I enjoy beer quite a bit and for the last couple years I've made an effort to try lots of new and interesting styles and brands. In particular I've developed a great fondness for local craft brewed beer; a scene which is exploding all across North America. Ontario has a number of truly amazing small breweries and the LCBO has become more flexible lately and has taken to featuring those breweries on a regular basis. Unfortunately, due to the strange rules of liquor distribution in this country, the LCBO rarely gets anything from outside of Ontario. So it is quite difficult to access craft beers from the US or even from other provinces in Canada.

Sometimes though, the LCBO works something out with a particular brewery from out of province and we get a chance to buy wonderful beers from other regions. This fall, the LCBO is featuring the Quebec-based brewery Dieu du Ciel. I've tried four different beers from them and my favourite by far is their American IPA "Corne du Diable."

IPAs (India Pale Ales) seem to be extremely popular among people who, like me, seek out new and interesting beers (many would call such people beer snobs and personally I'm OK with that...I'd rather drink fewer delicious beers than many average beers). I've never been able to really get into IPAs though, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is because the style has such a large amount of variation and I've just never had one I liked. Just a quick aside, the definition of what makes an IPA is a hotly debated topic among beer aficionados. I won't step into that argument here except to say that if all you've had is Alexander Kieth's then you've never had an IPA.

Now that I've tried Corne du Diable, I am reevaluating my attitudes towards IPAs because it is just so good. It's flavourful with a good amount of bitterness and it's also super dry in a way that reminds me of dry white wine. I have three more bottles in my fridge and I'm thinking I'll have to pick up some more before it's all gone. Either that or start making regular trips to Montreal!

Toronto is electing a new mayor soon and it's causing me stress. Something that has been bothering me about politics lately is the apparent desire of many people to have candidates that are "down-to-earth" and "just like me." For example, Sarah Palin in the US and Rob Ford in the current Toronto mayoral race. For a converse example, see criticism of Stephan Dion or Michael Ignatieff for being too smart/educated. Also noteworthy is Stephen Harper's aversion to listening to advisors who are experts in their fields as well as his push to make the long form census non-mandatory.

Seriously, on what planet does any of this make sense? I want the smartest, most educated and most experienced person possible to win elections. It shouldn't be about who is nicest or most approachable or about religion. It should be about who is actually best for the job. I want someone who is better than me. Running countries or provinces or cities is hard. An average person isn't going to cut it. Why would you vote for someone average? So that the country can be average? We should all aspire to greatness.

The only explanation I can think of is that perhaps people don't like to vote for someone who is smarter/better than themselves because it makes them feel bad about their own lack of accomplishment. To those people I say, if you can't stomach voting for a person who is better than you, do everyone else a favour and refrain from voting at all.

For a more amusing take on this same topic, check out this blog post from the Real Johnson.

Late last night the downtown Toronto location of Canada Computers burned down! Well, burned out I guess. The building is still there but will need to be totally gutted. The apartments above were destroyed too, which is pretty sad. No one was seriously hurt though and apparently it could have been a lot worse. They were able to contain the fire to just the Canada Computers building and prevent it from spreading to all the adjacent buildings (which are equally old and flammable). We walked by this evening and it was sad to see all the bits of computer stuff blackened inside the store (see my slightly blurry photo below, be sure to click for the full resolution version).

Tonight I updated my main RSS feed to include both my blog posts as well as photos I post to my Photos page instead of having a separate RSS feed for each. So if you read my blog from an RSS reader you'll have noticed five new photos pop up in your feed in addition to this post. Please let me know if you see any problems.

Finally, although I am normally pretty good about backing up my data, I have always been reckless with my lists of recipes to cook and restaurants to visit. Both are kept as drafts in my Gmail account. The other day, after adding a recipe to my recipe list, I pressed the discard draft button instead of the save draft button. Gmail is pretty good and will let you undo stupid stuff like that, but I didn't notice I had done it until three days later when I went looking for a recipe. By then it was too late and I was sad. So I'm going to push ahead a little on some plans I once thought up to add a recipe section to my blog so that I can store the data more permanently. I should do something similar with restaurants, but I think it's best to focus on one thing at a time.

Burned out Canada Computers

I haven't had much to post about lately so I'm posting my Algonquin trip journal from this past Civic Holiday weekend. I wrote it up a couple weeks ago and was just waiting to receive the last set of photos from one of the people on the trip. Unfortunately that set seems to have gotten lost in the mail or something. Anyway, I'm posting with the photos I do have and if the missing ones ever show up I'll add them in.

