Is it possible that Winter is almost over?

I can’t believe that tomorrow is March 1st. What happened to these last few months? There is hope that the winter is almost over. March is coming in like a Lamb, though, which means it’ll most likely go out like a Lion, which means a winter storm. That’s when Old Man Winter will say good-bye. Hopefully, it won’t be so bad, but most of the time these old sayings are quite correct. And April can also be unpleasant. We’ll meet it in stride.

Today I went to buy Seed starter soil, because in about three weeks I will start seeding my vegetables indoors. For that I always Seed starter soil. I got another lesson again.

Last year, just before Christmas, I was at Rona. I walked into their garden section and saw bags of the starter soil. When I said to my wife I’m going to buy a bag, she said, “Come on. There is still lots of time.” So I didn’t buy it.

Well, last week when I looked at Canadian Tire, they had none. I checked Walmart and they didn’t have any, either. So today I drove to Winnipeg and went to Rona. They were out. They guy told me they had over 100 bags a couple of week ago, but it seems everybody is buying right now. They might get some in again in a week or so.

I know what that means: Perhaps by the end of March, if I’m lucky. Panicking a little now, I drove to Home Depot. They had very little gardening stuff on display, but, as luck would have it, I found 2 bags hidden behind some potting soil. A small bag but enough for me. I also bought a few more packages of seeds and now I’m ready.

I won’t seed any tomatoes this year. The few plants that I’ll grow (18 probably), I will buy from the garden center. I’ll get better plants that way anyway.

The only vegetables I’ll seed will be mostly peppers. They do well. I usually have about 150 pepper plants in the garden, so buying all of them gets too expensive. We love peppers. We make lots of salsa and pepper sauce, but we also love to eat them stuffed with meat and rice, and fried up. There is a lot you can do with peppers.

The other thing I did today was get a couple of tickets to a show February 17 in the Casino. A tribute to Rod Steward, Cher, and Tom Jones. The tickets were free. How can you beat that? I was lucky; they had only a few tickets left. That’s what happens when you don’t open all of your emails. I saw it only yesterday and it was a little bit too late. The good tickets were gone, of course. The trouble is that we get bombarded these days with emails from everywhere and sometimes we miss important ones.

It’ll be a good show and after the show we’ll have supper there. Anyway, that is the plan.

#More Morons

My wife says I’m using the word ‘stupid’ too much these days, so I’ve changed it to ‘moronic’. The #Morons are everywhere. Yesterday we went shopping in a shopping mall. My wife wanted to go into a clothing store. There is nothing more boring for a man than going into a woman’s clothing store. Since I was tired anyway from all the walking, I said, “I’m going to sit down and wait for you.”

There was a comfortable chair right in front of the store, so that’s were I decided to park my tired body. I barely sat down, when somebody said, “I was heading for that chair.” Looking up, I saw a young woman standing in front of me. I told her, “So was I. I guess I was faster than you.”

“I’ve been on my feet all day. I’m tired,” she whined, giving me a defiant look.

“So am I, because I’ve been on my feet all day, also,” I said.

At this moment I thought she might just start breaking into the tears. So I got up. “You go ahead and take the seat,” I said. “I’ll find another one.”

I didn’t say anything else. I could have said, “Look at my hair, girl. It is white, because I’m probably more than three times your age. My back and my joints are aching from my arthritis and my legs are tired because I don’t have the stamina of a young person anymore. In my youth we were taught to respect our elders. What do they teach you in School or at home these days?”

I got up because I’m a gentleman. I was taught to have respect for older people and to give up my seat for a woman. This one was barely out of her teens, but she was a woman, nevertheless. As a man I respected her. As an older person I didn’t.

It is sad to see our youth grow up this way. No respect for anything, be it older people, the law, other people’s property, or anything else.

Morons!

So what did we shop for anyway? Dishes. My wife wants new dishes for the kitchen, for every day use. I never realized how difficult it is to find suitable dishes. Who the hell designs the dishes these days? My problem is I just hate most of the soup plates. I still love the old-fashioned, European designs, the plates with a rim. What you find in most dishes are bowls. They are fine if I want to feed my dog or cat. Figuratively speaking. We don’t have neither a cat nor a dog. We have a Canary. A bird.

