Jennifer?

The title of today's post is the question a young woman asked me last Saturday just after I'd stepped through the sliding glass doors to the Loblaws at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was making my way through the mob of people who were either waiting to order something at the deli or shopping for flowers or grabbing a shopping cart or stepping onto the escalator up to the liquor store or entering or leaving the store. 

MLG Loblaws is a nice place but I think they could have spent a bit more time thinking about crowd flow.

Anyway. I step in the door, look over to see if there are any small shopping carts and the face of an absolutely not familiar-looking young woman emerges from the anonymous hubbub of the crowd. She's looking right at me, so I smile because why on earth wouldn't I. Her eyes lock onto mine. I see that she seems to recognize me. I get that much-more-frequent-these-days feeling of slight panic as I search for information in my brain to help me know who this young woman is.

My panic is completely diffused by her question "Jennifer?" and I smile more broadly. "No, not Jennifer," I say. The young woman is thunderstruck. "Oh my God," she says, "You look exactly like her."

Sadly, I failed to act on this. True dopplegangers are hard to come by and come in handy. I should have asked for Jennifer's number.

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I flew to Washington this week. Because I persist in packing illegal-sized liquids, I have to check my luggage (and pay an additional $25 - for which I apologize to Ontario taxpayers). 

I needed to go to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the Air Quality Committee - an august body operating under the auspices of the Canada-US Air Quality Agreement. The AQA has been around for a long time and the international cooperation under it has been remarkably successful, and not just because the competition - action on climate change or protecting the Great Lakes, say - is so weak. Things are moving along so well in fact that there really wasn't much to talk about. 

The fact that we had little to say notwithstanding, I spent my 22 hours in Washington DC -- one of America's most beautiful and interesting cities -- inside one of a cab, the hotel where I was staying, or the room where the meeting was held. The only photo I took was of this card I found in my luggage:

A very polite notice -- in both official languages -- telling me that after I'd sent my bag on its way along the belt conveyor, someone with the Screening Officer Number of 5279, and with a closed circuit television as a witness, had rummaged through my luggage.

Stay safe! Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

I'd Rather Talk About Something Else, Thanks

Let's just get this out of the way now: yes, the video showing Rob Ford smoking *something* has been brought to light by virtue of the hard work and expert investigative skills of Toronto's finest. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to turn to more pressing matters along the lines of my mother's change hoarding habits, or the privileged lives of feral cats, or what is the most popular topic on this blog: my dad.

Accupressure for Loiterers

During the Mike Harris years, a ten-story former government building on the south-east corner of the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley was converted into a condo. The street-level retail space is occupied by the bank that assures us that we're richer than we think. 

The condo conversion included cladding the building exterior with slabs of polished granite, even along the surface of the exterior ledge under the first floor windows. For many years this slick smooth ledge afforded the tired, homeless and incapacitated a place to hang out, sleep and do other things.

Recently, workmen installed bumpy metal strips on the ledge. 
  

The ledge, just after installation.

The ledge, the very next day.

More About Smelly Trees

A couple of years ago, cutting across the Allan Gardens on my way home, I smelled something truly godawful just north and west of the south-east corner of the park. I assumed that someone had taken a dump in a flower bed. The horrible stench subsided eventually and, for another year, I did not encounter it again. But, the next fall, the horrible stink came back.

Yes, I picked this ginkgo nut up to arrange this shot; yes, my hands smelled very bad.

Driven to the Internet to test a hunch about a tree growing close to the path at that end of the Gardens, I learned that the fruit of female ginkgo trees comes encased in pulpy flesh that, depending on an individual's olfactory, smells like vomit, farts, rancid butter or poo. Some people complain about this; some cities cut the trees down; in Toronto, people carefully search among the grass and fallen leaves below the trees and take the fruit - a delicacy and a medicine - home.

The Fate of the Allan Gardens Agave Spike

The stalk is gone; the glass pane repaired; the fate of the bulbils unknown. Come back in 70 years and we can talk again.

My last shot of the spike.

One week later.

Now, This Guy Probably Did Lose His Job

Around 6:00 p.m. on Thursday night, I was walking south along the highrise canyon on Bay Street just south of Wellesley. It was warm, but very windy. I could hear a loud, strange sound which I could not immediately place, but it reminded me of the noise a hoist rope makes when the wind drives it against a flag pole. It was dark, so I couldn't really place the noise, but I guessed it had something to do with the window-washing platform resting on the sidewalk at the foot of a highrise. It was an incredible racket and I wondered if anyone was going to do something about it.

Just behind the blue car: the window washing platform. You can also just barely see the rope.

