A Taste of Summer

We’re getting some real heat today. I even got the fan out of the attic. It’s about 28 Celsius and hotter than yesterday when we broke a few records at 24 C. You won’t believe this but I actually had a small fire in my garden! Two spots on my new greenhouse focus the sun into a point like a magnifying glass would. One of them ignited the wood chips in the Moo Poo. I saw a thin spiral of smoke coming from the area and went out to put it out and to put a slate tile over the spots. I can’t reach the parts on the greenhouse that’s causing the problem so I’ll have to wait until T-Man comes home to discuss any strategies for preventing further fires. One of my baby leeks is less than 10 cm away from the spot and it was lucky it didn’t get singed. I would never have thought that this would be a problem and I’m sure it has to do with an exact angle of the sun vs. the greenhouse panels. In which case either it will resolve itself or the spot will shift as the sun does. We’ll have to watch and see. Right now there isn't any hot spots which proves that it's just during a certain time of day. So far.

I had a new Finished Object to show today but Blogger is not cooperating with the picture posting thing again, so it’ll have to wait until another post. I have no idea why this happens but it does. Often. It’s kind of hard to complain when it’s a free service however. It Is Annoying!

So what will we talk about instead? How about the fact that I did not get very far on my attic cleaning before the heat hit. I started on the spinning equipment (south-east) space and realized that I hadn’t made a proper inventory of all the stuff in there. It would be good to have for insurance purposes if nothing else. Especially since a goodly proportion of the equipment actually belongs to my weavers guild. So of course that stopped me in my early-morning tracks and I didn’t get any further along, either with the cleaning or the inventory. Tomorrow morning a friend is coming over to play in my dye studio and in the evening I have to teach my last beginner spinning class to the current group, so that leaves the afternoon when it’s supposed to be hot again. I knew I’d left it too long, although I shouldn’t complain. Besides there will be cooler days still. It’s only mid-May and we can still get cool days even in July.

Today is Census Day in Canada. I already did ours (the long form again!) yesterday morning online. So convenient even if you have to answer a bunch of really dopey and rather personal questions. At least I didn't need to mail the paper version which I used as a cheat sheet. What this proves to me right off the bat is that Canada is a wired country. We have the option to E-File our income tax returns and fill out census forms online. There must be a large enough percentage of people with computers and internet access to make it worth it to set this up. I'd love to be able to vote online too, particularly for civic elections which are tedious: mayor, 10 councilors, school board, parks board, plebiscites, referendums, and whatever else they can dream up. Maybe that's next?

Off to set up a database for my equipment inventory…