Tomorrow night is the monthly quiz night at Hurley’s Irish Pub. Hosted this month by the inimitable Walter, it’s sure to be a fun and varied bunch of trivia. Join us at 8pm. You might win a prize!
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Monthly Archives: January 2005
WTF am I?
So for those of you who didn’t successfully Google last week’s photo quiz, the bronze boar is in the middle of a market in the beautiful city of Florence, Italy. That photo was taken a few hours before I proposed to Jen.
This week I’m in another foreign city, slightly closer to home. You shouldn’t have to Google this one (and you probably wouldn’t be able to anyway!). Sorry I’m not in it, I was behind the camera.
Words of Christopher Moore
As the observant among you might have noticed from the sidebar, I’m reading The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore at the moment. Perusing his website I came across this quote in his blog which I liked so much I had to share.
Well, having done a whole bunch of research for a Jesus book that I wrote a few years ago, and therefore knowing that Christmas has nothing whatever to do with the historical birth of Christ, I’d have to say that the best way to honor the “meaning” of Christmas is with a spirit of peace, generosity, and forgiveness, because these are things the man for whom the holiday is named stood for. Of course that was before he became a Republican. Evidently now he just wants to bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq and keep Gay people from getting married.
Lonesome tonight
My beloved is boarding a plane to Tronna as I type, heading out to Mississauga for a week of trade show hell. I always miss her when she goes away, but I’m just gonna keep myself busy until she comes back. I plan to spend the weekend watching the movies that Jen isn’t interested in. I might also sand my wood (oooerr missus). I expect I’ll do a bit of cleaning, and maybe some cooking.
Then on Tuesday night it’s Hurley’s pubquiz night, I’ll be there begging and pleading for someone to let me on their team, there’s usually at least one team desperate enough to take me. Walter is hosting the quiz this month so I’m studying up on South American countries.
Finally Wednesday night will be spent at the woodshop, sanding my wood and measuring my box (don’t you love woodworking double entendres?)
Woodworking Lesson 4
I glued the various pieces of my mallet together last night and left it in a vice to cure. I used way too much glue, but I guess I’ll figure out the best quantities eventually. We also learned about planes; the kind that shave wood, not the kind with wings. Oh and I had my first woodworking injury, stabbed myself in the palm with my pencil.
Indian Yumminess
I had some fish in the freezer which was making the freezer smell and upsetting Jen, so I thought I’d better do something with it. I fried up some onions with garlic, ginger, bashed up mustard and cumin seeds, fenugreek, turmeric and salt. Hacked up the fish into bite size pieces and fried it up with the onions. Threw in some chopped up tomatoes and the juice from the can. Simmered for a little while and served my delicious fish curry on a bed of lemon and mustard seed flavoured rice.
Of course, an indian meal isn’t an indian meal without onion bhajis, so I sliced up an onion and mixed it with some grated sweet potato, then made a batter with flour, chili powder, turmeric and salt mixed with water. Deep-frying is a real pain when you don’t own a deep-fryer, so after mixing the batter in with the onion and sweet potato, I put it all in a hot frying pan, spreading it out nice and flat for even cooking. In hindsight I should’ve cooked it in smaller batches because the large pancake type thing I created was hard to turn over, but I managed and got it good and crispy on both sides. Delicious!
My Delicate Princess
My wife is always cold. Well in winter she is anyway. Doesn’t matter how high we crank the thermostat, if it’s cold outside, she’s still cold. I bought her some cozy flannel pyjamas for Xmas, but even they aren’t enough. She’s taken to coming to bed wearing several layers. The pyjamas, at least one pair of socks, a t-shirt, a turtleneck. I even have to prepare a hot water bottle for her every night. I’m waiting for the gloves and hat to make an appearance.
Meanwhile, I’m in bed wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, and sweating like a pig.
Where Am I?
The weekly photo quiz continues. Last week’s piece of graffiti was a tough one. That particular work of art is on a building along the Lachine Canal bike path, between Atwater and De Seigneurs. This week we’re going further afield. Where was this photo taken? That’s me feeding the boar, looking all scrunched up because it was raining. Once again extra bonus brownie points awarded if you manage to produce a photo of the same location.
Click on the image to see it full size.
