Blessed by the Potato

And what a St. Patrick’s day it was.

I locked myself out of the house today, what must be the first time ever in my life that’s happened. My new place has these stupid locks that automatically lock when the door closes (except at the cottage I’ve always lived with deadbolts where you need the key to lock the door, so it’s impossible to lock yourself out). I left my cell phone and my wallet inside as well.

Fortunately, a friend has a key to my place and could let me in later on in the evening… but going out with my friends was going to prove to be a challenge without ID or money. That’s when the luck o’ the Irish came into play. On Monday my new license arrived in the mail, which I picked up as I was walking to work. So I had opened it there, and left my old license in my desk drawer at work. Boom, ID, I could get into a bar.

Money was then not such a big issue: I could borrow from friends, or, as it turned out, get some from work since I had reimbursed a subject out of my own pocket yesterday, and was able to get paid back in cash today.

The biggest challenge turned out to be the lack of a cell phone for coordinating with my peeps. I got myself locked out because I was running out of the house in a big rush to do something at work… so I was at work while my friends were starting the day-long liver killing festival. I was supposed to meet them at Mike’s house. They knew I didn’t have my cell phone and would be just a little late… yet they left without me for the bar, but I didn’t know which bar.

Ah-ha! I remembered that Mike’s apartment intercom/buzzer system called his cell phone (since he doesn’t have a landline), so I just buzzed him that way. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear me and just told the intercom that he wasn’t home (”I know that” I shouted in his lobby “but WHERE are you?”). He buzzed the door for me and hung up.

So much for that plan. Luck struck again though when another member of our group walked by on the street and told me where to go to find them.

Then it was us against the crowds. London’s a student town, and the weather was awesome today, so even though St. Paddy’s day fell on a Wednesday, there were lineups at all the bars. To try to avoid that, we went to one of the smaller ones away from Richmond St., and even they had a lineup. So Mike, like a ninja, goes and sneaks in the fire exit in the back. The place was nowhere near full, but they were being really anal about capacity (even though no other bar in the city was)… so without too much guilt, other members of our party start sneaking in. But with such a small place, they quickly found the ninjas out and kicked them out. In the frustration of being kicked out of a bar that they were behaving civilly in and paying good money for beer, one of Mike’s friends swiped a funny St. Patrick’s day hat (which I now have).

Anyway, it was a fairly crazy day. I feel like such a kid for all the shenanigans. I mean, I’m an old-ass man. I shouldn’t be locking myself out of the house, hiking around town without money or ID, let alone sneaking into crappy London bars on green beer day. But there you have it. Despite the disastrous start, it didn’t turn out to be all that bad a day in the end.

I’ve been using the same towel for two weeks now, and it doesn’t smell like death. Living mould-free is the way to go, I tell you.

I’ve been amazed at how quickly my desk re-cluttered. Not 3 weeks ago everything was packed up into boxes for the move, or thrown out as junk. For the first week or two I kept my desk as clean as possible so that there was plenty of open space to do double duty as my eating table (since the kitchen table was piled high with boxes of kitchen stuff to be properly put away after the move). Now after just a few days of working on my lecture for this morning, it’s every bit as bad as it was before the move, if not worse. Pop cans, candy wrappers, and papers piled everywhere.

Finally, a teaser: John Hempton at Bronte Capital had an interesting post about the demographic crunch coming our way in a few decades, and what that might mean for socialized medicine. Once I catch up on my sleep I plan on doing a short post on the matter.

We are fairly well-read people (in the sense that we read a lot, not that we’ve read all the classics), and own a buttload of books. I keep trying to rename our dining room “the library” since it’s basically wallpapered in bookshelves, but the name hasn’t stuck yet. Now as we find it’s time to move, we’re faced with the task of moving these hundreds and hundreds of heavy, heavy books.

We just don’t wanna.

After all, a lot of them we’re never going to read again, or loan out to friends to read, so why hold on to them? In just a brief round of going through the bookshelves, we found 5 boxes worth of books to pull out and discard without the slightest regret (i.e.: books we had zero emotional connection to and would have no desire to read again). The question became: what to do with them? We figured that they had to be worth something, and kept planning to haul them down to the used bookstore to see what we could get. Even if it was just a dime a book, that’d make the trip down worthwhile since we had so many.

Unfortunately, our time has been quite tight lately, especially during business hours, so we just haven’t gotten around to doing it. Now we’ve got just a few days left before the big move, and the damned books are still sitting there in their boxes, and we don’t want to move them! So, abandoning our plan to recoup some of the costs of these tomes, we started looking for convenience. Just any way to get rid of them that would be a step above the recycling pile. Much to our surprise, the London Public Library makes book donations very hassle-free: we called in and set up an appointment for a fellow to come to our house and pick the books up.

And of course, we love the library now: we can read all the books we want without having to pay for — or store them!

That is all.

You know, it’s kind of a miracle that we have clean water coming right into our houses that we can get any time we want.

… and the London public works makes sure that we never take that for granted for very long…

My car was broken into again sometime yesterday or this morning. The club was on it, thankfully, so the car itself didn’t go anywhere, but the driver’s door was left ajar (with the dome light on and the battery not dead yet) and all my stuff had been rifled through — sunglasses on the driver’s seat, etc. As far as I can tell, nothing has been taken (and I’m getting awfully sick of trying to mentally inventory the stuff left in my car), and no damage was done. Either I forgot to lock the driver’s door (and my last trip was for groceries, so I might have), or they just jimmied it open without blasting through the whole lock.

I just can’t wrap my head around why this keeps happening — we’re close to downtown, and there are a lot of students in the neighbourhood, but I’d be really hesitant to call it a high-crime area. Plus it’s a 12-year old Honda accord. It really doesn’t look like the kind of car that would have valuables in it. I think I’m going to have to get some stickers to that effect made up and put in the window.

