Unfinished lapstrake pram needs new owner.

http://picasaweb.google.ca/rodcros/UnfinishedLapstrakePram#

This is a winter project which will outclass any other dinghy in the harbour, guaranteed.

The first pram was appraised at $2800 and was a boat show winner. It never lost a rowing race against a hull under 15′. This one’s more elaborate.

I’ll provide clear walnut for the seats and floors to go with the kit. $800. or best offer.

Post a comment here or inquire at
rodcros at gmail.com.

(The “at” above is to discourage spam-generators).

How much does a free building cost?

This all began early last summer when my friend Les Parrott suggested that I should acquire a 20 X 40 portable shelter which was sitting unassembled in Richmond. At the time I was overwhelmed with renovations on two houses and had no time for further confusion.

But things change. This week I visited Lorna Hyland and we loaded the pieces of the building onto my trailer. It was a whole lot of galvanized truss sections, some long pipes with strange triangles in the middle, and two very awkward rolls of white plastic. It made a good load for my new trailer, and I happily hauled it home.

After determining a location for the edifice, I decided that the grade needed to rise a bit, as I had no desire to have the floor covered with ice all winter. The lady at the Sweet’s/Tackaberry quarry listened to my tale and recommended a triaxle load of 3″ crushed limestone, most likely followed by another of 7/8″ to make a smoother floor.

I remembered the guy on the triaxle truck from his last visit to the farm during the runup to the Plowing Match. He led a fleet of trucks into the woodlot to construct a road for the tour wagon. Apparently among the Tackaberry staff “The time we backed into all those maples” is the stuff of legend. “They all said we couldn’t do it, and we did,” he told me proudly.

It had been a tight fit working the trucks backwards out of brilliant sunlight into a very dark, forbidding wood among the towering maples. At some points the clearance between the truck’s mirrors and the trees was no more than a couple of inches, total. And there were turns. Then, of course, they had to unload the gravel, and a triaxle dump truck needs at least 20′ of clearance for the box. Fortunately we had lots of overhead space, the canopy hovering at about 90′ in this area with few lower limbs.

I had dumped quite a few trucks while working on construction during my student days, and I figured we could drop the aggregate on the work site and save an enormous amount of work by eliminating the need to carry it in with a front end loader from a central pile.

The worst part for the drivers was backing out of the sunlight into the dark. They were blind for about fifty feet and had to trust my directions until their vision recovered. Then they discovered that the footing was indeed solid, if irregular, and that there was space for their mirrors and even space to turn, if they were careful. They were careful, indeed. Nobody touched a tree. The mirrors of all of the trucks emerged intact, and a couple of hours with the scraper blade behind my tractor and we had roads over the mud holes for the IPM tours.

Anyway, this time the guy came in heavy and was concerned about driving across the sod to the dumping location. Turns out the ground was pretty firm and he made the spread successfully and went on his way. That left the task to my tractor to grade the pad. A serene morning with the Massey left the 3″ limestone level and packed. The lady at the pit was right. I would need finer stone to provide a smooth floor for the garage, so I ordered another load. The 7/8″ material was very nice to work with the scraper, so I spent another hour playing in my sandbox.

After completing the pad (45 tonnes of crushed stone) I asked Bet to park her car on it and then to return it to the house. She landed the Lexus in the spot and then backed out awkwardly onto the driveway (nasty little upward slope there) so I started cutting into the bank with the bucket of the tractor. The loader is quite strong, but old Massey Fergusons only have one hydraulic line, and I needed to switch it from three point hitch (to hold up the scraper) to the loader each time I lifted something. This is not a precise process, as sometimes the pump loses its prime and must be encouraged with adjustments on various levers on the right side of the seat. The loader works really well for individual lifting jobs around the farm, but it’s no bulldozer. For any real work in the future I definitely need a backhoe.

The cost of the free building continues to rise.

So much for The Sun’s credibility

Ottawa Sun Walter Robinson recently wrote a column condemning the cheque scandal as pure posturing by the opposition. He backed up his argument with a variety of examples from Ontario to prove his point. It was a good, convincing column.