An Englishman in Canada
When I was going through the Canadian Immigration process five or six years ago (I’ve been here five years this month!), I kept an online diary which I later turned into a more useful resource for people considering emigrating to Canada. That page has been fairly dormant ever since, but it is still one of the most visited pages on my website.
I receive emails fairly regularly from people going through the immigration process, and I received a long one this weekend from a fellow Essex boy asking to know more about my experiences. That made me think maybe I should update the Canada page, but for now I’m going to blog about it.
My experiences as an immigrant in Canada have been nearly all good. The immigration process went smoothly, I settled in quickly with Jen, found work, got married, bought property, all things that have made me very happy. Apart from the occasional language issue (which is more my fault for being incredibly useless at learning new languages), I haven’t encountered any anti-immigrant sentiment. Maybe that’s because I’m a WASP male, who knows.
I only have one real regret about the time since I’ve been here. When I arrived in January 2000 I basically stayed in the apartment for the first few months. I guess I was a little nervous about venturing out into that new and strange world. I really wish I’d gone out there, explored the city, used that time before finding a job to immerse myself in my new surroundings.
After that initial reluctance though, I have been out there, I know the city fairly well now. I’ve joined clubs, taken courses, found pub quizzes to take part in, made new friends, discovered the local blog community and generally had a very good time.
Woodworking Lesson 3
Wednesday night was my third woodworking lesson. It looks like every Wednesday evening is going to be horrible weather; it was another scary drive to Hudson. The lesson was good though, we learned about glue and how to grind chisels, and started working on the mallet. Apart from briefly rasping my thumb everything went fairly well and I now have a reasonably shaped mallet handle ready for its head.
It’s an interesting process getting a piece of wood into the right shape, especially doing it with just hand tools. I’m sure it could be done in 30 seconds on some big machine but there is something very satisfying about doing it by hand. The downside is that leaning over a small piece of wood trying to accurately chip away with a chisel gets tricky when your hair keeps falling down over your eyes. I have to remember a hat next week.
Bernie and Michael sitting in a tree
So thanks to Ferrari and his boyfriend Michael, Bernie Ecclestone maintains his strangehold on premium Motorsport. He gets to keep his millions, and earn a few million more. OK so he’s giving the teams another $500 million, but that’s pocket change in the big F1 picture. What Bernie really needs to do is stop stiffing the fans. Give us high definition TV feeds. Give us more on-board cameras. Give us team radio eavesdropping. Give us lower ticket prices, and better access to the pit lanes. Oh and stop threatening to take your toys and go home whenever someone mentions tobacco advertising bans.
Brrrrrr!
It’s getting to the coldest part of the year now here in Montreal. Today we officially hit -40 with the wind chill. Wickedly cold; my dangly bits nearly froze off on the way to the train station this morning.
Even though I’ve been here for five years now, it still maintains some of the novelty value it had when I first arrived. It’s still bizarre to feel your snot freeze with the first intake of air through your nose. I still see how long I can go without blinking before my eyeballs start frosting over. The pain and numbness of my cheeks and toes still hold a certain fascination. Jen thinks I’m insane. Most Montrealers probably agree. Maybe I’ll be like them in another five years.
The Photo Quiz is back!
Yes, after a brief hiatus my weekly photo quiz is back. This week it’s with a bit of a twist. This is a photograph of a piece of graffiti somewhere in Montreal. Where is it? For extra bonus brownie points, get out there, photograph it from a different angle and post it on your blog. Click on the image to make it bigger, if you think it’ll help.
She didn’t send me
When I was first introduced to Michele, I thought it was kinda fun. I thought it was a nice way to increase my blog audience and find new blogs. I liked her approach better than BlogExplosion, which I have still resisted joining.
Sadly though, I’ve pretty much stopped reading her blog. For someone who writes so well, it’s amazing that she never manages to write anything of substance. She never expresses an opinion or says anything even remotely controversial. She’s just too “nice”. Her blog is a long list of inane questions and silly games designed to produce as many comments as possible. The questions get more desperate every day. How long can she keep this up? Where is the content??
