Canada is advanced in many ways - but now and again the odd idiosyncracy shines through. I first came across this when debating lumber sizes (note to Brits: it's lumber, not timber) and realised that I was conversing with people who never bought an 8'x4' sheet of plywood, or a length of 4"x2" timber (sorry, lumber) to frame a wall. "You mean 4x8 and 2x4 - round here it's always the smaller measure first" Six months in, and I'm starting to get the idea.
Next is the idea that a 2"x 4" measure actually means 1.5"x 3.5" - and even for rough framing, the lumber is never the size you expect it to be. However, a 4' x 8' sheet of 3/4" plywood is just that, 4' wide, 8' long and 3/4" thick. And everything is sold in standard (note to Brits : standard=imperial, unless you're talking about a car gearbox when standard=manual) lengths - 8', 10', 12' and so on.
Nothing unusual about that of course, except that as a nation, Canada adopted metric distances on its roads many years ago (to be different from the USA, so they say) and food is sold in grammes and kilogrammes. Except mushrooms. Yesterday I bought half a pound of mushrooms.
Back to the building lark. Plasterboard comes in 4' x 8' sheets, and it's drywall, not plasterboard. Why? Because there is no plaster. Back home, plasterboard is covered with a skim of finishing plaster to seal the surface and make it ready for paining or papering. Oh no. Drywall goes up, the joints get taped, screwheads filled and filling compound is feathered in and sanded down to ensure a smooth surface with the drywall panel. Hmm... this sounds like a shortcut to me. When you tape over joints and then apply filling compound, the surface will be higher than the surrounding wall area, won't it? Yep. So you apply some more compound, spread it out further and by the time you've finished, you've plastered the whole wall with polyfilla! The difference is, it then has to be sanded down again (cough!) to get a surface ready for painting.
So, on to the plumbing. It's inches again, not millimetres. I've spent the past 20 years adapting old 1/2" pipework in the UK to 15mm metric, and here I am going back again. Ho hum. It's a good thing it's only 5 km (note to Brits: 3 miles) to the building supplies shop.
Back there, we take our cars across the water to Europe and the clever cars can change from miles per hour to kilometres per hour at the flick of a switch. Same here, of course - so that when you drive across the border to the US, you can switch back to miles. US miles are, by the way, the same as UK miles..... so why is a US gallon only 0.83 of an imperial gallon? So that it converts readily to litres of course (not...) at just 3.79 litres to the gallon instead of the 4.54 litres that we have to buy in the UK to fill a gallon can. So, in the US, petrol (sorry, gas) is sold at a price which relates to 0.83 of a proper gallon, or 3.79 metric litres. Simple eh?
Well, just to confuse the Americans, Canada sells its gas by the litre (so they can convert it readily back to US gallons by multiplying by 0.26417205235814844), whereas back in the UK we buy our fuel in litres and simply multiply by 0.2199736031676198 to get it back to gallons. Why do we convert it back to gallons? It's obvious - it's so we can measure our fuel consumption in miles per gallon!
Canadians have grown out of that, naturally, and instead have adopted the European standard of measuring fuel consumption in litres per 100km. So, a Ford Explorer sells in Canada with a fuel consumption on city roads of 16.2 litres per 100km. Ouch! That's only 17.4 miles to the gallon in town. Unless you're in the USA, then it's just 15 miles to the gallon. No wonder they're called gas guzzlers.
All this became clear when I bought my 2003 Ford Windstar in March. Like most Fords, the Windstar will keep going for ever in a country that doesn't have an annual MOT test to pass. There were dozens of Windstars on the market with a quarter of a million kilometres on the clock (note to Brits: that's 155,230 miles) but, not surprisingly, they are starting to get a bit tired by then. So how do you ask for a car that's covered fewer kilometres in Canada? You insist on a low mileage model of course, what else?
I'm confused. Oh well, it must be an age thing.
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