I actually once met someone who is in the target market for Juan Gato's new foil product.
She was the only anti-Catholic bigot I've ever met. She actually claimed that Jean Chretien [Prime Minister of Canada] was taking some political action (I can't remember what it was; maybe a soft line on illegal immigrants? Appeasement in Kosovo?) because of direct orders from the Pope. Apparently she didn't know that I was Catholic.
Anyway, she complained about radiation, too. The microwave, you know, it gave her headaches. She had to turn it on, and then leave the room. Not to mention the headaches she got from the "low-quality" (Chinese, she confided) fluorescent lighting most merchants had in their stores.
I told her about Faraday cages. I almost tried to convince her to get an old birdcage and wear it, like a hat, with foil wrapped around the bars. But I didn't try.
There wouldn't have been any challenge in it.
Avdi, whom I've never read before, has an excellent point on the subject of war toys:
Some day I'm going to be handing my stepson one of the most important material gifts I'll ever give him - his first gun.... I could not in good conscience educate my children about the necessity of war unless I knew that I was doing everything humanly possible to impress on them them what a horrible, inhuman necessity it is.
I don't mind guns but don't like war toys, and I haven't thought hard about why that is. This post really grabs me.
I hope Avdi sticks around.
Today was busy. Started with walk 20 run 10 (runner's knee, right leg, more pronounced, possibly stage II; exacerbated by walking quickly). The exercise was fun, though. We talked about drug policy; or was that Thursday? Sunrise is around the time we're getting back, and it's often a spectacular one.
Wasted a bunch of time this morning on the 'net. My wife wanted to do some more work (we're behind on time for September, even with all the on-site days we put in for the conference), but I stalled indefinitely -- well, until she started playing Age of Empires, at which point I know I'm safe. But she answered some client e-mail during the game, which was a quarter here and a quarter there.
We painted the all the rough spots on the exterior of the house that are reachable from a low stepladder, which is to say all but about two of them. Scraping, sanding, cleaning, priming all took under an hour in the late morning.
We went over to her parents' house for lunch. Pea soup and fresh yuppie bread -- nice! After lunch we got to ride around in the fancy rental Jetta station wagon, which is cool but probably not what I'd buy if I actually wanted a car.
We put on the first coat of paint and then headed our for our wild orgy of home-improvement shopping. First to IKEA: plant stand, curtains, sheets, hooks for towels and coats. Then a quick run to the fabric store for material for more curtains. Then we swung by the Ben Moore store, even though it was after six and we knew they'd be closed, because we wanted to see what their Sunday hours are. Their Sunday hours: closed. I do love that company, even though their treatment of their franchisees inconveniences me. I guess as a Christian I shouldn't be complaining.
Then we drove down to Home Depot, looked at some of their crappy paint and decided not to get any. Then we bought 5 feet of rubber-backed entryway carpet for the back entrance. Excuse me. We stood around for 20 minutes while the perfectionist Home Depot flooring guy carefully plastic-wrapped the linoleum for a very harried mom with two small kids. Then he phoned for relief, as it was 7:00 and evidently he was off shift. Then he stood around waiting for his relief for ten minutes while we waited and another flooring-starved family waited. Finally, he decided to help us.
"I want five feet of this carpet," my wife said, brandishing our measurements of the entryway. "That's within an inch, since we've got the door on one end and the stairs on the other end."
"It's not that precise," he said. "The machine is out by a bit."
"Well, how much is it out by?"
"It's out by how much it's out." Deep thoughts from the Home Depot flooring guy. He looked at us accusingly. "You just don't want to cut it."
"That's right. We want you to cut it."
So he ran out five feet of material according to his measuring device. And we measured it with my measuring tape in my pocket. And it turned out to be five feet on the dot. So it wasn't out by much.
We took off after that. Actually, there was a long interlude with a composter, vinyl floor tiles with hardwood patterns, laminate flooring, and a serious relationship discussion of our flooring preferences before we made our ultimate decision: to move the library to the basement after our housemate moves out, and to install real hardwood floors down there because we can't stand the way laminate feels. But basically, we left Home Depot with our rug and two impulse items (airplane-hijacker knife and tiny impulse buy can of WD-40 for the water shutoff valve in the basement, which is stuck.)
On the way home I had the familiar joy of getting onto the Whitemud Freeway from Calgary Trail (see my previous post on the subject if you care). Once home, my wife stained all the raw wood pieces from IKEA while I complained about the fumes. And now I'm blogging, so there.
