GLOBADOM

Well, I am The Lovely One (TLO). At Ryan’s urging, I have agreed to do a weekly posting. In each posting, I will discuss one sublime event in the week and one ridiculous event in the week. I am sure it will be easy to find many examples of the latter, but the former may be more difficult. So, let’s start with the ridiculous.

Our wonderful, black cat, “Vuvuc” aka “Wooly,” provides us with many exemplary examples of the ridiculous on a daily basis. However, recently, it has done something particulary strange and somewhat grotesque. A long time ago, we gave up buying cat toys for Vuvuc. Our cat makes its own fun. It usually involves biting or swatting me in the morning, meowing at birds through the window, or throwing its body against closet doors in vain attempts to open them. The other day, it found a long piece of string on the floor. Instead of merely playing with the string, it decided to eat it. Hearing the cat making strange noises, Ryan went to investigate and found about an inch of string hanging out of its mouth. I advised Ryan to pull it out, thinking that there wasn’t much more. Ryan started pulling and pulling and pulling and what emerged was at least sixty centimetres of soggy string. Yuck. I love Vuvuc dearly. He is, at times, a wonderful cat. However, on this occasion, he was the epitome of ridiculousness.

My sublime event originated on my 15 minute walk from the bus stop to work. Every day, I pass by this little shop. I have never gone in and have a vague impression that it sells floral and gift items. In the window of the shop, there are a variety of stone wall plaques facing the passerby. I walk fairly quickly and am often quite unobservant about my surroundings, especially as I am listening to my discman at a high volume and wear sunglasses whenever possible. Yet, one of these plaques had a saying on it which struck me, “Oh, the person that I could have been.” With a grim smile, I have often thought that this summed up my rather dissatisfied impression with myself. This week, however, I decided to stop and have a closer look in the window of the shop and find out who this quote was attributed to. When I looked at the plaque, I realized that I had always misread the saying. It actually says, “It is never too late to become the person you could have been” (George Elliot). This was an epiphany. A truly sublime moment in which I discovered that perhaps my perception of myself also needed revision.

No, no I do not.

Jelly: I dug the ghost of crab apples past out of the deep freeze earlier this week, thawed it, and with nothing more than the application of 7.5 cups of sugar, some pectin, just a bit of lemon juice, and an hour or so of work, I have a couple of quarts of jelly in pretty little jars, suitable for giving.

I used the lessons of the Summer’s work: I went and bought real canning jars with real snap-lids and canned for real. I also learned an important lesson about, well, being easygoing regarding food safety.

No, I’m not going to poison anyone. But I bought, more or less by chance, Bernardin pectin and jars. Each came with dire warnings about the horrible gastric tortures and deadly molds that would visit anyone who dared make jelly without using strict, boil-for-ten-minutes-after-canning techniques. It appeared these spectres would probably come in threes, most likely late at night on Christmas Eve. Also, no heating the jars in the oven.

Now, most of my Summer jelly was a gastronomic triumph, but a food-preservation disaster, and I essentially treated the whole batch as freezer jams (keep it cold to prevent mold). I wanted more out of these latest jellies, but I didn’t have any stupid canning boilers, and was under the impression they were serious overkill for normal jams and jellies, which simply are not as prone to disaster as odder preserves.

My mother-in-law confirmed that canning would be overkill, and suggested just relaxing. Then I checked out Kraft’s website, which has jam and jelly-making guides as an adjunct to their Certo pectin. They said to relax too.

Well, maybe it’s the spectre of a tort-crazed world, or the sheer number of cooks, chemists, and lawyers Kraft likely has working for them, but when a huge trans-national corporation tells me it’s okay to just heat the jars, put hot jelly in ’em, and seal the works up, I’m willing to put my mouth where their money is. And yours too, if you get one of these jars from me.

So I just jellied everything up, popped very hot jelly into very hot jars, and relaxed. The result is an aesthetic triumph, and seems just as tasty as before (I get to clean the pots afterwards.

Jam or jelly is one of those great, nerdy procedural types of cooking that should naturally appeal to men. You have a schedule, you have merciless chemistry issues that can preserve your food beautifully or kill you, and you have rigid (though, as my example above shows, sometimes completely contradicted) strictures on Doing It Right. For me at least, it’s a satisfying sort of effort. It helps a lot that since tasting it for the first time, I have come to believe that crab apple jelly is the Lord’s own fruity manna (sure, it sounds quasi-blasphemous, but we are talking about crab apples harvested from a tree in a churchyard, so cut me some slack). Despite the mess and effort, I find jelly-making pleasant work, and I’m pleased that after a season of practice, I think I’ve finally produced jelly made to a high standard of taste, aesthetics, and safety.

