a peek inside the fishbowl

ETA: Thanks for your entries everyone, but we have a winner!

I’m especially happy to post this giveaway. Not only is it about art (and I love art) but the prizing has been generously donated by longtime patron Alison Fowler. I thought you might also be interested to know that she’s a mother of two, a Fishbowl reader, and I consider her a friend as well. Double happiness.

For the record, here’s a photo I snapped of her awhile ago:

I am not obliged to say this, but I am a big fan of Alison’s art. She has a real connection to the natural environment around her and it shows. We have one of her paintings (pictured here) hanging in our dining room right across from where I sit. I’ve been looking at that thing since September 2008, and you know what? I see something new in it every day. I never tire of the scene.

Alison is known for her poppies. They are deeply passionate and colourful, painted with bold strokes that give them an especially distinctive texture that makes you want to reach out and pet them. They are little red bursts of happiness.

This giveaway is for one original 6″ x 6″ acrylic/resin poppy painting on wood panel. Here it is! (ETA, I uploaded the wrong photo. Sorry. This is the right one. I promise.)

It looks like a tiny universe inside there, doesn’t it?

I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t mention that Alison is going to be at the New Art Festival in the Glebe on June 4 and 5. If you like this painting, and the others on her site (here’s an album of Fowler’s flowers for example) well, this is the event for you. The NAF is a MUST if you (a) like art (b) want to buy art or (c) all of the above. I’ve purchased a number of great pieces from the NAF. I really like buying directly from the artist. (Which is the coolest part of NAF if you ask me.) Admission is free, and it’s a very fun and friendly event… an extremely non-intimidating place to buy art. I urge you to check it out. If you swing by her booth, please tell her you read about it here. :)

Anyway, yes, let’s get on with it!

If you’d like to win this painting:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but  …
• … the winner will have to pick up their prize at Alison’s booth at the New Art Festival. She’ll be at #12 Central Pathway. Look at the map of the park to see where I mean. If you can’t make it, arrangements can be made to pick it up at her studio. She’s located at 1395-B Wellington Street West, just one block east of Island Park Drive. It’s a cool place. REALLY COOL.
• If you can’t post your comment because you’re behind a firewall at work (or whatever), you can email it to me for posting at andrea at quietfish dot com (Please note, I cannot be responsible if your entry is misdirected or gets stuck in my Spam folder!)
• This is not a requirement of entry, but you might be interested to know that Alison is on Facebook and Twitter too.
• One entry per person please! We want lots of people to have the opportunity to win. Good karma goes to those who tweet or post about this on your FB. Seriously, it increases your odds of winning!! ;)
• I will do a random draw using Random.org at noon EST on Friday June 3, 2011.

That’s it! Thank you Alison, for providing something so beautiful and cheerful for this giveaway. Over to you Fishies! Good luck!

Thank you for your comments and tweets about my post yesterday. Piper is better today. Phew.

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The Hydra is a multi-headed mythical beast you might remember from Herculean stories. If you cut one of its heads off, more sprout up to replace it. A nightmare, really. You wouldn’t want to meet that thing in a dark alley, no sirree.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rising costs of our utilities and trying to figure out if there’s something we should be doing when we renovate the house, something in addition to putting in a high-efficiency furnace.

I think our hydro consumption is kind of like that hydra. We – as a society – are concerned about replacing a few incandescent bulbs with CFLs but then again we have more television sets, computers, and a whole host of other electrical devices than ever before, all rearing their heads, draining our power resources.

Would it be terribly tacky of me to ask you to share what your last hydro bill looked like and describe your household usage? What do you think your biggest hydro issue is? And how is the new “time of use” billing affecting your family?

I think it might be interesting to compare notes.

Our billing period is two months long. We’ve haven’t been incorporated into the world of time-of-use yet, but it’s coming.

Our last bill was $120.43. It’s more if it’s an especially hot summer, but I’m not sure how this compares across the board. I think it’s pretty good for a family of four in a home that’s approximately 1500 square feet in size.

