It was fucking cold...

Sorry for the delay (and the profanity), I've been busy, busy teaching and doing research and submitting presentations for various conferences (I'll be chair of a session somewhere too, I feel so important). Well, Xmas has been over for nearly two months, but when we got back home we had the unhappy surprise of entering a nearly freezing house. It was literally as cold as inside a fridge (4 degrees Celsius upstairs, 5 on the ground floor and 15 downstairs, our Convectair electric heater saved our asses and our pipes). Now, coming from Chicoutimi, 4 above freezing is nothing outside, but inside it's a real pain. It took an hour and a half for the gas company guy to come and fix it (it would have taken an hour less had it not been for a more urgent gas leak somewhere else), and another half hour to fix it. Then, 3 days later, the furnace failed again (turns out the "loose connection" problem was more of a "broken valve" problem) so I had to call again, but the second guy fixed it better. Anywho, I'll try to blog again this weekend and update you folks on more recent things (like the now over OC Transpo strike which resulted in us having a temporary roommate tenant, I mean, guest (because we're landlords homeowners now), to make good use of our guest room. Oh well, it'll be for later.