Bicycles: still fighting my stupid shoulder ache, I got on the bicycle for my usual Saturday morning ride. It doesn’t really hurt on the bike. The pain is hardly noticeable on the bike. My neck even felt a bit more relaxed after a few hours on the bike. Huh. I really like cycling.

It was a chilly but sunny day out, with enough moisture in the air to suck the warmth from your bones, but enough sun in the sky to make you smile and think about how pleasant it was to live somewhere where riding a bicycle in mid-November could be pleasant.

Tune in next time to a very special posting on Wired Cola. The Lovely One speaks!

I’ve been surfing Techbargains an awful lot lately (any other good bargain sites?) looking for a deal on a digital camera.

With the Canadian dollar suddenly well over $0.80 U.S., and with Canadian (and American) consumer prices not quite caught up to the new reality, an interesting bargaining situation arises.

In short, consumer goods being sold in the U.S. look really cheap to Canadian shoppers for the moment. This is probably a temporary situation, though maybe not: the current exchange rates are a result of a dropping U.S. dollar much more than a rising Canadian dollar, and most of the goods you are looking at were made outside of the U.S., so they should start getting more pricey in America. But many of these goods (especially cheap electronics) are made in China, whose currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar, meaning that their export goods also get cheaper when the U.S. dollar is falling.

Because of that latter factor, there may just be a general drop in the price of consumer goods in the next few months. It will be interesting to see what happens.

In the meantime, a quick guide to buying America’s stuff:

-If possible, get the vendor to use US Postal services. FedEx and UPS will charge you some pretty exorbitant fees for customs clearance, at least on their reasonably cheap ground services. I paid about $30 the last time UPS brought something over the border for me, and $13 with FedEx. That makes shipping a lot dearer than you think. the postal service tends to charge far less for brokerage services: five bucks.

For some shipments, especially ones where the shipper does not offer USPS as an option, or refuses to ship outside of the U.S., you may wish to use a U.S. post office box. The best I have used is The Letter Carrier in Point Roberts, who accept packages without prior notice from U.S. Mail, FedEx, and UPS. Their fees are quite reasonable for this very useful service, which saves you money if you don’t ship often enough to bother with a full-time box service.

So there you go: use the postal service, go to Point Roberts, and if you see a good deal on a Canon A75, let me know.

Argh. Sidelined at home. This is why you shouldn’t run around and have fun on your lunch hour after age 30:

Thursday, I participated in the usual intramural indoor soccer game in the gym. It went just fine until I had a harmless fall while playing the ball, got up, and a minute or two later was incredibly stiff-necked. I abandoned the game, and ground my teeth through the rest of the day.

I could barely move my neck all night. I still can barely move my neck. At least this morning large doses of ibuprofen seem to be helping, unlike last night. Note to those who would exploit the synergistic effects of alcohol and ibuprofen: one of the side-effects is stomach bleeding. Which didn’t happen to me. But the pain overwhelmed the ibuprofen.

Hey, it’s time for a “two weeks late” book review!

I have been reading Gregg Easterbrook’s book The Progress Paradox, which posits the shocking idea that things are getting better. The book is a font of interesting tidbits, all aimed at Easterbrook’s exploration of the question of why people who are doing so well relative to their forebears think they are doing so badly. He has interesting analyses of everything from the increase in global prosperity (which has been enormous, even in very poor countries) to the unheralded point that U.S. and Russian nuclear weapon stocks have been dismantled down to about a tenth of their Cold War peak.

I’m not done the book yet, but it’s interesting reading in parallel with The Book of Risks, which attempts to document as factually as possible relative risks of various activities. I don’t think it’s a very good book, so far: the author makes a good start when he describes how relative risks should be assessed, but doesn’t seem to compile the data he has into a form that would best allow you to do that across all manner of risks. The charts and graphs in the book contain all manner of Tuftean sins, including 3-D pie charts, bad pie charts with holes in them, and other annoyances. But it does glean some useful statistics, including the clearest comparison of the relative risks of motorcycling and car-driving ever (your mother was right: motorcycles are really dangerous, but don’t let that stop you).

Both books have as a major point that people don’t worry about the right stuff, and don’t assess risks and their current situation well. We worry about very small and dubiously proven carcinogenic effects while ignoring huge hazards caused by eating too much or exercising too little.

So today’s meditation: cheer up. It’s not as bad as you think, it’s getting better all the time, and you’re worrying about the wrong stuff anyways.

Ow! My neck….