Lunar Bovine - Jason Cobill's Weblog » Ottawa

Sketchbook – Parliament Hill

jcobill — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:41:45 +0000

I showed up a bit early to pick up Natasha after work, so while I waited in the car I pulled out my long-neglected sketchbook and doodled out the awesome view from the back of the confederation building. This is Parliament Hill’s Peace Tower, looking from just behind and below the West Block. (Can you guess what time I drew this?)

For a 15 minute sketch (with a bit of cleanup afterwards) it’s not bad. The perspective is wonky all over it and my straight lines are messed up … BUT I HAVE NO REGRETS!

Planes Out of Time

jcobill — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:11:07 +0000

Sunday afternoon I heard a loud droning noise from above and looked up over downtown Ottawa just in time to catch a fleet of biplanes and WW2 Canadian warplanes flying in formation. I wasn’t aware of any military celebrations, but Greg suggested it could be the Vintage Wings of Canada out on a practice flight before they do a flyover for Canada Day in two weeks.

(a shot of the Vintage Wings of Canada by Peter Handley)

What a cool, unexpected sight! And how much fun must they be having tooling around over downtown doing formations? Beautiful planes!

Update: Mystery Solved – it was definitely Vintage Wings, and they were doing an “airborne parade” for the Tulip Festival. So much going on now that the festival season is in full swing!

White Grubs (Junebug Larvae)

jcobill — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:38:21 +0000

While I’m on the subject of grumpy news… we’re finding the Junebug grubs especially frustrating this year – our neighbourhood seems to have a scourge of them devouring our lawns in wide patches.

Natasha and I are wary about using insecticide – but we tried to dig up some of the grubs along the munching wavefront with a spade. It seems futile – there’s just too many of them, and not enough birds to come help us out with the ones we’ve missed. I’m willing to entertain suggestions. We’re losing about 6 inches of lawn every day, and while I’m at work the grubs are chewing away with impunity. (They’ve helpfully left the weeds behind.)

I looked up some entomological texts to read about Junebugs (aka Maybugs, May Beetles) but altruistic biologists seem only interested in identifying them (by the shape of their penis, strangely), and not destroying them angrily in large numbers. I think our troubles are short-lived – I’ve seen the mature beetles buzzing around our windows in the evening, so I suspect the grubs are all very close to coming out of the ground and “buzzing off”. (After, probably, exfoliating all the trees and shrubs in a hundred mile radius.)

The grass we planted in their wake is growing fast – we’ll probably have a lawn again by the end of summer. (So they can eat it again next spring?)

Update: Lots of resources!

The summary of all of them is that there’s not much you can do beyond growing a more resistant lawn with longer roots. There’s a nematode treatment you can use to kill them, but it sounds rarely effective.

Gingerbread Construction

jcobill — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:18:24 +0000

Following a sign that promised fresh butter tarts, we ended up visiting The Gingerbread Man while we were in Manotick last week. It’s a cute store along a strip of quaint teahouses and things next to Watson’s Mill, where the owner sells gingerbread cookies and pastries. Inside the gingerbread showroom, though, is a full-on gallery of gingerbread architecture.

A bunch of years ago I heard a competition on CBC Morning featuring architects hilariously trying to reproduce their structures out of gingerbread and it put the idea in my head that you could get pretty elaborate with your cookie houses. I’ve since had the good fortune of meeting a very neat family (you know who you are) who do a traditional gingerbread building party every year – and although I’ve only been a few times, my inner architecture nerd is always coming up with unreasonable construction ideas.

I think The Gingerbread Man just inspired me to new levels of madness.

Vera’s Burger Shack

jcobill — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:06:42 +0000

We did a bunch of cross-city driving this weekend, but the upside was that we finally had an opportunity to stop into Vera’s Burger Shack in Bells Corners! Ottawa managed to snag the only location outside of British Columbia, it’s a rare import that’s been getting good reviews on foodie sites. Vera’s is hidden inside “The Butchery” next to the Winners and Metro on Richmond Road, so don’t go expecting fancy ambiance unless you dig counters full of flayed meats. (Vampire honeymoon spot?) There’s three small tables and a bench, which was enough to seat the pretty steady traffic they were getting while we were there.