One of my serious concerns in moving to Edmonton was, how will the driving be? This is not a flip question, as any Angeleno can confirm. Driving comfort matters in city life, especially in big, spread-out post-automobile cities like LA and Edmonton.
Edmonton's pretty good. The speed limits are funky -- I still don't have a visceral understanding of 50, 60, 80, 90, 110 kph the way I understand 25, 35, 50, 65 mph. People don't really know how to drive here, especially when there's a little traffic. People check for space but ignore speed on freeway lane-changes, a typical bad habit in low-density traffic areas (I've noticed the same thing in Albuquerque).
Where Edmonton mainly suffers is in the road design. Somehow, Edmonton managed to hire perpetually drunken road and highway engineers to creatively destroy the driving habitat of the city. I feel certain that these engineers were imported from the San Francisco Bay Area, which is the worst driving environment I've ever had the extreme discomfort of living and driving in. Some examples follow:
Suicide Merges: A "suicide merge" is a freeway entrance/exit that requires exiting freeway traffic to cross the traffic stream that's entering the freeway. Typically, the entrance rolls onto a new lane parallel to the freeway, lane-changing is allowed between the new lane and the freeway for some distance, and then the lane exits from the freeway. Suicide merges are tempting because they're economical in land, but they can't handle traffic growth the way a conventional cloverleaf merge can. They're very popular in the Bay Area -- sometimes only allowing about 50 yards (about 12 car lengths) for merging traffic to get up to freeway speed, find a slot in traffic, and merge in. Bizarrely, they're also popular on Edmonton freeways, where land is ... shall we say, not at a premium.
Bizarre lane direction: This is a problem of design which can sometimes be fixed by repainting or re-signing. Even though cheap fixes are available, nothing is done about it, leading me to believe that the engineers in charge are criminally stupid.
One Bay Area example: about two miles before the 13 southbound terminates into the 580 (a two-lane freeway joining a five-lane interstate), the left lane is signed as "580 East" and the right lane is signed as "580 West". The conventional interpretation of this signage is if you want to go east, you'd better get in the left lane. In fact, to go 580 West you must soon exit right from the right lane. If you stay in the right lane, you pass first the 580 West exit; an ordinary street exit; and then you get onto 580 East. (That's right: both lanes ultimately go onto 580 East.) I can't count how many times I've seen Pokey the Family Minivan switch into the left lane on seeing the first sign, and roll on in the left lane for two miles at 50 for no reason.
Edmonton example: If you turn left from Calgary Trail Northbound(*) (major N-S surface street corridor) onto the Whitemud Freeway (major E-W highway), there's a four-lane rollup to the freeway entrance. Left lane is turn only onto Calgary Trail Southbound; the next two lanes (#2 and #3 lanes) are freeway entrance lanes; from the right lane, after crossing the intersection, you can either get into the #3 lane and try for the freeway or else go straight ahead and go on a service road paralleling the freeway. On the freeway, the #2 and #3 lanes merge with the three existing freeway lanes, sort of. Actually the #2 lanes merges immediately with the freeway #3 lane (looking over your shoulder as you're coming down a hill, look out for semis), and the #3 lane becomes the freeway's #4 lane which is exit-only for 111th St. -- the same destination as the service road. The exit ramp for 111th St. is approximately twice as long as the suicide merge distance between the Calgary Trail entrance and the breakoff for 111th St.
What makes this all worse is that Calgary Trail Northbound is Highway 2 (Alberta's major N-S road; incidentally the main access road from the international airport) up to the Whitemud, and then the 2 continues along the Whitemud. So in order to stay on the 2, you have to do the following:
But overall the driving in Edmonton is decent. The drivers are courteous, at least compared to Berkeley driving practices, which is what this post was originally going to be about.
* "Calgary Trail" is of course the traditional Edmonton name for the road that leads to Calgary -- which is Highway 2 for most of its length. Inside Edmonton, it's a major N-S surface corridor on the south side of the city consisting of two one-way roads a block apart called "Calgary Trail Southbound" and "Calgary Trail Northbound". Recently, the northbound road was renamed "Gateway Boulevard" because some astute idiot pointed out that you can't get to Calgary by going north. I will continue to use the traditional name, because everyone else in Edmonton still does. Twenty years from now people will still be saying things like "Get on Calgary Trail Northbound -- you know, Gateway Blvd -- and ...." My wife's relatives still give directions in terms of "the first old traffic circle" and "the second old traffic circle" -- and these traffic circles were removed at least ten years ago.