Mom and I had "adventures" today.

On the way to take her for church, we were driving along a major road to the Queensway (the expressway through town) when this guy zipped past us going WELL over the limit (probably between 75km and 80km in a 50 zone). He swerved almost into my lane.

Two blocks later, he swerved right up on the curb and almost jumped a snowbank, splashing the only pedestrian for a mile around. Had he jumped the snowbank, he would have killed the pedestrian. Then he veered into the left lane. A bit later, he veered back onto the curb, nearly jumping another snowbank. He wandered back and forth across the lanes for the entire time.

By then I was pretty convinced that he was drunk so I got out my phone. I dialed 911 when he entered the on-ramp for the Queensway. He was swerving into lanes, sometimes signaling and sometimes not -- cutting cars off and speeding well over the limit. Meanwhile, I was on the phone talking to the OPP (Ontaro Provincial Police) dispatcher.

I hadn't yet got his license plate and he was well ahead of me. Finally, I caught up to him... my speedometer was at at least 140km... I got his license relayed it to the dispatcher and dropped back to 100. He sped on.

We headed along but the traffic suddenly came to an almost complete halt.

My "Spidey Sense" told me that there was an accident and that in all likelihood he was either in it or the cause of it... I pulled out my phone again and called 911 again and was just speaking with the OPP dispatcher, again when I started seeing debris... Sure enough... there was an accident and guess who was in it...

As a matter of fact, he was the only car in it. He had lost control and hit the left median cement barrier, careened across 4 lanes and hit the snowbank (luckily, instead of going over the cement barrier into the Rideau River) before coming to a stop in lane 3 (second from the right). There was another driver who had witnessed the accident and he was talking to him. I got out and talked to the driver who had witnessed it and I asked if the other driver was okay... "He isn't injured but he's drunk..."

Between the time I made the first call to the OPP and the time I made the second call was a TOTAL of 6 minutes... It must have been 4 or 5 between when I called and he had the accident. We were in the west end of the city when I made the first call and right across in the east end when I made the second call.

He WAS drunk and was charged with impaired driving. I have to go to court.

He was damned lucky he wasn't killed and damn lucky he didn't hit anyone else. The other driver had his son in the car. Traffic was pretty heavy by then... He was lucky he didn't cause a major accident.

It was 10:06 when I made my first call. How do you get drunk by 10am???

Fuckhead....

On Saturday, I was walking down a flight of stairs in a park and someone behind me stumbled. They were able to catch the handrail... I was not.

I fell down the stairs, receiving a number of injuries, including a broken left "naughty finger", a broken bone in my right hand (in the palm under my ring finger), as well as a cut (I was carrying a glass juice bottle) between my ritgh ring and pinkie fingers. I was very lucky that there was no more serious damage in the cut in my hand. I could have lost it. As it was, the damage was ti the skin and underlying tissue which was easily repaired (9 stiches), no nerve or structural damage. (see also my vlog)

I also received a cut to my forehead, just at my hairling which while small, bled like a son of a bitch and left me covered in blood form head to foot. I also have bumps, bruises, and scrapes all over my body. Luckily, I neither lost consciousness, nor did I have any other fractures.

It could have been a LOT worse. For reasons I won't go into, I could have been killed. My Mom was there and, thank GOD she wasn't knocked down, too, and thank GOD she didn't have to withness anything worse than the result.

No... no lawsuit. Everything is covered by my Provincial Health vare, and anything else by my private plan, if it should come to that. It was an accident, pure and simple.

I am already feeling much better, though the stiffness and soreness is just coming to a head. I have bruises on my back, chest, legs, arms, had, hands.... well, I think the only thing that was un-bruised was my face and neck. Thank GOD for that!

I did meet a VERY nice (and very handsome and with the same name as a famous comedian) paramedic, too, which is ALWAYS worth an ambulance ride to the hospital!

After a slightly bumpy start (I didn't realize that all new videos uploaded appear on the front page and uploaded a whole bunch which got some rather pointed reactions...) which were all smoothed over by morning, I have been schmoozing on Vloggerheads.

I also joined Moar but haven't done much there. I have been frying my fish at VH.

In fact, I have been finding that VH is the community that disappeared from YouTube and is swiftly disappearing from LV. So far, so good. Like any good neighbourhood, there is always the potential that the strip club will open up next door and we will all be looking for somewhere else to call home. C'est la vie...

It doesn't take my house burning down for me to sour on a neighbourhood. Unfortunately, LiveVideo is becoming more and more "YouTubish" and the "straw" was my video being deleted without reason and, more to the point, without explanation or recourse. I still don't have an answer despite having messaged them a number of times. I did get an email that was the text equivalent of "I dunno... it's up now..." (yeah... because I uploaded the damn thing three times after the initial deletion, the first two times getting 18+ designations.... on a video of thunder and lightning.....).

