Blessed by the Potato

A natural gas stove is all the rage these days, and I have no idea why.

There’s the efficiency thing: when you want heat, it makes more sense to just burn the natural gas yourself rather than have the power plant do it, send the energy by electricity, and then reconvert to heat. That gives natural gas a bit of a cost advantage. However, that’s assuming that the heat produced actually goes into the food, which has not been my experience lately. On my electric stove, almost all the heat goes into the pot. On my parents’ gas stove, a ridiculous amount of heat escapes around the side of the pot, and often makes the handles too hot to touch.

I’ve heard that they’re faster, but that’s just not been my experience. If I crank either my stove or my parents’ stove up to max, the water boils in about the same amount of time. They are more responsive, so if you want to go from max to min or vice-versa, that happens much more quickly, but I don’t see that as a huge benefit. Along with this is usually a statement that “a chef can exactly control the heat under a pot with gas”, but I personally cannot master that when I go visit my parents. There, I find that the floor level heat on a gas stove is way hotter than what I usually want — my electric stove has a number of settings that can keep a pot warm/hot but not above boiling, for instance, when I want to melt but not brown butter.

One benefit that the electric stoves can’t touch is that they can operate in a power outage — but there’s only been like four days in my life where that was important.

Then they have all the downsides: the escaping heat, making handles too hot; the fact that it’s an open flame, which is much more hazardous. The small (but non-zero) risk of a gas leak.

Underneath the range, the gas oven changes things for the cookie perfectionist: suddenly the oven isn’t a “dry heat” any more. The exhaust gasses (Co2 and water vapour) affect how things rise and brown. Plus the fan constantly runs so they’re a lot noisier, which is important as more entertaining/socializing is done in the kitchen.

They’re widely seen as a prestige thing, advertised as a feature for houses and condos. I know a lot of people who swear by gas stoves, and I recognize that it’s a personal preference, so I’m glad that Wayfare is also an electric person. I’m kind of curious as to the actual real-world efficiency of a gas stove (given the heat escaping issue), but while I know how to measure the electricity usage of an electric stove, I’m not sure how to measure gas usage with a gas stove.

Another natural gas appliance I haven’t quite wrapped my head around is the gas fireplace. I suppose they are considerably safer and more convenient than a wood fireplace, but I just don’t really see the point: they’re almost always trapped behind glass, so you may as well just turn on the “fireplace channel” on your TV (maybe record it next Potatomas and pop the DVD in as necessary) — you miss out on many of the elements of a fireplace experience, including being able to burn things like marshmallows and incriminating documents, and also the survivalist element of having the ability to make heat and cook when society falls apart. Many times the heat they give off is unwanted in the room and just vented away, though of course there’s always the issue of the pilot light: my parents’ gas fireplace is hot to touch all the time, like, hazardously so, just from the heat of the pilot light. Drives me crazy. So Wayfare and I are looking at potential new places to move to since our time in the lovely, mould-infested century-old home we’re in now is almost up, and we’re looking at floorplans that say “optional gas fireplace here” and just praying that the unit we’ll be looking at doesn’t have it.

The recent news that a pedestrian was killed by a cyclist riding on the sidewalk was shocking. For some, it’s lead to a refiring of the debate over whether bikes belong on the sidewalk or the road. Of course, this freak incident is so shocking because it is so rare, and unfortunately some people aren’t taking that the right way: cyclists on sidewalks hardly ever seriously hurt pedestrians, that’s why this is news. Cyclists are frequently hurt by cars (though throwing a monkey wrench into the whole argument is that overwhelmingly more accidents are between cars and pedestrians, which are generally separated!). Not helping matters in this debate is that despite the death that did occur, it was a case where the bike belonged on the sidewalk: it was a 15-year old boy on a bike with tires small enough that the law says he should have been on the sidewalk, in an area of the city with few pedestrians, and cars that regularly zip by at 80 (the limit is 60 km/h).

The answer is that cyclists don’t quite belong with either group, so the best solution is dedicated bike lanes with physical barriers to cars. But that’s a fantasy, not something that’s going to happen in a city that’s already built up. Ignoring that solution I fall back on the one I use myself when riding my bike: when I’m going fast, and/or when there are lots of people on the sidewalk, and when the cars are going slow, I ride on the street (like in downtown areas). When the cars are fast and the pedestrians are missing (such as suburban areas), I ride on the sidewalk (though on sidestreets where there is no appreciable traffic, I’ll stay on the road).

