owning a house

(Part One in a three hundred a forty two million part series here on fixed address)

Luckily, Phet likes the house. It was a teeny worry, I have to admit. How many people do you know who would let you buy a house with their money when they hadn't actually seen the house themselves? I'm willing to bet the answer is: not many. But somehow Phet went along with my advice to throw a sack of cash at an abode out in the middle of nowhere, in an area that emphatically does NOT boast a healthy population of noodle shops.

We got to Toronto and eased out of our jet lag by watching TV in the aunts' basement. We don't have a TV here in Bangkok, so we find it pretty fascinating when we've got access. I, for one, was riveted by midnight nudity and sexy programming. Back in the day when Phet and I were young 'uns, you stayed up extra late watching City TV with the illicit lure of a couple of seconds of exposed nipple in a B-movie. But now, holy smokes, it's a wonder that p*rn merchants get any business at all, what with the kinds of "shows" that are on cable TV! And, uh, has anyone else noticed that Everybody Loves Raymond SUCKS? Roseanne, Cheers, The Fresh Prince -- those are shows that improve upon a second viewing. But Raymond? He and his entire family were pathetic and unfunny the first time round. Even worse, they showed an episode of ELR on the cross-Pacific flight back to Hong Kong. It's like torture, watching that show. The Inquisition could've had a field day with that trick up their long, velvet sleeves.

"Si, si, Diego, ee has not essuffered enough! Bring out Raymonde!"
"Nooooo! Raymonde is muy horrific! I will tell you everything!"
"Heh heh heh, te quiero, Raymonde..."

After a few days of decompression and a fun family visit to the dentist, Phet and I headed up north without Ji for the weekend. We rented a cool, fast, black car and I drove it. Phet was in charge of music, and we rolled through wee hamlets blasting the Beastie Boys. When we arrived at the house (after an accidental detour through Southampton and Sauble Beach), Phet was relatively happy with the place. Relatively happy, that was, until he found the new basketball net in the shed and then he became beamingly thrilled with our new home. Thanks, Mum and Dad.

We spent the weekend shifting around furniture and sorting through photos. We drank a bunch of booze and stuffed ourselves with Canadian delicacies - cheescake, cheese, cheezies, Nacho Cheese Doritos, and cheese. We puttered around exploring our cupboards. Phet get the shed all gussied up and ship-shape. We saw the blue heron that hangs out at our pond. We chilled out and star gazed. I had some pretty great insights on the nature of the universe and tripped out on the fact that all the stars are suns. And that most living things on the earth spend their lifetimes trying to pull themselves up against the onslaught of gravity, only to be pulled back down to the grip of the earth after death. And that we are actually always in space. Cool.

We also decided to paint the dining room and front hallway. There was an almost-coming-off wallpaper border around the room printed with tacky grey maple leaves, and then the top section of the wall was pale greyish blue, and the bottom section was dark slightly bluish grey. I loathed the border, and so convinced Phet that instead of hanging out in the shed that what he really wanted to do was get out some rollers and slick some latex on the walls. We went into 'town' around noon. We took a sample bucket of paint with us, and went to the Wiarton Home Hardware. The helpful lady there explained (after quite a wait) that they didn't carry the exact brand of paint we were looking for, but that she could use the colour-matching computer system to find a 'very close' match. Given that we didn't want to re-paint the pale blue staircase walls, I decided we ought to go to the big city and try for an exact match instead. So off we trotted to Owen Sound.

In Owen Sound we bypassed Colour Your World and headed straight to the mecca of all mortgage-payers, the Home Depot. We dropped our paint off with the paint dude and wandered around for 20 minutes, went back to the paint dude and he told us the system was down and could we come back just a little later. We walked over to Walmart and bought us some plastic stuff. Then we went back to Home Depot. The paint dude was gone, and no one was manning the paint department. We had the dude paged. Thrice. To no avail. Then a dumb paint girl came around and said 'oh, was that your paint? Sorry, we didn't do it yet', at which point I got very grumpy and Phet politely got our bucket back. We then drove off in a hail of henshit to Colour Your World. Which was closed. Then we raced back across town to Canadian Tire. We got there 10 minutes before closing time and Phet ran in with the bucket. He came out 2 minutes later. The Canadian Tire colour matching computer system was also down. Nice.

We got back to our place at around 6 pm, only four hours late for meeting the chimney sweep, who called - pissed off - at 6:30, wondering in a really-not-pleased sort of way why the hell we hadn't left a note to tell him that we were out and couldn't make the appointment. He said it had been his wife's birthday, and he'd be charging us for his wasted time.

Total cost of Debbie Travis's nightmare day? Half a tank of gas (like, 200 bucks in Canada these days) and 65 dollars for the non-swept chimney. The next day we drove back to Wiarton, went to the same Home Hardware - well, duh, there is only one - and got our bucket of pretty closely matched paint. It looked great on the walls and no one seems to have noticed any shade inconsistencies yet. [Countryside-8-September-2005]