productive sunday
10 Jan 10
Cleaned the bathroom, got groceries, did the kitchen chores (including polishing the dining room table), changed the cat litter, and did two loads of laundry—all while listening to Eddy Grant, David Bowie, Marianne Faithful, Shreikback, Suzie Quatro, and the Cocteau Twins. Oh, and I finally did this:
Still to do: make dinner, then take a second run at Ganondorf.
Posted by pzed on January 10, 2010 at 3.52pm
My email to the PM and M of Foreign Affairs, please consider sending your own #iranelection
20 Jun 09
To: CannoL@parl.gc.ca, HarpeS@parl.gc.ca
Dear Prime Minister Harper, and Minister Cannon:
I am a Canadian citizen doing my best to follow what is happening in Iran. I am shocked to hear reports that the Canadian Embassy is refusing to accept injured democracy supporters. I sincerely hope that these reports are untrue. If they are true, however, please on behalf of Canadians, open our doors to them. The world is watching.
Peter Zimmerman
Windsor, Ontario
Posted by pzed on June 20, 2009 at 3.36pm
big excitement
22 Oct 07
Such an exciting day! Got groceries, changed the filter on the furnace, even tidied up the dining room table (kinda). Oh, and this happened up the street:
I could have sworn there was a house here this morning. This lot is on the north east corner of Pierre and Assumption. Note that the local pronunciation of “Pierre” rhymes with “beery”. Like a bad SCA event, eh? “Golly, yer Excellency, this event sure is peery. Er, sorry, your Grace.”
There goes the neighbourhood!
Posted by pzed on October 22, 2007 at 8.49pm
third time’s a charm
10 Oct 07
Summer, 2003, and Jodi and I have just moved into our new house. Our neighbours to the south have just put up a new fence between our properties, quite recently before we moved in. Our property has a fence along the back which is a little bit dilapidated and the gate hangs open all the time and can’t be closed properly because it rubs on the ground. So one of my first fixer-upper jobs after moving in, on a hot day in late July, is to take the gate off, drill some holes, and remount it with a simply latch. Suddenly we have a working gate, and the guys who live in the crack house out back no longer have an open invitation to cut through our back yard on the way to the variety store to buy pepperoni and smokes.
Unfortunately, it turns out our neighbour is one of those guys who gets almost done a job and then leaves the last little bit undone for a while. Jodi and I have NO idea what that’s like. So in August we went away on vacation and asked a friend to come by and feed the cats. Our friend dutifully comes by and finds that he can’t get the gate open. It just so happens he used to work as a mover, so in fact he CAN get the gate open, but it won’t properly close again. Our neighbour had finally finished bracing his new fence, and in the process has fucked up my gate. We find we can force the gate shut and that friction will keep it there, but this only works for August humidity. Once January rolls around, either the gate or the ground or both shrink in such away that, once again the gate hangs open and the crack dudes have an open invitation to cut through.
Finally, after a year or so of thinking about doing something about it, I figured out a new solution that involved cutting off a piece of the gate and putting on a bolt latch that fits into a whole drilled into the fence. This works well in dry weather, but once things get humid again, the gate sticks mightily, and over the past summer just seems to get worse. Perhaps the ground is shifting, or perhaps it’s because I keep backing into the fence when parking the car.
At any rate, over the past couple days I’ve attempted a third solution. With the help of a saw, a chisel, and my newly purchased 8″ rasp, I’ve removed a few hunks of wood from the gate and repositioned the bolt.
If you knew what to look for, you could see evidence of all the previous attempts to fix this thing, along with the various erosion effects of slamming this rickety thing shut. Hopefully this one will last for a while. Meanwhile, you can fantasize along with Jodi and me about the day when our fence looks like this:
Posted by pzed on October 10, 2007 at 8.34pm
Honey, well. . .
27 Aug 07
Last year over xmas Jodi and I spent three or four days visiting family out of town. When we got back, we discovered that the thermostat had been stuck on for probably half that time. Now, I had been procrastinating on replacing it for at least two winters. It no longer gave an accurate temperature reading, but I’d say it was between 35 and 40°C in here. We turned the furnace off (’cause, you see, you kind of had to open up the thermostat and flick the mercury to get the furnace to go on or off, only it had never before gotten so stuck that it wouldn’t turn off, it was more like if you set it for 18 it would turn on at 12 and turn off at 24) and spent a fitful night sweating in our underwear in what should have been a too cold bedroom. When we rose in the morning and the house had cooled, it was as though the house had had a fever and we had nursed its delirious soul through the night.
Well, no more of that!
Now I have a question which it’d be great if someone could answer. The installation instructions for the thermostat look super easy. They even say something on the box about it being super easy (or some such equivalent). But nowhere does it say anything about turning off any power. Shouldn’t you have to turn off some power somewhere? Instruction one is, “Take your old thermostat off the wall and carefully label the wires.” I’m thinking there should be some power to turn off. Or is there just not enough power running through these things to do any damage? Maybe I should get in there and lick those wires to get that delicious, 9 volt battery tingle.
