Bruno's big adventure

The regular reader will be acquainted with Bruno, the silver-grey Neopolitan runt we picked up at the animal shelter down the road a few months back. Probably not the brightest dog of all time, and doesn't see very well, and occasionally attacks other dogs at random, which I think is related to not seeing very well, but he is the love of our lives.

The other day, the Farm Manager brought home eighty dollars worth of tomato cages she'd scored at curb-side pickup at Home Hardware, for the forty bucks worth of tomatoes she'll grow this year. Don't worry though; those cages should pay for themselves in just a couple of years.

Unless of course Bruno figures out a way to destroy them, and frankly, it never occurred to us that such a thing was possible.

The FM got the deluxe extra-large tomato cages and tossed them in her 10x10 kitchen garden. Naturally, Bruno had to investigate the new stuff, and wouldn't you know, he gets his head stuck up the large end of a tomato cage.

Although Bruno is a "runt," a runt Neo weighs in at a hundred and fifty pounds or so, and the sight of him trying to fight off the four-foot tomato cage that had attacked him was quite something. He raced back and forth across the yard in a mad panic, banging into various arbours, bird-feeders, plant-hangers and the like, until I was able to get close enough to pull off the offending tomato cage, at which point it was a crumpled mess of broken welds and bent wire.

But Bruno's ok now.

Confessions of a digital dummy

I must admit I don't have much use for internet shopping, and avoid it if at all possible.

Partly that's because you can't shop on-line without putting your credit card info out there, and it seems to me that sooner or later even the most reputable on-line vendors get hacked, and that's when you get a bill for a Bali vacation you never took. 

The other part is that it's very hard to think on-line-shopping without thinking Amazon. Don't get me started. Amazon opens a warehouse... oh, I'm sorry, a "fullfilment centre" in Brampton that'll bring 600 jobs at min wage plus fifty cents, and PM Fluffy is right there thanking Jeff Bezos for "creating solid full-time jobs that will strengthen the middle class."

Oh fuck off!

Amazon does not create jobs, it kills them. Depending on how you look at it, for every job Amazon "creates," it will eliminate somewhere between two and five in the bricks-and-mortar economy. Thanks Jeff!

So then my lawnmower goes for a shit, and we're under lock-down, and while you can go and spread your germs at Foodland or the corner store or the LCBO, you can't go into a hardware store, and until they sell lawnmowers at Foodland or the corner store or the LCBO, I'm outta options. 

I crack open my laptop and check my favourites first. I've decided to go with another push-mower. Ya, I know nobody with a lawn this size cuts it with a push mower. I'll leave the rider till after my first serious heart event. In the meantime, pushing a lawnmower around hopefully pushes that date back a bit.

My first stop is Home Hardware's website. It's my first stop because it's a Canadian company with a folksy origin story. Out of St. Jacobs Ontario, deep in the heart of Mennonite country. First time I get to their site, there's no prices on any of their stuff. I'm told to put in a postal code to get pricing.

I must have put in the wrong postal code. I know it starts with "n," but how often do I write letters to myself? By the time I went to the Canada Post site to retrieve the correct postal code (and I did have the first letter right) I never again saw the little window to enter it, even after a half hour of repeatedly trying. 

You gotta spruce up your web-page, folks!

My second choice is Canadian Tire. Still Canadian, but way more corporate. I see prices right away. I find my lawnmower. I'm ready to buy!

Alas, I'm looking for curbside pick-up, and there is nothing I can do to convince the Canadian Tire website that my nearest store is 25 km away in Owen Sound, not 600 km away in another province. 

You gotta spruce up your website, folks!

Hate to do it, but my next shot brings in the US multinational, Home Depot. Things start off promising! I can see on my laptop that the Owen Sound store has 8 of the model in stock that I want. Prices are right up front. Finally! 

I can almost smell the fresh-cut grass!

But then I hit a snag. I simply cannot find curbside pickup on the website. I call the store. The person who answers tells me she's on a "chat" and therefore cannot view her screen to direct me towards any possible link to curbside pickup.

By now I've spent three hours on-line trying to buy a lawnmower, and there is no prospect of one in my immediate future. 

The FM gets home. I spell out the situation. She gets on the computer. Within two minutes she's figured out that to find curbside pick-up at Home Depot, I have to go into my cart...

How am I supposed to know?! 

Spruce up your website, folks!

"There's a moose loose aboot the hoose..."

