Family visit: Days One and Two

The next few posts are photos from my family's visit in Nova Scotia last week. We did a bit of sightseeing, well actually, quite a lot of sightseeing. For one short week I think Josh, Kim and Eva saw a heck of a lot of this little province. But not nearly enough of course. We didn't even get into The City! [Nova Scotia has a couple of cities, but "The City" refers to Halifax.] Or Cape Breton!

We took a lot of photos but somehow missed photographing The Valley (Annapolis, that is). We managed to drive down a good part of it, all the way from Wolfville to Middleton. Stopped at a wonderful antique store where Kim picked up a couple of lovely large old kids' story books.

We visited Halls Harbour and took some photos there, but I am not including them here. I am sure if you google Halls Harbour you will see some good pics. Also, google the Halls Harbour webcam for really great views of the giant Fundy tides (up to 30 ft here I think).

OK, here we go with the first day.

Hanging out at home:



We walked down the hill to see the town on a cold but sunny day:


We stopped at a local farm for eggs, and the farmer gave us a tour of the barnyard and showed off his biggest lamb:



Unfortunately, Kim was ill on the second day here so we let her sleep and took a short walk to the town reservoir for the view:


This is Eva doing her incognito film star act:

Family visit: Sixth and last day

The weather was much better on my family's last day in town, I suppose it would have been nicer to do our South Shore tour in the good weather, but we were all glad to have a relaxing day at home.

We did a nice stroll around town, had dessert at the Front Street Cafe. We had been told that the Bread Pudding there was a treat and we were not disappointed.

For supper we went to Rosie's and had seafood and of course their own micro-brewed beer (I think we had the Annapolis Cream Ale, I don't remember for sure). Josh had lobster mac 'n' cheese, I had codfish cakes, and Kim had haddock fish and sweet potato chips. All good!

We also stopped at the Old Burying Grounds.


Many of the gravestones are so old and eroded you can't read the inscriptions, but some are clear.


In the old days gravestones were often marble, and unfortunately marble is very susceptible to damage from acid rain. Thankfully the acid rain is somewhat reduced now, but it has done a heck of a lot of damage.

Sadly, Josh, Kim and Eva headed home early on their seventh day here. I had a wonderful time with them and loved the time I got to spend with baby Eva. She's such a mellow and beautiful little girl!

Six Metres of Pavement

I thought this was kind of cool, what a great way to market a book!




This little video is set in my old neighbourhood in Toronto, the author of the book being "trailed" lives a few doors down from my old place.

Doesn't it make you curious to read it?

Six Metres of Pavement, by Farzana Doctor (2011).

In the jungle

Friday was a little cooler than the previous few days, there was a breeze and the temperature was forecast to only go up to 24C. So I cleaned up the truck in preparation for leaving.

We live close to the railway tracks, which is generally considered not a good thing due to the noise and vibration of passing trains. But we only have GO trains, the green and white double decker commuter trains. They are short and zip by quite fast, and mostly run during rush hour.

The interesting thing about being near the train tracks is that they provide a corridor for wildlife to come into the city, so we regularly see creatures that don't normally live in city centres. We
have rabbits and possums and hawks and redwing blackbirds. Plus the usual raccoons and skunks.

There's a spot where the street passes close to the tracks, a small stretch of no-man's-land filled with trees and shrubs. A few locals have taken it on to keep the area clear of garbage and planted in native flowers. When you walk by that spot it is raucous with birds. I am not sure what kind of birds, maybe robins maybe something else, but they sure are noisy. It's like being in a jungle listening to them. I've seen people walking that stretch of street and stopping
under the trees there just to listen to the birds.

Between the snow and the jungle birds, this is definitely a magical faerie land.

June snow

It's snowing on Wyndham. Has been for over a week and there's no end in sight. It's also very hot.


The snow fills the air, turns lawns white and makes flowers look as if they are covered in white mould.


It piles up along curbs and walls and in side alleys, you have to wade through the stuff. Huge flakes, some almost as big as a fist, blow and float down the street.


When I open the front door, it swirls into the front hallway. I left the windows cracked on my truck because of the heat, and now the truck is full of snow.

