Near epic fail (but still a fail)

So this morning, I'm all stunned with sleep and stressed about the day etc (as is my want), I got up, got Lucas downstairs and went to make breakfast.

So I got the loaf of bread out, chucked it onto stove top, got the tea water going (there wasn't enough coffee for two cups) and then went away to the computer to check the news and the weather...

A minute or so later I smell something, pretty much simultaneously to this the smoke detector goes off.

I'd turned on the wrong element. So the water wasn't heating up, but hte plastic wrapped bread was quite... well gross (and toasty).

Now the house smells of, I dunno, what I imagine toast for robots smells like.

The most astounding thing...

... happened to me the other day as I was leaving to go and pick Lucas up from the daycare.

This late 20's guy came up to me at the door and said "Are you the owner of this house?"

I was prepared for "yes I am, but seriously I don't want your cleaning service/painting service whatever". But he surprised me, he said "I'm here to applogize and to try and make amends. It was my birthday last night and I got drunk and then one of my buddies gave me a can of paint. Like an idiot I painted my name on your wall. I'm so very sorry, there is no excuse for my doing that." (I'm translating here, very roughly). I was so stunned I didn't know what to say.

Well actually, let's be realistic here: The wall is a mess. It needs brick work (which will be done in May) and there were already some tags on the wall that I should have taken care of in the Fall. Also, and this is maybe just me, but I really can't stand watching people squirm with embarrassment. It kills me inside. So I thanked him for his honesty, accepted his apology and sent him on his way.

Leaving me behind utterly shocked and stunned.

Of short screws and annoyance

Today we installed a couple of light fixtures we got at IKEA the other day. One (in Lucas' room) went up super fast and easy, but the other became an annoying series of trips up and down the stairs to find longer machine screws to hold it up.

Why doesn't IKEA sell their lights with these screws included? Why are these screws always so fricking short? Why doesn't anyone sell lights with the widest head/sort of built in washer screws included?

Why?

The lights are up. They look great, but holy crap, something that should be simple and pleasant becomes frustrating for want of about 10 cents worth of screws

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.

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.

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.

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.