Shaw Weekend

The weather was much better on Sat. than on Sun. when I was to head out to the Shaw Festival.  Still, Sat. morning was pretty overcast and even a bit chilly for Aug., so I was leaning towards ditching the company picnic altogether.  I got a late start at the gym and then did an abbreviated workout.  I wasn't too proud of that, but at least I didn't ditch it all together after getting off track last weekend.  (And on Thurs. I did squeeze in 18 laps at the pool.)  I did get on the stationary bikes and managed to skim through the script for Wohl's American Hero, which is a pretty grim comedy about the impact of late capitalism on average workers at a sandwich shop akin to Subway.

But the weather did improve a lot on Sat., and I decided at more or less the last minute I would try to bike up to Sherway Gardens, which was where the company picnic was being held.  Getting up to the Don Valley wasn't that bad, but then it was really unpleasant after that as Laird is a very high speed road without a bike lane.  Just in general trying to bike in what used to be East York (or Scarborough) is so dangerous.  So I wasn't in the best of moods when I finally made it there.  I did eat a bit, and chatted a bit, then had to turn back around and head to downtown on Mt. Pleasant Rd., which was generally better aside from tangling with a bus at one point.

I made it back downtown and had about 25 minutes before The Odyssey.  Some minor SPOILERS if you have been under a rock and not read any reviews of Nolan's version of The Odyssey.

SPOILERS

I decided to go over to Robarts and drop off American Hero and pick up a couple of poetry books on the hold shelf.  I also changed into a different shirt, as the one I was wearing was quite sweaty by this point.  I made it back to Yonge and Dundas and up to the theatre (up on the 4th floor) with about 5 minutes to spare, though of course there were 10 minutes of previews.  I liked the fact that Nolan went into some of the slightly obscure details, including the fact that Odysseus warned the men not to slaughter the cattle of Helios the Sun God, but they did anyway after they had been stuck on the island for weeks (it is much more clear in Homer that Zeus was the one keeping them trapped, but Nolan really, really downplays the gods in his movie (I suppose because he thought making this like Clash of the Titans would be too kitschy, but I do think it was a misstep)).  I also liked the detail that one of the suitors managed to break into the storeroom where the arms were stored and get some over to the rest of the suitors before he was killed.  What I really didn't like was Odysseus taking on all of the suitors on his own, like a superhero almost, whereas in Homer, Telemachus is much more active and kills many of the suitors,* and they also have a lot of help from the swineherd (who is not a blinded bystander) and one more loyal servant, the ox-herder, I believe.**  Nolan wants this ending, as he can't imagine an ending where Odysseus manages to keep his throne without Athena stepping in and putting down the uprising of the suitors' families, as actually happens in The Odyssey.  So Nolan has imposed a far more "realistic" ending on but at the cost of rewriting the Odyssey completely (and not very convincingly as Telemachus still doesn't seem remotely ready to rule Ithaca).  And as I think I mentioned already, this side-steps the whole question of Penelope bringing up the bed riddle as a final test, which in the poem sets the stage for his true homecoming, where here he has no intention of spending any time in Ithaca.  So I didn't like that at all, as I thought it undercut the entire point of The Odyssey.  I also wasn't too thrilled about how he changed the Calypso story around a fair bit, again I think mostly to avoid having to have the gods turn up and force Calypso to give Odysseus up.  He absolutely wanted this to be a human-focused epic, which seems pretty bizarre given the source material.

Afterwards, I went over to this Asian (mostly Thai) festival at Yonge-Dundas Square.  There were very few safe vegetarian options, so I just got some ice cream.  I went over to BMV and looked around a bit, though didn't see anything I really wanted.  Then I biked down to work and did a few hours scanning stuff, then finally went home.

Sunday I had to wake up fairly early, then biked downtown.  It was overcast and sprinkling just a bit, but I was glad to have my bike available at the end of the day.  The bus ride to Niagara-on-the-Lake was smooth, and we got there a bit early.  Almost too early, as the place I often eat at wasn't going to start serving sandwiches for another 45 minutes.  I wandered around downtown a bit, reminding myself why I dislike Niagara-on-the-Lake so much (it is tacky, geared entirely towards tourists (and lower class tourists at that), and there are no safe ways to cross the street in the downtown).  I did find a decent Thai place and ate there, then went to the theatre early to keep reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.  

