Brothers in poop

People find our blog through some pretty crazy keywords. Most of them have to do with well digging (sorry, folks, no practical information here), but there are some funny ones too: "suddenly have to pee", "absolute fucking idiots", "dating hand on breast", "mary poppins programming satanic", "how do i get rid of my stomach that hands over my waist".

Today we got one that I had to google myself: "poop on my head song". There we were, number two on the list. Awesome. But wait! Who is that at number one? Why, it's Bruno! Yes, Bruno the Brazilian, my former coworker, is number one of the 1,180,000 results for "poop on my head song". Way to go, us, and super way to go, Bruno!

I wonder

On Quantum Leap when Sam was in someone else's body and he wrote something down, was it in their handwriting or his?

More about the heat

I woke up cold this morning. Yes, it's August 7, and I had to put on slippers and a hoodie this morning. I guess this is what Canadian summers are like. By contrast, one year ago today was our last day in KC. It got up to 97F (36C) with a heat index of 105F (40.5C) that day. One year ago yesterday was the day we returned our borrowed air conditioning window unit, so one year ago today was quite miserable in our hot little house. I, for one, am extremely grateful that today I am not hectically packing and cleaning the house, while sweating up a storm. Dirt, dust and cat hair stick to sweaty flesh. I am grateful that I don't have to bathe in a shower curtain-less shower. I am also grateful that I won't be trying to sleep tonight in clothes I've been sweating in all day on an air mattress that keeps sticking to me.

I just checked weather.com, and it looks like folks in KC are having the same sort of weather again today. I truly hope that there is no one in KC going through what we had to go through a year ago today. It was miserable.

Good eats

There's a new recipe for ya'll on my myspace recipe dump. Yeehaw.

Sweat till you bleed

I knew that if I just waited long enough, Canada would deliver. And deliver it has! It's finally hot! Last night the weather didn't cool off as much as it usually does, so we are facing a hot day in our non-airconditioned apartment. It's certainly not nearly as bad as in our non-airconditioned house back in KC where we faced a kind of oppressive heat I hesitate to wish upon even my worst enemies.

Luckily for me, and now for you, I have some tricks up my sleeve for finding comfort in an overly warm apartment. I wrote an article about it over at the green site a while back. Give it a read and try out the techniques if you too are feeling the heat at home. Remember that it takes time for your body to adjust to the heat, especially if you work in a cold building all day. So be patient. You may want to eat ice cream or drink cold beer while your body adjusts!

Upchuck the Kool-Aid

Today, for the first time in at least two years, I bought toothpaste that wasn't Colgate Total, which is, of course, the most advanced toothpaste for your superior oral health. I bought Arm & Hammer instead. I feel a little guilty.

Sometimes advertising = good

Oh those crazy advertisers!

I just read this news story about an ad encouraging economic development in South Korea that uses a picture of the Calgary skyline. My first reaction was to think that the art director/designer who picked the photo didn't know what city it was and didn't think anyone else would know either. But the CEO of Calgary Economic Development thinks otherwise. Says he, "This is a testament to our city and what we're doing here." I wonder what the art director's boss had to say about the whole thing.

Matt is not dead

Don't worry; Matt's appendix hasn't ruptured. He's not dead. He's actually feeling better. If he was dead, though, I think this would be a good picture to blow up really big and have framed and displayed at the funeral.

iGoogle poetry

Something on Chelka's friend Amber's blog made me think that horoscopes would make really good poems if you just spaced them out all funny. So here's my horoscope poem for today:


Confronting an
                           emotional situation
                                                             today
          sounds like
          a
          smart idea,

but

                            be ready
              to turn down your volume
    so you don't come on

                                                  too strong.


On second thought, I think I have too much graphic design training in me to space out a poem like a poet instead of like a designer.

MIL blog

I read this blog post today and it made me think of Matt's mom. I wish she had a blog. That would be a good one to read, I bet.

Watch out, boys

Boom boom bah boom.

4th of July in Canada

Today has been rainy and cool. In short, crappy weather for the 4th of July. Even if there were supposed to be fireworks tonight, they would have been rained out. Our inaugural use of the football helmet mini grill coincided with the heaviest rains of the day (and the best crash of thunder I've heard in this country yet, which caused me to pump my fist in the air and cry out, "WOOOO!"). The grilled corn was tasty if not local, as were the traditional Independence Day root beer floats, but it was just not the same spending the 4th of July indoors on a gray, rainy day.

So I spent the day researching Canadian brand presence. Actually, I didn't. But I did just come across this article on the CBC website that lists the top ten iconic Canadian brands. They are the following:

1. Cirque du Soleil


2. Ski-Doo


3. CBC


4. Roots


5. Toronto Maple Leafs


6. Montreal Canadians


7. Calgary Stampede


8. IMAX


9. CN Tower


10. Terry Fox

I'm not sure how accurate this list is, as the agency who compiled the list admits that these were "not necessarily the most valuable iconic brands, but were the special favourites of our panel." I guess as an American, and therefore an outsider, I shouldn't speculate on iconic Canadian brands. But as an American, and this being the 4th of July, I feel it is my patriotic duty to butt in and have my say. And my say is thus: I didn't know Ski-Doo, IMAX, and Roots were Canadian companies. Upon arriving in Montreal, I was in fact confused as to why all these Canadians had Roots logos all over everything when the US Olympic athletes had Roots logos on their outfits in Athens.

