Update

It's been a few weeks, so here's some news!

NB and I endured a short-lived but annoying plague of fruit flies. We seem to have removed whatever it was that they were feeding on, though, because they seem to have died out. NB caught a cold, and then he didn't want it any more so he passed it on to me. I got a crab for my birthday! :D It was very exciting.

One evening we saw a porcupine in our backyard! It was too dark to take photos of it, but we watched it from the sunroom. It had its back turned to us and was wobbling gently, so that it looked like a grey gelatinous blob. We watched it wobble for a while and then got bored. The next day NB found an apple core in that spot, so it was probably dining on the few leftover fallen apples. We've kept an eye out for it, but it hasn't returned (as far as we know).

At the beginning of November some component of our furnace fan broke, so that it wouldn't stop running. We discovered this at midnight on a Saturday, of course, after it had been pumping cold air into our house for an hour. Luckily it's still not all that cold outside. We called the emergency furnace line, but the furnace guy didn't show up until Monday. We had to control the fan manually all day by using the circuit breaker. By Monday, the fan had managed to "fix" itself. We thought we might buy a new furnace, but the furnace guy recommended against it. He said that the old furnaces are far more reliable.

We've found some contractors to do our roof -- they were recommended by my boss, who has used them for his house and all his farm buildings. They won't be able to start until the spring, but that's just as well.

Apart from that, the weather has been fairly good, so we've been cycling in -- NB usually, I occasionally. The new (temporary?) bus station by Southgate is irritating, but they're putting up some heated shelters so hopefully that gets done before the really cold weather hits. There's still construction everywhere. It's very irritating.

Anyway, that's mostly it for us.

October

So, there's still not much happening at Casa Gazza. We finally put down the last of the hardwood in the sunroom. Now we just need to buy some baseboards. We looked at the available options when we returned three out of our four remaining hardwood boxes to Home Depot (the other box had reached its 90-day return deadline a few weeks ago). It looks like we'll want to paint our baseboards white to match the walls, so we probably won't be getting around to that until spring. But the sunroom is basically ready for use, give or take the elusive leak in the ceiling.

We didn't do much for Thanksgiving this year. My brother was in town and the three of us went to the Blue Plate Diner for dinner on Sunday. Then on Monday I cooked and mushed a medium-sized pumpkin for pie purposes. If you need to cook pumpkin pieces for pie, but aren't sure whether you want to roast them, I definitely recommend microwaving rather than steaming. I spent an hour steaming pumpkin bits in the wok (we have a bamboo steamer we almost never use) before getting sick of it and discovering that you can just microwave a covered casserole dish full of pumpkin in about 6 minutes.

Next week we'll be turning pumpkin mush into a pie or two.

Neil spent some time cleaning up the mess in the sunroom and library and putting some shelving together this weekend. We've also cleaned up the yard a bit. Neil mowed and picked up apples, while I pulled up a LOT of baby spruce trees last weekend. Luckily, the weather has been nice for the most part.

And that's about it. Time to go into winter hibernation!

Not really New!

I don't actually have much new news, but the long time since the last post made me think I should put something up.

My video card was acting kind of flaky, so I replaced it. A good video card is finally more expensive than a really good CPU + 1GB of memory, which is kind of amusing. Fortunately it's amusing in a good way: it's mostly because CPUs are less than $200, even for ones that are pretty much top of the line, and I expect to start finding 1GB memory sticks in my cereal boxes any day now.

I'm playing a new video game: Bioshock. It's been a surprisingly long time since a good single player computer game has come out. There are definitely a lot more console games now.

The sunroom is almost finished: it just needs the last row (where the boards need to be cut lengthwise) and some sort of baseboard/edging. It's still not leaking, which is irritating, because I'm not quite sure I trust it. I almost want to say "yeah, it's still leaking. Come have a look!" because I don't think they'll drop by if I say "it seems to be fine, can you check it?" After that, the next stop is in fix-the-roof-ville.

Still doing Wing Chun. Made spaghetti and sausage instead of spaghetti and ground beef meat sauce.

Back!

NB and I are finally back home. We arrived yesterday afternoon. Our house didn't burn down, our bikes, computers and tomatoes are still there, and all the plants are happy and well.

And now, for a weekend of recovering from our vacation!

NB has already uploaded his vacation photos here. Mine are slowly going up here.

Heritage Festival

Welp, NB and I had a great Heritage Festival weekend, as usual. We're pretty bushed, though.

We went soon after it started on Saturday. It was raining a bit before we left, so we put on some raingear and drove in. By the time we got down the hill, it was raining harder, and we were starting to get soggy by the time we reached the festival. The hot-drink vendors did well that day. We went from booth to booth, soggy tickets in hand. There were no line-ups, and after getting our food we'd duck into the exhibition tents and eat there. The sun came out briefly when we got to the end of the tents. We made it back up the hill and to the car before the rain started again. It was really pouring on the way home, and we were pretty happy to have gone earlier.

