Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Gainfully Employed

I start a new job tomorrow and I'm very excited. I'll be doing carpentry work for a company (http://halforbes.com) that primarily does restorations on Victorian era houses and buildings.

This is a great opportunity to be doing the kind of wood work I like to do on a daily basis. No stinky bathroom renos here. This will be my first nine to five job since I left the radio station and I'm looking forward to the structure it will give my day to day livin'. Did I mention I'm really excited??

I couldn't have asked for a more fitting opportunity. The job market is obviously a lot tighter here than Calgary, so I wasn't expecting to find something even remotely as interesting. Jen and I were out with some of her friends the first week I arrived when I met her friend Scott (http://www.photomunn.com/). He mentioned this company that a friend of his works for and that I should check it out, he heard they were looking for carpenters. With loose directions as to the location of the shop, I set out to find this mysterious wood shop. I found it on my second day of trying and then it took me a week of going back everyday until someone was around I could talk to. Jen was talking about the power of positive thinking and this is a perfect example. I knew this was the job for me and that I was going to get it.

I have a habit of setting too high of expectations and getting burned, so while I'm excited, I'm trying to keep things in perspective.

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It was my Day of Life (Birthday) this weekend and Jen and I went down to Lunenburg to celebrate. Lunenburg was beautiful, not nearly as touristy as I expected. It's a world heritage site, so aside from cars and the odd Crocks wearing tourist, there are few signs of modernity to be found.

It's also where the Bluenose is moored. Apparently they only give out dimes as change because after ordering a coffee I received 40 cents in dimes when a quarter, a nickle, and a dime would have sufficed.






The town before Lunenburg - Mahone Bay was crawling with middle aged white people who all looked like they could be distant relatives, double fisting double-doubles. It was the annual Scarecrow Festival.



1 comment:

  1. Hey Brendan;

    How goes the new job? It sounds friggin' perfect! Sorry for the near-curse, Brendan's mom.

    I hate to come off like a staunch upholder of maritime history, but that is NOT the Bluenose. It's actually the Bluenose II, built in 1963 by the same shipwrights that built the original and from the original plans. It has never been in a race, and though a fine replica, it ain't the real thing.

    The original Bluenose was built by shipwrights Smith and Rhuland based on plans envisioned by a (formally) uneducated fisherman named Angus Walters. It was launched from Lunenburg in 1921, and for two decades it took on and left in the wake all challengers for the Fisherman's Trophy - a race of working fishing schooners that bestowed the highest honour on the hometowns of the winning boats. The Bluenose was untouchable in the races.

    The fisherman's trophy race died with the onset of motorized fishing fleets - but for the last 20 years, no one could take it from the Bluenose.

    Angus Walters and some other folks tried to have the Bluenose preserved as a National Treasure and purchased by the Museum of Civilization or other such organizations, but no one could see any value in preserving a vestige of a by-gone era (sound familiar?).

    Eventually Angus and his supporters went broke trying to save the Bluenose, and they were forced to sell her to unscrupulous merchant mariners, who cut off her masts, stuck a big diesel in her, and rode her as a freighter until she foundered and sank off of Haiti in 1946.

    How often in Canadian history have we unconscientiously destroyed historical treasures, only later to realize what we have lost and then try to erect some fitting memorial?

    Anyway, I'm not trying to bring you down or anything, but such a memorial is what you saw in Lunenburg, and I thought it my duty as a proud maritimer to set the record straight.

    I'm glad you're working to restore the remaining bits of heritage - too bad there are so few who see any value in that out this way...

    rock on - PS I'm totally with you on the hockey song - what a piece of cheesey flavour-of-the-month garbage. But I was saying to a buddy the other day - all it is is a pavlovian-response-inducing jingle - a sound that we hear that reminds us that it's finally time for something worth watching to come on the idiot box.

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