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Breakfast Combo
Dec. 27th, 2010 10:25 pmDrove up to Beaverlodge--well, to my stepdad's apiary, Kamisak, which is in the country nearby--for Christmas.
Checked the oil on the way up. We don't do that as much as we should, really, mostly because we often don't drive far enough to get the oil churned up enough to measure accurately (or so I'm told), so I bit the bullet and lifted the hood while we were gassing up in Fox Creek at a self-serve Husky station with startling antiquated gas pumps--I mean, no pay-at-the-pump or anything. Not even a digital display. I couldn't even read the level on the dipstick, and there was no convenient "fill line", but from the dark colour of the oil I decided it was probably time to top it up. According to the oil-change place sticker on the inside of our windshield, we're a month and a half overdue for a change, but the little "Change oil" light on the dashboard hasn't gone off yet, and I'm sure I didn't take as long to reset it after the last oil change as I did the first time, so we're ignoring it. The whole quart (or whatever) of oil went in without overflowing, so I don't know what that means about the quantity of engine oil we've been using. I'm sure our superintelligent car would have lit up another dashboard light if it was seriously low, though. First time I've checked the oil myself in years, though.
My mom has a nice wood stove in her "sun room", which I like to keep fed on our winter visits. I'm very careful to open the stove door using the little handle wrapped with the wire that somehow never gets as hot as the dark metal at its core, and to use the poker or pieces of wood to manipulate the wood I insert, or want to rearrange inside. The first day, though, I absent-mindedly pushed the door a little further open with my left hand, and instantly wished I hadn't. My mom has lots of first-aid equipment, since mishaps are not unknown around the bee yard, and smeared some silver nitrate on my left middle finger--in retrospect, this was probably the stuff that they used on my forehead after I second-degree-sunburned it at the athletics championship back in the summer of '01, that they told me would turn black in sunlight. I wrapped it with a huge bandage, since I wasn't sure what precisely had been burned, but by the next day it seemed pretty clear that what I had was a big blister near the tip, but the rest seemed to be okay. I've been keeping it bandaged since then, though using smaller and smaller bandages since. Hope it goes away soon. My mom gave me a "finger cot" to wrap it in while I had a shower--a tight plastic shield that you roll down over your finger, sort of like a condom--and that worked well enough that now I want to buy some of my own.
We got the boys a Wii for Christmas, which makes this the first gaming console I have ever owned. The first one I ever played, of course, was my friend Jeremy's Colecovision back in the 80's, and the Wii is probably the second. I've played it at Graham and Nancy's, of course, mostly Rock Band, but I love Rock Band, so I was on board with it. The boys have played it a lot at Sharna and Nick's, so they were familiar with the Sports and Sports Resort games, as well as the Star Wars: Force Unleashed game. The boys got Force Unleashed II, which they played a lot. I haven't tried it yet. The boys beat me handily at Swordplay in Sports Resort, but I held my own in Archery. Nicole has informed me that Rock Band, or some version of it, is her Christmas present to me, but neither of us really knows what version I should be getting (or Band Hero, perhaps?), so she didn't want to buy it herself, so I'll try to do some research and then head out with some trepidation to face the Boxing Week crowds. Plus the boys have asked for another nunchuk thing so they can do the Duel mode in Force Unleashed.
Started a 1000-piece puzzle based on Escher's "Waterfall". Was still not done when we left. Decided that Escher should have used more colours. We did most of the darker bits in the middle, the actual waterfall and based, leaving the lighter surrounding bits. Nicole craftily disassembled it in strips and laid them in the box, so we can resume work on it here without having to go back to the beginning.
