Blessed by the Potato

I really like the weathernetwork.ca, the website of the Weather Network. Their forecasting is about as accurate as you can expect weather forecasting to be, and they have a bunch of other neat utilities like the highway forecast or current highway conditions. However, lately they’ve been getting really anxious about issuing weather alerts that often don’t pan out, but that’s not what’s been getting me lately. What I really find bugs me is that while you can go back and look at past weather predictions with their site, they never tell you what actually happened. So, for example, if we were to go back and look at December 8, 2006 (or the band of days 6th-9th), London got hit really bad with a huge snowfall that was way above what they were calling for — 30 inches in front of our place (760-odd mm of snow). However, the archives on the Weather Network show a measly 25 mm of precipitation. Now, they might not count a mm of snow as a mm of precipitation, since snow can be quite fluffy and volumous, but still, 760 is nowhere near 25, and I don’t think they discount snow that much (perhaps a factor of 10, and they were calling for 25 cm of snow that night).

I had the same problem this weekend: they were calling for freezing rain, ice, and snow to hit London through Toronto, which was going to make my drive home miserable. Then in the early evening they started changing their prediction: Toronto went from getting a mix of ice and snow (up to 20 cm) to a predicted 5-7 cm of snow. They were still calling on London to get iced in: basically the weatherpeople were wailing “But if you have any friends or relatives in London, it may be too late for them, as they’re already encased in their icy tombs. There may still be hope, however, as scientists ten thousand years from now may thaw them out and ask what it was like to hunt the Woolly Mammoth that was briefly resurrected from extinction by genetic engineering; they will, of course, have to sheepishly admit that they were frozen in the London ice storm just a few decades before that actually happened…”

The snow in Toronto was pretty gentle, and we only got about 2 cm, which wasn’t going to stop me from driving. It made me wonder what London actually got, because I’d hate to get halfway down the 401 just to find the driving impossible. Did we get spared the full wrath of the weather network’s predictions, as Toronto had? Or was Toronto merely spared because the clouds had dumped their load in London? The weather network’s site was pretty much useless for trying to answer that question. Their highway conditions page said that the roads were slushy and awful all along the 401, including through Toronto, but it didn’t look that bad out my window. I kept hitting refresh hoping to get an update, when I noticed that the information was several hours old and not getting updated. At that point I just decided to get in the car and risk it. I’m here now typing, so everything turned out fine: in fact, Toronto was the worst part of the drive, with a tiny bit of slush on the roads and the snow still falling. London’s roads are wet, but clear of snow (I guess it was largely regular rain, as opposed to ice — or the city put down a lot of salt) though there is some slush on the sidewalks.

It was just brought to my attention that there’s a strange error on the site right now where the sidebar is not loading properly (at all) for many people. It’s very strange because it loads fine for me when I use the local address for my webserver (192.etc.) but it doesn’t work for me when I go via the web (www.holypotato.com). I have no idea what could cause behaviour like that, so if anyone has any ideas I’m open to suggestions.

Edit: As soon as I posted this, the problem appeared to go away. I wonder if the extra post pushed the image (a few posts below) far enough down the page that it wasn’t interacting with anything on the sidebar or something along those lines…

Twice after we moved in, Wayfare and I asked our landlord how to turn off the water to the pipes on the side of the house. “Oh, you don’t need to” she said, “I’m pretty sure they’re the new ones that won’t burst.” I had never heard of such pipes. It was possible there was a small heating element in it (there is a small wire attached to the pipe, but as far as I can tell it then goes into the cable box, so my guess was that it was a grounding strip). It’s also possible that the world of plumbing has advanced and water freezing and expanding inside pipes doesn’t lead to failure anymore. To be safe, I asked the last tennant as well, and she said she never had to turn it off.

“Oh well,” we shrugged “it should be fine.” Of course, now my landlord’s on vacation in New Zealand (not just out of the country, but completely out of touch and in a completely different day/night cycle) and the pipe decides to burst. It’s very strange though that it would burst today: it’s close to freezing for the first time in weeks; I would have thought it would have burst last week in the bitter cold. Naturally, along with the water spraying all over the side of the house and the deck, there’s now water seeping into the basement.

