Category Archives: Home & Family

This is pure inanity…
Here are some notes and observations from the very quick and simple Moncton Shopping Blitzkrieg.
The plan was to leave Charlottetown on Saturday around 10am.  We left our driveway at 9:55 but inexplicably didn’t leave Charlottetown until about 11:10.  Well, actually it is explicable.
We had to go get Cameron, who was on the morning side of a sleepover at a friend’s house.  He had a good time, he said, although they didn’t get much sleep.  This fact would become a major factor later on in the trip.  After we got Cameron, I thought I would take this time to exchange my (potentially faulty) iTrip FM transmittor at Future Shop and then have a properly functioning one for the trip.  So, that took about twenty minutes too long.  Then we had to go get some cash.  The first bank/ATM (at WalMart) was not functioning, so off to the second one, further in town.
Finally on our way, I was a bit grumpy, for three reasons:  1) it was taking too long to get going, 2) there wasn’t quite the amount of money in the bank I thought there was, and 3) the new iTrip was just as crappy as the original one (I think, actually, it’s our crappy car that causes the iTrip to be too static-y, which severely lessens the enjoyment of listening to the iPod in the car).
We get in Cornwall, and stop at the Tims for some on-the-road bagels and coffee.  This stop, too, takes too long and it’s about 11:30 before we’re actually "on our way".
On our way to the bridge, we play a road-trip game.  We each pick a colour of vehicle.  Each time that colour vehicle meets us on the road, we get a point.  First to 10 wins.  I picked "red" and came a close second (I had 9) to Cameron, who picked "blue".  Karyn was a distant third with only 7 "white" vehicles.
We gassed up in Borden-Carleton at the Esso.  I noticed a couple of new flavours of Humpty Dumpty chips and as I’m a sucker for trying new flavours of chips I have to try them.  "Lime and Pepper" and "Cheese and Onion".  The rest of the car is aghast at the anticipation of the stink from the chips.  I open the Lime and Pepper, and what a pleasant surprise.  They are fantastic!  So subtle in flavour, a great taste experience.  The rest of the car become fans of the chips and I begrudginly share.  Having inhaled the Lime and Pepper chips, we decide to save the Cheese and Onion for the trip home.
Cameron, hung over from a night of sleep deprivation, falls quickly to sleep in the back seat of the car, and we zoom to Moncton.  He awakes moments before we arrive in the city proper.
I’m not too hungry from the bagels and coffee and chips, so it’s up to the other two to decide where to eat.  They are tempted by Chinese, but decide against it after realising it’s a buffet.  A quickly decided upon second choice is Jungle Jims.  I had faint recollections of poor service the last time we were there, so long ago, but was up for the experience.  It was a mistake.  The service was terrible, the food not so great, and it took forever to leave.  They cut us a deal on our bill, but I can’t recommend the place lowly enough.
Mediocre food in our bellies, it’s off to shop!  We Champlain Place it, and away we go.  My goal is to find a jacket.  Karyn wants some new clothes in general, and Cameron is hoping we buy him a video game.  After a couple of hours in the mall, Karyn has a couple of new pieces of clothing, Cameron has a new video game and I have a new jacket.
We decide to head to the other side of town, and check out Winners et al, plus see if there’s a movie we could all take in (there wasn’t).  On our way to Winners, we see the new Old Navy store.  Excited we are, and we head inside.  It was very busy.  I may have bought something, but the lines for the checkout were much too long, so we left empty-handed.  Winners had moved from where I remember it, but we found the new one.  Disappointing, it seemed much smaller than the original one.  Not much bigger than the Charlottetown one.
Having spend ourselves shopping, we have a decision. Hang around Moncton for an hour or so, wait until we’re hungry, then eat, or head home and eat on the way, most likely at my favourite of favourite places, the Aulac Big Stop Irving.  We choose to head home.
On the way to Aulac,  Cameron promptly fell asleep, only to wake up moments before we arrive at the Irving.  We did make a small detour on the way, taking a drive through the lovely town of Sackville.  Karyn got very excited about seeing a pheasant on the road in front of us (she gets excited at seeing any animal).
Again, I was amazed at the professionalism of the servers at the Big Stop.  Amazing ability to be upbeat and positive and fast and courteous and friendly.  Amazing.  Moments before we got there, Karyn came down with a whopper of a headache and didn’t really enjoy the Big Stop busi-ness.  It didn’t help that the new toy that accompanies kids meals at the Big Stop was an annoying whistle.  Six or seven kids throughout were whistling their obliviously annoying high pitched whistles.  And still the servers appeared happy.  How?
I so rarely order dessert (as you can likely tell by my svelte figure), but for years I’ve been intrigued by the immensely huge size of the desserts on display at the Big Stop.  I succumbed and ordered a piece of chocolate cake.  It was huge and delicious.  We couldn’t finish it.  And it only cost $3.49.  Amazing.
We drove home, Cameron stayed awake, and got home about 9:30.

And that was the blitzkrieg to Moncton.

