At that point, I struck up a conversation with a tenant who owns many dogs and who, until now, has been particularly unfriendly. We were talking as we were walking away from the building, and she certainly gave me a earfull. After living here for about 8 years and loving (as I do) her apartment per se, she is considering moving out after years of being bullied and feeling terrorized by the janitor and her brood. She even has suspicions, but can’t prove, about who may have broken into her place a while back — “very likely an inside job,” the police told her.

As for me, would I also consider moving out? That’s a good question. White trash aside, this place has other cons alongside many more pros. I love this location, including the proximity to a great bagel shop, decent restaurants, and the métro station on two lines, as well as living in a 1930s building with indoor parking in the most multinational neighbourhood in Canada. But lately I’ve been starting to think about looking into those “For Rent” signs on nearby buildings that look better maintained. The thing is that I don’t know if that would stretch my budget too thin, as I’m pretty well at the ceiling of what is reasonable on my single income.

In the wake of all the chatter over the Harperites’ elimination of the mandatory long-form from the 2011 census, I have been thinking a lot lately about how Harper’s Conservatives have seemingly been getting away with dismantling the Canada the majority of us know and love despite his minority standing in the House of Commons. This article by Frances Russell Murdoch published on The Tyee puts into words, in a way I never could have, how the census debacle is only the latest manifestation of the Harper government’s implementation of the hard-right agenda that centrists and left-leaning Canadians feared so much prior to the rise to power of the Reform/Alliance Conservatives.

Taxes are not inherently a bad thing; mismanagement of tax dollars is. Having the state dictate to me where I can or cannot smoke or who I can or cannot f*ck is a bad thing, but having a state upon which I can call upon should bad luck befall me is a good thing. Meanwhile, it slays me to see, economic recession notwithstanding since the pattern began well before the recession struck, how these Conservatives, like Mulroney’s in the 1980s and 1990s or the U.S. Bushites of the 2000s, have made a porridge of the country’s finances (i.e., mismanaged tax dollars) to the point that, like Obama in the U.S., it will take another party longer to fix than it took these asswipes to break.

It breaks my heart to see Canadians and Americans alike fall for empty populist buzz phrases without realizing the negative long-term consequences. The left is not without its fault, but looking at the last century in both countries, it is clear that progressive policies have improved the lot of the majority far more than so-called conservative policies.

In the nearly 4½ years since I began my day job, which I suppose I can’t call “new” anymore, I have hardly worked on what was the centre of my existence for several years before: my home-grown TextStyleM content management system. In fact, over the years I have even let go most of my clients, only creating a new TextStyleM submodule for one client last year and amending some of the MySQL queries in the CMS as a result of a major upgrade of the LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP-Perl) kernels on the server where my remaining clients’ sites reside. However, I have been keeping relatively current in web development with PHP/MySQL, as I have developed a series of applications for my day job — the initiative that earned me that big recognition/cruise last winter. I say “relatively current” because I haven’t changed the software I use — a text editor and FTP client — in about a decade because, really, a text editor is just a text editor and anything that we see online can ultimately be coded by hand.

About two weeks ago, one of my remaining clients came to me for help about uploading material in a new subdirectory within its domain. The client wanted access to upload the material on its own, which means giving FTP access. Normally it would be easier to have the client send me the stuff to upload, but I didn’t “fight” (because I didn’t feel like it) the assurance that “my neighbour and web developer is very familiar with FTP,” even though that statement sent chills down my spine and reminded me of how, a decade ago, I would have people say to me, “My 13-year-old nephew knows all about websites and even created his own webpage, so I’m sure he can help us update once ours is up.” (That’s what got me working on TextStyleM in the first place.) The only warning I gave is that if this guy screws things up, I won’t be able to fix anything until I return to Montréal late this week.