Yesterday was Rib-o-Rama X at John's house and guests were encouraged to bring salads and/or desserts to augment the piles of delicious smoked meats that are always served. Inspired by Janet, I decided I would attempt to make baklava to bring as my contribution.

Baklava is extremely time-consuming to make as it requires you to lay out ~40 sheets of phyllo pastry one at a time, brushing each with clarified butter as you go. I messed up the syrup a bit so the baklava wasn't as moist as I would have liked it, but it still tasted just fine. The nice thing about Janet's recipe is that it is much less sweet than baklava you might pick up at a bakery or wherever which means it's easier to eat lots all at once.

Also yesterday the thermostat in our apartment decided to finally die (it seemed like it was about to die when we moved in, but then it clung to life for almost three more years). Generally I would call the landlord to get it fixed, but he has a new baby and I thought it would be good practice to try to replace it myself. So I picked one up from Canadian Tire that looked similar to the old one and installed it this afternoon in about 30 minutes. It was super easy and our apartment is nice and air conditioned again.

Home-made baklava

I've been totally sucking at blogging lately, not too much has been happening beyond the usual climbing, house searching, and general life stuff. There is some exciting news though as of today, Chris and John got engaged! Good times!!

Also tonight we talked with Patrick and Toni on Skype for the first time in a while which was fantastic. Finally, I made a tart for supper tonight with fresh Ontario zucchini and it was amazing.

Zucchini and Sun Dried Tomato Pesto Parmesan Tart

I'm back from our annual canoe trip in Algonquin and it was friggin' awesome as usual. We had 20 people this time in total and everyone was great. I'll be writing up a proper journal with photos and even cliff-jumping videos soon.

This weekend I met up with Mike and we headed up with a whole bunch of people to Alex's cottage. It was an awesome trip with lots of good food and relaxing out in nature and stuff. It was also a good precursor to our annual Algonquin trip next week. I'm very excited!!

Watermelon!

Boat on the water

Dock

Lighthouse

Sunset

Lighthouse

Flower

Tonight my climbing gym held a free intro yoga class. I'm normally there for climbing on Wednesdays anyway so the timing worked out well. I climbed for two hours and then did the yoga thing. I've never done yoga before, but it was pretty good. I think my only problem was that I would normally have climbed for another hour and so I felt unfulfilled from a climbing standpoint.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, things have been busier and more stressful than usual over the last week. For the last three months (since about the middle of April) Kim and I have been working with a realtor to try to buy a house. We've been all over the city and seen dozens of places. Toronto real estate is crazy and things are all expensive or crappy or weird or whatever and everything moves very fast. It's been a pretty special experience so far.

Last week the stress-o-meter went up a notch. We found a house we liked enough to put in an offer on! It was a detached, three-bedroom house with a decent yard and beautiful deck out in south-west Scarborough (near Danforth and Warden). It was in our price range and was in really good shape.

The only problem was that the attic had vermiculite insulation in it. Vermiculite is a normally harmless substance that is very good for insulating attics. In fact the Canadian government gave substantial tax credits for installing it back in the energy crisis of the 1970s. Unfortunately a lot of vermiculite came from this one mine in Libby, Montana which happened to be contaminated with asbestos. Thus, the vermiculite was also contaminated and now sits in many homes threatening to become a health hazard if it is ever disturbed.

The owner of the house we were looking at disclosed the presence of vermiculite, but did not know if it was contaminated or not. She also dropped the price of the house by $15,000 due to the vermiculite scaring people away. After talking to asbestos people we determined first that on average the removal costs for contaminated vermiculite range between $12,000 and $15,000 (although if there are complications it can go as high as $40,000) and second that there would be about a 50-50 chance the vermiculite was contaminated.

We tried to get the seller to agree to split the removal costs (and thus the risk) with us but she wasn't interested. Nor was she interested in reducing her price any further. So we decided to give an offer anyway, conditional on testing the vermiculite for the asbestos. We hoped we might get lucky and score an awesome deal on a great house. And if there was asbestos, at least we could back out if we didn't want to take the risk ourselves.

Well as you can imagine there was asbestos. Lots of happy asbestos. Boo. We talked it over and decided we were too scared, especially on our first house, to take on the risk of removal. Although it is technically harmless if undisturbed we didn't want to leave it there as it would have been an issue again in the future when we went to sell the house. So we backed out of the offer and felt sad (and a bit sleazy).

So no house yet. But now I know lots and lots about vermiculite. Woooo.