Turns out the guy’s a registered lobbyist for the PMO. He didn’t mention that.

http://twitter.com/Stephen_Maher__/status/5041578296

Frosh Week, 1969

When the papers are full of the fuss surrounding Queen’s Homecoming each year, I can’t help but think back to Frosh Week, 1969, and one of the early moments of the Queen’s tradition.

I was a country kid, just coming off a summer bout of mononucleosis after completing grade 14. Mom had said I was too young to go to university at 17, so she made me stick around for another year. During the year I majored in Volkswagens, repeated French, my favourite course, and caused no end of grief for the teacher while sniping from the back row.

On September 7th, my parents in front and Bet beside me in the back of the family two-door Chrysler, we made our way through the crowded streets of Kingston until we came out onto Union Street. Dad took one look at the slogans printed on the bed sheets which formed a banner across University Avenue and shifted into reverse to do a three-point turn in the traffic and get his innocent son out of there. By the time he had the car half-around, though, I had escaped through the back window with my suitcase.

A hurried goodbye to Bet and I was out of my parents’ reach and into the welcoming embrace of Queen’s University. And what a welcome it was! I was immediately surrounded by more people of my own age than I had ever seen before. We quickly learned that the grinning extroverts shouting instructions were known as Gaels, and that we were expected to drop our luggage, join arms, and do a can-can dance while chanting nonsense. It was kind of fun to lock arms with a thousand people, jump up and down and yell.

The prospect of residence life caused me some apprehension as I had never had a roommate before. As fate would have it, I had no sooner arrived on the fourth floor of McNeil House than someone told me that my room had been changed: the pre-med guy who had the other half of my room had asked to live with his pal from prep school, so the university fathers had re-assigned me to a private room in Morris Hall.

I trudged across the compound to my new building, found 209, and settled into what seemed like a pretty good room. Turns out singles in Morris were usually reserved for seniors or brilliant students, so I gained instant, unearned respect as a brain. My floor-mates soon saw through that when they heard my Leeds dialect and I regaled them with a few tales of hunting and off-road driving, but the Toronto boys were still a bit uneasy around this hick who had landed the single room.

The best part of university for me quickly became evident: I was in a building with two hundred people of my own age with whom I could talk. Of course there were classes and social events and dumb team-building exercises, but what it came down to were the conversations, and I learned as much in residence in that first year as I did anywhere else during my time at Queen’s.

My most memorable night in residence was the first. Apparently the residents of Victoria Hall wanted to get to know the guys on Leonard Field right away, but the rules promised expulsion for any guy who entered women’s residence after curfew. No such rule applied to women entering men’s residence, however. So the first “fruit-of-the-loom raid” was hastily organized.

It must have been about 11:00 that night. On signal Victoria Hall emptied and a mob of young women descended upon the five residence buildings on Leonard Field. Apparently they swept through the buildings, storming into empty rooms and ransacking drawers for trophies. Legend has it one poor guy in Leonard was doing his laundry in the basement, clad only in a bathrobe. The flock of Maenads took every stitch of clothing he owned except the bathrobe.

Merriment ensued, but in Morris our floor seniors had been tipped and we were ready. Crews waited in the downstairs washrooms until the ground floor was full of marauders. Then they closed and blocked the doors. Momentum had carried the raiders up the stairs, where they found all of the rooms locked, and groups of guys politely waiting to escort their visitors into tubs hastily prepared with cold water and a box of detergent in each. For more formal tubbings we used ice cubes, but this event was organized on very short notice.

There may have been some private deals arranged, but to my knowledge no girl gained passage out of the building until she was suitably festooned with wet soap flakes.
After our leaders had dealt with the first onslaught, we locked up the building and formed good-natured human chains to herd any stragglers into Lake Ontario.

The morning after the raid Leonard Field was something to see: no grass was visible, or even the concrete walkways. Everything was covered with a deep layer of abandoned cotton. But in Morris Hall we had held onto our unmentionables because of informed leadership and good battle tactics. We were well started on our campaign to make Morris Hall #1.

