As it started out sunny this morning I spread the second bag of polymeric sand in the paver cracks of my new walkway. It did sprinkle a bit but never enough that I had to stop this activity. The tedious part was removing the little leaves and seeds that had fallen in the cracks before I spread the sand. I found a probe from a dissecting kit worked well for this task. So, now the walkway is essentially “done.” I need to “edge” my porch with 2“x6” boards and, if the weather forecast is for nice weather next weekend, I’ll order a couple of cubic yards of “quadruple” mix to spread along the edges.
I cleared the deck of leaves and patio furniture. Though it threatened rain again, I raked and shredded leaves in the backyard: making at least a half a dozen bagsful of mulch. Then I mowed the lawn for what should be the last cut of the season. Though the chipper-shredder works well, the vacuum-mulcher is still the best tool for vacuuming leaves out the of the gardens and evergreen shrubs.
I also went for a run. The change from EDT to EST, and the cloudiness meant it was getting rather dark by the time I got back home.
If I was playing, why am I so tired now?
In the last couple of weeks I have caught four mice in the garage. Now the traps appear undisturbed so perhaps the problem is gone for another year. BTW, I don’t use those clothes peg type traps: they are not as “snappy” as the kind in the image, but you don’t have to touch the dead critter, either.
Quoting from this CBC news article:
“Nationally, consumers purchased an average of 85.6 litres of beer a person, 13.1 litres of wine, and 7.5 litres of spirits in 2002-03.”
- 85.6 litres of beer
- This about 242 bottles of beer or just over 10 two-fours or between 5 and 6 bottles/week. Somebody is drinking a lot more beer than I am!
- 13.1 litres of wine
- This is about 17.5 bottles/year or about 70 glasses of wine or a little more than one glass/week. I figure I consume about 1 bottle/week for about ¾ of the year to make a total of 39 bottles.
- 7.5 litres
- ! This works out to about 2½ 2oz. drinks/week. The dust on the bottles in my liquor cupboard certainly shows I’m not responsible for this statistic.
- Conclusion
- I’m drinking enough wine for two Canadians. Beer I’m not sure about but I would guess I’m probably half a Canadian here. As for spirits, I’m only consume a minute fraction of that total. And most of that was on this past summer’s canoe trip.
My wife doesn’t complain often, but once she was having a old-fashioned “heart-to-heart” with me and said, “Hon, you never listen to me. Every time I try to talk to you, you get this far-away look in your eyes after only a few seconds. Please promise me you’ll try to work on that.”
The last thing I remember was replying, “I’m sorry, what was that you were saying?”
Found in Clean Laffs email.
The deliverymen said it was too big to move downstairs. Tonight I removed the doors (per the instructions on the fridge) and my older son and I moved it downstairs. A fridge is actually pretty light as compared to pavers or wheelbarrowsful of limestone screenings. We only had to finagle it around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t think we scratched the fridge or the walls. For the rest of the evening I removed the tape, packing materials and remounted the doors on the other (left) side. Now the fridge is cooling off getting ready for beer 'n' stuff.
I cooked swiss chard on the weekend like I do spinach: boil in a pot with a bit of water until just limp. I like it sprinkled with lemon juice.
When I made a salad a couple of days later there has half a head of lettuce and one clump of swiss chard so I thought I could use it “raw,” again, like spinach in the salad. Now it wasn’t awful; however, I felt like a ruminant because those leaves are tougher than regular salad greens and not particularly tasty. I guess cooking releases some flavours.
The Bell’Arte Singers had their retreat yesterday in a dance studio in Toronto’s Distillery District. Basically a singers' retreat is extra rehearsals, some sort of “master” class and plenty of breaks to “foster the choir community spirit” in our director’s words. Today’s master class was led by Larry Beckwith, he of Toronto Masque Theatre fame among his many other musical talents. We’ll be singing the Messe de Minuit by Charpentier in “French” Latin. Think Inspector Clouseau asking for a hotel room or ‘Allo ‘Allo and you’ll get the idea.
