Blessed by the Potato

There are meter-high stakes pounded into the ground all over the Island here. Along the road, down driveways, and it’s not too hard to figure that they’re there to mark where the road is when the snow comes down too high too fast to really know for sure. What I find really amazing though is that everybody takes those stakes out of the ground in the Spring, because there’s virtually no sign of them during tourist season.

Also, in our nearly hour-long drive in the funeral procession to the gravesite, we saw many instances of cars (coming from the opposite direction) pulling over as the fleet of cars went by. It turns out nearly everyone stops to give room for the procession and give respects to the dead, another strange funeral custom I’ve never seen elsewhere (though there were a few people who didn’t know about it, and you could see them taking advantage of the people in front of them pulling over to whiz past).

Horses, it turns out, are giant scaredy-cats. They’re terrified of deer for some reason, and my cousins leave the lights and a radio on for them in the barn at night.

Nearly everyone out here is at least a little behind the curve when it comes to computers and the like (dial-up access penetrated fairly quickly here in the 90’s, but due to the geography and demographics, high speed is pretty rare and things have stagnated a bit). To print pictures from the funeral right away, my dad picked up a cheap photo printer (just plug the camera directly into it and go!) and I was showing my aunts and uncles how to use it. My uncle Kevin took a particular interest in it, so I started talking about some of the other features, talking down to him a bit as, unfortunately, many of us do with our less-technologically inclined relations. A little later we were talking about laptops because he wanted to get one for my aunt, to make it easier for her to do a bit of writing and what-not. I started talking about how pretty much anything would do for the uses she had in mind, and he said that sure, it starts out that way, but then you get into photo and video editing and you need more power… he just put a 4th hard drive into the server computer he built himself (on a motherboard with 8 RAM slots) and then I felt stupid since he obviously was plenty familiar with computers.

Oh, well.

Most people (out here at least) have more second (and greater degree) cousins than they know what to do with. I met my great aunt and uncle (my grandfather’s brother and sister-in-law of his other deceased brother) and their whole clan for the first time today, a good dozen or so second and third cousins. It was a little strange being in a room full of family yet not really knowing anyone’s name.

One thing about being on PEI in the summer is that there are always a ton of bugs around, especially annoying flies that get inside. While they can be a pain up north, I generally don’t notice any flies around Southern Ontario, and while most people out here have several flyswatters, I know we don’t even own one in Toronto. However, our cottage is pretty new, well-insulated, usually has a stiff breeze coming off the water, and just recently aquired air conditioning as well (so those windows get closed!). So we usually don’t get many (typically 2 or 3 will hang around to be swatted), and they’re hardly ever a major nuisance. By comparison, at my grandparent’s place, or at the cottages we used to rent before we got our own, they were the bane of our existence. A good hour before bed would have to be spent either swatting them or else turning on just one or two lights in the place to lure them away from the bedrooms.

However this time there are dozens of flies around here. Which I thought was really weird because it’s freezing outside. It turns out the stupid things will go dormant for long periods of time, hiding in the vents or the walls or what have you, and as soon as we cranked up the heat coming back, they all woke up at once and started buzzing around.

Today was the visitation for my grandmother. It was very, very long: first an afternoon session, then a dinner break (where more people showed up to the house) then another two hours in the evening. PEI has a strange tradition for the visitation: the family lines up beside the coffin (a big receiving line with nametags, no less) and visitors file through, chatting briefly, shaking hands, and offering condolences. It was exhausting, especially since of the hundreds of people who came through (my grandmother made a lot of friends!) I only knew about a half dozen. So there were a lot of people who came through and were in tears after talking with my grandfather, then got to us grandkids and would say “oh, who’s are you?” or “I think I last saw you when you were just this tall”, etc. It wasn’t a very comforting ritual — half the time just talking to someone who was already crying would set one of us off even if we didn’t know them, plus I find it quite stressful to constantly interact with strangers that way. My aunt says that it’s not usually done that way in the few funerals she’s been to in New Brunswick, and I don’t think they work like that in Ontario, either. There, she says, people tend to mingle a bit and chat up the survivors they actually know, and get some time to say goodbye to the deceased without the next people in line shaking hands and chatting at either end of it. The line got so long at one point that they were bringing people in out of the cold and seating them in the chapel to queue up again after the line thinned a bit.