It's kind of hard to review Heartbreak House.  I will say I thought the director's vision was not a good one, very gimmicky and not at all respectful of the play.  I did enjoy seeing Tom Rooney as the enigmatic, eccentric captain, and his two daughters were entertaining as well, though their parts were shallow (and the pining brother-in-law was not welcome).  

 
But the play itself is just not very good (with much of it taken up with quips about why women shouldn't be just as ruthless in pursuing marriage as men were in ruining others (including their partners) in business -- and one of the final twists in the sphere of romance was truly stomach-curdling), and it was certainly undermined by the director and his decision to have two servants shouting out the stage directions, which reminded me unfavourably of Schimmelpfennig's Winter Solstice, which I absolutely hated when Canadian Stage put it on.  Shaw wants to be as witty as Oscar Wilde, but most of his witticisms don't land, and he is just obsessed with Shakespeare (and how in his own mind he is a much better playwright than Shakespeare).  We get it G.B., but you simply aren't better than Shakespeare.

I'm very torn because there are four(!) potential plays of interest at Shaw next season, but I don't have any intention of coming back that often (and yet I really don't want to stay overnight in Niagara-on-the-Lake).  They are doing Arsenic and Old Lace, which I've never seen as a stage production; I think I did pass a chance to see it in Hamilton, so I may well pass on it again, given the challenges in getting there.  Then Shaw's Arms and the Man, which I may have seen but it would have been 20+ years ago.  Then the Goblins are doing Pygmalion.  This will surely be fun, but it does seem just an excuse to make an appearance at Shaw.  I don't think Pygmalion is even one of Shaw's five best works...  Finally, Stoppard's Jumpers.  While I think I would prefer to see Travesties again (though I am not willing to go to Raleigh to see it!), I will almost certainly go see this, making the trek out there next year at least once.  If I knew for certain which of these would transfer to the Harbourfront, that would help with my planning, but I don't think they know yet.  My money would be on some musical (South Pacific?) and Deathtrap, but I might get lucky and they bring Arsenic and Old Lace to Toronto.  So most likely, I will go see Jumpers and call it a season, but if I can combine it with the Goblins, I might stay overnight, as much as I would prefer to avoid that.

The trip back wasn't too bad, though we got snarled in traffic (esp. on the Gardiner), and it took 2.5 hours, which is pretty typical, unfortunately.  I made it through all but the last 20 pages of my book, and those I finished up while eating dinner at Union Station (I was pretty famished).  I enjoyed it a fair bit, though it is hardly classic literature.  From the reviews of the sequel (this is part of a trilogy!), there is a huge cliff-hanger at the end, so I probably ought to hold off until the third book is published.  I have a fair bit of poetry to work through, and I think the next books I will read are Thien's The Book of Records, Harvey's Orbital and then Giovanni's Room (whenever it turns up at the library).

Overall, not a bad trip, though I certainly wish the play had been better.  I also managed to ruin yet another backpack, trying to carry too much stuff back home from the grocery store.  Sigh.  It looks like there is going to be a lot of rain this week, and I've decided to pass on Squeeze after all, and I will probably have to move the BBQ (ideally to Friday but if there are too many objections, then I will see about the following week).

 

* The death of the disloyal maids is strongly hinted at, but we don't see any of them die on-screen, and we certainly don't have Telemachus string them all up.  Again, Nolan wants Telemachus's hands to be (unrealistically) free of blood in order to set up his future rule, and again, I think this does serious violence to meaning of The Odyssey to the point the movie is visually compelling epic but, in the end, it really is just not The Odyssey.

** I certainly can't prove it, but the four of them together slaughtering all the suitors (with Odysseus and Telemachus as the main killing machines) in Homer's version reminded me a great deal of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his tales of the nearly unstoppable killing machine John Carter of Mars.  I really would not at all be surprised if he was borrowing from Homer in those novels.

Fall Reading

I wasn't sure I wanted to reread Station Eleven (even for Book Club), but once I got back into it, it really was quite an engaging read.  I'm sure it helped that I had a lot of time to focus on it in (out to Stratford and back) unlike most of my reading time, which is very broken up.  This may well rank as the best book I reread in 2026, but Under the Net may also put in a strong claim if I actually manage to reread it this year.