Now, I’m reluctant to say, “I have a bird.” When you translate that into German ‘Ich habe einen Vogel’, it might mean something totally different. It could mean: I am a little bit crazy.

I may just arrive at that stage if we don’t find dishes that we both like soon. Aside from the soup plates, some have no mugs but small cups, barely large enough for a little sip. Or the plates have undesirable colors. Who wants to have black, brown, purple, or yellow dishes? Not me. I want to see my food on the plate. Then we have the square or triangle plates. Who in their right mind designed those?

Like anything in this life, people have different tastes. There is nothing wrong with that, in fact, it makes life diverse and not boring. However, I am happy with certain ‘boring’ colors and shapes. My motto has always been: Just because everybody likes it, doesn’t mean I have to. Maybe I have a little ‘bird’ inside my head and maybe I should evict it and embrace new views and opinions, open up to new things.

How can I look at a girl, wearing ripped jeans, her beautiful body disfigured with tattoos, rings through her lips and nose and eye brows, a stud piercing her tongue, and say, “She looks gorgeous,” when I think “What a moron. Those tattoos will never come off. She is scarred for life. She talks with a lisp, and she can’t afford to buy new jeans?”  That is a difficult thing to do. (I know this has nothing to do with buying new dishes, but I needed to slip it in here. It is one of my pet-peeves.)

Tomorrow we’ll be doing our weekly shopping for groceries. What will I find to criticize? I hope it will be a pleasant day. I need a pleasant day.

Today wasn’t bad. The sun shone all day, but it is still cold out there. Another two days and March will arrive. The way it looks, March will come in like a Lamb, which means it will go out like a Lion. We’ll see.

#A Matter of Integrity

I don't usually write too much about my activities in my other life, the Writer, but since I do spend some time with writing my books, sometimes these worlds cross over. Last year I published my crime novel A Matter of Integrity, which I published with Smashwords. I designed the cover myself, but I was never overly excited with it. I'm a writer not a designer of book covers. So I decided to have one designed. I won't go into the novel itself here, except saying it is supposed to be not too serious. It features PI Lews Canon. That might already give you hint what kind of novel it is. Anyway, here is the new cover. For more details, if interested, visit Smashwords for a closer look and a free reading sample of A Matter of Integrity.
 Just click on the link.

 

I don't know if the new cover will boost sales. I hope so. The novel inside is still the same. I didn't change anything there. I like it as it is.

Another Gourmet meal

We always like to have a nice dinner on Saturday night. That doesn’t mean we don’t have nice dinners for the rest of the week; it means we like to make it just a little bit nicer. My wife and I, we love food, but I’m not talking about stuffing myself until I can’t breathe anymore. Even though food is necessary for survival, it doesn’t have to be bland and just basic. I don’t only eat with my stomach; I also eat with my eyes and my taste buds. Food needs to look attractive on the plate. It needs to be presented like a beautiful woman (I’m talking now as a man!).

We had #Water Buffalo sirloin steak this past Saturday, accompanied by a baked potato, a little left-over asparagus, and steamed champion mushrooms. Because the steak was not very large, we also fried up some raw shrimp. And we drank Pinot Noir wine with the meal. It was a feast for the gods.

This was the first time we tried Water Buffalo. The meat was quite lean with just a little bit of marbling. My wife marinated it for a couple of hours with just virgin olive oil and some steak spices. Then she barbequed it on our indoor grill (It was too damn cold to go outside). She left it on the grill for close to 4 minutes. The she put it into a warm oven and let it sit until I was done with the shrimp, which I fried up in the frying pan. The shrimp had been marinated for possibly 15 minutes in virgin olive oil with some onion and garlic powder. I fry them for 3 minutes.

The steak was maybe a little bit too rare on the inside, but after having it sit for a while, it lost that angry red color and the juices pulled back into the meat. Taste-wise there was not much difference between the Water Buffalo steak and a Beef steak. It was tender enough, but not as tender as we had hoped. Even though, we were quite satisfied. I don’t know if we’ll be buying it again, because it is quite dear. The steak we had cost us $14.50. I didn’t weigh it, but I don’t think it was even a pound. Apparently, Water Buffalo meat is very healthy because of its low fat content. I with, though, it wouldn’t be so expensive. For the same price you can probably buy filet mignon, which is a more tender steak.

