If I blogged more regularly, I would have told them so

Those of you outside Canada may not know two important things about the Canadian economy: the Canadian dollar is at an all-time high, and Canada is in the middle of an economic boom. When the dollar hit its peak earlier this week, there was a rash of articles on the subject. My favorite, though, was from an economic analyst in the Globe and Mail who claimed that this boom was different from all other booms, that this time it’s sustainable and will go on indefinitely.

How stupid are people? The late 90s? The Asian Tigers? Boom markets never last. And indeed, one day after the loonie hit its peak (1), the stock market took a big dip as did the exchange rate.

This is one thing I will never understand. Or maybe I do understand it but I really don’t want to. Things like booms and wars are cyclical. With each boom, there’s talk of it never ending, until it does, and then there’s a lot of clucking and “never again.” Unless you work in parts of the tech industry, where the 90s appears to be some kind of cultural template. The same happens with wars, at least in the U.S. The government makes a big pitch and run-up to the war, flags are waved, the press is compliant, troops are sent off, people die, and then the scandals start coming out. By the end, support for the president is down, the press is all over the lies we were told to get us into the war in the first place, and there is much clucking and “never again.” That is, until the next time.

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1. A strong Canadian dollar is an ambiguous thing. It gives Canadians more buying power in the U.S., but industries don’t like it because it means that they’re less of a bargain for American investment. For consumers inside Canada, it’s ambiguous: some prices are set according to an older exchange rate (magazines are a good example of that), while others are set at the actual exchange rate. So if you buy a book on amazon.ca right now, you’ll pay more or less the American price at the current exchange rate. Meanwhile, if I walk into a magazine store and pick up the latest Vanity Fair, its Canadian price will be higher than if we’d just run the exchange rate on the American price. Maybe there’s a whole post to do on the cost of things in Canada. Another time.

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Carrie’s dad and stepmom are in town this weekend. Many movies will be seen, and much rest will be had.

Confession

I know I’m not supposed to say this right now and that it singles me out as a terrible human being, but I hate the Harry Potter series. I don’t generally read fiction to begin with and never found the books captivating enough to change my custom. As a non-reader of the books, I found the movies boring but also annoyingly self-congratulatory in their attitude toward special effects (“Look! We’re telling a story with our special effects, not like those other big-budget blockbuster movies”). And I could really use a break from all the press coverage.

Thank you. That felt good.

Real Estate Saga Part III: four neighborhoods and three more contenders

6629 St. Andre was smack in the middle of a neighborhood called le Petit Patrie. Rumor has it that the name was coined mainly as a branding exercise to distinguish it from neighboring Rosemount (and with which it shares a parliamentary riding). My first foray into the the Petit Patrie was a children’s book launch at a francophone bookstore in St. Hubert Plaza. Otherwise, we hadn’t really given it much thought until we saw a place in it that we liked. We fell in love right away. In fact, in the final analysis, we loved the neighborhood more than the place. There are lots of cool little shops (mixed in with the gazillion bridal shops in St. Hubert Plaza), restos (Lin et Lin has the best dumplings in town as far as I can tell), an excellent SAQ, a wonderful Italian sandwich shop and a good Italian resto (Bistro Unique), a convenient metro stop (Beaubien) and all the services you could ever want. The Petit Patrie quickly became our ideal type of a Montreal neighborhood: not as overpriced and trendy as the Plateau, but with a good vibe and plenty of interesting stuff to walk to, and easy to get to from downtown.

We weren’t totally sold on the condo, though, so we started looking around for comparables. We found two in short order.

The first was in the Gay Village, or on the edge thereof: 1200 Amherst #104.

We loved the interior of this place — a huge main room with 22′ ceilings, a mezzanine, 2 bathrooms, and on and on. The space itself was great and we could walk to McGill. However, it was in the middle of party central, and 22′ of windows on the ground floor had us worried that we might as well be hanging a “free consumer electronics” sign out the window for potential thieves. Our friends also –with one exception–dissuaded us from the neighborhood. While less interesting than the Petit Patrie, we liked the idea of being close to so many things, and a couple blocks walk to the Berri-UQAM metro station, which is where the two main lines meet.

Our other contender was at 2055 Pie-IX #118, which was so impressive that I am linking to the .pdf of the entire listing.