Afterwards I dropped my wife off to have supper with a colleague and then the an opera while I went to a reception for BAS members. My wife told me my old “friend”, Maestro Bennett, was on the podium. However he was 40 minutes late and the audience was very restive. Her colleague fell asleep during the first half and they both left during intermission—a bit of schadenfreude for me. My wife planned to go to another colleague’s party after the opera and I was to meet her. However, she phoned and asked me to pick her up at the GO train station. We were just too tired having been on the go since 7 a.m.
Today was drizzly. Despite this I generated 4 bags of mulch from the front lawn leaves with my chipper-shredder. Indoors I installed the 3 “boob” lights, hooked up the cable to a bedroom TV and tested a UDS-10 serial to TCP/IP converter box for work. This was in response to a manager asking me if this thing will work on somebody’s local area network. It did. The UDS-10 has a built-in DHCP client. At home I control the DHCP server so that I could see what IP address was being assigned to it. Then I could try out its web server configuration.
In today’s workout I told the treadmill I was 35. Finally, I think I have found a sufficiently strenuous workout: burning over 350 bogo-calories in the 30 minutes.
Here’s the quote as copied and pasted from a humour email:
“There’s reports of price gouging going on for flu vaccine. It was $85 a vile?, now its up to $900 a vile?. So apparently Starbucks must be selling this stuff.”
Jay Leno
Now let’s compare definitions. I’ll let you choose the correct one.
- vile
- despicable, ugly, vile, unworthy – (morally reprehensible; “would do something as despicable as murder”; “ugly crimes”; “the vile development of slavery appalled them”)
- filthy, foul, nasty, vile – (thoroughly unpleasant; “filthy (or foul or nasty or vile) weather we’re having”)
- nauseating, nauseous, noisome, loathsome, offensive, sickening, vile – (causing or able to cause nausea; “a nauseating smell”; “nauseous offal”; “a sickening stench”)
- vial
- phial, vial, ampule, ampul, ampoule – (a small bottle that contains a drug (especially a sealed sterile container for injection by needle))
After doing some research and talking to other DIYs, I decided to hire someone to replace the torsion springs, one broken and one not, on our single car garage doors. The decision was easier when I found the invoice for the garage doors we had installed in 1990. That company is still in business so I figure they must be doing alright after 14 years. It was less than $250 and done the day after I called. I would still have to measure and buy the springs and then get a couple of tools, etc so it might have been another couple of weeks before I did it myself. Money well spent this time.
My cousin emailed me this image of his daughter and his brother’s (uh, that would be another cousin) daughter. So cute at this age!
I installed a javascript package that makes popup overlays on Saturday evening. I used them at work for a demo website with several large (image) maps and selectable houses. I needed little popups to display the house addresses. Through my web research I came across the overlibms package which seemed to be the best of the overlib clones.
It was quite easy to add to an MT blog. I added the following to my various index templates:
The second line specifies the styles names used in the popup that are found in your styles-site.css file.
Somewhere, just after the <body> tag, you add:
This initializes the “floating” div that overlib uses for its little popup box. Of course, I had to add a popup entry title to my calendar entries:
I also lightly hacked the mt/tmpl/cms/preview_entry.tmpl file in a similar fashion so that I can see my popups when I preview my entries. Now I find I might have to revise my TeXlike formatter so that I can embed html in those popups more easily.
Now that I have devoted several weekends to working on the front and side walkways the job is essentially complete, save for a few minor finishing details. So, I ran my regular route (12km?) in about 1:04* this afternoon, a decent time considering my lack of “practice.” Though it was only about 9°C, I wore shorts. And, just before leaving, I decided to wear my running shell. This turned to be “a good thing” as there were several brief showers during the hour or so. The fall foliage was beautiful especially some brilliant red maples at the corner of Collegeway and Mississauga Road.
An hour’s run over familiar routes allows one time for thinking and meditation. I thought today that my suggested Chrismas list should be runners' apparel or gift certificates from the Running Room or Coast Mountain Sports.
My younger son drove to my work today, then I drove him to the Kipling subway station about 5 or 10 minutes walk away. He was heading to Kensington market to do a photo essay for one of his Humber College courses.