I just went to get some ice cubes for my drink, which around here is pretty rare. So, the frost free freezer, with its cycles of temporary heat, had evaporated (sublimated?) almost all the ice out of my ice cube tray. The few, shrunken ice cubes that were left were dirty. Eww, that’s just not right. Ice cubes shouldn’t get getting dirty in the freezer, especially not in one I fully cleaned out in December.

I haven’t had a chance to tell all my stories from the trip out to PEI, and I’m not quite sure I want to. But I do want to mention that it is traditional, perhaps universally so, to send food to mourners. Perhaps because food can be very comforting to our ape-brains, perhaps to spare us from having to cook for ourselves, or perhaps just because practically every get-together/tradition involves food in some way and it would just be wrong to not bring something. Anyhow, there was so much food waiting for us at my grandfather’s house after the visitation. The food was piling up at the front door, with more people stopping by with more as we were eating. Any flat, unsuspecting place that stood still long enough accumulated food. The kitchen table and counters, naturally, were nearly overflowing. A folding table set up in the living room accumulated food along with the coffeetable; some food even found its way on top of the TV. The stove had a few pots on it to keep warm, and then someone else came along and started piling food up between the pots. What I found hilarious though is that the washer and dryer were covered in food.

This of course meant that everyone had to eat in their laps with their good clothes on…

I’m not usually a concert-going guy: I typically figure that the added experience of seeing a band live, once, along with the between-song banter and special live-only covers/ditties/version is usually not worth the hassle of sitting in a packed hall/stadium with lots of screaming people and the very high admission. I’d rather have the CD and listen to it a number of times all by myself in the car, thanks. Nonetheless, I’ve heard that the Barenaked Ladies are a fun band to see live (and I like almost every song out of their catalog, so there won’t be embarrassing moments like when Robert Smith tried to pass off his newest song list as worthy of playing in front of people) so I decided to go. Plus it made for an awesome you-know-what-day present for Wayfare. (No modesty needed).

Now, we had tried to see BNL in concert once before, a few summers ago at the Molson Ampitheatre for their day-long “Barenaked circus” concert. That, my friends, was not a very good concert. It was basically Mama Page going up and smacking Stephen over the head and forcing him to let his whiney kid brother do an opening set for the now wildly popular BNL (though to be fair, his kid brother was one of the best of the acts). And of course, once that happened everyone wanted to let their cousins, friends, or people who play in the subway station on their morning commute do a set. It could have worked, if they had tightened up the set changes a bit lot more — it was pretty ridiculous, since we could see the stage hands wheel everything out pretty much preassembled on the rolling platforms, then take 40-45 minutes connecting stuff up and doing sound checks. I really thought a professional group of stage hands sould have been able to do that in less than say, 10 minutes. I think they did too, since Sean Cullen, who was entertaining us between groups, only had about 10 minutes of material at a time, then lots of dead air. It was also a little unfair that they didn’t really tell anyone that was the way the concert was going to go: we were not prepared to spend nearly 8 hours in our seat in the sun. Also, the actual BNL set (while fairly good) was really short, due in part to the crazy noise restrictions at Molson/Ontario Place (why they don’t just start concerts an hour earlier on a summer saturday afternoon, I don’t know). Of course, that concert did give us “Wood, Cheese, and Children” so not all was lost.

This concert was better. One opening act, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the good doctor Funkenstein intended. It wasn’t just that they had a curling song (though, really, that was the highlight of the whole affair, right up there with Lovers in a Dangerous Time for you-know-what day), it just seemed like a better concert. They were a little… cold at first, and there were some issues in getting the volume balanced between the instruments and the vocals. But it was smooth with very little downtime.

