Category: General

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The counter top refinished

Clara is out of town, which leaves me in the house without adult supervision. This immediately prompts me to conduct myself in such a fashion as I cannot when she is around.

Now, before you start planning the wild parties, I should mention that much of this centres on Clara being allergic to “fumy” substances and fish. Of particular note is polyurethane, since it can level people who aren’t that sensitive, too.

Our countertops in the kitchen were a stop gap measure to allow for the plumbers to finish. I ordered the cabinets from Ikea, and were quite content with them. However, when I went to order the counter top, they were backlogged and it would require about 2 to 3 weeks before they could be finished. At the same time, Gary, my plumber, wanted me to get this finished so he could install the kitchen sink and finish up the plumbing for the new house.

Two of the things that came with the cabinets were several large cover plates. These are the finish pieces that cover the white cabinet carcasses and match the doors. However, the cabinets, like the doors, were also pine finished and I didn’t need them. Sending them back would have cost more than it was worth and I was wondering what to do with them. Now, I had a plan.

I ran them through the table saw to cut them to size, and cut off backers. Then, I used them as counter tops that actually matched the cabinets. This would hold me until the real counter tops could be delivered and installed and I would just have to reinstall the sink afterwards. However, when we put them in, they looked so nice that we held off on ordering the proper counter tops. That was in the spring of 2005, and they have been in place since then.

counter image
The refinished counter top.

The one downfall of this is, despite looking nice, they are made out of laminated particle board and dent and mark easily. However, a couple of coats of polyurethane every two years keeps them reasonably well protected.

They are showing their age, and I don’t think I’ll refinish them again. Instead, I’m kind of thinking a nice oak plywood counter top in a few years, with a slightly darker stain for contrast. But, that should be about two more years down the line, given the length of time refinishing them lasts.

Of course, with Clara gone, the first meal prepared on them involved scallops…

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St. Patrick’s Day

You would think that being of Irish descent, although Northern Irish Protestant descent, you’d get St. Patrick’s Day as a bit of a holiday.

However, being a musician who plays mostly Celtic music, the possibility of a holiday is a bit out of reach. I’m popping over to the Airport Chalet Hotel tomorrow night, the United Church Sunday afternoon, and playing in the lobby to open for Maeve Mackinnon at the Yukon Arts Centre Sunday night.

Holiday? That ain’t happening…

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The Tōhoku earthquake: Two years later

Today, March 11th, marks the second anniversary of the Tōhoku megathrust earthquake and tsunami that struck the east coast of northern Japan, killing an estimated 20,000 people and destroying or damaging over 1,000,000 buildings. The earthquake, with a magnitude of 9.03 M, took place on the seabed 70 km offshore, generating a tsunami that reached a height of 15 m in some locations. This was the largest recorded earthquake to hit Japan, and the fifth largest instrumentally recorded earthquake in history. The quake actually moved the earth’s axis about 7 cm, resulting in shortening the length of a day by 1.8 microseconds. The World Bank estimates the costs of damages at US $235 billion, the most costly natural disaster in human history.

Two years later, many residents of the affected areas have experienced great difficulty beyond the immediate tragedy. Many are still in temporary housing and the rate of recovery operations have been complicated by issues such as failure to allow people to rebuild in some of the affected areas and the clearing of others. Many people are experiencing the difficulty of needing to rebuild their homes, while still being stuck with the burden of needing to pay the mortgages on the destroyed ones. It is difficult to even consider when the lives of many will ever revert to some semblance of “normal.” For many, it never will. Of particular issue is the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant complex and its future ramifications for resettling the immediate area.

People have, by nature, an inability to accept the scope of such a disaster. It is difficult to conceive of such consequences from a single act of nature. Perhaps we should consider the human cost in one way that may let us appreciate its effects.

The median age of the population of Japan is 44.6 years. While this is strictly a rounding figure and may not be totally accurate for our considerations, it could be considered that each of the victims may have ab0ut 44 years of friends, family, loves, fears, and all of the other things that make up a lifetime. In this view,  the death of 20,000 people reflects a loss of 892,000 years of cumulative human experience, and maybe this is a perspective that makes such a disaster more easy to comprehend, and mourn…

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Remiss

I’ve been remiss. As you can see, it has been a bit since I put up my last blog post.

I have been busy, with work, writing a play, coming to some arrangements on my What’s Up Yukon column (now regularly scheduled for every two weeks), emceeing an interactive murder mystery, and now, prepping playing for St. Patrick’s Day.

That being said, I’ve decided to be somewhat more dedicated. Honest. I promise…

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Christmas Eve

Another Christmas Eve is here and, since I know many who do not celebrate Christmas, I will simply pass on my standard sentiment. But to preface that, on December 24, 1968, Wlliam Anders took what is probably my favourite, and in my view, the most important Christmas picture.

earthrise, Dec. 24, 1968

Peace on earth, goodwill towards all.

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Remembrance Day

On this Remembrance Day, like others, I am constantly amazed at how lucky we were that all of our immediate relatives who served in recent memory came home.

Dad's medals

Dad’s medals, Korean Service medal second from right.

My mother’s three older brothers served in bomber crews through much of World War II. Dad served on a destroyer in Korea.

For some frame of reference, the average life span of a bomber crew member during most of the war was three missions. While the navy was certainly safer in Korea, we did take losses on the HMCS Iroquois in 1952 and this is always a possibility in war.

All but Uncle Bob are gone now, but on this day, we remember all of those didn’t return, or returned broken. They went willingly. And all of them, whether for the Boer War, Spain, World Wars I and II, Korea, a myriad of peacekeeping missions, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan or Libya, went knowing that they may not return. That, in itself, is worth remembering, and probably for more than one day a year…

 

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Ever have one of “those” days?

