Plenty of Nothing

Siding Bee

    This past weekend a piece of aluminum siding came loose from the eaves and began flapping in the wind above my next door neighbour's driveway.  I left a message with a contractor who was to call me back Monday, then I went next door to suggest to my neighbour that he move his vehicle to my driveway till the contractor arrived, in case the piece blew off and scratched the car.
    "You're not going to pay to fix that!  We'll borrow my neighbour's ladder."
    "Okay ... but I'll go up," I said.  My neighbour is about 82.
    I went to find a hammer and some roofing nails, and by the time I came up from the basement my neighbour's neighbour's ladder was against my house with my neighbour's neighbour at the top.  I wound up passing him nails through the upstairs window while he hammered the siding back into place.  The whole thing took about five minutes and was motivated by the old guy's go-to attitude and by his neighbours' desire to keep him the hell off the ladder.

Douglas

What I Learned Today: Nearly Post-Flu Edition

After one miserable week and one draggy week, I'm approaching post-flu.  The two key signs of this are that my brain now thinks in sentences of more than five words and that my sense of smell is starting to come back.  I've never lost my sense of smell before and it's been more disconcerting than I would have predicted (see--long sentences).  And without smell it's almost impossible to cook well.

So today I learned two things.  The secret ingredients for any tasty meal are garlic and bacon fat.  This revelation brought to you by my laziness.  Yes, I know it's a shock, but I've been too lazy to clean out a  frying pan after cooking up our December treat of bacon.

The first bacon and garlic miracle was performed with kale--sauteed with garlic and a bit of bacon drippings. Amazing.

The second bacon and garlic miracle was performed this morning when I used the same (still unsoaped pan) to brown some stewing meat  which I plopped drippings and all into the crock pot with a lot of garlic, pureed tomatoes, and root veg.  Eight hours later very good stew was had.

The grannies with their cans of dripping were on to a good thing.

Heather

Growlers and Bergy Bits

    I encountered these two terms today while exploring the sea ice section the Environment Canada website.  Here's a site that explains the difference, so you don't embarrass yourself by calling one the other the next time you're up the Labrador.  Heather, of course, knows all this stuff already, being an Antarctic maniac.  She could tell you the name of the cat on Shackleton's last voyage.

    I was trying to think of whether I've ever seen an iceberg, or at least a bergy bit, and, yes, I have.  They used to be visible from the upstairs window of the house in Sydney Mines, the winter of 1970/71, menacing the North Sydney ferry.

    This image is by David Blackwood, Newfoundland printmaker, whose pictures of the natural world always seem to be so much more awesome that Christopher Pratt's, because he puts people in them for scale.  Douglas

Argosy Cartoonist Joel Duggan

Joel Duggan is republishing his strip Jungle Jazz which appeared in Mount Allison's student newspaper The Argosy Weekly around the beginning of the decade.

This has got me thinking about assembling a collection of Argosy Weekly cartoons.  When I worked at the paper (c1980) we had a wealth of cartooning talent.  Carlyle the Smart Chicken, for one, comes to mind.  I suppose a proper survey would have to involve a week at the university archives, but if anyone has any information, links, or back copies of the paper, please write.

Douglas

Table Soccer

Ice hockey has been played in Britain off and on since Lord Stanley and kids got home from Ottawa in 1893, but interest was waning in the 1960s, making the UK a poor export market for table hockey sets, so the inventive minds at Munro came up with this footie hybrid.  But it was apparently no match for Subbuteo.

Do You Think One These Would Fit Into Our "Decor"

Wonder if something like this is eBayable?

Seen here. Via plep's feed.

Heather

My Only Prediction for 2007

The mousie that just came in from the bad weather is going to smell really really bad if it can't find its way back out. Good thing the flu has destroyed my sense of smell.

Heather

Andrew Spratt

When we were in Scotland four years ago we visited Dirleton Castle near North Berwick.  The castle is now a ruin situated on a rock in a garden, but it played a role in the days of Edward III, and again in Cromwell's time, by being besieged, captured and knocked down.  To me the most interesting feature is the nearby dovecote (pronounced dooket), essentially a stone beehive for doves.  The man in charge of the park is Andrew Spratt, a gregarious sort whose method of shooing away stragglers at closing time is to fire arrows in their direction.  He seriously wants to rebuild a Scottish castle, but in the meantime has done a series of historical paintings.  His site is here.

Table Hockey Player, Mark 1

Here's my first pass at a custom Coleco table hockey player.   I made a team set of University of Ottawa Gee Gees women's hockey players about a year ago using a weird amalgam of  kindergarten  techniques:  coloured pencil, cut and paste (literal, not virtual), computer scanning and  reduction.  Mixed results, eh.  The border is unfortunate, but the blue background has kind of a nice ice surface look to it.  The next time I'll figure out how to do the whole thing in the computer.  Maybe soon I'll have the whole QSSF.  Douglas