Woodworking lesson 2
Last night, after a slightly terrifying drive through freezing rain to Hudson, I had my second fine woodworking course. I now know how to make a straight(ish) and square cut with a back saw, how to sharpen and use chisels, how a coping saw works and how to make a housing (aka dado) joint. My joint was good and tight, no glue required. I felt so proud. I even brought it home to show Jen.
Next week we learn about glue, and start making the mallet.
First quiz of 2005!
Tonight is the first Hurley’s quiz night of 2005. Due to lack of alternative volunteers, it will be hosted by yours truly, and my beautiful assistant, Jen. Come along, bring your friends, test your brain power against my ability to generate useless trivia questions. Superbly crafted Hurley’s gift certificates to the winners.
Details: Hurley’s Irish Pub on Crescent, starts at 8pm, upstairs in the reception room.
Science triumphs
A follow-up to my previous post. This article illustrates my point perfectly:
A 10-year-old British schoolgirl saved the lives of hundreds of people in southern Asia by warning them a wall of water was about to strike after learning about tsunamis at school.
She learned the warning signs of an impending tsunami in her geography class. Predictions based on hard science leave the kooky stuff standing.
Who knew?
Apparently, not one single astrologer saw devastation, death and destruction in the stars and planets before December 26th. One guy had the gall after the earthquake to say something like “oh yeah, now I look back at it, I see Jupiter colliding with Pluto which predicts the earthquake, I wonder why nobody noticed”; but beforehand? Nothing. No psychics, mediums or clairvoyants had premonitions of 150,000 people dying. Nobody saw it in the tea leaves. Nobody was told by their god to leave Indonesia because he/she/it planned on smiting the place in the next couple of days.
Despite the fact that these charlatans never manage to get it right, people continue to believe and continue to pay them large amounts of money for the right to be scammed.
The only thing that could have predicted the events of 26th December would have been a seismic early warning system built on scientific foundations. Sadly people will pay to have their birth chart done but they’ll be up in arms if they find out their taxes are being used to pay for some “pointless earthquake measuring thingy”.
Inches schminches
So the woodworking class went well. We didn’t actually do anything, it was mostly theory and a shopping list (I have to go buy a back saw and chisels at the weekend). Gary gave us our first piece of wood which will become the mallet handle and told us to take it home and bond with it. That seems to be going ok, I haven’t got a splinter yet anyway.
One thing that I find annoying is that apparently all measurements are done in inches. I realise that woodworking is steeped in tradition and it’s almost sacrilege to make changes, but sometimes change is good, and in the case of the metric system change is fantastic. I don’t want to do math involving eighths and sixteenths, I want to do multiples of ten. Call me lazy. Canada is supposedly a metric country, and yet the three hobbies I’ve tried since moving here, flying, cooking and woodwork, all insist on using outdated measurement units. Oh well, I have my six inch rule and I guess I’ll have to use it.
lambic the carpenter
Tonight I take my first introductory woodworking course. It’s quite exciting. I have no idea if I’ll be able to do anything remotely creative, but I’m going to try, and I’m going to have fun trying. The course is at the Merlin Wood School out near Hudson, run by Gary, a very nice Brit ex-pat. Apparently the first project is a mallet. Anybody can make a mallet, right??
Happy Non New Year
Jen and I don’t do new New Years Eve. No parties. No kissing and hugging a hundred people. No champagne. Instead we just stayed home, watched Regis (get well soon Dick!), drank tea, watched the ball drop, kissed each other, and went to bed. The perfect end to the year.
So what did we achieve in 2004? Well we had an amazing honeymoon. We painted the bathroom and survived. We got someone else to paint the rest of the house. We became bloggers. Jen became a blog addict. We gained a nephew. We made some new friends. We hosted a Lord of the Rings marathon. I cooked some new things. We bought new rugs (they really tie the rooms together) and new furniture. We hosted and played many pub quizzes but hardly won any. I managed to grow a few vegetables and Jen filled the garden with many pretty flowers. I wrote and implemented a web based purchasing card management system. Jen sold lots of cards. We did our bit to try to stop the re-election of war-mongering religious nutjobs. We failed. We gave as generously as we could to worthy causes. We arranged and executed a pretty damn good Christmas dinner.
Yep, that’s about it. Oh and we procrastinated about stuff. A lot.
Happy new year everyone. Let’s hope this one is a little more peaceful and enlightened.