On Sunday we met my brother at the LRT station and wandered around together. He was taking cellphone photos for his foodie friends back in Quebec, and I brought the little digital camera so we got a few pictures of the food and booths. These are just mine, since he's on the road back and hasn't had a chance to post his yet.

One of the first things we noticed was the Segway Police:



There were a few of them and they were riding around, answering questions, flashing their lights and whatnot. We played the "spot the police" game -- they were on foot, on bikes, on segways, in a car, and a few went by in a golf cart. It was like collector trading cards. I didn't take photos of them all, though.

The England exhibit was set up nicely, but they didn't have anything too interesting to eat.



Apparently my parents were also wandering around. We went around by the pond to find the Polish exhibit.



We talked to them briefly, but they weren't planning on staying very long. They came back in the evening and walked around some more after the stores closed, and they said it was very crowded later on.

I took a few pictures while we decided what to eat next. Some dancers by the Hungarian pavilion had pulled some bystanders into a circle dance:



NB had some tasty rendang at the Indonesian pavilion, but it looked like a bit too much food to me:



Some Polish girls in costume preparing to dance:



Later on we got some mango shakes -- the best drinks at the Festival, with the Nicaraguan cacao and Scandinavian sima being possible runners-up.



But not even a mango smoothie could cool this spicy, spicy papaya salad from Laos.



I gave it a good go, but had to give up a few bites in. NB liked the spice, but didn't like the papaya, and my brother liked neither. It was my one failed experiment. Luckily, the Laosian meat skewers more than made up for the disappointment.

NB and my brother tried some Zimbabwean sausage kebabs, which were delicious. I tried coming back several times on Sunday and Monday to try to get one for myself, but the supply was low and they went quickly.



We sat down to rest at the top of Saskatchewan drive, and I got my brother to take a photo of NB and I:



I have a few more photos from today, but am too tired to upload them. I'll have to do it later in the week.

Gnus

So NB went to Vancouver and came back. We're both overworked and dead tired now. We have too many things to do before the vacation, and we haven't had a good night's sleep in what feels like years.

Now that there's been some rain, we've confirmed that there is a leak in the new sunroom. We've called the sunroom people and they said they'd send someone out to look at it sometime. I hope it's soon, because we're about halfway done the sunroom floor now, and would just like to finish the job and forget about it. But since water and wood don't mix, we have to wait until the leak is fixed.

Apart from the never-ending sunroom troubles, we also have other problems. It looks like our roof is deteriorating more than NB expected, so we have to start calling roofing people this week so that we can get it fixed as fast as possible. The garage is probably going to need replacing very soon because the roof is visibly sagging and the door will no longer close all the way. We're looking at a lot of repairs and renos in the next little while, which is a giant pain in the butt and expensive to boot. We're not happy. Oh, and the car has started making funny noises so we need to take it in (for the third time) before we go to BC.

We did get to lay a little more hardwood this weekend. Since some of the tools our friend lent us aren't actually his (and need to go back soon), we had to go and buy a compressor and brad nailgun. While we were out, we also got a bike rack. We tried out the new compressor on Sunday, and it seems to work nicely.

In addition to everything else, I've also had a setback with my tomatoes -- almost all of the ripening romas and the one ripening Jet Star have succumbed to blossom-end rot, while the tumbler tomatoes have funny blemishes on them (they look bug-related to me). It's very disappointing. At least the cucumber is still producing enormous fruit (bigger than the two of us can easily eat) and it looks like the banana pepper plant will give us a bumper crop of peppers.

So, that's the news from Edmontonia. I'm depressed just having to write it all out. :P But we have the Heritage Festival to look forward to, and we'll be celebrating our Yam-a-versary with a nice dinner out tonight. We're thinking of maybe buying a couple of yams at the supermarket, putting little hats on them, and taking them out to dinner with us. It seems appropriate for some reason.

Floor Photos

Saturday Night

This is what we got done on Saturday night. I took photos on Sunday morning because the light was better.





Sunday Night

And this is how it looked by the end of Sunday:




Once we got going, we really got some work done! Here's the cutout vent:

Flooring

NB and I started laying the hardwood last night. We ripped up the tar paper and the staples (I don't know how the tar paper was, but the little staples were pretty easy to remove). We're doing the tar paper as we go, now. We've got one strip down and we're covering it in hardwood.

So it's going well so far. We did about six rows last night. NB is putting the hardwood together and stapling it and I'm sawing the ends off. It's fun, at least for me. I'm starting to wonder whether I should get me a mitre saw and take up... I don't know. Sawing things.

