Malbec
And a Happy New Year it was. One of the many items on the list of to-dos in the precious little time before returning to work was to get the most recent batch of wine all finished up.

Last year's Ottawa Wine and Food Show left me with the distinct impression that perhaps Malbec is my favourite grape of all. All of the wines I had sampled had a nice smooth quality to them, with a gentle warmth after each sip. Celebrating the end of the major renovations would be accomplished with a fine batch of Malbec.

Though it's still aging, I'm certain it was a good choice. Even at the time of bottling it was surprisingly smooth and mellow. Cheers to that!

It Was Worth It
The renovations to the living-dining rooms were completed just in time for Christmas. At an average of between three and four hours per day, maybe even more, over the span of two and a half months, it was nothing short of a giant commitment. But, it was definitely worth it.

In the end, it was the little details that make for a nice reno: the paint, trim, crown moulding, flush-mount vents, corner blocks, clean new electrical fixtures, and so on. The hardwood looks great and is surprisingly warm to walk on. The new window does a decent job keeping the heat in. Getting new furniture and moving back some of the pieces previously removed was exciting.

This much-needed renovation makes the house feel like home.

Bye-bye GNOME 2
Over the past couple of weeks, GNOME 2 has essentially been taken away from me.

After almost ten years of this excellent environment, it will very much be missed. In my Debian systems, GNOME 3 finally made it into sid/unstable, and Ubuntu forced me over to Unity.

Feels like the end of an era.

House Renovations
Now that we are all settled into the new house, it's time for renovations! The chosen area to start is the living room-dining room half of the house. Since the rest of the ground floor already has nice tile, this half really needed attention, with its original 1983 carpeting.

The plan was simple; buy some relatively nice hardwood and apply. Of course, along the way, things got more complicated. Choosing the right flooring took forever, and the right look comes with a price. To make it nice and level, the OSB subfloor will be removed and replaced with plywood. This will require some floor joist work. The drywall is also being tackled at this time. There was a small leak from the washroom above at some point, so some ceiling is getting removed to address the issue. This will need to be refinished in several places in the house. While we're at it, why not replace the window in the dining room with something more modern?

The list seems to go on and on. In the end, it will be worth it.

The Big Week
This is it; the big week. In a couple of short days I will have the keys to my first ever house. It always feels strange to sort out old clutter and pack up. For the most part, my apartment is exactly as it has always been. All of the interesting packing will be last-minute. Fun times...

Since the last post I've been at a friend's cottage twice. Both weekends have been packed with water skiing. It was nice to know the skills don't go away. Surprisingly, I even managed to pick up skiing on one ski... who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Today, the muscles are sore.

Looks like the next entry will be from my new place. I'm going to miss the view!

Hot
This week in Ottawa we are experiencing a heat wave. It's not at all unusual around this time of year, but the numbers are quite high. Apparently, we haven't had this kind of heat since the fifties. It is strange to have higher-than-body-temperature weather here.

It occurs to me just how much of a temperature swing there is around here. We've had as low as -45°C, and this +40°C seems to be a high. That's a whole 85°C!

The new house has air conditioning, but by then, the heat wave will be long gone. Good thing it has heating, too.

New House and Scuba Diving
While I didn't post it here, since it has until quite recently felt unreal, I took the leap and purchased my first house late last month. Now that all of the paperwork is pretty much complete, it really feels much more like I own it than before.

My new house is a decent single unit, built in 1983, in the Tanglewood part of Ottawa. It needs some work to get it up to snuff, but nothing too drastic. I look forward to the various tasks that are on the to-do list. At the moment it still feels a little overwhelming, but I'm sure that as I start buying the tools I need, things will click into place.

It should also be fun to live with my closest friend in the whole world.

Aside from that bit of news, summer is finally feeling like summer. This weekend was the perfect weekend, and it proved to be the perfect weekend for scuba diving as well. I've never actually dived in Canada yet, so the experience with a 7mm wetsuit in fresh water was both new and enlightening. We drove down as a group to the Prescott area, and dove four times in the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was neat using the old canals and locks. The highlight was the shipwreck of the Conestoga, a 250-foot-plus iron-clad freighter. Also, drift-diving was a new experience, at times quite thrilling in the treacherous current.

Another Resin Part
After creating the resin replacement parts for the 1:1000 scale movie Enterprise, I set my sights on the newly re-released Enterprise-D, Picard's ship.

This new re-release is done in clear plastic, making it ideal for lighting. It is overall a great kit, but everytime I see it, the details of the dorsal surface of the neck connecting the two hulls stand out as being inaccurate.

The goal was to correct this issue in a way that others could benefit from. Obviously, the idea was to make a replacement part in clear resin. There are many details that needed correcting, and it is a large part. It took much longer than expected; initially, the part was to be completed by the start of the year. Nonetheless, I'm finally pulling decent castings from the (rather large) mold.

Just a few details left to tie up in terms of decals, instruction sheets, and the web site. But it sure feels good to get a project done.

Velox
It would appear that May has come and gone. Amidst the lousy weather, it went by quickly. I managed to spend the first week of the month vacationing in Vancouver. There was also a long weekend trip to Toronto.

The big achievement for the month was finally finishing the model boat that's been on the bench for a year-and-a-half. The kit started out as a poorly-built and abused Billing Boats "Thor" model. The kit currently lists for a rather high price and this model was just begging to be redone nicely.

Getting this model up to spec was challenging. Removing the old paint and gobs of glue and uncured polyester resin was messy work. Many replacement pieces had to be scratchbuilt. Sections of the hull needed replacing. Likewise, many of the detail pieces needed to replaced. A rebuild of the jet propulsion system was required. Lastly, the model has full internal lighting and is built with more detail than the plans indicate. All in all, a solid chunk of work.

Rather than use the somewhat dull suggested paint scheme, I have renamed this ship Velox and given it Canadian Coast Guard colours. The red paint is actually paint from a CCG shipyard, heavily thinned and airbrushed. I think it works very well, and the service would be proud to have a vessel like this.

The last few days of May finally brought decent weather and the boat was in the water for the first time. It performed beyond expectations. Now, on to June!

Boondock Saints Location
Yesterday, I partook in a quick trip to Toronto. I finally got to try out the Porter service from Ottawa to the Toronto City Airport, on the island right in downtown. It was a "fly-in in the morning, fly-out in the evening" affair, and Porter worked great for that.

On the way back to the airport, I decided to take a quick detour to see if I could find the alleyway used in the movie Boondock Saints. While the movie was supposed to be based in Boston, the big Henry's sign in the background of the alley scene indicated that it was in Canada. A little bit of Google Streetview confirmed that it was in Toronto.

Finding the alley was no problem. The white brick building was recently stuccoed, and the pavement was just being redone. The building closest to the road is actually a Scotiabank.

I was disappointed that the off-shoot alley between the stuccoed building and the bank had a steel door. The door looked like as though it had been there from before the movie was filmed. I was perplexed. Closer examination of the film shows some evidence that the steel door was simply removed for the movie.

I was unable to determine which of the three churches in the area was used for some of the other scenes. It could also have been anywhere else in town.

I enjoy my strange hobby of finding Canadian filming locations.