Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

A slightly embarrassing, but also hilarious thing happened to me today. I went to an ice cream farewell party for some coworkers today, and asked for a fudgesicle. It was super thick, not like the standard kind that is barely thicker than the popsicle stick. Apparently it retained its lack of heat very well, because I went to bite the top off of it like I do with my regular fudgey & icey treat, and my lips closed eagerly around it to catch any drips… and became stuck. Very stuck. Painfully stuck.

My first thought was, I had better not panic and rip my lip skin off. Just wait for it to melt off in a couple seconds. A couple seconds passed, but my lips remained just as frozen. I tugged gently to no avail. Since both of my lips were sealed on a smooth ice cream treat, I couldn’t blow on them to warm the area up. I tried pushing saliva at my lower lip with my tongue. Success, my lower lip was free after about 30 seconds.

By then, the 3 women standing around me talking had noticed I was in some distress. I considered going to the bathroom to run water over my lips from the sink, to get it off instantly, but I didn’t want to waste the ice cream. And it would melt off eventually, right? Wrong.

Well, not completely wrong, because it did come off about a minute later after I was carefully tugging, while blowing as best as possible through my nose onto the ice cream, trying not to drool through my free lower lip, or refreeze it to the death trap ice cream. If I had injured my mouth by freezing it, indoors, in August, do you think Occupational Health and Safety would want to know about it?

“Ighn sawwy, I cant talk wight naw, I roze Igh ‘outh on ice crean. Need ‘orkers conkunsation.”

Ice cream 1. Saskboy 0. But I did eat it for the last laugh.

I picked my only kohlrabi on Saturday. I ate some of it raw, and tried frying the rest. It’s not my favourite veggie, but it helped fill me up for supper. I didn’t remember the top leaves are edible if cooked, so by the time I found out by surfing the web, they were already left behind in the garden.

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I finished watching “Mousehunt” [7/10], and saw “Mission Impossible II” [8/10] for the first time on Friday. For Saturday I went for a long bike ride, stopping at several garage sales to haggle, and picked up a selection of some very useful stuff [Brita tanks, camera memory, exercise ball-tube, book] for under $8 in total. (And yes John, I did end up blogging about my new Brita tanks like we talked about Saturday.)

Along the way I stopped at Jesse’s and watched Olympic volleyball, then finished my ride with a stop at the dragon boat races just before they wrapped up. The team names are hilarious, including the “Civil Serpents”, “Soggy Bottom Buoys”, “Wascanimals”, and I think I even heard the names “Ship Kickers” and “Dragon Your Assets”.

My remaining evening at home could be described as cooking, cleaning, and TV watching. Oooh, exciting.

If you like home made bread, and sunny days, you may want to consider a solar oven. Lord of Wealth (GAB as I call him) shows us just how bread practically makes itself if you leave dough out in the sun (in an easy to obtain box).

- An example of a solar oven at an “eco-fair” in Regina this Spring.

While I would recommend the Sun Oven as a quite a useful contraption, for non portable use or a large family I might suggest people attempt to build a larger one that has bigger reflectors, a more stable tilting mechanism (the worst flaw of the Sun Oven) and perhaps the turntable I mentioned. I would also consider any charity project delivering Sun Ovens or some other variant of a solar oven to be a good, long term solution to fuel costs, carbon emissions and deforestation in the 3rd world.

I now know I can make cheaper, better bread with a lower carbon footprint than a commercial bakery. Now I must find a source of locally grown, organic hard wheat and a quality hand mill.

- When cooking you must leave the lid closed to maintain the trapped heat level

-This clever design lets you rotate the oven directly toward the sun without difficulty.

-Quite tasty raw even

I meant to post this yesterday, but constant thunderstorms kept my computer off for most of the day.

The World Wide Web is easy to get tangled in. I started out looking at photos of the Moon transiting Earth, as seen from space! And I ended up reading about False Morels.

From there I started wondering about what the far side of the Moon looks like, since I haven’t really bothered to commit it to memory when I’ve seen it on a poster years ago. Many people refer to the far side as the “dark side”, but they are not the same thing except when the Moon is full (as seen from Earth). On a New Moon, the near side that we typically see, is the dark side of the Moon.

It is completely amazing to me that we hadn’t seen most of the far side until the space age. It’s not like we’d have another way, but it just seems wrong that we’d know so much more about the visible features of distant planets like Jupiter, and nothing about the size of the South Pole Aitken basin crater on the Moon.

