I was back in Montreal for the long weekend. It was a bit weird being there as a visitor, instead of as a resident. We stayed in the Intercontinental, at the bottom of Bleury. It is right on the fringe of Old Montreal, which meant I got to see a bit more of that area, which I had largely ignored for most of last year. We had lots of good food. I had steak for three nights in a row, plus the night before leaving, and the night after coming back. That’s got to be some kind of a record. We also saw some jazz at the Jazz Festival. As usual, a huge swath of downtown was closed to traffic, and stages were set up everywhere for free outdoor concerts. It always amazes me how much inconvenience Montrealers are willing to suffer in the name of a good time.

Here are some snaps from my wee camera, which I carried everywhere, but barely used.

I flew into Montreal for my last weekly trip for a while. Montreal looked ghostly as I arrived. It was snowing yet again, and as the plane descended through the clouds, I saw that the entire city was cloaked in shades of white. On the tarmac, airplanes coasted silently by, swirling up powdery white wreaths behind them. The image of snow has a way of implying silence, even in noisy places.

My one year commitment at my second job ends at the end of the month, and I’m in Montreal to tie up some loose ends, and to initiate my replacement into the company. To be honest, I’ll be glad that this phase of my life is ending. To be sure, I’ve made some good friends here, and cemented old friendships too. I’ve experienced a lot, and grown a lot as a person. That being said, I’m happy that the end is within sight. With each end, there is a new beginning. That might sound like a cliché, but every cliché has roots in truth.

One of the reasons I’ll be glad to be home more or less permanently is that I won’t miss opportunities. One good example happened this week. Laura managed to score free tickets to see Paul Potts in concert in Hamilton on Thursday night. He’s someone significant to me, because he took his life from zero to superhero in about 30 seconds, realizing a lifelong dream. I must have seen it about 20 times, but I still get emotional watching that video. That’s enormously embarrassing to me because I loathe reality TV. Anyway, needless to say, I couldn’t go, because I’m here. I was in a meeting with one of my clients, and told him about it. Friday morning, he emailed me to say he heard Paul Potts was performing in Montreal that night, and that he could tell I was disappointed that I couldn’t go see the show in Hamilton, so he sent me a link to buy tickets. To me it’s amazing how little connections like that happen. I bought a ticket right away.

The concert was wonderful. It wasn’t entirely because of the music. Potts was clearly not at the top of his game. He had picked up a cold during his tour, and I could hear it in his voice. While he was talking, he was congested, and the cold was taking its toll on his singing voice too. Between songs he would sip a cup of tea, and that would restore him temporarily, but the strain of performing while ill was apparent. Somewhat disappointingly, even a lengthy standing ovation could not bring him back out to perform his signature piece, Nessun Dorma. He is living his dream, but I’m sure that he’s not used to the kind of pressure that this kind of tour creates.

What I found wonderful was watching what has been created in such a short period of time. The hall was packed with almost 3000 people, most of whom seemed to be francophone. Watching the seemingly never-ending stream of people filing into La Salle Wilfred-Pelletier at Place des Arts was truly inspiring. Knowing that this happens at every stop on his North American tour is mind-blowing. Paul Potts has become an overnight, worldwide phenomenon, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Ok, ok, Mother Nature, we get it. You can snow. Now you can stop it.

I think I’m seriously cut out for warmer weather. It’s a shame I like being Canadian so much, because I wouldn’t give up living here, even if I could enjoy a more pleasant climate. Maybe when Canada annexes Turks and Caicos, I will have some relief.

My trip home from Montreal on Wednesday night was something of an ordeal. My flight was scheduled for 7:50pm. I got to the Montreal airport at 7:15pm, because I’d signed up for flight updates by SMS. Since I didn’t get any notice there was a problem with my flight, I optimistically arrived on time. Of course, at 7:16pm, the notice arrived on my phone. The flight was delayed until 8:40pm. “And so it begins,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. I settled into a seat in the gate waiting area to see what Air Canada’s definition of 8:40pm would eventually be.

At 8:30pm, it was clear that the flight was not leaving. No one was standing at the gate, getting things ready for departure. There was no call to prepare to board the flight. Soon enough, the time of departure was updated. 9:50pm. Around that time, I got the notification on my phone about the new delay.

At 9:40pm, there was still no sign of movement. I looked at the big LCD monitors to see the latest estimate. 11:15pm. There was no notification by SMS. I guess the SMS-sending computer was embarassed.

By 11:00pm, we finally started boarding the plane. The airport was mostly empty by this point. I thought that was a relief. There should be little delay getting off the ground. Wrong.

At 11:30pm, we were still sitting in the plane at the gate. The door to the plane was still open, which I took to be a bad sign. Eventually, the pilot spoke over the PA system, letting us know that we’d be on our way as soon as they could get a ground crew to load the luggage onto the plane and push us out to the taxiway. What?! They delayed the flight by three and a half hours, and didn’t know they’d need a ground crew?!

There were a few sporadic messages from the flight deck over the next 40 minutes, apologizing for the delay. There was a heated exchange between the flight attendant, and someone who poked his head into the plane from outside. Apparently no one wanted to load luggage onto our plane. We could see other ground crews assisting other flights in adjacent gates. None of them came over to our plane when they were done.

By about midnight, a ground crew arrived from a different terminal to load our plane. After that, things went rather quickly. We were in the air by about 12:25am. I have to say this was not Air Canada’s finest… er… four hours.

In other news, I took the plunge and ordered a new computer. My old one was inexplicably turning itself off at random times, often while I was in the middle of working on something. Not only is this a recipe for data corruption, but it’s highly annoying. Instead of spending hours and hundreds of dollars trying to troubleshoot the many possible causes for this, I decided to replace the guts of the machine. The old one, while perfectly fast enough for my needs, was about two or three years old, and didn’t really owe me anything.

I’ve spent the last day or two setting up the new machine. It’s a quad-core Intel processor, which is the current best bang-for-your-buck for running Photoshop. I also put 4GB of nice fast DDR2 memory in there. I replaced the power supply with a quiet 500W model too, in case the old one was causing my sudden shut-down issues. I also caved in and got Windows Vista Ultimate. I hadn’t been planning to get Vista, but I figured if I was going to start from scratch, I might as well give it a shot. It turns out to be not as bad as I had thought. Most of my software seems to run on it, and it’s certainly prettier than XP. The new processor chews through my camera raw files like lightning. I like it!

So, I’m finally feeling at home again. I’ve got my computer set up how I want, and I’m back in my comfy loft in Hamilton. It’s snowing like mad out there. This is not a bad place to be.