Mud Lake / Britannia conservation area

Yet another good thing about the location of my condo is that it's a 10 minute walk to one of the trailheads for the Mud Lake / Britannia conservation area.  This is a pond right beside the Ottawa River, surrounded by forest and a trail that goes around it.

One of the best kept secrets of the trail... a forest monster!

Here are some pics from my hike around the lake.  It was an overcast day, and the fall colours aren't quite as glorious this year as they could be, but it's still a very nice hike.

At the north end of the conservation area you come out to a little channel of the Ottawa river:

I love how Ottawa has these little bits of semi-wilderness tucked into the city.  This trail was around a 1-hour hike.  There are lots of small side trails to explore, I didn't do all of them, saved a few for another day.

Goodbye, old house

I sold my house at the end of September.  I'd owned it since 1999, although it had mostly been rented out since 2004.  I sure bought at a good time- best investment I ever made, house prices more than doubled in those 12 years.  It was 103 years old, built in 1908.

Mine is the right hand side of the brick semi below:

I'll miss the house- it was very small, but it sure had character.  For those who knew it, come take a last look through...

Here's the living room- I loved the stained glass windows.

The kitchen...

This was the bike room, I didn't have a garage or shed so I kept them in this back room off the kitchen:

Let's go upstairs...

A contender for the skinniest bathroom in the world... loved the claw-foot tub though.  It was a small one, very cosy.

That's a stained-glass mirror over the sink, too.  The house had some charming touches like that.

The back bedroom.  It had french doors to open up the bathroom into it.

The middle bedroom- it faces south so it's very bright.

The front bedroom, it's the only normal-ishly (but still small) sized bedroom in the place:

The upstairs hall:

The back yard.  My most recent tenant was a gardener wannabe, which meant she got as far as removing my raspberry and other fruit bushes and all my perennials, and then lost steam and let it go to weeds.  Sigh.  For a house in my price range though, this is a very nice, deep back yard, with parking (that lower part of the patio is the parking space.)

I'll miss the atmosphere and the charm, and the wonderful natural light.  I won't miss the maintenance, the lawn mowing or shovelling, the thermostat that didn't do the "stat" part very well, the current foot-stomping and guitar-strumming neighbors on the other half of the semi, sharing a driveway with a madman on the other side, or the relentless insurgence of the local herd of very determined mice.  I also won't miss being a landlord... the tenant who razed the fruit bushes was also not too reliable with paying her rent.

My house... cloud and silver lining, all wrapped up together.  The neighbor who owns the other half of the semi bought it, so she can find someone now to rent it to who can put up with Strummy and Stompy.  I was on the brink of insanity from the noise, which I guess is a good thing, made it much easier to leave an otherwise really nice little house.

Sunset

These are from Sept. 29, taken from the balcony at the condo.  Loving these fall sunsets!

Condo reno: Done!

I moved into the condo about a week ago.  Here are the official before and after pics from the reno I did.  I think I improved it at least a bit.

Here is the living room wall before and after the carpenter enlarged the window between it and the kitchen.  That and getting rid off the off-brown walls really increased the light:

Living room before and after the floors and paint were done.  The floors are a red-oak engineered hardwood.  (In a condo, you can't use solid hardwood as it expands too much on the concrete):

Dining room / entry:

Kitchen:

Bedroom with the disturbing yellow paint and beige rugs.  Between that and the off-brown in the living room, I called it the pee-and-poo colour scheme.  Gone!

And the view of course is still amazing, no improvements needed there:

So that's where I'm living!  Closing day on my house sale is today.  I'll put some photos up of the old place once I am connected on internet (Bell has still not figured out how to move my internet connection, after a whole week!  I'm at the library right now.)

Condo reno: Floors finished

For the past couple of weeks the flooring installers have been working on my floors at my condo.  Here are some photos from during the process:

The hardwood boxes, tile boxes, and hardwood underpadding.