I enjoyed Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala more than I expected.  It's a bit of a hard book to spoil.  Taking it's lead from Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the reader finds out immediately that the narrator (a Cuban boy named Raul) is also the reincarnation of the Greek priestess Cassandra, so can foresee everything (including his own death in Angola) and yet will never be believed.  It tied together well with my recent foray into Greek literature, but it is much more closely bound up with The Iliad, as well as Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Euripides's The Trojan Women.  It did feel a bit longer than it had to be, but overall it was an engaging and fairly quick read.

I thought I would give up on Montimore's Ooona Out of Order right away, but it's just compelling enough that I plan on finishing it after all.  It clearly is inspired by Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, but comes up with a scheme where our time traveler leaps into a different part of her life every New Year's Eve (which just happens to also be her birthday) and stays there for the entire year, which allows her much more time to be deliberate and learn which stocks to pick and sports teams to bet on, and so becomes incredibly wealthy (and yet very lonely as her relationships don't survive the toll that her leaps through time impose on them).  

Tomorrow I should make a lot of progress in The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, hopefully finishing it up.  I was panicking slightly when I couldn't renew it, but fortunately the person with a hold on the book got a different copy, and I was able to renew my loan, though this will be the last time.  It turns out this is part of a trilogy (slightly undercutting the tension when we know Amina will inevitably triumph, but that isn't exactly a state secret for this type of book).  It looks like the 2nd one just came out, though I will push that off a bit, maybe waiting for the third to be published and read them back to back.

I'm struggling a bit with All That Monk Business, but now that I am through The Odyssey, Station Eleven and The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (soon), I can probably just press on and get it crossed off. 

This is what I said I was reading next, and this is certainly a good (if overly ambitious) plan: McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Amis's The Information, Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody.  However, losing some books (my own and my son's) has caused me to reconsider a few things.  I had to replace my son's copy of Baldwin's Another Country (tracking down a cheap paperback at BMV*), and I'd kind of like to read that before he comes home to reclaim it, but I would prefer to read it in order, which means reading Giovanni's Room first (which would have the added benefit of allowing me to listen in to the Secret Life of Books podcast episode on this novel).  Oddly, there is quite a wait list at the library for Giovanni's Room, so I'll see when it turns up.  I do have it in the LOA edition of Baldwin's Early Novels and Stories, but I just find reading on the train so much easier with a stand-alone paperback.  So this may be a limited detour into Baldwin (and I really ought to read some of his essays as well, but that is probably biting off a bit much even for me).  

I'm also a lot more interested in looking into Herodotus and Thucydides than I was before.  I did rescue the Landmark editions of both (and hope I don't regret that), but these aren't the best actual translations, according to many.  I think the Oxford Herodotus is the way to go and will be reordering that soon.  I was leaning towards the Oxford Thucydides as well, but so many reviewers are pointing to a much newer Cambridge edition translated by Jeremy Mynott, that I might go in that direction (though I have put a hold on the Oxford edition just to copy the notes out).  Neither TPL or (more surprisingly) Robarts have this in stock, so if I want to read it, I would need to order it.  I'm on the fence over a copy I found from a Boston book seller.  Given how large and heavy the book is, I think I would have to eat the shipping fees, rather than have my wife bring it back from Chicago.  On the other hand, I am just not that likely to actually read it this year or next, so maybe I should just hold off.  (I would say I am marginally more likely to actually read Herodotus's Histories.

 

* I also had PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep replaced, but it was sent to Chicago.  I'm actually a bit glad it was sent there rather than to Toronto, as I thought I had just misplaced it here in the house...

Life Comes Slowly Back to Order

There are so many things I would like to commit to paper (or the Interwebs, I suppose), but I am pressed for time yet again.  I will say that as I knock off a few tasks (and finalizing the Fringe accounting was a big one), it gets easier to do other things, including whatever I am supposed to be up to at work.

Last week there were quite a few visits from contractors.  I think Friday we had the most people come in, replacing the furnace and then the water heater, though certainly Monday was close.  Monday morning a couple of guys came by to clean out the ducts.  They hadn't been quite clear on what they needed to do, which included blowing forced air down every vent in the house, even in the upstairs bedrooms, and then running this plastic tube out to their truck.  It definitely felt like a scene out of Brazil!  