We got a digital camera a month or two ago, and ever since, my son and his friend have been pestering me to use the "movie mode" of it to help them make a movie.  I have always been reluctant because, as other movie projects we’ve done in the past prove, it ends up with them having fun doing the acting, then it’s a couple of hours of frustrating importing, uploading and editing on my part to get some type of finished product.  Frustrating because the program I use (the rather cheap Windows Movie Maker 2) keeps crashing, and any other program I’ve tried has been worse.
Anyway, Good Friday I relented and agreed to shoot them in a "movie".  It really is just an action scene, but they do actually have a rather involved plot outline for a larger feature.

We went outside, around our yard and for twenty minutes or so, we came up with some quick shots, which I then took and edited together.  Borrowing a cool piece of music, The Battle was complete.  It actually turned out much better than I thought it’d be.
I’m offering it here for only a couple of days because I don’t want it eating up my limited bandwidth.

If you stumble upon this post after April 1, 2005, the download link will not be working.

Have a look, if you like.  It’s a 7MB wmv file.

Download The Battle (6861.4K)

Having been raised by parents who choose a hard-day’s work over paying someone else to do it, I always have a tinge of guilt whenever I contract out some of the household chores we are faced with. I hate mowing the lawn and in the past have paid a neighbourhood kid to do it, even though I feel like it should be me. Now that my son is of lawn-mowing age, the job now passes to him, and I don’t mind paying him to mow.
My father is a very handy man, always was, and continues to be so even at his advancing age. Because he always did home repairs himself, I have a hard time calling a plumber or carpenter to do a job that I feel I should probably attempt myself. (Un)Fortunately, I realise that I don’t have the skills or knowledge of a handyman and often, when I do attempt some pretty basic stuff, it usually ends badly, and so that makes the phone calls to fixit people a bit easier.
Trouble is, once one begins to call repair people, it becomes a bit of a habit and one begins to rely on their services to accomplish more and more. If I’m not careful, I’ll soon be calling a contractor to come and replace the roll of toilet paper in our bathroom everytime it runs out.
With the hard-work ethics of my ancestors in my head, a good-enough back, sturdy legs and a general-enough knowledge of how things should be repaired (but not the ability to carry repairs out) I should not rely so much on others (not that I do anyway, but I should do so even less).
And so, this year, as winter began to show its full force, I vowed to do my own driveway shovelling this year, even though it’s so easy (and not that expensive) to get a ‘professional’ to clear it.

Yesterday, though, the decision was easy. A 9 foot high, 15 foot long drift behind our car, combined with a 7 foot high, 10 foot long drift at the end of our driveway is just insanity. So, a 5pm call to our neighbourhood snowblower, and by 9:30 last night, the driveway was cleared.

Wonderful. And guilt free.

But not to worry. I’ll be shovelling, as promised, until another major storm hits the neighbourhood.

It’s been so long since I posted a plumbing related post.

Lately, I’ve been noticing/ignoring the fact that when it rains, our sump pump seems to stay on for an inordinately long period of time before it finally shuts itself off. Last week, or longer ago, whenever we had our last substantial rain, I noticed that the sump pump wasn’t shutting itself off.
Down into the belly of the beast’s basement I go, and fiddle around with sump pump. By “fiddle around” I mean “push on some things and pull on others”. Still, the sump pump’s engine purred right along. “Hmm, prolly a blockage of some sort”, I think, as I note that the water-level doesn’t seem to be lowering for all the pump’s work.
So, I unplug the power, unhook the connector so that I can remove the pump from the sump hole. Removing the connector results in a large and lovely spray of dirty, stinky sump-water onto my pants. No big deal, that’s part of home-ownership. I take the sump pump out onto the back deck and take some of it apart. “Hmm, no noticible blockage”, I think. I put the thing back together and re-install it in the sump hole.
Since the water level wasn’t rising, I left it and forgot about.
Well, today, the sky’s opened up and a deluge of water causes our sump-hole to fill up. At around 7pm, my wife asks “is the sump pump s’posed to stay on that long?” “How long?” I ask. “Ten minutes.” Oh shit.
Down to the basement I run, and sure enough, the sump pump’s a-purrin’ away, and there’s water evacuating itself from the hole, onto our basement floor.
Time for quick action. I call for my wife and son to start bailing water into receptacles, and I head out to Canadian Tire (remember when CT wasn’t open on Saturday evenings? When it’d be impossible to buy a new sump pump on a Saturday night) and pick up a new sump pump.
Come home, wife and son still bailing (and barely losing the battle), quickly (but not really quickly enough) hook up the new pump. Situate it properly in the hole (you should situate your pump into a plastic container, so that it’s not on the actual floor of the hole. This keeps sludge and dirt from causing blockages), and turn the thing on.
I tell ya, it sucked up the water in that hole like it was a Danish hooker: Fast and absolutely worth the 70 bucks.
A little bit of start/stop-level adjustment on the pump’s ball, and we’re in business.

Well, I was home sick yesterday. Sick to my stomach. It’s a recurring problem that doesn’t strike me as often as it used to.

Anyway, we got our water supply hooked up to the city’s water flow a coupla weeks ago. We’ve been hooked up to the city’s sewage system for a couple of years. Yesterday I really got to test both systems out quite a bit. They work well.

Today, however, I am scared to use the bathroom.

That’s all I’ll say on that.