Nurtured by Love

Category: Miscellaneous

  • Temperature Blanket

    Temperature Blanket

    I knit. I don’t crochet. But when I saw a particularly fetching temperature blanket design online, I figured I could learn how to make a hexagon. Almost four hundred hexagons, actually.

    A temperature blanket uses colours to represent daily temperatures, typically over the course of a year. Mine is a 2025 record of local temperatures: the low represented in the centre of each hexagon, and the high surrounding it. Because 365 isn’t divisible by two similar factors, I am including a month-marker hexagon at the start of each month, and one at the end. By including those extra thirteen hexagons, my total will be 378, and that number can be factored by 18 and 21. So my blanket has 18 hexagons per row, and 21 rows, and because of the efficient packing of hexagons that bees know about, it’ll end up being roughly square and a perfect (large) lap blanket.

    I used divisions of 5 degrees Celsius with my coldest colour being “below minus 10” and my hottest one “above 35.” I went with Berocco Vintage yarn because of its (relative) affordability, ready availability and large colour range.

    Grey-white (8 o’clock on the wheel-of-skeins) is the coldest colour. From there they proceed clockwise through the blues, past the freezing mark to the greens, into the spring-like yellows, then the summery orange-reds, and up into the uncomfortable dog-days of the maroon and purple skeins.

    Most mornings I get up and the first thing I do upon coming downstairs is to check the Environment Canada temperature record for the previous day. Then I make my coffee, grab my yarn and make yesterday’s hex while sipping my coffee. It’s a nice twelve-minute ritual.

    The summer this year has been cooler and wetter than the past few years – thankfully! – but we did get one day with a high over 35 degrees, so I am happy that I have been able to use all the colours I planned out at least once. It has been so fun watching the design and the colour-shifts take shape, and my awareness of the back-and-forth shuffle of the seasonal temperature changes has been piqued.

    I suppose it’ll be a little less exciting as the year heads towards its conclusion, cycling through colour combinations I’ve already used. But so far my interest and energy for this project has continued. The only times I’ve gotten behind on my hexes are when we’ve been away, and I’ve caught up easily upon returning.

    Coincidentally a local friend of mine is sewing a temperature quilt. We had both started our projects before we discovered what the other was doing. It has been fun trading photos and sharing excitement as the temperature in February dipped to a previously-unseen low, or the afternoon high broke 25 for the first time in April.

  • Newton Viola

    Newton Viola

    When I was about 16 I was part of a chamber group in my home Suzuki program. As the senior-most violinist I was looking for additional challenge, so my teacher handed me his 17″ viola and suggested I give it a whirl. It was ridiculously huge for me but I used it at rehearsals for a few months (did I have a crappy little viola to practice on? I can’t recall but I must have) and that experience planted a seed. I loved the sound, the range, the timbre, and the quirky alto clef was a good fit for quirky me.

    But I was a violinist, and I only had a violin, so I stuck with that. I played a couple of semi-professional orchestra seasons, first with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and then (during my medical internship, when I could fit the services around my call schedule) with the Newfoundland Symphony. When I moved to the middle of nowhere I continued playing violin and started doing some teaching. Then my mom moved to the area, and we found a cellist friend and began playing chamber music locally. My mom had a cheap viola that she lent me, and gradually viola became my preferred instrument.

    When Noah switched to viola, I bought a better-quality 16″ viola for me to use, figuring he could grow into it. He did, and then he grew in new directions (he now plays an electric 5-string), so it came back to me. And the vast majority of my freelancing has been on viola for the past 6 or 7 years.

    But it wasn’t a great viola for me. It was still too big, the tone quality was only in the “decent student instrument” category, it wasn’t very responsive and it had some quirks that made it hard to play, especially for someone fairly small. I was feeling kind of demoralized by my inability to play up to the standard I had set for myself for my orchestra gigs. I was thinking of resigning because it was hard to feel like I sometimes dragged the section down.