More importantly, I didn't realize that the front door would need to be open, and I didn't have time to track down the cats and put them in a cage.  I was definitely freaking out, though ultimately we found Rho hiding in a corner in the study and Toby was hiding in an upstairs closet.  Then there was another moment, where we knew where Toby was but Rho had moved to a different hiding place.  But they both turned up.*

Then there was a lot of back and forth over whether the insurer would sign off on the contents list on Monday.  In the end, we agreed on the items on the list, but I would do my best to get the value updated and back to him in a couple of days (which I still haven't managed to do but it is close), and he agreed to sign off on the removal order.  Then I checked and someone did show up with a truck around 3 pm and cleared off the deck and took the refrigerator out of the basement.  (I was a little worried the refrigerator wasn't on the list, but it is there.)  It's getting a bit easier to accept the loss now that I don't have to look at it.

Also, I had really wanted to throw a BBQ for the Fringe cast, and I had set the date for Tues.  So I was a bit panicked that I would have to push it back yet again if the deck was occupied with all my stuff.  Anyway, it all worked out, and I ran off to get more food and drink and some charcoal at the mall.

The BBQ was pretty fun, though people actually showed up early, and I really wasn't ready.  I may discuss this a bit more down the line.  I have just finished the accounts, and we made $5300 from ticket sales and the costs were almost exactly $4300, not counting the stipend I guaranteed the actors.  Taking that into account, I lost $300, but really this is so much better than the last Fringe outing.  I might even be able to get $50 for the table I bought, bringing the loss to $250, which is almost nothing these days.

I've been making decent progress on the scanning of stuff and re-ripping a bunch of data CDs that were salvaged from the wreckage.  It's a bit much though, and my brain makes it hard to move on to the next thing until these tasks are done.  Still, I am finding some ways to entertain myself in the meantime.

Last weekend was incredibly busy.  On Sat. I took the GO train to Stratford to see Guys and Dolls.  It rained most of the day, but it was a fairly light rain and it didn't really spoil my trip, aside from not seeing Art in the Park.  I did, however, see a swan on the river, which I haven't seen in years. 

I took the bus back, managing to finish Station Eleven on the way.

Sunday was a trip out to Sobey Stadium near York University to see Wang Chung and Howard Jones.  I'll write more about that in a separate post.

I am probably going to see Coyote vs. Acme tonight over at Carlton. Then Sat., I think I am going to bail on the work picnic and go out to Vaughan instead to see The Odyssey in IMAX before it is too late.  Sunday I am off to Niagara-on-the-Lake to see a Shaw play, Heartbreak House.  Unfortunately, the reviews make it sound like the director just doesn't know what he is doing (or perhaps more accurately kind of resents the prominence Shaw gets at his namesake festival).  I think there's a pretty good chance I will finish up The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi on the way there and back.

I'm a bit torn between seeing Sheep in the Box at Paradise and going to see Squeeze out at the venue formerly known as Budweiser Stage.  It's not selling that well and there are lots of tickets for $30 each, though they are uncovered seats and there is a 40% chance of rain.  I think I'll check again over the weekend to decide for sure.

Then next Wed., I am planning a second BBQ (and final one of the season) for work colleagues and former colleagues.  It looks like the weather may cooperate.  Anyway, I am truly late and need to get a bunch of other things done today. 

Edit (8/29): I'm making a bit more progress getting through some work tasks, but the insurance list is still not done.  I'll try to work on that another hour this morning and then wrap up tonight.  I am finding that most nights I am simply exhausted from dealing with everything all at once and am falling asleep instead...  Anyway, I did get to Coyote vs. Acme and thought it was pretty good.  Not Roger Rabbit good, but solidly entertaining.  Then I discovered while trying to find out the IMAX times out in Vaughan, that there is an IMAX screen showing The Odyssey just down the street at Yonge & Dundas, which is a heck of a lot more appealing than Vaughan, even though I won't get as much reading in.  I'm planning on making it over to the 3:15 showing.  So this opens up the day, and I think I'll go to the gym this morning, bike up to the company picnic (which will be faster than taking the TTC because they picked such a poor location!), come back downtown, grab a couple of items from Robarts, stop in at work and do some more scanning, then go to Yonge & Dundas, stop in briefly at BMV and then go see this movie.  