It’s much nicer seeing concerts in London. For one thing, the tickets are (a bit) cheaper. We were in the cheap seats, up in the nosebleeds, and we were about as close as the sort of second price tier seats would be in Toronto (for the Molson Ampitheatre, about where the seats turn to grass). It was also a breeze to get there: if the weather had been even remotely decent, we would have walked. Instead, we took a cab for $8, and afterwards walked like 4 blocks to get on a bus to come home — all in all, a much more enjoyable experience IMHO.

The record companies (or more properly, the artists) really haven’t seemed to see some of the strengths of digital music with respect to their concerts. There are almost always unique one-off moments in a concert: a different version of a song (even if it’s just more vibrant with cheering fans), or a new cover, or some little throwaway ditty that didn’t seem worth putting on an album. But there are quite often fans who would like to have that song: the BNL live version of “Brian Wilson” is now the definitive version of that song; personally, I’d love to have a copy of “Canada Curling Stone” that they played tonight, or “Bounce to This“, a really good, catchy song at the George Clinton concert that I’ve never heard before or since. Sometimes, they’ll release a concert CD or DVD, but it’s often of a representative night of a particular tour, and still misses some of the jokes, local flavour, and audience reaction. So, my point is: wouldn’t it be great if bands sold recordings of each stop of their concert tour? Of all their songs, in all their many flavours? It seems like it should be trivially easy to record and sell MP3s once you already have the infrastructure to do so for full studio album versions. Plus it would be a great way to extort more money from the die-hard fan who has to have everything, and cut down on the desire to record performances: if you knew you could go and buy any particular song you really liked live afterwards, why even bring the tape recorder? (And I think I like Pinch Me better when the line is “take a drink right from the hose, and change into my sister’s clothes”). This is the kind of way that digital media scales: it’s just as easy and profitable to sell a thousand different songs/versions as it is to sell 26 off two albums. Shelf space is no longer a concern: the only issue remaining is the customers’ ability to sort through it, find what they want, and absorb it.

There are meter-high stakes pounded into the ground all over the Island here. Along the road, down driveways, and it’s not too hard to figure that they’re there to mark where the road is when the snow comes down too high too fast to really know for sure. What I find really amazing though is that everybody takes those stakes out of the ground in the Spring, because there’s virtually no sign of them during tourist season.

Also, in our nearly hour-long drive in the funeral procession to the gravesite, we saw many instances of cars (coming from the opposite direction) pulling over as the fleet of cars went by. It turns out nearly everyone stops to give room for the procession and give respects to the dead, another strange funeral custom I’ve never seen elsewhere (though there were a few people who didn’t know about it, and you could see them taking advantage of the people in front of them pulling over to whiz past).

Horses, it turns out, are giant scaredy-cats. They’re terrified of deer for some reason, and my cousins leave the lights and a radio on for them in the barn at night.

Nearly everyone out here is at least a little behind the curve when it comes to computers and the like (dial-up access penetrated fairly quickly here in the 90’s, but due to the geography and demographics, high speed is pretty rare and things have stagnated a bit). To print pictures from the funeral right away, my dad picked up a cheap photo printer (just plug the camera directly into it and go!) and I was showing my aunts and uncles how to use it. My uncle Kevin took a particular interest in it, so I started talking about some of the other features, talking down to him a bit as, unfortunately, many of us do with our less-technologically inclined relations. A little later we were talking about laptops because he wanted to get one for my aunt, to make it easier for her to do a bit of writing and what-not. I started talking about how pretty much anything would do for the uses she had in mind, and he said that sure, it starts out that way, but then you get into photo and video editing and you need more power… he just put a 4th hard drive into the server computer he built himself (on a motherboard with 8 RAM slots) and then I felt stupid since he obviously was plenty familiar with computers.

Oh, well.

Most people (out here at least) have more second (and greater degree) cousins than they know what to do with. I met my great aunt and uncle (my grandfather’s brother and sister-in-law of his other deceased brother) and their whole clan for the first time today, a good dozen or so second and third cousins. It was a little strange being in a room full of family yet not really knowing anyone’s name.