When I worked at Frankel Steel there was a gang of steel-fitters and welders at the place who had been brought over from steel works in Scotland. This was the mid-eighties, and the UK was a little ahead of us in the de-industrialization race to the bottom. These guys were relegated to the dole back home and were happy to come over for a chance to earn a living.

That lasted a few years, but as the Canadian dollar approached parity with the USD, the competitive advantage for a big fab shop like Frankel, which did much of its work for US projects, gradually declined, and eventually they found themselves on the dole again. By and large they were an agreeable lot, and they had that great accent, that I tried to capture with that quote from a guy whose wife saw a mouse in the house.

I'm thinking of that because this has been a banner year for mice in the house, and although it's not much of a comfort, it ain't just us. Back in the autumn TSC and Home Hardware were both sold out of mouse-traps. We were catching 2-3 per day for at least two months. Thankfully, we seem to be winning; there's only been one mouse caught in the last three weeks.

Unfortunately, our ordeal is not over. Now we've got chipmunks in the house!

As a life-long camping aficionado, I've always enjoyed their company. They are regular companions in campsites across the country. Quite often, within a few hours of settling in, they'll come right up on your picnic table and eat peanuts out of your hand. It's always delightful, and the kids used to love it.

For some reason, the prospect of feeding them peanuts out of my hand while I'm sitting on the couch watching TV isn't nearly so delightful.

There's a mouse living in my Toyota

I shit you not! There's a f@cking mouse living in my Toyota, and it's not some 20 year old beater nicknamed "Rusty.

How does a mouse even get in your car?

Do they lurk in the grass, and leap in when you open the door?

If not, they must climb up a tire, navigate the various suspension parts, and then tunnel their way into the cabin.

I only became aware of my unwanted tenant because of a trip to Mill Creek Chocolates last week. I bought a dozen individually wrapped chocolates as a gift, and stuck them in the side-pocket of the door. When I reached for them the next day, the Mill Creek bag was there but the chocolates weren't.

I assumed somebody had broke into the car, (they can do this in about two seconds with these new and improved electronic door locks), filched the chocolates, and buggered off... they didn't even bother taking my wallet!

Although that scenario seems suspect in hindsight, it felt 100% plausible at the time.

I even shared that yarn with the folks at Mill Creek when I went back to repurchase my order.

The next day, I'm fishing around under the passenger seat for a carton of smokes I keep stashed there.

Four of the packs had been breached, and a couple of them actually had individual cigarettes pulled out of them...

That ain't no hit-and-run thief!


I hustled off to Home Hardware and bought myself an old-school mouse-trap. Fixed it up with a generous chunk 'o extra-old white cheddar, and set it on the floor mat right in front of me.

Next morning, nothing. Maybe Mr. Mouse was dead, OD'd on chocolate and tobacco. Not necessarily an unpleasant demise, if you stop and ponder it, but it made for a somewhat anxiety-inducing drive into town to fetch my morning paper.

I guess he was just comatose from his OD, because the next morning there was a nice plump rodent in the trap.


The cheese was gone, though, so at least he'd had a decent last meal.

Bigger conglomerates building crappier stuff...

That pretty much sums up the arc of progress, doesn't it?

Time was, manufacturers took pride in building durable, reliable, and quality products. In case you haven't noticed, those days are largely behind us.

Nowadays, one conglomerate with manufacturing facilities in China will push out hundreds of thousands of you-name-its, whether they be washing machines or lawn tractors, under half a dozen different brand names, all of which are fully expected to be replaced within five years or less. The idea that you should take pride in building a quality product that can last a lifetime is so ancient...

Speaking of lifetimes, the Farm Manager and I attended a birthday bash today for a family friend who was celebrating his 94th. Took along the 89 year old Bubbinator. Their paths used to cross all the time thanks to the Owen Sound Little Theatre. Earl was a patron and his late wife an occasional actor, while Bubby was for decades the beating heart of that outfit.

Also present at the party was a Syrian gentleman of my recent acquaintance. Nash is in his 80's and he's not a newcomer. I think he's been in this country longer than I have. The reason the dude fascinates me is that he's a genuine cannabis whisperer. He was keen on hearing how my crop (two plants) was faring this year.

Fifty-fifty, I said. Half my crop unexpectedly turned male when it was about three feet high. The other half is promising a very decent yield. Think "elephant sticks." If you weren't a pot aficionado fifty years ago that reference might be meaningless to you, but it's a good thing.