I am a bit bummed out about how much rain there is in the forecast for next week.  I'm now leaning towards seeing Squeeze for $30, as the set list is entirely different from last year, though it leans very, very heavily on their new album (which is likely why the show isn't selling out!) and just hoping we get moved up out of the rain, though we'll bring the ponchos we found for the Howard Jones concerts (and didn't really need by the end).  It's probably going to rain a lot on Tues.  It looks like it will even rain most of Wed., but it will probably clear up by the evening in time for my BBQ.  I guess we'll find out.

 

* Interestingly, I was outside late at night last night, checking out the lunar eclipse.  It was cool to see (and the skies were clear for once!), though I should have gone back a second time but fell asleep instead.  I saw some amazing photos of the event, but mine aren't worth posting.  Anyway, I hadn't remembered to close the screen door, so when I opened the door this morning to air the place out, the cats were able to escape to the back yard!  I didn't even realize it for a while, that's how out of it I was...  They didn't go particularly far and came back in, but I don't really plan on letting them be outdoor cats, as much as they seem to want that.

Trade War!

I guess it isn't really a surprise, but Canada and the US could not come to terms, even though the Canadian team had already given far too many concessions to the US side.  I know there are conflicting stories, but pretty much everyone believes the Canadian version, which is Howard Lutnick turned up pretty much at the last minute with a new set of demands, including trying to put limits on Canada's trade deals with other trading partners!  This is completely typical of Trump and his lick-spittle lackeys, and mostly is simply his way of trying to humiliate others.  As painful as it is (and it could get painful indeed, including with services, which would impact my job), I think it was the right call.  I so hope the GOP is pounded in the midterms (and of course I hope even more that Trump vanishes from the scene before the midterms from natural or unnatural causes...), but it is a long way off from them.  And truly I don't see any way for the US to get its house in order aside from a civil war that would actually open things up for meaningful reform of the Constitution (no electoral college, no 2nd amendment, major rethinking of the Supreme Court), which won't happen in my lifetime most likely.

I suppose it's just as well that I ran off to Iowa (and then Chicago) a few weeks back for my cousin's funeral, as I really don't think I will travel to the States until after the midterms and maybe not even then.  On the positive side, my step-brother is improving, so I don't think this will be an issue for future travel (as I was fearing for a while).  Still, it is frustrating not to travel to the States.  There are good reasons for me to go down to North Carolina (including an upcoming production of Stoppard's Travesties I might have checked out otherwise), but it is just not on the table for the immediate future. 

Edit (8/28): Trump actually followed through with his threat to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.  I mean not a single person outside the federal agencies forced to use it and his dwindling idiotic fan base is going to use this, but it is still an embarrassment (I mean really beyond an embarrassment) and it will have a pretty significant impact on costs.  I hope this time around Google Maps tells him to Fuck right off and that they aren't changing it based on his whims.  What a sorry excuse for a human he is, and I honestly don't see how anyone with the federal government can continue to work there and have any respect for themselves.

The New York governor had a good line that instead of spelling HOMES with the Great Lakes, now it was only going to spell SHAME.  And this was a very appropriate cartoon in the Toronto Star that pretty much sums up how everyone feels about this narcissistic credit.

I believe it was in the Guardian that one of the columnists pointed out that Trump was now in the position Machiavelli warned the Prince against the most of being hated but no longer feared.  That's certain where he is now, though no question the other EU and Asian nations need to stand up to Trump as Carney finally did because he is a bully who feeds off dominating others and there is no end to his demands once you give in.  No question is a very ugly mirror for the American people to be contemplating themselves in...
  

Computer workarounds

I have been moaning about how my hard drive keeps losing space, even after I moved at least 3 or 4 GB off it.  It felt like some horrible virus (or another Windows update, even though I have paused those).  I got so desperate, I downloaded something called WinDirStat that digs around and finds what is using up hard drive space.  It turns out that it wasn't Windows for once, but lots and lots of iTunes data, which is frankly ridiculous.  That is one thing that really ought to go away after a restart.  Anyway, I deleted a lot, though I probably will need to make a permanent link to that folder to keep pruning the temp files away going forward.