The place was breathtaking inside. It is among the most beautiful places I’ve seen in Montreal. There was a huge terrace for Carrie to work her gardening magic. It had parking (the others did not), and some of the fixtures were outrageous: if you look at the bottom of right corner of page 4, you’ll see a walk-in shower that’s the size of a Plateau bedroom. The only downside is that the place didn’t really have separated rooms, and strangely, very little built in storage. At the time, we weren’t ready for the price: we were still thinking closer to the $300,000 range, the condo fees and taxes were high, and then there was the neighborhood.

Located at Pie-IX and Ontario, the loft is part of a neighborhood called Maissoneuve. Maissoneuve is up and coming and has some really nice parts, and some other really down and out parts. The loft was close to the market where we buy bread and vegetables (the Marché Maissoneuve) and had all the trappings of the onset of gentrification (chain coffee shops, mostly), but not a lot in the way of interesting restaurants or other places to go. And the commute to school, while doable, did involved a bus ride to a metro station. Friends again warned us about the neighborhood: “people [=our anglo friends] will think it’s far away.” I wondered about moving somewhere where we weren’t totally excited about the location. Again, we weren’t quite ready to put down an offer.

Finally, there was 816 Dollard. The 3rd floor of an old Victorian in Outremont, it was close to the Outremont Metro (unfortunately on the sleep Blue Line) and had lots of space. But the building was old and creaky, the layout was that classic Montreal railroad style, the one bathroom was tiny, and the place needed a lot of updating, including the electrical. There was no outdoor space and no parking. It was definitely a deal for the neighborhood and amount of space, but it wasn’t quite right for us.

And so, we continued to look, hemming and hawing about what to do.

Real Estate Saga: Part II

In late June of 2006, we met our first love in the Montreal real estate market — after Luc, our realtor, that is — 6629 St. Andre, Apartment 3, listing for a mere $370,000. It was the 3rd floor of a 3-story (+basement) industrial building that had been converted to 3 condos. The 3rd floor was completely open, and while it had been renovated well, it was renovated in that weird Montreal way: totally idiosyncratic to the owner. You’d step down half an inch from the hardwood floors to the kitchen. The place was totally open, and while the front had hardwood floors, the back was carpeted. The light fixtures in the walls were naked sockets with bulbs. And still, the place had a lot of charm. It was huge and bright, on the top floor with no adjacent neighbors on either side and access to a rooftop terrace, and the location was great (except for the fact that it faced the back of St. Hubert Plaza–but then, there was all sorts of cool stuff nearby). And it has a fireplace. It was the first place we saw that was big enough and that we could imagine ourselves living in. After dipping our top into the real estate waters, we jumped in. It had potential, though we had resevations. Either way, we’d need to check out the market. $370,000 was way more than we’d originally hoped to spend. Then again, the only “2000 square foot” places we’d seen for under $300000 were well under 2000 square feet and either in lousy condition or undergoing what can only be described as dubious renovation.

Social Construction Holiday

Every year, the last two week of July are a “construction holiday” in Quebec, and lots of businesses close down. It’s a great idea once you get used to it, and it’s a good time to vacate yourself, that is, if you’re not trying to write a book, complete a real estate transaction, and are getting ready to move. Actually, if it was just the book, I’d be out of here.

Things have been quiet on the blog but noisy around here. In addition to all the usual excitement, our friend Kevin (one third of Destiny’s Rentschler) came to town for close to a week and much fun was had by all. We rented a guitar for $20 (I can’t believe how cheap it is to rent a decent electric guitar for a week) and wrote a new song, which is almost mixed. I’ll post it when it’s done.

We are also in the process of putting our apartment up for rent. Since we’re breaking the lease, it’s up to us to find a replacement, and so all the ads are going out. I’ve created a webpage, and so locals, if you know someone who wants a huge, cool place, please let them know: http://sterneworks.org/loft.html Malcolm Gladwell says these things work best as friend-of-a-friend sort of deals, so maybe the blog will work better than the classifieds we are placing. We’ll add more pictures of the place in the next couple days.

The third anniversary of our arrival also quietly passed this week, and I may have more to say about that as we get to the blog’s third anniversary. But that will have to wait until the end of the summer. Now, back to your irregularly scheduled programming.

Residual Media Making the Rounds

Some time ago, I mentioned the release of Charles Acland’s edited collection Residual Media on University of Minnesota Press. Well, it’s getting some attention. Will Straw’s piece figures prominently in a recent Henry Jenkins blog post, and Google Alerts (is it vanity or simply keeping track of one’s own online presence? you be the judge) just pointed me to this article in the Toronto Star, which nicely connects my argument regarding obsolescence with the recent iPhone craze.

Yay, home team.