Unfortunately, after laying about a box of hardwood last night, we realized that we'd miscalculated how much wood we'd need. We bought two extra boxes, but we're losing about a square foot and a half per box due to trimming, and it's likely that we'll use up part of the last box. So went back to Home Depot this morning to see if they had any boxes left. We found the pallet, but the colour we wanted was marked "All Sold". We asked whether the other stores might have some -- and luckily, they all did. We drove out to the 17th Street Home Depot to pick a couple extra boxes up.

When we got there, we discovered that the pallet was still up on the shelving, and would have to be taken down by forklift. The salesman helping us paged the Flooring Supervisor. We waited... and waited... and waited some more... finally, they managed to track down someone else who could use the forklift. We were almost embarrassed to have them take the whole pallet down just so we could buy two boxes.

Two hours after we left, we finally got our extra flooring home. We've opened up some of the other boxes and realized that the wood in those comes in slightly different lengths than the first box. NB is modifying his tiling program to tell us how to best tile our floor with a minimum of waste, and I'm just waiting around.

I should have some photos of the floor-in-progress to post later.

This Week's Trials

So, not much has happened in the past week. NB seems to be feeling better, after drinking copious amounts of tea. I think I may be coming down with whatever he had, but I still feel good enough to hope that it might pass me by.

We helped a friend move into a condo on Saturday, then went for Ukrainian food in the evening. On Sunday, we bought some asphalt felt to use as a moisture barrier for the floor in the sunroom. NB stapled it down Sunday afternoon. It's made the house smell like tar and was apparently unpleasant to work with. We made some chicken souvlaki and Greek salad on Sunday evening, and used home-grown cucumber (El Gordo -- nearly a foot long!) and home-grown oregano as ingredients. Sweeter Yet has turned out to be a very tasty and mild variety of slicing cucumber, although El Gordo started to get soft at the tip and we had to perform some surgery before we ate him. The other cucumber that has matured seems fine. We plan to eat it next week.

This morning we woke up and discovered that all the tar paper NB tacked down so carefully has buckled up in the night. We can't really put down hardwood on an uneven surface -- we're not sure what we ought to do next. Or rather, we're going to rip up all those staples next and remove the paper. We're just not sure what we'll do after that to keep it from buckling again.

Canada Day Weekend

The Canada Day long weekend has come and gone. NB and I went to the Legislature on Sunday to sit around and watch one of our friends race his bike. We kept trying to figure out which one he was -- it's surprisingly difficult to tell guys in sunglasses and helmets apart when they zoom past you. Eventually we recognized him going by (in the third race we watched), but he only lasted for about 15 minutes before he was lapped and dropped out. In the meantime, we lounged around in the shade and did lazy-people things (like reading and swatting mosquitoes). During one of the races, a rabbit hopped out onto the track right by us. Luckily, the pacing motorcycle scared it back onto the lawn, where it proceeded to have lunch in a bed of petunias.

We waffled about whether to go see the fireworks, but we didn't really feel like riding out again when the evening came.

Yesterday we went to look at floors for the sunroom. We stopped at Home Depot first, where we discovered that they had a couple of shipments of oak hardwood on sale for $3.29 per square foot. We went to look at the laminate, but most of it was more expensive and not as nice-looking as the oak. After looking everything over, including some terrifically ugly lino that was more than $5 per square foot, we decided that the oak was probably our best bet. We bought it in a nice burgundy-cherry sort of finish. We'll see how difficult it is to put it in ourselves -- we bought an extra couple of boxes in case we screw it up badly.

NB has come down with a sore throat, so he's staying home and drinking tea today. It seems to be going around.

Sunroom Photos

Some photos of our finished (or almost-finished) sunroom:



It looks pretty much the same as our old sunroom, minus the deck and door.



What it looks like from the inside, with the floor as-yet unfinished.






A close up of my peonies, just 'cause I like them (they smell very nice!):



And just because it's such a great picture, I'm posting a photo my dad sent me of this year's Caterpillar Situation in Fort McMurray:



(You can click for a closeup. Isn't that great? In a really gross kind of way?)

Sunroom Action

Well, it looks like the contractors have shown up to work on the sunroom. Either that, or strange people are milling around our backyard, stealing building supplies. I might have actual progress photos to post in the near future.

The Weekend

NB and I spent a quiet weekend, as usual. On Saturday I went to the Farmers' Market and bought a backpack of vegetables. Then I went to a comic artists' meeting, but no one else showed up. I didn't mind. I brought my laptop and sketchbook, so I surfed the net until I decided no one was going to show, then I put the laptop away and went sketching. I got a ride home with NB after kung fu, and we went for dinner at Matahari. We haven't been there for a while because it's always busy now and we forget to make reservations.