One odd thing I noticed is that a lot of men on PEI have huge hands. I think that I have fairly average-sized hands; I fit into medium or large sized gloves for the most part, and they’re a good deal bigger than Wayfare’s, etc. But whether it’s use on the farms or just genetics, a lot of the men who came through had hands that just completely dwarfed mine. There were also a lot of people who tried to express their condolences with a nearly comical handshake that tried to crawl right up my arm. First, a regular handshake that went on too long for comfort, then just as you think they’re about to let go they would take their other hand and grab your elbow…

The funeral will be tomorrow, on the far side of the island where my grandmother was born. She’s going to be buried on a hill known as the coldest part of the Island. She said “oh, I know it’s cold, but I won’t really mind when the time comes.” After about 5 hours of visiting today, I’m not sure if I’ll have the energy to get out there (it’s about an hour-long drive away).

One of my aunts is a nurse, my mom was a nurse (she went to nursing school out here), and my grandmother had a lot of nurses out to visit her at home to help take care of her after her last stroke, so at one point there was a big discussion about health care in PEI. It turns out there are 7 hospitals on PEI (for a population of about 150k, half that of London which has 4(?), only two of which have emergency departments), though I only know of two myself. They were talking about how ridiculous it is to have that many small hospitals and how in some other provinces a city with 150k people would be lucky to have one, so they were talking about ways to try to improve the ambulance system here so that they could then start closing and consolidating. A good suggestion was to add a few helicopters to permanenly serve PEI (rather than having to borrow Nova Scotian helicopters in times of need), and then set up one good centralized hospital with lots of modern equipment and stuff. It turns out that a lot of diseases here get missed or mis-diagnosed because no one hospital is large enough to support many specialists, instead the hospitals are more like clinics with surgical facilities, and anything much beyond setting a break requires a patient transfer to Halifax or another large hospital. In fact in my grandmother’s case, she was admitted to the hospital with a stroke, and a common treatment for that is to administer a thrombolytic (“clot buster”) to try to save the brain tissue. She was lucky and managed to get a CT to rule out bleeding in the brain (clot busters make that worse, as you can imagine). However, there are only a few doctors licensed to perscribe a thrombolytic in PEI, and none of them was available at that hospital at the time, so she never received treatment.

After moving in, we noticed that the relatively new (<4 years old “Crosley”) washing machine was not doing a very good job of getting the water out of our clothes in the spin cycle. It got progressively worse so that after just a few weeks, there were still large puddles of water in the bottom of the tub. A closer investigation revealed that the motor had gotten so weak that it wasn’t actually moving the tub at all for the spin cycle: it was just making noise and pretending to work. We called our landlord, who called the repair people. They took a look, and found that the tub seal had broken and water had been seeping into the motor and the rest of the undercarriage: the motor bearing had rusted out and the resistance was just too much for it to overcome and drive the spin cycle. The estimated repair cost was over $400, and this is a washer that’s already had the tub seal repaired once before (the last tenant told us to keep an eye on it). At first, my landlord authorized the repairs, but I talked to her for a bit and suggested that just getting a new washer might be a better plan, and not too much more expensive. She agreed, and told me to basically pick one out and send her the bill. I went for a reasonable, middle-of-the-road Kenmore top-loader that’s also reasonably energy efficient (important since I pay the water and hydro!), it also happened to be on sale for $500 so it was pretty close to the repair cost for the old Crosley (a brand I’ve never heard of, but is supposedly manufactured by Maytag).

Sears delivered it within a few days, and the delivery went very quickly: the guys came in, took away the old washer, hauled the new one down the stairs, connected it and were gone in less than 10 minutes. However, our new washer was possessed. Not surprising, since the bill came to $666 after tax and delivery. During the spin cycle of the first load, it started violently shaking, attempting to walk its way across the room and possibly destroy itself in the process. The instructions said it was important to level it properly or “some vibrations” may be present. So, Wayfare and I spent nearly an hour carefully levelling the thing with no sucess (and many cuts on my hands in the process — they sure don’t sand/grind the sharp edges on the sheet metal around the bottom!).

Finally I gave up and said that there’s no way the washer can be that sensitive to being perfectly level, and called Sears to sort the mess out. They went through the troubleshooting guide with me: was the load uneven? (No, it was barely a load at all, just a few shirts and one pair of pants) Were all the shipping restraints removed? (I said yes, I specifically saw the guy pull the yellow zip tie out of the back that he said held the guts together). Was it level (oh, hell yes). Finally she said there might be something wrong with the washer and set up an appointment to send someone out to look at it next week. After I hung up I looked in the garbage to just double check that the guy got the ziptie out properly. The manual clearly showed a picture of a long tie with two cotter pins attached to it. In the trash was a short yellow tie, and no cotter pins. Cursing, I moved the washer out from the wall and looked in the hole in the back: sure enough, a ripped-off yellow zip tie was stuck in there. With a handy pair of pliers and many stabs at it, I finally managed to pull it out (with, what would you know, two cotter pins attached to it). It was at least twice as long as the piece in the garbage, and the washer worked fine after that. I was pretty pissed that the guys were in such a hurry to get in and get out that they didn’t check that the cotter pins actually came out with the zip tie when they yanked on it, or even that the zip tie was even approximately the right length (it looks like he tore off the third of it that was sticking out the back — there should have been a lot more zip tie, and I think he should have known that). Anyhow, that itself didn’t cause any permanent damage to the washer, though it is a bit of a piss-off since my landlord paid $85 for them to deliver and set up the washing machine. Unfortunately, I caused a bit of damage to the brand new washer when I tried to walk it back towards the wall: I pulled on the top instrument panel to get leverage, and rather badly bent the bit of sheet metal around the back of it. :(

