Christmas present

An amalgamated playlist of all the videos ever posted on this blog:

I even wrapped it for you in dark blue paper.

Baritone Blues

Winter cleaning

I've spruced up the lab, tacking up retro-looking polka dot contact paper to cover the peeling veneer on the cabinets.

During the clean-up, I've been listening to the www.stereomood.com playlist "Spring cleaning". This decidedly non-spring song is featured, I always bop along when it comes on:

Uh-Oh...

HURRY! HIDEEE.......

come in and curl up

Inspiration here.

dead or dying: arboretum edition

Ten hours into a super-low pressure system (charmingly called a "weather bomb" by the weather station) we've already lost two of our century-old spruce trees. Living on an old estate has it's benefits but watching the trees fall is not one of them.

Satire-I wish I were smart enough to use it.

Question to Weekly Advice Columnist:

The Christmas celebrations in my office have taken on an increasingly religious character over the years. Last year, there were Christmas carols, including "Silent Night," playing in the break room, and several of the holiday cards bought to decorate the area around the Christmas tree had Nativity or other religious themes on them. Multiple people complained, either to management or to each other after feeling that management was not responsive to our concerns. My boss asked me why I wasn't at last year's tree-trimming party. When I told her that it was because I'm not a Christian, she suggested that it would be OK if I hung a menorah on the Christmas tree. I can't begin to describe how offensive I thought that was to all religions. I don't have any problem with Joe wearing a cross in the office or Ayanna putting a picture of her favorite Hindu goddess above her computer. It's the corporate-sanctioned expressions of religion in shared spaces that bother me. What can we do to encourage management to return to the more secular celebrations of previous years?

—Not a Christian

Comment under the advice: Regarding holidays in the workplace, I agree with the posters who said that "Not a Christian" should simply "even up" the holiday representation rather than asking the Christians to tone it down. However, bringing in a menorah (hung on the tree or not) won't accomplish that. Christmas is a major Christian holiday; Chanukah is the most minor Jewish one, and has very little by way of celebration. The Jewish holiday season is in the fall (when Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and the High Holidays fall), not the winter, so "Not a Christian" should do his/or her "evening up" then.

About five weeks before Rosh Hashanah, "Not a Christian" should plaster the walls of the office with stars of David, chamesh hands, shofars, chais, and other overt Jewish symbols.

"Not a Christian" should bring in a mix CD of Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur songs and insist that it be played constantly in the break room until the holidays are over. (Overtly religious songs such as Avinu Malkeinu, Kol Nidrei, the Unetaneh Tokef, Yigdal, and the Ashamnu should be translated into English, so everyone can better appreciate the very un-Christian dogma they contain.)

"Not a Christian" should put up Rosh Hashana cards on the walls that contain holiday messages directed specifically and exclusively to Jews and wish everyone around an easy fast and a good sealing...whether they're Jewish or not.

"Not a Christian" should see to it that everyone in the office gets paid days off for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, whether they celebrate them or not. If they are willing to work those days and would prefer to transfer the paid leave to another, more convenient day, too damn bad -- they can't.

"Not a Christian" should also host an office Tashlich party so that everyone in the office can be pressured into going to the nearest body of water to symbolically rid themselves of sin by throwing bread crumbs into the water. If someone chooses not to come because he/she is not Jewish, "Not a Christian" should offer to let them throw Communion wafers into the water instead of bread crumbs so that their religion can be included, too.

And if anyone in the office complains about the fact that they are being hammered over the head with religion, "Not a Christian" should scoff that they should shut up, stop whining, and quit ruining the holiday for everyone else.

Then, and only then, will things be "even." Because that's exactly the same behavior "Not a Christian" is describing, just coming from another religion.

It is a skill to remove oneself from the status quo and be able to self-examine actions. I wish everyone could learn to do it. Now back to my Christmas shopping...

fun things continued...

