It is a “how the hell is it Friday already?” kind of week. It’s been a combination of ongoing clean-up from the ice storm, restocking, general maintenance, and a dollop of guilt. Hopefully the guilt will help me keep this short.
Over the years, like everyone else in the area, we’ve lost all but our youngest Ash trees to the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle. This has left us with a good number of logs lying about, cut to firewood lengths by the crew we hire to take them down. Cleanup from the storm is going to increase that substantially, as well as provide a big supply of smaller branches that will make good kindling. Last week we cleared some new space for a new wood storage rack, and I spent Monday afternoon splitting logs. We’ve got a little “5 Ton” electric splitter that does a great job on smaller logs but chokes on these. So I got the wedge axe and the sledgehammer out and took to splitting them old school. Man, that’s tough work, but I made a significant dent in the pile before running out of steam.
I had planned to pick The task up on Tuesday, despite some complaining muscles, but winter is still hanging on and had other ideas:
A week into April and winter is still hanging on.
There are still many other small jobs to take care of, so the rest of the day was spent getting something done, warming up, getting another thing done, warming up, and so on. Biggest achievement: getting the cable back on our laundry line, after I managed to knock it off while trying to clear it from ice. It took me a while to remember that the way to get this done is not to set a ladder in a precarious position on the tree the far end is attached to, fearing that one slip will send me crashing onto the large rocks below, but to disconnect it at the house side, stretch up (I can just barely reach it), pull the wheel assembly off, re-thread the line, hook it back up and then do the tough part, which is re-tensioning it, back at the house where it can be dropped to chest level. I’m hoping that when this inevitably happens again, I remember this instead of spending 30 minutes re-discovering a non-life-threatening solution all over again.
I also managed to release NovelWriterExtract, a tool that will be of use for a specific kind of writer who is highly analytical when it comes to reviewing their work, and who is using novelWriter as their writing tool. So, like maybe five people. But hey, I’m one of those five and I’m happy about it!
Wednesday started with a restocking run. We aim to stockpile 4-6 weeks of non-perishables with a single trip to Costco, but this time with an added layer of complexity: aggressively minimizing product coming from the country run by a tariff-obsessed madman. By the time I’d returned from that, the new resin printer I’d picked up at a decent discount for In3D arrived. I have a project that needs a big pint volume, and this thing is huge!
This box is big!
It’s so big that I had to do some significant re-arranging of the print shop. I have a mid-sized CNC machine that takes up a lot of room for nothing. It’s not in use because the amount of sawdust it creates would turn the rest of the shop into a disaster area. The printing operation prefers nice clean, dust-free, almost clean room conditions. The CNC will move to the garage, but at the moment the garage is a disaster area in need of a major renovation (not to mention a plan and a bucket of money) so the CNC sits here idle. I stole the clearance space the CNC would need to operate to move a shelf, thus giving me room to move a few other things around, which ultimately cleared space for this monster. By the time all that was done, I was both exhausted and “out of spoons”*. Setup, calibration and test prints have been deferred until I find more time.
Thursday was a trip to Toronto to go to the dentist. There are some good reasons why we endure a two hour drive each way to go for a routine dental appointment, but I won’t bother going into them here except to say that if you’re closer to the Sheppard and Warden area, look up Dr. Lindzon. I had gone in with fears that a broken tooth was going to require an expensive crown, but fortunately all that was required was a filling (okay, there’s one of the reasons; other dentists I’ve used would have had me into an expensive crown in no time, he’s more about the right level of care than bringing home the big bucks).
Then more re-stocking. First at Blue Sky Supermarket. Blue Sky is a massive supermarket full of foods you’d find in a Southeast Asian menu. If we can even find an ingredient out here in the country, the cost will be ridiculous. For example, we can buy a tiny bottle of sesame oil for $12 here or get a huge one at Blue Sky for $7. They also have a huge selection of spices and spice mixes at half the price of Costco’s limited selection. Even then, we couldn’t find a couple of items like Poha, a flattened rice common to Indian cuisine. Enter Namaste Indian Supermarket, where we picked up the last few items on the list including Poha and Fenugreek leaves.
This left us hungry, so we decided to look for fast food that can’t be found in our small town. This used to mean a quest for Burritos, but a year or so ago a branch of Fat Bastard Burrito opened in town, so this time we went on a quest for Shawarma. Our first stop was Towny Shawarama. A ramshackle pile of equipment in place of a cash register and a menu board with gaping holes where the prices should be put us off, despite a 4.8 rating on Google. Our next attempt was at Big Bites Shawarma, where staff were cleaning the front window as we approached. As my wife observed, if you’re wiping down the front window, everything else has already been cleaned. This was confirmed as we entered a spotless shop. I got a freakin’ huge Shawarma, she got a Falafel plate. Prices were more than reasonable, service was great and the food was excellent. Definitely earmarked for a return visit.
The drive back wasn’t bad, considering my low tolerance for urban traffic these days. I can still switch into “GTA Driving Mode”, which requires a strange mixture of patience, aggression, and courtesy, but isn’t much fun. As a friend once observed, the key is to be able to read the “automotive body language” of other drivers and respond appropriately. Still, driving in the city is far more demanding than the big source of complaint here, which is that sometimes it can take all of four minutes to get over the bridge. Four entire minutes! This makes the Toronto driver in me laugh, hard. Other than that, we had a mixture of snow and rain on the trip back, none of it heavy enough to be a concern.
Now here it is Friday evening. I’d started this post in the morning, hoping to fire it off quickly and get on with the day. Alas I had forgotten that we had a visitor scheduled to drop in this morning, so that plan was replaced by a relatively intense effort to clean the house. As it turned out, our guest couldn’t make it, but heck, the place looks better!
Oh yeah, the guilt. Tomorrow is the Annual General Meeting for Spirit of the Hills, our local arts association. I still have responsibility for managing our membership and over this week I have both failed to send our President a current membership report and to remind members who haven’t renewed that they have to do so before the AGM. Clearly some stuff needs to get done tonight! Then, last but not least there’s the feeling — I’m not sure which word describes it best, guilt, remorse, or frustration — the feeling that through all of this I’ve written maybe 100 more words of outline for the novel. A novel that I wanted to finish a year ago, and now each time I work on it, completion seems to get more distant. In part, I blame recently reading A Passion for Narrative, by Jack Hodgins and his emphasis on the benefits of reviewing, re-drafting, and repeatedly honing a manuscript until it’s the best it can be. This has left me in dread of being five years down the road, working on draft nine. It’s a somewhat irrational dread, but a writer’s mind can pay on them this way, and I am not immune.
* Spoons are a concept I first discovered in the autistic community. This references the limited pool of resources we have for doing things that neurotypical people seem to do effortlessly, such as interacting with other humans at a social level. At some point we run out of this resource, and are at risk of going into a meltdown. In this case, the spacial reasoning required for me to figure out how to move everything around and still make it all fit in some kind of workable configuration pretty much exhausted my abstract thinking resources, so doing any more actual work, or writing for that matter, wasn’t really possible.
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