Cottage life for the August long weekend, the Malcolm Olympics, sunset, Linda’s wedding shower, Tim and Emily’s visit, Dow’s Lake and the Arboretum, and meeting baby Madeleine
My wife was noting that she had a FB memory the other day of me from four years ago announcing that I had done my full plan for the coming year of shows — NAC, Great Canadian Theatre Company, Ottawa Little Theatre, everything! Many of those shows were later in the winter/spring season, but the plan was in place! Until March 2020 when all those plans joined the global swirlies.
We’ve done a few things here and there, mostly for special occasions or shows, but this was our first real “hey, this looks good, why not?” impulse. And since it was Andrea’s birthday, the synergy was hard to miss. Particularly with your wife asking you several times early on if you’ve bought tickets yet so that she doesn’t have to plan something else for her birthday. 😉
The show was “My Jokes Are Up Here” with four female comics performing for the night.
Erica Sigurdson led off, and also served as moderator/host for the night. Many of the comics are known for being on various Canadian television and radio shows, almost none of which I watch (The Debaters being the most prominent), so they were all “fresh” to me. She was obviously the most polished of the group, and handled audience interactions well. It was a fabulous start to the night, mostly around standard fare of the life of a 49-year-old woman living in Vancouver and travelling for shows. While a bunch of the “jokes” were not nominally hilarious, her delivery was flawless and they all sang for the whole set. Awesome opening.
Christina Walkinshaw was up next, a former Carleton student who got some reaction to having a tie to Ottawa. A bit younger, and nominally single for the set, she covered standard fare like dating apps, d*** pics, etc. She says she prides herself on trying to be a really “positive” person, very upbeat and perky, but she did a couple of darker jokes in the middle. One of them was almost Andrew Dice Clay-cringeworthy (“What’s worse than ants in your pants? Uncles!”). It was not indicative of her set, just a one-off perhaps to show she can do darker, and was an example of a joke someone told her while working cruise ships. She tried to do some audience interactions, but I wouldn’t say an older crowd at Centrepointe’s Meridian Theatre is the best group for that feedback energy. I’ll come back to that in a second.
Rebecca Kohler was my favourite of the night. She is an Ottawa native, and started strong with some riffs on French immersion as a kid, the teacher’s pronunciation of her name, etc. She also did a regular impression from time to time of a rich white woman’s startled manic laughter (you’d have to see her to see it), and so the bits would occasionally swing to the side for a moment. Expertly done, great pacing for the presentation, and a good mix of life in the modern era. She had fresh takes on sex, vibrators, and learning to masturbate as a chubby 14yo in her parents basement. But her best bit was about her enjoyment of lesbian porn. Her final take might spoil it for any man out there or create a fetish for them for cat videos, it could go either way. The final story though around anal adventure? Jaw-dropping funny. Excellent night. She wasn’t quite as polished as Sigurdson, but she was awesome.
Jen Grant closed out the night, with a little bit of her act on her life in Wakefield. I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what was off with her show for me. She was funny, that wasn’t it. But it seemed slow, almost a little too flat, passive maybe? I didn’t feel like there was much energy in her delivery or bits. A few places for pacing between bits made for a VERY quiet theatre. I feel like in a more intimate venue, like a comedy club, she’d rock. A big wide theatre? Not so much. She did a little bit of audience interaction, and it was good, but nowhere near as good as Sigurdson’s at the beginning.
Which leads me back to an interesting element for the night. For those who watch comedy specials or go to clubs for shows, you can tell that the good comics generally know their audience. Russell Peters generally knows what they’ll react to, or Taylor Tomlinson, or Jeff Foxworthy. If any of them asks a specific question, they generally know the audience is going to be close to that demographic. It’s the same profile as they had at the previous 20 shows.
But the audience at Centrepointe shows skew very heavily towards older, diverse but still mainly white, married and with some disposable income to buy tickets to a comedy show that isn’t for hardcore fans downtown at a comedy club. So when one of the comics went to do a small bit about apartment life, she asked how many people in the audience were living in / renting an apartment. Dead silence. It totally threw them off. Equally, when they did their bits about Tindr, d*** pics, dating in general, etc., the audience laughed, but it was often the laugh of “isn’t that interesting” as opposed to “you are living my life!” roars that they would get in a comedy club that skews younger. That’s not their fault, they’re doing one-off shows, not everyone in the crowd is a standard demographic, so harder to gauge in advance. Just something that stood out three or four times.