Rocco Rossi, Tim Powers, and two parties headed in opposite directions

John Geddes interviewed Liberal National Director Rocco Rossi for MacLean’s this spring and Rossi most wanted to talk about the data base he had bought from the Obama camp. Over the summer Liberal donations have doubled and membership has grown rapidly.  Rossi’s focus seems to be entirely positive:  his interest is in the building of a new organization, one suited to the needs and the technology of the next decade.

Leeds residents may have seen Rossi in his kayak this summer as he made his very public fund-raising voyage through the Rideau Canal.  The text and video blog entries showed mostly what an energetic, good-natured fellow he is.  But he loves the Rideau, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Rossi respects the Conservative machine for their ability to fund a permanent campaign: “Last year they raised $21 million. We raised $6 million. You let that situation continue and democracy is at risk. No matter how good your ideas, no matter how good your leader, you won’t be able to present your message on an equal footing.”

Veteran Star writer Linda Diebel concluded her profile of the man:  “If Rocco Rossi can’t fix the Liberal party, maybe nobody can.”

I first encountered Conservative strategist Tim Powers in a Globe and Mail article on the weekend.  It was a brief diatribe attacking Michael Ignatieff, and its content seemed well beneath the paper’s standard.  Astonished that the estimable Globe and Mail would publish such tripe, I looked its author up.  Turns out he is vice-president of Summa Communications, consultant to CTVGlobeMedia (the Globe’s owner), a U. of Ottawa lecturer, frequent commentator on CTV, and point-man for Prime Minister Harper.

In the article he states: “Iggy the ‘world-class leader’ has in his nine months of leadership supported a coalition with the socialists and separatists, promised to raise taxes on occasion, abandoned EI reform and canceled his trip to China after talking endlessly about the importance of that travel. Seems more like the behaviour of a house leaguer than the No. 1 draft pick.”

I fear we can expect a lot more of this sort of discourse from the CPC over the course of the next few months, for while the Liberals seem to be drifting pleasantly along the high road in Rossi’s wake, the Conservative spokesmen are enthusiastically splashing around in the muck of half-truths behind Tim Powers.

A visit to the Liberal website

Apart from the new T.V. ads the most interesting part of the website is the network of activities for Liberal Party Members across the country.  They range from boat rides on the Ottawa to a national tour of the play, Trudeau Stories, to lectures about women in politics, get-acquainted meetings on campus, and so on.

Rocco Rossi seems to be having his way, and the new organization is active, involved, and with a grass-roots emphasis.

If anyone thinks that this is the same old Liberal Party of the Chretien/Martin trench- warfare era, he should check out the website at www.liberal.ca.

A visit to the Conservative Party of Canada website

If you mine deeply enough, there’s a lot of detail on conservative.ca.  The legislative record of the CPC government covers several pages and reads well.  It presents the impression of a government devoted to reducing taxes, law and order issues, and a nationalistic attitude toward the North and foreign policy.

Of course it’s hard to get past the first page.  One bit of teenage humour I rather enjoyed was the ad which read:  “Freak out your roomate.  Join the Conservative Party.”

The big surprise is that Michael Ignatieff is as prominent on the CPC site as he is on his own.  They’re making him a star.  The bulk of the creative effort has gone into putting together a spurious ezine entitled “Me:  It’s all about me” which pays more attention to the Liberal leader than he’s gotten all summer from the vacationing press corps.

For example the “Me” ezine denigrates “The Visitor’s” latest book by quoting Noah Richler’s review. A literate reader then has to find the original document and read it.  This is definitely not a good idea if you plan to vote CPC. Noah Richler is a very good read, and he’s not by any means as dismissive of Ignatieff as the tabloid would have the viewer believe.

The authors make much of a magnified Ignatieff signature, purportedly on the coalition agreement of last spring.  They show this as evidence that Iggie is a traitor to democracy, and will say or do anything to gain power.  They must think we’re stupid.  We remember that Stephen Harper signed an identical agreement with Layton and Duceppe in his attempt to dump Paul Martin a few years ago. It seems that every time Harper points a finger at Ignatieff, three point back at him.