Went to see "Tangled" on Boxing Day. We weren't about our plan when we discovered that it was snowing as we drove in to Grande Prairie. Also some trepidation about possible Boxing Day crowds at the new (to me, at least, still) big box stores near the new multiplex on the west side of the city. The theatre was pretty deserted, though we were confused by the fact that the box office was unmanned. We had a gift card from who knows how long ago, as well as some movie passes we got for Christmas, but we ended up letting Elmer buy our tickets. Only then did we discover that you could buy your tickets with the popcorn at the concession stand. Well, whatever. We used the gift card to buy the popcorn and drinks, as well as the free Smarties that we ended up accidentally leaving at the counter because of disorganization. The movie itself? It was pretty good, nice to see a good treatment of the Rapunzel story. The inn-of-villains scene was a bit too reminiscent of the ending of Shrek the Third, and a little improbable, and Rapunzel's eyes seemed just a little too unrealistically huge (but what else is new for cartoon princesses, I guess), but overall it was a good movie, even the songs. Welled up at the floating lantern scenes. Also, don't understand why they're making a sequel to "Cars", but then, I didn't understand why they made the first one, either.
Waffled about whether to leave on Monday or Tuesday. We did want to be home on Monday, even though we hadn't finished the Escher puzzle, because, well, we like to be home. But after the Boxing Day snowfall, we weren't sure about the weather or the roads. We didn't pack on Sunday night, and the first thing I did when I got up was check the weather report and highway conditions. Became annoyed that by 8:30 there was still no road report more recent than 6:00-something, but decided that since it was supposed to snow Tuesday morning as well, there wasn't much advantage in staying.
Found out when we were about to leave that my cell phone battery was dead. My mom, who also had a Samsung phone, had a car-lighter charger, but it didn't fit. With the roads and weather possibly dicey, we didn't want to be without it, so we charged it for like ten minutes before we left and set out for Grande Prairie. There, we stopped at London Drugs, and I found a car-lighter charger for my phone. On the whole trip, we only used the phone to call my mom and let her know that we had bought the charger.
Just before Valleyview, the roads started getting sloppy, and everyone who passed us sprayed dirty road guck on our windshield. We tried to use the windshield washer, but nothing came out, and the wipers just smeared it more. This was in the middle of the First Nations reservation which is the only holdout of non-divided highway on the entire stretch of Highway 43 between Edmonton and Beaverlodge. Nicole declared that she couldn't see well enough to drive any more, so we pulled over onto the snow-covered shoulder and put the hood up. I dug out the windshield washer fluid from the back of the trunk behind the suitcases and bags of presents and books, with less effort than I had expected. The washer fluid tank turned out to be missing its cap, but once Nicole confirmed its location from the owner's manual, I refilled it. Still didn't work. With cars zooming by at what felt like insanely ludicrous speeds a few feet from the driver's side door (where the tank opening happened to be), we elected to wait until Valleyview to check it out. We washed the windshield by the simple expedient of having me splash some washer fluid direct from the jug (probably quite wastefully), and managed to make it to Valleyview. For some reason, Valleyview is short of decent restaurants, at least ones near the highway; this time we elected to stop at the diner next to the Esso gas station near the south side of town, in case we needed to get the whole wiper system fixed at a garage and stay at a hotel in Valleyview overnight while they did. Once we got the car parked with the hood up, and Nicole tried to wash the windows again, I saw the problem: there was a leak in the hose, which sprayed the fluid under the hood instead of letting any get to the actual wipers. We ate at the diner (I had a cheese donair, with no tomato, which was not at all bad), and then I found some duct tape at the gas station store next door. Simon assisted me while I tried to tape up the leak; it sort of worked, but that, and another leak which had also been duct taped previously (possibly even by me), still leaked a little bit. Didn't matter; enough came out of the wipers that we could actually clean the windows, and we promised ourselves that sometime in the next week or two we would definitely take the car in and get that little hose completely replaced.
Got the whole week off, which is nice. Will try to fit in "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" with Nicole and Simon, a blood donor appointment, and maybe one or two other things. We'll also try to find a couple of movies on Telus TV that we missed in theatres to watch on New Year's Eve. 2010 was not as unkind to us as to some other people we know, but we're hoping 2011 will be better nonetheless.