    I had an epiphany one day rehearsing with my mostly-amateur local group, realizing that I had the lowest quality instrument of anyone in the room. I had just received some money from my mom’s estate and I knew that she would have unreservedly supported me spending it on a decent professional instrument.

    So I started asking around about small high-quality ergonomic violas that might be available for sale. “Around” meaning scouring western Canada over a period of months for anything that might conceivably be coming up for sale.

    And then it landed in my lap. There was an email chain with friend, a former student of hers in another city a few hours from me, a John Newton viola languishing at her mother’s place in yet another city, some intervening forest fires and delays, a long drive, a two-week trial and … I bought it!

    I have to say it has changed my life. For the first time I actually enjoy practicing and love the sound I make. I can hear myself improving.

  • Active Transportation Advocacy

    Active Transportation Advocacy

    I’ve been a member of the local trails Society for years, and have volunteered at a lot of trail-work days, but I’ve always resisted invitations to become part of the board. Three years ago, though, I learned that they had become the keeper of the legacy of another Society, one that had tried unsuccessfully to create a trail between our neighbouring twin villages.

    I got interested.

    I didn’t join the board but I did ask to be appointed the head of a committee charged with this initiative. I have ignored it for months at a time, but I have hamstered away at various aspects of it on and off. Now happens to be an on time, so I’ve put a lot of energy into it over the past month or two.

    Our two villages are, largely speaking, two neighbourhoods comprising one community. Although they have separate village councils, the businesses and services that comprise a functional community are shared between them. There is one post office, one ER, one credit union, one grocery store (located in New Denver). There is one dental clinic, one health food store, one laundromat, one hardware & building supply store, one performance hall (located in Silverton). Between the village is a single two-lane highway. This stretch of road is just over 3 km long, and has an 80 km/h speed limit, negligible to entirely absent shoulders, poor sight-lines and steep drop-offs. There is no sidewalk, no adjacent pathway, no back road or gravel track to offer an alternative. And of course there is no public transit: a bus runs through three times a week but depending on the schedule and direction of travel you will wait between 8 hours and several days for a return trip

    I bike it, but I don’t feel entirely safe doing so, and I’m one of only about 10% of the area population who feel even passably okay walking or biking the highway. So most people feel like they have no choice but to use a private motor vehicle for their daily commutes or errands.

    While I am willing to accept — as the previous Society decided — that a scenic lakefront trail is a no-go due to private property interests along the foreshore, I am not willing to accept that there is no active transportation solution whatsoever for connecting two interdependent neighbourhoods. In the late 1800s people living in this area were able to push railroads through mountain passes in the space of a few months with little more than hand tools and dynamite. A rock face or scree slope here or there was not a deal-breaker.

    With some governmental money floating around to support the development of Active Transportation projects, I decided the time was right to resurrect the pathway idea and try to push it forward with less of a scenic/recreational spin and more of a eco-conscious/active transportation spin. I had a co-conspirator early on, but he stepped back for personal reasons, and so I’ve been carrying the torch mostly on my own.

    The inter-Community Active Transportation (i-CAT) Link now has its own webpage (because I maintain the Trails Society website). I have done a large community engagement survey, put together a twenty-page white paper laying out the case for the link, explored land title issues, done an informal survey of the existing road bed, and have learned more than I ever expected to need to know about historical public roadway statutes, Ministry of Transportation construction and maintenance standards.

    The i-CAT Link has now been picked up by a regional Citizens’ Advisory Group on Rural Mobility as a supported project, which gives me a foot in the door with the regional district government and the Ministry of the Transportation. Queue lots of meetings.

    I also applied for a small community grant under the Trails Society umbrella, so later this year I should be able to hire a planning consultant to start a bit of a scoping plan. I’m not kidding myself: this three-kilometre stretch contains within it almost every geotechnical and jurisdictional challenge possible. Ultimately big grant money, likely to the tune of several million dollars, will be required to build a separated shared mobility pathway. But even if I can smooth the way a little bit, I think it will be worth the work. Until motor vehicles are banned, we need an alternative, and this project makes so much sense. I am convinced it is inexorably moving towards fruition, albeit on a geologic time-scale, and I am happy to play whatever role I can.

