This Is Not A Food Blog

I fried tofu last weekend for a potluck at work on Tuesday. 

We took ownership of our current address in September 2008, a bit more than ten years ago. When we first looked at the property, we were charmed by the recent renovations, especially in the kitchen and the third floor bathroom.

Not long after we moved in, though, we started cursing the name of the previous owner, the guy who had DIY'ed all the renovations. Glen Owen had a penchant for impracticality and poor workmanship. He favoured expensive materials and fixtures but installed them like an amateur. Particularly annoying was his taste for lights with hard-to-find replacement bulbs. This past week, for example, we paid more than $50 to replace a 16" circular fluorescent in the kitchen. The bulb was cheap, but, because no one keeps that item in stock, we had to order on-line from a bulb clearing house and paid $35 for shipping.

After ten years, we thought we'd seen and managed the worst of Glen's expensive taste and low rent skills. And it's not all bad. I like the granite in the kitchen. Our third floor bathroom looks nice, though mildew in the shower has always been a problem.

And then, of course, since just after the New Year, there's been that ominous stain on the ceiling showing the outline of an access panel - an access panel, it turns out, that no other unit has.

The engineers came this past week to poke their head in the hole and opine on what the problem might be. Their best guess is that Mr. Owen, hoping to improve heat retention in the room farthest from the furnace, cut a hole in the ceiling and blew in insulation. The insulation blocked the vents. For ten years moisture has been gathering under the roof, providing a welcoming environment for mould. Something - we may never know what - triggered the stain-generating accumulation this year.

Long story short, the peak roof above our third floor bathroom needs to be rebuilt. That will happen in the spring. Which means that distracting hole in the ceiling will be around for a while longer.

Dog-sitting Sundae

Sundae supervised the making of mac 'n' cheese. 

From Friday around noon to Monday around 2:30 in the afternoon, we had a dog in our home again. Sundae belongs to Bruce's cousin's daughter and her husband, the couple who were married a few months after I had my hip replaced and a few weeks before Bruce's mother died. 

Sundae's part Jack Russel and part some other kind of terrier. If I had to guess, I'd say Staffordshire. She's energetic and clever. 

Sundae had a lot to get used to in our home. Her usual digs are in Aurora. She found the noises of the inner city cause for alarm, as in she sounded the alarm with vigorous barking whenever she heard something unfamiliar. That got tired fast.

She's not well socialized with other dogs, nor especially well leash trained, so walking her in the canine-congested 'hood was not relaxing.

In every other respect, Sundae was a playful, sweet, hair-shedding companion. Bruce and I lapsed immediately into talking to her like we used to talk to Molly. It was impossible not to.

The question that of course arises is, now that we've had a dog in our home again, does it make us want to get one of our own?

Nope. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

I Have No Real Problems

This is Sundae, our house guest for the Family Day long weekend.
Of course she's on our couch.

 Norm Erosion

Everyone who has ever worked in an office knows the kitchen fridge is a battleground. The winners are almost always the fridge fetishists, the ones who load the shelves with forgotten food, half-empty bottles of dreadful salad dressing and jars of mayonnaise. Once this camp has secured their dominance over the fridge, everyone else capitulates, risking salmonella, but avoiding something much worse, by just not using the fridge.

Every morning, when I open the crammed, smelly fridge where I work to stow my lunch, I imagine another fridge in another office, with this sign on the door: 

“No overnight storage. 

Any items left in this fridge after 6 p.m. will be thrown away.”

When I think of this imaginary fridge, I think of the imaginary manager who announced the new policy to her team by saying: “Look, there are almost forty people who share this fridge. No one has a greater claim than anyone else, which means you can use about 1/40th of it. 

“How does that translate into action?" asked the manager. "It means you can use the fridge to keep your day’s food cold. That’s it. You do not use the fridge to store the different ingredients of your lunch so you have a loaf of bread and a head of lettuce and some Tofurky slices and a jar of vegan mayonnaise and some sliced vegan cheese. You keep those things in your fridge at home. You make your lunch at home. You bring your lunch to work. You store your lunch in the fridge. You eat it that day. 

“You leave nothing in the fridge overnight. If you do, it’ll be gone the next day.”

I think, too, of the imaginary office staff’s reaction to the new policy. I assume some are quite offended. Some wonder about milk for their coffee and tea. None of them see themselves as the offender with the Tofurky and vegan cheese. Others (the ones who actually are responsible for the Tofurky and vegan cheese) think this is ridiculous and swear to never use the fridge again. And some think to themselves, “well, this could work.”