One thing about being on PEI in the summer is that there are always a ton of bugs around, especially annoying flies that get inside. While they can be a pain up north, I generally don’t notice any flies around Southern Ontario, and while most people out here have several flyswatters, I know we don’t even own one in Toronto. However, our cottage is pretty new, well-insulated, usually has a stiff breeze coming off the water, and just recently aquired air conditioning as well (so those windows get closed!). So we usually don’t get many (typically 2 or 3 will hang around to be swatted), and they’re hardly ever a major nuisance. By comparison, at my grandparent’s place, or at the cottages we used to rent before we got our own, they were the bane of our existence. A good hour before bed would have to be spent either swatting them or else turning on just one or two lights in the place to lure them away from the bedrooms.

However this time there are dozens of flies around here. Which I thought was really weird because it’s freezing outside. It turns out the stupid things will go dormant for long periods of time, hiding in the vents or the walls or what have you, and as soon as we cranked up the heat coming back, they all woke up at once and started buzzing around.

Today was the visitation for my grandmother. It was very, very long: first an afternoon session, then a dinner break (where more people showed up to the house) then another two hours in the evening. PEI has a strange tradition for the visitation: the family lines up beside the coffin (a big receiving line with nametags, no less) and visitors file through, chatting briefly, shaking hands, and offering condolences. It was exhausting, especially since of the hundreds of people who came through (my grandmother made a lot of friends!) I only knew about a half dozen. So there were a lot of people who came through and were in tears after talking with my grandfather, then got to us grandkids and would say “oh, who’s are you?” or “I think I last saw you when you were just this tall”, etc. It wasn’t a very comforting ritual — half the time just talking to someone who was already crying would set one of us off even if we didn’t know them, plus I find it quite stressful to constantly interact with strangers that way. My aunt says that it’s not usually done that way in the few funerals she’s been to in New Brunswick, and I don’t think they work like that in Ontario, either. There, she says, people tend to mingle a bit and chat up the survivors they actually know, and get some time to say goodbye to the deceased without the next people in line shaking hands and chatting at either end of it. The line got so long at one point that they were bringing people in out of the cold and seating them in the chapel to queue up again after the line thinned a bit.

One odd thing I noticed is that a lot of men on PEI have huge hands. I think that I have fairly average-sized hands; I fit into medium or large sized gloves for the most part, and they’re a good deal bigger than Wayfare’s, etc. But whether it’s use on the farms or just genetics, a lot of the men who came through had hands that just completely dwarfed mine. There were also a lot of people who tried to express their condolences with a nearly comical handshake that tried to crawl right up my arm. First, a regular handshake that went on too long for comfort, then just as you think they’re about to let go they would take their other hand and grab your elbow…

The funeral will be tomorrow, on the far side of the island where my grandmother was born. She’s going to be buried on a hill known as the coldest part of the Island. She said “oh, I know it’s cold, but I won’t really mind when the time comes.” After about 5 hours of visiting today, I’m not sure if I’ll have the energy to get out there (it’s about an hour-long drive away).

One of my aunts is a nurse, my mom was a nurse (she went to nursing school out here), and my grandmother had a lot of nurses out to visit her at home to help take care of her after her last stroke, so at one point there was a big discussion about health care in PEI. It turns out there are 7 hospitals on PEI (for a population of about 150k, half that of London which has 4(?), only two of which have emergency departments), though I only know of two myself. They were talking about how ridiculous it is to have that many small hospitals and how in some other provinces a city with 150k people would be lucky to have one, so they were talking about ways to try to improve the ambulance system here so that they could then start closing and consolidating. A good suggestion was to add a few helicopters to permanenly serve PEI (rather than having to borrow Nova Scotian helicopters in times of need), and then set up one good centralized hospital with lots of modern equipment and stuff. It turns out that a lot of diseases here get missed or mis-diagnosed because no one hospital is large enough to support many specialists, instead the hospitals are more like clinics with surgical facilities, and anything much beyond setting a break requires a patient transfer to Halifax or another large hospital. In fact in my grandmother’s case, she was admitted to the hospital with a stroke, and a common treatment for that is to administer a thrombolytic (”clot buster”) to try to save the brain tissue. She was lucky and managed to get a CT to rule out bleeding in the brain (clot busters make that worse, as you can imagine). However, there are only a few doctors licensed to perscribe a thrombolytic in PEI, and none of them was available at that hospital at the time, so she never received treatment.