From that page I started reading about the Clementine probe, because the name was familiar. And then I was learning about the toxic rocket fuel that I’d heard about before — Monomethyl Hydrazine. The name of the fuel was familiar to me after hearing of the spy satellite several months ago, that was shot down.

It turns out that monomethyl hydrazine is found in trace amounts in False Morel mushrooms, and also the kind you can buy at your local store.

An no, Table Mushrooms don’t grow on the Moon. But in an odd sort of way, they kind of help us get there.

I’m anticipating munching on some radish pods, using the ones I grew on my balcony for pods and seeds rather than eating the more well known root. I picked a handful from my real garden today, along with some onion tops. I didn’t take my camera along, so no photo today. Despite the rain the last few days, the ground is still cracked and dry. I also killed a few potato bugs that were taking a liking to my baby potato plants.

- Albert Street in Regina

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Last night I made some yogurt. It’s an experiment, and I’m really hoping it turned out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a flop since I used the temperature guesstimate method instead of a thermometer.

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Sunday I biked over to Canadian Tire to pick up a clamp, and a Presta valve adapter. I find it moderately hilarious that “Canadian TIRE” doesn’t have a Presta tire valve to Schreader valve adapter. I also encountered a garage sale with a free golf club bag (perfect for my set of mutt clubs that have been bagless for so long). In fact, the bag was better than free, since it contained a dime in a pocket - canceling out the dime I spent on the only other item I picked up at the sale.

I went to the dollar store, hoping to get some cheap superglue to fix my sunglasses. I had a little bit of trouble parking my bike, since there was no lock within a block, and no metal signs even to fit my lock around. The cashier inside was naturally only politely disinterested in the dilemma for cyclist customers. Also a little off-putting was that the Dollarama had 9W CFLightbulbs, but there was absolutely nothing on them indicating that there was mercury inside. Not on the bulb, nor the packaging. They looked to be made by Sunbeam especially for the dollar store chain. I suppose when shopping at a dollar store, it’s important to remember that toxic metals are the rule, not the exception.

ADDED: I’ve heard of cheap hotels, but the former Howard Johnson is just ridiculous:

My two little radishes on my north facing balcony are doing just fine, especially with the rain from yesterday and last night.

Mosaic was lots of fun again this year. More Pavilions! They’d have to add more days though, because even with the 3 nights, I was still unable to make it to 3 of them, taking the bus to well over half.

The bus was plugged up at 10:15 at the Italian pavilion, and it was raining cats and dogs after 5 minutes of standing at the bus stop. I think I managed to fit about 6 and a half people under my umbrella. The drunk high school girl who was trying desperately to land in the gutter by swooning backwards, was not invited, and seemed oblivious and accepting of her perilous situation anyway.

We ran inside, and after a quick second bite in the Italian club, we caught the bus and made friends with a very drunk man who ended up in the north end when he was looking to be south. We hopped off at the Poltava Ukrainian pavilion, and enjoyed the closing dancing and live orchestra. I’ll probably put a clip of it on YouTube later, it was fantastic. The food had already been put away, so Jesse was disappointed by that, but he got some kybassa at the Kyiv pavilion earlier.

On the bus ride home, I spent some time asking/telling high school kids to put their cigarettes out while we were on the bus. After saying loudly “PLEASE PUT YOUR CIGARETTES OUT!” the bus driver pulled over and I fingered a few of the culprits who had hid it in the mean time, but he didn’t do anything except yell for a second and glare at them for a few more. If he’d tossed even a couple off the bus it would have fixed the problem organically. Naturally, the chain smoking junkies lit up again within 5 minutes. At least I had an open-window seat with some air.

The Chilean pavilion had a punch drink that was a lot like sangria - it was good. The prices for bottled water varied though from place to place ($2 at Chile, and $1.50 elsewhere), and few of the pavilions had drinking fountains available, which is kind of sad. I spent way too much on food (like last year, only less this time), but it’s a once a year kind of thing, and the travel cost can’t be beat, even with the smoke filled night buses. The German pavilion had the biggest dinner for the best price, and I bumped into Nicole who I’d never met before, but have spoken with through blogs for a couple years now.

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Here are some very funny pie charts. I think I could come up with a few more like some of these.