The burgers are pretty great! Their fresh-ground paddies are beefy, not too seasoned, thick and juicy without being so huge you can’t finish one. It’s served up on a good quality bun, too, which is a big bonus. I don’t know if I’d drive across the city for one, but if you’re in the neighborhood and hungry you’re going to find a better burger here than any of the fast food joints, and they’re considerably more affordable than The Works. I heard that the Vera Sauce is crazy delicious, but I played it straight up on my first visit with my usual toppings. (Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, Tomato, Lettuce, Cheese)

Since Vera’s is inside a butcher’s shop, skip the fries and grab one of the bucher’s prepared stuffed baked potatoes – they’re only like a dollar and they’re delicious. Wendy’s has nothing on this place.

Because the burgers are grilled to order, you’ll have a few minutes wait. They have a paper form you fill out with your name and burger preferences and they’ll call you out when your food’s ready. It’s hilarious to mess with the form – they played along and called me out as Captain Awesome. Fun staff!

Capital Cleanup 2012

jcobill — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:06:59 +0000

Me and a gang of keeners from the office took a walk around Hampton Park with garbage bags and rubber gloves to do some spring tidying. I expected litter and found plenty, but I thought it was weird how much large-scale waste we found laying around. It doesn’t help that there’s a road construction site right nearby – but any thicket that made a suitable windbreak was heaped with jars and bottles and mats of plastic bags.

There’s definitely enough trash laying around in spring to gross you out. We found not one, but TWO mattresses blown off the Queensway. Dirty diapers. Lots and lots of Tim Hortons cups. And then you find a beautiful field of wild trilliums (Ahem: Trout lilies! ), and it reminds you why it’s worth making an effort.

Squirrels Moving In

jcobill — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:00:25 +0000

There’s a new squirrel moving in to the tree in the front yard – we had a grey squirrel for a while, but this black squirrel seems to have asserted itself and captured the territory. We’ll see how that plays out. I suspect squirrel territory has pretty flexible boundaries. There have been squirrels chasing each other around the neighborhood treetops with loud yipping noises all week.

Salad Toss

jcobill — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:45:14 +0000

Yesterday at the office I went all-out and put together a salad bar as part of a charity lunch fundraiser for the Ottawa Community Gardening Network. 3 kinds of lettuce, 22 fixings, 5 dressings, 4 pasta salads and over 25 hungry customers later I had raised over a hundred bucks.

Weirdly, a bunch of people made a big deal about my chopping job, claiming that I’m a meticulously even chopping machine. Some of the credit belongs to Natasha, who was tremendously helpful! It took us about four hours of washing and chopping, so I thought I was getting sloppy towards the end. Nobody noticed.

The economics of salad bars (and food in general) are really interesting when you start trying to make a profit off of things. Making a salad for one person is expensive, because you have to overbuy everything. But then a second, third, fourth person can eat for free. When you get up around ten you start needing multiple heads of lettuce, multiple dressings (che-ching!) and pounds of fixings. There are all kinds of “sweet spots” where you can get just the right amount of everything to nearly please everyone, but one ingredient runs short or is overabundant. I had enough celery (one stalk) to make salad for an army, but ran out of cheese. You can make a half liter of ranch dressing for $6, or you can make five litres of ranch for $8, but there’s no in-between.

If I was going to do it again, I’d abandon the salad bar approach. It was memorable and worth trying once, but if I do it again in the future I’ll probably prepare a few “themed” salads and force people to choose, so I can control all the ingredient quantities and don’t end up with margin-killing leftovers of all the unpopular veggies. (Nobody likes poor red onion)

Incidentally – potato & pasta salads are a pretty good bang for your buck. With $5 of mayo you can feed like forty people.

Meltwater

jcobill — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:12:26 +0000

The parking lot where I work had a pretty big snow hill that’s taken a beating over the past few days of summery weather. When I was a kid, I’d spend all day out in my rubber boots stomping around and channeling the puddles all over our driveway. As an adult, I’m still captivated by the scale model glaciers slowly receding, depositing silt (and garbage) in enormous flood plains and deltas.

Green!

jcobill — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:51:58 +0000

We’ve had an unusually warm and rainy March, leading to a few early surprises like these spring flowers pushing up out of the flower beds.

To be honest, I’m still not able to distinguish tulips from other bulb flowers like crocuses (crocii?) and irises at this early stage, although I vaguely remember tulips growing in this general region of our flower garden last year. So I’m going to go ahead and wager that these are, in fact, tulips.

(Pretty sure irises come up ‘wrapped’ in their outer leaves, and crocii are shorter and come up with thin narrow shoots next to the main plant)
(Update: An anonymous tipster suggests they may be daffodils! Time will tell!)