After moving in, we noticed that the relatively new (<4 years old “Crosley”) washing machine was not doing a very good job of getting the water out of our clothes in the spin cycle. It got progressively worse so that after just a few weeks, there were still large puddles of water in the bottom of the tub. A closer investigation revealed that the motor had gotten so weak that it wasn’t actually moving the tub at all for the spin cycle: it was just making noise and pretending to work. We called our landlord, who called the repair people. They took a look, and found that the tub seal had broken and water had been seeping into the motor and the rest of the undercarriage: the motor bearing had rusted out and the resistance was just too much for it to overcome and drive the spin cycle. The estimated repair cost was over $400, and this is a washer that’s already had the tub seal repaired once before (the last tenant told us to keep an eye on it). At first, my landlord authorized the repairs, but I talked to her for a bit and suggested that just getting a new washer might be a better plan, and not too much more expensive. She agreed, and told me to basically pick one out and send her the bill. I went for a reasonable, middle-of-the-road Kenmore top-loader that’s also reasonably energy efficient (important since I pay the water and hydro!), it also happened to be on sale for $500 so it was pretty close to the repair cost for the old Crosley (a brand I’ve never heard of, but is supposedly manufactured by Maytag).

Sears delivered it within a few days, and the delivery went very quickly: the guys came in, took away the old washer, hauled the new one down the stairs, connected it and were gone in less than 10 minutes. However, our new washer was possessed. Not surprising, since the bill came to $666 after tax and delivery. During the spin cycle of the first load, it started violently shaking, attempting to walk its way across the room and possibly destroy itself in the process. The instructions said it was important to level it properly or “some vibrations” may be present. So, Wayfare and I spent nearly an hour carefully levelling the thing with no sucess (and many cuts on my hands in the process — they sure don’t sand/grind the sharp edges on the sheet metal around the bottom!).

Finally I gave up and said that there’s no way the washer can be that sensitive to being perfectly level, and called Sears to sort the mess out. They went through the troubleshooting guide with me: was the load uneven? (No, it was barely a load at all, just a few shirts and one pair of pants) Were all the shipping restraints removed? (I said yes, I specifically saw the guy pull the yellow zip tie out of the back that he said held the guts together). Was it level (oh, hell yes). Finally she said there might be something wrong with the washer and set up an appointment to send someone out to look at it next week. After I hung up I looked in the garbage to just double check that the guy got the ziptie out properly. The manual clearly showed a picture of a long tie with two cotter pins attached to it. In the trash was a short yellow tie, and no cotter pins. Cursing, I moved the washer out from the wall and looked in the hole in the back: sure enough, a ripped-off yellow zip tie was stuck in there. With a handy pair of pliers and many stabs at it, I finally managed to pull it out (with, what would you know, two cotter pins attached to it). It was at least twice as long as the piece in the garbage, and the washer worked fine after that. I was pretty pissed that the guys were in such a hurry to get in and get out that they didn’t check that the cotter pins actually came out with the zip tie when they yanked on it, or even that the zip tie was even approximately the right length (it looks like he tore off the third of it that was sticking out the back — there should have been a lot more zip tie, and I think he should have known that). Anyhow, that itself didn’t cause any permanent damage to the washer, though it is a bit of a piss-off since my landlord paid $85 for them to deliver and set up the washing machine. Unfortunately, I caused a bit of damage to the brand new washer when I tried to walk it back towards the wall: I pulled on the top instrument panel to get leverage, and rather badly bent the bit of sheet metal around the back of it. :(

Anyhow, I found out this morning that my grandmother passed away after having a bad stroke this weekend (she was in the hospital all week), so I’m leaving for PEI for the funeral. I’m holding up ok: everyone seemed to think this stroke was going to be the last, so we’ve had a bit of warning to prepare mentally.