As part of my relaxing weekend, I re-watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - which was just as great as the first time I saw it. I signed up for Netflix.ca for a free one month trial, so I started watching Mad Men season 3 too. On Friday I attended the annual Christmas parade with family and got sore legs from bouncing adorable children on my hip in tune to Christmas carols for several hours. Saturday we went over to a friend's house to play games and drink wine. I even had a nap mid-day on Saturday!

I can't imagine why, but I'm still apparently very tired. Body tells me so: I dreamt of falling asleep last night AND my eye muscles spasm when I'm tired, so that's been happening all morning. Might be hormones, I might be getting sick. Ugh.

A mountain of wet lab work awaits, my bosses return from their three-month stay abroad next week. Eeek!

A few things before the weekend

The first weekend I might take time to do something fun (!).

• Our insulation is getting installed! We went to check out the walls last night and found purple goo seeping over my beautiful house. I was brought to tears. I am 100% confident in my choice of product, but the exposed beams and wood in my house were so beautiful it hurts to see them now. It reminded me of watching this childhood trauma-inducing film.

• Three eggs in total so far. Woohoo!

• I feel bad for American flyers. Show-and-dance, people. TSA jazz-hands!

• An interesting discussion on "science cheerleaders" being held all over the science blog-o-sphere. It prompted an amazing 45 minute discussion with my husband about science outreach & feminism. Love him.

Pictures @ Stage 0:

The First One

holy smokes

Between Olenka and the Autumn Lovers and Regina Spektor, I think my musical tastes as of late lie somewhere in eastern Europe. The three languages in this song, so impressed...

Ode to Odessa

(Canadian edition)

Olenka and the Autumn Lovers

Vs.

Caribou

Go!

If I were rich

I would wear leather or wool all the time.

Yeatsian yearning

And again. Minus twenty years and the orchestra/plus twenty ounces of pain and six prominent forehead lines.

Kick.Ass.

hazy mist of solitude

My co-worker is gone temporarily (five weeks). Conclusion: I can play my music VERY loudly in the lab. Yesss...this will make all the experiments I need to run much more fun to do.

And at home, the tiring pace continues. We tackled a giant to-do list this weekend, working furiously through several meals and (on Saturday) well into the early morning. We kept ourselves amused by imagining the pie we would eat at the local trucker's restaurant and we were crushed when we cruised up to the restaurant at 3 am on Sunday morning to find it closed. Noo!! Stale coffee shop baguette sandwiches were the only thing available around the clock, so we chewed our sandwiches in silence. That'll teach us for working so hard.

We worked on the outside of the house, removing the last of the siding, framing windows & installing wind barrier Typar paper (covered in lattice in preparation for new exterior finish). I didn't take any pictures of the interior work we did - removing all the lathe and plaster from our front entry. No more plaster work until next year!! Yay!

And Sunday afternoon was the big event - culling the roosters from our flock. I did the actual slitting of throats, a big step for someone who hasn't even killed a fish before. My great-grandmother did it, my grandfather did it, I would do it too = prepare meat for eating the old-fashioned way. And I decided if I were to die, a sun-speckled orchard on a beautiful fall day would be one of the nicest locations I might pick.

This is where we set up the for rooster processing. Killing cone attached to the old Spruce tree on the left and plastic covered work table just behind it, set up in the grass among the hundred year old apple trees.

Just across the bridge, the fire pit & cauldron were prepared for de-feathering the birds.

All in all we had three roosters found their way to our freezer yesterday. At the pace we are working, combined with the lack of sleep and the season, I'm sure their services will be needed in the form of chicken soup very soon. I just hope we have the heat turned on by then because having a cold in a cold house suuuuucks.

aye. aye. aye.

Music to spin anabena cells to, test the BenchPro to, find flights to Black Rock City to.

updated kitchen post

Confession: We had to turn the heat on overnight one day last week. The temperatures were dipping to minus 8 celsius and we were worried the water might freeze in the pipes. On came the oil furnace for 12 hours, and off again in the morning. Blessedly, we are back up in the +double digits this weekend. I hope it lasts.

