Moved to Montreal!

We arrived here late Monday night and spent Tuesday unpacking. I'll post pictures soon. So far Montreal has been everything we've hoped it would be - warm, friendly, close access to food and subway.

The movers we hired to help us get things up the stairs were cool. It was also an interesting test of my French to see how much I had lost in rapid conversation. I find it strange that friends at Debconf and UDU weren't generally interested in speaking in French at all, but I'm certainly getting enough practice now. =) The movers had everything up into our place in about 90 minutes, didn't mind us helping and were quite reasonably priced. If you want movers in this city, I cheerfully recommend them.

Two nights ago we had the joyous adventure of buying appliances. Funny that when we were looking for them in Toronto, the Bay told us that it's better to buy in Montreal, and the guy at Sears was generally unwilling to make a deal for buying 4 appliances at once. When we arrived here in Montreal, the folks at the buy pointed out that they had to ship everything from Toronto. The guy at Sears wasn't willing to look at a price discount either. At future shop, we found a salesrep who was attentive, knowledgable, willing to deal, fun, and friendly. So we get a fridge and stove tomorrow, and a washer and dryer on Tuesday.

My mother-in-law has been helping us with the move, selecting appliances and all that, and it's working our surprisingly well. I remember my mom telling me once that letting family visit in dangerous. "Remember, there's a reason you moved out..."

I just finished wiring up the internal house wiring to my VoIP box. Hydro Quebec apparently uses the phone line somehow to get information from the metre. I found their tech support line to be less than helpful for explaining how this works, so it's currently disconnected. The best they could assure me is that when they discovered that they couldn't access it remotely, they'd call me to talk.