Where is it coming from? Why, the great big old cottonwood in Casey's front yard! Looking up into that tree I see no end in sight, the leaves are obscured by balls of cotton everywhere.


I guess I've never been in Toronto at this time of year, or at least not in Toronto on Wyndham Street, because this is my first experience of June snow. Due to climate change, the snow has arrived early, June isn't until next week.

Some residents love it, it's a magical sight to see all this fluff floating, dancing, piling up everywhere. And as soon as you turn the corner off our little street, the snow is gone, no one else has it. Others hate it, Casey says that in the past some neighbours have attempted to cut the tree down. She always feels a little embarrassed on behalf of the tree when its snow is blowing.

Kids kick the snow up in the air, try to collect it in great mounds. There are no green (or even brown) lawns on our street, they are all white. Looking up into the sky, you see it dancing everywhere. And as I sit typing on our front porch my hands and arms are growing fluffy cobwebs, it looks like the kind of stuff people decorate with at Hallowe'en.

Isaac tells me this will last at least another week, and I believe it, there's a ton of snow still up in that tree.

Sunday morning big ass quiche

The Dog Ladies did it again. This time at Grace's home.

We had talked about getting together sometime after I got back from BC, but trying to get the six of us together is rather like herding cats. We used to meet regularly at the dogpark, but our schedules have changed, and some of us no longer even go to the dogpark, some of us have chosen to walk our dogs elsewhere (not going to mention names here...).

Catherine insisted that Grace make her "old big ass quiche", Grace wanted a Sunday brunch with mimosas, and Sandra and I wanted it to be at Grace's house because we were sure it must be very interesting. And it was.

In the end we settled on the time and place and Grace agreed to make her old big ass quiche. Fatima brought champagne and OJ for the mimosas, I brought a baked French toast with fruit and maple syrup, and Barb brought cardamom squares. Sandra brought flowers and Catherine slept in. She never showed up at all!

Grace's home is magnificent. She has a two-storey condo in an old factory/warehouse, and she has lived there for 20 years and fixed it up quite nicely. She lives there with her partner, two cats and dog Indy. It has high ceilings, old wood floors and ceilings and brick walls. There's a skylight in the roof and an opening in the second level floor so that you can see from the dining room on the ground floor all the way up to the sky.

Grace made some big sliding shutters for the kitchen window (which looks out onto a garage across the alleyway) that are covered in four big shiny tin ceiling tiles with a large circular pattern, normally used for where a chandelier would hang from. They look spectacular on the shutters.

We waited around for Catherine to show up, Grace left her several messages but she never responded. Finally we gave up and got down to serious eating and drinking. A couple of hours later Catherine called to say she had only just woken up. Oh well!

Barb and Grace and I have decided that the next event will be a sort of pub crawl. Barb wants to find a good pub that serves craft beer in the neighbourhood. There are of course a bunch of them in the city, but she wants one close by, close enough to walk to and stagger home from. We think we have a line on one, but if not then I guess it really will be a crawl.

The old big ass quiche was exactly that, and really really good.

Power of soup, skates and simplicity

Here's a great little news article from close to my neighbourhood (Dufferin Grove Park), about a local community activist, Jutta Mason. Very cool lady.

Blues 'n' booze at Hugh's

Went to see Matt Andersen and Mike Stevens play at Hugh's Room last night, dropped a hundred bucks and had a marvelous time. Total blast. Am paying the price this morning though for the bottle of wine Grace and I shared. But I have a new Andersen CD on the stereo so that's OK. I feel like a teenager, I actually got his autograph on my CD! Hoo-wee!

I had wanted to see Matt in Lunenburg before I left Nova Scotia, but it just didn't work out. I checked his website and sure enough he was playing Toronto, but last night was the one and only night, and after that no hope of crossing paths with him for many months. So I hooked up with Grace, one of the Dog Ladies, and we booked a table at Hugh's Room for dinner and the show. It's a great venue, seats around 200 people mostly at tables, and every table is a good table---good views and good sound. Grace looked around the room and noted the wide mix of ages, opined that that was a good sign. Gotta be good to attract that kind of audience.