What we do

• We turn off lights when we’re not using them.
• Most of our lights are CFLs.
• We wash most of our clothes in cold water.
• We have a natural gas-powered clothes dryer (which is a huge savings for us).
• I line dry a lot of my own clothing (mostly because I want them to last longer).
• We use the shortest cycle on our dishwasher and only run it when it’s fully loaded… and we don’t use the “dry” cycle.
• We have one television, which we turn off when we’re not watching.
• We run the air conditioner only during the warmest evenings on the hottest days of the summer (although we had to run it recently because Mark’s allergies have been particularly bad this season).
• We have a kettle to boil water for tea (we don’t use the stove for this).
• We use the BBQ more often than the oven in warmer weather.
• We try to cook efficiently: putting lids on pots, turning the oven off a few minutes before the timer goes, keeping the fridge door closed (and we have a small fridge too, and no second chest freezer).

What we could be better at

• Turning our computers off when we’re not using them.
• Checking that phantom load we’re always hearing about. Speaking of which, did you know you can borrow a tool to measure your phantom load from the Ottawa Public Library?

Anyway, yes. I am worrying about these things, because to have a larger home means that our bills will be that much higher too. And although I don’t think we’re in a position to build solar panels on the roof (as much as I’d like to) I do believe that some extra energy savings can be built into the plan before we build.

All of this aside, I believe that commercial hydro usage is absolutely out of control. Our little families are switching off our lights yet acres of malls and giant office buildings blast air-conditioning to chill-inducing temperatures and keep their lights blaring at all hours. I think something should be done about that too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

She was licking her front paw incessantly. Actually, the first thing I noticed was that she’d licked a whole patch of the hardwood floor in the office. I looked at the pad of her foot. One of her toes and part of the pad was grossly swollen. Mark, who was home sick yesterday, took a look too. The only thing we could see was the results of lots of licking and chewing.

Our regular vet couldn’t see her. I called another, they couldn’t see her until much later in the afternoon. I called Alta Vista Animal Hospital. Did you know they offer 24 hour emergency care? It works like a people hospital. Incoming patients are assessed as they arrive. Emergency cases get top priority, and other ones follow. Anyway, this wasn’t an emergency per se, I just couldn’t get in anywhere any sooner. They were very nice on the phone and said it wouldn’t be too long of a wait. So off I went.

I tried not to cry in the car on the way there.

I racked my brains trying to think of what it could be. We’d been on a walk that morning and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Was it glass, a sliver, a bee sting? Was it poison ivy from a visit to my mother’s place on Sunday? (I found out later that dogs aren’t affected by it apparently.)

I really liked the vet who checked Piper out, but after the examination it turned out he couldn’t tell what was going on either. Her paw was swollen and there were no clues as to why. So he sent Piper home with a shaved and bandaged leg, some anti-inflammatories, and a prescription for antibiotics should we decide we needed them … which I appreciated, as it might save us a return trip. Also, he didn’t suggest X-rays, which was a relief. X-rays are EXPENSIVE. We agreed that it didn’t appear as though anything was broken.

We received excellent care at Alta Vista. The staff were all very friendly and patient and I now understand why people love them as much as they do.

Suffice it to say our visit wasn’t cheap. (If there is anyone out there who is thinking of getting a dog and wouldn’t be able to make a mortgage payment because of a $212 vet bill, well, don’t get a dog.)

My wallet is hurting but Piper doesn’t seem to be in any pain. She sure suffered with her cone last night. Man, she hates that thing. And who can blame her. It’s embarrassing to have to wear a hard plastic satellite dish around your neck in front of your friends and family.

I stayed up with her and tried to make her comfortable, finally taking the cone off around 3:00 a.m., but then I had to watch her to make sure she didn’t chew her bandage. It was a long night. In fact, it felt just like having babies again!

I am feeling totally zonked this morning. I predict that this day is going to be a writeoff.

Piper is cone-free at the moment, but I can tell, she is feeling depressed. She’s snoozing in her bed right now, with her bandaged paw positioned awkwardly away from her face. Poor thing.