Posted by pzed on August 27, 2007 at 9.17pm
the path is clear
22 Aug 07
Today, a big fat wet air mass settled on Southern Ontario, but our house stayed cool and dry inside. Rather than stay in after dinner and heat the house up by doing one or more of the many things that need doing, I decided to go outside and get all sweaty working in the garden. I had only intended to do a little weeding, but somehow I ended up scraping up all the mud and weeds and fallen bits of tree that had made the above path pretty darn hard to see (I must remember to start taking “before” pictures).
Afterwards, I went to the alley where we park the car and cut down all the little trees that always spring up along the back fence—one of these is a mulberry and the others are equally weedy—and then cleaned up the last couple months accumulation of litter from the parking area. (In Windsor, at least in older neighbourhoods like ours, the garbage pick-up is off the alleys, and people aren’t always careful how they put their garbage out. Our parking area is bounded by walls and a fence on three sides and seems to be a catchment area for other people’s windblown trash.)
Finally, I had a shower and it still wasn’t yet eight o’clock. How is it that there is always so much that remains to be done?
Posted by pzed on August 22, 2007 at 9.10pm
fabric organizing party
30 Mar 07
First, here’s what three boxes and four bags of fabric scraps look like dumped out on Claire’s bed:
Now the hard part: how to get this stuff into two plastic totes in a way that might be called organized—by colour, light and dark? by weight, light and heavy? or by usefulness, useful and “why the hell do we still have this”? What I actually ended up with was bits and scraps (in green) and costume resources (in purple):
Oh, the box of leather is still a box of leather. And don’t worry, baby, I didn’t throw anything out. Not that I wasn’t tempted.
Posted by pzed on March 30, 2007 at 9.17pm
what could possibly be interesting about this bookshelf. . .
28 Mar 07
. . . apart from bad lighting and a jaunty lurch?
Well, not so long ago it was mostly empty. Today, it is more than mostly full, and four and a half boxes that were cluttering up Claire’s bedroom are now neatly nested and tucked away in the basement. A careful observer will notice that a lot of these books are rather old. Some belonged to my grandparents, some belonged to Jodi’s grandparents, a few belonged to my dad, and some were mine and/or Jodi’s all along.
Now, I need to tread carefully. There are some legitimate family heirlooms here; for example, my great-great-grandfather Van Houten’s copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m wondering if, in some cases, it wouldn’t be best to hold a little memorial service and immolate them. Or maybe we’ll just hang on to them forever and let my grandkids figure it out. Van Who?
That being said, rest assured I haven’t done anything crazy. There are, however, a few titles that emerged from these boxes which, I think, can safely be put up for adoption. The following, then, are looking for a new home. Tell your friends!
Family Circle Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia, vol 2 (Bas-Bui). Garden City, NY: Rockville House, 1973.
Fry, Christopher. Venus Observed: A Comedy. London: Oxford UP, 1949.
Hieatt, Constance B. and Sharon Butler, eds. Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century. London: Oxford UP, 1985.
Larsen, Earnest. Good Old Plastic Jesus. Liguori, MO: Liguorian Books, 1968.
Mackenzie, Compton. Vestal Fire. New York: Curtis Books, 1927.
Munro, Alice. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1991.
Poch, John and Chad Davidson. Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2006.
Posted by pzed on March 28, 2007 at 8.33pm
Ohhhh, yeah…
7 Feb 07
The every day project resurrects itself. Inspired by something Jodi told me about somebody she “knows” who is trying to get rid of half of everything they own, and remembering my own musings about getting rid of some books, I decided to tackle the fiction shelves with the intention of getting rid of half of what’s there. The list of stuff to go is below, but for some reason I feel I should check with somebody first.
For now, these are just piled up under the piano. If anybody wants any of these, just let me know. Or if you think you know somebody who might want some, feel free to send them here. I won’t vouch for the condition, but they range from crappy yellowed paperbacks to relatively decent hardcovers, one of which is even signed by the author. Some are covered in scribbles having been bought for my undergrad; others, having been bought for my undergrad, have never been opened.
- Canadian short stories: fourth series
- Scholes and Sullivan, Elements of fiction
- Ashley and Moseley, Elizabethan fiction
- 50 great short stories
- Holman, A handbook to literature
- Great Canadian short stories
- Modern Canadian stories
- Short novels of the masters
- Short story masterpieces
- Douglas Adams, Mostly harmless
- —So long, and thanks for all the fish
- Richard Adams, Shardik
- —Watership Down
- Margaret Atwood, Cat’s eye
- Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice
- —Sense and sensibility
- Simone de Beauvoir, The mandarins
- Albert Camus, L’etranger
- Joseph Conrad, 6 novels in one!
- Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a coma
- Robertson Davies, The cunning man
- —Fifth business
- —The lyre of Orpheus
- —The manticore
- —A mixture of frailties
- —What’s bred in the bone
- —World of wonders
- Defoe, Moll Flanders
- Dickens, An xmas carol
- —David Copperfield
- —Hard times
- Eliot, Middlemarch
- —The mill on the floss
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, She
- Timothy Findley, The butterfly plague
- —Dinner along the Amazon
- —Famous last words
- —Headhunter
- —The last of the crazy people
- —Not wanted on the voyage
- —The telling of lies
- —Spadework
- —The wars
- Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby
- Forster, A passage to India
- William Golding, Lord of the flies
- Goldsmith, The vicar of Wakefield
- Gunter Grass, The tin drum
- Hardy, Far from the madding crowd
- —The return of the native
- —Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- —The woodlanders
- Hermann Hesse, Demian
- John Irving, The cider house rules
- —The Hotel New Hampshire
- James, The portrait of a lady
- Joyce, Dubliners
- —A portrait of the artist as a young man
- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at noon
- Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The leopard
- C. S. Lewis, The Narnia chronicles
- Somerset Maugham, Cakes and ale
- —Then and now
- Great short works of Herman Melville
- Walter M. Miller, A canticle for Liebowitz
- Farley Mowat, The dog who wouldn’t be
- Vladimir Nabokov, Bend sinister
- Michael Ondaatje, In the skin of a lion
- George Orwell, 1984
- Nino Ricci, In a glass house
- —Lives of the saints
- David Adams Richards, Mercy among the children
- Mordecai Richler, Jacob Two-Two’s first spy case
- Gabrielle Roy, The tin flute
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s children
- Saltykov, The Golovlevs
- Kate Taylor, Mme Proust and the kosher kitchen
- The new Tolkien companion
- Tolkien, Unfinished tales
- —The fellowship of the ring
- —The two towers
- —The return of the king
- —The silmarillion
- Tolstoy, Master and man
- Anthony Trollope, The way we live now
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead revisited
- H. G. Wells, The first men in the moon
- T. H. White, The book of Merlyn
- —The once and future king
- Elie Wiesel, Night
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- —Orlando
- —To the lighthouse
- —The waves
- Emile Zola, The masterpiece
Well, in the end, that’s only about a third. Odds are I won’t touch 95% of what’s being kept until ten years from now when it’s time to purge again.
Posted by pzed on February 7, 2007 at 10.28pm
vee queue eh
21 Jan 07
Ah, Ontario. A place to stand and a place to grow. And what do we grow here? Why grapes, of course. What, you mean when you think Ontario the first thing you think isn’t grapes? Shame.
I made an impulse buy today, leaving the grocery store. There’s some back story, though. See, I’ve been trying to drink more lately. Kind of a New Year’s resolution. What I like to drink best is red wine, and a few nights ago I opened a bottle of Pelee Island Shiraz Cabernet. I’d been avoiding this bottle for two reasons: Pelee Island is in Ontario, and Shiraz is, well, Shiraz. But you know, it wasn’t bad at all. Can the magic of Cabernet dispel the torpor of Shiraz? Apparently.
So I made an impulse buy today. There’s a little wine shop just outside my grocery store. In Ontario, you can only buy booze in three ways: Beer, wine, and spirits can be purchased through the government-owned LCBO; beer can be purchased at the heavily regulated, beer-industry owned Beer Store; and wine can be purchased in a few specially licensed locations, usually attached to but separate from grocery stores. These wine stores are limited by regulation to selling the wines of Ontario wineries. And today I got distracted by the shiny red “sale” signs. I decided to take a chance on a bottle of Inniskillin Cabernet Merlot (2003) that was marked down from $14.95 to $9.95. Why not, eh.
But the fun had only begun. I remembered I had $50 worth of LCBO gift cards lying around, and so I went out this afternoon and spent them. Here is a list of today’s wines, including the above-mentioned, just because:
- Ancient Coast Baco Noir VQA Ontario
- Colio Estates Cabernet Sauvignon VQA Ontario
- Inniskillin Cabernet Merlot
- Pelee Island Cabernet Franc VQA Ontario
- Salmon River Cabernet Merlot VQA Niagara Peninsula
- Willow Heights Baco Noir VQA Ontario
VQA is a quality designation that guarantees the wine is made entirely of grapes grown in a specific region. Only the Inniskillin lacks this designation, which is odd, because on the Inniskillin web site there are a 2004 and a 2002 Cabernet Merlot that are both VQA. 2003 must’ve been a bad year for the appropriate local grapes.
I’m also a little confused by the other wines that are designated VQA Ontario. If I read Inniskillin’s explanation of VQA correctly, they should be designated Niagara Peninsula, Pelee Island, or Lake Erie North Shore. Perhaps the Ontario designation means the grapes came from more than one Ontario region, but isn’t the whole point to distinguish among them? Wine is about nothing if not distinction.
At any rate, a glass of the Inniskillin sits beside me now, and it’s good enough. Hint of this with a finish of that. You know, drinkable. And that’s all I ask.
Glad it was on sale, though.
Posted by pzed on January 21, 2007 at 9.03pm