As a small aside, there was also the standard challenge that all comedy ensemble shows face when they do a booking like this. This was their first night together (I don’t know if they’re doing it elsewhere too or if this was a one-off), and some of the bits overlapped. Over time, comics who perform together often realize that if they’re going on third, and doing a bit that overlaps with the first comic’s take on d*** pics, then they either need to refer back to it so it seems like a continued conversation and then take it in a different direction OR drop it entirely from their set. Comedy clubs have the same problem, luck of the draw for some comics going earlier lessens their need, but if you come out 6th in a long lineup, and do your bit that mirrors the same subject matter of someone else earlier, the laughs still come, but not anywhere near as loud. I once saw a comedy set where four comics in a row gave their standard take on dating apps, making it abundantly clear that they had not listened to the previous comics’ sets AT ALL. Some of the jokes were IDENTICAL. Not in a “they stole my joke”-sense, but more “I’ve heard this commentary before”. The fourth person got almost NO reaction other than polite laughter.
However, those are small issues, and it was a good show. I’ll probably search for some more stuff online for Rebecca Kohler, although all four were good. We had debated taking Jacob, but he would have HATED the night, missing the meaning of most of the jokes, as we expected. I loved stand-up shows when I was his age, but it’s a different world after all. A few more years, maybe.
So a funny thing happened on the way to the forum…or some such quote.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been kicking up a little dust in the old website, uploading a whack of galleries from Flickr and embedding them on my website. I did one yesterday evening, which basically involves about 11 steps:
Sorting all the photos into the respective groupings like one person’s wedding or a picnic on the river;
Weeding out the duplicates, which for 2004 has been a nightmare, as I mentioned earlier, with 5-6 copies of photos in different resolutions and formats since I’ve uploaded them to other sites in the past, but all I want now is the best version of each photo to get it down to “one set”;
Filtering out the bad photos and curating the good ones;
Merging them into “monthly” folders or big “event” folders;
Letting my software do facial recognition on them;
Adding labels to each photo;
Uploading it all to Flickr, including videos if necessary;
Setting some variables on the Flickr albums, including cover photo;
Creating a new gallery on my website;
Updating the gallery index; and,
Moving the folder on my hard drive to the final structure where it gets auto-saved and backed up several different ways.
However, yesterday evening, I made a new gallery (step 9) on my website early evening and it all went fine. Things I had written the night before and updated in the morning were being “shared” automatically by my media tools; everything was working.
Then about 9:30 p.m., I did a new gallery, copying over an old one to a new template and then going in to change the links. I have done the same thing about 50 times in the last 3 weeks. Except I had noticed the night before that some of them weren’t showing right, spent about an hour fixing that glitch (a problem in a setting that was being ignored), and yet last night, when I went to save it, everything looked good. Until it wasn’t.
Glitchy
Since my restructuring of the site a few years ago after a huge meltdown, things have worked relatively smoothly on my site. Yeah, I’d like this tool to work faster, I’d like more power with that one, but I like keeping the cost down, too, as it is, after all, just a personal site. I’m not selling anything through it. Yet. (Dun dun dun! Stay tuned for the long future!)
So adding a new gallery is easy peasy. I add it in, I click save, and the website says “no”.
Well, technically, it threw an error saying my JSON wasn’t valid, but it meant it didn’t save. It has been working perfectly, nothing changed for the settings, everything looks fine on the front end, but it wouldn’t let me create new posts. Hmmm.
So, I’ve had an error like this before, forgot what it means, looked it up, oh, that’s right. My permalinks aren’t saving properly. Instead of a URL address being “ThePolyBlog.ca/?P=923” or “ThePolyBlog.ca/2023/09/20/Wedding_gallery”, I like my structure to look like “ThePolyBlog.ca/Alex_and_Jacobs_wedding”. In other words, the title of the page shows up in the URL itself, like prose. If I was running a shoe blog, I couldn’t use the title “New shoes” 10 or 12 times a month with that structure, but I vary my titles. So that is the default. When you get a JSON error, it usually means that, for some reason, WordPress has forgotten the structure of that setting.
