Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by zoom! on July 27, 2008, at 12:20 pm |
Things are unusually quiet on the blogging front these days. I keep shaking my blog reader to see if it’s still working. Even the prolific bloggers have slowed down or stopped. Even the group blogs are silent.
Mayor Larry has even refrained from giving himself a bloggerly pat on the back for three days. A day without Larry’s narcissistic blog postings is like, um…hmmm. I’m stumped. I don’t even know what to compare it to.
He’s an odd duck, that mayor of ours. I used to think he and I just had philosophical differences and so we tended to disagree on most things. But since he started blogging, I’ve come to realize he’s actually not that bright. Seriously. His comprehension of the issues is naive and superficial. He lacks critical thinking skills. His approach to learning is primarily through memorization.
All these weaknesses are accentuated and compounded by his very high opinion of himself. You would think a weak and naive politician might surround himself with abler advisers and competent PR people. But Larry is blind to his own weaknesses, so he rejects any notion that he might need help compensating for them (or at least disguising them). He blunders about on his own, feeling like a superstar, while ordinary people like me sit back and marvel at his mediocrity, lack of substance and abundance of ego.
Take, for example, his delusions of grandeur: he seems to honestly believe he is personally responsible for anything good that happens in this city. The crime rate drops? He did that. He goes for a walk and doesn’t get solicited by panhandlers? His plan is working. The sun is shining? Thank you Larry.
On the flip side, it’s no secret that Larry doesn’t handle criticism well.
He started his blog to bypass the local media which he perceived to be picking on him. I think he expected the media to be his personal cheerleaders and felt angry and betrayed when they turned out to be, well, you know, the media. And I think it made him uncomfortable to be asked tough questions by people who understood local issues better than he did. His solution was to draw a line in the sand, boycott the offending media outlets, and start a blog.
Back on May 15, 2008, he said “I hope that you will participate by sending me your ideas, your comments and your stories. This website is as much yours as it is mine, its success comes from the conversations we will have in the days ahead.” (Actually he originally said “this website is as much mine as it is yours,” but edited it in response to snickers around the blogosphere.)
It was a reasonable thing to say, that we would have conversations. But nothing ever came of this promise of conversations. I did my bit by submitting comments, but Larry chose not to publish my comments even though they were polite and respectfully written.
If Larry were as honest as he says he is (see the typo-infested values statement on his blog) he would acknowledge that he only wants to have ‘conversations’ with people who agree with him – just like he only wants to talk to those members of the media who don’t challenge him.
Anyway. Do you read Zero Means Zero? Things have been very interesting over there lately. Apparently Larry is determined to find out who’s writing that blog.
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Posted by zoom! on July 26, 2008, at 11:27 am |
This is the longest stretch of holidays I’ve ever taken: June 28 to August 4. Five and a half weeks. Thirty-eight days.
There’s only nine days left after today. I’m getting that ominous Sunday back-to-work feeling already.
Here’s a list of all the things I want to do before I go back to work.
Write a short story
Organize my art studio
Do all my ironing
Clean up my study
Paint my bedroom
Go to an auction and buy dining room chairs
Get Duncan a lion cut
Make a turkey soup
Go to Sue and John’s overnight camping party in Greely
Finish James’ income taxes
Finish reading How to Write a Story
Finish reading The Realm of Hungry Ghosts
Go to the National Gallery
Put winter clothes away
Weed the front garden
Work on my art journal
Learn to play some more songs
Go to Hermits meeting
Rebalance my RRSP
Up the mortgage payments
Organize my iPod
Clean up my many inboxes
Backup blog
Upgrade WordPress to latest version
Declutter house
Clean basement
Put loom on usedottawa.com
Get bicycle ready for summer
Get together with friends
Buy new computer
Do guerilla art kit project
Wash curtains
Ho hum.
I think I’ll go lie on the couch with Duncan now.
