i slept all day again. 

i'm sneezing every few minutes and i'm exhausted. my head is throbbing. but i think i'm awake for the first time in a few days. i'm congested, but i'm not swollen, and i'm not bleeding. it seems to just be a really bad head cold.

i ate some oranges to use them and to wake me up. there's nothing quite as delicious as fruit when you're sick and i do have extra oranges because they were on sale. i bought about 20 oranges for $3; in fact, it was about 40 oranges for $6. i'll be eating pizza for the next 7-10 days but i'm gong to wait until the morning or maybe until the evening. i may eat a few more oranges instead. oranges are a staple in my salads, so i can never have too many, but i'm happy to have them now, too..

i'm going to get some tylenol, brush my teeth and make some coffee.

i think i can get my bed set up in here tonight and get back to work.

there's a lot of information about this.

this is a good summary.

i am also in favour of government directing increases in greenhouses, to boost what anarchists call "food sovereignty". i would prefer to see direct investment rather than tax cuts, but i want to give the state a hint about this.

this was actually one of the very few policies brought in by stephen harper that i supported, and you might want to take note of carney once again copying harper. but, harper was right about this. here in southern ontario, greenhouses provide stability for year-round growing seasons, and there was a brief period where you could buy gorgeous locally grown hydroponic tomatoes, peppers and strawberries here in windsor, for cheap.

then they legalized marijuana.

i bicycled from windsor to leamington once a few years ago. amherstburg is less than an hour on a bicycle, but leamington was a full day ride, both ways. i did get back into town before the sun came down. you can smell the marijuana production coming into town from about 10 km away, and the stench overwhelms the whole town. perhaps the residents have gotten used to it, like those who live by niagara falls are used to the sound of the rushing water.

to my dismay, i slowly started seeing the affordable local hydroponic produce disappear. it's obvious that what happened is that virtually all of the greenhouses switched to marijuana grow-ops instead. a few weeks ago, i was not even able to find tomatoes in my grocery store at all, here in what, until recently, was called the tomato growing capital of the world. i had to go to walmart and buy tomatoes imported from mexico.

if you want the greenhouses to grow food and not drugs, you need to write the policies with this understanding in mind and with the realization that there may simply be little you can actually do to get independent growers to grow food instead of drugs, besides growing it under direct state control.

i think that a crown corporation for greenhouse production of produce, specifically, would be the best way to approach this. the government should mandate certain nutrient proportions in the slurry to ensure the food is legitimately healthy, as well. plants absorb what you give them, and you can pump a plant up with almost anything, if you give it to it at the root.

the other issue is labour. i don't have anything against mexicans, exactly, but i don't like the idea of importing mexican slaves to work in greenhouses. this government has made a lot of ai and should realize that robotic fruit pickers are now a thing that exists in reality.

it would be massively beneficial for canadians for the canadian government to eat the capital costs in purchasing this means of production, and holding it in public hands. if we are to have collective ownership of the means of any production, robot fruit pickers in state owned greenhouses is the best way to start.

otherwise, you should be prepared to deal with (1) the reality that drugs are more profitable than food and (2) issues with importing labour to do the work.

again with the competition. always with the competition. there he goes again about the competition.

i'm a poor canadian with an education. you should ask me.

in fact, the carbon tax credit/rebate was extremely useful to me as i spend $0 on gas directly, due to not having a car, and the inflation was mostly not being caused by the carbon tax directly, although the increases in gas prices coming from global instability did lead to increases in fertilizer prices, and that was a major cause of the inflation. some people claim that grocery stores are just being greedy, and there are specific items sold in grocery stores that get insanely marked up for huge profits to compensate, but actual food is practically sold at cost in canada. the factors driving inflation in food (specifically. just food.) are due to production costs, not greed. but if your favourite pre-made chocolate cake at loblaws is 4x as much as it was five years ago, or your brand name detergent is 5x as much, that's how they compensate and pull in these crazy profits.

shifting the carbon tax rebate to the gst refund, without levying a carbon tax in between, will at least make up for that lost income, which very low income canadians will find very helpful. some conservative called it "chump change". well, it's easy to say that when you're not very poor, but that chump change could be the $50 of pasta you need that month. this is responsible in that sense, as it's targeted towards low income groups that need it, should not be inflationary and was, i always argued, the value of the carbon tax in the first place. i never expected that the carbon tax would reduce carbon use. when faced with a high gas bill, canadians will choose to pull their kids out of hockey, or reduce discretionary spending, instead of address the gas bill. there are ways around high energy costs that don't require "innovation", and taxes are never going to "spur innovation", but canadians are so culturally tied to using gas as a way of life that they won't think to do it, even when faced with steep increases in costs. canadians are trained to tighten their belts during down periods in order to pay the bills, and that's what we saw.

