I am sitting here in the gathering dark as our short winter day comes to an end. We had a serious wind storm here during the night and into the morning, and around 9:30 am or so our power failed. It is a bit past 4:00 pm now.

According to the BC Hydro outage phone system message, 180,000 people in the Lower Mainland are without power. I guess falling branches and swaying wires caused over a thousand separate power “incidents”, one of which was ours.

The power has flickered on for a second or two twice now: once at around 2:00 PM, and again just now. I am made increasingly aware of my dependence on electricity as the light gradually fades. I’ve gathered some candles and an oil lamp, but I’m saving those for when it becomes fully dark: another hour or so now.

But this lack of electricity is doing more than just making it dark. I have food in the fridge, but the left over pizza needs to be heated before I would want to eat it. The food is still okay in the fridge- but another four or five hours and I’m not so sure if I would trust much of it. We have a gas stove, but it is a modern thing that uses electricity to start rather than a pilot light…so there won’t be any cooking there, either. Of course I can’t watch TV, but the other things I usually do like read are becoming problematic as it gets darker. I spent the afternoon reading a book or two, but that is no longer possible: books don’t emit light, and my eyes can no longer make out the words on the page without straining. Thankfully our gas fireplaces both use old-style pilot lights, so I have those for heat.

So, I’m writing this on my laptop. It still has a couple of hours of battery power, and emits light so I can still read it. But of course, I can’t actually post this: no internet connection.

In less then ten hours, the loss of the trappings of our modern technical civilization has rendered me hungry and bored. If this were to last 24 hours, I’m not sure what my condition would be. I guess I would make do…

Power came back on at about 7:00 PM

My Mom’s 85th birthday was yesterday.  My sister Judy pulled together a surprise party, and as many of us kids as could make it were there. 

You can see the rest of the pictures by clicking on the above image.

We had a blast: I think Mom was at least somewhat surprised :)  It was great to have everyone together, Shane spoke Spanish, there was a great chat with Bryan towards the end, and food was (as always when Judy puts on a spread) delicious.  Thanks, everyone!  And Happy 85th, Mom!

I have a stainless steel coffee mug that Irene bought me a while back that I really like.  I use it several times a day.  It is an extremely well made Oxo mug, highly polished inside, so it took a long time to build up a stain.  But eventually, even a really good coffee mug needs more than just plain soap and water to make it sparkle.

So, I did a bit of research: how do you clean coffee stains from stainless steel coffee mugs?  The two suggestions I found that sounded easiest were baking soda or powdered dishwasher detergent.  In either case, you mix a tablespoon or so of powder with a full cup of water, shake or stir, and let it sit for a while.  Sounds easy enough.

I couldn’t find any baking soda, and Irene was already asleep for the night.  So dishwasher detergent it is.  We have those little tablets instead of granules, but I’m a handy guy: take the tablet still sealed in plastic, pound on the counter top- voila, powder.  I wasn’t sure exactly how much to use, but the entire tablet had been powdered, so I poured the whole thing in.  I added water from our “instant boiling water” dispenser, closed the cup, shook, and set it on the counter.  I then wandered back to my computer to continue my usual wanderings around the Internet.

A few minutes later, there was a BANG! and some rattling sounds from the direction of the kitchen.  I knew the kitten had been playing around a bit, so I went to see what kind of trouble she’d gotten into.  What I saw when I arrived took a few minutes to process.

On the floor was a strange black object.  On the counter was an odd looking stainless steel thing, and lots of water lying about.  After about 5 seconds I figured out what had happened: my coffee mug had exploded.

To be more precise, the dishwasher detergent had produced a lot of gas, and the sealed coffee mug was so air-tight (the Oxo mug is extremely well sealed) that it had no where to go.  It blew the top (plastic) part of the mug cleanly off.  I picked up the odd looking black bit, and realized it was the lid plus the ring that attaches the lid to the stainless steel.  I noticed it was designed to snap back into place, so snap it back in I did.  A few moments later, I found a rubber seal ring several feet away that was probably supposed to go on the mug before the plastic part snapped back on- unfortunately, it took a lot of force to put back together…and it’s a lot easier to apply compression force than expansion force with my bare hands.

I calmly shook the (slightly reduced) dishwasher detergent + water mixture in the mug again, cleaned up the mess, left the mug unsealed this time, then went back to the computer.  

The end of the story is that the mug is beautifully clean- the dishwasher detergent removed the coffee staining without any scrubbing whatsoever, and did so in under an hour.  I have a spare rubber seal in case I ever somehow get the mug apart again.  Interestingly, the mug still seems to be totally water-tight, but I’m sure that rubber seal had *some* purpose.