Yes my son is quite different than my older son and myself. We tend to be technical type of people and know where we are. My younger son came back on the subway and planned to walk back to my work: except we walked in the diagonally opposite direction. He called from his cell phone and I suggested he eat, find out where he was and I would come and pick him up. Later, he phoned and said he would be at the Esso station on the south side of Dundas at Shaver. At least the intersection was right: however, the Esso station was on the north side. Yes, we love our son but, always, always, always we make sure and write down very explicit directions and give him a map, too. Here’s a person where a cell phone is a necessity when he’s wandering about.
Today’s “new thing” was installing and using the Template Toolkit(TT2). The demo website I made to show off how we will display the daily readings of a new technology has now become four “sub sites.” No longer were Apache server side includes going to be adequate. The only wrinkle in the installation is that ActiveState's win32 Perl didn’t have a win32 package for TT2. I found one elsewhere.
Now, generating more “sub sites” will be a snap.
Finally the Google Desktop search engine has arrived. Anytime I want to a look for an email in MS Outlook I find their search function justs crawls. After indexing with Google for about an hour at lunch time today, I now get a spiffy near-instantaneous display of my emails à la Google. The last time the virus checker ran it reported 140,000 files on my work computer. Now these are instantly searchable—no more “I know I saved that report/email here somewhere.”
I brought home three ceiling lamp fixtures (a.k.a “boob” lights, a term coined by my brother-in-law) in my canoe pack. The whole lot including my usual knapsack weighed 21.5 pounds or just under 10 kg. I once weighed this combined amount at one point during my University of Toronto undergrad student days. That must have been during the semester I had no midday break time to use the fitness facilities. Of course my run home was slower.
The ceiling lights are for the upstairs hall and bathroom. The existing fixtures have two narrow base bulbs each which, even though the hall lights are seldom used, burn out quite frequently.
The first bag of polymeric sand I opened had obviously gotten wet at some point. It was clumpy just like cat litter. It even says on the bag, “Keep in a dry place.” Out back on a skid in open air isn’t a “dry place” my garden centre friends. I’ll ask for another when I return the pavers' skids next weekend.
The second bag was OK. After all the back aching work of digging clay, removing concrete slabs, spreading screenings, carting pavers and making a cutout in the driveway asphalt today, it was relaxing to just sweep the sand into the cracks.
We had a little Thanksgiving dinner, just the three of us tonight. My younger son doesn’t really care about the family stuff, especially since his cousin is in France for a year, but he would have missed the turkey. We had one of those pre-stuffed, cook from frozen birds. Mmmm!
My wife and I finished laying down the pavers today. My estimates all seemed to have worked out: we have one layer of pavers left over which I can either use to make a step or hide the galvanized sheet I used to cover the opening under the front porch.
I rented a “brick splitter” to do the few cuts needed on the sideway walkway around the downspouts, window well and electrical service entrance. It also came in handy when my wife came to an impasse in the pattern-less pattern. She was using too many of the “twinkie” size. I cut one in half so she could plug up the twinkie run and start a new “twinky-less” pattern.
After using the brick splitter I know more about the sudden release of energy in earthquakes: You apply (enormous) pressure to the paver between two narrow knife-edge blades with a lever arrangement. Usually the paver splits suddenly with a sharp cracking sound and a sudden release in lever force. Another fun part of this job. Tomorrow’s fun includes sawing out a part of the driveway so I can set in the front pavers of the walkway, putting in the edging and sweeping sand in the cracks.
The torsion spring broke on the garage door of the side where we keep our car. So, now I am searching the Internet on the subject to determine whether or not this is a DIY project. Apparently it can be with a great deal of care. Perhaps I’ll phone around for repair estimates and time to complete versus the time and expense involved in trying to purchase the spring (not usually available at your typical home repair “supermarket”) and doing it myself.
We (yes, my wife helped) laid out a skidful of pavers this afternoon and evening. We had trouble discerning what sort of pattern we should use with these 3 sizes of tumbled pavers:
So we went back to the garden centre to look again at the display.
