Blessed by the Potato

Rather than talk about myself this fortnightly update I figured I’d turn it over to my RL friends who are starting new blogs for the spring. First up is Ben, who’s launching a new business venture in southern Ontario in the form of an organic farm. Here’s Ben with the details:

Fresh Start Farm is a project Lisa and I have put together in order to test the waters when it comes to market gardening and earning a sustainable living farming. We are both huge foodies and we’ve been growing all kinds of things for our own consumption on a small scale over the years. At the same time we have both yearned for more space where we could expand our gardening into full-on farming. We both agree that the farming lifestyle is one that we would love to embrace.

After attending the Guelph Organic Conference last year, we both agreed that it was going to be our goal, over the next 5 years, to transition our current careers from what they are now, to full time farming.

We have rented a piece of land, roughly ¼ acre, in Pelham, a short drive from our house in Welland, while we continue the search for a suitable homestead to purchase.

We have invested a decent amount in seeds, soil amendments, tools and things, although the biggest investment will come in the form of our time throughout the growing season this year. In order to sell the produce we produce, we have rented a booth at the Welland Farmers’ Market, which is a fairly large and well attended market very close to our home and farm.

We have created the website in order to blog about our experience as well as get the word out as to what’s going on, what our problems and successes are, and most importantly, what we will have for sale at the market, once that time of year rolls around!

I’m sure most of your readers are in Toronto, so they would probably never attend the Welland Market, but in the future we may start offering a CSA delivery to the GTA. I still have a strong connection to North York, and I would love to get a booth at that market, if possible. In the interim, I encourage everyone to follow us as we go about doing what we do, offer comments and questions, and see that it is possible to be awesome if you want to be!

And also Lenny has launched a blog where he talks about whatever he feels like (so far, making his own pizza dough and encryption).

As for me, I’ve got my first job interview coming up later in the week. This is for a position I applied for in December, so I guess they’re not in a terrible rush to hire someone (and does give me hope for all the other applications I haven’t heard back on yet — there could yet be good news!). I’d say I’m pretty nervous to face the interview, but Wayfare’s way worse. To be fair, she knows how terrible I am at interviewing and the awful turns interviews can take, whereas I am consumed by the notion that I am generally awesome in all things, so it’ll be fine. ;)

Flag football is coming to an end, and much to my surprise attendance never got better. Who are these people that shell out over $100 to join a football league and only show up for one game? After much discussion and debate I decided not to join any leagues for the spring: as good as team sports are for motivating me to actually get out and exercise, there’s just too much uncertainty with a new job (any. day. now.) and baby on the way (same). Plus many of the spring leagues are on weeknights, and I have zero desire — nay, a full-on hatred of the very thought — of commuting around Toronto rush-hour at 6pm to try to make a game half-way across the city. Others may whine, but I’ll take a 10pm Sunday game every time.

I leave London alone for two months, and it all goes to hell…

Another article at the Globe warning about the housing market. I like the way Tom Bradley phrased this: “When I pull together the economic fundamentals, valuation and sentiment, real estate, as an investment, doesn’t look very attractive. The distribution of potential outcomes looks asymmetrical to me – limited upside and plenty of possible downside. But what really screams out at me is how many important factors are at extremes … bad extremes. One or two off-trend numbers can be explained away, but too many are jumping off the charts – price increases, mortgage rates, loan growth, consumer debt and home ownership levels.”

James Randi on scientists and trust and skepticism.

Nelson tries to find a way to short the Canadian real estate market.

Teacher Man, writing for CFB, says the Canadian real estate bubble can’t be denied any longer.

My neighbour, who lives in the other half of the duplex here, moved out a few days ago. He left a bag of garbage on the front porch. I don’t know what happened to his garbage can (I’m 90% certain the landlord left a can with a locking lid specifically to deter the raccoons for his half), but bags are simply not an acceptable container for food waste in this area, especially not in the summer. So of course, now I’ve got a raccoon outside my front door, frolicking in half a loaf of stale bread. I tried to shoo him away, but apparently I’m not terribly frightening on the other side of the glass. He’d only run as far away as the bottom of the steps, and be back in less than a minute. I don’t really want to risk opening the door to become more menacing, in case I’m not.

So I decided to get creative and try deterring him with my laser pointer. I banged on the door and shooed him off the porch to the steps, then as he was about to put a paw down on the top step, started waving the laser dot in front of him. He seemed to bug out the first time, afraid the porch was protected by an evil glowing raccoon-demon-equivalent or something, and after the second time he went around the side and came across the railing. There, I spun the dot around right where he was planning to land, which stopped him 4 or 5 times from jumping down. But I guess he’s hungry — and he already knows that garbage has food in it — so the little light bug couldn’t keep him off for long. I kept playing with the laser in the hopes that he’d get distracted and chase it like a cat. That’d be fun for me, and also keep him from making more of a mess of the garbage. Unfortunately, though I’ve seen that behaviour on youtube, he quickly lost interest in the laser dot once he figured out it wasn’t a serious threat to his dinner.

One downside to working late I hadn’t considered is the possibility of a large-scale power outage. I don’t know what’s going on, but I can see out my window here that there are no lights stretching for several blocks between the hospital and the river (but there are some lights on on the other side of the river). I’m freaking exhausted here now, and more than ready to head home… but I don’t want to leave the hospital (where there’s power and internet) and walk home in the pitch black. It’s been dark for about 25 minutes now, and it’s starting to freak me out (the sleep deprivation and general anxiety is not helping matters there). On the other hand, I really don’t want to be in the hospital if they decide to conserve the generators and cut off power to this wing… The streets are dark and slippery, but the hospital is creepy.