Checked the oil on the way up. We don't do that as much as we should, really, mostly because we often don't drive far enough to get the oil churned up enough to measure accurately (or so I'm told), so I bit the bullet and lifted the hood while we were gassing up in Fox Creek at a self-serve Husky station with startling antiquated gas pumps--I mean, no pay-at-the-pump or anything. Not even a digital display. I couldn't even read the level on the dipstick, and there was no convenient "fill line", but from the dark colour of the oil I decided it was probably time to top it up. According to the oil-change place sticker on the inside of our windshield, we're a month and a half overdue for a change, but the little "Change oil" light on the dashboard hasn't gone off yet, and I'm sure I didn't take as long to reset it after the last oil change as I did the first time, so we're ignoring it. The whole quart (or whatever) of oil went in without overflowing, so I don't know what that means about the quantity of engine oil we've been using. I'm sure our superintelligent car would have lit up another dashboard light if it was seriously low, though. First time I've checked the oil myself in years, though.
My mom has a nice wood stove in her "sun room", which I like to keep fed on our winter visits. I'm very careful to open the stove door using the little handle wrapped with the wire that somehow never gets as hot as the dark metal at its core, and to use the poker or pieces of wood to manipulate the wood I insert, or want to rearrange inside. The first day, though, I absent-mindedly pushed the door a little further open with my left hand, and instantly wished I hadn't. My mom has lots of first-aid equipment, since mishaps are not unknown around the bee yard, and smeared some silver nitrate on my left middle finger--in retrospect, this was probably the stuff that they used on my forehead after I second-degree-sunburned it at the athletics championship back in the summer of '01, that they told me would turn black in sunlight. I wrapped it with a huge bandage, since I wasn't sure what precisely had been burned, but by the next day it seemed pretty clear that what I had was a big blister near the tip, but the rest seemed to be okay. I've been keeping it bandaged since then, though using smaller and smaller bandages since. Hope it goes away soon. My mom gave me a "finger cot" to wrap it in while I had a shower--a tight plastic shield that you roll down over your finger, sort of like a condom--and that worked well enough that now I want to buy some of my own.
We got the boys a Wii for Christmas, which makes this the first gaming console I have ever owned. The first one I ever played, of course, was my friend Jeremy's Colecovision back in the 80's, and the Wii is probably the second. I've played it at Graham and Nancy's, of course, mostly Rock Band, but I love Rock Band, so I was on board with it. The boys have played it a lot at Sharna and Nick's, so they were familiar with the Sports and Sports Resort games, as well as the Star Wars: Force Unleashed game. The boys got Force Unleashed II, which they played a lot. I haven't tried it yet. The boys beat me handily at Swordplay in Sports Resort, but I held my own in Archery. Nicole has informed me that Rock Band, or some version of it, is her Christmas present to me, but neither of us really knows what version I should be getting (or Band Hero, perhaps?), so she didn't want to buy it herself, so I'll try to do some research and then head out with some trepidation to face the Boxing Week crowds. Plus the boys have asked for another nunchuk thing so they can do the Duel mode in Force Unleashed.
Started a 1000-piece puzzle based on Escher's "Waterfall". Was still not done when we left. Decided that Escher should have used more colours. We did most of the darker bits in the middle, the actual waterfall and based, leaving the lighter surrounding bits. Nicole craftily disassembled it in strips and laid them in the box, so we can resume work on it here without having to go back to the beginning.