So, okay, what shall we try next? The place where we bought the steaks also carries Elk, Bison, Deer, but they are nothing special. Besides, we have Deer meat in the freezer. Apparently, they have access to #Kangaroo meat. Hmm...Interesting. How about Rattlesnake, Crocodile, or Frog legs? We may have to take a trip to Louisiana for that. We had Ostrich once at the Casino, but it was too rare and we didn’t care much for it. I wouldn’t mind trying it again. Unfortunately, they don’t serve it anymore.

I think, next time we’ll buy some Wild Boar steaks. Who knows?

To try new things is always exciting. Sometimes they turn out and sometimes they don’t, but that is the chance we have to take to discover that tasty morsel.

Tonight we’ll be eating pizza. Oh well, can’t have a gourmet meal every day.

#Stupid people

Oh, it's crying time again...

Today we went shopping to #Walmart. We buy our groceries there. The products are of good quality and the prices are right, much better than at Safeway. But that is not what I want to write about.

I wish they charged one dollar for the use of their buggies. They don’t and that is the problem. Perhaps it is not my business, but it upsets me when I see shopping carts all over the place in the parking lot. Some people are so lazy, they can be 10 feet away from the shopping cart returns, but they still leave their carts in the parking place they vacate.

Today I saw a cart right beside the driver’s door of a truck, courtesy of his neighbor who left it there. The return spot was across on the other side. Are these people really so lazy, unconcerned or just stupid?

While I waited for my wife to come out of the bathroom, I stood near the entrance to the store, inside the store. One woman came with her buggy after going through the cashier, took out her bag with groceries and just left the buggy standing in front of me, right beside a rack where the  movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’ was displayed. I thought it is quite appropriate. She was even ‘Dumber’. Besides, she blocked the walkway to the exits. How stupid can you be?

Why do people leave perishable items anywhere on the shelves if they change their mind? Why don’t they take stuff out of the freezer, carry it in their cart for a while, and then change their mind and just leave it on a shelf that displays clothing? Why not put it back into the freezer?

What makes people like that? Perhaps it is the location of the Walmart store. It is in Selkirk. Is it the type of people that shop there? I can’t mention any ethnic groups, because these days one has to be careful. Everything is considered either a racial slur or a slur against ethnic minorities, even if it is the truth. The truth always hurts. I don’t feel of being accused of that. Could it be it is just the Walmart Shoppers? I hope not, because, damn it, I am a Walmart Shopper. What does that say about me?

I always return my shopping cart. I always park my cart out of the way in the isles so other shoppers can pass me. I try to be considered to other shoppers. I don’t block traffic by standing and talking with somebody I run into. I move aside. How hard is that? 

#The rusty Dishwasher Rack

Everyone who owns a dishwasher has probably had to deal with a rusty rack. By rust I mean the tips of the tines are wearing off and start to get rusty. Not good for the dishes, because the rust spots may transfer to the dishes. We have a Maytag dishwasher. According to the commercials, when you have a Maytag dishwasher you never have to worry about problems. Well, like every promise you get these days, that is not true. The bottom rack of our dishwasher was showing rust already after a few months. We have a well and our water is hard, but we also have a water softener. My wife adds vinegar to the rinse cycle once-in-awhile. Nothing helps; the rust appears.

We had the rack replaced, but the new one has a terrible design. The basket for the cutlery is in the front and there is little room for dishes in the rest of the rack, and we wished we would have just kept the old rack, because this new one didn't last very long until the first rust spots showed up.

Not wanting to buy a new rack, because they are over $100.00 and probably won't last either, I did a search on the internet. A rusty rack is nothing unusual, and many people complained about it. I found a product that actually worked, it is called #ReRACK and we managed to locate it at our local #Home Hardware Building Center in Selkirk. It was the last package, so we bought it, even though it cost $20.00 plus 13% Tax. Apparently, it is cheaper in the USA. We didn't check any other stores, except for Canadian Tire, but they don't carry it. They should, because it could be a good seller if people are made aware this product exists.