in order for the carbon tax to do what it was supposed to do, it would require huge amounts of social conditioning to get people to think differently about their spending decisions. canadians are famously socially liberal and fiscally conservative and trained for that belt-tightening, rather than to innovate or look for ways around high bills. at best, they might try to reduce usage, but that's not the point of the tax. we've had a problem in canada of finding the right policies but refusing to do good implementation because the government constantly argues that the market will figure it out.

no. the. market. won't. figure. it. out.

so, when we rolled out heroin decriminalization, we abandoned the portugese model that it was supposed to be built on and instead brought in this market libertarian pipe dream and watched it blow up in our face. when we increased immigration through the roof, we just flew them in and dumped them on the street, rather than spend to build the integration services, because that's what the market is for. when we brought in a carbon tax, the government avoided talking about it, in the mistaken belief that it would just work, and the market would figure it out, when the government should have been running constant ads everywhere explaining what it was and how to adjust. no, don't pull your kids out of hockey. get a hybrid instead. etc.

for now, this replaces the income subsidy that the very poor had come to rely on in the face of the coincidental brutal inflation because they don't burn gas directly, and which was abruptly taken away from them. that shouldn't have happened; there should have been a plan to transition. but if they're fixing it, great. that takes us back to where we were last year, at least.

as for the cost of groceries, people should make more of their own food, to start. there's a connection between healthy eating and affordable eating. unfortunately, in both canadian and american society, the more wealthy eat better and pay less, and the less wealthy tend to eat worse and pay more. there's a problem of education underlying this, tied into class and tied into lifestyle.

if you want to stick it to loblaws, don't buy that premade cake. buy some produce instead.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-gst-grocery-rebate-9.7060673

apparently, this is actually something mice do when they're courting, is leave nesting gifts. i don't imagine the rodent is quite that confused, but it's still a known act of affection.

a mouse would like my diet.

a mouse would like the pizza. right?

there was nothing left out for them to get at, but if they smelled it and/or watched me make it, it could conceivably want to hang out.

if it stays in the wall and eats roaches, whatever. but if it's going to crawl into my bed and make me sick, that's not cute, and it has to go.

my upstairs neighbours are also hacking and sneezing.

that doesn't make one scenario or the other more likely.

if the mouse was a pet, it might have slept on beds? i dunno. mice are smart animals, and they apparently have long memories. if i'm right, the mouse seems to be crawling up in bed with me when i'm sleeping and leaving me items it thinks belong in a nest, like leaves and insulation, apparently as some kind of gift.

it's easier to want to kill them when they're making you sick, and if this is the source, i have to kill it. but i also want to understand this.

i still can't find any clear evidence of rats or mice in my apartment directly, but i'm again finding some odd suggestions that there's something in here.

the animals in the ceiling are roof rats. that's clear at this point.  i also think there's at least one house mouse around somewhere, but it's very elusive.

as mentioned, i was cooking with pineapple last night and i have a virus, or something. i am noticing two thing waking up:

1) while i was careful to clean it up before i went to sleep, i found a cm^2 sized pineapple leaf beside me when i woke up.

2) the used kleenexes were on the other side of the room, under the table

i suppose it's possible that i might have kicked one of the used kleenexes when i got up to urinate and i might have accidentally got the little bit of pineapple leaf in my hair when i was cooking, but this isn't the first time that i've woken up with the perception that a mouse is trying to befriend me for chasing off the rats, although i'm not sure what it's eating down here if that's the case, besides maybe bugs.

i don't want to nest with the mouse, but if i can't find a reason to get it out of here, i'll leave it alone, especially if it is eating insects. 

i wouldn't normally make pizza. i like pizza, certainly, but pizza is junk food and something i will order and have made for me. i'm the same way with hamburgers. i will make myself lots of things, but i will order pizza.

however, they gave me a small stack of tomato sauce when i was at the food bank last fall because it was piling up. nobody wanted it. so i grabbed it, and i'm going to make "pizza" with it.

my dad used to make these cheeseless mini pizzas on english muffins that were extremely italian - they had no cheese on top, but were rather loaded with basil and oregano on top of the sauce, and something on them like olives or tomatoes and often chopped ham. they were really english muffins baked with tomato sauce and topped with pesto. this is something approaching traditional italian pizza rather than the franco-american pizza we eat today in north america. his third wife had an aversion to cheese and would get upset even watching somebody else eat it, so there was no cheese on anything he made (these mini pizzas, spaghetti, penne, whatever), unless i put it on when i ate the leftovers. all leftovers went to me, because she wouldn't eat leftovers, either; she insisted on only eating prepared food, and would just throw out whatever wasn't eaten, if nobody would stop her. dad would shrug off the cheese, but he couldn't accept the food waste, and i was happy to eat the leftovers as it gave me the ability to schedule eating when i wanted to - after school, in the morning or, sometimes, at 3:00, when i came in from somewhere, and was watching rereuns of star trek. her aversion to leftovers meant there was always something in there to microwave when i came home, even if i didn't come home for supper that night, or even if they brought something back from a restaurant, and that was actually very helpful to me, as a young person. you would need at least four, sometimes eight, of these mini pesto pizzas on english muffins to fill you up, as a meal. he'd make like 50 at a time and leave what was left in the fridge for me, and sometimes i'd eat them for a week at a time. 

