Rain Like You Wouldn't Believe

I've lived in Vancouver for a decade now, but I've not experienced rains like this before. I think we broke a monthly rainfall record before the halfway point in the month. I've been taking extra clothes and shoes with me to work because despite the umbrella, I still get wet enough to need a change.

And then on Thursday morning there was some cloudy water in the toilet. Later that day we found out there was a "boil water" advisory for all of Vancouver. Apparently some landslides kicked up a lot of "turbidity" in the reservoir and just to be safe they advised us not to drink the water from the tap. We've got a pretty good water filter, but that just means that I need to clean it about 50 times more frequently than normal. The insult to the injury was that all the local coffee shops stopped serving coffee due to health concerns with the water.

Hopefully, all the rain down here will translate to snow on the mountains.

Damned Glad To Be Wrong

So it looks like the Blue Team won full honours on Tuesday, in the process making me look like a fool for my earlier prediction of a Red victory. I see that my juvenile reverse-psychology trick worked -- I successfully psyched out the entire voting population of the USA, and I couldn't be happier. Mostly because nobody took me up on the bet.

I should have tried that back in August with the IAU's planet definition vote.

Gorgonzola: No

It's been awhile since I tried a new cheese, but the other day we were out at Save-On-Foods doing our weekly grocery run, and we wandered over to the Deli cheese section and picked out some cheese to snack on.

My hand settled on a wedge of Gorgonzola, which I'd never had before, but which has such an interesting name, that I thought it was worth a try.

It's a very soft, creamy cheese, with some (apparently) penicillin mold running through it. It's got a bit of the "old boot" aroma and taste -- not exactly horrible, but certainly not the sort of thing you'd automatically pop in your mouth when you smell it. There's an aftertaste which I can only describe as a sort of concentrated phlegm thing.

I vote no on Gorgonzola. The web page I visited made it sound much better than my experience. It's not the worst cheese I've ever had, but I do wonder how such tastes get started.