I have much to learn about Canada. But not today. Today is for stars and stripes! I'm going to see if I can find fireworks on TV.

Past and present residents of Tallahaseee and Woodville

Last night I dreamt that on August 1, Matt and I were moving into a house with his brother Dan. I think the house was in Tallahassee. It was certainly in a nasty hot climate like that. Where the garage door should have been was a giant screen door, and the space that should have been the garage was the living room. There was still a drive way leading up to the garage/living room though, and to the side of it there was a two-sided, somewhat rounded bookcase. We were only allowed to put our stuff on one side. The neighbors got the other. I was really not looking forward to this move, because I liked our current apartment better than this trashy house.

This is completely unrelated to the above paragraph. Danger Kitty has gotten so much nicer in his old age. He turned five a month and a half ago. He follows Matt around all the time just like always, but he's much more cuddly and insistant that Matt pet him. When I am home alone, Danger Kitty gets lonely after a while and come over to squeak at me and rub against my legs. It's nice to have a 20+ pound ball of fur wanting to love you.

Edward Abbey rules

I read this quote on the 90% Emissions Reduction email list.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

From a speech that Edward Abbey gave in Colorado, which was published in High Country News in the 1970s or early 1980s under the title "Joy, Shipmates, Joy."

yumyum

Right now I am eating homemade yogurt made from local, organic milk topped with strawberry-rhubarb sauce made from local strawberries and rhubarb. This is the first time I've ever had rhubarb that I can remember and definitely the first time I've ever cooked with it. The sauce turned out sweeter than expected, and the yogurt turned out more sour than expected, so the mix is delicious. I hope you are enjoying fresh local produce wherever you are!

Dear Quebecers

Your accent is too hard to understand. Why don't you speak real French? Tabarnac!

Ode to Lindsay Smith

Once upon a time, when the interlux was a much smaller place, young people used to buy domains and then "host" other people's personal websites by giving them their own directory and the password to the ftp account. One wishing to be hosted had to first prove that she was worthy of being hosted, usually by having a cool-looking site on a free hosting site like Angelfire, and hope that a hoster with whom she had "applied" would let her on board.

In nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, both Matt and I were approved and hosted by one Lindsay Smith of offcentre.net. At the time, we lived two time-zones away from each other and, of course, had two very separate web sites. In fact, neither of us knew the other was hoping to be hosted by Lindsay until we were both approved. Both of us were very excited at the time. Neither of us can remember why now.

Lindsay's site was large and content heavy with one section or another always under construction with promises that it would all be up and working soon. She was constantly redesigning the site, often before the previous version was finished. The web archive's last recorded version of the site was version 7.

And now the site is gone. No one owns the domain anymore. It makes me a little sad. Even though I rarely visited, I always knew that if I typed offcentre.net into my address bar, there would be Lindsay's somewhat-finished site with already-past due dates still posted on the homepage. Not anymore.

In rememberance of Lindsay "Red" Smith, I present to you now this link to what I can only assume was Lindsay's own free-hosted site before she decided to take matters into her own hands and host her site herself.

UPDATE: I also found her current journal in case you are curious. She was the first Lindsay Smith on a search on myspace too. Makes me feel like the internet is small again, like the good old days.

BOOM!

This morning I was lying in bed, telling myself that I needed to get up and get to work but complaining that I was so tired and no one was expecting me anywhere and the bed was so comfy and I could sleep just a little longer when BOOM! An explosion! Up I jumped! Looking out the window, we couldn't see anything out of the ordinary except a bunch of people gathering on the sidewalk and a little boy excitedly shouting, "Fire! Fire!" I threw on some clothes and went outside but by the time I got down there, there was no fire left. I spoke with the maintenance lady from our building who was putting out the trash, and she told me what happened: two manhole covers exploded open! One of them was under a car at the time, and the car was thrown off the road. There was fire coming out of the now-open holes in the ground, (although by the time I got downstairs, it was just smoke) so she thought it was a gas pipe explosion. Our street is now closed off, and there are firemen everywhere, although they don't seem to be doing a whole lot. (And their trucks have been idling this whole time! Damn energy wasters!) I don't think we are allowed to leave our building without being escorted by the firemen, as we are in the danger zone, roped off by orange (not just yellow!) tape.

Baseline

Over the past week, I've tried to come up with a baseline for the 90% challenge that I've decided to take on. (Matt is sort of taking it on.) Because we are not in control of and cannot track progress in some of the categories, we are not going to be able to do the whole challenge, but I still think it will be fun to see how low we can go in the other categories. Here is where we stand now.