Posted by zoom! on July 24, 2008, at 12:29 pm |
It was a year ago today that I stopped smoking. I haven’t had a single cigarette since then. Not even a drag. Not even a deep inhalation as I pass through the cloud of smoke outside the L’Esplanade. Not even a bit of tobacco rolled together with something else. Nothing.
I’ve quit smoking more often than anybody I know, but this is a record.
I stopped for 15 months a few years ago, but I did indulge in the occasional smoke during that time. It started with a smoke with my niece Lindsay on a balcony in Florida on the six-month anniversary of quitting.
Following that, I’d just have a smoke if I was at Irene’s Pub and really really felt like it.
Then I started smoking at Stuart’s Thursday Night Barbecues. I would leave the pack at Stuart’s at the end of the evening, in the drawer of a dresser on his front porch.
For a few month I smoked only on Thursdays. But then I started having cravings occasionally on Fridays, so I would wander over to Stuart’s house and retrieve a smoke from the dresser drawer and smoke it on his porch. I told myself it was the stress of the impending move, so it was okay.
I moved. Stuart’s house was further away. I told myself it was okay to buy a pack and keep them at home. I’d only smoke them occasionally. As required. On Thursdays and Fridays.
You know how it goes.
I was a full-fledged smoker again for nine months.
On July 24, 2007, I quit. Cold turkey, as usual. After reading Allan Carr’s book, as usual.
I don’t know if I’m going to stay a non-smoker for the rest of my life. I hope so, but if history is any predictor, probably not.
It never ceases to amaze me that I can quit and get past it and into a place where I’m genuinely happy to be free of cigarettes and where I can’t imagine ever taking up smoking again…and then, inexplicably, I take up smoking again. It’s like the addiction lies dormant, waiting to be triggered, waiting for an opportunity to ambush me.
I’m more vigilant now. I refuse to believe I’ve got it beat. So while I’m celebrating the one-year milestone today, I don’t feel triumphant or complacent. I love owning my own lungs. I love that I’ve shaved seven years off my mortgage. I especially love that I’m free of all the burdens of smoking.
But I know the predatory bastard is lurking in the shadows, waiting for me to lapse into fond memories of our illusory old friendship, and I know he’ll seize that moment.
In the meantime, though, do I ever like being a non-smoker.
Posted by zoom! on July 23, 2008, at 9:16 am |
I ended up calling Darren from Regional Drain, on the recommendation of one of my blog readers (thank you GA!). Darren had a plumber at my door in twenty minutes. His name was Bruce and he was a soft-spoken, twinkly-eyed man with a very long black ponytail. He stepped inside, dropped to one knee and introduced himself to Duncan, who thought he was wonderful. Then he stood up and introduced himself to me, and I introduced him to the blocked sink.
Bruce busied himself with the sink and Duncan lay down beside him to watch while I retreated upstairs to surf the net. Before long, the sink was fixed and the duct-taped trap was replaced.
“All done,” said Bruce.
“What was the problem?” I asked. Secretly I suspected there was a dead mouse in my plumbing.
“There was a lot of grease in there,” he said.
I must have looked a bit guilty because he smiled gently and told me that it’s a very common problem and that he used to put grease in the sink too, back when he was a carpenter. But now that he’s a plumber he doesn’t do that anymore.
I thought he was very sweet about it. I guess I think of plumbers as authority figures when it comes to plumbing, and maybe I expected him to give me hell for screwing up the sink. I KNOW that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Let’s just attribute it to my mom’s authoritarian parenting style and leave it at that. (Sorry Mom.)
Since he was being so nice about things, I asked Bruce to take a look at my toilet too – it’s kind of a crappy flusher. He lifted the tank lid and pushed the hose thing into the tube thing, and that was that. We talked about billing arrangements (the rate was very reasonable, I thought – $60/hour plus a $10 fuel surcharge), and then we talked about animal rescues. After he left I set about putting my kitchen in order.