so, this is an idea i'm familiar with and have eaten a lot of. however, it's because of that that i'm going to address some of the defects with these mini pizzas i grew up on. 

i did not know until recently that the words pita and pizza are actually the same word. so, i'm going to one up him a little on making this out of thick greek pitas, like this, and not out of english muffins:

the major difference between the greek pitas and the probably more well known arab pita is that the greek pitas do not have pockets and are not meant to cram stuff in. you would be more aware of this if you've had a gyro or a souvlaki; you roll them up like a thick tortilla, or you just put stuff on it and eat it like a canadian beavertail, which is essentially a fancy desert souvlaki.

but what i see is a small premade pizza dough, and that makes sense, because pizza and pita are the same word, and that is exactly what it is. 

i am going to go through one can of sauce per meal and we'll see how many that is but i imagine it will be two or three. i bought a stack of them pre-made in the bread section at walmart and it should be enough to get through the sauce, i think.

when i buy a pizza, i don't order it with pesto and tomatoes, although i do like the ham and olives. depending on how much i want to spend and what i feel like, and what's on sale (2 or 3 toppings), my usual pizza toppings are, in hierarchy:

core, always:

- bacon

- olives

first add:

- pineapple

second add:

- extra cheese (but it usually doesn't count)

third add:

green peppers

i will put hot sauce on the pizza when available and, if i take it home, will prefer to make my own dipping sauce out of frank's + caesar.

i have all of these ingredients and will be using all of them, along with the following toppings on the cheese:

- avocado

- garlic

- oregano, thyme, basil

- nutritional yeast

i think we know how to make pizza, it's the ingredients here that are unusual:

- make the bacon first (don't fully cook)

- slice fresh pineapple,  green peppers

- grate cheese

- start with the greek pitas

- put the sauce down, add hot sauce to tomato sauce

- rub some of the bacon grease around the edges of the pitas

- add green olives, bacon, pineapple, green peppers and anything else (grilled chicken, perhaps, but i'm not adding that ingredient)

- add cheese

- bake

- chop avocados, garlic while baking

- add avocadoes, garlic, spices, nutritional yeast, hot sauce to top of pitas when they come out

- slice them in four

there won't be crusts here, but if i want a dipping sauce, i'll mix frank's and caesar dressing together to make it.

update: i can get four pizzas out of one can, but it's too much. i used the following proportions:

- one can of sauce

- four greek pitas

- one large green pepper, in total

- about a third of a fresh pineapple

- four slices of bacon

- one block of mozarella, but this was maybe too little

- two avocados (one half on each pizza)

i still have two of them in the fridge.

c'est bien, mais c'est pas la pizza. i don't know what this is. if i put chicken on it, it might almost be a pizza souvlaki. the pitas actually do bake up like a pizza. is it a pizza beavertail? a pissaladere with pineapple? i dunno, but it's pretty good.

i don't know what i'm sick with, but i am sick.

there are rats in the ceiling. i do not believe they're down here. at all. i've seen no sign of them down here. no droppings. nothing chewed through. no food missing. there are clear entry points, and i'm working to identify and block them, but they don't seem to be coming down here. i think it's a combination of the facts that (1) i leave the lights on at night, (2) i'm usually awake at night, (3) my food is very well stored and (4) the main floor tenants turn the lights off at night, sleep all night and leave their food out. maybe they'd come down here if there wasn't so much easily accessible food upstairs. so, the rats are nesting in the ceiling and eating out of the upstairs kitchen, which is on top of my bathroom. i can hear them up there every night.

while i don't think they're down here, they are clearly directly above me, and they are urinating and defecating in the ceiling, and i can smell it. i've had stains coming down from the ceiling, and both food and droppings coming from holes or gaps in the ceiling, which i'm trying to find and cover up.

i'm consequently a little concerned about leptospirosis. about 95% of people survive leptospirosis. roughly. however, unlike covid, it doesn't target the elderly. being young and healthy is not going to help you against this one. it's a gamble with no clear way to predict the outcome. i would generally avoid anything with a 5% likelihood of death. that's too risky for me.

