VillageToolbox Blog

Wow, so it’s been over a year since the last post. Much has happened since then, but not much work has been done on the toolbox. I’m beginning to think about it again, so hopefully you’ll see some new features and blog posts showing up soon.

I’ve been working on the Ad engine for the last couple of weeks, and I just noticed last night that the New Account creation had a nasty bug that stopped it from working. I apologize to anyone who was affected, but to make it up, I’m sharing the recipe for our ‘Not Really Very Good Brownies’ that got rave reviews at our park bake sale on Saturday.

Dahlia and I spent a couple of years perfecting this recipe, so enjoy, and here ya go…

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 tablespoons water
• 200 g dark chocolate (good quality. We use the PC Swiss Dark), broken into pieces
• 3 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2/3 cup flour
• 1 cup white chocolate pieces (belgium baking wafers from Bulk Barn work best)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Line a pan with teflon tin foil if desired (it makes it much easier to remove them).

Melt butter, sugar, water in saucepan, bring to boil and let boil for 2 minutes.

Take off the heat, add the chocolate and stir until melted. Let it cool for a minute, then stir in the eggs and vanilla. Add flour and mix well.

Add white chocolate and quickly pour it into the pan.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Brownies are done when a skewer poked in the middle has wet crumbs stuck to it, but no streaks of batter.

Let the brownies set in the fridge overnight before cutting, but they are best served at room temperature.

Exciting news! We have finaly heard back from the city about our neighbourhood plans to put a permanent BBQ into the park.  This is exciting for me, because after a year of pushing and emailing, and jumping through hoops, I was beginning to believe that it was never going to happen.

So, now we have permission from the city to begin fabrication. That means no going back – they can’t change their minds once we’ve spent money of building it. It also means that the onus is now on us, the community, to move the project forward. After so long, this is an interesting turn of events. Also it means (hopefully) that I get to do some cool welding now.

We need to make a number of decisions now.  What material do we use (what can we afford). How do we design it? How do we anchor it? How do we make sure the neighbourhood teenagers don’t break it n the first 2 weeks.  So much to do!

Summertime so far has been busy, filled with camping trips, friends cottages and sunny days in the lake.  Adding this to an already full schedule has been a little difficult, and has significantly slowed down the development of VillageToolBox.  Still, it’s important to practise what you preach, and so time with the kid, and time spent on neighbourhood pursuits has overshadowed my plans for world domination.

Soon, I’ll be back into the full swing of development, and hope to really take the site live in the early fall.  Still for the time being, I have a few more sunburns to rack up.

Me, Juliet and 2 pounds of fresh local cherries spent the afternoon at the wading pool. Sadly, the cherries did not make it home.

To me, the following story points to a possible reason why good communities don’t just develop on their own.  The folks of sunny acres had a bunch of ideas for ways to improve the community. We prioritized our wants, spoke to the folks in park planning, and decided on a way to go about getting what we wanted.  One of our first priorities was a park bbq.

Now, I’m not sure if you’ve seen these simple metal bbqs that show up in parks and campsites and such.  Basically they are a simple metal box, with a grill, welded to a post, stuck in concrete. BYOBriquettes kinda thing.

Anyway, we want a big one in the park.  The idea is that it serves as a sort of catalyst for spontaneous zero-planning community events. Friday nights would be ‘eat your dinner at the park’ night. Whoever shows up, comes to the party. Anyway, we think it’s a great idea.  It’s got lots of community support, so here we go to the city.  Our first and best contact has been one of our city councillors, who is standing behind the idea, and being very supportive.  She put us in touch with the community planning officer at the city.  I was very impressed after our first meeting.  She was enthusiastic, motivated, and passionate about finding ways for the city to help communities excel.  She got me excited about the possibilities. Two days after our second meeting, she was fired.  It seemed the city saw no value in what she was doing.

We pushed harder, getting a meeting with a junior planner in the parks department.  He seemed generally enthusiastic about the idea, and promised to send it up the pipe. We got as far as the head of the parks department, who said, in effect, he can’t be bothered. And the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.

What’s crazy about this is not that the city doesn’t want to do it.  We’re not asking for anything more than just permission. The community is happy to do all the work. But it seems that city employees just aren’t that interested.

So on we fight. June, our councillor, is still poking at various options, and we are trying others, but I fully expect it to come to the point of me standing in front of city council, asking them just exactly what is wrong with a city where communities are actively discouraged from bettering themselves.

Yesterday, being a lovely sunny Sunday, we took the family out for a hike, doing a geocache in the puslinch area.  As we approached the coordinates, the gps pointed us down a narrow path into the undergrowth.  In we charged, and soon the path began to narrow, the branches scraping our skin, the mud sucking at our shoes, and just as we began to consider the wisdom of our route, we burst out into a lovely serene sunlit patch of poison ivy.

And that’s why today, I am itchy.

Friday night of last week, Crispin Hellion Glover was in town, doing his Big Slideshow and showing What is it? on Friday night, and It is Fine, Everything Is Fine on Saturday night.  I went Friday night, since I wanted to see the movies on some semblance of order.  Glover’s a strange man, and his books showed it.  (He takes old books for the 1920′s on things like Concrete Inspection, and judicously cuts, pastes and adds to make them his own)

What is it is the disturbing story of a young man’s obsession with snails, salt, and his social standing. His inner turmoil plays out on screen like a greek tragedy, except with Shirley Temple hawking Nazism. Worth a watch, particularly with Glover there afterwards, talking about his film making process.

Of the two films, I somewhat regret not seeing It is Fine, Everything is Fine, as I suspect it is the better of the two films, but if your the type of person to enjoy Eraserhead, or even Twin Peaks, then I would suggest that both movies are required viewing.

Wow, 2008 is here. Everyone and their dog and their dog’s fleas has a blog, and you are now reading my first post. 

First and foremost, I plan on using this space to share my thoughts on VillageToolbox development, and to keep any who cares up to date with feature changes and other exciting stuff. Along the way, you may get subjected to random musings, and miscellaneous other crap.  We’ll see, I guess.