Journal/20 Messidor CCXIV from Evan Prodromou

No honking today; I guess there just isn't a big German population in Montreal. But, y'know, fourth place is pretty damn good, Portugal! Nothing to sneeze at. Still ahead of Brazil, for what it's worth.

Tomorrow's the big finale, of course. The Paramount Famous Players on Ste. Catherine downtown is going to have a live showing, free for the first 300 people. I dunno... I guess it could be fun, but it seems a little impersonal. I think I'll be watching from Niko's again. It's easy to walk to Little Italy, or Barouf, from there.

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Grillr

I spent the day putting together household furniture. We stopped by Canadian Tire on Tuesday to buy lawn furniture, and we got a shipment from Ikea on Wednesday. This afternoon cleared out a lot of cardboard boxes from our house.

First up was Amita June's big girl bed, which she got as a present for her month birthday. Yeah, Amita turned the big one-oh yesterday (10 months!), and although we've been doing co-sleeping, we want her to start learning to sleep in her own bed. (Most co-sleeping babies want to move out after about 1 year.) She got a toddler bed, which is actually pretty cute, and fits perfectly in her room.

Building Ikea furniture isn't really all that fun. First, they optimize for shipping size and storage, not for ease of building (or stability), so you get some really shaky stuff. Second, the instructions have no words -- assumably to avoid translation costs -- so you have to interpret their graphical Völapuk into some kind of reasonable instructions.

Fortunately, just about the time I finished building it, Maj and Amita came home from a walk. Amita had just fallen asleep, so we put her in to see how it fit. Looks pretty good to me!

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After that, I watered my new lawn. The grass seeds I spread on Tuesday are coming up in teensity-tinesity leaves. Huzzah!

Then I turned my attention to the Muskoka chairs we got from Canadian Tire. These turned out to be a lot easier, and they were made from cedar wood, so they were pleasant to work with. Maj had invited over some friends for grilling, so she went to the store to buy food while I worked on the Muskokas. The baby hung out with me outside in her playpen.

The chairs turned out great, and we had a nice grill. Brenda, Parise and Tony all came over. Brenda and Tony are librarians, and Brenda and Parise grew up together in Moncton. The Muskokas were a hit; here are Brenda and Amita enjoying one.

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Fireworks

I can hear right now the dull thump thump tha-thump-thump of fireworks going off down at La Ronde, the amusement park in the middle of the St. Laurent River. They're the hosts of the International Fireworks Festival, which happens every summer. It's one of the great things about living in Montreal -- fireworks every Wednesday and Saturday from early June until the end of July.

The festival is a competition -- national pyrotechnics teams each provide a half-hour long show on one of the nights, and then at some point after the festival they decide on a winner (I think... I've never actually checked who "won"). The fireworks are first-class, and it's just fun to have explosions over the city all the time.

Tonight's team is South Africa -- it's the first time there's been an African national team. Go SA!

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Best show ever

One of the best music shows I ever went to was a "surprise" event by Camper Van Beethoven at the now-defunct Mint Platter record store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California around 1990.

Probably one of the next best music shows I ever went to was a surprise (for me) when Maj took me to see CVB at the Just pour Rire Theatre in Montreal in 2004, one week after we were married. (The band had recently reformed, and that night their equipment was stolen out of their tour bus in Mtl. Such a shame.)

I'm just thinking about it because so many of the shows I love are on the etree section of the Internet Archive. Secret message to every taper I crabbed out because their big boom mike was blocking my view of the stage: sorry. You were right. Thanks.

And what reminded me of that? The NPR Live Concert Series, aka All Songs Considered. Man, there's a lot of good music in there.

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One

So, has anyone offered Kyle Macdonald of One Red Paperclip a marketing job yet? Guy knows his marketing.

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Bignose strikes again

I'll be honest -- most of the time, I totally don't understand fellow piglogger Michael Bakunin's blog. Here's an excerpt from Gasoline: FD: small short position in one US refiner, and thinking about crack spreads. Does that mean something to some species of animal? I dunno.

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