I was hoping to have some Halloween content to go with this but unfortunately the weather was all gloomy and a real down pour during trick or treating. I’ve gotta give the kids in the neighbourhood credit however, they didn’t let it stop them.

This month was mostly work and self-reflection, some planning for 2022 and working towards Canadian Permanent Residency. Unfortunately it’s too early and/or personal to really share anything in this list at this time. I will talk about my experience going through the Atlantic Immigration Pilot program at a later date, however.

The weather has become cooler, 4°C at night and 10°C during the day. We’re definitely seeing that fall to winter change start, no snow or ice storms yet. (Out west has had at least one already) We roll the clocks back next week, It’s going to be weird seeing the sunset before 5pm on Sunday.

Hopefully I can get a chance to ice skate and go to a hockey game this winter.

I didn’t write a post for July or August. I was focused on navigating the Atlantic Immigration Pilot process, which will allow me to stay in Canada without having to worry about temporary permits all the time. I’ve been working a bit more too, a minimum of 61.5 hours a week (compared to 37.5 when I last posted)

I did migrate all my projects to a single server, utilizing LXC containers. I was expecting issues in migrating over the Asterisk PBX but surprisingly that went smooth. My real issues were a wordpress redirect loop and getting mastodon running a little more smoothly (still working on that one, thinking the redis cache needs some tweaks)

While it’s unfortunate that I broke my resolution, the point of it was to make enough of a commitment and see if I’d actually stick with it or not. Could I write content and maintain the server or would I lose interest? I’ve had enough changes between then and now that this doesn’t feel like a failure, I’m still writing posts (I have technical ones that came out of the migration work mentioned above, getting ironed out in the drafts folder too. Also some travel related ones, but they’re in bad shape. Not even close to publishing that set.) So I feel like the spirit of that resolution is still great, despite a few major things happening I didn’t quit.

I’m going to do things a little differently this month. instead of writing a post as a summary of the whole month, I’m going to write it a paragraph at a time, more or less as it happens.

June 7th

This is kind of an interesting month, Nova Scotia is reopening. We’re going to head to Ottawa for some essential errands and when we get back, we’ll have to quarantine for two weeks while everyone here is getting back to normal. It’s the right thing to do, but it feels rather surreal.

We’re at Leon’s getting a new couch for our new apartment, only one person per household at a time is allowed inside. It’s the hottest day I’ve felt since I flew here over 10 months ago, not the best day for a game of pandemic musical chairs but we’re making it work. At least I have some shade under the trees and my platypus water collapsible water bottle with me. (I highly recommend it for taking up very little space empty, hooking to my bag or belt when full and saving a ton by filling up at the water fountain VS buying bottled water everywhere. Not sure how it’ll work in the future with Covid-19 closing so many water fountains, time will tell)

June 14th

All of the planning seems to be done, it’ll be the longest road trip I’ve done in at least 3 years. It will be a different experience with Covid-19 now, but we have an idea of what to expect from our PEI trip in November.

I’m going to be packing lighter than I usually do, made possible by the surface tablet replacing the laptop for this trip.

I’m trying to push myself into exercising more, taking longer walks like I used to and lifting weights (nothing major, just simulating what I did at factories and warehouses before.)

Thankfully the weather has made that easier, our climate is a much nicer summer (in my humble opinion)

Over the weekend walking around, I was able to see a submarine manoeuvring around the Bedford Basin, I’ve seen ships and helicopters but this was the first time for a sub.

July 1st

I was trying to decide if I should wait a little more for some details to wrap up or publish this and add that to July’s post. I decided there’s enough here to go on. I didn’t manage to do anything for ARRL Field Day due to the driving. I should have taken more photos on the trip, but I got some new & different shots of Niagara Falls to add to the collection.

It was weird to see how different the reopening plans had been between Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia first hand. It was nice being able to relax a little in Niagara Falls & Quebec City, get my new work permit activated & help Awen with some of her errands too.

We had to apply to enter New Brunswick and there was supposed to be a check in at the provincial border, the structures were there but nobody was manning them. Lunch Break maybe? Quebec and Ontario had already reopened their borders since the third wave died down.

While in Niagara Falls I went to the Lewiston–Queenston Bridge, stayed in the Canada only lane asked if I had anything to declare and then directed into a parking area for people who didn’t need to test and quarantine, handed my papers and waited for my permit, If I hadn’t started a podcast right before I wouldn’t have known how quick it was, whole thing took about 15 minutes. It was weird seeing four of the five bridges being fairly idle, only exception was the International Railway Bridge.

Coming back, we had to go to a checkpoint in Edmundston, NB (on the Quebec Border) traffic was light here and the whole process was fairly quick. Because of our 1st shot of the Pfizer vaccine we were allowed a pretty much normal drive thru New Brunswick, as they reopened to all of Canada. It took a little longer getting into Nova Scotia, more traffic midday. Even then we were continuing on in 20 Minutes to home.

Our quarantine will be over on Sunday presuming that tomorrow’s vaccine test is negative, we’re glad that Nova Scotia made that change apply retroactively. Now we’re just trying to prepare for a heat wave coming.