What I have not been able to resolve is how to get to the Girl Genius website through FireFox.  I kept resetting and clearing the cache, but there is something that it just doesn't like about that website, so I reluctantly have been using Edge just for that purpose, and then closing Edge.  I really ought to be able to figure this out, but haven't so far.  It turns out Disney+ is the exact same thing.  I cannot log in through FireFox, but there are no issues on Edge.  What makes this even more annoying is I have tried for close to a month to get my Roku to load Disney+ but it won't do it at all (even after a factory reset!).  It's probably something my son did.  This is annoying beyond belief (and Roku has probably the worst customer service I've run across yet), so I have given up and will watch the rest of Futurama Seasons 13 and 14 on the desktop in the back room.  But not tonight.

I was able to track down a lot of the missing Girl Genius web comics from a bunch of different hard drives, and that is consolidated now.  I even managed to find the Buck Godot e-books I purchased a long time back.  I do have a DVD with the full run of Dragon magazine, and that is a proxy for What's New?  But I really wanted the physical books (and these were completely ruined in the flood, and the pages completely fused together!).  I found a fairly cheap copy of #3 on Amazon, and then a seller with a pretty good deal on a lot of What's New #1 and 2, though this all has to be sent to Chicago (and at some point my wife will kill me...).

Honestly, I am still in a pretty deep funk about the loss of all this stuff, but it's slowly getting a bit better.  On the plus side, I was going to have to go through all that stuff anyway (and most of it is not really all that interesting), so half of the job is already done when I decide to downsize and move to a condo downtown.  But I need to get back to some other tasks now.

Dealing with the Flood

It's been a fairly stressful time, so let me try to put down the main events as I remember them, before I completely forget/suppress this period.

As I said, we didn't get anyone in until Wed. morning.  They put down a bunch of plastic sheets heading down into the basement.  Ironically, most of the time people go straight out the back door, and don't really utilize the sheets on the main floor, though the cats are having a great time trying to get underneath it and generally just messing with it.  They also left some enormous dehumidifiers and driers.

I believe it was Thurs. when I got in the crew to deal with the contents of the basement.  They put all the salvageable stuff out in boxes on the deck, and eventually this was trucked off somewhere (and I probably won't see it for a couple of months).  I have a pretty good idea of which books were saved, as well as the Futurama toys.  I'm not nearly as sure of how much of the quilting material was saved, and whether the half quilt I was working on for my son was saved.  If most of the spare material I needed for the other half was tossed and I can't find matching material (and 5+ years on that is a safe assumption), I probably need to just start all over.  I'd have to cut way back on the work I do on converting music files (and blogging!) and just get back to quilting.  Most projects can be done in a month or two if I just focus.  I think I do owe him a quilt after not delivering for so long!  At least the sewing machine was salvaged, though I do need to sterilize the pedal and power cord.  And I even know where it is, unlike the record player and stereo which got carted off.)

I had really hoped they would be done by 5:45, as I wanted to head over to Carlton to see Sheep in a Box.  In the end, they worked later than that, and I felt I had to keep going, sorting out a few boxes of personal effects and papers and such.  So I missed that movie.  Maybe it's just as well, as it is pretty melancholic, about a family trying to replace a lost son with an android child.

Friday, a new crew came through to deal with the rest of the contents.  This guy was a lot blunter, saying there was no way to salvage the wooden screen or the futon frame.  Sigh.

There aren't too many bright spots, though I suppose because water didn't come through the walls but up from the floor, the paintings down there weren't affected.  They are currently just stacked up in the dining room with some other boxes...  And while I was trying to be pro-active and took things like the records and a small kids' rug from upstairs downstairs where they were ruined, I did bring up the musical instruments (as there was a brief moment when my daughter was thinking of learning them), so those were spared.  But overall, there is a huge loss of personal stuff and mementos, along with lots of junk, which should have been thrown out ages ago.  (I do wish that at some point I moved the Krazy Kat Daily books upstairs to be with the Sunday strips from Fantagraphics.  Oh well...)

I think Thurs/Friday was when we had three separate repairmen looking at the furnace, the water heater, the washer/dryer and a "spare" refrigerator that happens to be down there.  Basically, all of this will have to go, except for the washer/dryer, which were somewhat elevated.

Sat. I went swimming and then biked over to Factory Theatre to see Soft Squishy Things, which was an odd piece where a person, bored out of her mind, either on a space station or pretending to be on one but in her basement, recreated lots of scenes from sci fi movies, like Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and so on.  I believe that she ended by throwing a party for herself with some "robot" friends, which is a scene from Silent Running.  (Again, I'm still a bit annoyed that the Paradise's screening of Silent Running conflicted with something else, perhaps Fringe-related, but I'll watch it one of these days.)  Then I biked back to work and did the first of many rounds of scanning.