I'd never heard Mike before, he's a harmonica player with many years behind him of The Grand Ol' Opry (Nashville) and touring Innu and Innuit communities of Canada's north. It shows in his music, a unique mix of many styles. He talked about his experiences on tour and some of the work he is doing bringing music to northern communities as an alternative to drug use among youth.

I have never heard a harmonica "speak" before, but Mike makes his harmonicas speak. You can hear the words coming out of the harmonica! His harmonica said: "Grew up in Sarnia/From Sarnia still/If the air don't get ya/Then the fries will", or words to that effect. Mike's from Sarnia.

Matt is Matt, fabulous voice and virtuoso guitar playing, and an engaging personal style on stage. He bantered with Mike and with the audience, and used his long curly hair like another instrument. He'd swing his head so his hair whipped around like a halo. When Matt sings the blues it pierces your soul. He doesn't just sing the words, he IS the blues. He did one song about returning troops that hit hard. And of course his signature rendition of She Takes The Sunshine. I first heard him sing that two years ago at Deep Roots in Wolfville, and it literally choked me up and brought tears to my eyes. This time he has polished his rendition some, and in the process lost some of the emotional rawness, but it was still a great performance.

Grace and I arrived early to eat dinner before the performance. The format at Hugh's Room is they want you to come early if you want dinner so they can get you fed and the dishes cleared in time for the show. So you have lots of time to eat and chat before the music. Grace and I don't really know each other that well, we met a few times last winter at Dog Lady get-togethers, so this was a chance to get to know each other. We ordered Concert Specials from the menu, and a bottle of a good red wine.

Grace's background is Japanese Canadian, her ancestors settled in the Steveston area of British Columbia. During World War II her parents' family was split up because some of them had been sent back to Japan for school, so they had to stay in Japan while the rest of the family was interned---like most Japanese in Canada at the time---in camps in the interior of BC. They would have lost everything during that time, and most of them did not return to Steveston after the war because their old community was gone.

After the war Grace's parents came to Toronto, where she was born and grew up. We shared experiences of growing up in Toronto, of travelling to other parts of the world and coming back here, realizing what a great place it was right here. We remembered going to the 'Ex' as kids, the Royal Winter Fair, the AGO and the Grange Park behind, the Superdog show (well of course! We're Dog Ladies!).

We both get a big kick out of travelling on the streetcar, on Queen, Dundas or College, and being surrounded by the sights and sounds of people from all over the globe riding the same streetcar. It's a magical experience, it makes you feel like a real Citizen of the World, being surrounded by all those ordinary people from everywhere, settled and jostling up against each other in this very international city. I don't want to call it "cosmopolitan", that somehow implies something sophisticated and this is not. Toronto certainly can do sophisticated, but it also has a real down-on-the-ground regular-folks international feel as well.

That bottle of wine disappeared pretty darn quick.

Not on the road but in recovery

The pictures today are completely unrelated to the text, they're from a recent shopping trip on Roncie (Roncesvalles).

Best laid plans, etc

All the test results are in and the coast is clear. With a couple of minor exceptions, nothing there to impede the way. The twinge of pain down there is most likely arthritis, so I'm going to ignore it.

Doc asked if I wanted an X-ray, I said No, his diagnosis made sense to me. He said take a couple of Tylenol every day for a few days and if the pain goes away then that pretty much confirms that it's arthritis.

Of course in the meantime I came down with a sore throat and fever, so leaving today---which had been the plan if all went well at the doc's office yesterday---is now out of the question.

I'm over the worst of whatever this is, fever is gone, throat is better, but I'm sufficiently lethargic to not want to be driving all day. With the long Victoria Day weekend coming up, I don't want to be on the road with all the other holiday travellers, so that means my departure date is now postponed until sometime next week.

I have mixed feelings about it all. Toronto is leafed out and green now, the weather is neither hot nor cold, so it really is a nice time of year to be here. But I had set my heart on being in the Harbour by mid-May and that is now not going to happen.

So, my plans are now to:

(a) get better,
(b) try to get my kayak into Lake Ontario this weekend,
(c) see the latest Star Trek movie,
(d) see the last Lost episode for the season, and
(e) try to get together with The Dog Ladies one last time.