And yes, I’m letting the mug soak in plain water to clean out any residual dishwashing chemicals.  I knew the stuff was nasty, but the explosive power of the expanding gasses produced by simple dishwasher detergent is pretty impressive. 

Time is relative.  When I started my vacation, two weeks seemed like forever.  Now that I’m on my last day of vacation, two weeks seems to have been hardly enough to get started.

I had a lot of grandiose plans when I started.  Some of them came to pass: when Chris was here we did pretty much all the things I had hoped we would, except maybe making it to see a movie.  The airshow was once again a great day, and our boat trip was, arguably, the best ever.  Perhaps not as memorable as the time we boated from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo and back in a 15 foot boat…accidentally.  But it was much more fun knowing where we were and not making any serious blunders.  The scenery and sun were a blast. 

As Chris mentions in his blog, we also spent a fair amount of time playing computer games.  I *think* we actually spent less time than usual playing, at least in part because my computers didn’t have any suitable games installed.  I haven’t had anyone around to play first person shooters or what have you on my LAN in a while, so I’ve sort of let things slide a bit.  I could also almost convince myself that its better to not have the “old standards” pre-installed, and to go out and find something new each time Chris visits…an almost believable rationale for my procrastination.  Battlefield 2 was great fun- I even went so far as to install the server on my Linux box, although currently it is still LAN only (firewalled).

We also tried playing a game on the XBox 360 using two controllers in split screen mode.  The game itself was a flop: I can not recommend Armored Core 4 at all.  My opinion: in their effort to appeal to first person “twitch” players, they totally ruined the battle mech genre.  Mechs should be like tanks: huge, powerful machines that deliver incredible firepower.  In Armored Core 4, mechs are like twinkle-toed ballet dancers, fluttering about the battlefield like a spastic on crack.  Add to this the fact that the graphics are…well, pathetic.  Boring, repetitive and mechanical textures with no sense of “place”: many of them have as much appeal as a deactivated holodeck.  I was extremely disappointed.  That said, I think the split screen mode on the XBox 360 shows some promise: a good game could work reasonably well.

The last four or five days of my vacation have been spent playing XBox 360 games and puttering on my computers.  The computer stuff…well, if you read my previous blog entry at the link above, you can understand that I’m not very satisfied with how that turned out.  The XBox games…a bit of Kameo, and a ton of Hitman: Blood Money.  I’ve been playing Hitman on “easy” as is my usual preference, and having a great deal of fun.  Maybe fun is the wrong word for silently and methodically killing dozens of computer-simulated people.  However, it was very satisfying doing so while my computer reformatted/reinstalled for the umpteenth time.

So, the last day of my summer vacation is half-way over.  I’m not looking forward to checking my work email tomorrow, and am even less inclined to log in and check it now.  Ah well, it was good while it lasted …

I just got back from the dentist.  Nearly two hours in the chair: in itself, that’s tiring.  But the part that is bugging me at the moment is that the freezing is still fully active.  My mouth feels like its stuffed with cotton or something.  And of course you have to answer a bunch of questions while you are standing at the dentist.  The best part was when my credit card was “declined”: Citibank likes to refuse approval on “unusual” charges periodically.   Trying to talk through that situation is great fun when half your mouth is frozen.

I suspect I’ll be in some pain once the freezing wears off- at the moment, I actually am sort of looking forward to that.  I doubt I’ll feel the same way in a few hours.  I’m a big baby when it comes to pain.

I remember reading about wonderful new dental technologies that were coming “any day now” to completely eliminate decay.  I’d be happy if they worked out a totally pain/discomfort free way to do their work.  Today’s treatment was amongst the best I’ve had in terms of “comfort”, but I still had a death grip on the chair arm every time that evil drill went into my mouth.  Then there are the challenges involved with … spit.  What do you do with the saliva in your mouth while the dentist is drilling away?  Answer: suffer with it, or drool, or struggle to swallow in between drilling sessions.

I go back for a permanent crown in a couple of weeks, then some more work (a full cleaning) a week or two after that.  It’s my own fault for not keeping up with the dental appointments the past few years.  There are no magical technologies to fix my teeth, unfortunately. 

Chris, Kalen and I went boating yesterday.  This is sort of a “traditional” thing, as in we’ve rented a boat and risked drowning three times in the last decade or so.  This time we rented our boat from Sewell’s marina in Horseshoe Bay and went up to Anvil Island.