Lots of things going on this weekend for the house because WE HAVE A DEADLINE (for insulation). I called the company that I decided on hiring again (they spray this stuff) to see when they could come out to do our walls. Their date: November 24th. Twenty days from yesterday, three weekends from now.

To help us with the long list of things to do before the insulation gets sprayed in, we are inviting friends over this weekend who have expressed interest in helping with the house (aka those who pity our cold cold living conditions...). We need to pull thousands of tiny nails out of the wooden studs, put up windproof wrapping on the exterior of the house followed by lattice for our new exterior finish, remove hardwood and plaster from the front entry, shovel gravel around the cistern to be covered by poly plastic (making a barrier between wet ground and the inside of our house) and kill our roosters. The last step should be interesting, but upon arriving home last weekend we found an ominous feather pile that suggested something (mammal or large bird) had made our job easier by one. We still haven't found the body.

So tons of things to do. And hopefully some hands to help do it.

We tried to consult our local, well-respected kitchen guy about our kitchen. We could tell right off the bat he was not really impressed with our design (cooktop in the corner, unconventional refrigerator, no upper cabinets on one side of the room), didn't believe it was large enough given the size of the house, etc. etc. Depressing really, because I was hoping he could give me hints on efficient design and working around our interesting architectural features. No dice.

Instead I hopped on Ikea to use their kitchen planner and re-convinced myself this design would 1) work in our space and 2) work well for us. Here are some images of my rough draft where there are obvious alignment issues and blank white spaces where there should be black fridges or doorways into opposite rooms. Anyway, here's a few screen captures with lengthy explanations.

This is the view from the (currently invisible) door of the hallway entry. The hallway door will be an arched entry, and will be centered on the sink of the peninsula. On the left will be a bar countertop (currently too low and wayy too wide). On the right will be a wall of cabinetry and appliances (wall oven and glaring white fridge). The room is open to our "den" on the left and although not pictured in this set-up, we will have a small couch under the left-most window, and of course our wood stove in the opposite corner.

This would be the view from the woodstove corner. I was using Ikea website for ease and choice of cabinetry, but the wall heights on their program are too low. In reality our walls are about 1 foot taller than shown here, enough room for another small set of swing cabinets above the cabinets shown here. I want to line the ceiling with glass-front, back-lit doors because I think that will just highlight the incredible ceiling height. To make the most of our single corner, I have two pull out cabinets that operate from the other side of the work space. I was thinking this would be a good spot for re-useable grocery bags, giant bags of dog food, and pull-out recycling centres for newspapers/bottles/cans.

From above you can see the 30" cook-top in the corner over a bank of pot drawers next to the 24" dishwasher (with a panel), and two additional drawer banks tucked into the "workspace" corner. For whatever reason the sink function sucked donkey balls on the Ikea site so I left it out, and our end-piece is currently a 12" drawer bank but we aren't so keen on the aesthetics of that piece. We'll likely switch the a sink-side operating skinny bank of drawers there too. Space above the cooktop will stores oils and spices (attractive so it can be glass-fronted), and the blank space along the right hand side of the cook-top can either be a single length of wine bottle holder OR a tall upright stacking space for cookie sheets and such.

Looking from the bar top, the deficiencies in the Ikea program are apparent. I couldn't make my fridge black or stainless steel so it sticks out like a sore thumb between those two dark brown timbers. Further, the two symmetrical skinny banks of doors should open opposite to one another and be topped by a line of glass-fronted cabinets over another arch into the dining room (ie the big blank space of white on the right). The really deep cabinets on the left will hold dry goods in a few pull-out, pantry-style cabinets while the ones on the top and right will hold dishware, plastics, and small appliances. The moveable table under those giant windows will be our expandable prep space or storage space (if need be).

That turned into one giant post. Man, I love this part of construction :)

Boo!

Ugh.

House Now

Sometimes I wonder how we can live like we are, with the make-shift appliances/holes in the wall/lack of a floor.

