Blessed by the Potato

Tires are one of a number of very important pieces of equipment on a car, and are easily overlooked. Keeping tire pressures up can help improve fuel economy (and as long as you never exceed the sidewall pressure, they can be pumped up above what the door jamb recommends with the only side effect being a harsher ride). My old tires were starting to get a little run down after nearly 100,000 km. The legal minimum treadwear is where the wear marks are at 2/32″ tread depth, and I was at a little less than double the wear marks (3-4/32″). But, several articles don’t recommend using all-season tires in the winter with less than 4/32″ of tread, and I’m inclined to agree. I was leaning towards getting a second set of dedicated snow tires, an inconvenient practice that my dad used to do but has grown to loathe, but which everyone else recommends once they do it (snow tires really do have much better traction in the nasty stuff; as an aside, 4×4/AWD drivers should really think about snow tires since it’s “4 wheel go, not 4 wheel stop” — the tires determine the stopping part). Since London can be a little tardy when it comes to cleaning up after a snow dump, I’ve found it particularly important to drive conservatively in the winter and keep my tires in good shape.

So, I lamented for a while the decision to replace my tires, wondering instead if I should replace the car. While it does have some negative emotional associations after being stolen (twice!), and has started making a few distressing sounds, the sounds haven’t actually gotten any worse recently. It’s a good car that should have another few tens of thousands of kilometers left in it, and it just makes good economic sense to keep it running (as long as nothing else major breaks down, and no matter how cool the technology underneath a Prius is).

I replaced the tires today with Nokain WRs. The timing was decided in part by a sale at the local Kal Tire (taking about $70 off the price of four). I haven’t heard too much about these tires in most of the review sites I visited, though there was a good review of them on the Canadian Driver site. However, there has been a lot of good word-of-mouth about them around the internet, and Kal Tire also highly recommended them, so I decided to give them a try. They are a relatively new and revolutionary tire design, an all-season tire that is a “true 4 season” rather than a “3 season” tire like many others. It carries the “mountain and snowflake” severe service marking that’s only given to snow tires (the M+S marking, on the other hand, is pretty meaningless). So a lot of people are excited about having a tire that comes close to the snow/ice traction of a dedicated snow tire, without the need to switch out for the summer.

Only having driven about a kilometer I can’t really comment on their performance so far. One compromise they make is a noisier ride, but I haven’t gotten up to speeds where I could possibly say yet. I hope to do a more critical review of them after logging a few thousand kilometers of winter driving on them.

I had never been to Kal Tire before, but they seem like a decent outfit, with many locations across Canada. They were friendly, but there were some issues in getting my tires. I had first made an appointment last week, but they ended up selling the set of tires they set aside for me before I got there. Fortunately, they did call me before I left to let me know, which I think is a decent way of handling the situation. The service was fairly slow today (two guys were in the office helping customers, one constantly on the phone and one very slowly ringing up the bill of the last customer). Like many other tire outfits, they offer free rotations every 10,000 km along with a road hazard guarantee. Their prices for most services (installation, balancing, the tires themselves) seemed competitive with other locations in the city. They couldn’t quite match the Costco sale on Michelins, but then again Costco had a very limited selection for that sale. The one exception was that they quoted me $80 to do an alignment, and while I haven’t gone to get a competitive quote, that seemed a little high to me (I seem to recall my last one cost $50, and I wasn’t buying 4 tires from them at the time!).

From Wayfare:

I just realised that we’re very cult-like… Come to our party! Wear a funny costume! Drink kool-aid out of a skull!

The Halloween party is promising to be cool, you should all aim to be here!

(Though I still don’t have my costume worked out…)

It’s been a very busy couple of days here with a few all-nighters while I try to finish off a paper. Consequently, I was taking a nap at around four this afternoon when my landlord stopped by to finally survey the water/mould issues in the basement. She’s full of wacky ideas (I’ve got a whole separate rant in the works about her ideas to fix our problem, which unfortunately is going to have to come later), and relayed more to Wayfare today. I’ll leave it up to her to blog about on her own about the whole experience of the landlord dropping by, but I just had to post her tip of the day to try to prevent break-ins: popsicle sticks. Yes, her brilliant suggestion was that we should glue some popsicle sticks together and make it look like security bars on the window.

Yeah.