I had to scour the sink and wash practically every dish in the house. But first I thought I’d dump the pail of dirty water Jamie had scooped out of the sink on Sunday. I didn’t want to dump it into the newly fixed kitchen sink, so I took it down to the basement and dumped it into the laundry sink. This is where the washing machine empties into. I dumped it and it all poured out onto the floor. It seems there’s a big fat leak in the plumbing under the sink. It’s not a huge deal since it just flows into a drain in the basement floor a couple of feet away, but if I’d known about it 20 minutes earlier, I could have gotten the plumber to fix it.
Anyway. I’m very pleased to have my kitchen back in commission. I celebrated with filet mignon, summer pea salad and red wine. Thanks to all of you who recommended your plumbers to me. If you ever need a plumber, I highly recommend Bruce via Darren at Regional Drain. Kat and Grace’s plumber Marcel at Cundall’s Plumbing sounds good too: “a neat freak and a prince!”
Posted by zoom! on July 22, 2008, at 3:00 pm |
 Congratulations to XUP for winning the Brillante Award and thank you for sending it my way.
It’s kind of like a meme actually. I get to send it to seven other bloggers, and they each get to send it to seven other bloggers, and if nobody drops the ball eventually we’ll all have a Brillante.
I’d like to send it back to XUP, since she’s prolific and interesting and witty in that wry, dry way of hers. But I can see how that might set an unsustainable precedent, so I will resist that urge.
Instead, I’m going to try to cast this one a little further afield than among the Usual Suspects (you know who you are).
Just Making It Up: I love her writing style and sense of humour, and if you read back through her archives, you’ll find that the past year dealt her a shocking and life-altering event.
The Home Improvement Ninja is an irreverent and politically incorrect derivatives lawyer in Washington who blogs about things like weighing his poop.
Wandering Coyote has a rich assortment of interesting interests, and is good enough to share them.
Don Mills Diva is not just a mommyblogger.
Toni over at Write Knit Read Purr lives in Florida and blogs about why she’s not knitting or blogging.
Mauricio at El Collage lives in Brazil and offers up a virtual parade of intriguing art.
Posted by zoom! on July 21, 2008, at 9:25 am |
My kitchen sink is plugged. Again.
I avoided the kitchen for a day or two because I knew Jamie would be over for a barbecue on Sunday and he had already said he’d fix my sink again if it needed fixing again.
He spent about two hours on it yesterday. First he did the vinegar and baking soda thing a bunch of times. Then he plunged it. Then he snaked it. Then he repeated these operations a few times. Finally he conceded defeat.
“I’ve done hundreds of these,” he said a little sadly, “and this is the first time I’ve failed.”
He was clearly experiencing a crisis of confidence, so I let him put my dining room table together. He accomplished this quickly and efficiently and to some extent it offset what the sink had done to him. (Not completely though – I caught him a few times going into the kitchen and just staring at the sink.)
I phoned Gus, my plumber friend. When I bought my house, he promised me free plumbing for the rest of my life.
“Gus!” I said.
“Zoom!” he said, “What’s up?”
“My sink’s blocked,” I said.
“Oh no,” he said, “I’m just leaving for Alberta.”
“Oh no,” I said, “What else is new?”
“I got shot,” he said.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “with a 12-gauge shotgun, right in my shoulder as I was stepping out my back door.”
“Who shot you?” I asked.
“Some guy I know, but not very well,” he said, “I think he was after my pain meds.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah but I’ve got 200 fragments in my shoulder and the doctors aren’t going to take them out and it hurts like a sonofabitch.”
“That sucks,” I said, “Can you recommend a plumber?”
Gus gave me Gibby’s number and insisted I’d met him decades ago at the Elmdale Tavern, but I couldn’t remember.
“What’s new with you?” Gus asked.
“I just got stung by a wasp,” I said, “and it hurts like a sonofabitch.”
“Poor baby,” he said.
Normally I would feel bad about destroying the wasps’ home, but not this time. Live and let live, unless you sting me first without any provocation. Besides, they built their home in my barbecue, demonstrating a profound lack of foresight on their part.
I phoned Gibby this morning because I know better than to phone plumbers on Sunday. I left a message.