Dog days

While I was going through my week of medical tests, we very nearly lost our dogpark. Apparently a complaint was lodged (this now turns out not to be true) and one of the Catholic School Board maintenance folks told us that we would have to get a permit to take our dogs onto school property, and the permit was going to cost BIG BUCKS. It was a rather stunning turn of events. With all the stress of the medical tests I was in no mood for it and it instantly depressed me.

I thought:

(a) there's no way we can fight this, or at least not in the near term, and
(b) this dogpark has meant more than simply a place to walk the dog, it was the basis for my flimsy but growing social life in Toronto and now it's gone.

Without it I just felt like, what's the point, well, of anything, really.

However, with the Clean Train Coalition thing going on, this neighbourhood is very politicized right now, it was just a hop skip and a jump to take on the School Board over this issue. The Brockton Dogs Yahoo group had already been formed so it was kicked into high gear to take on the issue. Within a day alliances were formed with other dog owners' groups, several people were calling the Board over the issue, and news was being debated and discussed online as to what our best strategy was. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, within a couple of days the issue got resolved and the dogpark remains, it turns out that the "complaint" was actually a somewhat misrepresented report from a Board employee.

So kind of not surprising that I fell victim to a sore throat, as this past week has been an emotional roller coaster.

Preparations continue in spite of setbacks...

Seeing as how I have no energy for packing or cleaning or whatever, I instead mapped my truck. Crawled around inside the cab and the truckbed with a measuring tape and wrote down all the packing space measurements. Then I measured all the things I wanted to pack and tried to map them to the truck space measurements. I think I'm going to squeak by. And there's still the kayak hatches as a last resort.

Come fly with him

On another note, I recommend Black Flies and Bush Planes to you (see the blog list on the right). This is the new blog of my son Josh, who is spending this summer in northern Ontario becoming a bush pilot. He's an excellent writer (comes by it honestly I think ;-) and it's an interesting topic.

Something I've found fascinating about blog-reading over the past year or so is all the sub-communities of bloggers. There are elders, birdwatchers, taxi drivers, political commentators, mommies, knitters, quilters, you name it, they have a blogging community. When you chance upon one blog you get to sample a bunch of the same ilk by following bloglist links. So Josh is the tip of the airpilot iceberg, check out his bloglist for an international sampling of airpilots who blog.

Saling into the storm

The Brockton Triangle Yard Sale was today, unfortunately we had several thunderstorms pass through, complete with heavy downpour and lightning. Some of us were undeterred though, we put our stuff out for sale, and then either ran it all back onto the porch when the downpour started or simply covered everything in tarps. The storms came in waves, so we had to do this several times over, but we were determined!

I managed to sell a few things, and then spent my earnings on two bead necklaces from Mary Anne across the street, a cookie from Tristan, and a chana, potato and cheese roti from Queen Street.

A lady wanted to buy binoculars from me and tried to bargain with me, but I was of two minds about whether I wanted to sell them at all, so I told her that I wasn't going to lower the price because I would be happy to keep them. She finally bought them at my price. I was half wishing that she would walk away without them, kind of disappointed to see them go.

Dobby had to stay in the house for the whole time that the yard sale was going on. He kept sneaking out every time the front door opened. Gretel was trying to sell an old dog crate, and one time I caught Dobby sneaking out the door and I stuffed him into the crate. He didn't like that.

I had an electric drill that a fellow wanted to buy, I didn't care what I got for it I just wanted to get rid of it so I told him to make me an offer. He said he hated dickering, he just wanted to pay my price, but he didn't have change and neither did I so he went off to get change and didn't come back. After the yard sale was over we had arranged for a charity to come pick up our leftovers and I gave them the drill. But five minutes later the fellow did show up and I had to tell him it was gone. He shrugged his shoulders and we both laughed. He said he probably didn't want it after all.

At a slow moment in the yard sale, Brighid and her Dad got out their fiddles and played a couple of tunes. Brighid's fiddle is tiny! I've never seen such a tiny fiddle.