As Rick Salutin put in a column last week, Stephen Harper seems to like to cast himself as a later-day Ronald Regan in his determination to defend the northern frontier from those pesky Russians who want our oil.  The North for the P.M. is a land where the next periscope may be the invaders, not where ten year old kids sleep outside and homeless.

Then another huge picture of Ignatieff appeared.  No mention was made of the senate appointments of the previous day, but now the site’s creators were blaming him for the Senate blocking passage of a tough-on-crime law.  So I guess the nine new senate appointments are Ignatieff’s fault.  When you go negative it’s hard to stop at www.conservative.ca

The new “Conservative”

James Travers’s column in today’s Toronto Star bemoans the loss of civility in parliament, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Stephen Harper and the CPC. I keep thinking of Swift’s Liliputians when I watch Harper at work. Here’s a rope-balancer who isn’t very good at it. He keeps letting someone else have the centre and then has to squawk and flap his arms like crazy to keep from falling, first to the left and then to the right. Ignatieff has planted himself more or less in the centre, so the increasingly strident Harper has to struggle on the margins.

Then Stephen Chase of  the Globe and Mail has an article on Harper’s announcement that the deficit will continue if growth does not eliminate it, even if it takes ten years, as most economists predict, to get over the current $17 billion/year drain (July 21, Ottawa likely stuck with deficits for a decade:  economist).

Funny, when Bob Rae ran a deficit like that in Ontario back in the nineties, he became a pariah, labelled variously a communist, an idiot, a fool, a traitor to his class.  Most tellingly, public employees revised the calendar to include the Rae-day, an ironic tribute to his leadership, and the NDP has never recovered.

So when a man leading a party which attempts to call itself “Conservative” adopts the same strategy, do these labels no longer apply?  To be a “Conservative” do you have to act like George Bush and ignore the facts, using reckless spending and relentless tax cuts to shore up personal popularity until the country is bankrupt?

Where I grew up a conservative spent what he earned and saved a bit for tomorrow.  He shared with his neighbours and cared for the needy.  He had no thought of helping a few friends get rich so he could eat at their tables later.  Not everybody agreed with the conservative, but they respected him.

Moving Day!

We just finished the first meal in or new/old home.  We hauled furniture all day and set it up.  Charlie and Roz and Mom joined us.

As soon as Charlie hooked up the living room T.V. the bickerring started over the satelite t.v. feed.  Oh, well.  The floors are nice and the old furniture looks pretty good in the new rooms.

As of now the house in Smiths Falls becomes a construction zone until we list it for sale.  Plumbing and wiring to do.

Care and feeding of your Delta Sidekick 12″ compound miter saw

Halfway through the construction of a basement door my chop saw quit this morning, an obvious burned wire somewhere.  So I took the thing apart and located the culprit, shorted another wire on the re-assembly, took it apart again and generally familiarized myself with the machine and its construction on the next three or four disassemblies.  Then it went back together and worked fine until I tried to cut a board.  Damned thing was turning backwards.  Tried reversing the polarity on the plug.  Nope.  Put that back.

The only thing that wasn’t the same as before was that the motor housing had gone on upside down.  Off it all came and apart it went.  The red wire gave me fits again as I re-routed it for the fifth time, and then the thing worked, as normal, but more smoothly than it has run in years.  Nothing like a thorough cleaning to spark a motor up.  Turning it backwards really lets go with a lot of dust.

Almost four hours lost, but it was fun.

The American Dream

The best line I’ve heard in a while comes from The Watchmen:

“What happened to the American dream?  It came true.  You’re lookin’ at it.”

Brainy donation

I heard this one last night on the Sportsnet broadcast of the Senators/Lightning game.  The announcer mentioned that the player with the puck at the time had recently donated his brain to science for the study of the effects of concussions.  When word got out in the Tampa Bay dressing room, another player asked the guy, “How long will the surgery keep you out?”