It comes in a small bottle and is liquid vinyl. You brush a few coats onto the tip of the tines after cleaning them with fine sandpaper and rubbing alcohol. We waited 30 minutes between coats, as suggested, and after the last coat we waited another 24 hours before using the dishwasher. So far so good. We'll see how long the vinyl tips last.

Here is a picture:

#The Bargain Vacation

One more segment in the series 'Harold's cheap vacation'. As I said before, research is everything. Read the real fine print hidden in he fine print. Beware of those 'back to nature' vacations. They can be tricky and my hold a few surprises. Here is an example:

#Valentine's Day

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. We don’t go out for supper anymore on Valentine’s Day, for various reasons. It is such a hassle to get reservations and parking is usually a pain in the butt. Restaurants jack up their prices and they are packed to capacity. It's never a relaxed affair.

So, like every year, we stayed home and had our traditional Valentine’s dinner. Traditional for us. My wife made a duck. With the duck we ate white cabbage and boiled potatoes. And, of course, a bottle of wine. My own homemade wine. This year we drank Australian Cabernet Shiraz.

Our duck dinner was much cheaper and better than we could have had in any fancy restaurant. A duck takes nearly three hours in the oven for it to be done correctly. A duck is fat and all the fat needs to be broiled out of the skin. We never ate duck anywhere that was done right. Either the meat was tough or it had a thick fatty skin. Besides, you get only small strips of meat and you pay a small fortune for a duck dinner. The other problem is that duck is only on the menu in expensive restaurants.

Usually, we have Savoy cabbage, but we couldn’t find it in the stores we normally shop, except Safeway carried it. However, when we saw the price my wife and I said, “Forget it. We’re not going to pay $3.00 a pound.” Cabbage by nature is heavy. We probably would have paid ten bucks for a head, so we bought white cabbage instead for 77 cents a pound. We love white cabbage, anyway. Even cabbage needs to be done the correct way, and, as with duck, not every restaurant serves cabbage. I’m not talking about coleslaw here; I’m talking about steamed or boiled cabbage.

Well, our Valentine’s dinner was delicious, a culinary feast, if I may say so. 

Since I write a poem for my wife for every holiday, I wrote her one again for Valentine’s Day. That’s also tradition for me. I don’t publish the poems I write for her, because they belong to her and are not mine to publish. They are her private property.

Here is a poem I wrote that didn’t make the cut to be included in her collection:

A Valentine’s Poem

By Herbert Grosshans

If I were a monkey wild and free

Living in the jungle in a tree

Would I buy flowers for the love of my life?

Would I give roses to my monkey wife?

Would we go out for a Banana feast?

Would it matter that I’m a beast?

Perhaps these questions may sound silly

But I’m not asking them just willy-nilly

This morning when I got out of bed

From lack of sleep my eyes still red

And in the mirror I saw my reflection

It caused in me a strange reaction

The face of a gorilla looked back at me

I hadn’t shaved for a few days, you see

I feared I may have changed into an ape

With my beady little eyes and my mouth agape

But then I saw you, my dear Sweetheart

And what I saw gave me quite a start

Your lips were formed into a big pout

It almost looked like you had a snout

It seems we are a perfect pair

So we’re monkeys, I don’t care

I’m hanging upside down from a vine

And wonder:

Will you be my Valentine?

Who says I'm not a romantic?

Hope your Valentine's Dinner was as good as ours.

A belated Happy Valentine's Day

#Honey

Even though I am a retired Electrician, emphasis on ‘Retired’, people sometimes call me for a job. Unless it is a friend, I tell them that I’m retired and not doing any more jobs.

This morning I did a job for an old friend. He bought a new digital thermostat for his furnace and he wanted me to replace his old one. It was one of those with the mercury bulb and the spring that expands or contracts to control the temperature. His wife wanted one with large numbers and one that also was more accurate.

So I went yesterday morning to do this little job. When I was still in the workforce, I installed plenty of those digital thermostats. They can be programmed for every day of the week to raise the temperature in the morning and lower it again for the night. Everything is automatic. I have one of those in my own house.

