O Canada,.... and other cold places.

[captainsblog]

We've been working our way through the first of six seasons of Republic of Doyle, a Canadian comedy-mystery series that ran from 2009 to 2014. I'd watched one or two of them back in the day when the non-titular Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea appeared in some of the episodes still being broadcast on CBC. It's Jake, Malachy and Rose who are the Doyles to watch here, though, although Alan and the boys do provide the "Oh Yeah"  theme song for the series. It's set and filmed in St. John's, Newfoundland, a time zone and whole universe away from the Toronto centre of most CBC television production. The actors are mostly known only from local productions, although Russell Crowe apparently pops in at some point, but the writing is incredibly snarky and fun, the romantic subplots a bit too 70s misogynistic for 2020 tastes, and Jake's car is right out of the Jim Rockford School of Driving.... but it's fun, the plots silly but always with a good twist, and the family dynamics are spoot oon.  We're almost rhrough the first season on Neflix disks, with the second also available on DVD; for some reason, the final four don't appear streamable, although Youtubes are there at the moment; the whole series can be had on disk for around $40 US, and it's looking like a decent investment, especially if there are commentaries or extras on it.

Also making it to Canadia, in their final Netflix episode, are George and Mae from the Feel Good series. It's weird seeing Toronto playing itself, after so many series where it's either pretending to be Some Other City or, as with the early days of Orphan Black, anonymously denying its Canadianess.  As they explored vaguely familiar looking neighbourhoods, we fondly remembered our trips there from the Before Times.

----

Then there's the little bit of the Great White North that should be residing in our kitchen.

A day after we had our entire HVAC system priced out for upgrade, and three days after we got quotes on many other things, we came home tonight to find that the freezer section of our kitchen fridge had decided to stop freezing. There was water in the ice trays and even more of it in a puddle below.  Rather than panic, we turned down the settings both up and down, and I brought in a thermometer from the garage freezer in hopes of confirming that it was just a matter of not having properly shut the freezer door sometime during the day.

Well, it's showing it's 16F in there right now, so I think we likely have dodged that frozen bullet:)

Comments

Oh crap

[dauntless_heart]

Same thing happened with one of our fridges at YPS--we have two: one for dog foods and one for people foods.

It's hard to talk about this without mentioning that our staff is, on average, about 40 years younger than we are--but what we see is that they have no knowledge of how the "machines of their ancestors" work, LOL.

Several came to us saying the fridge was broken and leaking. It was the work of about 30 seconds for Dave to discover the issue and fix it like you did.

Now if only we could make them understand about vacuum belts...

[thanatos_kalos]

Where are you seeing $40s for the DVDs?! On Amazon the complete set is over $125! I'd buy it for research if it were $40s...

Russell Crowe turns up in 3.1. I won't spoil it but it's very cleverly done and his accent is much better than in Robin Hood.

[captainsblog]

And there is a bunch at that price on eBay. There’s also a comment on the Amazon one, which I also saw, suggesting that some of the other alternatives are rather crappy bootlegs. Which, they probably are at that price.

Tell you what. I’m gonna try ordering the shed, and will see how bad it is. If it’s crap, I’ll send it back. If it’s not, I’ll copy the stat and send it off to somebody.

[thanatos_kalos]

<3 That'd be great, thanks! I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting the set earlier in the year (it was around $65 on Amazon) but... :P