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A day late and a dollar short, but the apartment will be ready for occupancy December 15th. Pass it on.

4 1/2 metro Beaubien
available December 15

Google Map of the neighbourhood.

• One double bedroom and an open living room & kitchen. About 55 m2/600 sqft
• Very bright 3rd floor of a triplex.
• Balcony in front and back.
• Very spiffy new kitchen and bathroom with lots of storage.
• New front-loading washer and dryer.
• Stove and fridge.
• Newly varnished hardwood floors and lots of original 1929 details.
• Quiet street with big trees and non-metred parking
• Six minutes on foot from Metro Beaubien and 3 minutes from Parc Marquette.
• Grocery stores, pharmacy and a bakery with good bread around the corner.

Please, no smokers.

kitchen - yes, those are solid wood cabinet doors

to make room for more storage, we replaced the tub with a glass shower

that's a full cabinet over the sink; more hardwood doors

original 1929 china cabinet in the corner of the salon

might be the bedroom

might be the office

new front-loading washer and dryer

I still had to think about whether protecting myself against a deadly strain of influenza virus was really something I wanted to do. A likely outcome is that I will have a longer old age, which is not something I necessarily want. (Healthy but not particularly long would really be the ideal for me.) But another likely outcome is that I will not be a vector transmitting H1N1 to other people who might actually be gunning for that long, productive life but who might not be in a condition right now to be vaccinated: small babies, for instance, can’t be effectively immunized against influenza. My friend with cancer, who most definitely wants to live, may get only limited protection from a vaccine and is largely dependent on the people around him to not transmit it to him. The girlfriend of the woman who is dying of lung cancer in the apartment upstairs will not be able to point the finger at me as being the one who infected her with her final illness. And I will not interrupt the old ages, happily surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, of my old relatives.

So I got the H1N1 vaccine and will get the seasonal flu vaccine when it becomes available. If I ever decide my old age is dragging on too long there are ways around that that do not involve making other people sick.

Rightey-ho, then. Mark is going to spend September making the apartment functional, comfortable and beautiful as only as a storage-and-lighting-obsessed dutchman can, and then we’ll want someone to move in around the beginning of October.

Challenge to my devoted readers: time to bring any latent matchmaking skills into play!

But then the Nurse from the Insurance Company called to say she was coming by the next morning – at 7h00 – to take blood and urine samples. Oh. That’s serious. Somehow that felt like more of a sobering initiation ritual than sitting in an office with a scattered notary signing a document and being informed that the important stuff would be done later and eventually mailed to us.

Like, somebody else wants to check up on us make sure it’s being done right. Must be Important then. Even if it’s just the life insurance and has nothing directly to do with the purchase at all.

Makes me question how I judge when something is important or even real.

[originally transmitted by e-mail July 31, 2006]