If LiveVideo is so damned concerned about porn (none of which, I reiterate, was present in my video), they MIGHT start by getting rid of the LiveTV shows which are fairly obviously undisguised porn rooms. Personally, I don't like going to the front page and seeing nothing but cleavage or almost-crotch-shots (male or female).... If that's what they want, fine.... I didn't join for that and I don't intend to stick around for the inevitable deluge of juvenile behaviour from haters and trolls and bullies that abounded on YouTube and drove me away from there.

Will I stay with VH?....

Who knows. If it does the same thing as YouTube and LV, sure....

So far, however, I am liking it.

Today, an article appeared on NewTeeVee which seemed to completely miss the point of the search for "community" that was lost on YouTube and is fast becoming extinct on LV.

"With a leadership that seems to be comprised of all middle-aged men — though they’re up to nearly 700 members already — the project seems driven by fear of persecution, commercialization and the mass market."

Since many of the users aren't actually "middle aged" (or, indeed, male) I think Liz Gannes missed the obvious. The search for "community" and "communication" isn't just a "middle-aged thing". Though those of us who ARE middle-aged seem to know what we are missing, there are a good number of younger people who want to communicate, want to join in, want to hear and be heard, without worrying about harassment and not having to find our way through the porn and skateboarders in order to do that.

"Community" is something that seems a mystery to some people, especially the concept of the "virtual community" that started out on YT and partially migrated to LV. In fact, like any community, virtual or otherwise, VH is diverse and sometimes rather "exclusive". After all, those who choose to live or not to live in a particular community do so because choose to. Either they feel like they belong or don't. A community is bound by mutual interests.

In any community, there are cliques and neighbourhoods, friends and associates, neighbours who hold their doors open to everyone and others who choose to socialize with a few select friends. Where communities fail to thrive, it is because the community is undermined either by the municipal bureaucracy or by the arrival of interlopers who have no interest in participating in the community and take their neighbours for granted.

YouTube's community failed when the owners failed to listen to the needs of the charter members of the "community" there and by the arrival of those who didn't actually make their homes on YouTube but made it their business to harass those who did. When YouTube further failed to act in defense of those who actually USED the services, they failed the community completely. LiveVideo has followed the YouTube model and is pandering to the lowest-common denominator and likewise failing the users.

Vloggerheads and Moar, appear, at least for the present, to offer the best hope for "community". If the founders of VH actually mean to stick to their principles and maintain VH a a "community", whether it remains private or not, perhaps in another year and a half, I won't be looking for someplace else to hang my hat.

"The point of VloggerHeads, which requires that users be at least 18 but doesn’t seem to be about naughty content, is plain old videoblogging — talking through a camera to other people about your life and issues you care about. That’s something the members feel has been crowded out as YouTube has grown. As VloggerHeads founder/early member Tom Guarriello (aka YouTube user tig847, with 270 videos on the site to his credit over the last two years) put it in a video from last week, “There’s millions of people in the audience on YouTube; there’s 500 people over on VloggerHeads just making boring videos to one another, talking about nonsense — nothing anybody cares about except us.”

It is intersting to note that the very first comment is from someone called EDiot who makes the unfounded statement (either taking the word of or using a spurious posting on "Encyclopedia Dramatica") that Vloggerheads "want your personal info (like CC#’s) in order to “verify” people". In fact, no such requirement exists. Like YouTube did, at least initially, there was mention that "eventually" there "MIGHT" be the requirement to provide some form of proof of identity "like a credit card" which would preclude those people who only want in to harass others. If such an eventuality DID occur, there would be  a third-party verification process, presumeably through one of the secure verification companies.

Again, this is only an "IF" and certainly not a current requirement. As I noted above, YouTube also mentioned this possibility, someting they have never done. Though I, for one, would be more than willing to offer some form of proof of identity if it meant a harassment-free community.

I tried posting this the other evening and lost the whole post when my computer froze... so it is a few days late.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Harper made a formal apology on behalf of the Canadian government, Parliament, and the Canadian people for the forced removal of Aboriginal children to Indian Residential Schools, and the attemps at forced assimilation through the schools.

Present on the floor of the House were representatives of the Indian, Metis, and Inuit peoples of Canada, as well as survivors of the Residential Schools. Amongst the survivors were Marguerite Wabano, (seen here in a video on her 103 birthday!) at 104 the oldest survivor, and Crystal Merasty, at 17, the youngest survivor.

Phil Fontaine, Grand Chief of the Assemblty of First Nations, himself a survivor of both the schools and sexual abuse at the school he attended, received the apology on behlaf of the Indians of Canada.


It makes me feel honoured and elated to have been part of the process of working towards compensating survivors of the schools, enabling them to have their cases heard, and to find, at least in some small measure, healing.

It will be interesting to see how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission unfolds.

This is an Easter egg I decorated a few years ago for a friend's daughter. I scratched the design into the surface of the egg using an Exacto knife.

My favorite method of colouring the eggs is to get brown or red onion skins from the grocery store. They are all too willing to get rid of them but they tend to treat you like you have just escaped from somewhere when they find you rooting through the boxes of oinion and stuffing bags full of the loose skins. These days they remove them from the boxes every day, so invariably I have to ask them if they have any. They may produce three skins and I have to explain... "No! I need as many as I can get.... All you have of them!" ("Surrrre, Lady! You colour your eggs with them....").

