Still to do: make dinner, then take a second run at Ganondorf.

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

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!

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:

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

1. Canadian short stories: fourth series
2. Scholes and Sullivan, Elements of fiction
3. Ashley and Moseley, Elizabethan fiction
4. 50 great short stories
5. Holman, A handbook to literature
6. Great Canadian short stories
7. Modern Canadian stories
8. Short novels of the masters
9. Short story masterpieces
10. Douglas Adams, Mostly harmless
11. —So long, and thanks for all the fish
12. Richard Adams, Shardik
13. —Watership Down
14. Margaret Atwood, Cat’s eye
15. Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice
16. —Sense and sensibility
17. Simone de Beauvoir, The mandarins
18. Albert Camus, L’etranger
19. Joseph Conrad, 6 novels in one!
20. Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a coma
21. Robertson Davies, The cunning man
22. —Fifth business
23. —The lyre of Orpheus
24. —The manticore
25. —A mixture of frailties
26. —What’s bred in the bone
27. —World of wonders
28. Defoe, Moll Flanders
29. Dickens, An xmas carol
30. —David Copperfield
31. —Hard times
32. Eliot, Middlemarch
33. —The mill on the floss
34. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, She
35. Timothy Findley, The butterfly plague
36. —Dinner along the Amazon
37. —Famous last words
38. —Headhunter
39. —The last of the crazy people
40. —Not wanted on the voyage
41. —The telling of lies
42. —Spadework
43. —The wars
44. Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby
45. Forster, A passage to India
46. William Golding, Lord of the flies
47. Goldsmith, The vicar of Wakefield
48. Gunter Grass, The tin drum
49. Hardy, Far from the madding crowd
50. —The return of the native
51. —Tess of the d’Urbervilles
52. —The woodlanders
53. Hermann Hesse, Demian
54. John Irving, The cider house rules
55. —The Hotel New Hampshire
56. James, The portrait of a lady
57. Joyce, Dubliners
58. —A portrait of the artist as a young man
59. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at noon
60. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The leopard
61. C. S. Lewis, The Narnia chronicles
62. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and ale
63. —Then and now
64. Great short works of Herman Melville
65. Walter M. Miller, A canticle for Liebowitz
66. Farley Mowat, The dog who wouldn’t be
67. Vladimir Nabokov, Bend sinister
68. Michael Ondaatje, In the skin of a lion
69. George Orwell, 1984
70. Nino Ricci, In a glass house
71. —Lives of the saints
72. David Adams Richards, Mercy among the children
73. Mordecai Richler, Jacob Two-Two’s first spy case
74. Gabrielle Roy, The tin flute
75. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s children
76. Saltykov, The Golovlevs
77. Kate Taylor, Mme Proust and the kosher kitchen
78. The new Tolkien companion
79. Tolkien, Unfinished tales
80. —The fellowship of the ring
81. —The two towers
82. —The return of the king
83. —The silmarillion
84. Tolstoy, Master and man
85. Anthony Trollope, The way we live now
86. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead revisited
87. H. G. Wells, The first men in the moon
88. T. H. White, The book of Merlyn
89. —The once and future king
90. Elie Wiesel, Night
91. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
92. —Orlando
93. —To the lighthouse
94. —The waves
95. 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.

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.