We had dinner last night at the Dragonfly Bistro (Richmond St., just south of Oxford in London). It’s a cute, tiny little place, with just about 8 tables (consequently, reservations are recommended). The menu was quite limited (a choice of one soup, 3 appetizers, and 5 entrees) that fit on a single sheet of paper (in large font at that), and rather pricey (over $50 for two, expect more if you’re inclined to drink). The food was good though, and it was a nice, relaxed, quiet atmosphere (it’s a bit of a change being able to practically whisper at dinner, since so many restaurants are fond of blasting music lately). Note that the place is brighter inside than it looks from the street, almost too bright given how intimate the atmosphere is otherwise. Just as we were finishing up, another couple came in — a loud couple — and we found out thanks to them that the staff is open to changing up the menu on request. Apparently the fish option is pan-fried, but they were open to the suggestion of possibly grilling it, or making up a salad (and oddly enough, salad is only an option on the lunch menu).

Earlier yesterday, we went off into the country to go apple picking. There’s a cute little farm on Dundas, about 4 km east of the city. We found out about it from a little guide book to u-pick-ems that we got at Home Hardware, and the directions were something like “head east on Dundas, look for signs”. We saw one sign, and it had no directions on it, just the name of the farm, and it was in the middle of a field that had already been harvested (not an apple orchard) so we weren’t sure if it was just advertising for the place we were looking for, or what. After driving for another few kilometers, we figured that was indeed the place and went back to turn down the street the sign was nearest (Richmond Street, though not that Richmond), and found it about a kilometer down that street.

It was a pretty bustling place, with a fry/hot dog stand, a shop full of souvenirs, fudge, and pies, and of course, pre-picked apples. The apple picking was busy with all sorts of families with small children. They had a really cute train made up that cost $3 to take (from what we understood, a mandatory cost of going out to pick apples) that would drive you out to the orchards, and pick you up again after the picking was done. It was actually the first time I’ve gone to pick apples, and I was amazed at how small the actual apple-producing trees were. I always imagined them as being, well, tree-sized. Like 10 m tall. My aunt and uncle have an apple tree (it produces tiny yucky green apples though), and while it’s not quite as big as most of the maples in this area, it is an impressive tree, quite large enough for a tire swing (I know this because it does actually have a tire swing). At the orchard though, the largest fruit-producing tree looked to be maybe 5 m high, with several being not much taller than I was (2.5 m, maybe). And the apples grew much denser than I ever thought possible — they seemed to be about half the mass of the tree!

Wayfare, throwing caution to the wind, picked an apple off the tree, and then ate it. Just like that, no cutting, no peeling, no checking for worms. I felt like we were taking our lives in our hands, it was thrilling. Today, I had a few more for breakfast.
“What are you doing?”
“Making apples.”
“No, the trees make the apples. What are you doing to them?”
“Err… peeling them?”
“Hmpf.”

I have to peel them and cut them up before I eat them, I don’t quite know why (maybe I was a browncoat in a past life?), and of course the apple slices go best with a bit of peanut butter smeared on them.

After apple picking, we went to the farmers market out there (I’m not quite sure if we were in Thornton or Thames Centre) just as they were closing up. If you want to eat cheap, then that’s the time to go. We stopped at one stand to grab some field tomatoes (which were huge and cheap, but didn’t look great with lots of spots on them). “I’ve got a special on right now,” the guy said, “get a cauliflower for a dollar. Or, two for a dollar. Or, three, for a dollar. Or our best value, four for a dollar.”

The bathroom here at the hospital has rather poor ventilation and tends to smell a little more strongly than your typical public washroom. Sometimes it smells strongly of cleaning products, whatever turns the toilet water blue, and disinfectant (especially at night, when it usually gets cleaned, and when I’m really the only one left around to use it; I, somewhat unfairly, have a near-total monopoly on the odd magic of turning that toilet water solution green). Other times, as one might expect, it smells foully of other people’s waste products.

Today, it smelled like fried chicken.

That kind of threw me for a loop when I first walked in there, because there really aren’t any cleaning products on the market that the caretaking staff could possibly have switched to that might smell like that (oranges, lemons, “springtime”, and bleach, yes, but I’ve yet to see “fried chicken scented Lysol”). And no matter how little one’s digestive system may be acting on food, there’s simply no way it could come back out (either end) still smelling so much like fried chicken. The mystery of the odd, out of place smell was enough to make me start to wonder if I might be having a stroke, though worrying about whether I’m having a stroke seems to be my default state these days, particularly when strange smells are involved. Eventually the logical explanation hit me: all around that washroom are labs where no one is allowed to eat. The people who work there usually have to eat out in the hallway, sitting on the floor (and even have to leave their food sitting out there unattended, like the wet snowboots of so many kindergarteners). So of course, if one is just a little bit crazy and wants something approximating a chair to sit on and eat lunch, there’s really only one seat in close proximity…

But if it were me, I’d try the cafeteria. They have tables there, too.