And sure enough, the phone started ringing around 8:30 this morning. But I’m on effin’ vacation and only got up and called the client shortly before noon. As I expected, everything that was “wrong” was totally out of my control, from changing on the template what’s between the bloody <TITLE> tags to correctly sending the files via FTP. Plus, wouldn’t you know it: the site in the subdirectory looks almost fine in Internet Explorer but like total shit in Firefox. I know this is a snooty comment on my part, but I can’t help wonder if this neighbour/web developer is merely using a Mac-equivalent of FrontPage of old without having a clue what the fuck is happening in the background.

This reminds me of my biggest technical weaknesses: I freely admit that, design-wise, I suck. And I always lean towards pure server-side coding rather than fancier (and, I also admit, often more user-friendly) client-side scripting. But, to this day, I seldom fall into the trap of browser-specific compliance issues, or not being able to read a CSS stylesheet, or, for that matter, unwittingly uploading files in ASCII versus binary mode or vice versa.

Additionally, as I mentioned to BeeGoddessM earlier this week, I’m reminded of how sad I feel about having essentially abandoned TextStyleM. As I use a server installation of WordPress to write this blog, I see how it’s a formidable CMS for this kind of online publishing, but I also see how TextStyleM had content management features far beyond anything I’ve seen in other any other CMS. For instance, if an image was deleted, TextStyleM would scan the entire site and REMOVE every reference to that image to prevent gibberish code or a broken image on the affected page(s). Plus, publishing a site in two languages is easy as shit with TextStyleM. However, as BeeGoddessM pointed out five years ago, the interface of my CMS needed to change to become more like the other CMSs out there. I started working on that makeover and it would have kicked ass had I had the time and energy to bring it to fruition. But work and other life-altering events intervened, so it never happened.

Despite how stupid the day job has become recently, I definitely prefer the steady paycheque over the uncertainty of freelancing. But I still feel some sadness at seeing thousands upon thousands of hours of work not leading to anything significant today.

Yes, I’m already back in Montréal! I think I made the Halifax-Montréal trip in record time (for me): it was something like 8:15 am EDT on Junior’s clock when we drove away from BeeGoddessM and Stephanie‘s home and I was sitting at this computer around 9:30 pm EDT.

It’s not like I didn’t stop. In fact, I stopped six times: in Moncton to drop off BeeGoddessC and some lunch at Deluxe French Fries (thanks again!); a pee and pop stop in Woodstock; a pee, coffee and gas stop in Edmundston; two pee stops (due to all that pop and coffee) between Rivière-du-Loup and Québec City, and a gas and pee stop just west of Drummondville where I also picked up a cheap bottle of wine for when I would get home. It was dark only for the last hour or so, and it would have been less than that had traffic not come to a crawl on the Autoroute 30 bypass south of Montréal.

Although too short to see everybody, what a wonderful trip it was! I think a sign of a good trip is that, when I arrived home, it felt like I had been away much, much longer. The trip served as a total disconnect.

I left Montréal as planned last Tuesday when I realized that Junior’s breaks were fine enough for the trip. I did get them checked in Moncton, and the mechanic was as surprised as I was that the breaks on a 7-year-old Cavalier with 100K km are only half worn. I did get the rear break shoes changed when he recommended it should be done by late fall or early spring. Knowing how I can procrastinate with such things, I figured it was better to just go ahead with that fix right away.

I spent two full days with Mom before heading to Halifax on Friday afternoon, with BeeGoddessC driving shotgun. What followed was four blissful days of total relaxing, learning a new card game, and eating like royalty at BeeGoddessM and Stephanie’s bungalow palace and enchanted garden. I also dropped in on Saddam and his brother-in-law Mu’ammar who now runs a fish-and-chip joint; briefly saw Jain (a.k.a. Pastry Monster) although she couldn’t come to Montréal in the end; spent a day with Indiana Jones at Crystal Crescent, an afternoon by the ocean with the Queen of Sheba and an early evening with La Chelita. In other words, I ran out of time to see nearly a dozen other people, but I plan to return to the Maritimes for my next vacation in October, so……

