Things keep falling on my head

Portrait of Ms. Fluffster's head by Danette Byatt

While reminiscing about home renovations past and present, it struck me how often things have fallen on my head throughout my life due to construction flaws.

The first time I remember was because of a shelf just out of my reach (a life-long issue). I was young, maybe 6 or 7, and helpfully making my own breakfast. I’d made toast slathered with honey and was returning the large honey jar to its shelf, well above my head. The loose-lidded jar slipped from my sticky fingers, sending a cascade of honey onto my noggin.

Chaos ensued. First into the kitchen was our dog, who began licking up the honey spreading across the floor. Then my mother, who marched me straight into the shower.

The dog lapped up too much honey and threw up. My brother tracked through it and spread honey all over the house. When my sister saw the dog vomiting, she threw up beside her. While my mother cleaned up, I was singing in the shower.

The next such incident came years later. As a young adult, I briefly worked in the insurance division of a bank in the Netherlands. I sat on one side of a table with several others seated across from me. Behind me was a row of metal cabinets, considerably taller than me, stuffed with shelf upon shelf of binders. All our work was stored in these.

When something struck and knocked my head and shoulders down onto the table, I assumed there’d been an earthquake, and peacefully waited for rescue amid the outcry going on around me. 

As it turned out, the cabinets hadn’t been secured to the wall, and one simply tipped over onto me, with all of the binders it contained flying over my head.

Though I was only a little stunned, and not seriously hurt, my employer went into overdrive. I was rushed to a doctor, examined, and then driven home and told to take the rest of the week off (with pay). Get well cards and flowers followed.

I felt no ill after effects, except for listing slightly to the right or left when walking for the next few days. I’d find myself smack up against the wall whenever I tried to walk down the middle of any hall. Rather disconcerting.

When I got back to work, the cabinets had all been bolted to the walls, and people I’d never met before introduced themselves to ask after my health. I was briefly famous. It was all rather fun.

The next instance was again at home. When we first moved into our current apartment, the kitchen contained a large home-made cabinet, with shelves above it. Because our kitchen table fit best in this space, we removed the cabinet. Assuming that the shelves were properly affixed to the wall, we left them there to store our jars of beans and flour.

As I stood on a ladder wiping shelves down, the entire structure suddenly collapsed.

Fortunately, it knocked me to the far side of the ladder and most shelves came down on the other. Mr. Fluffster came running at my shriek. It took him several days to recover from the sight of me on the floor surrounded by shelving (and the few jars I’d already positioned).

The shelves hadn’t been properly secured to the wall studs, and were supported only by the cabinet underneath. We never did replace them; that wall contains only framed pictures to this day.

My latest home misadventure was recent and involved our new LED kitchen light (above). As I stood at the counter preparing dinner, one of the screws securing the fixture to the ceiling suddenly pulled out of its anchor. The fixture swung off the ceiling to deliver a glancing blow to my head. Once again, shriek, Mr. Fluffster racing to the rescue, etc.

Fortunately, electrical wiring prevented the light fixture from crashing to the floor (and directly onto my head). It just swung down to one side, dangling next to me until Mr. Fluffster detached it from its mounting bracket (below, from both angles).

The Fluffster offspring arrived shortly after. He insisted I wear my bicycle helmet to finish making dinner, just in case the mounting bracket also fell off. I agreed, just to keep the peace.

The electrician returned, and with profuse apologies, re-secured the fixture to the ceiling with twice as many anchored screws as he’d used in the first place. It’s now there for life.

Moral of this story? My head can survive a lot, but maybe I should just stay out of kitchens and offices.

A visual interlude

Here’s a mostly visual post; first, some floral art to brighten your day from the third annual Fleurs de Villes Noël event in downtown Vancouver.

Next, a few photos from last year's event:

For more, check out the Galleries on the Fleurs de Ville site.

And last, on a more sombre note; a current art installation at the Vancouver Art Gallery — Offsite on Georgia Street: “Dusk Meridian” by Keith Langergraber, with a warning about the climate crisis.

Why keep doing it?

Every so often, something in our home needs replacing, and we get this wild impulse to renovate some or all of the room it lives in. This happens only after the last renovation has faded from memory, which takes years. But we always embark with enthusiasm and hope. You’d think we’d know better by now.

Renovations are harrowing one way or another. Each experience is unique — and wreaks havoc — in a whole new way. We’re going through one right now. I won’t write about that just yet, however; it’s not finished and I’d prefer to avoid profanity.

Our very first foray was new ceramic tile on a bathroom floor, installed by a handyman we found in the Yellow Pages.* He loudly cursed and banged his way through the job, then tried to leave us with a cracked ceramic tile — directly in front of the sink.

Pointing it out led to more cursing and banging, and left a replacement tile that sat half a centimetre above its neighbours. By then we were too sick of the loud cursing and banging to insist that he try again.

Every time I walked barefoot into that bathroom, I thought of that handyman.

Then there was the full kitchen renovation, undertaken because our cupboard doors were falling off, the counter duct-taped together, and the oven no longer working.