Anyhow, I found out this morning that my grandmother passed away after having a bad stroke this weekend (she was in the hospital all week), so I’m leaving for PEI for the funeral. I’m holding up ok: everyone seemed to think this stroke was going to be the last, so we’ve had a bit of warning to prepare mentally.

Well, I just got back from the dentist after having a crown put on the tooth I broke on a TicTac about a month ago. My dentist was fairly concerned because the crown is so thin in the centre that the porcelain didn’t coat the metal underneath, so you can see the shiny spot. Of course, a shiny spot in the centre is nothing new for me; I’ve had metal fillings before (and still do in the top), and of course, the top-centre of my head is pretty shiny, too. It’s funny though, since I had a pit that was well on its way to becoming a cavity in that tooth, and they reproduced the pit in the porcelain crown. Now I guess I’m stuck with it. Oh, and my dental insurance doesn’t cover crowns. It raises the question of course of what it does cover: AFAIK, insurance is supposed to be there to cover unexpected, expensive events. It doesn’t get much more unexpected or expensive than breaking a tooth and needing a crown. By contrast, paying for half of one-third of my cleaning/checkups (I go every 4 months now since my teeth are so bad, but they only cover one per year) and half my fillings is more of a subsidy than insurance: I know I’ll have a checkup every X months and can budget for that, and with my mouth I can even tell you that roughly, I’ll have a cavity that needs filling in March, and then another one approximately 18 months after that. Then every 18 months thereafter until all my teeth are prosthetic. These are not only relatively known events, they’re also about as cheap as they come in the dental playbook (of course, that is only speaking relatively).

On a sadder note, I realized that over the past few weeks, I’ve actually seen my dentist more than my friends. Granted, the weather’s been terrible, I’ve been hella busy, people are busy planning weddings or babies, and Baum got a girlfriend, but it’s still really, really sad. Hopefully that’ll change though, as spring is coming, and I’ve got a new place that’s still waiting for a housewarming party, and I should be able to come back for more Friday/Saturday nights as work (hopefully) tapers off a bit, and I don’t have any more Monday dentist appointments.

Back on the topic of shiny spots on the top of my head, my mom was talking with my dad’s doctor about thinning hair, and how it was ironic that my dad was the one recovering from chemo, but I’m the one with the seriously thinning hair. She said the doctor said that that “stuff you just pick up at the drug store to put on your head doesn’t work” and gave her a bottle of this plant extract stuff to give me. I was a little taken aback, I mean, this isn’t just some stuff I picked up, it’s Rogaine, FDA/Health Canada-approved with ~60% success rate (for me, not so much — it’s definitely slowed the loss, but not fully stopped it, let alone lead to regrowth). Heck, it even had a Simpson’s episode! (“I love you too, Karl”). So instead she gives me this even more expensive plant extract stuff that’s “really supposed to work” and ugh, it reeks. I think I’d rather go bald. So then my mom says that even that won’t really work, and that the only cure for baldness is to get a hair transplant, then says I should go out and get one since it’s not seemly for a man my age to be so very bald. She then starts explaining the process, and I’m just like “yes Mom, I’m a night owl, I’ve seen the infomercials…”

Anyway, I’ve seen a ton of reports lately about the benefits of microwaving your sponges to keep them bacteria free. Speaking as a bioelectromagnetics scientist, I just wanted to clarify that yes, it does work, but it’s not related to anything magical about the microwave (well, not for sure, anyway). Those reports also recommend that you do this with the sponge wet, so basically you’re just using the microwave to boil the water and heat-sterilize the sponge. You can do this with a kettle or on the stovetop too (drop the sponge in a large mug and pour in some boiling water from the kettle, or bring a pot of sponges + water to a boil on the stove). The microwave does seem to be a bit faster (~2 minutes), perhaps because water tends to superheat in microwaves and steam hangs around a bit longer, so you’re getting more heat. The method I like to use is to take a microwave-safe plastic or glass cup, put the sponge in it and fill ~3/4 full with water, then turn it on high and wait for about half the water to boil off.