Sunday, January 11, 2009

K-OS Ain't Just a Rapper from Toronto

Hello, fans of sports!!!
I started this post in early January, but I didn't finish it. I'm finishing it because it had some sweet, sweet bloggold in it. More retro posts are on the way...stay tuned

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Our house is in K-OS. Khaotic Operating System v1.0 - that's what our furnace and Internet connections are running on. I always capitolize "Internet". I guess it's because I see it as an entity all unto its own.

Our stuff was delivered last Monday morning and it was a near death experience for me. I almost froze to death. I know, I know...I was not actually close to freezing to death, but what would this blog be without a bit of overzealous exaggeration? In the words of my mother when I used to throw a teeny-bopper tantrum and claim that I would die if I didn't get borrow her car on a really stormy night to go to Hamilton to visit my cousin Marcia, "People don't die that easily" (true story). She was, and still is, so logical. In all seriousness, I wasn't close to death due to freezing, but maybe I was close to taking my own life because I was slowly freezing to death and I was feeling like I'd rather get the whole death business overwith quickly.

The garage door and front door were open while the movers brought our posessions into the house. The thermostat stopped dropping at 40 degrees F - the point at which I had assumed the cold from the outside and the heat from the furnace came to impasse.


I was thinking, "stop being a wuss...it's not that bad. 40 isn't even below freezing", yet my limbs were starting to ache, I couldn't feel my feet or fingers. When the movers weren't around, I'd get up and jump around and make high-pitched squealing noises in an unsuccessful attempt to get blood pumping through my very purple arteries. Jennifer Beals and Sarah Wolf both would have been proud of the Flashdance I did in the spirit of warming up. Lots of running on the spot.


I started walking around the house to keep from turning into Jack Torrence.



*note, the picture above was taken from the Affordable Housing Institute blog. High-larious.


While I was walking, I saw one of the movers putting together one of our chairs.

The mover was sweating because he was actually doing something physical, rather than just sedentarily whining about how cold he was (he probably wouldn't keep his job if he was more the latter than the former). As he leaned over the chair to screw the legs onto it, I noticed that big drops of sweat were dripping from his face onto the seat of the chair. First of all, gross. Second of all, yuck. I turned the other way, like I usually did when I couldn't watch what the movers were doing to my stuff.
A few mins later, I walked past the chair he sweated on and I noticed that the sweat had beaded on the cushion and hadn't soaked in. Great, I thought. I'll just brush that sweat off of there and perhaps absorb any remaining heat left in it. Well, sure enough, the beads of sweat were frozen solid. Frozen before they could even begin to soak into the cushion. That's when I realized it wasn't 40 degrees in the house. It was probably -40! The forecast that morning called for -25 Celcius and that was before the wind chill. I'm proud to report that I'm not a wuss.

So - do you like what we've done with the place?











And for your viewing pleasure...WTF? I don't know which video is worse. The second one looks totally Canadian, and if it's not, that makes it extra disgraceful, if ever one could be so disgraced.







Oh, and while I was searching for the videos above (yes, I actually looked for them. You get what you pay for and YouTube is free), I found this awesome picture of the band Toto. Be sure to scroll all the way to the right. Enjoy


Sunday, January 4, 2009

Someone Left Some Snow at Our House

So, someone left some snow at our house. Obviously, the "No Dumping" sign we put up was ignored. Sean and I had to go clean up the mess.

About 30cm of snow fell in the last 24h here in T Bay. Sean diligently blew out his parents' driveway in the morning while it was still snowing.



New James Bond villian - Dr. sNOw



In the afternoon when the skies cleared, we headed over to our place to clear the driveway there by good ole fashioned shovel power.
Holy crap!! Who the...? What the what? What? Are you serious? Let me tell you - a snowblower is definitely going to be on the wedding registry. Check out the drift on top of the garage.


Good thing the plow came by to make this blog post even more shocking.



Closeup of the drift on the roof



A couple of shots of the first pass with the shovel



Me, hiding behind the drift. It's only going to get larger.



You know all those uninformed things that parents say to explain snow to kids? God has dandruf and his head is really itchy. Angels are getting a wing trim. Zeus is sawing extruded styrofoam insulation for his latest home project. Woogie, the great freckled camel in the sky is shearing his lavender sheep. Etc, etc.
Well, here's a neat website regarding snow and how it works. The link below will take you to some fun lies people tell about snow. This will break your heart if you think water has emotions or a sense of nostalga.