The primary solution is to click on it, resave it, and all good. In the past, it has always worked. Did it this time? Nope, couldn’t save still. Huh. Tried a few different settings and discovered if I went to the vanilla format, it worked just fine. The “hard code default” would work, my set default would not. Huh? A little odd, but potentially a clue if I could figure out what it meant. Off to google my favourite WP help sites.
It could have also been a problem with my certificate, but it was working fine (if it wasn’t, my front end would have blown up — it was showing fine). Tried a few other things.
Then it hit me…wait, I have a backup that gets run nightly, dodo bird that I am. I reset it to the night before when it CLEARLY had been working fine, and voila! It still didn’t work. Time travel was not the answer, apparently. By reverting my site back a day, I had wiped out two posts, but I had copies of those in my email that I could repost once the problem was solved. But it had not worked, it still wouldn’t let me save.
The BIG solution to try is to deactivate just about everything. I really HATE doing it. Not because I don’t like the deactivation, it’s the part where you have to reactivate things slowly, one by one, until you find something that conflicts. But it’s the standard “self-solve” step — turn off all the bells and whistles to a plain site that works before adding each bell or whistle back in. Okay, all deactivated, and the theme switched to a basic theme. One of my reluctances here was that a couple of my plugins do NOT keep the data for their settings when they’re deactivated, so when you reactivate them, you have to go through all the settings again. Blech.
But with everything off, no bells, no whistles, the site … still didn’t work! WTF? That is NOT possible…is it? Apparently so. If you’ve eliminated all those pieces, one of the higher solutions was to see if a certain mandatory file still exists. WP needs it. I checked, and gone. WTF? How in hell did that file “disappear”? There’s nothing that I have done to get rid of it. Could the host have done something? No clue.
Anyway, I was manually putting each bell and whistle back in when a small lightbulb went off. Wait a minute…if the problem is with the structure, then all of my backup is perfectly fine. It SHOULD work, except for that other problem. It wasn’t my posts, or my plugins, or my theme. I could scrap the manual rebuild process and simply restore again from the backup with all the plugins and settings back to my version of normal. Which I did. Nothing would let me save, but all my plugins were back to normal.
I submitted a support ticket, asked a couple of questions, and left it.
During my lunch hour today, I also realized that I had restored from my backup from Sept 19th, two days ago, when I knew things were working. But I had also done a backup on Sept 20th at 9:00 p.m. or so, not too long before I found the new error. If there was nothing wrong with my settings, I might as well go with the full latest backup, one day later and with the two missing posts restored. Done. Earlier tonight, I reposted them.
I checked a bunch of other online settings at lunch, all looked normal. Tweaked a couple of things, went into my website, did a test NEW POST, and it saved just fine. Umm…that wasn’t working last night, I swear.
So. my website is back to normal, but I don’t think I fixed anything. And my support ticket is sitting there unopened. I won’t be surprised if someone already saw it, found something they did and fixed it, but hasn’t told me yet. It’s not great service, but it can happen. And in the end, everything is back where it should be. I think.
From the front-end, I didn’t think anyone would notice. But I missed something. I had posted a blog about my mental health, and it was one of the ones that got rolled back temporarily. So I had posted it, my social media app had shared it on FB and Twitter, and a few people read it. Then I rolled the website back and those posts disappeared temporarily — from the WEBSITE. I planned to republish them later, but I forgot that they were still showing as posts on FB, for example. People could see the post link, see a short preview so they knew it was “live”, etc. But after the initial roll-back, if they clicked on it, the links went nowhere. A friend flagged it on FB that the links weren’t working. Oh, right. So I temporarily deleted the links, eventually republished the posts and created new “updates” for FB and Twitter as a repost. But that was minor compared to the website glitch.
But this is the second of two new posts that I’ve written today. Plus, I reposted the other two posts that I deleted and restored during the backup, so I think it’s working again.
So, from the earlier post about not hitting the curve, I’m now a day later, and I’m out of some of the initial funk.
First and foremost, of course, I found the missing parts for the exercise bike so the big “spiral” moment was mostly averted.
Second, and almost equally important, I had the guy come to the house and do a bunch of work for the day that helped jumpstart some of my old goals that have been lingering for quite a while.