The sign over their heads is Gretel's new business and website address. You can go there and see what she's doing.

Dirty old man

One day this past week I went out and bought some petunias, marigolds and lobelia to plant in the tires in front of our house. I am tired of looking at the dirt. These flowers are not very big, but they're a start.

Here's Dobby admiring my work.


I've been slowly packing and putting things into the truck. On Friday, Ross was out on his porch with his "lady friend" the homecare worker who keeps him company on weekdays. I waved to him and he waved back and asked me if I wanted a beer. In the summertime, he sits on his porch every afternoon having a beer, and he frequently asks me if I want one too. I usually say No because I am busy doing something or other. But this time I said Yes. No doubt I surprised the hell out of him.

Coincidentally Gretel was just returning from a visit to the doctor's, she had hand tremors that the doctor said were caused by stress and the best thing for it was alcohol. So when Ross invited her for a beer as well, she took him up on it. Gretel and I went over to Ross's porch for a beer. Ross introduced his homecare lady, Joyce, and asked her if she'd have a beer too. But she said, Not while she was on the job.

Ross has told me about his lovelife during the War. He was stationed in Halifax and a family there took him in and treated him like their own son, who was overseas in the War. Ross had a thing going with their daughter. But he was also engaged to be married to a lady in Toronto, so he was torn. In the end he chose the lady in Toronto and they did get married and have a good life together, but he always remembers the lady in Halifax with a touch of regret. So this day I was kidding him about his luck with the ladies. Turns out he has two homecare ladies, Joyce and another woman who comes twice a week to give him a bath. He ain't complainin'!

I asked Ross if he made it overseas during the War. He said that he was posted on a frigate heading to Britain, but it was struck by a torpedo and went down. Fortunately he survived and was rescued, but it so affected his nerves that he was posted to a tugboat for the rest of the War and never left Halifax until the War was over.

At one point I asked Ross how old he was. He asked me how old I thought he was. I said I thought he was 80, based on something he told me last year, and he said that he wished I had never asked him that question. He said he was hoping to get a date with me, but if I knew how old he was I'd never agree to it. He's 85. I laughed and said, Well if he was just a couple of years younger, I'd seriously consider it. He said I might be disappointed, the equipment wasn't what it used to be.

Our very own resident Dirty Old Man!

Ross's house is on a bit of rise above the street, sitting there on his porch in the sun with beer in hand, it's a nice view of what's going on up and down the street. His house is one of the older ones on the street, more than a hundred years old. His grandfather used to live there, his mother grew up in that house. When she married she moved to a house on the next street up and Ross grew up there. Ross eventually bought his grandfather's house and raised his own family there. The two rosebushes in front of Ross's porch were planted by his grandfather, so I guess they'd be older than Ross's kids and maybe even older than Ross.

And Gretel reports that the alcohol works just fine.

Lithuanian House Metrolinx Open House

The Clean Train Coalition website is up, here's the link.

Just got back from the Metrolinx Open House in our area tonight, there was a great turn out of people living all along the corridor, and it looked like the Metrolinx folks were a bit overwhelmed by all our questions and comments. They had lots of displays but not a lot of hard information, couldn't give a straight answer about how many new tracks were being built, couldn't tell us what the noise and vibration levels were going to be, or how much air pollution more than 450 diesel trains a day would spew in our neighbourhood. Said they could tell us in a couple of months, at the next round of Open Houses. Not reassuring.

Gretel said a lot of people she talked to were holding off on renovations, thinking it might be time to sell rather than stay, and Catherine my realty friend says she wants to go door-to-door and talk to some of the Portuguese residents to get them to realize how big a deal this is. Sandra's worried about the groundhogs and 'possums that live along the tracks and come into her backyard, they may not be rare and endangered but they're all we've got in the way of wildlife.

But the place was packed and all the Metrolinx representatives had crowds of people peppering them with questions. I think it was a good start.

The dog ladies meet again

This weekend has been blur.

Healthwise, not so great, a gum infection compounded by a sinus infection, leaving me quite lacking in energy and focus. I think it's getting better, but hard to tell, it's so damn gradual.

