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Blueberries are #1

Study: Blue Skies for Blueberries

In terms of area under production, blueberries rank as the number one fruit crop in the country. Blueberries officially surpassed apples in top spot in 1996.

I don’t think I would have even guessed that blueberries were in the top 5, let alone bigger than apples.

Crazy Train or Emotional Subway Attack

This was in my bookmarks from way back, and it still amuses me. I don’t believe a word of it, but the concept is fabulous, darling!

Vote!

Vote vote vote vote vote.

Need help? See Elections Canada.

Our incumbent MP entertained me

…by losing her cool at our all-candidates’ meeting last week after being asked pointed questions about copyright and various conflicts of interest between her government role and her campaign donors.

Too bad for her, some local bloggers were there — one filmed the whole thing and tossed it at the Internet. Even worse for her, BoingBoing picked it up. Hundreds of thousands of hits. It’s creeping into the mass media — even Maclean’s and the Financial Post have picked up on the issue.

I’d feel sorry for her were she not so utterly useless.

Meme

Well, good thing I have a zoology degree then….

You scored as Biology. You should be a Biology major! You are passionate about the sciences, and you enjoy studying cell growth and evolutionary concepts which enable living organisms to survive. Pursue that!

Mathematics

100%

Engineering

100%

Biology

100%

Sociology

92%

Psychology

75%

Philosophy

75%

English

58%

Chemistry

58%

Journalism

50%

Theater

50%

Linguistics

50%

Anthropology

50%

Art

25%

Dance

17%

What is your Perfect Major?
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What passes for New Year’s fun at our house

We raised, if not the roof, the second floor of our house by a centimetre or so. (Not by partying, sadly.)

Safety-Averse Former Owner (SAFO) decided that cutting great huge chunks out of the joists was a good idea — hey, why not, just because they’re structural doesn’t mean you really need them, right?

Chunkified bathroom joists

– which made the upstairs bathroom & back bedroom kinda sproingy. We’d like to tile the bathroom, so we needed to make things more rigid so our tiles won’t crack. The large metal pole on the right in the photo below

Looking upstairs from downstairs

(looking up into the bathroom from the equally-destroyed downstairs kitchen) is one of several similar poles holding several joists up a bit, levelling them with the other joists, while we screwed 2×8s to the worst-destroyed joists. The photo below is looking down into the kitchen from the upstairs.

Looking downstairs from upstairs

It’s immense fun to push on a hydraulic jack and — with one hand’s easy effort — feel the entire second floor shift upwards. Highly recommended.

And then it was nearing 11pm and since we figured the neighbours might not enjoy the deafening thunkathunkathunka of the impact driver at that hour, we broke for some Veuve Cliquot.

Today D. is finishing up making things level and putting some thick plywood subfloor down.

New subfloor

Soon the plumbers will arrive and rip out absolutely every vestige of the old plumbing and will give us nice, new, properly-installed, non-leaking, non-corroded pipes and drains, yay!

Maddy’s very excited because all of this means that she will soon have a white bathtub in which she’ll be able to see the pretty colours in her bath salts (which aren’t apparent in our hideous old blue tub).