A few of the imaginary office staff test the limits of the rule. They leave a half-consumed box of blackberries in the fridge and a couple of cupcakes left over from an office celebration.

These items are removed that night by cheerful and motivated imaginary cleaning staff. 

The person who left the blackberries is upset until he reads the sign on the fridge and thinks to himself, “oh, right. I forgot.” He’s still annoyed but knows he’s on the wrong side of history.

Everyone is secretly relieved about the cupcakes.

And so it comes to pass in the imaginary office that no one treats the communal fridge like a home fridge, and there is always lots of room for sandwiches, and reheatable containers of pasta, and Ziplock bags full of salad, and clear plastic containers of fresh fruit and no indescribable stench arises from the depths of the crisper bins and no items are left to fossilize at the back.

It didn’t take long in the imaginary office for the new way to become normal. People who used to avoid the fridge now use it. After a few traumatic losses, no one leaves anything in the fridge overnight, so the cleaning staff is even more cheerful. And finally, after untold decades of fridge wars, there is one imaginary place in all the world where peace reigns.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Family Day!

Karen

What's Been On My Mind

Having a hole in your ceiling is a distraction like 

• a pebble in your shoe
• something stuck between two back teeth
• that tick in the corner of your eye sometimes

The ominous little stain on the ceiling I showed you a couple of weeks ago became something much more as soon as we had someone come and take a look.

And, as is always the case, now that the hole has been opened, those who made it have shaken their heads in puzzlement, packed up their tools, wished us well, and left.

The knowledgeable contractor who came along later said, having stuck his head in the hole and looked around, that there's a lot of water up there - and mould - and it looks like it may be an issue with ventilation. 

The problem may be with the roof, or not. A diagnosis requires qualified engineers. Because we live in a condo, and because the roof is part of the condo's business, and because engineers cost money, the condo board needs to decide at a meeting whether to engage the engineers or not.

So the hole is ours until late this month when the Board gets around to talking about it. 

It does not assuage my current state of distraction in the least that I am a member of the Board.

Rogue Emissions

A couple of times over the past couple of weeks, subscribers (all 20 of you) have received unauthorized issues of this publication. The first one was a post from when we were in Banff, the second, from around the time of Hallowe'en. I confess that sometimes I go into the deep workings of this blog - there are lots of Google tools - and fool around, pushing buttons to see what happens. Most of the time, nothing happens. These two times, something did.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Winter at Last

Allan Gardens: Early morning, late January

This week I had the mixed pleasure of attending a meeting at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference, held this year at the Sheraton Hotel on Queen Street West.

Mixed, because while it is always nice to get out of the office, there's no real role for public servants at these meetings.

These are meetings of cabinet ministers -- in this case the ministers of Agriculture, Infrastructure and Municipal Affairs -- and constituents -- in this case a consortium of mayors and reeves from eastern Ontario who wanted to talk about gaps in cell service. There are stretches of lonely country road in their part of the province where you may be able to drive your car into a ditch, but, once you have so done, you will not be able to call 911.

No for-profit provider of cell services can make any money extending service to these areas, so the representatives of the rugged, independent, small-government-tax-cut-and-Doug-Ford-supporting scions of ex-urban and rural Ontario gather in the presence of aforesaid Ministers and ask for a handout largely financed by latte-liberals like me who live in areas of sufficiently high density that we pay for our own cell service. And now we will pay for theirs too. (If you click through to the video of Doug Ford, his speech starts at about 3m40s).

I have nothing to do with cell coverage in my day job, but there was a small chance someone at this meeting might ask a question about the similarly high-density-settlement-subsidized natural gas expansion program that the ministers either would not know, or could not fake, the answer to. 

But, ministers can always fake an answer, so I was just room meat, along with a couple of dozen others, straining to hear the conversation of people sitting ten feet away, half of them with their backs to me.

The meeting was symbolic. After greetings jocular enough for the Elk's Lodge, the mayors gave a presentation to the ministers that the ministers had already seen. Then the ministers made statements that they had already made the day before. This was a disciplined, staged, foregone conclusion of a meeting.

After the meeting was all but over, talk turned to a recent reversal of proposed changes to planning law. In a trust-building show of candid vulnerability, one of the ministers admitted that they had let the messaging get away from them. They wouldn't make that mistake again. "The environmentalists," said the minister, "set the story in the paper. But I want to assure you," he continued, earnestly, "that we govern for the majority."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

26 cm of snow
on the back patio