Friday and Saturday felt like summer was just around the corner, it was so warm! But today, Sunday, it's back to cool and windy, I almost put my winter coat on to take Dobby for a walk. The daffodils and forsythia are in bloom and there are green lawns everywhere, so it does feel like spring is well underway. The chirping robins confirm it!

My main activity though has been editing and writing documents for the Clean Train Coalition, the newly formed organization to fight the diesel train invasion. The first document was a short "FAQ" that will be printed up in brochure format. This was started on Friday and completed today, all by email between about five people, including myself.

The next document was something called a Backgrounder, I'm not sure how to describe it, which is odd because I wrote it (the first draft of it I mean). I just sat down this afternoon and wrote a two page outline and then five pages of text, pretty much non-stop. Then I posted it on a website where it will be available for other people to edit. It is supposed to end up as a three page document, which means it is going to need some serious editing. I am too brain-dead to tackle it tonight, the others can spill all the red ink on it that they care to.

In the meantime a couple of other people are preparing a long FAQ, an expansion of the short one we wrote this weekend. Looking at what they've produced so far, there's quite a bit of overlap with the Backgrounder, so hopefully my document can be cut down to size without losing any crucial information.

The Coalition website is not up yet, when it is I'll post a link to it.

It's been quite interesting doing this, I've learned a lot about diesel locomotives and local politics. This whole thing is politics, there's stimulus money out there, lots of people want to get their hands on it, projects are being put together in a hurry with a skim of language about "greening" the city, "climate change", "world class city", and so forth, and pushed through environmental assessments and public consultations all in the name of getting that stimulus money. As for diesel, well, don't get me going!

On Saturday, Isaac, Gretel, the kids and I all went to see a dress rehearsal of Roseneath Theatre's Rocket and the Queen of Dreams. Quite an amazing play, a mix of actors, puppets and shadow puppetry. A very imaginative story about a child who is afraid to go to sleep because of bad dreams. It seemed quite long, but all the children in the audience were quite entranced by the amazing puppetry, no one fidgeted at all.

After the production there was quite a long Q and A with the actors, the children were fascinated by the behind-the-scene details. Later, the workings of all the puppets and scene changes were exposed and the kids examined every inch of it. This play is being taken on tour to many schools, I am impressed that they can pack and unpack such an intricate setup at many different locations.

Last Monday night I went to a potluck dinner at a neighbour's, Fatima's place. Same place the dog ladies had their party last January. In fact, pretty much the same cast of characters, all dog ladies. There were five of us: Fatima (Alpy), Sandra (Chico), Grace (Indie), Catherine (Dylan) and me (Dobby). Dinner was salmon and pasta, asparagus, fresh greens and feta salad, and Blackbottom Cupcakes (I made them from the recipe that Gretel made my birthday cupcakes from, it's in the latest Joy of Cooking).

And six bottles of wine. Not only did we drink all six bottles, but then after everybody else left, Fatima and I got into her bottle of Calvados. Oh my. I have not had a shot of Calva in a very long time.

But we had a great time, laughed ourselves silly and apparently I agreed to buy a house in Brazil and invite everyone down to stay. Or so I'm told.

Fatima just had an operation and is taking six weeks sick leave to recuperate. She spent a couple of weeks getting her strength back and now she's ready for Stage Two of her recovery: two weeks of eating and drinking and laying around in the south of France. She's not allowed to lift anything so she's taking along a friend who must tote all her baggage.

So the next day all of us were thoroughly hung over. I was supposed to go to the McMichael Gallery with Zach, but I could barely stand up for more than five minutes without getting nauseous so I had to cancel. And of course Zach told everyone in the dogpark so when I showed up there in the evening a half dozen or so dog owners were laughing at me.

The next day after that the gum infection kicked in and I had to cancel out of my weaving and carving classes, not to mention the public meeting about the diesel invasion. And I am sure the sinus infection can probably be blamed on this train of events as well. Last night I broke out the whiskey to treat the gum infection with, it appears to have done some good.

But I haven't knitted a thing all week.