Twice since I’ve been on vacation, I peeked (without actually signing in) to see how things are going at work, and both times I felt like screaming afterwards. It looks like I’ll be coming back to a mess that easily could have been prevented. But, as I told BeeGoddessM after I looked the second time, I’ll just have to learn to be the unquestioning automaton they — or at least my *(@$&!@ supervisor — want(s) me to be.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to be back in MY town for a few days of doing whatever I please, whenever I please. Seeing the Montréal skyline as I crossed the Champlain Bridge yesterday evening, I truly felt like I was coming home, just as while I was in the Maritimes, I felt like a visitor. I guess I’ve officially become a Montréalais whose only beef with the place is the distance from his best friends and the ocean.

Today’s the first day of my summer vacation, and yes, I really need it as my previous post attests. Even though each day and each week goes by quickly, it felt like a painfully slow crawl to this date. And given the stress I’ve been feeling, I made a point of refusing to make any travel plans until today, although I always knew I would head to the Maritimes for part of my time off.

However, the last week, I must admit, was delightful in that my brother and sister-in-law came visiting. The last two years they also came but I wasn’t here: in 2008 I was in Mexico and last year I was in Halifax. So, it was nice to actually be here and host — not that they require any hosting, mind you. In a way, that’s what makes them such delightful guests. They just take off in the morning to explore or shop or both and come back in the early evening.

I don’t mean this in the pejorative way — quite the opposite! — but the first word that comes to my mind after observing them for a few days is “cute.” They really are cute! They’ve both turned 50 this year and have been married for 30 years. Yet my sister-in-law is still a bombshell and looks almost exactly as she did when she married my brother. (I can write that because I said it in her face when she was here, noting that she clearly had the good fortune of inheriting her father’s genes, who up until 90 looked like he was bearly 70.) However, it’s the way they play off each other that reveals not only that they’re beyond familiar with each other, but that they’re each other’s best friend and ally. I’m sure they’ve had their moments like any couple with two (now adult) kids, but they preserve a little je ne sais quoi that is both enviable and admirable.

We never talked about the fact I’m gay until I decided to marry and then I thought it was ridiculous to keep the subject taboo. I wanted no more and no less recognition than I’d bestowed upon their relationship. It’s one of those things whereby I felt badly not just because it was the worst-kept secret of the last 25+ years, but because I feared they would somehow feel slighted for not having been officially let on the “secret” for all that time, especially since they’re such “live and let live” people. But not only did they not take offense; they were the first to ask when the wedding would be. Except I had already rushed into it by then.

So, really, the official recognition among us is still relatively new and they met their brother-in-law only once. Their first night in town, we were sitting at the kitchen table talking about this and that, when they mentioned how they wished their elder daughter might partner up with a guy with whom she studied interior design. Knowing that said daughter already has a boyfriend, I wasn’t totally sure what they meant and clearly the puzzled look on my face must have been plain to see. My brother picked up on that and said, “Oh, no no no. As business partners. Let put it this way: It wouldn’t work with them otherwise because they have the same taste in guys.” I burst out laughing, especially because of the way he delivered that line.

On the Tuesday evening we met up for supper at La Strega in the Village. Whenever my brother had been in town, we went to numerous places together but never to the Village, but I wanted them to experience it during the summer when Ste-Catherine is closed to car traffic. I met them outside the Beaudry metro station, whereupon my sister-in-law declared as she looked around, “So, this is Gay Street, huh?” To which I replied, “Pretty much,” although it wasn’t long before she noticed how the street closure attracts all kinds of people, gay or straight. By the time we (or, actually, just I) were having dessert at Kilo, she remarked on how relaxed the ambiance is and how pleasant it is to be sitting outside at 11:00 pm with so many people still milling about.