They are easy to connect, but not so easy to program, unless one has done a slew of them and, ideally, they all are the same. The problem is they are not all the same. Every manufacturer has its own design. Different look, different way of programming. Before you install one you have to spend time to study the instruction booklet. This thermostat had only 3 buttons and the programming was done by pushing them in different order, and it was all done on the screen.

It took me an hour to figure out the damn thing. Most of it by trial and error. Who can understand those EASY instructions? Maybe a ten-year-old kid but not an adult. If they only had added one line: Don’t push the button ‘Done’ before you have finished all 10 steps to get everything set up. It may have saved me some time. I finally realized what needed to be done after pushing every button (all three of them) in different sequences. Once you know what to do it is easy and it seems so logical.

Perhaps one of the problems was that I am not doing this kind of work anymore and haven’t kept up with new products. Well, I managed to get it all working.

I don’t charge friends for this. I do it as a favor and for old time’s sake. My friend is a beekeeper. Retired now also from keeping bees, but he still gets honey from the guy who took over from him. More than he can use himself. I’ve done plenty of work for him for the last 30 years. He always needed some work done in his honey house; in fact, I wired it for him when he built it. Over the years he kept adding to it. I built special heaters with thermostats for him to keep his bees alive over the winter, helped him design gadgets for his experiments and things like that. It was interesting. He is a handy guy and built everything himself, but he needed advice when it came to the electrical stuff.

He never paid me any money, ( I didn’t ask for any), instead he gave me honey. I always got paid well for my work – in honey. And that was okay, because I eat it every day. He made excellent, award-winning honey. One wall in his bee house is plastered with awards, mostly first and second prizes he won at competitions. In his productive years he entered competitions in Toronto where he competed against beekeepers from all over the world, and he won many first prizes.

Honey is a wonderful product for many ailments. Mixed with cider vinegar it helps to ease the pain of arthritis and gout. It has many healing properties, is useful as an antiseptic. You can put it on wounds to keep them clean. It helps with stomach problems, strengthens the immunity system, etc. It is almost like a wonder drug. And it tastes great. A wonderful substitute for sugar which is not healthy.

Anyway, I got another pail full of honey (about 10 pounds). We put it into small margarine containers and freeze it. That’s right. We freeze it. It keeps fresh in the freezer and lasts forever. When we need it, we let it thaw, then we heat it up in a pot to return it to its liquid state. NEVER put it into the Micro wave oven. It destroys all the good stuff.

Honey does not go bad. They found honey from early Egypt and it is still edible. So the next time you dig up a mummy don't throw away that urn with the honey.

#The Destruction of a Hard Drive

I finally did it. I finally took the step. For 2 years now I had my old Gateway computer standing on my workbench in the basement. All hooked-up. For some reason I always thought I may be able to use it as a backup. Which was totally ludicrous. The reason I bought a new computer in the first place was that this one was acting up. It was slow and just didn’t perform anymore. Last week I thought I might be able to use it as a CD player, but the player didn’t work. So I decided to take it to a recycling depot in Selkirk.

After reading all the precautions one has to take when discarding a computer, like reformatting the hard drive, erasing all the information on it so it cannot be recovered by some unscrupulous person, I was undecided what to do. Apparently, just deleting and uninstalling everything doesn’t erase the data. It is just stored away somewhere on the hard drive, ready to be extracted by someone with the knowledge and tools to do so.

Now I was starting to get paranoid. Searching the internet for solutions, I found plenty of info. None of it worked for me. I downloaded an ‘Eraser’ program with my new computer, transferred it to a flash drive and installed it on my old computer. Well, it did nothing. When trying to reformat the hard drive I was also stumped. You need the Windows installation disk to do that. My DVD player on the computer didn’t work and it would not read the CD.

After wasting days, trying to delete everything and looking for a way to erase all data, I followed the advice of ‘Experts’: A sledgehammer, which translates into: Take a sledgehammer and destroy the hard drive. When I told my wife about my decision, she said: “I told you that 2 years ago. You’re finally taking my advice.”

Now, no man wants to admit that it was his wife’s idea in the first place, but she was right all along. The sledgehammer was the final and ideal solution.

