Author Topic: Moving to Montreal  (Read 1208 times)

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Offline odeon

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #30 on: May 09, 2015, 03:19:32 AM »
Yes, true. I went there in early August, every time.
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Offline WolFish

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #31 on: May 09, 2015, 05:37:02 AM »
:lol1:

Funny, though. It's always been hot as hell when I've been there.
It's hot as hell now. I can't tell the difference between here and Florida. Oh wait. I can - no central air here.
supposed to get to 29C here today AND rain. I've managed to get my room down to 26.
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Offline odeon

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #32 on: May 09, 2015, 03:48:02 PM »
Ouch. I remember my first time there. The heat and the humidity... :GA:
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Offline renaeden

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #33 on: May 10, 2015, 04:09:59 AM »
29C isn't hot. Says the West Australian. ;)
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Offline 'andersom'

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #34 on: May 10, 2015, 05:58:50 AM »
29C isn't hot. Says the West Australian. ;)

29ºC and humid is way harder than 35ºC and low humidity. I do not really mind the latter. The former I utterly hate.
The humidity takes away the cooling options via perspiration. The Australian temperatures above body temperature, I have no idea how I would be dealing with them, no matter what the humidity.
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Offline WolFish

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #35 on: May 10, 2015, 06:57:12 AM »
Managed to get my room down to 28.3 last night. Humidity is up to 50%. One of the other issues is that there is a roof outside my window which I am sure is heating the air outside my window. Between that and the diesel fuel smell, it was kind of miserable in here last night.
I suspect I will not be able to stay in my room in August. I slept poorly last night.

I'll get you a sound bite of the trains now that I've located my Zoom. Foolishly I protected that and forgot about my college ring, which the packers stole. They stole a lot of stuff. They took two days to pack and now that we are nearly done unpacking, I understand why. They were going through my stuff. I "collect" new dollar bills since I have trouble spending them. I have trouble with any new or large bill so I still have Christmas money (I hope) from 2011. I hid it somewhere and forgot where it was. But the rest they took, including a $20, a $10 a $5 and two ones that I had folded into origami shirts. There was more tucked into the sides of drawers and all that is gone.

They took a camera that I had bought on Ebay so that will cost less to replace. The ring will cost $800 to replace. I was supposed to buy a safe yesterday but they're expensive. I'm thinking that I will just use my old one, for which I have lost the keys. I opened it before we left and took out everything to take with me so it was open when we got here.

I should wander in the direction of my grading.
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Offline WolFish

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #36 on: June 03, 2015, 11:36:41 AM »
Today wolfish is having a bad French day. Bad language day, more like it.

Very glad I did not learn enough Japanese to speak it. So we have two mechanics across the street from us. One is a friendly Mexican fellow and the other is a jerk who puts cars where they block our driveway. Today I saw the jerk fighting with the sidewalk fixing people (which you NEVER should do), and I wondered if I could ask the Mexican guy to translate. I would have to ask him in Spanish but my Spanish is fairly good. Except I couldn't remember the word for "or." Brain got stuck on "oder." I minored in Spanish in college and to do that we had to take a second language. I took German. I learned just enough to get in trouble. So now when I am trying for a word in French and comparing in Spanish (a lot of words have the same root), German comes up instead?
"oder?" Spanish is actually easier - it's "o"
WTH?? :GA:

I did have my first conversation in French. Some guy on the street offering gluten laden samples. I said no thanks.
In other news, wolfish is not used to the changing weather and now has another cold. It went from sweltering to freezing overnight. Apparently this is common here.
This cold doesn't have the asthma component so unlikely to turn into pneumonia like the last one.
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Offline Jack

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #37 on: June 03, 2015, 04:30:55 PM »
Jack approves of Wolfish's use of third person.

Offline WolFish

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #38 on: June 03, 2015, 09:04:53 PM »
Jack approves of Wolfish's use of third person.
Wolfish used to talk like that all the time until he got out of school and discovered the world was a little different than the ivory tower. He was astonished to realize that almost no one said "we" when referring to self.

Go figure.
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Offline Jack

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #39 on: June 04, 2015, 07:35:44 PM »
Jack approves of Wolfish's use of third person.
Wolfish used to talk like that all the time until he got out of school and discovered the world was a little different than the ivory tower. He was astonished to realize that almost no one said "we" when referring to self.

Go figure.
Claire is the one who largely speaks in terms of we, but not a self of we. It's a we of belonging, we the family, we the organization, we the team with the common goal; she's a leader, a diplomatic peace keeper, negotiator and compromiser, all for the overall good of all of we.

Offline WolFish

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #40 on: June 19, 2015, 09:29:31 AM »
Now we are working on finding a doctor.
We had a recommendation but the guy's reviews went from good to bad. We went anyway and lots of red flags.
The phlebotomist thinks he's Harvard trained - she's been with him for at least 10 years. She tells me he's from America, he's 68 and did his residency at McGill (a Montreal med school and teaching hospital).

The doctor hears that I have lived and worked in MA and was treated in Boston and tells me that he went to Tufts (oops, what happened to Harvard?) but ended up in med school at McGill (he glosses over why). He misses the fact that for years I worked at a teaching hospital in MA as a psychiatric crisis clinician. He tells me he's from Albany - I say, oh, I went to schoo there. Ah, no, he's from Schenectady actually. I say, ah, I know Schenectady as well. He changes the subject, and when he hears that I was born in NYC tells me that most of his relatives live there (huh?)