Sunday I went to the gym, then eventually made it over to Carlton to watch an anime film (Your Name).  I will say that they have really messed up Carlton yet again for some streetcar repairs.  The street is fenced off, and the bike racks aren't even open!  This is definitely going to make it harder to get there, and this construction is likely to drag on through December.  Sigh.  I went back to work and did more scanning.

I don't think there was a lot going on on Monday, though I did get the report back that the dry wall was relatively recently installed and didn't have asbestos in it.  This was a huge relief, as the entire process would have been pushed off by several weeks if they needed to do asbestos abatement first.  This meant that we could schedule some work on Tues.  After work wrapped, I ran over to BMV at Yonge-Dundas to see if any of the Motter titles were in stock, particularly Condemned, but they weren't.  Then I dropped a few more things off at work, then biked up to Bloor to check out the bigger comics section at the BMV there.  Sadly, I only had 10 minutes to look around, but I didn't see them there in the limited time I had to look around, so when I got home I ordered Condemned.  Then I went over to Robarts and did some research.

Tues. we had the workers come over and start ripping out the carpet and the bottom of the dry wall.  It didn't help my mood that we had no water from 10 to 4:15 because of other city work on repairing a nearby fire hydrant.  I guess the only positive is that I was finally able to view my water meter, which stopped working, so I will try to get that meter reading uploaded fairly soon.

I asked them not to send any workers on Wed., and I went in to work (pretty much the only time all week), and after work, I went to the Rex to see Allison Au.  She decided to bring on a vocalist into her group, and truthfully, I didn't care much for this, and left at the break.  I went back to work and scanned some photos, most of which did not survive the water well at all.  I think the photos in the photo albums generally will come out better, but there are just so many left to be scanned!

The workers are back today and should wrap up the first stage of the demo.  It isn't clear if this crew or a different crew is going to clear out the deck, though they promised it would be gone by the weekend.  I certainly hope so, as I plan on having the post-Fringe BBQ next Tues!  I may need to call and find out what is going on.  I think I will also try to go swimming tonight.

Sat. I head over to Stratford to see Guys and Dolls.  I'm going to see about taking the train over, and the bus back.  I need to get a lot of Station Eleven read, as we are talking about it at Book Club next Wed.!

Sun. I am toying with the idea of seeing The Odyssey up in Vaughan, as the Scotiabank IMAX (which would have been very convenient for me) has switched over to the new Spiderman movie, and the Odyssey in IMAX is only up in Vaughan or over in Square One in Mississauga, which is even harder for me to get to...  Anyway, then I need to make my way back down to York University and meet my wife, as we are going to a concert (Howard Jones and Wang Chung and some other 80s bands).  So it will be an extremely long day.

So things are a long way from going back to normal, but I can at least slip out of the house from time to time to do a few fun things. 

Edit: Well, I was going to go swimming, but around 7:30 pm another work crew showed up to cart away all the debris from the first work crew, and I had to stick around.  I think this weekend will be a total write-off as far as the gym goes. 

 

Life Turned Upside Down (Basement Flood)

We had a fair bit of water in the basement once before after a heavy, heavy rain.  But it didn't really have the same impact.  That time around it still required bringing the huge dehumidifiers and driers, but the damage seemed largely confined to the furnace room, and in the end we didn't even have to change the carpet.  Clearly this should have been a warning of sorts, but what I ended up doing is changing insurance (because TD completely stiffed us on the water damage coverage) and ultimately pulling all of my money out of TD after generally being dis-satisfied with them, mostly related to the insurance business but for other reasons as well.  Maybe if they had covered some of the costs (which were mostly just labour), they would also have required us to put in a sump pump to keep our insurance premiums from rising.  Now I have no idea if a sump pump would have made enough of a difference, but our neighbour has one and didn't have any significant flooding.  I remember thinking at the time that I should have the basement windows treated as that seemed to be part of the problem, but the contractor at the time said the window well treatments were ok, but that I really needed to reroute the rainfall from the gutters, as part of it went straight down the side of the house and connected with some city-owned drain that might cause flooding at some other point, and we did that.  But no one at the time said we really needed a sump pump.  (I'm not even sure if they asked about it when I switched to the new insurance company.)