Obviously, he assembled the exercise bike. I had printed some instructions, and just looking at them was almost a traumatic trigger. They are/were HORRIBLE pictures. You had to stare at segments for 15 minutes to even comprehend where screw 4 went into part 3 that was separated from main part 7, blah blah blah. If you get it, you get it; if you don’t, IKEA looks like ideal schematics by comparison. The guy that came, Sam, is great and has done work for me before. He is really good at this stuff, he’s assembled this type of bike before, more or less, and I think he did most of it without wrestling with the instructions. Awesome. Except even for someone who is GOOD at this, and who didn’t need the instructions, he still took 30 minutes to do it. Now, admittedly, he also put a screw through a broken part and reattached it. It’s not particularly a relevant part unless you’re moving the whole bike around (it’s like an extra roller so you can tip the bike and then move it more easily…if you leave the bike mostly in one spot, the part isn’t that critical). Anyway, he got it together and Andrea and Jacob tried it last night. All functional.
He also assembled a workout bench. I mostly wanted it so that I could lie flat on it, but it does angle up and has some stationary bars to let you hook your feet for stabilizing your lower body, etc. It probably would have taken me about an hour with someone like Jacob or Andrea helping me, while rolling around on the floor and getting frustrated with the diagrams. Instead? Sam had it together in thirty minutes. One hour in and Sam had two of the four projects done.
He tackled the Gorilla cart next. It is a large professional-grade utility cart, and one that I planned for carting all my astro gear from the garage to the backyard in one go so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole bunch of trips. And with a little planning, I could even throw a tarp over it and leave some of my gear in it between outings. Now, I know this cart is a pain in the patootie to put together. I’ve seen online videos of people saying how awesome the cart is but how painful the assembly process was. It’s just big. Sam is really good, has all the tools to do it, AND it still took him a full hour of work to assemble it. When I talked to him, he said, “You know, this is really industrial grade. It’s not really a home cart.” He had to use his power tools to get all the parts to go together in the hour, or he would have been much longer still turning bolts and nuts. Uh huh, that’s why I’m paying you, dude. Cuz I don’t want that pain. Now, don’t get me wrong, he LIKES doing this stuff, but it was a tough slog for that second hour.
The fourth and supposedly final project was one that I initially was going to do myself. We have a trampoline, great quality, amazing device. Yet it was an absolute beast to assemble. They had views of guys assembling some aspects of it one-handed by themselves like they were laying lace doilies on a table. In our case, we had me on the ground underneath the trampoline BENDING the sides as far as I could, while Andrea and her mother hauled on the canvas, and her dad hauled too. With all four of us PULLING, we could attach the parts. But once together, it’s fine. Just REALLY heavy. The solution for moving it is to get 4-6 really strong people and lift it. Uh huh. I always keep 3-5 spare people in my shed in case I need that kind of muscle work. OR you can get wheels made by the same company, attach them in a criss-cross pattern to four equally-spaced spots on the trampoline’s base, and bob’s your uncle, you have a way to use the wheels like a lever. You put in a wrench, lever the wheels into their DOWN position, and the trampoline goes up. Do all four wheels and the trampoline is elevated and ready to roll. Once the wheels are down, Sam can move the whole thing by himself. Great tool. We repositioned the trampoline closer to where we wanted it, and then put the wheels back into their UP positions.
Four projects done in three hours. Pretty sweet. So I asked if he wanted to consider a fifth. A few years ago, or maybe more since I know it was pre-pandemic, we bought a new doorknob for our main door. We needed to replace the latch at the time, which I did manage to do with a bit of help. But there was a second component for the deadbolt — an electronic keypad. I would have tried to install it long ago, but we just ran out of time when we did the first part. So it sat in our living room for a while in a box. Then in a bag. Then we got rid of the box to the garage. Then we weren’t sure where the bag was when we asked him to look at it. Sam initially figured about 30 minutes or so. Hah!
The mechanism was too big to fit into the existing deadbolt hole. And the frame of the outer door is metal, not wood. Dun dun dun. Sam had to get creative to make everything fit, which he did at my request, and one full hour later, we had a new e-pad on our front door. It’s surprising how much this will mean to us.
When I go out, I am almost always going in the car, so I have my car keys with a front door key on the ring. Yet equally regularly, I have 3-4 things that I’m carrying for the route to work, or going shopping, or whatever. I need a new shoulder bag so I can put it all together more easily, my man purse if you will, but I don’t have it right now. But that means I don’t have a free hand to take care of the front door with key, pulling the door tight, locking, etc.