A bike thief was captured by the UWO police this week, and they gave a few tips about bicycle security in the article describing it. One tip was to take your seat with you if you have a quick-release seat. This is something I’ve seen a number of people do and always wondered about. Why do it? I would think by now with my history I should know that thieves are retarded and random, but do people really steal the seats off bikes? Is there a big second-hand market for bike seats? Is it a vandalism thing? Or is it to make it more difficult for a thief to ride off with your bike if they do try to steal it?

It’s been a while since I was an active cyclist. In high school I used to bike all over the place, even with snow on the ground, although even then I wasn’t much of one for running off road through the mud. In university, I really gave up on biking and became a car/subway/walking kind of guy. In London, that went double, despite all the attractive bike paths this city has to offer.

A few years ago, I tried to get back into it and bought the cheapest bike I could (a blue supercycle from Canadian Tire), but that bike was heavy, and didn’t shift smoothly, and it was a pain to take down the elevator in the apartment, and, and, and… so I very quickly stopped riding everywhere. When winter came, the only place to keep my bike at the apartment was out on the balcony, where it of course rusted up and I haven’t biked since.

Now, I think I’m going to give it another go. I’ve got a decent “tax return” (actually, I saved up anticipating that I would have to pay since I didn’t have any withholding this year, but I saved more than I owe) so I can use that money to buy a bike! I’m not going to try to get the minimum cheap bike like last time: I’m willing to spend a bit of money to make sure I get something decent (I’d like to stay in the $400 region, but can spend up to $600) because, if I do this right, I shouldn’t need to buy another bike for decades.

I’ve got three things working in my favour to keep up biking this time around: my friends (both in Toronto and in London) are all getting focused on staying in shape, and many of them bike. I live in a very bikeable area with paths and reasonably wide sidestreets (or, reasonably empty sidewalks and cops who never stop cyclists on the sidewalks). And finally, gas is getting really expensive and I’m trying to save wear and tear on my car if I can. Working against that though is the fact that I live a 10 minute walk from work at the bottom of a very large hill. Most likely, I will continue to walk to work rather than bike, and if I’m not biking every day I might not stick to it as much (as a kid, a big help was that I biked to school on a fairly flat route every day, and my friends’ houses were also a reasonable bike ride away). And, as I mentioned, I live at the bottom of a very large hill. Half my potential biking destinations involve going (insanely) uphill, which may influence my stay-at-home-itude.

Anyhow, I’m going to go to the Cyclepath in the morning and see what they have, so if anyone has any suggestions about what I should get, I’m all ears! (And if you have a recommendation for a specific shop, I’m also open to that: Cyclepath was mostly chosen because it’s walking distance from here). I don’t really know what I should be looking for. I think I’ll be looking for a “hybrid” bike because I’ve never really been keen on road/racing bikes, but I don’t really plan on doing much off-roading. Since I won’t be straying from the path, I don’t think I need suspension. But, I do want something that will let me climb hills relatively effortlessly, something that is light. I’m not sure what type of seat I want, which may be one of the most important considerations. I have what is medically termed a “large sexy man-booty”, or “fat ass” as the kids would say. But I don’t know if that necessarily means that I want a wide seat. My high school-era bike had a fairly narrow seat and I actually found it fairly comfortable, but I was like 80 lbs lighter in high school. My Canadian Tire bike had a medium width seat, and while it was ok to ride on for about 20 minutes, after that it would give me searing ass pain and I’d have to bike standing up. But that may be due more to cheap build rather than strictly size… I’m hoping that if I choose poorly, it’s something that’s fairly easy to change out later.

So far, I’ve spoken very briefly to Baum, who’s a bit of a bike expert. He recommended I look at a Trek, or a Rocky Mountain brand, but didn’t suggest any particular model. He also recommended SRAM components over Shimano (although Shimano is about the only brand name I recognized there). Any other recommendations are more than welcome (either in comments, or email me — see the image on the right for the address).

I know I should just drink water right from the tap for both environmental and frugal reasons, but then once or twice a year this happens, and I go right back to the bottle or Brita…

Phase two of our hot water heater install was finished yesterday. That consisted of putting in a new exhaust duct made out of a plastic tubing that “won’t melt”. Respecting the building codes is always a good thing, or so the teevee tells me. The new water heater has had two problems. The first is that it smells like gas when it runs; I think that has been fixed by the new, better fitting vent (the guy attached the old one at a weird angle, perhaps doing a sloppy job since he knew it would be replaced in a week), though I don’t know how much of the odorous chemical in natural gas is supposed to survive the fire part and get into the exhaust. The other problem is that there is a very deep thrum when it runs. It makes the whole house vibrate a bit, and always makes me think that there’s some giant truck idling outside my window (for the apartment used to do something similar, though to a lesser degree, when exactly such a thing happened). I mentioned it to the guy doing the replacement, and I don’t think he really noticed it, because after looking to listen for a while he said “that’s normal for a superflue” — except that our old one was a virtually identical superflue water heater, and it definitely didn’t shake the house when it ran.

The basement has a pretty hefty crop of mold coming up now after the flood from the last tank going kaput. The usual corner of the laundry room was a little fuzzy, but Wayfare seemed to do a good job of cleaning that one out, there was only a little residual fuzz there. However, where the floor is rough, unfinished concrete and hard to bleach a whole culture has developed, mostly under the washing machine and the water heater. I’ve doused the areas with the last of our very expensive bottle of mold inhibitor (Wayfare thinks we ought to send the bills for it to our landlord), so hopefully that will keep it at bay.