At any rate, last weekend, it was supposed to storm (and many people thought the Taste of the Danforth would be wiped out at least for one day), but it really didn't.  Instead, the East End was hit very, very hard with intense showers for about 15-20 minutes.  And it didn't even rain downtown, which just seems incredible.  So if the rain had been spaced out a bit more or ideally just bypassed my neck of the woods entirely, then this entire mess could have been avoided.  I'm pretty sure that the construction for the Ontario Line nearby, which often shakes the house all the way to the foundation isn't helping matters either.

I had briefly toyed with the idea of going to see Sheep in a Box at Carlton after work, but stayed a bit late instead and then came home.  My wife had been trying to call me but somehow I didn't get the message.  (This became a bit of a running theme of the evening.)  She said that there had been a lot of flooding and that the basement smelled terrible, which indicated that the worst had happened and that the drains that backed up were combined water/sewer pipes or something.

I was able to catch someone at our new insurance company just before they signed off for the evening (and I also checked to make sure that we had a water damages rider and that we were up to date on the insurance!).  Unfortunately, the email back from them didn't actually tell me who the contractor assigned to the case was, and this contractor apparently tried to call but the voice mail didn't actually go through.  This was incredibly unfortunate as the contractor had been around the corner on Egan (which is even lower than our street and was hit just as hard by flooding).  

There really wasn't all that much to be done in the evening.  I looked around a bit and pretty much everything in the bedroom downstairs had been impacted.  It was particularly annoying in that I had tried to clear up some space upstairs by taking a crate of LPs downstairs, only a few weeks prior to this, and they all were soaked beyond salvage.  I didn't see it but there had been water 4-6 inches deep pretty much everywhere downstairs, but it had retreated by the evening, though it definitely didn't smell great.  It seems likely that it came through the furnace room, as that seemed to have the highest watermarks and the floor was still quite damp, though the carpet everywhere was quite squishy (and disgusting when one stopped to think about it).

The next morning was spent trying to get the claims adjuster on the phone.  I finally got through to her and then got the contractor's number.  By the time I got through to him, he said he didn't have any crews available and that I should have contacted him yesterday evening when he was nearby.  He said he could send a crew Wed. morning.  I was pretty furious and asked the insurance company to reassign me to someone who could come by on Tues., but she said that seemed unlikely given the large number of flooding claims that they were dealing with, so I had to call back the contractor and eat humble pie and get an appointment for first thing Wed. morning.

I took most of the day to go through and see what could immediately be salvaged and what I wanted to try to salvage (or at least scan) even if it had clearly been soaked in the disgusting water.  One small consolation is that the many CDs downstairs had all been ripped before I took them downstairs, with the exception of two box sets (including a Tafelmusik one) that really seem to have come through relatively unscathed.  I do need to disinfect those box sets a few more times.  So many of the CDs seemed to be above the water, though I did hang onto 5 or so that were signed, and I guess I'll just scan the covers and dispose of them.  The LPs are pretty much a total write-off, though there were more (5 or so) which I hadn't recorded, and then Andrew Hill's Nefertiti, which I had recorded but there was a terrible electrical hum throughout, so it clearly has to be done again.  

I spread a lot of stuff out on the deck to dry out, which I am sure is not really the approved technique...

I can't remember, but I don't think I was particularly careful about wearing gloves on that first day, but I got much better as the week went on.  

In pretty much all cases books on the second shelf were ok.  The books on the bottom shelf near the washer/dryer were all toast.  Interestingly, the damage was fairly limited in the books on the bookcase in the bedroom.  If it had only been water, there would have been no issue.  I decided that I would replace a couple of the Gorey Amphigorey books, but the ones that are really rare (including a bunch of Krazy Kat daily strips and a signed copy of Rushdie's Step Across This Line), I would hang onto after drying them out.  Maybe this is a bad decision I will regret later.  I suspect in the long run, I will scan the Krazy Kat books and part with them, deferring the final decision for a while.  But I have so much scanning of photos and a handful of ultra rare comics to do in the meantime.

 

I'll just post a couple more photos of the progress of emptying out the basement (and even ripping out much of the dry wall), and then I really need to head out.

And this is the back deck, completely full of all our ruined stuff going off to the dump.  Sigh.