Sambal

EDUCATIONAL INFORMATION FOR CALIFORNIANS TRANSPLANTED INTO ARCTIC CLIMATES

presents

How To Shovel Your Walk

– one in an occasional series –

WHY YOU SHOVEL YOUR WALK

You may be wondering, why should I shovel my walk? After all, I
got by without mowing my lawn for several months. Why shovel my
walk? Actually, there are several good reasons to shovel your walk.

1. It’s a crime not to. Really. And I can’t talk about why because
   we don’t have freedom of speech here in Canada.

2. People can sue you if they slip and fall in front of your house
   and you haven’t shoveled your walk.

Although Canadians claim not to sue anybody, there do seem to be an
awful lot of lawyers up here. And I if I do get sued, all the
lawyers and judges will be wearing funny wigs, and I’ll probably
get put in jail for contempt of court for laughing at them.

PRELIMINARIES — TOOLS

First, you need tools: a snow shovel and a good outside broom. You
can buy the outside broom in advance, but it’s not possible to buy
snow shovels in advance. Just try it! You’ll be laughed out of Home
Depot.

Traditionally, you wait until the first snow day, when all the
traffic is tied up and the roads are extremely slippery, and then
you drive (half off-road) to the nearest drugstore and buy the
cheapo snow shovels they have there. These you use until they
break. If you’re lucky enough and it breaks in the middle of the
season, you might be able to find an ergonomically designed
shovels; otherwise, you just get lower back pain (”Canadian
Soloflex”).

Optionally, you can get an icebreaker. These very handy tools are
best if you need to open a channel to an iced-up port. Some of the
best icebreakers are made in Finland, home of sauna, Nokia telephones
and attractively-priced 60% grain alcohol…

Sorry, just my Finnish tourism implant going off again. An
icebreaker is kind of like a garden hoe, except the blade is attached
directly to the pole (no bent part). You use it to chip at and
shatter ice.

Don’t bother getting salt. It’s too cold for salt to work.

PRELIMINARIES — GEAR

Really nice warm gloves. Boots with decent traction. Everything
else is optional, though if you plan to do your front walk, there are
decency laws you should follow. (A normal ski jacket, ordinary wool
socks, jeans, a sweater is fine, even in -30 C, for as long as it takes
to shovel. Haven’t tried -30 and naked yet.)

HOW TO SHOVEL

Push the snow into a pile. Lift it with the shovel and throw it
off of the walk. Throw it downhill.

After shoveling, sweep the snow off the shoveled surface with brisk
back-and-forth strokes. Don’t worry about where the snow goes.

KEY TIPS

Shovel early — before lots of people walk by (and before you drive
your car out of the driveway.) Snow that’s packed down is hard to
get off.

Wait until the sun has come out before starting to shovel. This
way you can be sure that it’s stopped snowing(*). As a bonus, the snow
will be a little softer, and when you’re done shoveling, a little bit
of extra heat from the sun helps evaporate the last specks of snow
(but see below).

But don’t wait too long — shovel before the snow half-melts and
creates an enormous thin sheet of ice on the sidewalk in front of
your house (*).

Shovel downslope, so that in three days when the temperature pops
up above freezing, there’s no snow that you shoveled upslope to melt
and run down across the sidewalk creating an enormous thin sheet of
ice on the sidewalk in front of your house (*).

Always sweep after shoveling. If you don’t, the snow that’s in the
cracks of the sidewalk will be melted by the sun and will later
refreeze, creating an enormous thin sheet of ice on the sidewalk in
front of your house (*).

Items marked with a (*) were learned personally through experience.
In case you hadn’t guessed.

… and it doesn’t even snow very much in Alberta.

There’s snow.

Admittedly, about 3 mm of snow, and it’s probably not going to last out the day.

But it’s funny, because last night I was thinking aloud about garage logistics, and one of the things I mentioned was the need to reorganize which cinder blocks are where in the garage, so that the four that belong to our housemate can be properly returned to her trunk. She keeps them there in winter to improve the traction her rear-wheel-drive car gets.

My wife and our housemate, both Edmonton natives, laughed at me for worrying about snow so early in the year.

Har har.

Good thing we picked the last of the carrots in the middle of last week. I suspect they soon would have started rotting in the ground.

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.

Fall is in the air, and a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of getting his furnace fixed.

It all started last January, which, I hope everyone would agree, is a lousy time for a furnace to break. In this case, not only was it -15 C outside most days, but we had also just got back from Africa. Cold, cash-strapped and unused to weather, we tried to get the furnace fixed.

We got a recommendation to use Competent Plumbing and Heating, but they were busy — except for emergency calls, which this wasn’t. We have two furnaces in our house, and the one that failed heats the upstairs. If you’re going to have one furnace fail, have it be the upstairs one, as the upstairs rooms are heated by waste heat from the downstairs furnace.

They said maybe they could send someone in February. We asked for a recommendation, they told us about Other Heating Company, which also turned out to be unavailable. But they gave us a recommendation to Notably Incompetent Furnace Repair.

