Jam warning!!!!

A JAM WARNING!!!!

Warning: DO NOT BUY THIS JAM!!!

It is labelled Nutrafruit, is from Bosnia and Herzegovinia, and the ingredients are Blackberries, Sugar, Citric acid, and Pectin.

It sounds alright, but it is not good jam.

The texture is like that awful jam you get in the little packets in cheap restaurants - you know where the texture is like jelly but is a bit gritty like it had corn meal added to it. But as awful as that is, the texture is probably the best part of this jam! The flavour is non-existent, and I think they must have added food colouring to get the jam to be the dark blue/purple colour that it was. And there were occasional chunks of grittiness in it, as if they chopped up bits of twigs to add a little something extra....

Actually, the texture isn't the best part about the jam. The lid is the best part - it is very pretty and colourful too!!!

I actually threw the jam in the garbage and now the rinsed-out jar is in the recycle bin. I didn't even ask Freda about it, but I know she would have approved.

A real pane in the window...

We are still getting the pretty American Goldfinch coming to our feeder. Today Freda saw that chickadees were at the feeder too. Very nice!

We have had a window that has had a crack in the corner ever since we moved in here. This window has been replaced four times - each time it takes about a year to get a replacement pane and get it installed. Friday morning saw the fifth replacement. The window didn't crack when it was installed at 9am, but it was cracked at 4pm when I took this photo!!! ARRGHHH!!! Very very frustrated about it.

Robins are stupid (and a tiny frog)

I took this sequence of photos this afternoon. I was hearing a knock on the window about once every minute or so. So I peeked out the window (the curtains were drawn to prevent bird kill) and saw this robin attacking it's reflection in the window. This went on for a very long time time, so I can only conclude that robins are stupid.

The photos are a bit blurry, sorry.


This tiny frog was sitting on the brickmold by a window. The black horizonal line in the photo is the window seal and the green is the brickmold, which is about 2 inches square. So that means the frog is about 2 inches long (just guessing) and less than an inch wide.

I hope he eats a lot of mosquitoes. :)

Attic insulation - before

So I went up into the attic to check out the insulation status. This was because the energy audit we paid for said our attic insulation was only R-35. Charles and the insulation contractor said that it was R-40 (I had asked for R-50 or better but Charles said a good vapour barrier made anything more than R-40 a waste of money). Well, I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it know.

We bought a bunch of cellulose blow-in insulation a while ago. This is what the coverage chart from Home Depot says in terms of "blown inches" (after installation) and "settled inches" (after cellulose has had a chance to settle down):

R-32 9.4 8.4
R-40 11.8 10.5

With that information in the back of your mind, here are the photos.

This photo is above the closet by the great room, and shows a large hole (I could put my hand through it) where the electricians roughly made a hole for the wire. You can also see condensation in there because the cold air can enter the space and condense the warm inside air against the cold plastic. You can also see there is absolutely no insulation against that plastic....


This photo is looking south along the front wall of the house. You can see the soffits on the right, and in the center you can see the top of the wall. The solid plywood wind barrier should have been in line with the outside of the outside wall, or right above the 2x12 (which is a bit weathered, beside the new looking 1x4 strapping).


For this photo, you need to know that the solid plywood wind barrier is 1 foot tall (almost everywhere). You can also see the trussesin this photo, which are made of 2x4 and 2x3. If R-40 of insulation was installed according to the table form Home Depot, then only 1 1/2" of plywood should be showing - and clearly there is a lot more visible....


I said the wood barrier is 1' tall almost everywhere. In this location, it is only 11" tall. Not such a big deal, but the insulation on the other side is about 3" - 3 1/2" below the top of the wood, which means that there is 7 1/2" - 8" of insulation. According to the Home Depot table, that makes it less than R-28...

Losers and liars.... that describes the builder and the insulation contractor...

Trust me on this, you DO NOT want to fall through the ice

Yes, on Sunday Freda fell through the ice when she took the dogs out for a walk by herself. She was rescued because a girl at our neighbours house happened to look through the window and see her. She lived to tell the tale, and I will tell the story later.

Freda lost one mitten when she fell in, and it marks the place where she fell in -- this photo shows that location. It was quite far out from shore, as you can see. Freda was only out there because she was trying to rescue Tawny who fell through the ice when she took off to chase birds.

What can you do about incompetence?

This is the former RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli. He resigned following his flip-flops over whether he knew or did not know about the RCMP's involvement in the US' "rendition" of Maher Arar to Syria, where Arar was tortured.

Around the time this was going on in Sept/Oct of last year(but before Commissioner Zccardelli's resignation), I heard Maher Arar's lawyer being interviewed on the radio. At the end of the interview, it went something like this (not a transcript, clearly!):
Announcer: So it sounds like Mr. Zaccardelli was just incompetent. But what can you do about someone who is incompetent?
Lawyer: Well, in law we have a term for incompetence. We call it negligence.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, more than you might think. We shall have to see what the future brings.

Propane refill

We use propane for heating the water for the radiant floors as well as domestic hot water (with the same boiler). We also have a propane stove, fireplace and dryer. This means if there is a long power outage (like the ice storm in 1998 that left some people in the coutry without power for over two weeks), we can live mostly normally with heat, water, and cooking and laundry facilities, etc. (We wouldn't be able to run an electric range with a small generator.)