For Andrea, she doesn’t drive, so often when she goes out, she doesn’t need a big key ring with a fob or anything. The only keys she has is to the mailbox and our house. While the garage has a keypad on it, it’s a bit more elaborate a routine to open the garage door just to let a person into the house. With the new pad, if she goes for a walk, she may not even need to take anything with her. Or if she’s the last one out of the house, she doesn’t have to dig for a key, etc. She can literally press a button and turn the bolt mechanism to lock with one hand. All good.
Jacob has a key to the house, but never uses it. He’s almost always with us or we’re home when he needs to go in or out. Often when he gets home, he waits for us to get out first and then slowly follows us to the door. The last few days? He raises to be the first one to the door, in the house, shoes off, and gone before we’re out of the car. I don’t know who this kid is, actually.
There are obvious benefits for guests too. Parents, siblings (at least the ones we like) or friends watching the house can get a code to get in without any need to get together first or hide a key for their arrival. Kind of like an AirBNB for friends, here’s your code. Let yourself in when you get here.
But a bigger irritant was removed today. For some inexplicable reason — and really, we’ve asked — the cleaning company we use keeps sending people to our house without a key. They arrive, complain they couldn’t get in, and leave. We get home late in the day to a WTF moment…whyyyyyy? They have a key. Why did they not bring it? Needing keys is not unusual for a house cleaning service. Most people are NOT home (although the pandemic changed a lot of that). But I think this is about the fourth time in 2 years, and maybe the third time in 3-4 months that they have forgotten their key. Which means things like beds that were stripped so the cleaners could clean need to be re-sheeted so we can sleep in them. It’s not life altering, don’t get me wrong. I know that. It’s just really irritating. This week? Andrea texted the owner and said, “Here’s your code”. We came home, they had been, the code worked, no issues. Hallelujah, and pass the ammunition!
So, five projects that are all relatively minor; yes, I/we could do almost all of them myself/ourselves. But here’s the thing. For the exercise bike? I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass because I’m the one who assembled it the first time, with Andrea. Really, really frustrating. So I’ve sat on the project since we moved in many years ago (we had originally partly dismantled it in order to move it as the seat and frame were too wide for doorways).
The work-out bench was self-indulgent. We could have done that ourselves. Instead, I basically paid someone $30 to put it together and get it off our to do list.
The utility cart, by contrast, was big. We could have done it, but as Sam said, some of it really needed the right power tools to make it go efficiently. I had no interest in spending 3-4 hours assembling it. It cost me about $60 to have Sam do it. Again, done. I feel we COULD have, but meh, nowhere near as efficiently.
The trampoline wheels were ones that I said I thought about doing myself initially. But you have to be down on the ground, fiddling with the frame on something that was a royal pain to assemble, etc. Sam knew it was one of the tasks (we chatted in advance), and he brought a small hydraulic lift so the could get at the frame better. Fantastic. I don’t have one of those though. So I am not confident that even with 3-4 hours, I would get it done. I know it would have been supremely painful and frustrating. Even Andrea didn’t have a burning desire to touch that one, although she felt we could do the bike, bench and cart ourselves.
Finally, the extra project for the door pad? Sam took an HOUR including having to CUT THE DOOR frame to make things fit. I would have had NO chance of doing that, not even close.
So I totally feel that it was money well-spent. I’m not particularly thrilled that TaskRabbit takes a slice of the pie AND slaps on a $10/hour service charge that seems to do nothing other than line their pockets. The TR contractors hate the fee too, but well, they like the website gigs. I had booked him for about four hours to do four projects, and he managed those four plus an extra one, too. That’s a pretty good deal, I think, all things considered.
And they’re all DONE. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. When it comes to home handyman work, I write a mean cheque.
Yet at the end of the whole day, having taken Jacob to band in the morning, worked my office gig for the day, and picked him up, while also liaising with Sam the whole time he was here for any questions he had, I was totally exhausted. Definitely glad to be done.
And I’ll count it as having caught a piece of the pitch. I didn’t drive it deep into left field, but at least it was a credible swing overall. And did I mention that five big projects just came off my old to do list?