On Sunday NB washed the car, while I bumped around the house and did small chores. We bought some new games and had fresh Farmers' Market pasta marinara for supper (de-seed and cut up 2 lbs. of Roma tomatoes; add about 6 cloves of garlic, 1/4 to 1/3 cup olive oil, and cook on medium for a few minutes, just until tomatoes become warm and a little soft; add a handful of shredded basil & serve). It's like eating warm bruschetta on pasta.

Today, the network is down at work. I've been bumping around all morning with nothing to do. I finally found this laptop and at least the wireless is up now. But otherwise, I'm pretty bored.

In the Garden

So, nothing is happening with our sunroom yet. We haven't heard anything. We probably won't hear anything until either workmen show up unexpectedly or snow falls. I've taken some photos of of our new deck and sunroom materials, sitting in our yard like toads on a log:





The first photo was taken about a week and a half ago, the second yesterday.

Apart from that, things have been springing up and blooming. I haven't been out in the yard much since we didn't want to disturb our bunny, but since he's wandered off to greener pastures (although I'm not sure where he'll find a backyard with more weeds than ours), I took the opportunity to mow the lawn and take some photos.

The nasturtiums I planted in the barrel out back haven't really leafed out yet, but several have started flowering:



The buds are fat on the peony out back:



The lilac bush beside the house is in full bloom. It smells sweet right by the back door, and I have to brush past it on the way out so I'm always shaking a few tiny flowers out of my helmet when I get to work.





A couple of the tomato plants have started to set fruit. The little Tumbler tomato is covered in little green tomatoes:



The Jet Star has grown up tall, but I haven't been very good at pinching back the side shoots, so it's still in flower. It's supposed to be quite a prolific bearer, though:



And just for fun, a before-and-after of our roasted vegetable disaster.

Yummy vegetables:



Look like yummy vegetables, but are barely on this side of edible:



This week, NB and I are planning our vacation. We're not sure where we're going to go yet, but I think we really need a week away from it all. We were talking about going camping, maybe in Waterton Lakes National Park, but that's probably not going to happen because we don't own any camping equipment. And also because bears are scary. It's more likely that we'll hike somewhere just on the other side of the BC border. We've hit Banff or Jasper for a few years now, and it's starting to become difficult to find short hikes we haven't already done in those areas. We've also been talking about putting a bike rack on the car, though, so we'll have to see where that leads, if it actually happens.

Pork was a success! It turns out the roast we got (from M&M) was pre-seasoned, so it was a bit salty even after washing, but it was overall a tasty supper. There are just enough leftovers for pork sandwiches for supper today.

One poker competition (computer versus computer, part of the AAAI conference) is now finished. More specifically, I guess we're finished with it. We've submitted our entry, and now we just have to wait for a month of computation to find out how we do. Waiting this long would be less of an issue if it hadn't turned out there was a bug at the last minute, despite all the testing we did. I had to make a last minute change, and now I get to worry for a month that the change broke something else. Oh well. Other than that, I think our chances are good to repeat last years sweep of the competitions, if not last year's crushing victories. Now we just have to work on the Vancouver man machine poker competition.

Weekend Experiments

Our backyard bunny went away for a couple of days, and we were starting to worry about it a little. Luckily, it came back and has been eating a swath through our flower bed. It's dug itself quite a sizeable bald spot in the rock plants, and it's slowly moving its nap spot towards the edge of the bed as it cleans out edible things within its immediate reach. For something that's mostly immobile, Bosworth II is surprisingly entertaining.

We tried making pasta with roasted vegetables today, but I left the veggies in the oven a touch too long, and they came out a little too burnt. Tomatoes are moist, so they fared all right, but we had heavy pepper and onion casualties. It's too bad, because the un-charred bits were quite tasty. I'll have to keep a closer eye on them next time.

The switch plate on our bathroom light switch cracked in half, and we finally got around to replacing it today. We got a brushed-brass plate that looks really good and seems to resist fingerprints. It looks so good that NB wants to replace all our switch plates now.

Other than that, the sunroom is still waiting on parts, and I'm going to continue experimenting with new recipes by attempting a pork roast tomorrow. With any luck, it will be tender and tasty rather than slightly charred.

Bosworth the Second

Our backyard bunny, Bosworth II, reclining on our cactus bed and building supplies:

Casa Gazza

Hi there! This is going to be the NB and JW family update blog, for all those little things in life too boring to write an e-mail about. Hopefully I'm not going to be the only one posting here.

I've called the blog Casa Gazza, (hopefully) meaning "Magpie House" in Italian. NB and I are both big fans of magpies. They're even amusing at 6:00 in the morning when they're playing magpie games on our window awning.

Anyway! The rain has finally stopped here. NB and I were getting tired of riding the bus in the middle of the summer. The traffic hasn't improved much even though the campus is half-empty. The wet weather has also given us a bumper crop of mosquitoes, to the point where we have to be careful when we open the front door. Other than that, not much is happening. I'll see if I can post some photos of sunroom non-progress in the next couple of days.