This map sort of shows the area we boated around.  As per usual, we had a lot of fun.  I probably got a bit too much sun, but I was more careful this time about the sunscreen so the burning was negligible.

During our trip we saw more seals than I’ve every seen in the wild.  I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but did manage to capture one decent shot.

 My friend Chris and I had a great day at the Abbotsford Airshow today.  As per usual, I’m mildly sunburnt (despite sunscreen) and tired.  I also have several hundred photos to sort through.  I was thinking I might get to uploading them tonight, but I think that will wait for another day.

Here is one of my better shots to tide you over until I put up the whole gallery of pictures from the show.  This is a trio of Snowbirds: it only took me about a hundred pictures to get one that turned out this well

Note also that I haven’t done any editing on this picture yet- I haven’t even adjusted contrast or cropped it.  Purdy!

The last couple of days I’ve been visiting with family.  That is, when I’m not playing new games on my XBox 360. 

My brother Ron, his wife Jessie, and their daughter Rebecca were passing through while on a vacation.  We spent the afternoon with the whole local clan at my Sister’s place on Saturday: Judy fed us salmon, and supplied Irene with her special wine.  On Monday Ron, Jessie, and ‘Becca came to our house for a few hours.  Rebecca played with our braver cats, and Iris met her first child.  She was apprehensive at first, but once we reminded Rebecca that cats aren’t fond of hugs, it was perfect.

(thanks, Shane, for the pictures)

I enjoyed visiting with everyone.  I’m feeling pretty lucky today to have such good family.

Today was my last day at work for a couple of weeks.  I still have work to do, but I am no longer on any kind of clock other than one meeting I’m supposed to call in to tomorrow morning.

I don’t take traditional vacations very often.  You know…the kind where you get on a plane/train/boat and go somewhere a long distance from home.  There are lots of reasons why this is the case.  Firstly, we have a house full of cats that are more our children or our demanding house guests than something so crass as a “pet”.  We can’t very well take them with us: most hotels frown on guests with six cats.  And it takes a lot of arranging to find someone trustworthy enough to care for them who has time to do so that just happens to correspond to when we want to take our vacation. 

Secondly, I’m not really that fond of travel in the traditional sense.  If I could basically put my house on wheels, I suppose travel would be okay.  And if I had virtually unlimited time to bumble around, no rush to get home, and plenty of time to recover afterwards: in other words, my next vacation will be retirement.

I’m exaggerating a bit.  Irene and I do occasionally go somewhere for a day or two.  And I expect that we’ll take a couple of longer trips, maybe a cruise or something, in the next decade.  But most of my vacations take place in my own home or the back yard.  I get to sleep in my own bed each night, and I like it that way.

For this vacation, my friend Chris is supposed to be coming out to visit with us.  He and I will definitely go to the airshow (the tickets are already bought).  I expect we’ll probably go out in a boat of some kind (although if it has a sail on it, I’ll be watching from shore), and possibly visit a museum or the like.  Undoubtedly we will go somewhere and walk some vast distance, I will probably get too much sun exposure, and there will almost certainly be some time with me drinking beer and Chris drinking Pepsi talking about the old days.  Those days back when we did adventurous things like roll 20 sided dice and draw maps of dungeons that only existed in each other’s imaginations.  And quite likely there will be some computer games somewhere in there, probably more than Chris wants to play and not enough for me.

To someone who travels the world, parasailing, mountain climbing, and bungee jumping their way to whatever nirvana awaits them, my idea of a great vacation probably sounds pretty dull.  But I am very much looking forward to it.

It was 38 degrees Celsius here on Wednesday.  It was about 32 today, and about the same on Monday and Tuesday.  I like warm weather, but “warm” to me is 25 degrees. 

We’d probably have central air conditioning in our house if this kind of weather was common.  Instead, we make do.  Our house has ”top opening” windows, so in-window air conditioning isn’t an option for us either.  I bought a portable AC unit a couple of years ago, the type with the big hoses you are supposed to route through the window…but guess what?  There isn’t any real way to mount the hoses / vents in top opening windows either.  I can jury rig something with tin foil and cardboard (I’m serious), but it is generally more hassle than it’s worth.

What this all means is we have a bunch of fans running, and don’t sleep terribly well.  The cats sprawl out as flat as possible in the lowest part of the house most of the time.  Amazingly, though, they actually come up and sleep with us: I suppose being near their pet humans is more important than finding a spot that is a few degrees cooler. 

What do you want to bet that, a few weeks from now, I’ll be complaining about the rain?