For several weeks our fridge stood in our living room alongside the microwave, the only appliance available to us for cooking. (Renovation costs precluded eating out.) I learned how to microwave pasta, and stretched the limits of our tolerance for canned food. “Beans or soup today?”

Plastic sheeting hung across doorways, which swished whenever you breathed anywhere nearby.

The tile backsplash behind the counter had to be redone because the first effort yielded crooked tiles and bulges. The vinyl floor had to be re-laid because the vinyl they used was badly discoloured. The contractor told us later that the worker who laid it wasn’t feeling well that day. We felt unwell too when we saw it. Someone else replaced it.

These misfires meant Mr. Fluffster had to convince the contractor of the obvious; replacement was essential (and shouldn’t cost more).

The Fluffster offspring and I didn’t get the worst of the experience, as he was in school and I was going out to work every day. We missed most of the chaos. Mr. Fluffster dealt with the planning and paperwork, workers traipsing in and out, and negotiations with the contractor. Happily for me, renovations have always been his responsibility.

One renovation experience that still rankles was the bathroom (tub, tiles, and toilet; see photo at the top of this post) that seemed to go reasonably well until the contractor finished and left. He’d forgotten to install the shower curtain bar. It was late Friday afternoon, so the earliest he could return was the following Monday. We were not happy.

I have more of these anecdotes, but this is enough for today. I need to pick my way through the current renovation detritus in the hallway to get to bed.

* The hard copy Yellow Pages that were delivered to everyone’s home once upon a time. You won’t remember those if you’re younger than a certain age.

The Fluffsters break with tradition

‘Tis the season.

For the first time in 32 years, Mr. Fluffster and I will be back in Ontario for the holidays. I have some qualms about leaving the Fluffster offspring behind, and foregoing years of Fluffster-developed West Coast traditions, but our course is set.

The Fluffster offspring may not miss us, quite frankly. We’re planning a couple of special dinners with him before we leave, and we’ve already resolved the gift question (assuming he gets his butt in gear and picks out the precise model of office chair he wants before we leave).

Last year, we had a Christmas Day Zoom call with him rather than our usual time spent together eating too much, exchanging gifts, and lounging about afterwards. It was so low-key I can barely remember details, except that we did a crossword puzzle together on Zoom and dropped off some chocolate at his door.

Growing up, my Christmases were a Big Deal, as they are for many children: Santa Claus; a growing pile of presents under the tree; a boot filled with oranges, gingerbread cookies, and chocolates at my bedside;* too much food; and my father complaining about commercialism and the folly of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Also, trying unsuccessfully to keep the truth about Santa Claus from my younger sister. She saw through it early on, and told my father, when he undertook The Talk, that she’d known for years it was a hoax, but didn’t want to hurt our feelings. Made me contemplate my own naivete, as The Talk took me completely by surprise.

Later on, it was pooling resources with siblings to buy bigger presents for family members, New Year’s Eve parties, too much drink…

Mr. Fluffster and I created new traditions when we moved to BC. By then, I’d come around to my father’s way of thinking about overspending on what is, after all, an advertising-fuelled free-for-all. Mr. Fluffster was already there when I met him.

Fortunately for us, the Fluffster offspring never developed acquisitiveness and for years presented us with modest Christmas wish lists that were always a variation on this:

Why peppermints? Those got into his Christmas brain early on and stuck there. I blame my mother-in-law, who may have fuelled his addiction by bribing him with them.

This is the kid who also got excited about eating ice cubes for dessert when he was two.

Our holidays have always been low-key, and centre mostly around food. We came up with a menu for our first Christmas Eve dinner in 1989, wrote it down, and have followed it ever since (with a few hard-negotiated alterations when Mr. Fluffster’s mom joined us). Christmas Day dinner is generally an elaborate pasta dish (always vegetarian, and now also gluten-free). Red wine and Prosecco have been known to appear, as has Mr. Fluffster’s brandy-soaked “tipsy cake.” And enough of my mother-in-law’s home-made Italian cookies to feed a large army.

After our first few years together, New Year’s Eve meant toasting the new year at 9 or 10 pm (it’s midnight somewhere then, right?) and toddling off to bed.

This year, the holidays will centre on Mr. Fluffster’s 85-year-old mom. Food will still take centre stage, but we’ll be merely meal-planning consultants to the director. Maybe also grocery shoppers. I’m good with that. We’ll Zoom with the Fluffster offspring, of course. And visit my sister and other relatives.

If the weather cooperates with two weeks of above seasonal temperatures and just a little sprinkling of snow, it’ll be perfect…

* Boots (or wooden shoes) are the Dutch equivalent of Christmas stockings. We didn’t have wooden shoes but, living on a farm, we had plenty of boots. I hope my mom cleaned them first.

Evil code won’t defeat me!

I’ve always known that Microsoft Word is capable of vile acts. Years spent wrestling with recalcitrant section breaks, vanishing headers and footers, or missing chunks of text — or whole documents — have fostered a fraught relationship. Paired with HTML code, Word can really wreak havoc. But I’m a stubborn git, so I’ve generally won.