A couple of hours have gone by. Maybe Gibby’s on holidays. Maybe he got shot. Maybe he’s not taking new patients.
But I can’t live without my kitchen anymore, and it’s getting pretty ugly in there.
Can anyone recommend a good plumber in Ottawa?
Posted by zoom! on July 20, 2008, at 3:04 pm |
There’s more to Haliburton than art school.
1. If you’re looking for women, it’s the ideal place to meet interesting, attractive, middle-aged women. Seriously, the Haliburton demographic, from what I saw, is predominantly women around the age of 50. They tend to be fit and creative with interests like yoga, kayaking, art, music and gardening. Haliburton offers a veritable gold mine of women.
2. If you’re not into women, Haliburton also offers a veritable gold mine of lakes. If you like fishing, swimming, canoeing, boating, or just hanging out near water, there are gorgeous, clean lakes everywhere in and around Haliburton.
 3. Coffee. Well, you have to dig a little deeply for a decent cup of coffee in Haliburton, but I’ve done the field research for you. You can get a good cup of coffee at the Internet cafe on York Street, or at Heritage House 1863 (if you go there, get the french press for two, and ask them to make it strong – you’ll get about six good cups of coffee for $3.) They have good wraps and salads too.
4. Free concerts. There’s a free concert at the Fleming Campus every Thursday night. It’s usually a musician who is teaching at the college that week. I saw Rick Fines one Thursday and Eve Goldberg the next Thursday. The Haliburton Folk Music Society also has free concerts in the park periodically. I went to one of those too and saw Guy and Laurel, and Zoe Chilco.
5. Wildlife. I saw deer and coyote and lots of jackrabbits and chipmunks. Someone showed me a photo of a bear that had been dining at their bird feeder a few days earlier.
6. Thrift shop. The world’s cheapest thrift shop is in Haliburton. I got these two pictures for fifty cents. Shirts were a buck.
 
7. Artists Trading Cards. Every Thursday night you can go to the Rails End Gallery and make ATCs. They supply all the materials, and it’s “pay what you can.”
 8. Artist Studios. There are dozens and dozens of studios to visit in and around Haliburton. I visited the glassblower’s studio. This is his mud pond. At first I thought yuck but then it started to grow on me.
9. Jay Lake Campground. Technically this is more in Minden (Em’s, from Knitting is My Boyfriend, hometown) than in Haliburton, but close enough. Jay Lake Campground is no ordinary campground – it’s a kingdom. King Don – a veritable mountain of a man – is a bit of a campground Nazi, but if you can get past that he’s a pretty nice guy. (Some people we know parked in visitor parking so they could pop by and invite us for dinner, and King Don told them if they weren’t off his property in ten minutes he’d be charging them $7.)
10. JanKnits Knitting Studio. For such a small town, Haliburton’s got an awfully exotic knitting store which carries Paula Lishman Fur Yarn , Mission Falls, Fleece Artist and Hand Maiden, Philosopher’s Wool, Berroco and Rowan yarns. Not only that, but they let you sit down and knit with these fibers for free. Great if you need a quick fix. There’s also a combo Health Food and Knitting Store just up the road from JanKnits. It’s a bit weird seeing yarn tucked in with the bee pollen and protein powder, but I liked it.
Bonus: Minden’s biggest attraction seems to be the Tim Horton’s on the main drag. Open 24 hours a day, it’s the only Timmy’s for miles around and it features the freshest Boston Cream donuts in all of Ontario, as well as a never-ending lineup snaking out the front door.
Posted by zoom! on July 19, 2008, at 3:22 pm |
 When Mudmama came to visit last month she totally cracked me up by saying “Oh, I LOVE YOUR GARDEN!” And she wasn’t being facetious either. She really did love my garden.
My garden and me, we have a funny relationship. I try to give it its freedom because I’m laid back and haven’t the energy to try to control it. In return, it tries to take over the world. I am always in awe of its capacity for unchecked growth. This is what it looked like in June 2007.