Back home that night, my brother and I stayed up way too late talking and reminescing, particularly about Dad. Through that conversation I found out that the priest I so dislike after what he did at our father’s funeral is dead. He boarded a plane to South America on his own two feet — a Catholic priest goes to South America? isn’t that how they handle pedophile priests? — but came back in a pine box. “So I guess now both my namesakes are dead,” I told me brother.

They left my apartment Thursday morning, planning to stop at the IKEA in Brossard before taking the road back to New Brunswick. That’s how they do vacations: they spontaneously decide to go somewhere and they go. So, I’m taking a page of their vacation roadmap. I’ll leave Montréal Tuesday morning if I can get Junior’s brakes fixed on Monday and come back mid-week, possibly with Jain (a.k.a. the Pastry Monster) in tow.

This image is a good representation of myself after work today. That, and the fact I felt on the verge of tears until I finally said to myself, “For chrisssake, it’s only a job!”

Thankfully, the heat has come down in the last few days and I’ve recovered from a short summer cold most likely induced by my new air conditioner, so my concentration should be better now than the last two weeks. Alas, around 6:30 this morning, workmen started wrecking and rebuilding the deck on the apartment building in the alleyway just a few feet from my bedroom window. Missing out on my last hour of sleep and being molested by building sounds all day rendered me a basket case by early afternoon.

By that point, I got an e-mail that quite rightly but sternly pointed out the inappropriateness of an e-mail I sent a client last week. I never said I was perfect and this incident certainly proved it. But another unrelated e-mail from a colleague, which was appropriate in all respect and came in response to a short one I sent him minutes earlier, pushed my headache over the edge.

I now better understand how, after a while, people who work in big corporations turn into unquestioning automatons. Asking questions only leads to trouble, or to be seen as being a trouble-maker. I also now have a far greater appreciation of the courage of whistle blowers. It is truly hateful to be in a position where you are systematically excluded and not given any support despite witnessing glaring problems or, worse, very deliberate acts of petty-political sabotage by people just one level above you, whose agenda is impenetrable but suspect. Even worse is having no significant recourse when your rapport with your direct supervisor has fallen apart, in this case, very much because I’ve lost all respect for said supervisor.

Ironically, at a mid-afternoon meeting, one of the topics of discussion was the general feeling of lack of recognition among employees. And it would seem now that, just like good like kids coming back to school in September, those of us who are willing to participate are to write a little essay on “what rewards and recognition mean to me.” Except that, unlike the notorious “What I Did During My Summer Vacation” essay expected of school kids, I can’t help but feel that this exercise, in this case, is little more than a trap: If I write about what I think recognition is, I will be ignored at best or shut out even more at worse; but if I write the platitudes expected of an automaton, I will get a pat on the head and still be ignored.

People like me become automatons because we need the job. We need to eat, pay rent, …live. And we are able to live with ourselves only because we understand that the “wrongs” we’re suffering aren’t downright evil or injurious to others. We understand that what we do, or no matter WHAT we do, will not matter in a few months or a few years, let alone when we’re good and dead.

But the thinking and creative humans that continue to live inside those automatons feel sad and mortified. And, tragically, they begin to wish that the ideas that roam through their head and are never heard would simply silence themselves. Leading, sadly, to those thinking and creative humans to become even more hopeless automatons.

How typically Canadian that two blog posts in a row should be weather-related, but here goes!

After living 20+ years in Halifax, I can safely say that I have never experienced before — or, at least, not since my childhood in Moncton — a real canicule. (I like that we have a specific word in French for “heat wave.”) However, now, after this past week, there’s no mistaking that I’ve popped my canicule cherry.

The definition of a canicule varies according to location. That makes sense, for what passes as normal in Florida or the Caribbeans may not be normal elsewhere. For most of Canada, a canicule is defined as “three or more consecutive days in which the maximum temperature is greater than or equal to 32°C (90F).” I believe the weather service in France also considers the overnight low, which mustn’t go below 20C or 21C (68F-70F). But given that the overnight lows in Montréal during the recent canicule, which officially started July 5 and ended in the early afternoon of July 9, didn’t go below 24C (75F) — it was often still 28C-30C (82F-86F) well into the early morning hours — we surpassed most definitions by a long shot.