Went to see "Tangled" on Boxing Day. We weren't about our plan when we discovered that it was snowing as we drove in to Grande Prairie. Also some trepidation about possible Boxing Day crowds at the new (to me, at least, still) big box stores near the new multiplex on the west side of the city. The theatre was pretty deserted, though we were confused by the fact that the box office was unmanned. We had a gift card from who knows how long ago, as well as some movie passes we got for Christmas, but we ended up letting Elmer buy our tickets. Only then did we discover that you could buy your tickets with the popcorn at the concession stand. Well, whatever. We used the gift card to buy the popcorn and drinks, as well as the free Smarties that we ended up accidentally leaving at the counter because of disorganization. The movie itself? It was pretty good, nice to see a good treatment of the Rapunzel story. The inn-of-villains scene was a bit too reminiscent of the ending of Shrek the Third, and a little improbable, and Rapunzel's eyes seemed just a little too unrealistically huge (but what else is new for cartoon princesses, I guess), but overall it was a good movie, even the songs. Welled up at the floating lantern scenes. Also, don't understand why they're making a sequel to "Cars", but then, I didn't understand why they made the first one, either.
Waffled about whether to leave on Monday or Tuesday. We did want to be home on Monday, even though we hadn't finished the Escher puzzle, because, well, we like to be home. But after the Boxing Day snowfall, we weren't sure about the weather or the roads. We didn't pack on Sunday night, and the first thing I did when I got up was check the weather report and highway conditions. Became annoyed that by 8:30 there was still no road report more recent than 6:00-something, but decided that since it was supposed to snow Tuesday morning as well, there wasn't much advantage in staying.
Found out when we were about to leave that my cell phone battery was dead. My mom, who also had a Samsung phone, had a car-lighter charger, but it didn't fit. With the roads and weather possibly dicey, we didn't want to be without it, so we charged it for like ten minutes before we left and set out for Grande Prairie. There, we stopped at London Drugs, and I found a car-lighter charger for my phone. On the whole trip, we only used the phone to call my mom and let her know that we had bought the charger.
Just before Valleyview, the roads started getting sloppy, and everyone who passed us sprayed dirty road guck on our windshield. We tried to use the windshield washer, but nothing came out, and the wipers just smeared it more. This was in the middle of the First Nations reservation which is the only holdout of non-divided highway on the entire stretch of Highway 43 between Edmonton and Beaverlodge. Nicole declared that she couldn't see well enough to drive any more, so we pulled over onto the snow-covered shoulder and put the hood up. I dug out the windshield washer fluid from the back of the trunk behind the suitcases and bags of presents and books, with less effort than I had expected. The washer fluid tank turned out to be missing its cap, but once Nicole confirmed its location from the owner's manual, I refilled it. Still didn't work. With cars zooming by at what felt like insanely ludicrous speeds a few feet from the driver's side door (where the tank opening happened to be), we elected to wait until Valleyview to check it out. We washed the windshield by the simple expedient of having me splash some washer fluid direct from the jug (probably quite wastefully), and managed to make it to Valleyview. For some reason, Valleyview is short of decent restaurants, at least ones near the highway; this time we elected to stop at the diner next to the Esso gas station near the south side of town, in case we needed to get the whole wiper system fixed at a garage and stay at a hotel in Valleyview overnight while they did. Once we got the car parked with the hood up, and Nicole tried to wash the windows again, I saw the problem: there was a leak in the hose, which sprayed the fluid under the hood instead of letting any get to the actual wipers. We ate at the diner (I had a cheese donair, with no tomato, which was not at all bad), and then I found some duct tape at the gas station store next door. Simon assisted me while I tried to tape up the leak; it sort of worked, but that, and another leak which had also been duct taped previously (possibly even by me), still leaked a little bit. Didn't matter; enough came out of the wipers that we could actually clean the windows, and we promised ourselves that sometime in the next week or two we would definitely take the car in and get that little hose completely replaced.
Got the whole week off, which is nice. Will try to fit in "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" with Nicole and Simon, a blood donor appointment, and maybe one or two other things. We'll also try to find a couple of movies on Telus TV that we missed in theatres to watch on New Year's Eve. 2010 was not as unkind to us as to some other people we know, but we're hoping 2011 will be better nonetheless.