I live in a townhouse, which means I’m in the middle of nine connected homes. Our nine tiny back yards are all connected and separated only by wooden fences. One day a few weeks ago my next-door neighbours on the left knocked on my back door and very nicely pointed out that the crazed mutant Virginia Creeper vine had set its sites on their back yard and was expected to cross the property line by morning.
 She gestured at her own tidy back yard with its rows of potted flowers. “I don’t have much of a garden,” she said, “But I like what I’ve got, and I don’t want that vine to get it.”
She had a point. The rapacious vine strangles everything in its path. The only thing that stands a chance against it is the other aggressive weeds. My garden is all about aggressive weeds and survival of the fittest, but her garden is all about delicate flowers and tender loving care.
I was sympathetic. As soon as I indicated my willingness to cut back the vine, she and her husband whipped out their machetes and shears and giant garbage bags, and we all set to work hacking away at the mutant vine. The mutant vine, by the way, doesn’t have its roots in my yard – its home base is next door on the right. We cut it back to THAT fenceline. It put up quite the fight. When we were done, I swear I heard it hiss “This ain’t over – I’ll be back.”
And sure enough, it’s on the march again. See?
If my back garden is freakishly and frighteningly aggressive, my front garden can only be described as downright embarrassing. It’s a complete eyesore, right out there in public for everyone to see. Even Mudmama couldn’t bring herself to say she loved it.
Instead she said “What are you planning for this garden?”
Last Fall I attempted to stifle the growth of this year’s goutweed (it’s a tenacious and pernicious invasive weed) by digging it all up and covering the entire front garden with landscaping cloth.
My plan was to cut x’s in the fabric this year and plant desirable sturdy annuals while remaining vigilant for signs of returning goutweed. I was going to stay on top of that goutweed, dammit.
 Somehow a few assorted weeds found their way through the fabric and I was so impressed with their survival instincts that I let them stay.
“What’s wrong with a few little weeds?” I asked myself.
Well, when I got back from holidays, these few little weeds had mushroomed and now there were lots of very big weeds.
It didn’t help that I never got around to cutting those x’s in the fabric and planting flowers. Or that I didn’t stay on top of the goutweed babies. You give that stuff an inch and it takes a mile.
I can’t even pull the weeds anymore because they’re too big and strong. I need tools and implements and protective gear before I tackle them.
Or, you know, I could just wait till winter and let nature take care of it. Then I could get a fresh start next year and do everything right and have flowers and herbs and other wonderful things growing in my garden. Is that what you would do if you were me?
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Posted by zoom! on July 18, 2008, at 6:51 pm |
You may have seen Mayor Larry heralding the news that Ottawa’s crime rate fell 5% last year. He certainly seems pleased with himself about it.
In fact, the crime rate has been trending downwards since 1991. It’s not a result of anything Mayor Larry has done, it’s the result of demographic shifts in the population. The chief perpetrators of crime are young males. As the population ages, there are proportionately fewer young males and therefore the crime rate drops. It’s a well-documented and predictable thing.
Public perceptions of crime, however, have not accurately reflected this downwards trend in crime. For many years, the public has believed that crime is increasing.
An interesting phenomenon is that while an aging population will experience a decline in crime, it will also experience more fear of crime, since exaggerated fear of crime is more prevalent among vulnerable populations such as the elderly.
Combine this with the fact that Conservative politicians at all levels like to stoke public fears about crime. If you can convince the population that there’s a threat, public opinion will support your calls for more police, more prisons, more laws, more social control.
Television also helps to feed the problem. A very high proportion of TV dramas are about crime. Average everyday crime is too mundane and unthreatening to make good TV material. Even serious crimes would get boring after awhile, so the entertainment industry has to continually out-do itself with ever more sensationalized crime stories. As a result, TV watchers are subjected to a steady diet of more deviant and chilling crimes over time, and they begin to internalize this distorted version of reality. They begin to believe that increasingly horrific acts are being perpetrated by increasingly deviant sociopaths against increasingly high numbers of innocent victims.