You may recall reading (and if you don’t live in London, laughing) about our woes with record snowfalls here in London this year. The snow squalls were bizarre in their specificity, these narrow finger-like bands of cloud streaming off Lake Huron, arrows shooting straight for London. Towns just 30 minutes away to either side still had green lawns in some cases. I just realized now that I may have caused this series of supernatural storms via the application of accidental weather witchcraft.

You see, just before this all started, I was starting to decorate the office for winter (read: procrastinating on my thesis) by cutting out paper snowflakes from scrap paper (and I have a lot of scrap paper on my desk). I then hung them around the office at important power nodes, including a large tissue-paper snowflake guarding my filing cabinet. Perhaps summoning the most power weather magick was a string of snowflakes, of all different sizes, with at least one cut out by other members of the office, that was then itself hung from snowflake garland. This multiplicative effect of snowflake on snowflake, combined with suspension from the ceiling in the psychic centre of the room may ultimately have been too much for the physical realm to bear, and snow squall after snow squall was summoned up and directed directly at London until finally well over a meter of snow blanketed the supernatural signal and it’s dread message could no longer be received in the humid airs above Lake Huron.

To all the residents of London, I’m deeply sorry for this irresponsible — though accidental — use of the dark arts, and I promise it will never happen again.

The snow here has been just insane. I wonder sometimes if it’s not real, and just a product of my prolonged illness. Sadly, I can’t wish it away as some kind of fever dream, since I’m not all that sick (just a stupid cough that won’t clear up now).

The city seems to have found some crazy new plows for the sidewalks that I don’t recall seeing in previous years. They cut through the drifts leaving a nearly vertical wall of snow on either side of the cleared path. Though by my reckoning we’ve had roughly 5 feet of snow fall in total over the last week and a half, the general snow accumulation isn’t nearly that high as it has been melting and compacting thanks to bright sunshine whenever it’s not an active snowsquall, plus a final dump of heavy, wet snow last week. Nonetheless, there is still a solid two foot wall of snow lining the sidewalks.

And as I discovered today, that is too much snow for a squirrel to bound over.

I was walking to work and saw a squirrel on the sidewalk playing in the snow. At first I thought he was just having fun, slipping and sliding and jumping around, the equivalent of pulling squirrel doughnuts. But soon I saw he was either very sick, drunk, or exhausted. He let me get very close as I was walking down the sidewalk, then tried to run away from me, but kept slipping over and falling into the wall of snow. I stood back to let him get some room, and then he tried to jump up and over the snowbank to get out of the sidewalk canyon. It took him something like 8 tries, some of which weren’t even close to getting up — he’d try one side, then turn around to go for the other but jump halfway across the sidewalk and land before even reaching the other snowbank, crash into it after sliding, turn around, and try again. I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically, feel sad, or call animal control over his weird behaviour (I ended up splitting the difference on the first two). He did finally get up and over, and then basically swam through the snow drifts to a tree. Once on solid bark, he just hung there and wheezed.

I’m pretty miserably sick here. Sore throat, cough, fever, and vile fluids being produced all over the place. I think the combination of thesis stress and digging out from over a meter of snow just did me in.

My cache of drugs was pretty low to be heading in to a major illness. In particular, I was just about out of advil; I had to ration them yesterday so that I’d still have one to take this morning to get me out the door to the pharmacy.

On the bright side, I was going through the Pharma Plus flyer, and just about everything I wanted was on sale. Advil, vitamins, mouthwash, nyquil, and cold-fx all had pretty substantial sales on. Plus, it was a big bonus airmiles promotion if I spent $50 or more (which wouldn’t be hard to hit with all the stuff on my list). There was even a 1-day sale on 7-up ($2.22 per 6-pack of bottles! awesome!) today. I didn’t feel like driving, especially since we got another dusting of snow last night, and that would involve sweeping the car off. The Pharma Plus is only like 3 blocks away, so I walked.

And when I got there, there was no sale tag out for the Advil, just one of the “switch to the store brand and save X” tags. I figured I must have remembered the flyer wrong, put some store brand ibuprofen in the cart, and moved on… but the vitamins had no sale tag either. Nor did the mouthwash. The toblerone did, but not the door-crasher one-day sale price, and the 7-up wasn’t even available in the bottles. Something was definitely wrong, so I went to the front of the store where the flyers usually are to double-check (maybe I had the effective day wrong? Maybe I dreamed it all in my fever?), and there were no flyers. There wasn’t even that tray where they usually sit. I asked the cashier for a flyer, and he said they’re not a flyer store.

What? I know they were a flyer store just a few months ago, the last time I was there. How can they not be a flyer store? Can they do that, opt to use the Pharma Plus name and everything but then not follow their flyer? And also, if they’re not a flyer store, why is Pharma Plus sending a flyer to my house? The next closest store is 4 km away, and I have to pass by three Shoppers Drug Marts (and this Pharma Plus) to get there. Not a very effective use of the advertising budget…

I have to say though that given the amount of snow that was dumped on London, the city has done a decent job at cleaning up the sidewalks. This is particularly remarkable because the city usually does a terrible job at keeping the sidewalks free of snow — the sidewalk ploughs seem to take a day or two before they come around, and by that time the snow has been packed down into an irregular icy surface by the passage of what pedestrians there are, and that’s nigh-impossible to walk on. The one issue is that at many intersections the sidewalk ploughs went by first, and now the street ploughs have put up an icy barrier for pedestrians to hop over. Nothing new to anyone out there, I’m sure, but with the amount of snow we have, those ice dams mean that we’re going to have some epic meltwater ponds forming soon…

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.