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.