The first day they made lots of progress, the carpet and old baseboards were ripped out and they got the floors laid in the bedroom and the living room:

This is a couple of days later, the tile guy came and ripped out the tile, and then disappeared for a while, I think they said he was having a baby or something:

The front entry- I don't think I documented what it looked like before but it had a nondescript brownish tile before:

This is the kitchen without the tiles, the appliances have been taken out.  That roll of pink stuff is the underpadding, it's required in a condo for sound insulation.

Here are some before and after pics to show how drab the floors were before and now nice they are now.  Here's the bathroom, the white tiles are the old ones that came out.  The new tiles are a porcelain tile made to look like slate.  They're still very dusty, haven't swept yet:

Living room:

They did a nice job on the stairs down into the sunken living room (it's still dirty, I need to sweep and then damp mop to get all the dust up):

Bedroom- the carpet in here was particularly boring and nondescript:

Detail of the inside of the closet:

Kitchen- I really like how the new tiles add some contrast, the kitchen and bathroom were just pathologically neutral before:

So, all that's left is the painting, which is happening this week.  I'll take some photos once it's done.  I move in on Friday so I might not be free to put them up right away.

Expiry minute

As a nurse, I work a lot with expiry dates.  Drugs and other assorted medical doodads have a certain shelf life, and the month and year in which they need replacing is printed on the package.

In recent years expiry dates have been added to packaged foods that didn't always have them before.  As I was munching on some peanuts recently, my eyes passed over the expiry date.  I was pretty impressed, that wow, they don't just know that these nuts will go bad in June of next year, they think they know the exact date!  Then I looked closer...

They don't just know the day.  They have it timed right down to the hour, and indeed... the minute.  If I don't finish them on June 3, I'm gonna have to get up pretty darned early on the 4th to polish them off safely.

It's official: Twitter is stupid

After years of anecdotal research, I've developed my theory into solid fact and am ready to share it with @you: #twitter is stupid.

I get the concept of microblogging.  I believe in it.  I participate in several times daily myself, through Facebook.  (Which isn't to say I believe in everything Facebook does...)

I think it's wonderful to keep in touch with acquaintances who would have faded out of my life, and often turn these very loose connections into genuine electronic friends, who I then get together with whenever geographical challenges allow.  Some acquaintances from years past have resurfaced via my friend's friends lists on Facebook, and we know each other better now via electronic means than we ever did in "real" life.  I've never bought into the idea that face-to-face communication = real, electronic communication = fake .  You often see sides to people on Facebook that you didn't see when they were wearing a different mask when you hung out with them in real life.

It's great to be part of a bigger community of people, and stay in touch with what is going on in their lives.  This is true even when they're not someone I know in 3-D life... in several cases I've added someone to my friends list on Facebook whom I've never met, in fact have sometimes never even met electronically, and as long as they can construct a sentence, and aren't trying to "network" for moronic mogul-wannabe or religious reasons, I enjoy following their updates.  They become part of my community, even if they don't live next door or even in the same town.

I've concluded however that Twitter really doesn't offer that, despite the claim that it does.

I follow a lot of blogs, and lately many bloggers have been offering up their Twitter feed.  If it's a bright and interesting blogger, I go have a look.

What I inevitably find is a string of incomprehensible, uninteresting @replies they make to their 4756 followers or followed, who you can tell from the meaninglessness and randomness, aren't people they know either electronically or in real life.

There's no point in this.  This is not a community, this is not a useful addition to the real and well-crafted thoughts they share on their blogs.  There's rarely anything bright or compelling on their feed, there is rarely anything original at all.  Twitter's own character limit doesn't allow for bright and compelling... it often doesn't allow for a single complete thought before you've gone over your alloted Tweet-space.

So, if you were feeling Flintstonian for not "getting" Twitter (hey, plug the words "I don't get" into Google, and it's #1 suggestion for what you are looking for is, you guessed it...), rest assured, it's not you.  It's Twitter.  There's just nothing there to get.  I've been checking back for years, there is nothing there but noise.  If there is the odd nugget, it's lost in the noise.

There's nothing Twitter does that other electronic forms of communication don't do better.