Nash gave me some hints on how I could improve the odds for my cuttings. He's a seriously smart guy who is in demand as a consultant for some of those Bay Street wankers who ended up owning Canada's legal weed market, thanks to PM Fluffy.

As you recall, Fluffy was elected in no small part due to his promise to legalize pot. What he neglected to mention on the campaign trail was that his legalization gambit was premised entirely on making sure the corporate sector was handed the market, instead of legitimizing the mom-and-pop growers who have kept weed science alive for the last hundred years.

That was merely one of Justin's bait-and-switch shenanigans. He got a lot of votes from folks who still harboured happy thoughts about the reign of his dear daddy. Pierre was his opposite, a Canadian nationalist who pulled no punches when it came to our relationship with the elephant next door. Pierre was all in for an independent foreign policy. Justin is all in for making sure we don't offend the Trump-Bolton-Pompeo axis of virtue.

That's why we're discussing the 19 billion dollar purchase of fighter planes and a 60 billion dollar warship building program... in a country that can't afford to ensure our Indian Reservations have drinkable water.  After all, ensuring "interoperability" with the armed forces of "our allies," meaning Uncle Sam, is going to be way more important than clean water once the Ruskies snowshoe over the North Pole to invade us.

To say nothing of the Yellow Peril...


The day began with a bit of a scare. My dear Hanna was up for a brief visit. She's been in Toronto for the last seven or eight years, collecting various university degrees that have thus far failed to improve on the income she makes from that Iranian food-truck operator. I think she's finally on a good track; starts an MSW degree at U of T next week. Hopefully that will get her out of Hoonan's food trucks once and for all.

So Hanna has her turn in the shower, and whoopsie... there's no more water!

I panicked. Last time this happened it took multiple trips to Home Hardware and a couple of YouTube videos to sort things out. Ya, I know; I'm one of those geezers who still wants to fix everything himself.

I had a party to go to, and no time for Home Hardware or YouTube. I was just pissed off that I was denied a shower.

Long story short, when someone, anyone, (I'm not mentioning any names) has a 45 minute shower, both the hot water tank and the pressure tank will run dry. By the time we got back from the birthday bash everything was functioning normally again.


What a relief!

The brown brown grass of home

It's a good news bad news kinda thing. We've had about a five minute squirt of rain in the last month.

The bad news is that the cash crop guys are gonna go broke this year.

The good news is that I'll probably get by with cutting the lawn two or three times, instead of twenty or thirty.

Thank God I didn't fall for Junior's advice and get one of those fancy riding mowers. I mean he made a good point; get that Cub Cadet rider and cutting the lawn is gonna be an adventure after you've had eight beers. I get it.

Whereas, no matter how you cut it, pushing that Home Hardware $199 special around the yard is never gonna be anything other than drudgery, no matter how many beers you had.

About that BBQ

I bought my first charcoal grill about 1980. Ya, I'd had one of those little hibachis, but around '80 I went wild and scored myself one of those Weber kettles.


Me and the Weber got off to a rocky start.


First off, I was taking a bit of a flyer here. You can buy a propane grill for the price of a Weber kettle.


I struggled with that.


Eventually I made a commitment to charcoal.


So I pick up my new Weber at the Home Hardware in Guelph, when it was still on the corner of Woolwich and Speedvale. The guy who owned the store lived three or four doors down the street from me. It always makes me feel virtuous when I can support the locals.


I'm pushing my kettle to the car. It wobbles and then wobbles worse. A wheel falls off. The kettle kilters... and collapses.


I'm a bit pissed off.


I pay premium dollars for a Weber kettle and the fucking thing breaks down before we're out of the parking lot!


I know, it's a high school part-timer making minimum wage who assembled this.  I try to keep my cool. The wheel portion of the grill is now completely separate from the kettle part.


I load the various parts in the trunk and head home.


Anyway, I get her home and bolt everything up the way it should have been done in the first place, and by gosh that Weber kettle did me twelve months a year BBQ for the next twenty years!


I bring this up because I witnessed somebody spending a good ten minutes scrubbing a grill the other day, with one of those wire brush thingies.


My Weber kettle did yeoman work for twenty years.


Number of times I scrubbed the grill?


Zero!


I don't know what people think they're doing when they scrub the BBQ grill... just fire that puppy up and let the heat purify the grill!


Yup, that Weber kettle went twenty years without being touched with a wire brush. Must have fed hundreds over the years.


And the last steak we cooked on it was flavored just a little by every BBQ from the last twenty years.