  • Post-asbestos progress

    Post-asbestos progress

    First the roof came off. Then it poured rain all weekend. Of course.

    There were tarps up, but they leaked. It could have been worse. We lost a light fixture. Some old drywall got wet in a few places and will eventually need to be replaced. The bathroom mats were sopping. The house survived.

    It set us back about three weeks and cost a lot of money, but the asbestos is gone, and the renovation is moving ahead again.

    The new roof went up. And the old part of the roof got two skylights and a new skin of dark grey shingles. The addition has dramatically changed the overall appearance of the house. It’s not longer a squat 1940s gable-and-shed-roofed block. Now the roofline appears more interesting and broken up from all angles.

    As the crew throws up partition walls and roughs in for fixtures, we’re starting to get a sense of how the interior will feel. The airy height of the staircase and hallway is great. We’ll probably be tucking a reading/study area in against the wall, which will eventually have a row of four small windows under the eaves on the right.

    We’re now at the point of ordering tile and flooring, which is exciting. It will be another couple of weeks before it goes down, but reaching this point was enough to inspire me to start assembling the IKEA cabinetry.

    The stairs themselves feel immense. They used to be narrow, enclosed and more ladder-like, with lean-back-and-duck head clearance and irregularly-sized treads. Now they are completely to code, which makes them about 50% longer and a dream to climb. They also have natural light from the skylight, and are open to the living room for the bottom five steps which also gives them a sense of spaciousness. Getting upstairs no longer feels like a trip to a maltreated servant’s garret.

    The bathroom is harder to appreciate properly at this point without the fixtures, cabinets or window. It seems much bigger than it will be eventually.

  • HazMat Adventures

    HazMat Adventures

    img_3241Our Nelson place is the eyesore on the block. We bought it because of that. It was affordable and well situated, and that created the possibility of bringing it up to neighbourhood standards and eventually reselling it for a price more in keeping with the rest of the strong housing market.

    The house has four bedrooms that would make it a great choice for a family with children attending any of the very nearby schools, but it has only one bathroom, off the kitchen. That’s not exactly the way 21st-century homes allocate their square footage. More typical would be two or three bathrooms for a four-bedroom house.

    img_3234So we decided on a two-phase home improvement project. For the first phase we would increase the height of part of the upper story to allow for the installation of a full second bathroom. We would then turn the upper story into a master bedroom suite. This photo shows the south end of the upper floor as it was when we moved in. There is a dangerous steep staircase which pops up into a long dark space with limited headroom. Behind the camera is a bedroom defined by the same sorts of ancient walls and ceiling: uninsulated, smelly and with an “attic” aesthetic.

    We got a great local architect, very experienced with building codes, local construction and local architecture to draw us up some plans. This end will have the roof elevated on the left side of the photo, and that’s where the bathroom will go. The stairs will be replaced and the remainder of the space will be gutted, insulated and re-drywalled with the addition of skylights and extra windows.

    It took all summer to get a building permit. The city apparently considers the addition of headroom to equate the addition of floor space. The floor space is actually the same, of course. “Oh, but you’re increasing your finished floor space,” they said. No actually we’re not; it has been finished (panelled, carpeted) for decades. “Oh, but you’re increasing your usable finished floor space,” they countered. Okay, whatever; you can’t fight city hall, right? An engineer had to be involved. A major expense. But she worked quickly and efficiently, and finally it all came together. The contractor showed up at the end of September and got to work.

    img_3269The gutting of the space proceeded really quickly. Footings were poured in the basement. New beams and supports were retrofitted into the basement and main floor to support the new portion of the roof. New joists went into the upper floor to support the tub. Fortunately old vermiculite and cellulose found in the knee wall tested negative for asbestos. Things were very exciting for a while.

    But then WorkSafeBC showed up with information for our contractor about a new policy on hazardous materials testing for all homes built prior to 1990. This involved much more extensive testing of any materials being disturbed. Work had to stop until a certified person completed a full site review. Another big unanticipated expense.

