Trashing the Place - DIY Edition

How to escape a baby choke hold, by Mary Cassatt, Art Gallery of Ontario

It started with the tread stepper, which we got at the beginning of the pandemic, and have used a lot ever since. 

A short while ago, we noticed the belts had started to slip. Bruce consulted the manual to see if there was an easy fix that two amateurs (that would be us) could do on their own. It looked like there was, and we followed the instructions to the letter. About four days after that, while Bruce was tread stepping on his daily walk to nowhere, the machine made a plaintiff wail, gave up a wisp of smoke and died.

The Bowflex Customer Care centre said we had probably over-tightened the belts. They also said the machine had more than 400 hours on it and needed a new motor anyway. And new belt treads.

Bruce ordered the equipment plus a technician to attend our home and install all the new parts. 

While we waited for the technician to finally come by (took three tries), we had time to review the state of our floors. The recent painting project had scuffed and scratched the fifteen-year-old crappy laminate. We thought some floor polish would fix it up. But first we had to strip the old polish. We didn't think we needed to call a technician.

We bought a floor stripping product we found on the Internet, followed the instructions to the letter, and left the product on the floor for ten minutes, which was all the time it took for the crappy laminate to soak up enough liquid to swell, curl and blister at the joins. So we have completely ruined the floors in the kitchen and hallway. And, to add insult to injury, the product didn't lift the old polish.

Lastly, the weather has been so extraordinarily lovely these days that we have turned off our air conditioner and opened our windows, all on our own, mind you, without even consulting the manual.

So of course I broke the kitchen window (the winding mechanism, not the glass).

Sheesh.

Our management company will come by and fix the window. As for the floors, we're renovating the kitchen later this year, so we'll put down new laminate then.

Our one success, if that's what you want to call it, is that the tread stepper is once again fully operational. I can hear Bruce stomping on it even as I write.

Goes to show you what happens when you get the right person to do the job.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

How to turn straw into gold at the AGO
Helen McNicholl

Stuff Never Sleeps - Part II

 

In 2014, I spent two weeks in Lima, Peru, attending the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention.

My flight home left at midnight. To make the best use of the rest of that day, the other members of the Ontario delegation and I took a walking tour of Lima. Among many other things, we saw these painstaking excavations by archeologists seeking to answer the question, "how many times, and in what colours, has this building been painted?"

***

More than a week after our painters departed, the place still has that fresh paint smell. Our furniture, at least most of it, is back more or less where it was. But the artwork, the artwork's still a hanging job in progress.

Anyone who has visited my home knows there's a lot of art on the walls. It's a mix of stuff I bought abroad as souvenirs to remember museum shows or to support local artists, or bought at the Toronto Art Show to support local artists, or took from my parents' or Bruce's parents' collections after they were gone, or were gifts, or were odd little mass-produced pieces that struck my fancy. Or were just junk.

Our artwork hung randomly around the house, though some pieces were placed deliberately to cover holes left by the previous owner, or to use nails hammered into the wall by the previous owner. 

The cheerful painting crew we hired took care of all the unwanted holes and hardware. We now have, in the truest meaning of the phrase, a blank slate on all our walls.

Given the opportunity to take a long hard look at all the stuff we had hanging around, the first thing I did was put six pictures in the trash, and ten more in the crawlspace (aka the waiting room for the trash). 

Aside from the two large mosaics, a mandala and a portrait of Molly-the-Dog, by Sudarshan Deshmukh, most of the one-of-a-kind artwork pieces are still waiting to be hung. Getting the mosaics up originally took three separate trips to Canadian Tire, so we told the painters to leave the hardware where it was. We did switch their locations. Now Molly watches television in the living room, and Bruce has a halo at every meal.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Ancestral Voices

New installation at the Agha Khan Museum ... plus wildfire pollution haze.

At a symposium I attended in the 1990s, Louise Comeau, then with the Pembina Institute, made a stirring presentation about the useless steps governments of the day were taking to address climate change.

She directed most of her scorn at the idea that planting trees (a popular measure at the time) would solve the problem. 

"The models have already told us what's going to happen to forests," she said. "Anything you plant now is just going to burn."

Thirty years ago, that made quite an impression on me. And perhaps now others will also get it.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

We're having much of the house painted. Other 
rooms are storing our stuff, like a live hidden
object puzzle. Can you find the sloth, the 
Hamilton programme, the photographer?

Conductor

If you're down by Nathan Philips Square, check out this head-scratcher of an exhibit: a bunch of helmets and brains boxed in plexiglass, purportedly raising awareness about brain health. 

I sat in two very different audiences this past week.

Wednesday morning, I listened to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra rehearse Beethoven and Brahms, with Augustin Hadelich on the violin and Elim Chan conducting.The audience was 100% white and comprised of members of the monied demographic that most commonly has its Wednesday mornings free.

Wednesday evening, the audience was more diverse and less monied. We gathered in a Toronto Metropolitan University lecture hall to listen to six mayoral hopefuls give their pre-packaged answers to pre-approved questions about what they would do if they were mayor.

Just in case it doesn't go without saying, the major contrasts between the two events were: 

• the early event was uplifting and harmonious, the latter irritatingly discordant
• the morning event displayed astonishing virtuosity by both the violinist and the conductor; the latter showcased the embarrassing lack of even basic oratory skills among the candidates (Daniele Zanotti, the CEO of the United Way, gave the best speech; sadly, he's not running for mayor)
• as grand as the morning event was, it will make little impact on my life as a resident of Toronto; as dismal and pointless as the evening event was, the stakes for me and everyone else in Toronto couldn't be higher

The events had two things in common: both were highly orchestrated (sorry, couldn't resist), and a small-statured Asian woman held everyone's attention. 

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Olivia Chow, third from the right, is the candidate
to challenge in debate because she
has a name-recognition-fuelled lead in the polls.