Books for walls

For several months, my living room has looked like a disaster, thanks to a particularly nasty shade of red on the walls. I'm not keen on painting a small room in a colour dark enough to cover the red. That means that my only real option is wallpaper. But wallpaper is expensive. Solution? Cover the walls in the pages of cheap, second hand teeny bopper romance novels. Six books (that's roughly 1200 pages) and 2L of podge later, two out of four walls are done. Once all four walls are done, up go the shelves and on with the books that are more for reading than tearing apart.

Considerate Utilities

Something thoroughly awesome has just come to my attention. The Hydro Quebec guy was just here to do a meter reading. He stomped his boots on the front steps and then, as soon as he was in the door, he pulled out a pair of cleanroom booties to put over the real boots. Honestly. Little white plastic boot covers to keep the snow off of my floor. That just strikes me as spectacularly good planning for a utility in a profoundly snowy province.

Subway Ceilings

I avoid looking people in the eye on the subway. In turn, they avoid looking me in the eye. When the subway is packed, there's nowhere to look but at the floor or ceiling. The problem is that I can only stare at the ceiling for so long before I get bored. I never think to bring a book and don't really like the tabloid newspapers they hand out at rush hour.

Solution: Commission art for subway car ceilings. Give commuters something interesting to stare at. Print a magic eye or Where's Waldo sort of graphic up there. Art, puzzles, poetry, whatever. Just no ads. I don't think that subway riders should be abused that way.

Airport gum

Finally getting around to transcribing everything I wrote last time I flew. I find that I get a lot of thinking done on planes. It's a nice bit of escape from my normal routine.

What I'm wondering right now is whether or not convenience stores at airports sell more gum than normal convenience stores do. It seems logical that people would exit from planes, ears unpopped, and seek out gum. But do they actually? I could just be making silly assumptions.

Freestyle Crochet

I've taken up freestyle crochet. I had to kick around for a few hours at an art gallery over the weekend, and since I'm not big on small talk with strangers, I figured I'd bring some crochet stuff along. So it was me, my gigantic crochet hook, a ball of yarn and a spool of hookup wire. Seriously, hookup wire brings crochet to a whole new level. I wound up making this large, squidlike, asymmetrical necklace thing. And I'm very pleased with the result. Pictures once I document it. So I think that I'm going to go on a freestyle crochet kick for a while. It seems like a good time.

Instead of shooting shotguns at cans...

Here's a new idea for a fun passtime: Throw romance novels at Barbie dolls. It's like bowling or those carnival games with the water guns, only way more fun. Seriously, you can get a good throw with romance novels. I've tried it. They have a nice heft, but they aren't sturdy enough to actually damage things. And it's amazing catharsis.

Snow Weariness

I just started noticing today that loads of folks in the mainstream media are talking about something called Snow Rage. Clever name, right? Quebec has the distinction of being the centre of the universe for snow rage at the moment. That makes sense. I feel like we've had a major storm every week or so for the last several months and there are some really spectacular piles of snow kicking around. The high profile story is about the guy in Quebec City who menaced a snow removal worker with a shotgun. It hasn't gotten to that point in my part of the world yet. Most of the time, it comes down to coming in out of the cold, grumping and brrr-ing and then remarking that at least the skiing conditions will be good. I have yet to see the rage. It's really more a sense of weariness and resignation. So, I propose that, instead of calling it snow rage, we should be calling it snow weariness. That is, until the cross-country skiers take up arms.

Skate parks for longboarders

I'm being cabin fevered half to death. Spring isn't official for another two weeks and Montreal winter doesn't give up without a fight. Just walking on the snow covered sidewalks is cardio. But it's not the kind of cardio I want. For the past couple of weeks, I've been desperately wanting to go longboarding. That's clearly not feasible due to the snow, ice, road salt, and other winter things. If only, I thought to myself today, there were some kind of indoor place to longboard. A moment later I mentally kicked myself. Skate parks are everywhere. But that still doesn't solve my problem. I'm not really interested in kicker ramps and quarter pipes. That kind of thing doesn't work as well on a longboard.

To cure my cabin fever, I propose indoor longboarding courses. Build them in old warehouses and other large places with cheap rent. Just fill the place up with synthetic hills. Some can be steeper than others, some can be for racing and others for cruising. After all, longboards are becoming more and more popular. Sure, it's partially because they make great transportation, but I think it may also be because they're just plain wonderful. I think it would up the wonderful quotient to be able to keep it up even with snow outside.