    Because this policy is new and sweeping, the system and the people serving it are swamped. It took a while to get a certified guy in to collect the samples, and even longer to get the results of the tests back from the lab. “Same day turnaround” turned out to mean “different week turnaround.”

    The first results looked great: the flooring and vermiculite upstairs were completely clear of asbestos. But then the last few tests came back showing problems. The greenish stuff stuck to the chimney, some of the vinyl flooring that was a couple of layers deep on the old stairs and all of the drywall joint compound were found to contain asbestos.

    So that is where we’re stuck now. It means another wait. Now there’s a HazMat removal company that has to review the tests, look at the site, quote a price and do the removal. Presumably they’ll be wearing full-body hazmat suits and swanky respirators and will terrify our neighbours … and maybe we’ll have to vacate for the duration, I don’t know.

    This new WorkSafe policy didn’t kick in until the summer, well after when we had expected to have the renovation underway, but while we were still held up by the building permit and Land Title glitches. No one knew that we would soon be faced with a huge additional cost. When we did find out we were at the point of no return, with our upper story gutted and partly open to the elements. So I guess we just have to eat the cost, and put up with the delays. Fortunately so far the construction crew has been excellent at containing the mess and keeping the parts of the house we have to live in clean and habitable.

    img_3289A little bit of new siding will be going up as we complete the modifications upstairs, so we figured it would make sense to consider the second stage of our remodelling, which will be exterior upgrades. We had fun imagining all sorts of Nelson-esque colour schemes, surveying the neighbourhood and looking for houses we really liked the look of. We settled on blue, with cream trim and purple-red accents. I painted one side of the garage in the last snatches of fall sunshine and warmth to make sure we were going to be happy with it. I think we are. It sure beats the peeling 1970s white and barn-red.

    This part, at least, has been straightforward and enjoyable.

     

  • Web Development

    Screenshot 2016-07-02 23.10.25 Screenshot 2016-07-02 23.09.46I’ve been working on a couple of Udemy courses for the past month or so. I signed up for one in April but I didn’t really dig in for a while. Once I did I decided I needed more so I’m working through both in parallel.

    The Bootcamp course is the better of the two. It has more emphasis on the concepts underlying the code, and the increments and exercises are more carefully and sensibly laid out. But the Complete course has some interesting exercises and some additional content areas. Doing the two together is helping reinforce the learning and allowing me to make connections that I might not otherwise get.

    When I was in high school there were no computers. The year after I graduated they began offering a course that used Fortran on a university mainframe. In the summer of 1987 I bought myself a Commodore 64 and did a ton of programming in Basic. In 1992 I did a university distance education course in TurboPascal on my first PC.  I first got into building websites in about 1995. I worked from scratch in a text editor and got pretty good with HTML3. I could edit little bits of javascript to do mouseOver effects and could build framesets (ew, remember those?) and nice layouts with tables. But when CSS came into vogue and browsers began getting more powerful, I had moved onto blogging platforms for my day to day web work, and I no longer stayed current on the scripting side. I could hack my way through php installations of bulletin board scripts and got fairly good with WordPress plugins. But there was so much beneath the admin interface that I didn’t have a clue about.

    Because I manage the Valhalla Fine Arts website I decided I should get a more robust understanding how it really works. Sooner or later something will break or need a major overhaul, and I’d like to be able to upgrade it with something more customized and up-to-date when the time comes. It is currently based on a root Wordpress installation, with a php-based registration module that was installed by someone else which I don’t have a clue about.

    If I’d stayed on the crest of the wave of web development back in the early 2000s I would have been fine. But a decade and half of neglect has left me in a deep hole. I’m not sure how long it will take me to climb out, but I’m going to keep trying. I’m wrapping up my learning about front-end javascript right now. While I don’t find programming easy to learn, I do enjoy the satisfaction of cracking a problem and getting my code to run so it’s good stuff.