A conundrum

So like a good lefty I'm all for cheap housing for people who have less money. I think that mixed use neighborhoods/housing (in all the senses of that term: commercial, rentals, owned, subsidized even light industrial) make for better cities and societies.

I say this all to establish my street cred, and to try and mitigate what I'm about to say.

We live next to a boarding house. Firstly, boarding houses basically function as housing for people who have almost no way to get regular housing. As such they wind up accepting sub-par housing. Way way way sub-par. One of the guys who recently moved out told me that he couldn't open his closet during the winter, unless he wanted the out door temp to spill into his room. Secondly, there seem to be two kinds of people that live next door, working poor and, well, umm.. drunken/stoned idiots.

The former are amoung some of the best neighbors I've ever had. Helpful, pleasant, nice to Lucas, polite to Christine, quiet etc etc. The later? The later can all go to hell.

Between the late night guitar and fiddling, the abusive relationships (if you call the police and say that it sounds like your neighbor is beating his girlfriend, you get 6 police cars...), the abusive drunks on the front balcony...

The house was sold recently, all the working guys have pretty much moved out (one is left, but he's going at the first of the month) and the rest should be out with in a month or so. Then the new owners are going to split it in half vertically and make to duplexes (or whats called a cottage around here).

All of this to say that I've never, in my whole life, been more happy about gentrification.

Bad Karma is going around breaking bikes

So I taught Lucas this:


and now he thinks there's some big guy named Bad Karma running around stealing and breaking people's bikes.

Trying to explain the concept of karma to a 3 year old is some seriously tough sledding.

Projects

So we're up to a bunch of things around here lately.

One of them has been this:



It's a Kraft Peanut Butter jar that we're filling with sand. From Lucas' shoes. He collects it at the daycare and every night we dump a bit more in. We're trying to fill it by the end of the summer. This is about three weeks into the project.

The other thing we're doing is this:



This is our fence, with the first coat of stain on it. We need to put another coat, finish some of the trellis and that will be that. Then on to landscaping. Where the Barbecue is right now will be some variation on the river rock/small stone theme. The other half of the yard will be grass for small boys to play on. Though I guess that he'll wind up where he can hurt himself more effectively.

And then, for some light relief, we buried my mother

Yes. She did die in 2005.

Yes. You did read that and the header correctly.

Yes. She was cremated.

No. This is not how I would have handled this.

No. I'm not at all happy about the event nor the logistics.

Yes. I'm still a passive aggressive pussy so this will be the only near mention of it in public.

No. Please don't. They just wilt and die. You can still make donations to the Montreal General Palative Care unit in her name.

Suit? No suit? Just nice pants? Tie? meh

So there's a transit strike, so we went for a walk

We needed to go to Home Depot and Fabricville, but the STM are out on strike today (as a union man I'm with them... a demand of 2% a year being rejected? You should get 2% for not setting fire to the bus and showing up every day - plus the crux seems to be pensions..).

So we figured we'd walk. So we did. For about 5 hours. Here's where we went.

Facebook v. MySpace

Ok, so at the insistence of my sister and some friends I got a Facebook account. I had been resisting because of my feelings about MySpace.

For your consideration here are those feelings:

1. It's ghetto as fuck
2. Everyone is 18
3. Or naked
4. Or both
5. User customizable CSS templates does not = good
6. Usability? What? Huh? OMG THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
7. AUTOPLAY MUSIC IS FROM SATAN!

Compare that with Facebook:

1. 100% less ghetto
2. Many people are young, but there are tons who are not
3. I have not been confronted with anything more than a bathing suit shot (It's not the naked that bothers me per se, its the "of course I just want to be your friend, oh did I mention my porn site?"thing)
4. One template. One look. It's pretty. Much AJAX. Yay!
5. I can find things. It doesn't burn my eyes. Soothing!
6. They might go into music hosting/band pimping. Wanna bet they do it better than Myspace?

Prepare for the torrent

I've got like 5 posts in my head, some of them just house updates/a way to spam photos and some are political and some are Lucas related. All are good.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

Apparently I haven't posted since March, the day after the provincial election.

I am completely unable to explain why.

Well I am, but it's really not nearly exciting enough. I've been busy. And pissy. And grumpy. Also broke. And busy.

Meh.