Dear Diary

Right this second, as I type this, water mixed with methyl* alcohol is traveling out of my house, into pipes that plunge 110 feet vertically into the ground below my yard, and returning into my house. There, an expensive apparatus extracts the heat from the water and sends it back out to circulate some more.

Sweet.

____

* I think. Maybe it's ethyl. What am I, a chemist?

Right now, as I type this, there are two men making mechanical noises in my basement. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning*, I should have heat again; sometime after the long weekend** I should be pulling that heat directly from the ground.

Woohoo, and it's about time too.

____

* Assuming the electrician shows up at 8 AM so I can let him in before I go to work.
** Sometimes it's awesome being a Canadian. Like when I look forward to having Monday off work, because it's Thanksgiving around here. Of course the flip side of that is that Thanksgiving is the gateway to winter.

So this past Saturday we're doing some cleaning. It's the last warm day of the fall, probably (almost 25C, I'd warrant — Swan River, three-ish hours north of here, was the hot spot in Canada that day), and so we're washing windows, hanging laundry on the line, that sort of thing. I went up and down the ladder a dozen or so times, cleaning the gutters.

My wife calls to me: "I need you inside, something's leaking."

I think, Oh crap.

Our hot-water tank has sprung a leak.

#

I call around to some folks. First my dad, who's not home. Then my brother-in-law in Winnipeg, on the off chance he's got some least experience with this sort of thing. "Blind panic," he advises. "Then maybe call a 24-hour plumber."

I call the plumber. I have an electric tank all ready to go, to replace the holed gas one. "$300," he tells me. "Plus $92.50 for weekend premium." Even though I've got the new tank in the house already. "Plus you'll need an electrician to wire it to your panel."

"I'll, uh, get back to you," I say.

#

Because, see, here's the thing — we are in the endgame of installing geothermal heat, and part of the system is a pre-heat cycle for the hot-water tank. So we were going to have the electric tank installed by the geothermal guys, and use the gas tank as a holding tank for the pre-heated water. The new plan, of course, is to use just one tank, the electric one. Sometime this week, it should all be done. All hooked up, ready to draw heat from the pipes buried in my yard, pipes that go down 100 feet vertically.

Long story short, if you come to my house in the next few days, don't expect a hot shower. The best I can do is boil water for your bath.

Not sure where this is going, but here's what I wrote tonight:

Once I Was You

Every time your heart beats, a ghost spins off. Invisible, a perfect copy of your state of mind, he or she ascends, rising into the dark of the eternal night, bound for the edge of time and the unimaginable conflict that will inevitably arise there, someday, between entropy and hope.

Sometimes one comes back.

#

Someone—some artisan, some dreamer—had reshaped the Whiptail nebula. Stellar nurseries had been torn apart, protostars thrown free, scattered like pearls skittering across a floor from a snapped necklace. Dust lanes had been threaded and braided into skeins like hair. Two tiny blue stars, surely artificially induced, sat in positions of unstable gravitational equipotential. Twin red stars pulsed further down, variables that scaled up and down the brightness scale on a period of less than an hour.

Read more

W00t! It's back!

Canadian World Domination has returned! Here I thought I was going to have to go trawl the wayback machine's Internet archives, but someone's resurrected the site for me.

Some gems:

• The redrawn world map, in the Cartography section
  
• The little pull-quotes at the bottoms of all the pages, like:
  
• The Generals. Which one is hotter? That's up to each and every true red-blooded Canuck to decide for him- or herself.
• "You dismiss all beers under 6% as 'for children and the elderly'."

I'll leave you with a piece of Canadian music, one that's been stuck in my head for a couple days now, so it might as well be stuck in yours too.

Locked in the Trunk of a Car

And while I'm posting videos from the Tragically Hip, here's one of my favourites:

At the Hundredth Meridian