I take the skins and wrap them around the eggs (You can soak the skins in water to soften them before you do this step). In the days before pantihose, we used thread to wrap around them to hold the skins on. Now, I wrap them in the skins and drop them into a length of pantihose, making a knot in between each egg, or place them in one of those net bags that come with the oinions. Using thread as well as placing them in the pantihose usually makes interesting lines on them.

For brown and yellow eggs, use brown onion skins, for red use ...errr... Red onions. You can combine the two but I would boil them in a separate pot.

I drop them in a pot of sold water, bring it to a boil and boil them for 7 minutes and then let them soak until the water is cool enough to retreive them.

When you unwrap them, you will find the most amazing stained glass patterns on your egg.


My egg below was simply boiled using Variation 1, below.

To enhance the colour and pattern, wipe with a cloth and a drop of cooking oil.

Variations:

1. You can simply place the loose skins and eggs into a pot of cold water and boil them which gives the egg a more or less flat brown colour (or red, if you use the red skins). Nice, but the results using the other method is what I like. With the solid colour, you can do as I did below and scratch into the surface to make a picture.
2. You can also place flowers, bits of cedar greens, leaves or shaped stickers on the egg before wrapping the egg. This leaves either a stencil effect or a colored impression of the object you used. Just make sure you use leaves and flowers that are edible! (see image immediately below)

The other day, we noticed that the dishwasher didn't seem to be actually washing the dishes. The food particles might have been a little cleaner, but they were still stuck on the dishes.


Since we can't afford to have anyone in to repair it unless we really HAVE to, I decided to see what, if anything, I could do in order to prevent a repairman's visit.

Firstly, I looked at the lower spray arm to see if the supply tube was able to extend up to spray the middle of the machine. It was.

Then I noticed that the holes in the spray arm, itself were clogged with debris. With a pair of needle-nose pliers, I removed what I could from the holes themselves. It appears that there is more stuff stuck in there. I may have to replace the part itself.

Then I took a look in the back of the inside of the machine and saw that there was a lot of crud in behind filter housing and around the sump cover.

Since these were attached with bolts that I needed a ratchet set to remove, I borrowed one from my brother-in-law. Once I removed the filter housing, I removed a handful of what looked like handmade paper.... bits of paper, seeds, cat fur, and macerated bones. Ick....

However, as icky as that was, I had an ickier surprise waiting under the sump cover! The sump cover is held on with two long bolts. Once I got it off and flipped it over I was horrified by what it looked like. The entire underside (I really wish I had thought to take a few photos...) was coated with what looked like earwax... About a cup and a half of sticky, slimy, gummy, waxy crud --- and mold!

It took me about 20 minutes to clean the cover which has a grille around the sides and several baffles on the underside. I ended up resorting to using an old toothbrush and Ajax cleaner.

Before putting it back on, I used a big sponge to soak up the water that was in the bottom of the sump reservoir and then felt around to see if there was anything sitting in the bottom of it.

I extracted about 20 pumpkin seeds, a piece of vine (?), more of the papery residue, a bunch of labels - paper and plastic, what appears to be either a chopper blade (probably belonging to the dishwasher... I have to find out where from and if I can replace it) or a motor blade (again from the dishwasher --it resembles both items in the catalogue I posted the link to), and a bunch of the plastic backings from my mother's Nitroglycerin patches*

So, now all I have to do is try the dishwasher out and see if the cleaning helps. I think I am going to try and suction out the sump (gotta have some use for the turkey baster) first and then give it a go. If it doesn't... Time to get a :


The earliest dishwashing machines involved a dish rack on a spindle with a basin of water underneath. A hand crank rotated the dish rack, splashing it through the water [ref]. This was not an efficient or effective way of washing dishes.


A safety tip: Never, ever... EVER... put a sharp knife pointed upwards in the dishwasher. If you should slip while loading or unloading the dishwasher, you could land on the knife. It has happened, with fatal results**.

* I wish they would make these shocking pink or orange or something. She is constantly leaving these on plates, dropping them on the floor, or on the counters. Since they are clear plastic she can't see them. I am constantly finding them sticking to my feet, getting stuck in the vacuum cleaner, finding them blocking the kitchen drain and, now, gumming up the works in the dishwasher....

Worse, I find the actual patches scrunched up on plates or stuck to the carpet. I am afraid one of the cats is going to eat one. It would kill them! One day, she dropped one in a bowl we use to drop burning matches in in the bathroom. I just about set fire to the house when it caught fire and I couldn't put it out.

** On 22 January 2003, a five-year-old Kentucky girl died of wounds received when she fell onto a knife exposed in an open dishwasher. The fatal accident befell Payton Michael McElroy during a visit at her grandparents' house in the company of her mother and brother. The two children were playing while the grandmother was unloading the dishwasher, and somehow during this play session the girl tripped and fell onto a knife housed on the open dishwasher's door. The blade punctured the child's heart and left lung.