We met the fellow who had laid the bricks in the display. He said there is no pattern and that you’ll drive yourself crazy if you try and make one. He suggested starting in a right-angled corner fixed by some objects you can’t change and move out diagonally from there. You try and lay the pavers so that they don’t end up having long “crack” lines. By the way, he called the smallest size a “twinky.” Sure enough, his system worked. We started out at the corner of the concrete porch and garage wall and spead out along the porch and down to the side of the house and another part jutting out towards the street. When I sat down on the porch it appears the front walk is tending to the right so that we’ll run out of prepared screenings' bed by the time we get to the far corner. I’ll have to straighten that out in the morning.
Anyway, once we discovered there is no pattern it’s a lot of fun the lay those pavers “randomly” and trying not to use too many twinkies. Yes, my wife has been very helpful. Her extensive experience in laying out quilt patterns has helped us tremendously.
There are two skids and a section sitting on our boulevard: perhaps “a ton of bricks.” It looks like the lovely fall weather will continue to hold this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and my walkways will start to look complete.
Older son emailed me about an electrical problem at his house. It turned out he wired a ceiling fixture in parallel with a switch on the wall. When he screwed in a lightbulb, the radio plugged into the outlet operated by the switch turned on. He pulled out the outlet and switch and sent me a sketch of the wiring.
I sent him a possible solution tonight. The outlet is rewired to make it non-switched and the switch is re-wired so that it will interrupt the “hot” side to his ceiling light.
I carted the rest of the limestone screenings from the front boulevard to then front walk. Next I leveled and hand-tamped the entire walkway (about 300 ft2). I used a 3 ft. and 4 ft screeding boards and did it “by eye.” Most of the time, when I checked with my level, I was either dead on or slightly sloping away from the house—just as it should be.
In the afternoon my wife and I went to the garden centre and looked at their paver and brick displays. We settled on the Unilock Antara pattern, of 3 different size “tumbled” pavers. We think that will look best because there won’t be a long pattern line to possibly screw up. I like the tumbledness because I can use the guillotine rather than the diamond saw. I asked about renting a gasoline-driven tamper: it was “free.” Of course, I’d spent over a grand for the pavers and edging.
Tamping was rather fun—something like driving a zamboni. The only problem was the exhaust diverter of the machine had rusted off so the tamping operation was rather fumy. Now the walkway seems to be as solid as concrete. I have a wheelbarrow load of screenings for “adjustments” and I will have to get a bag or two of “polymeric” sand to glue the bricks together once I’ve laid them next weekend.
The Bell’Arte Singers had their first rehearsal of the 2004-5 season today. Most of agreed it was a good idea to have September off. Personally, I had lots of things I could do outside on September Saturday mornings. After section leading in the community choir for a few rehearsals now it is satisfying to be sight reading at “concert speed” and already “polishing” the pieces.
In the music library department I’m trying “assigned” numbers. I bought the smallest labels I could find and printed the numbers 1-50, 3 per label, 80 labels per page. This way I hope to mark every borrowed piece of music with a number which will be “belong” to a certain member this season. There have been years where we have handed out a dozen different pieces at several rehearsals. Different people arrived at different times so we sheets of names with at least half a dozen different numbers. It was very hard to keep track of who handed in what at the end of the concert. Hopefully, with one number/one member it might be an easier task. The easiest concerts from a music librarian’s point of view is where the choir performs just one major work, e.g. Mendelssohn’s Elijah.
This afternoon I put 1×4 forms along one edge of the walkway to keep the limestone screenings in place. I am building up the walkway level to more closely match the driveway and porch elevations. I would like to avoid that big step that we were having to take between the garage side door and the porch. I even had time to spread out some screenings. I used a bunch of 2 × 6 x 6' cedar and PT boards I had saved for a few years as a “boardwalk” over the uncompacted screenings.
I didn’t have time for a run today so I used the the treadmill and tried using the pulse-controlled aerobic program as a 40 year old rather than my true age. The average speed and distance travelled were greater plus I felt like I had a better workout in the 30 minutes.
Today’s image is brought to by the U.S. treasury.
September has been mild. It was never cold enough to turn the furnace on. I suppose I should vacuum the burners and air filter and turn on the pilot light this weekend as it looks like it will be rainy and colder next week. According to Environment Canada the mean temperature was 18.5°C and we had only 25.2 mm of rain all month.