Well, I just got back from the dentist after having a crown put on the tooth I broke on a TicTac about a month ago. My dentist was fairly concerned because the crown is so thin in the centre that the porcelain didn’t coat the metal underneath, so you can see the shiny spot. Of course, a shiny spot in the centre is nothing new for me; I’ve had metal fillings before (and still do in the top), and of course, the top-centre of my head is pretty shiny, too. It’s funny though, since I had a pit that was well on its way to becoming a cavity in that tooth, and they reproduced the pit in the porcelain crown. Now I guess I’m stuck with it. Oh, and my dental insurance doesn’t cover crowns. It raises the question of course of what it does cover: AFAIK, insurance is supposed to be there to cover unexpected, expensive events. It doesn’t get much more unexpected or expensive than breaking a tooth and needing a crown. By contrast, paying for half of one-third of my cleaning/checkups (I go every 4 months now since my teeth are so bad, but they only cover one per year) and half my fillings is more of a subsidy than insurance: I know I’ll have a checkup every X months and can budget for that, and with my mouth I can even tell you that roughly, I’ll have a cavity that needs filling in March, and then another one approximately 18 months after that. Then every 18 months thereafter until all my teeth are prosthetic. These are not only relatively known events, they’re also about as cheap as they come in the dental playbook (of course, that is only speaking relatively).

On a sadder note, I realized that over the past few weeks, I’ve actually seen my dentist more than my friends. Granted, the weather’s been terrible, I’ve been hella busy, people are busy planning weddings or babies, and Baum got a girlfriend, but it’s still really, really sad. Hopefully that’ll change though, as spring is coming, and I’ve got a new place that’s still waiting for a housewarming party, and I should be able to come back for more Friday/Saturday nights as work (hopefully) tapers off a bit, and I don’t have any more Monday dentist appointments.

Back on the topic of shiny spots on the top of my head, my mom was talking with my dad’s doctor about thinning hair, and how it was ironic that my dad was the one recovering from chemo, but I’m the one with the seriously thinning hair. She said the doctor said that that “stuff you just pick up at the drug store to put on your head doesn’t work” and gave her a bottle of this plant extract stuff to give me. I was a little taken aback, I mean, this isn’t just some stuff I picked up, it’s Rogaine, FDA/Health Canada-approved with ~60% success rate (for me, not so much — it’s definitely slowed the loss, but not fully stopped it, let alone lead to regrowth). Heck, it even had a Simpson’s episode! (”I love you too, Karl”). So instead she gives me this even more expensive plant extract stuff that’s “really supposed to work” and ugh, it reeks. I think I’d rather go bald. So then my mom says that even that won’t really work, and that the only cure for baldness is to get a hair transplant, then says I should go out and get one since it’s not seemly for a man my age to be so very bald. She then starts explaining the process, and I’m just like “yes Mom, I’m a night owl, I’ve seen the infomercials…”

Anyway, I’ve seen a ton of reports lately about the benefits of microwaving your sponges to keep them bacteria free. Speaking as a bioelectromagnetics scientist, I just wanted to clarify that yes, it does work, but it’s not related to anything magical about the microwave (well, not for sure, anyway). Those reports also recommend that you do this with the sponge wet, so basically you’re just using the microwave to boil the water and heat-sterilize the sponge. You can do this with a kettle or on the stovetop too (drop the sponge in a large mug and pour in some boiling water from the kettle, or bring a pot of sponges + water to a boil on the stove). The microwave does seem to be a bit faster (~2 minutes), perhaps because water tends to superheat in microwaves and steam hangs around a bit longer, so you’re getting more heat. The method I like to use is to take a microwave-safe plastic or glass cup, put the sponge in it and fill ~3/4 full with water, then turn it on high and wait for about half the water to boil off.