welcome, neighbourhood!

so this has been a lazy week. which is completely allowed, because 1)there's no one to tell me what to do, and 2)i'm supposed to get settled in my new place, right? right? which i've been doing by basically setting camp in the kitchen, now that i have a stove to boil water on, and LIGHT.
yes, it's been a sunny week. and my kitchen does get the biggest amount of light no matter how you take it, besides being the largest actual room in the apartment. so i wake up and move in there with the breakfasting and the interneting, and the snacking/lunch-ing, and all this time i'm telling myself i should be going out...because not only are there things to be done and seen outside (supposedly), but also it gets dark around 5 p.m, so not a lot of time for actual sightseeing.
so what really happens in the end is, i manage to go out in the afternoon at some point, take a walk on the side streets in my neighbourhood (in an area no wider than 2 metro stops' distance), then get some groceries and return home to make tea and dinner etc.
yes, there is a lot of eating and sleeping (and watching "nashville" and reading bad fanfiction) going on here. what! it's almost hibernation time!

i had my first visitor to my home though:

was making lunch on sunday and it was warm enough to leave the back door open, and in she comes! cautious and all, sniffing all over the place, but otherwise shameless:). obviously a friend of the previous tenants' cat, of the hairy heritage. I explained that i wasn't going to feed her and she wasn't allowed to jump on the table, but otherwise she could visit all she wanted. 

she looks like she's got a agenda, no?

lo, then it got colder again, so no more open doors for cats.

so far, my short walks around the home had been south, toward jean talon/plaza st.hubert, or west on villeray (toward parc jarry). these days i've been walking north-east, to jarry and a bit further. my ex used to live very close to jarry street, so i do have some recollections, but can't say i'm well acquainted to the neighbourhood of villeray as yet.
things that ALWAYS happen: i enter the first small grocery shop on jarry and discover that the prices there are way better than at the jean-talon Metro where i had been shopping til now. oh well.

then i find this adorable ruelle:

the neighbourhood spirit

seasonal nostalgia

piles of leaves the size of cars

i have yet to settle on a buanderie. i'm shopping around, trying to decide which of 2-3 of them around are 1)closer and/or 2) friendlier. (other such dilemmas: where to get a trash can; do i really need a big fancy mop, or would one of those floppy ones do?) (all these things cost money! i know, such a new concept! and i'm trying to be on a semi-budget, where i pace myself with the spending. the closest thing i can compare this to is a diet - it feels exactly the same to me: exciting through the deprivation/control, and also it takes up all my time. honest.
in the end, i will probably cave and blow off a lot of money on something that i totally don't need. it'd just better be beautiful, i say.)

continuing the neighbourhood tour (house by house :)), moving up north to cremazie:

you know this pic was taken just for the bike.

i remember that "below cremazie" was one of my strongest rules regarding where i want to live. that and "east of decarie". the thought of cremazie (metro) is icky to me (maybe a bit less so now that i'm relatively close to it?) because there's the big metropolitan highway there. just so ugly. so, i'm just walking by it these days and trying to...come to terms with its existence? to accept that it's part of the city; that little charming bohemian pockets of everything-that-looks-cute are going to be delimitated and crisscrossed by things like this. that it's necessary. aaah.

still pretty damn ugly.

and then, across the street from the highway, you get something like this:

don't even know what it's called. the church i see from my window is "notre-dame du rosaire". so many churches per square km, it's not even funny.  

so, heading back from cremazie. it's full of schools and (the hour right before dark) of yellow school buses and groups of children getting out of school and of the circulation people (brigadiers scolaires) waving them across streets.
then very close to home i go into a haitian grocery store and kill my budget again. what else is there?