what i have is an upper respiratory infection, and it's pretty brutal, but i don't have signs of leptospirosis, yet. no blood shot eyes. no bleeding. no gastrointestinal concerns, besides a little heartburn. no jaundice. i have sore sinuses, but no headache, exactly. i want to keep an eye on this but i just don't have symptoms, or at least not yet. 

right now, it looks like i must have picked up a flu or covid on wednesday when i went to an appointment. i woke up with a sore throat on thursday and started getting a runny nose on friday. i blew a lot of virus out of my nose over the weekend, but it's actually running clear tonight. 

i am noticing that gurgling with high flouride toothpaste is helping with my throat, which is concerning as it suggests i'm killing bacteria in there. it's also one of those bugs where you feel better when you go to sleep and worse again when you wake up. viruses generally work the other way around. so this is making me a little concerned.

i know the symptoms to look for. the best thing i can do is keep an eye on it and call my doctor if i think i'm showing signs of more severe disease. i would want to get an anti-biotic to kill the bacteria. right now, if it is a bacteria from the rats, it's manifesting as a flu. and i was in a doctor's office with sick people the day before i got sick, albeit briefly.

i was never vaccinated for covid. i had some technical concerns with the type of vaccination being used, and i calculated that i just didn't need it. i am in a demographic with a 99.99% survival rate. i figured my immune system could handle the challenge. i don't know how true it really is, but i imagine our immune symptoms are stronger when they get more practice. i would have gotten vaccinated for something more scary, but i just was not afraid of covid, and i don't think the data suggests i should have been. further, i actually think i got covid before the pandemic started, at a plaid concert in detroit in late 2019. i may have carried it from detroit to toronto, when i went to file court documents there. i was never tested for antibodies. i did test clear of covid in 2021 when i went to get my orchiectomy, also in toronto. if that was the case, i had an early strain, and it may have been a little different than the pandemic strain, but i did not get substantively sick during the pandemic at all, and i may have never come across it. it's likely i'd get sick if i caught a recent strain. 

but i can smell fine. 

so i'm going to hope it's a flu and not a bacteria from the rats. 

i'll also keep an eye out for bubos and you can be sure i'll be at the er if i see any swelling at all.. right now, i'm not swollen, at all. bubonic plague is actually easily treatable if you catch it early, but they might have to burn the city block down if they find it here.

i made a choice on thursday that i felt shitty enough to sleep it off before i focused on the court documents. i had to make that choice - i could try chugging coffee and hope it wakes me up and struggle through it, or try to sleep it off and get to work on it after, with the hope i'm more productive if i do. i decided to try to sleep it off. i consequently lost thursday, friday and saturday.

i was feeling good enough to get to work on saturday night, but right when i was about to start, my air purifier fell off my box spring, landed on my chromebook (it's ok), bounced off of it and knocked over a giant glass beer mug *full* of coffee. the mug is ok. by the time i got a towel, the coffee had created a mess on my mattress and box spring that had to be addressed by cleaning it.

i haven't set up my bedroom yet. the kitchen, bathroom and laundry are each mostly set up, but everything is still in boxes in the living space, the in-unit garage is empty and the other areas are full of storage items. i'm waiting on the weather, i'm waiting on the drug dealers to get evicted and i'm waiting on finishing the court documents. my mattress is on the floor. it's fine for now, but the spill required me to move some things, and it made sense to clean the floors and set a few things up, given i'm sick. 

 

- i got a lot of dust off the floor. no signs of rodents in here.

- i also blocked off two obvious rodent holes, which i don't think have been used in here recently.

- i also sealed all the baseboards with caulking, which was to block off a draft

- i was able to glue the bottom leg on one of my tables, which had broken off in the previous move. it's fine.

it's ridiculously cold out and the caulking instantly helped. i hadn't initially noticed the draft in the floor. i was focused on the draft around the windows and actually surprised by the lack of one but couldn't figure out why the temperature in here dropped so fast without constant heat. that seems to be it.

unfortunately, the box spring took the brunt of the spill and absorbed enough of it that i was going to have to let to dry. i think i can get most of the discolouration out with dish soap, but i just wasn't getting anywhere, until the moisture evaporated. so i stopped early in the morning to eat my last caesar salad (for now, i'm out of kale) before switching to mini pizzas for the next week to eat up the tomato sauce i got from the food bank last fall, i feel asleep mid morning, got up to finish my salad and fell back asleep. i woke up without a sore throat today, but with a sore upper nose (nasal cavity). i've been sneezing a lot, but it's been clear snot since i cleared the last bit of yellow when i first woke up. that's a definite change from the gobs of yellow yesterday.

i still have to clean my box spring and set my bed up before i can get back to work, but it's time to eat again, so i'm going to make some of these pizzas. this is a new recipe so i'll go to a new post.