Exaggerated fear of crime is contagious. If all of your neighbours are afraid to go out after dark, and if nobody allows their children to walk to school unattended, you’re likely to believe your neighbourhood is dangerous and predators lie in ambush, even if your own experience and empirical evidence suggest otherwise.
The solution to the escalating fears?
The conservative mayor promises to crack down on crime and hire more cops, and the Conservative prime minister promises to get tough on crime and build more prisons and introduce more mandatory minimum sentences. “The party’s over,” they say, as if crime has been flourishing unchecked under more liberal leadership.
It’s all just another example of ideology trumping evidence.
Nevertheless, a lot of people eat it up because finally someone has the balls to crack down on crime and do something about a problem they believe to be spiralling out of control and destroying the very foundation of society.
Meanwhile, this is what the crime rate has been doing for the last forty-five years:
If you lok at just violent crime, the picture’s even rosier:
It gets expensive to build expensive solutions to imaginary problems, especially when real problems are growing because they’re being ignored.
(More crime statistics are available from the Statistics Canada Daily from July 17, 2008.)
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Posted by zoom! on July 16, 2008, at 11:05 am |
I’ve been teaching myself guitar for a couple of years, but either I’m not a very good teacher or I’m not a very good student, because I’ve learned remarkably little in two years. That’s why I decided to take Eve Goldberg’s week-long folk guitar course at Haliburton.
I’m glad I did, because I learned more in one week than I had in two years.
There were eleven of us in the class, ranging from rank beginners to one or two fairly advanced guitar players. In order to teach people of such varying levels, Eve divided us into two groups. I was in the least advanced but most fun group, which was made up of some smart, interesting and funny people including a naturopath from Bracebridge, a Children’s Aid worker from Cobourg, and a teenager from Alberta. We had a blast, mostly playing but sometimes just sitting around talking and laughing. It was one of those groups that somehow gels together well and finds its own rhythm. I like when that happens.
Eve said one of my bigger challenges is timing, which is true but I also have issues around memory. I could work away at something and practice it over and over again until it finally sunk in, and the next day it would be gone again. Sometimes it would be gone after just five minutes away from it. Fortunately, it sunk in a little faster each time I returned to it. And Eve taught us some visualization tricks that made it easier to recall the songs and the patterns within them. Sometimes you know more than you think you know, but you can’t quite access it. Visualization helps with that.
I found myself quite tired by the end of each school day, and in fact I dozed off during movie time each day (we watched a series of American Roots documentaries). The lights would go off and I’d immediately fall into a narcoleptic sleep in my uncomfortable little wooden elementary school chair. Sometimes I would wake up just as I was about to fall out of my chair. Sometimes the jolt would wake me up sufficiently that I would get to watch the second half of the movie.
You know what’s weird? That course ended five days ago, and every time I wake up during the night or in the morning, I’m dreaming I’m playing the song Blue Eyes, which we learned in the course. I wake up boom chucking. I’m strumming and Eve is giving me the signal to slow down. It’s been the backdrop for all my dreams for five days now.
 Here’s our guitar class right before our concert. That’s me in the middle of the second row. (You can click on the image to enlarge it.) We played Blue Eyes. I made a lot of mistakes, but it was okay.
Eve said something interesting which I’ve been mulling over ever since. She said she has a lot of respect for adults who are learning to play the guitar, because they are purposefully putting themselves in a position where they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s true. We don’t have to do that. At this point in our lives, it would be easy to just stick to our areas of competency and never put ourselves in situations in which we feel awkward or incompetent. Some people never try anything new because it makes them feel uncomfortable. I think those of us who keep trying to learn new things and don’t feel we need to be good at everything we do are better off. It keeps our brains limber.
Honestly, I’ll never be much of a musician or artist. But I’m happy just being able to play with music and art supplies. I’m happy to be learning new things. I’m happy to have so much room for improvement. I’m happy that the law of diminishing returns won’t kick in for a long time yet.
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