GASOLINE
We are allowed 50 gallons each per year or .137 gallons each per day. According to the challenge rules, public transportation can be calculated at 100 miles per gallon. That means we are allowed to go 5000 miles per year or 13.7 miles each day on public transportation. We don't have a car anymore, so this is almost the only kind of transportation we use. I have seen a few sites that say that air travel is roughly around the same mpg per person. I know that I am going to be going to KC by air this winter, which is approximately 2400 miles round trip. If I don't want to bust my 90% allotment, I'll only get about 7 miles each day on public transportation. (Of course, that doesn't count all the gas I'll eat up once I get to KC, which has no public transportation to speak of! And it's 33 miles just from the airport to my mom's house!) I think this is entirely doable since I don't really go that many places, and I don't take public transportation every day. It's 5 miles round trip to Mary's house and 3.5 miles round trip to Twist Image. Anyway, enough rambling about gasoline.
Baseline: On a daily basis, we already use 90% less than the average American uses.

ELECTRICITY
We are allowed 90 kwH per month. According to our latest electric bill, we used 125 kwH last month. One caveat: the laundry machines are communal for the building, so I can't track that energy usage.
Baseline: We currently use 86% less than the average American uses. Woop!

HEATING AND COOKING ENERGY
We are allowed 100 therms or 283 cubic meters per year or 23.5 cubic meters per month. This one is tricky because we don't pay for (and are not in control of) the natural gas that is used for heating the apartment or for heating the water. We only pay for cooking fuel. I only found a couple sites that broke down natural gas usage by category, and they were not really in agreement. So I'm going with 10%. That means we are allowed 2 cubic meters each month for cooking. The latest natural gas bill I could find was from January, and we had used 14 cubic meters of natural gas. I'm not sure if this is something we'll be able to adjust that much. Also, if 2 cubic meters sounds way off to anyone, please let me know!
Baseline: We use roughly 30% less than the average American uses.

GARBAGE
We are allowed 6.3 pounds of garbage and .9 pounds of recycling each week. In the past four days, we've accumulated 5 pounds of garbage and 3.25 pounds of recycling. At that rate, we'd have 8.75 pounds of garbage and 5.7 pounds of recycling, or 14.45 pounds total. I know that a great deal of our garbage is cat litter/poop and vegetable scraps that could be composted. Because we live in an apartment, there is nothing we can do about the cat waste. The vegetable scraps are a different matter. Our friend MA has a compost pile. There are various places in town that accept scraps for community composting programs. We could try a worm bin. I am confident that we can and will improve a great deal in this category. We should also try to buy in bulk more and remember our cloth shopping bags to cut down on the amount of packaging we trash/recycle. One bit of progress already: today we brewed beer. We would have to throw away 4.5 pounds of spent grains and hops, but instead, I saved them and will get them to a compost pile soon!
Baseline: We throw out/recycle 53% less stuff than the average American.

WATER
We are allowed 20 gallons each day. Unfortunately, we can't track this since we are not billed for our water usage. I have a feeling that we are most certainly not down to 10% of the average, but I don't think we use as much as most people either. We certainly don't shower as much as normal people! :) Brewing beer uses a whole lot of water. We probably used at least 20 gallons just to make a 5 gallon batch of beer. I know that at least 5 of those gallons were unnecessary. (Yes, you know what I'm talking about, Matthew!) I'm sure that as we get more brewing experience, we will streamline our process in terms of time, energy and resources used.

CONSUMER GOODS
We are allowed $1000 per year or $83 per month. We don't spend a whole lot of money on things other than edibles for us and the cats, so I figured we were doing pretty well on this one. Then I added up how much money we spent on consumer goods this past month, and it was pretty eye opening. This last month, we spent approximately $450 dollars on clothes, a brew pot, curtains, a diva cup (which is totally awesome!), and a book by Karl Marx. At least half of that was on the clothes, and Matt and I are definitely not the most fashionable people you'll ever meet! I got a "job" and needed some new duds for that, and Matt caught the shopping bug. The last time we bought clothes before that... I honestly can't remember. However, for the sake of being fair, I'm going to count all of the money we spent for our baseline. After all, we have spent a lot on consumer goods in the past year, since we moved to a new city and had to buy a lot of furniture, etc. And it didn't all come from Craigslist.
Baseline: We currently spend 46% less than the average American on consumer goods.

FOOD
This is a tricky category. We are supposed to aim for 70% of our food being local and organic, 25% being dry bulk items, and 5% being the rest. This is very hard to approximate. What do you do about bread that is baked locally (or even in our own home!) but made with olive oil from Italy? What about the beer we brew? It uses lots of water and natural gas to make, but in turn, we re-use the same bottles and don't have to transport it anywhere (or package or advertise). In light of these concerns, I've decided to revamp this category a bit. We are now going to aim for 70% of food being local -- organic or not. I believe that while organice, sustainable growing practices are extremely important, eating locally and in season is even more important. This 70% will include anything we make at home (bread, beer, yogurt, etc) even if a few of the ingredients are not local. The other two food categories are basically the same.
Baseline According to last week's grocery list, our groceries were roughly 45% local, 10% dry bulk, and 45% everything else.