Every so often, the Fates look at a randomly-generated list of names, run their finger down the list and say, “Hmm. Let’s just get… ah, that guy.” Today, it was my day.

My work day started with me forgetting to bring my office keys. This creates a few issues throughout the day and means I need to constantly borrow a key from someone else. In short, it’s a real inconvenience.

Then, after a while, I headed out to my physiotherapy appointment. I arrived on time, or so I thought. The time I put in my appointment calendar was 9:40 but, apparently, my appointment was for 9:20 and I missed it. By the way, my physiotherapist has no open times this week and is off next week.

I get back to the office to set up for this afternoon’s class. I have a class on routing and remote access servers. Guess what? My server has crashed some time this morning. The means I end up spending an afternoon trying to explain a practical-oriented class on an abstract concept with no way to actually demonstrate how you configure things.

On top of that, the online class software we use doesn’t like working with dual monitors. Trying to put notes on the whiteboard was interesting since, every character I typed, the window jumped from monitor to monitor. Try to concentrate while watching your workspace jump from one monitor to the other every time you type a letter.

With all the kerfuffle, I didn’t get a chance to have lunch. That’s OK, since I have an ice pack in it so it will last long enough to take home at the end of the day, put it in the fridge, and bring it tomorrow. As I sit at home writing this, guess what is still sitting back in my office.

So, in short, everything I touched today either broke or failed to work properly. You can understand why I’m afraid to pee…

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An odd start to a morning

This morning started in quite an odd, but interesting, manner. The oddity began when I went out the front door to drive to work. On the fence between the front and the back yards, there were several magpies. They were looking over the fence and squawking like they were upset over something. So, I figured I’d walk over and look.

This was the odd part. Magpies are members of the jay family, which includes crows and ravens. And, if you’ve ever had any experience with magpies, you’ll know they are incredibly wary of people. Try to walk up to a magpie and see how quickly they disappear. This time, though, they didn’t. I was about two feet from the nearest one sitting on the fence.

Near the base of the fence, lying on the ground, was a dead magpie. The other magpies seemed far more interested in the dead one than me. They perched on the fence and squawked. Bagging up the dead magpie and putting it in the garbage container at that point didn’t seem appropriate, so for some reason I muttered, “Excuse me,”  walked back to the truck and drove to work.

When I came home, I dealt with the dead magpie. There was not a mark on the magpie so it wasn’t a predator of some sort that killed it. I don’t know what happened to it. It didn’t seem old.

The odd part is that, this morning, I felt like I had attended a funeral. Since they didn’t fly off like they normally would, I felt like I was invited. I don’t know if this is common behaviour with magpies, but if funeral ceremonies are good enough for people, they should be good enough for them, too…

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An era ends

Today, Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the Moon, passed away at the age of 82. And, it is difficult to describe how the world seems a bit different.

I remember watching the first steps on the Moon, in grainy black and white, from our living room in Point Edward, NS. It seemed momentous and unbelievable at the same time. I watched the space program from its beginning and the rate of achievements was incredible. From Yuri Gagarin’s first flight (which was not presented as a momentous occasion) and Alan Sheppard’s first suborbital flight (which was presented as momentous) in 1961 to actually landing on the Moon in 1969 seemed like progress had no bounds. That the program would be cut a few years later seemed impossible at the time.

Today, we often see the process of putting man in space in light of the Shuttle program: often compared to riding a bus. The fact that two were lost didn’t seem to change that for any length of time. Computers take off, fly and land commercial airliners and control so many aspects of our lives.

But in thoseQuote days, given the level of technology at the time and the fact that much of what was being done on each mission was done for the first time, little was available for testing many of the processes involved in each mission. Flying to the Moon at the time was often done on the old pilot’s adage of flying “on a wing and a prayer,” like the days of wooden ships and iron men sailing towards a strange horizon. And, given the level of experience of each of those mission crews, the level of risk in untested, untried vehicles in a harsh environment was known. Despite this, they went anyway and history was made.

Neil Armstrong is gone and the world is something less for it. One less hero is left. And, there aren’t really many potential heroes to replace him available…

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A semiproductive day

I started the day with three jobs to do. However, fate hath kicked me in the teeth again and each of the three are only partly done.

I wanted to finish the water system in the camper. After much cursing, swearing and expressing myself in a less than “fit for all audiences” manner, I did install the last fitting and nothing leaks. Yee hah! However, the pump for running from the water tank rather than a city water system doesn’t work. I suspect I have a minor wiring issue and will look at it tomorrow. All in all, this job is 98% done, so I was reasonably successful.

Job number 2 was wiring the trailer lights on the Escape. I had a hitch installed and ordered a factory wiring harness for it. The harness came in today and I went to plug it in and make sure it worked. It didn’t. I spent about 30 minutes tracking wiring until I discovered that the truck doesn’t come with the two fuses required for the trailer lights. I need a 15 and 20 amp mini fuse. I only managed to find the 15 amp one and have to go downtown tomorrow to get the other. This job is about 90% done, so I shouldn’t complain.

Lastly, it’s time to paint the old pickup and sell it. I don’t totally want to sell it, but having two pickups is sort of redundant. It’s a 1987 Ford F250 with a 460 cu. in. motor. It needs a bit of touch up on both sides. I picked up the paint and went to mask it but ran out of masking tape. I did, however, get one side painted and it looks nice. Oh, well. This one is 50% done I guess. However, tomorrow, the forecast is rain so I’ll either have to run a tarp over the truck or wait until a few days from now to finish this job.

So, three jobs to do and none finished. Maybe, tomorrow will be a bit more productive…