Now that I’m drafting content for this blog in Word, the struggle has taken on renewed intensity.

Years ago, peering over a developer colleague’s shoulder, I learned enough about web code to pick my way through basic HTML. It helped that he was a natural teacher who patiently answered dumb questions.

When the Fluffster offspring was in French middle school, armed with that basic knowledge, I blithely volunteered to maintain his (mostly English-language) school website. I had no idea what I was up against. Months of late-night head-scratching trial and error later, I'd ported the site over from Microsoft FrontPage to Dreamweaver and edited content written by French-speaking parents. Editing took very little time. Code clean-up ate my weekends and evenings.

The endeavour was deeply satisfying. Of course, no sooner had I finished than the Fluffster offspring graduated and the site was abandoned to the next hapless volunteer. I vowed never to look at it again.

I thought that would be my last hands-on HTML experience, but 16 years later, I'm still cleaning up cluttered code.

I’d almost forgotten what that looks like. When I started, I obliviously cut and pasted content from Word to Blogger's Compose view. If something didn’t behave, I just deleted and recreated it. I should have known better.

I can’t remember now what made me look under the hood, but when I did, I suddenly heard my developer colleague’s voice in my head: “Clean up that code and it'll get a lot easier!”

Sadly, I’d already put up 16 posts, so it took several weeks to clean up the mess. Cleanup consisted of deleting reams of junk code that Microsoft Word kindly deposits into anything you copy and paste and then checking to make sure nothing on the page changed.

The screenshot above shows one such code ream. I found several, plus smaller instances of surplus code on almost every line. In fact, there was more junk code than content. Deleting it wholesale changed absolutely nothing. However, it’s like cleaning out a utensil drawer that also holds random plastic forks, elastic bands, bottle tops, corks, etc.; if you have to find that spatula quickly, it won’t be concealed by the other rubbish.

I'll keep using Word to draft entries because I’m a creature of habit (ok, maybe a bit of a masochist). Then I'll strip out formatting in TextEdit and rebuild from scratch in Blogger. It doubles the time it takes, but there’s satisfaction in doing it right. I have all the time in the world now, after all. And it’ll silence my former colleague's voice in my head.

Created by Eliricon from Noun Project

Technology wins a round

I finally gave in and got a smartphone. Above, a recently purchased iPhone 13 mini. After holding firm against peer/societal pressure for years, not being able to use Uber in Toronto proved the tipping point.

Let me provide context. Mr. Fluffster and I are going to Toronto in December to visit his 85-year-old mom, who has discontinued her yearly visits to BC (2020 was the first year she missed since the late 90s). For many of those years, she travelled to Vancouver at Christmas, partly to escape Toronto's winter (yes, another sensible member of the Fluffster clan).

We haven’t been back to Ontario for Christmas since we fled, er, left the province where we grew up, in 1989. We have visited, but usually either in spring or fall, when the temperature is generally moderate and the airport less than jam-packed. Rare exceptions were a couple of trips for funerals. Those winter trips didn’t leave us gasping to repeat the experience.

We're staying at a hotel this time rather than with relatives. Hey, if we’re going to Toronto in mid-winter, we’re entitled to some pampering. However, that means we had to consider how to get around the city and to/from relatives’ homes.

On past trips, we took the TTC or Go trains and buses to most places, and sometimes relied on relatives for rides. But to contend with snow and cold while wearing our Vancouver-style boots and winter gear (not made for Toronto weather), door-to-door transport becomes a necessity.

I thought we could access Uber on my iPad using either Wi-Fi or temporary cellular access. However, when I tried to register, I found I'd need a phone that can receive and send text messages in the city where I'm using Uber. Our flip phone works here in Vancouver. But take it to Toronto and it refuses to cooperate without eating up more money. So, since we have to spend money anyway…

I might have been able to find a clever way around all of this, but I kept running into brick walls (and out of patience). Further discussion with Mr. Fluffster left us both convinced that the time for a smartphone had finally arrived.

So off I went to our local Apple reseller to buy an iPhone 13 mini.

The young man who spent over an hour helping me (for free!) was marvellous. Although he started out trying to convince me (unsuccessfully) of my need for AirPods, he adjusted his approach based on what I had to say. That’s rare in a tech sales person.

He recommended a better monthly service provider, advised on a case and screen protector, set up the service provider, and taught me the basics of my new phone while starting it up. All in all, a pleasant, painless, and enlightening experience.

The Fluffster tech resistance still limps along in that I bought only one phone. When we drop our landline in a few months, one of us will have to rely on our old flip phone or iPad with Wi-Fi to talk to the other on the rare occasions that's needed. A few times a year I go out for an evening without Mr. Fluffster, but when that happens, I’d better have a darn good reason for phoning home and waking him up.

On my way home from buying the phone, I tried out the camera. It was getting dark and I didn’t expect much, but the photos surprised me.

Pictures taken with my iPad this late in the day wouldn't show much of anything, except maybe the glow of the streetlights surrounded by utter darkness.

You can look forward to better photos in this blog. Bonus.