So we called up Notably Incompetent, and they sent out a guy the same day. In retrospect, I now know this was a bad sign. Like when an HMO physician can see you right away. He looked at the furnace, fiddled with his multimeter for a while, and came up with this: “Your transformer is blown. You must have had a power surge. Anyway, I can replace the transformer — that’s a $60 part. But if the transformer blew, the gas valve might have blown too. That’s a $300 part — if I can find one for a furnace this old — and it’ll go again next time you have a surge. Would you like me to get you a quote on a new furnace?”

Sure, why not? I mean, if the new furnace is $1000, then we’ll have more efficient heating and less likelihood of failure, for the cost getting this old thing repaired twice.

So the sales guy came. And he made a big show of measuring our floor space, even though we had all the measurements already. And the whole process took about an hour. This was annoying, because we’d hoped to have been working some of the time, as we planned to go visit with a client later that morning. We wound up rushing him out the door, but we did get a couple of quotes out of him. Not in the realm of $1000. More like $5000, or $8000.

So we told him we’d call him if we were interested.

This was still in middle January, and the temperatures had climbed back up into the -5 C range, so we decided to put off the whole furnace thing until summer. I mean, how cold could it get? March saw two weeks straight of -30 weather with occasional dips down to -40. Oh.

In July we tried calling Competent Plumbing and Heating again, and they told us to call back in September. In September, we tried one last time and got The Guy, and he said he’d be out to see us Monday. That’s last Monday, for those of you keeping score at home.

And he did come out, actually. He came out and fiddled around with his multimeter for a while and confirmed that the transformer was broken. “I don’t have a plate-mount one in the truck, but we can try swapping one in to see if that’s all the problem was,” he says, and zips out to the truck. He comes back with the new transformer, hooks it up. It doesn’t work. So he takes our transformer and tests it in an electrical outlet. It works.

Fiddles around with the multimeter for another five minutes. “It’s your switch,” he says. “That’s a $6 part. I don’t have a three-position switch in my truck, but I’ll order one and come back and install it.”

He looked over our furnaces. “Have you had the heat-exchangers inspected?” I allowed as I had, a year ago, when we bought the house. “These things are like Sherman tanks,” he said. He rapped on the cover plate with his knuckle. “Inefficient, but they’ll last forever.”

Part of me wants to dance with glee and mock Notably Incompetent for trying to sell me a replacement furnace for my broken switch. The rest of me wonders when — if? — Guy from Competent Plumbing and Heating will ever call back. It’s starting to get cold, you see…

Luckily, my neighbor has a multimeter.

Where can you get sambal in Western Canada? I mean besides here, of course.

You can get it at Edelweiss Imports down in Calgary. Sambal Badjak is the good stuff, but it’s all good.

From a Catholic blog, here’s a picture of a common sexual position around here.

We’ve recenty integrated two new cats into our household: Frederick the attack cat and Winston the rarely-seen black cat. This brings our total household cat population to six, which is the Edmonton by-law limit.

Thank God.

Tonight, Dizzy is sitting on one of the chairs in the living room and Frederick came downstairs to explore. He’s even letting me touch and pet him, which is amazingly positive. I took a picture of Frederick hiding behind Dizzy’s chair while Dizzy looks suspiciously over his shoulder, but unfortunately the camera battery went dead immediately thereafter, so I can’t upload it now. Maybe tomorrow.

Right now they’re having a staring match across the living room floor.

It has been very easy to introduce these two (both males) to our other two males — especially when compared to the endless nightmare we have with the two females and the original two males. (Actually, with the one troublesome female — Kess, who hates Dizzy and whom Dizzy hates.)

My working theory is that if you have a male pet cat, its development is arrested such that it thinks of itself as a kitten and you as its mother; while if you have a female pet cat, it thinks of you as a kitten and itself as your mother. Many males coexist because many kittens can coexist; but a sufficiently proprietary female cat drives out all others. Or tries to: you don’t have much traction in driving out an animal three times your weight.

A year ago today marks the first morning we woke up in our new house. Cash-strapped, makeshift bed on the floor, furniture still shipping, and both cats freaking out. And the raspberries were ripe: I definitely remember that.

Funny how much has changed, really.

Oh, there’s objective value in this blog, at least for me. I couldn’t remember when I bottled the Arrogant Bastard. This is important to know because I should wait at least two weeks to allow full carbonation before trying it. I forgot to make a note in the beer lab notebook, but since I made a blog entry about it I was able to pinpoint date and time.

A half hour of morning picking yields 1.5 pints of fresh ripe raspberries. Even factoring in the cost of driving to the store, I’m sure I could have bought them cheaper. So why am I so happy?

Warming my hands on a cup of hot coffee inside, picking bugs out of my berries, I think it must be this: bringing a bowl full of fresh-picked raspberries up to bed is the best way in the world to wake up my wife.

It’s too hot to think today — 33 Celsius in the shade. The raspberries are hot and sweet. The radio promised a week of rain and cloudy days — if they deliver, I’ll try to be lucent.