Author: Tony Dalmyn

Kayaking again

When I arrived in Victoria, I kept the Thule Tornado roof box on my car. When I moved into my house I took it off the car and secured it by a steel cable to the back fence. When my possesions arrived, I secured my kayak the same way.
Last weekend I went to lumber yard, bought two 8 foot 4×4 posts, and to an equipment rental store where I rented a manual auger. I drilled a couple of post holes in the sandy soil, and used some 2×4’s left in the house by past tenants to built a rack to hold the roof box and the kayak:
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That took a chunk of last Saturday. It needs some more work to cradle the kayak – some plywood to the cross pieces, cut in a curve, and some foam noodle should do it. It needs something to secure a tarp to keep the sun and UV off the boat, but that should be easy.
I went shopping for some books on kayaking on salt (tidal!) water and found the Easykayaker books to be useful. On Sunday afternoon, on a slack low tide, I paddled the Gorge from the Kinsmen Park to the Selkirk trestle and then back up the Gorge to the bridge at Admiral’s Road, and back to the park. No pictures – it was enough to get organized and back on the water, without worrying about the camera. I have only been on the water once since 2002. I have missed it, and I am in good place to make up for the lost time.

Nostradamus

The Wikipedia entry of the day is Nostradamus!
This has a rich personal resonance. When my kids were young my sister-in-law, once known as Sharon Wehner the dancer, now billing herself as Ariole K. Alei, said she believed that she had channelled messages from alien/spiritual presences. She wanted to approach Sting, the Dalai Lama and the Pope to inform them of the messages she had received, to bring about a great spiritual awakening of humankind. She felt that people near to her, by birth or marriage, had been reincarnated. Yours truly was believed to be the reincarnation of Nostradamus. My spouse and her parents seemed to think that Sharon didn’t have the gods lined up in the right order, but they felt the same way. My failure to be open to their collective beliefs, whatever they were, became a sore point in my dealings with my wife, and her parents and their circle of friends. My judgment that their New Age beliefs in things like reincarnation were, shall we say, eccentric, and that they seemed to gullible and vulnerable to being pulled into pyramid schemes was answered by their judgment that I was negative, destructive, hostile and sick. Repent Harlequin said the tick tock man and all that.
Sharon/Ariole has moved on and become a personal coach and healer, a poet, and spirit guide. Her husband is involved in the same ventures. They used to brand themselves as matchmakers too, but now they offer life and relationship services.
One of the links on Sharon/Ariole’s web site goes to the Liberty League (critical web site here) – a classic pyramid scheme, which has been sued for consumer fraud by the Attorney General of Arizona. If you repeat your mistakes, are you reborn?
I, Nostradamus, predict a hard fall for these fools.

Baking Bread

Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to bake bread. It started with a resolution to pack a lunch, which I have not done consistently since University. It brings back memories of Men into Space (see also the Wikipedia entry) and the lunch box I carried to grade school. I was not consistently eating the bread I bought at the supermarkets. The slices are light, suited for toast, not necessarily for hearty sandwiches.
Jean Paré’s “Company’s Coming” cookbooks are becoming like Louis L’Amour’s gunslinger romances. They are sold in grocery stores, kitchen ware stores and hardware stores like Canadian Tire more than in regular bookstores. Most of the books are bound in with plastic combs or coils, which means the books lay flat on a counter – a huge convenience in my opinion. I had a couple already and found them handy, and simple. More on that another time. Her books are being released in a new printing and I leafed through a copy of the 38th printing Muffins and More, the third book in the original series, which was first released in July 1983. The emphasis in the title should be the “and More” because it has recipes for bread, fruit and flavoured bread, buns and rolls, as well as muffins.
Her recipes all use baking powder and baking soda, rather than yeast. This means mixing dry ingredients and wet ingredients, pouring it into a baking pan and baking. This avoids the kneading and rising involved in baking a yeasted bread. The results are good in my experience. The wheat bread is good, the raisin bread is very good. My first impression is that the chemical leaveners have sodium, and bread most recipes for yeast bread suggest using salt.
The Paré book is good enough, but there are other options. I found the new edition of the Tassajara Bread Book to be quite useful, with detailed instructions and good illustrations of a process that was unfamiliar to me (I swallowed my indifference to the Zen proselytizing to read the book). The results are good, but there is a lot of time and a fair amount of work involved in kneading and triple rising. It works well on a morning devoted to chores or reading, where I can work around the requirements of coming back to the loaf several times over several hours.
There is no clear financial advantage or disadvantage. A 2 kg bag of flour runs around $5.00 and can produce about 5-6 loaves, but the cost of other ingredients, energy and hardware has to be taken into account. If you buy larger bags of flour, there are savings. The bread, if one avoids the pitfalls of the process, is worthwhile.

Canada Post

I went in to get my mail redirected to my house in Victoria when I moved in at the beginning of April. I was told that I could not amend the Change of Address, and that I had to pay for a new redirection. I filled in the new form, changing my address from Home Street in Winnipeg to my new address in Victoria. The clerk then checked off my forms as an amendment, but what do I know about their procedures. I knew there was a problem last week when Colleen called and said she was still getting my mail. This week – a full four week later – I got the new forms back with a printout of what seems to be a Canada Post intranet FAQ about amendments. It seems that amendments are possible – and free – before the redirection starts. Once the redirection starts, the customer is supposed to cancel it and purchase a new mail redirection.
I went to the post office and showed the clerk what I had received in the mail. I pointed out that I had paid the fees and given them a day time phone number on the forms. I wondered, if what they wanted, was for me to come in and cancel the first redirection, why my forms had been sent back. I didn’t get an answer. To the credit of the employee at the counter and her supervisor, no one said that this was my fault.
Canada Post doesn’t seem to train its employees in what should be fairly common procedures.