Blessed by the Potato

After calling for 10-15 cm of snow yesterday, we got a very pretty, wind-free but heavy and steady fall that lasted all night, dropping about 30 inches (75 cm!) in 24 hours. We’re completely snowed in now. I shovelled out the front walkway with my tiny car shovel (a mere 34 inches long), and now I’m beat. I have no idea how I’m going to clear a (longer) path to my car around back. I don’t even think I can open the back door since it doesn’t have an overhang like the front.

It was hilarious when Wayfare decided to try to make a snow angel. She climbed around the side of the porch so there wouldn’t be any footprints leading to it, turned around, and fell into the snow… only to sink in the really deep, light powder so that just a little bit of her face was left showing. She couldn’t get back out without help :)

The heat issue made the news.

And today of all days, with no one at work, hospitals in chaos, and a travelling nightmare… today I manage to lose a filling in my tooth. It’s not hurting at the moment, but I’m a little afraid to eat anything…

As the expression goes, I’ve been as busy as a dog with three dicks, and got about as much accomplished, too.

In the news lately there’s a scare at University Hospital here in London about a Creutzfeldt-Jakob patient who had surgery performed. The nasty thing about a prion disease like that is that typical sterilization techniques are ineffective; you have to burn the room (or seal it up with the extra asbestos and never use it again) and throw away all the tools. That’s one of the problems we’re having now: at least one OR and a whole batch of instruments is off-limits, and patients are being shuffled around the city in an administrative nightmare (latest reports even have the ER there redirecting patients). I thought they’d be reopening some rooms at my hospital, but it doesn’t look that way (I don’t know if it’s because the closure of our ER department didn’t actually give us any reserve of the type of rooms/instruments needed, or if it just hasn’t occured to anyone for what looks to be just a few days of closure — it would make a bit more sense in one regard since we’re a lot closer to UH than the other ER in town).

There’s this girl in my lab who came in when I was out defending my thesis over the summer and kind of laid claim to my lab space, everything got rearranged, and it’s been a little annoying to have to adjust. But now, all is forgiven, for it turns out she’s the freaking heiress to the Vachon/Hostess empire! She came in this week with a crate of Jo Louis, 1/2 Moon, and assorted other snack cakes and the like. A box about a foot high and easily 2×2′ in area, filled to the brim with disgusting sugary treats (though some of them were granola-y treats, which isn’t quite the same). On second thought, maybe her dad’s just a store manager or something, it was hard to pay attention to the details with that much chocolate staring me in the eye.

It’s strange, having that much food in front of you. You can say no to them when they’re for sale in a grocery store. If someone brings in a dozen Jo Louis for a snack at a meeting, you can still turn them down even if they’re for free. But when there’s a crate of them, it’s like the sugar reaches critical mass and just overloads your decision making process and you have to take at least 3 or 4 or else where’s all of it going to go?

Via DJ Paradise, comes this article about serving sizes.

Yep, people have trouble determining what a serving size is sometimes. I think it was a really poor choice of words — “serving” — it makes you think of a serving platter at a restaurant or something. Most people automatically make serving = meal in their minds, but really servings are quite small (a total of 20-24 or so servings a day over your ~3 meals + snacks). 2 cookies, a kid’s sippy glass of milk, half a bowl of soup: portions that are much smaller than we tend to have experience with. Unfortunately in this case it’s not the companies, but the government that’s to blame for not only creating the discrepancy between portion size and serving size, but also for giving it the name “serving”. [Though whether we should blame the American or Canadian government is a bit of an open question; if in doubt, blame both]

Also, I highly recommend you all go to YouTube and search for “How it should have ended” — they’re a funny series of clips.

I like that Toronto is getting into the game and trying to divert more garbage away from landfill through more aggressive recycling and composting programs. However, I’m really not so sure about those little compost bins everyone seems to have in their kitchen now. As someone with mold allergies I just find that to be a bad idea, especially if you, say, go to the cottage for 2 weeks with it half-full of crud and have your oldest son come back from London and try to throw something out in it…

I swear the fungus tried to reach for me when I opened the lid!

So, I did the only responsible thing I could do: I closed it tight, threw the rest of my organic waste in the regular garbage, and left it for my parents to deal with when they get back next week.