Since he missed the clue he doesn't know that I know that the only reason to attend med school out of the U.S. is because your grades weren't good enough to get into a U.S. school. He recommends an antidepressant for my ADHD. He tells me that my ADHD is probably lifelong depression which came out as hyperactivity and forgetfulness, and that my strategies to manage it are instead symptoms of OCD. He fishes for depression in other members of my family and comes up dry. I say no worries, I will go to a psychiatrist for treatment.

Now he tells me that he has one year in psychiatry residency.  He's missed my work experience so he doesn't know that I know that a one year psychiatry certificate is like a terminal Master's, which is what you get because you couldn't finish your PhD. The residency for psychiatry is two years. I ask why he didn't finish. He says it was boring.

He proceeds on a long discussion about how he has learned to tell character disordered people from people who can be helped (he also missed that I have a PhD in psychology), and then suddenly stops and says, "But you're not character disordered." (Pyraxis told me this - by that time I was thoroughly bored by his monologue and lost by the barrage of words.). He also turned to Pyraxis and tried to impress her with his stories, but that didn't work either.

They did an ECG which they can charge for but he didn't listen to my heart (I have a murmur). All kinds of blood tests but they didn't weigh me (I'm overweight). But the kicker is that he didn't ask how I was diagnosed with ADHD, so he's pitting his half residency against my psychiatrist in MA who spent two session diagnosing me, another few trying alternate medication (I didn't want to take a stimulant), and five years treating me.

So this guy is a fail as a GP. We'll have to look further. At least he didn't argue with the asthma diagnosis or the need for an epi-pen (though he says mine, which is expired, is good for "like a hundred years."

After writing this I'm thinking this guy actually meets the criteria for anti-social personality disorder.
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Offline rock hound

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #41 on: June 19, 2015, 10:21:55 AM »
That is not red flags that's full blown alarm bells, whistles, and sirens saying.  DO NOT HAVE THIS MAN AS YOUR GP!  I spent an entire day talking to the Doctor and being tested with multiple tests by the intern in Portland Maine for my ADD.   Then went back for the results interview/summation that took a couple of hours.   ::)  Though it was a few years ago, I still remember the details very clearly.  Anywho, this guy does not sound safe. 
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Offline odeon

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #42 on: June 21, 2015, 02:45:20 AM »
Nope, that guy is a death sentence waiting to happen.
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Offline WolFish

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #43 on: June 30, 2015, 08:39:23 AM »
The store is building my bike. The inventory on the site went down by one yesterday. Hoping they will call me today to come get it.

I wonder if there is something in Canadian socialization that says, "I looked where it should be and it's not there so it's not there. That's good enough."
The store clerks were convinced that the bike wasn't there; they didn't find them because they didn't look hard enough.  I went to the store manager and told him what happened, that the day before they told me they found them but couldn't build them, and the next day they couldn't find them. I did fudge a little so the clerk wouldn't get in trouble - I said it was a different one who'd found them the day before. It wasn't.

Pyraxis often stops looking for something too soon, resulting in what I call a "kin search," which means that I take a turn looking for it in the same places. This works in the reverse as well since I often overlook things even though I search longer and harder. I see her fighting against that "good enough" mentality in rock climbing - against the States view that if you're a girl you should give up on things that require strength. Yet when it comes to customer service she can articulate the Canadian mentality that you accept what happens (which seems more difficult to defeat). To me, that's giving up. I have never been able to do that - once to my detriment as I tried to run a marathon immediately after spraining my ankle at the starting line.

The idea of acceptance means that you're not really giving up, you're just accepting that you can't go further. There is a part of perseverance that it going on until success, and there is another part that is going on until it doesn't make sense to fight. I think this is confused here. It might explain the high numbers of young people with walking aids here. I've never seen so many in wheelchairs or with canes. I could not do this when I broke my sternum and a bunch of bones in my back and they wanted to give me a custom wheelchair - they actually said it was unlikely that I would walk again (2008). In my mentality that would be giving up. I walk with no aids at all now. Is there acceptance for this view in the States? What if I was just beating my head against a wall trying to walk again?

Within the Canadian mentality, it seems as though that in the continuum that goes between true perseverance and a useless effort, these folks have done what they consider persevering. But in mine, in a more generous continuum there is farther to go before wolfish is beating his head against a wall. That's the thing of it that I have learned. Sometimes you get a concussion, but sometimes when you beat your head against a wall, the wall comes down.

It's harder to tell where to stop here. People seem locked into their roles, and if going above and beyond isn't part of the job description, they don't do it. I wonder what they think of me?
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Offline 'andersom'

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Re: Moving to Montreal
« Reply #44 on: June 30, 2015, 10:12:37 AM »
So, what will happen, if they can't find the bike?
Will they build you a new one?


We left home with two art school books, that should have been handed in. They were in the list of books to hand in. But, the lady could not find the books in her system. So, the books did not exist for her. We got the list autographed for having handed in stuff properly.

Weird. Did not mind, they are cool books. But weird it is.
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