This is the view from the corner where the sink used to be, in the old kitchen. The lower left hand of this picture is the under-floor cistern, which we need to cover up before insulating the house. Joys.

But then I remember this place will be GRAND when it is done. And it will be just as I want to be, which is worth tons of sweat and worry. Of course these pictures just show the downstairs, while the upstairs remains construction-free. Living room, spare bedroom, kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom.

This is the house at night. The large hole on the left will eventually be a patio door. Right now it is just a hole :)

Although I have to remind myself it will likely get worse before it gets better (we've had a very mild autumn so far...) since the snow it not far off and our exterior wall downstairs looks like this:

(there is no wall here at the moment)

Yet the important things are present: I have a wood stove to dry my laundry, hot water & a clawfoot tub to have nice long baths in. I have tons of food in the pantry (and otherwise on the property!), and a lovely drive to work in the mornings.

Some of the goodies I gathered from the property: the last of the tomatoes, potatoes, onions and zucchini. Cranberies from the field, sandcherries from the field and about five dozen apples from the orchard which aren't pictured.

This place is big and needs lots of work, but it is mine*.

*not really, it mostly belongs to the bank. I found this informative online mortgage calculator that says just how much faster the mortgage will be paid off if I apply more money every month. I just got a job offer and now know what I'll be applying my raise to - $500 more a month and I'm mortgage free at 9.8 years instead of 23.4 years.

Late Summer

Later today I'm going to post some progress photos from the on-going house construction. In the process of uploading those, I came across these older ones from about a month ago. The first shows my view out to the quiet country road (and the water beyond), littered with fowl:



My mom came down to help pull apart my pathetic-looking garden before the first frost. We had tons of tomatoes though, thanks to the plants my mother-in-law started in her greenhouse:

I spent a few evenings stewing tomatoes for the freezer once the tomatoes ripened:

The cooking was being done upstairs, since the downstairs was being pulled apart and repaired. The wooden base shows where the kitchen sink will eventually be, at this point we were waiting for the plumbers to arrive. My husband's rubber-booted feet are hanging down from the roof he was repairing that day:

Thanks to a super-productive few weeks (funny what a few frost warnings will do to waning motivation in the face of a torn apart house), this looks very different now.

Spirit Day

On Wednesday October 20th wear purple to commemorate the LGTB teen suicides. Celebrate spirit & help make it better.

happy birthday puppy

According to the SPCA records, our dog (adopted in January) was born mid-October 2009. Her birthday gift? I've started saving money for obedience training. We have had almost no trouble training her, so I think she would take to service-dog level training if we bothered. We'll see.

(Images taken by Jessie Dodington on a visit to our place this past spring.)

After one year, her ears and body have grown but her face hasn't much. Such a skinny rostrum attached to such giant ears. I call her bat-face :)

trombone to the heart

It is high time I re-watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

to blue

Step 1: Uniform dark hair...no more sunny streaks. Suck it, summer.

Step 2: Bleach for 60 minutes. Just the ends (I am a professional now - I need to be able to tuck that shit into a bun).

Step 3: Dark blue dye 60 minutes with heat.

Step 4: Contrast apparent with white DrugMonkey Scienceblogs T-shirt, practically a collectible item after the pepsi-collapse.

modesty

Someone sent me this link, bless their little heart. A parody of the Flight of the Concords guys.

La plus ça change...

I won't make a habit of quoting HuffPo, but now that I'm back at home/catching up with news: I saw this and thought (yet again) Anderson Cooper is awesome. I might watch daytime TV if he was a host (urrr...actually, no I wouldn't). This is a cause worthy of Mah Boo Anderson, veritable gay icon. Appropriate message as of late, since Dan Savage started the "It gets better" campaign a few weeks ago, spurred by the suicides of seven bullied teenagers this summer:

"In the last two weeks, we've learned of five more teenagers who were being bullied and took their own lives: Cody Barker, age seventeen, of Shiocton, Wisconsin; Asher Brown, age thirteen, of Houston, Texas; Seth Walsh, age thirteen, of Tehachapi, California; Tyler Clementi, age eighteen, the Rutgers University student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge; and Raymond Chase, age nineteen, a student in Providence, Rhode Island. Their deaths come after the suicides of Justin Aaberg, age fifteen, of Anoka, Minnesota, and Billy Lucas, age fifteen, of Greensburg, Indiana."