I finally discovered how to open the console; now I was ready for the evil deed. You have to remove 2 screws to open it, but it took me an hour to figure that out! It is not easily evident and I didn’t want to break anything. Don’t ask why, since I’m not selling the computer. This is my excuse: I’m a builder not a wrecker. Perhaps I should have called my grandson. He would have known and I could have saved some time. Kids are born with that knowledge. Us old fogies have to come by it the hard way...through research and by learning.

After the side panel came off, I needed to identify the hard drive. Easy when you know, not so easy when you don’t, but my first guess was correct. Just to make sure, I went to the internet for advice and a picture. Once I was sure, I disconnected the wires and removed the hard drive from the open box. Four screws hold it in place.

That done, I was ready. I took the hard drive into the garage, took my big axe and hammered away at the small box. (I did put on goggles for safety). I felt like a criminal trying to hide evidence before a government raid. It took me some time to destroy that little gadget. The material was unbelievably tough. In the end, I held the broken pieces in my hand, realizing I had destroyed the brain of my computer that had served me for so many years. All that information...gone with a few (quite a few, actually) smashes of my axe. I felt guilty, but it needed to be done...for my own protection. I couldn’t let all that information fall into the wrong hands.

What information? You ask? Let’s be serious for a moment. There is lots of information we all have on our computers. Nothing illegal, mind you, but personal things, like my banking stuff, all of my books, letters I wrote, my address book with all my friends’ email addresses, my invoices from my business, tax-stuff, pictures etc. Am I paranoid? I don’t think so. Many of our disregarded computers end up in third-world-countries. We don’t know what they do with them. The world is full of criminals. Cyber criminals who have no qualms about robbing innocent victims. Better safe than sorry.

Physically removing the hard drive from your computer is still the #Best Way to keep your private information safe and from falling into the wrong hands.

Note: For more detailed instructions and pictures go here: How to remove a hard drive from your computer

Here is a picture (both sides) of the hard drive I took out of my computer (Before I took the axe to it):
 

Art or not

Art is like food. Not everyone likes the same thing and that is probably a good thing. If everyone in the world would love lobster and shrimp, then they would be prohibitively expensive that only the super rich could afford to eat them. Most likely, there would be no more lobster and shrimp.

Same thing with music. Tastes are different. I don't care much for most of the stuff played these days; I think it's crap, but, hey,who am I to say? My sons don't like the music I love. When you like something it is difficult to imagine that there are actually people out there who don't like it. Like I said...it's all a matter of taste.

I want to talk about paintings. I believe anyone who can paint lifelike is very talented. We have a couple of paintings hanging in our living room, prints only, but we paid good money for them, that fall into that category.  One is a painting of two raccoons by Carl Brenders, and the other one shows a pack of wolves in a winter scene, painted by Larry Fanning. The paintings are like photographs. Now that is true art.

I don't like what they call 'modern or abstract art'. Never cared for Picasso, even though his paintings sell for millions of Dollars. A few years back my brother-in-law was asked by a reporter on the street what he thought about a new statue in front of one of the Down-town buildings. It was a 'modern' style statue. No idea what it was supposed to be. He put it quite eloquently: "It 's crap. Modern art is just an excuse for somebody with no talent." I read once about an art exhibit where a painting that was drawn by a monkey won first price. What does that tell you? How about those elephants a few years ago that made the news when they, apparently, created masterpieces painting with their trunks and feet? They were hailed as talented artists. Rest my case.

Why am I bringing this up? I just saw on TV something about a 4 year old girl who paints and sells her creations for lots of money. Some 'experts' likened her style to some famous artists. It really doesn't say much about those 'famous' artists, I think. To me her paintings are nothing but blotches of colours. Just my opinion. Then again...I don't like modern art.

I've long been a fan of #Boris Vallejo, #Luis Royo, Frank Franzetta, and other talented artists like them. Among other purposes, they paint covers for books. What they paint is true art. I could spend hours looking at their pictures (if I had the time -:) It gets my imagination going. Looking at blotches and streaks of colours tells me nothing. Perhaps I get nervous if I see too much red? I've never put it to the test. I'd rather look at something I enjoy.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Nobody can argue with that.

#More Vacation Fun

When pursuing hobbies and adventures on a vacation, there are many pitfalls to watch out for. Bargains are not always recommended. Sometimes it is smart to spend a little bit more money. Remember: You only get what you pay for.