Spent a lot of today on the phone taking care of life. Part of it was enjoyable because I got to speak with Gary Robinson who's working on something big, cool, and ambitious. He's also got a weblog.

The not so enjoyable part was dealing with housing in Toronto. See we're trying to secure a 4 month sublet at 55 Maitland (not Isabella like I said earlier) and the contact person we're dealing with is very difficult. For a week we've been faxing back and worth and just today she realizes we haven't filled out the key application so she can do a credit check. Well after racking up a big fax bill and lots of phone calls the whole thing has been sorted out and we know have a place to live in downtown Toronto. Of course there never should have been this amount of fuss over a 4 month lease worth a measly $5500. It was getting to the point that if I had been in Toronto I would have walked down there and given them the money in cold hard cash instead of having to deal with all the nitpickings of minimum household incomes, tax returns and credit checks.

Turns out Mark will also be living in Toronto at Spadina and Eglinton. [4:50pm]

I went and visited our old house again. What's left is the top two floors resting on two huge beams with wheels. To accomplish this they had to wipe out the entire bottom floor (double garage, water tank room, family room). To fit the damn thing down the road they also had to take a chainsaw to the wings of the house to cut them down/off. The back deck also got the axe. As did this tree we planted (or at least saw planted) when we were kids. It was sad to see just a stump left where once a solid tree stood. It was also sad to see so much work wiped out. A floor that we had dug out by hand not once but twice. The first time was to lay the original floor and the second time was to remove all the mud caused by the ground heaving. I spent days digging that mud out literally by hand. Now it's filled in with rumble from the room. Also the barreled ceiling handcrafted by my dad is now gone too.

They filled the inside of the house with the windows from the bottom floor and all the insulation. Of course they just threw it in with no concern for the floors or walls. After we first left the house we'd go back and it was always this weird feeling to walk around the house in our shoes since when we lived there it was never permitted for fear that we scratch the floors.

Marchand is in a story state. One third of our house gone, trees felled, and the lawn even worse then it's ever been before.

I think we pegged the cost of moving the house at $300k. I'll be interested to hear how much it costs the turkeys trying to pull this off. Because bear in mind that they not only have hack a 4200sq ft house down to size so that it'll fit down a standard road but they'll also have to take out all the overhead power along the way (rumored to be costing $30k). They'll also have to buy land (I believe they did next to a golf course), pour a piled foundation, put in a septic tank and field, and outfit it with a water system. Then they have to rebuild the part of the house they destroyed and fix the havoc they've wrecked upon the entire by using it as storage as well as all the cracks in the drywall which are already appearing. We also made sure that we cleaned the house out real good. So it's missing all the signature handrails, moldings, lighting, and built in details.

Regardless who techinically owns the house it will always be ours and they will always be visitors. One day we'll seize Marchand back for ourselves. We've gone through too much with that house to just let it go (building it, fighting the flood, re-building after the flood).
[12:24:53 AM] []