Starting the evening of July 5, the temperature in my apartment remained in the 30C-32C (86F-90F) range. Whatever wind there was came from the south southwest and I’m facing the north northeast, so even someone’s fart would have been more breeze than I was getting. Realizing that I had a typically intense work week ahead of me and needed to both sleep at night and work at day, I found myself shopping for an air conditioner before starting work on Tuesday morning. I determined the night before that I wanted a portable device somewhat like the one pictured here, not only because I wanted to move it around easily but also because my office only has a door leading to the balcony rather than a window.

I never thought I’d ever break down and buy one of these things. I always found them too noisy, plus I never lived in a place where the heat and humidity can get so intense for so long. At the height of the heat, my new a/c only managed to bring the temperature down to 27C-28C (81F-83F), but the humidity it would take out is what made such temps feel comparatively cool. Unfortunately, it is too noisy to keep on when I’m on the phone for work unless I use the handset rather than my usual headset, and if the people I’m training happen to be on hands-free at their end, I still have to get them to repeat a few times. I’ve had to explain why — that it wasn’t them but me — and they were all very understanding.

Even now that the canicule has officially broken, we’re in for a really hot stretch.

It’s only 26C (78F) as I’m writing this, which apparently is the average high in Montréal at this time of year, but the humidex makes it feel like 34C (92F) and there’s no wind. And the dew point hasn’t gone below 20C (68F), which apparently is as important to consider as the humidex.

At the risk of sounding like I’m complaining, I hasten to add that I’ll take summer heat over winter cold any time! I’m just amazed, though, at how constant heat saps out one’s energy.

The weather here in Montréal last Monday was at once a frightening and beautiful sight to behold. This image, submitted to cbc.ca by Denis Sobolj (click on the image to go to the story at CBC News), doesn’t look real in some ways, yet it is. The best comment someone left on the CBC site, although possibly animated by anti-French sentiment, went along the lines that this cloud was looking for Kansas, but since all the signs around here are in French, it got lost.

Several funnel clouds were spotted and at least two touched ground on the West Island as F0 tornadoes — the weakest kind. And Tornwordo, who lives east in HoMa, posted another remarkable photo he took Monday afternoon (though it looks like evening). But here in Snowdon (or Uptown, or Upper Westmount, or whatever you want to call it), it wasn’t quite as dramatic in the afternoon, although it certainly rained heavily at one point.

I was working and did have to turn the light on, but clearly it was nothing like what nearby places in the area witnessed. Shortly after suppertime, however, things did take a rather dramatic turn. I was even compelled to step outside to the front of my building for a better look, and the rapidly moving whispy clouds under the solid dark blue black cloud rendered everything as surreal as on the image above. When it started to rain, I thought it best to get the heck back inside …just in case.

The Montréal area is no stranger to such wild weather we normally associate to the American tornado alley, although thankfully not as destructive. Two years ago, there was this waterspout in the St. Lawrence River, adjacent to the east end. And I remember some pretty nasty storms with tornadoes passing through and touching down in the suburbs early last summer.

After an overall cool and wet month of June here, about which I’m not complaining because we desperately needed the moisture, we’re about to start a typical continental summer hot spell in the coming days. It makes me wonder if it’ll also bring high humidity and the risk of more violent storms.

Someone on my Facebook friends’ list made a point of sending me this link privately, which I then promptly posted as my FB status and now here. It’s in French — the video quality of a version with English captions is too poor to post — but it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what’s being said. Trust me on that!

The thing you have to understand is that the show is broadcast live each weekday morning from Marché Jean-Talon here in Montréal, so this hit the airwaves as is.