On lost cellphones, curries and an early winter

This entry is partly the result of prods from the Maternal Unit.

Riding home from work on Monday of last week, I stopped in the middle of NDG to give directions to a woman in a cowboy hat. This involved pulling out my iPhone to consult a transit app. As I prepared to set off home, I remember a moment of uncertainty when I couldn't find my black gloves which I had removed to use the iPhone. I found them in my crate and set off for home. Around 9 PM, I suddenly realised I didn't know where my iPhone was. I tried phoning it, but I couldn't hear it and I had an uneasy recollection of having set it to silent mode recently. After a search of my messy condo didn't turn it up, I went out and retrace by bike the roughly 4.5 kilometres to where I had last had it. This did not turn up the phone. The trip back was made all the more stressful as my headlamp began to lose its charge. (Recharging it had been on my to-do list for the evening.)

When I got home, I called my mobile service provider to suspend service. I spent an uneasy night, tossing and turning as I mentally debated how soon I should go out and buy a new iPhone between mentally kicking myself for not having activated the "Find my iPhone" function, for having lost the thing in first place and for being so upset at having lost an electronic device. Yes, I am neurotic or something.

I went to work the next morning. However, the lack of sleep and stress led me to leave by mid-afternoon with my sympathetic managers' blessings. When I got home, I found a message on my answering machine with a British woman's accent saying that she had found my cellphone nearby and left a number to call. (While my cellphone is locked by fingerprint, I long ago took a photo my business card and have that displayed as the initial image on my cellphone. Thus if you were to pick up my phone and try to turn it on, you would see my name, addresses (both snail and email) and phone numbers. The logic was to accommodate just such an eventuality.) I phoned the number. She was at home in Westmount (thankfully below Sherbrooke Street). I grabbed the best bottle of wine I had in my wine cellar and rode up to retrieve my iPhone. I did my best to express my gratitude. I am not sure I fully conveyed the full extent of my considerable relief. (I suspect she had been walking her dog when she found it.)

As mentioned previously in this blog, I have returned a number of cellphones over the years, usually found when biking. The Maternal Unit in her prods expressed the opinion that I had easily earned enough karma to allow rapid return.

I then had to go to my mobile service provider in order to restore service. This took a while and by then night had fallen. So I headed off to Hurley's Irish Pub on Crescent Street. This establishment is well known for the best poured pints of Guinness in Montreal. It also does decent pub grub. There was beef curry among the specials, so I opted for that. One of the waitresses said it was good when I placed the order.

It was.

It was, hands down, the best curry I have had that wasn't either in an Indian restaurant or homemade.

That might sound a bit like faint praise, but I have eaten in some very good Indian restaurants (Mother India in Glasgow springs to mind) and I eaten some extremely good homemade curries, some made by my own hand. Also, I have eaten worse curries in Indian restaurants and made far worse curries.  (As well, please note that by "Indian", I mean the Indian sub-continent including Pakistan and Bangladesh. "South Asian" is the PC term.)

I let the staff at Hurley's know my high opinion of the beef curry. This included the manager and/or owner who happened by and who I encouraged to have the curry added to the regular menu. He seemed receptive to my enthusiasm.

The next two days of the week (Wednesday and Thursday) involved biking in some very cold temperatures (-10 C and beyond). The forecast for Friday called for snow, so I brought die Fleddermoose inside on Thursday night. Sure enough, there was easily enough snow to signal an end to biking for the time being. In my particular definition of the seasons, this means winter has come. This is relatively early, given that one year I biked until the Christmas holidays. It also might be temporary the forecast is calling for rain and above zero temperatures on the weekend and following. Still, it feels like winter.

On bikes, lights, further thoughts

For reasons that I am not going to discuss here, I went through a phase of uncertainty which lead me to want to be damn sure I was within the law regarding bike lights in Quebec. I would be bloody embarrassed and bloody angry if, after writing a slight smug post about bike lights, I was to be on the business end of a $127 ticket for riding without a proper light. So yesterday, I went to a police station to check that I had the right information. Unfortunately, I failed to convey that my bike (Floria die Fleddermoose) was fully (and possibly overly) equipped with reflectors and thus having a Light & Motion Vis 360 on my helmet* was not adequate according the officer at the desk.

When I returned home, I looked up the regulations on the SPVM** website. From it I could tell that die Fleddermoose was easily within the requirements vis-à-vis reflectors. However the requirement "[a]t night, every bicycle must also carry, a white headlight or light and one red tail-light, both of which may be flashing" was sufficiently vaguely worded that I was wondering if I had needed to dip into my bag of semi-discarded bike lights to find a couple of MEC turtle lights to make die Fleddermoose legal.  The whole insecurity thing lead me to go back today to the police station and verify with the SPVM that when riding a bicycle compliant with reflector requirements, that if I am wearing a helmet equipped with proper lights, I don't need to put lights on the bicycle itself. Thankfully, this proved to be the case. As well, the officer at the desk wasn't the same one as yesterday so I was spared looking like a crazy person.***

As it was, I had already visited SPVM stations three times in as many days owing having found an iPhone on my way to work on Friday. By my count, it was at least the 8th lost cellphone I have come across since the day I graduated from Library School in 2000, and 4th I came across while biking to work. This is easily worth my time as I would want anyone who found my cellphone to try to return it to me. Also, one time, the cellphone belonged to a real estate agent who was so grateful he gave me a card with $100 in it.

I would like to state that I very firmly support the SPVM's attempt to get cyclists to have proper lights at night. Nothing in my comments should be construed as negativity towards the Montreal Police, only a desire for great clarity. Of course, if I get a ticket for not having the right lights coming home tomorrow, I reserve the right to very, very angry with the SPVM! ;-)

* This incorporates a fairly powerful forward headlamp with rear facing red LEDs in a USB rechargeable battery pack.

**SPVM = Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal

*** Then again, I probably am.