It's On! (or off?)

So work has basically stopped in the first half of this week. The only excitement was the rumour that our mail was no longer being delivered. One of my neighbours went to our local post office (5 minutes by bike) to see why she hadn't gotten her mail for the last couple of days. They told her that it was probably because our street was too dangerous for the mailman and that she would have to go to the larger branch up on Jean-Talon (20 minutes by bike) to collect her mail, which she did.

I really, really, really found this hard to believe. We are all safely making it out of our homes to work or wherever. People are walking their dogs all over the street. I was extremely excited about a ripping investigation into the lameness of Canada Post. Was it a union rule or was our guy just really wimpy? I had visions of myself politely and steadfastly making my way up the Canada Post chain of command, hiding in the bushes to confront our mailman once I found out the rest of his route, caught between being outraged and sympathetic to a guy and his job. Then yesterday our mail came. So who knows what the truth was. Maybe at first he thought it was too dangerous. The thing is, there was no warning, no note saying that we should go to some other branch to pick up our mail. According to my neighbour, the people at the post office told her there wouldn't be one, because the mailman had no way of delivering it! It's really too good to be true.

I suspect the construction work has stopped because we are all waiting for the results of the tests on the quality of the water in the temporary pipes. Happily, shoved into our mail slot yesterday was the following note:



Basically saying that our water would be turned off sometime between 6 and 10 this morning and that we should run our new water for a little while before using it. I didn't notice any change during breakfast and the street was quiet, so I suspect they haven't started yet. If I have time, I'll swing by over lunch and see what happened. I heard a minor horror story from a friend in Toronto whose water was out for several days recently during similar work done over there. Extra fun when you have an infant and a new born baby in the house!

I'm also excited to have the phone number of the head of the project, M. Filippo Foti. Let's hope he will be as helpful as the people on the ground have been with my questions.