All my life I’ve dreamed about combining chocolate and bacon. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I mentioned that very desire to Risa just last week. As if reading my mind, a co-worker returned from Texas on Monday with a Mo’s Bacon Bar to share with the office. Amazingly (to me, anyway), it’s made with real bacon and has no added flavours.

The verdict: mixed. The chocolate isn’t bad, but the salty bacon aftertaste left me yearning for a couple of eggs, over easy. It’s not really suited for an afternoon snack, but this could be a pretty good breakfast chocolate bar. I imagine it melted over a pair of eggs and squished between a couple of slices of toast. Chocolatey heart attack heaven!

The contractors finished the floor yesterday and the cabinet crew took over today, installing all of the cabinetry. There’s not much left for them to do tomorrow other than putting up the moulding and doing some finishing work. It’s almost beginning to feel like a kitchen again. We’ll get measured for the countertop early next week. After tomorrow, we’ll be at the halfway point in the schedule.

His Highness, displaying two of seven shavings from his recent trip to the Veterinary Emergency Clinic, tries to look unimpressed by all the fuss as he lounges on the new floor.

…expropriate your farm, board up your house, and let much of your land lie fallow while we spend 40 years trying to justify building a huge and unnecessary airport on prime agricultural and ecologically sensitive land. Um, I mean, I’m from the government and I’m here to preserve your green space.

(Doublespeak at its finest, as seen on the site of the still-on-the-books Pickering airport.)

The old floor and tiles have been ripped out, and the relocated electrical and plumbing roughed in. In the last few days, the contractor installed the new subfloor and finished and painted all the walls and ceiling. The bulkhead that ran along the length of the wall above the old cabinets has been virtually eliminated, with only a small plumbing vent that ran through it remaining in place. It’ll be hidden inside the new cabinets.

The new cork floor is to follow this week, with the cabinet installation scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Sometime after that, we get our appliances, counter, and sink. With any luck, we’ll be fully kitchened again on schedule by mid-September. With even more luck, the worst of the dust is behind us.

This TTC schedule board (the same one that was put to different use on Torontoist yesterday) smiles at me every morning when I cycle past on my way to the office. Everyone else along the way looks pretty grumpy.

Furthermore, the sign on the front of the store in Guelph proclaims that this is the Original Boxed Meat Revolution. To which I must admit, unboxed traditionalist that I am, that I was unaware of the existence of a revolution, never mind competing revolutions. However, given that national boxed meat chain M&M Meat Shops emerged from nearby Kitchener, the whole area would seem to be a real hotbed of boxed meat.

Robert Cray headlined a rainy Kitchener Blues Festival on Saturday night, belting out a 90-minute set to the soggy faithful. After a day of off and on torrential downpours and thunderstorms (which apparently scuttled some acts earlier in the day), the skies cleared for good about half an hour before Cray was scheduled to begin his set. After more than 20 years of listening to his incredible guitar playing in my headphones, usually late at night while working on the computer, it was a pleasure to finally see him perform in person.

I’ve long thought that there must be some provincial regulation requiring municipalities to install pedestrian signals whenever they reconstruct a signalized intersection. I’m all for the idea, but implementations sometimes trend toward the bizarre.

Take, for example, the intersection of Highway 7 and Westney Road in rural Pickering. It’s near the hamlet of Greenwood, with Valley View Public School just down the street and the Pickering Museum a country block away, but I highly doubt that more than a couple of pedestrians grace the intersection on the busiest of days. There are no sidewalks anywhere around here. Yet pedestrian signals and their activation buttons stand guard over each corner of the intersection, just waiting to be pressed by the hapless soul who finds himself lost here. So far so good. But when you look closer, you realize that with no sidewalks and corrugated beam barriers sheltering the buttons at three corners, the only way to activate them is to stand on the road. On the fourth corner, pedestrians have to climb a small weedy hill to press the button:

But even better than the activation buttons are the curb cuts, dutifully guiding people in wheelchairs and with baby strollers into the guardrails and onto non-existent sidewalks:

The whole thing smacks of some bureaucrat following the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.

The contractor carefully removed the old cabinets, appliances, and fixtures, which we donated to Habitat for Humanity. The load filled up about half of a cube van. In contrast, with the exception of a couple of studs and a length of 4″ duct, the rest of the first day’s demolition detritus fit into three bags. Who needs a big ugly disposal bin?

And thus begins a scheduled six weeks of life without a kitchen. Tomorrow, the floor.

(No, we’re not doing any of the work ourselves. Knowing when to call in the professionals is a key to a happy marriage.)

This red-tailed hawk seemed to be concentrating on something as I walked past this afternoon. A companion? Some potential prey? Another top predator, perhaps?

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