Brockton diesel

There was a public meeting on Wednesday night about the Metrolinx project going through our neighbourhood. On the face of it, a good thing, much-needed expansion of the GO Transit system and an infusion of provincial (and presumably federal as well) money to expedite the project. But there are troubling aspects to it, principally the commitment to diesel-powered trains that will spew diesel fumes through our neighbouhood all day every day, and the lack of local stations so that we can take advantage of this transit corridor. The meeting was actually not a Metrolinx meeting and no Metrolinx officials attended, it was organized locally as an information session to get local folks up to speed on what was happening and, if warranted, stir up some concerned action to get Metrolinx to pay attention to our concerns. Other neighbourhoods along the route are also gearing up for some kind of political action on the matter.

I couldn't go because I was sick, but I did talk to some neighbours the next day at the dogpark. The consensus seems to be that this is going to have a horrific effect on the neighbourhood, the project is being speedily pushed through and there is little hope of fighting it, and some people are even talking about selling their homes and moving away in anticipation of the worst. There is a 6-month Environmental Assessment period before it is a done deal, and already one month of the six has passed, so if there is going to be any fighting it, it has to happen immediately. An official Metrolinx public session is happening next week so we are all urged to show up and let Metrolinx know that, Houston, we have a problem.

Around the neighbourhood...

These are some leftover photos from previous posts.

This one is another mural on a building near the Parkdale Library on Queen Street. The building is an old factory converted to loft apartments.



A close-up of the mural (click on it to enlarge).

Queen Street bay windows.


















Another Queen Street building.















Little boy driving a car, big boy riding a skate board...












...and attempted car jacking in the 'hood.

















At the dogpark, Dobby, Yuki, Titus and onlookers...














Dobby and Yuki boxing


















Look over there!



Yuki is required to wear a halty at all times, not because she is vicious (au contraire, a very sweet dog!) but because she is hard on other dogs, having a very dominant nature.

Above eye level

I took a walk along Queen Street West with my camera a couple of weeks ago, on one of the first really warm days in a while. It went up to 16C, the first jacket-free day of the year!

One of the things that fascinates me about Toronto is the above eye level streetscape, the architectural details of second and third stories of the buildings dating from the mid to late 1800s.

These photos were all taken in the Parkdale area of Queen Street. Click on a photo to see it in more detail.

In one block there is a Franciscan monastery and a convent. Sometimes you see the Franciscan friars on the street, wearing long brown robes with a rope for a belt. One of the friars has an earring. They serve dinner every day to street people. They also used to run the foodbank that I volunteered at last winter, but for various reasons they no longer do that.







I don't know too much about the convent, I've never seen the nuns on the street. Or maybe they don't wear anything special and I just haven't noticed them. The Our Lady of Loretto sign marks the entrance to the convent, which is on the upper two stories of the building.

When I was taking a picture of one building, there was a utility truck parked in front of it with some of the workers taking a break. One of them saw me photographing and waved for the camera.



He shouted for me to take another photo and hammed it up for the camera. Nobody else paid any attention.














I just find these buildings fascinating.



The street level can look quite grungy, especially now that the cigarette butts are emerging from the melted ice and snow. You can't smoke inside the many bars and restaurants, so smokers leave their butts on the sidewalks in front of these establishments.





But you look up and you see amazing details in the brickwork, stained glass windows, towers, cornices and more as far as the eye can see.









These pictures are just from my immediate neighbourhood, they get even better as you head east toward the centre of the city.

Murals of Dundas West

Dundas Street West runs through the Portuguese neighbourhood of Toronto. Many of the people living here are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Portugal, the Azores and Brazil. The Dundas West BIA (Business Improvement Area) commissioned Jose Ortega, a local artist and businessman, to paint a number of murals along Dundas Street.

The tantalizing tidbit in yesterday's post is one of Ortega's murals, on Dufferin at Dundas. The pic on the right is another view, but still only a portion of the whole mural.

Sorry, it's all I got, we were on the wrong side of the street.

Here is another of Ortega's murals on Sheridan at Dundas, not far from where I live. I took this photo in March last year, when we still had mucho snow on the ground after several major dumps in February. Click on it for a larger view.

For a few more pics of Ortega's Dundas West murals, look here.