Life's good

Today, February 21st, is Family Day here in Canada. For office employed staff this means a, paid, day off. So far so good.  The morning was pretty cold, -24 but in the afternoon it soon warmed up to -3 with a partially clear blue sky and some great sunshine. Thus the garden chair came out accompanied by a nice and cold Molson Canadian beer (like they advertise: Made from Canada) and sat down in front of the garage wearing a t-shirt reading the morning news-paper, where I was joined by our dog Fox. When outside Fox always does the walkabout first but eventually settles down around the house, temperature permitting; below -20 he starts barking at the kitchen door. It was nice and warm and the day kept being good.

And then there were two.

So after Thursday December 9th 2010 we are back to two again. Emma and Johan left Canada to live their lives in Holland again, quite emotional to say goodbye at Calgary International Airport. It's quiet here in rural Alberta with them gone now, but in time we will get used to that. At moments like these you start doubting the decision you took a coupe of years ago. We should have gone 10 years earlier, our kids could have developed their lives here. Other milestones, driving back to Edmonton, in your live also spring to mind; looking back there is one decision I deeply regret; I did not have the balls to take on the adventure of switching jobs to a steel-fabricator in my birth province. Even in hindsight it would have been the better move as steel-drafting was shifting to the fabricators who were being saturated with 3D solid modeling software. Some 12 years later I do have the balls to cross the pond to Canada at age 50. I wonder. On the other hand we probably would not have moved here.

Dear Canadians....

Please do not start throwing German words at me when you ask if I am Dutch. I understand you are trying, but really there is a very large difference between Germany and Holland, size wise and language wise. But maybe we add to the confusion ourselves: The Netherlands-Holland-Dutch all the same but where is the correlation? Canada-Canadians, America-Americans, Germany-Germans, The Netherlands-Dutch, see what I mean. Not much of a post but I needed to get it off my chest.

Nice background, eh?

For those of you who have no clue on the background picture. It are Pink Floyd album covers. Beautiful isn't it? The rest I will leave to your imagination...... Personally I favor "Wish you were here"

Huh???

Mavis, Chad, grooming shop? Maybe some explanation? Yes please. Mavis is one of Joka's co-workers. Both of them go along very well, personally and professionally. So well they decided setting up or buying their own grooming shop. And Chad? He is Mavis her boyfriend. Both of them are in their early twenties. We are, lets just say, considerably older. Nevertheless we all go very well together and age hardly has any relevance here in Canada; experience on the other does matter. The four of us are the proud owners of HollyWoof Inc, where Joka and Mavis are the directors and Chad and myself are, as we choose to, the collateral damage so to speak. We have a shop in our eyesight that is for sale at the perfect location to combine business with the boarding kennel from the previous post. We have made them an offer, a month ago, but it was declined being too low. Still there are developments that raises hope we can purchase the shop in the near future. Victor O is helping us out here, we are too eager and would probably pay way too much. And he is very good at what he is doing. So the next few weeks (days?) we are hoping to make some really good progress on this endeavor in the second half of our professional life.

Opportunity knocks

Saturday a week ago I had to go to Victor O to settle some financial matters. Dropped Joka at the Petsmart, drove the Whitemud-WinterburnRoad-Yellowhead-Range Road 15-Cole Anne Heights to his place. I got out of the car and at the same time I'm on my butt, slippery as hell. And it hurts. Guess what; nobody home except the cleaning lady. So now what? Standing there asking myself what to do I see Jutta's car approaching. "Are you telepathic?" she asks me. It turned out she wanted to call me on some dog grooming matter. She talked to a boarding kennel who want to do grooming too, as we are in the market to set something up, Joka and Mavis want to start their own business. This kennel also does rescue dogs and as it happens they were at a grooming-shop in Edmonton to promote this. So I went there, made an appointment for the next day. So we, Joka-Chad-Marco-(Mavis had to work), paid them a visit. It's a big boarding kennel with no room to do the grooming but we agreed we could accommodate them by starting up our own shop and set-up some kind of transportation service as they get many grooming requests. So this opens a real nice business opportunity as we can feed off their clientèle too. One problem, we have to find a place where we can start. Or buy an existing one.