Thirty Hours to Impress

I will be in the same country as Jon Hamm for just over one day. This makes me equal parts happy and sad. Too bad I blew the power adapter while trying to dry my hair and have curlyawfulfrizz hair as a result. Dommage!

The View from here

At my work station at the Oceanography Institute:

beardie

Just FYI, while I'm stuck languishing in a tiny French coastal town populated by old people & small dogs...I would like to say that men with beards are 62.7% sexier than men without beards.

See?

That (especially) includes most indie bands/artists like Dan Mangan, or that dude from Iron and Wine. The french are too clean shaven for my tastes and also really short. Sigh.

To France!

I betcha they don't say "fucking adorabe" much.

Swedish Efficiency

After 30 hours on four planes, I'm here in efficiency heaven. The Swedes have these *amazing* 24 inch fridges everywhere in all colours. Black. Silver. I'm so jealous. The garbage cans are separated by recycling/compost/garbage, swing out completely to access to all spaces. The toilets are all two inches higher and dual flush super-low water volume. No intersection lights, just whizzing tiny traffic circles that are well signed. Triple panes windows and underfloor heating.

I'm off to France on Saturday, so we'll see whether I need to experience the bureaucracy and if so, whether it will kill me.

The first ten seconds

I remember listening to a CBC documentary earlier this summer about the history of song composition. The guest speaker had theories as to how our new media and nearly unprecedented online exposure to new music (if one seeks it) has affected the composition of pop tunes. Basically, if you can't grab the attention of the listener in the first seven seconds, they will skip to the next song. This is in contrast to how radio works (where it isn't so instantaneous) and in complete conflict with how one experiences live music (you basically must stay put through the song). He had used Kei$ha's TikTok song as an example, among others. I was skeptical about his premise but intrigued enough to stay in the car well after I had arrived to my destination, just to keep listening.

A friend introduced me to this online radio streaming site that puts together playlists based on your mood or activity: stereomood. I really enjoy it, and it had introduced me (or in some cases, re-introduced me) to some very fantastic music.

This morning, I realized that I can generally tell whether I really, really* like a song in the first ten seconds or so. Some examples:

Greg Laswell

The Weepies

Bonobo

(PS How much does it drive me nuts when I google a song for a embed-able link and find the song was featured on Grey's Anatomy or The O.C.?? Shittons 'cause I think I'm better then everyone else and then realize I'm not.)

Fridays. Sigh.

*playing repeat twelve times in a row yet STILL singing it to myself after work, when I wake up or when I go to sleep.

Acceptable language in a lab: "just eye-ballin' it".

Amusing.

Mercredi, je sera en France. En préparation...

Ça commence at 03:20, finit à 09:30

Et, si vous pouvez, DANSER! Célébrez une belle vie. La musique de Gigi French.

auto-pilot gender-bender

Breaking old habits = very hard to do. Not just psychological bad habits, but the physical kind where your body does things without your brain acknowledging it, a situation we call auto-pilot at my place. Hubby will often go on auto-pilot while driving, suddenly veering off course to go to work when really we need to stop at the gas-station or the grocery store.

I don't know who designed the new first floor bathrooms in my building, but they underestimated the auto-pilot abilities of the long-term employees here. If they realized how difficult it is to break your body's natural path to the washroom when your brain is concentrated on the bladder, they might not have switched the position of the boys & girls bathroom.


It is a wee bit more complicated then that, of course. The old design was a female washroom and custodian closet along one hallway and then around the corner a short distance away, a male washroom. I suppose it makes more sense to have the two washrooms next to each other and the custodian closet around the corner. Fair enough. But the new design didn't just swap the custodian closet for a male washroom and left the female washroom intact oh noo...the old female washroom is now the new male washroom, while the custodian closet has been transformed into an expansive female washroom. 'Cause we need room to move in our skirts, yo.

