2012 Winnipeg Bike Auction

That's right - it's that time already again - this weekend in fact! The 2012 Winnipeg bike auction will be held this Saturday April 28th and Sunday April 29th out in the boonies Charleswood. According to the link to the Associated Auto Auction website, there will be over 700 bikes available. That means the police are recovering approximately 2 bikes a day. How are there that many unclaimed bikes per year?? Probably because people like me don't take my own advice (as given in the post last year about the auction) and register their bikes for the $5. Seriously, someone please make sure I do that this year. Call 311 for more information on that if you need. Also, this year apparently they have partnered with WRENCH to provide some of the bikes - take a minute to check out their website an learn a bit more about this great non-profit.

Because clearly you are all clamouring to know exactly how my brain works, that's the song that plays when I hear the word bicycle.

And this, is what I hear every time someone talks about Twitter and mentions a tweet:
Yes, my brain is a terrifying place.

Starting Monday off right

Another great Winnipeg from the past video - should help you get over any case of the Mondays. All those great old cars, drool.

The MLS is like my version of p0rn...

Dear me, this one is a doozy! My regular readers will know I have a bit of thing for trolling the MLS, it's such an amazing opportunity to see behind all those closed doors. I've discovered an amazing space inside a former bicycle shop on Selkirk Ave, a long lost piece of Winnipeg Girl art, and even managed to meet new people. This latest MLS discovery to be fair, did not come from my trolling, but rather that of another who passed me the link - houses built in 2005 do not generally generate a click-through on my part.

Completely unassuming looking house

This house is in Algonquin Estates, a neighbourhood I wasn't even aware of to be honest, although I think it might be to East Kildonan what a sub-neighbourhood like St. John's is to the North End?

 So, this completely normal looking house, holds a secret. Well, not quite a secret, Western Living magazine wrote an article about it in 2008, detailing the crazy freaking transformation of the basement into a Las Vegas style club and gameroom!

1070 McIvor is one heck of a house! Where to start? The roulette wheel dance floor? The 52 seats available? The poker tables? The separate gender multi-stall bathrooms?? I'm dying to know - have you been to this place? Someone who's reading this has, or at least knows someone who has (3 degrees of Winnipeg separation after all!). Now, I'm no expert at all as to property values in this neighbourhood, so I don't if the $599,000 asking price (dropped from $659,900 it seems from the feature sheet) is a good deal or not, but I'm thinking you could host at least a few nights down here and turn a profit before the authorities caught on!

If the appropriate people see this I would like to attend either the last hurrah for the old owner or the sure-to-be-one-hell-of-a-housewarming for the new owners!

What's in a word?

A lot of blog traffic if that word is h00ker.

I've reached the point where I think I might go back and change all the correct spellings of the word to the mildly ironic version where the "00" could certainly be confused for a certain part of a h00kers anatomy. Over 65% of my all-time search results that brought people to my blog were some variation of people searching for where to get busy with a stranger here in our fair city. I am just grateful that I (Love Me Love My Winnipeg that is) make the top 3 search terms!

Now, while part of me just wants to leave the word, as is, so that all the these folks looking for love in all the wrong places (hint: Google is wrong place for finding street workers, you find them on streets and it's probably easiest to ask a suburban teen where in Winnipeg they are, as that is what legends of the bad parts of town are made of) end up reading my ramblings instead.

What do other bloggers think? How do you deal with this sort of thing?

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So for those of you who were listening to CJOB (Richard Cloutier to be specific) in the last couple of weeks you may have heard me chatting about life in the North End and also about the garbage problem that shows no signs of going away. It was great to get to be a voice for what the neighbourhood is really like, I even heard from a man afterward who said that I helped to persuade him to consider the North End as a place suitable for his daughter to live after all.

Typical sight in my back lane, especially at this autobin

We still have a long way to go of course, especially in terms of eradicating the garbage (of both the human and litter variety) but I truly think it will happen. Right now my biggest concern with the litter is what is going to happen once they get rid of the autobins; at the moment they fit some of the bulky garbage, things like chairs and non-console tv's, where is that all going to go once the bins are gone? I predict a lot more emails to 311 - I think I'm probably going to become "oh... that girl again" - but what else am I supposed to do? Even just picking up the stray litter that is all over the place has netted me over two full garbage bags this year, what would I do if I had a large family and didn't have the room in my wheelie cart for that?

Sigh. On to happier things. Today is Transcona's 100th Birthday! I really really really hope there are 100 pink plastic flamingos on a boulevard or something!

Qatar is back!

Like many bloggers I get a kick out of some of my stats and search queries. Since I love to travel I also really enjoy seeing what countries some of my readers come from. Months ago I had a semi-regular visitor from Qatar. This particularly makes my day because a). Qatar is just a cool name and it's a "Q" word without a "u"    b). I've been to Qatar, sort of. As a general rule I don't count airport stopovers as countries visited so it's not technically on my list, but I did spend about 5 hours in the airport in Doha a few years ago. Most unexpected thing? They have an A & W in the airport - that's just weird, it's not like A & W's are found all over the place. Anywhoo, welcome back to my Qatar reader - I've missed ya!

This brings me to yet another "small world" Winnipeg story. Yes, I'm aware that Winnipeg is a crazy small town at its heart but I seem to have stranger than normal encounters. Last  week I was attending an auction at Kaye's and I sent out a Tweet (follow me! @LoveMeLoveMyWpg) commenting that I was at an auction and that it was more fun than watching Storage Wars on TV. One of my followers tweeted back that they were also at Kaye's. Ok, yes, that in itself is not that shocking, Winnipeg is not exactly overflowing with daily auctions. What is completely freaky and small world like is that when I responded to the Tweet to say that I was the girl who just lost out on a vintage fridge - the real life person next to me looked up from her phone and introduced herself!

Turns out the friend that had told me about the auction in the first place (who didn't even know that I had a blog) and was good enough to be willing to help me haul the fridge home in his truck, had another friend at the same auction. The three of us were chatting as I responded to my tweet and we each discovered the real life person behind the user name. So it was super great to meet someone who reads and likes my blog but crazy to think we were already connected by one degree of separation!

The fridge I didn't win actually wasn't for me (not that I'm above hoarding fridges, because I'm not) but a good friend of mine. So I'm officially doing a shout out to find his "dream' fridge. It's a 1938 Frigidaire. There must be another one out there somewhere... please help me find it - I would win best present ever forever. I'll never understand why the guy bidding against me also seemed to want it so bad, I don't believe that it's a particularly valuable model (except to my friend) and I think it's even too small to qualify for the free $40 that Hydro will give you to scrap your old fridge (I would link to that program but I can't support the destruction of such beautiful works of machinery, I call balderdash on them being super expensive to run, I run two of them in my house right now and my electric bill is on par with other friends of mine who only have 1 modern fridge). But here it is, it may have also been available in 1939 or into the 1940's, the key identifier is probably the push button to open it.

This is the outside

This is the inside

So, readers far and wide (although Qatar is probably too far) please find me one, will pick up, I'm always up for a road trip! While you're at it - I'm looking for an early 1950's fridge with a separate fridge/freezer, will pay extra if it's the model that has the lazy susan inside.