Unfortunately, we can’t rely on common sense alone, otherwise we wouldn’t need laws in the first place, and the law doesn’t seem to like taking a “wherever they damned well please, according to the conditions” stance, so we get the rules that cyclists belong on the street.

The heated debate also seems to be stirring up some motorist anger towards other bending of the rules by cyclists, especially not stopping at stop signs. Heck, I’m guilty of this myself on my bike: it takes effort to get back up to speed from a full stop, and in side-street riding you can hit a stop sign every block! Plus it’s not nearly the same issue with a bike rolling through than a car: a bike will have more manoeuvrability and can stop faster, and is going slow enough that they can check for oncoming traffic safely without having to stop (or for that matter, slow significantly).

There was a horrible, rotten stench in my parents’ basement the last day or two. I noticed it when running down there to grab a drink from the downstairs fridge. I thought it was a turnip that had gone rotten — it was looking a little wrinkly, but my brother said he noticed it too, before, when the fridge door was closed. We were afraid that the smell from all the garbage that’s been rotting in the garage had seeped into the basement, and unsure of what we could do to get the smell out if that was the case. I envisioned that liquid rot, garbage run-off, what we used to call “tracks” as kids, seeping into the drywall or the very foundation, impossible to get out short of a semi-major renovation.

Tracks, of course, being what the garbage trucks left behind, especially after running the compressor — pressed, pure, liquid, stench. It was always way worse than the garbage itself, and lingered sometimes for days after garbage day, visible as tracks down the road…

Anyhow. It turns out the union isn’t to blame for this unholy smell. The freezer in the basement stopped working, weeks ago by the look of things, and my dad’s collection of over 150 lbs of meat rotted in situ. That amount of meat was supposed to help us last through the zombie apocalypse; ironically, I fear it may start one. The meat dripped, and the formerly frozen berries were fuzzy, so things had got on for a while there.

The freezer is less than 4 years old, so I’m mighty unimpressed that it died so soon. What’s weird is that first off, it does still have power — the interior lights come on when the door is opened, and the weird status light I’ve never understood on the bottom is on too. There’s a huge block of ice on the bottom (not enough to keep anything except one or two things that were touching it cold; they’ve been thrown out to be safe of course), which is all the more curious. I don’t know if it’s a symptom, or perhaps even the cause (if it iced up so much it stopped the air circulation somehow).

My brother says that something similar happened once before with that freezer, when the door was left ajar for a few days: it wasn’t powerful enough to keep the food frozen with the door open. That I think speaks to the wisdom of the design of the old-fashioned chest freezers, with the doors on top, or even of freezers with drawers.

It’s possible that even if the compressor was working, with the door ajar the humidity from the outside air would continually condense where the cold air came out, forming a large ice dam before any of the food could be chilled; the defrost cycle might have added insult to injury by baking the rest of the food… It’s so disgusting though that I’m not really going to spend much effort in playing freezer forensics.

Consider this: you go to the washroom, you undo your belt, then your button, and your fly, pull your pants down, do your business, then back up in reverse order. You go to the sink and wash your hands (if you work in a hospital or your hands are grody, this may be the second time washing your hands in that visit to the washroom).

You get home, free yourself from the oppressive prison that are your pants, throw them in the laundry basket, and proceed to rock guitar hero in your undies, risky business style. As the laundry basket fills up, and later overflows towards the end of the week, you eventually get around to washing your clothes, and your pants are clean.

But when does your belt get washed?

I was woken up this morning at 10 am by a knocking at the door. Crawling out of bed to answer it, I found a confused woman “This… this isn’t the Erskine house, is it?”

Damned Erskines, we keep getting their mail — same street number, one block away, both streets start with the same letter, and their postal code is only one (very similar looking) letter off of ours. Of course, I bring their mail up to them, but they’ve never had to re-deliver our stuff. I haven’t noticed anything missing, but I would be surprised if the mail was never lost in the other direction.

Now we’re getting their visitors, too!

Damned Erskines.

After slacking off for a (busy, rainy) week, I finally managed to hit the bike trails today on a lovely June evening. I managed to hit 10 k fairly easily, which made me feel good — hopefully I’ll have some time to rent a bike while on vacation and keep up with it. The dandelion fluff was sailing through the air, rather heavily in parts — like dandelion snow (which, BTW, WMAGNFARB — a Dave Barryism that has suddenly become very important in our world as all the names I can think of for Rock Band names are taken on Xbox Live).