Once every few days I catch myself plowing the first door open to the men's washroom. There are two doors, which allows me a space for my brain to catch my body in action and back the fuck up. I don't particularly care, and have lived in a shared on-campus residence where washrooms were unisex. It suited me just fine. But I expect walking into the men's washroom to face an older colleague would be weird for them.

And this whole thing reminded me of an ad campaign I saw recently for a NSFW website called xdress. The sticker option made me giggle:



My course of action is obvious. Bend gender norms and question the status quo.

sniffle snuffle

The time it takes a virus to find me in my new niche at work (away from most of the students):

10 days.

Excuse me while I go sneeze for the fucktillionth time.

bleeding green

Next month my value package for communications runs out. Currently we pay $30/month for home phone and $30/month for internet. Next month that will jump to $90 a month for a basic home phone without ANY calling features, plus wi-fi internet. Goddamn ridiculous.

Don't know what to do about it though. We could drop our home phone I guess, and just use our pay-as-you-go cell phone. That would require us to keep it charged at all times and be otherwise put together. We've already given out our home phone number to a bunch of people. But there's no way I'm going without internet. I'm addicted.

Bummer. Sometimes living in Canada has it's downsides.

Today's Muse

I love Milla Jovovich, her nerdy fanbase and her continual acceptance of shitty movies because her husband directs them.

She was in Toronto promoting her new film(s), and inspired envy for both her physique and her style:


Photee 1: I love her sparkly cowl neck and side-swept bang here:

Photee 2: And I *really* love her tunic and collarbone-grazing earrings here. I could even come to love leather leggings if worn in such a bad-ass way:

pink horses and striped whales

look what I found on the "free book" table. Great cover!

Efficient kitchen design

For our forever house, it is important that the kitchen works well. Especially now that I have morphed into a domestic queen, making pickles and jams and pies and muffins every week. We have a fantastic looking kitchen design (I'll upload sketches when I get them scanned), but now I'm antsy to verify that it is as efficient as it can be. These are two great online resources I have checked out:

Blum Cabinet Hardware

&

Starcraft Custom Builders


While both pages provide great info on efficiency, the Starcraft website specifically addresses the windows vs. upper cabinet debate. This is relevant to us because we decided to move the kitchen into the brightest room of the house (central to the activity, open concept to the den & dining room). Yet the reason it was so bright is because of two windows that span lower than a traditional cabinet base.



So: we sacrifice a wall of cabinets or we sacrifice light?

Sacrifice cabinets, for sure. Aside from the prohibitive cost of replicating those windows in their current incarnation save for ten inches at the bottom - why would we move into the brightest room in the house just to squander our source of light? No, I'll get rid of my rice cooker, thanks. So the Starcraft site helps maximize the space we do have, like how to make great use of corner cabinets.



We have just a single corner cabinet, outlined in the trail tape above. An L-shaped piece of lower cabinetry provides room (eventually) for a range in the corner (away from hubbub and small hands), a length of "bar"-level countertop on the left (just like in our last house-loved it!) & a space for a dishwasher. On the short end of the L, a focal sink. The sink will be the first thing you see coming down the interior hallway along the stairwell, so the cabinetry will be "country flourish" - an arched open shelf for pottery and books flanked by tons of fancy trim. Sorta like these inspirations pictures:






Plus a fancy sink with fancy handle embedded in a fancy concrete counter. Fancy fancy.


Have also fallen in love with stone accent walls too, like this:

which would look great behind the oven. A bitch to clean, but I'll worry about that later.

Then the far wall, on the other side of the windows, will be floor to ceiling cabinetry and an archway going to the dining room. And a refrigerator, a nice slim one that fits between those 24" on center beams.

It's a lop-sided and asymmetrical design, but hopefully it provides a visually interesting room with tons function and sunlight.