Recommended Podcast and Garage Sale Finds

Today's Definitely Not the Opera had: a.) a procrastination theme, b.) an interview with Jorge Cham of Piled Higher and Deeper (the PhD comic), c.) an interview with Don McKellar, and d.) discussion of season finales with Tara Ariano, aka Wing Chun of Television Without Pity and Fame Tracker. Tomorrow the podcast will be up on the CBC website. (Update: apparently, the podcast will be up next Sunday.) (Another update: here is the website for the DNTO podcast page. Including the first podcast, starring Ricky Gervais. Ky: take note.)

In other news, Chris and I had a successful day of garage saling! On Monday (Victoria Day, which is a big holiday here in Canada), Chris is working a bunch of overtime, to take advantage of all that holiday pay. Because he's going to have a long workday immediately after working a night shift on Sunday, I told Chris that he got to pick today's activity. He picked garage sales, because of course there are fabulous garage sales in this city on the Saturday of May Long Weekend.

We got:


1. A telescope for Chris ($20). (It turns out to be missing a connector piece. Chris says we'll be able to replace it cheaply, but this means we can't use it yet.)










2. A bubbler foot massager (brand-new, still in the box, $15). The lady asked for $20, and so I looked non-committal and said I had to go and talk it over with my husband. As I was walking towards Chris, the lady called out, "Fifteen dollars!" We had a deal. (My landlady thinks I should've taken a couple more steps. "Twelve dollars!")






I apparently misunderstood the instructions about adding a bit of "bath oil." Apparently, it's a bad idea to add body wash. As you can see.

3. A solid wood set of table and chairs ($75). We found it at a moving sale in the suburbs, and we came fairly late into the sale. The guy was pretty desparate to get rid of his furniture, and had been looking for a couple hundred dollars earlier. (He got it at a garage sale, two years ago, for $200.)







My favourite part is the fact that it has a stored-under-the-table, fold-out leaf. It expands to be huge.










I'm quite pleased with myself right now. Chris especially had a good day. When we got home, we found out that our block's having a garage sale in a few weeks. Chris is going to be all over that. (We're going to sell our old table and chairs at that sale.)

Finally: an update on the ants. Some ants are coming in on the sides of the door (where we really can't be sprinking pepper), and were getting in to the pantry. And so we combined the advice of "spread double-sided tape because ants don't like sticky surfaces," "block off their trails" and "sprinkle cayenne pepper" and came up with this:


Yup, Chris painted cayenne pepper onto tape, which surrounded the cabinet and lined the front of each shelf. I spent quite a while, watching ants act all confused, as they tried to find some way into the cupboard.