The next morning I confirmed what I had supposed. Someone had lowered the window washing platform from the roof fifty stories above and left it there so that the ropes, in the high winds that blew all night, could lash against the side of the building. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Persistence of Memory

My mother made me believe from an early age that there were riches undiscovered in small change. She collected coins - as in they would come her way through everyday commerce and rather than having them move on to the next person, she would put them into piggy banks. This was one of her ways of saving money. 

Mom believed there was always the prospect that a coin both valuable and rare would find its way into pocket change. If all else failed, time would turn those thin disks of copper and silver (before 1968) into wealth untold.

In 1973, just before we moved to Trenton from our home in Edmonton, I helped mom and dad impose order on the chaos of collected coins in the house. They dumped banks full of pennies onto a card table set up in the living room and we counted and rolled, counted and rolled - sorting the pennies by the year they were minted - for what seemed like hours. 

I surprised both my parents and myself by how engrossing I found this task. They beguiled the tedium by discussing politics. And as I turned the messy piles of pennies into tidy, uniform rolls, I absorbed every word, my concentration perfectly split between their conversation and my counting to fifty.

Many years later, after Mom died, my sisters and I found some of those rolls of pennies, about fifteen dollars' worth, in a box. I took possession of the pennies and promised my sisters I would take them to someone who could tell us if there was treasure buried there.

Turns out not. Just 30 rolls of pennies that were worth quite a lot more when they were rolled than when we found them.

Nowadays banks and grocery stores have machines that will sort loose change. But I still roll my own, an idle pass time that masquerades as being productive. When I do roll the loose change that accumulates in a small dish in our home office, the trace of the memory of my parents' long ago conversation bubbles forward and I will find myself musing about present day politics. 

It's a small irony that the federal government has discontinued the penny.

The photo is of one of my mother's piggy banks. I didn't keep the pennies, but I kept one of her treasure rooms. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

The Extraction Crew News

At about 7:45 this morning, this nice group of people smiled and posed for a photo just before heading out to climb 1776 stairs in support of the United Way. Of these six, only two - me and the woman at the far left of the shot - had ever climbed before. Despite my being a veteran of two previous climbs - in 2009 and 2011 - my promise to my team was that I would take longer to climb than any of them. 

I kept my promise.  

In the photo I'm wearing the shirt I got after my very first time up the tower, with a climb time recorded on the back of 33 minutes, 26 seconds. As climb times go, it's a few minutes longer than average. Talented climbers can do the whole 144 flights in less than half of that. My former boss used to boast that he'd once done the climb in fourteen minutes. 

He doesn't do that now.

My climb time in 2011 was slower than in 2009. That t-shirt says 36 minutes and 37 seconds. 

The t-shirt from today says 33 minutes, 32 seconds.

If this inspiring story of human endurance and fussy time keeping makes you think you'd like to support the efforts of my team, you can still make a donation. Just click here. 

Oh, right. The post title. Who is the Extraction Crew? They're the group of paramedics who identified themselves on the landing of the 26th level as they radioed to another crew that two climbers had gone far enough and needed help getting out of the tower.

Good to know the Extraction Crew is on the job. Maybe I don't need to retire right away after all.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Renovations

Around thirty years ago, Bruce's parents built a house in a suburb on the outskirts of Waterloo, Ontario.

Over the years, the house got to be too big and too much work, so they sold it and moved into an apartment in Kitchener.

The guy who bought the house likes to renovate and resell properties. He saw a lot of potential in Bruce's parents' place.

This is what it looked like on March 21, 2009, when Bruce and I got married there:

You can see in the picture most of the living room / dining room. The den is off to the left in the picture. You can see the colonial-style light fixtures over the dining room table and in the hall behind Bruce. 

The house was a two bedroom bungalow with a big, bright kitchen and a den with a fireplace. Two good-sized bedrooms were down the hall. The house also had a huge, unfinished basement with every bit as much square footage below stairs as on the main floor.

It looks a little different now. 

The original kitchen has been divided into a laundry room ...

... and a small home office with a window that used to sit over the sink in the kitchen.

The new kitchen is built in what was once the den. The reno guys added a door opening out to the back yard and closed in the fireplace. The kitchen counter is about where Bruce's aunt and uncle are sitting - on his right - in the photo above of our wedding.

The back yard has been transformed with a large multi-tier deck...

... the huge fir tees have had their bottom branches trimmed. Black mulch fills the space where bunnies used to hide.

What was once the hall closet has been closed in from the side that used to be on the right when you walked in the front door, and is now part of the ensuite in the master bedroom, which used to be the guest bedroom.

The old master bedroom, former ensuite, former guest bathroom and part of the old den have transmogrified into two bedrooms with a shared "Jack and Jill" bathroom. No, really, that's what the renovation guy called it.

The whole basement used to look like this:

Now most of it looks like this:

The former two bedroom, two bathroom bungalow now has three baths and four bedrooms, but, when you walk through the front door, there's no place to put your coat.

Thanks for reading! Stayed tuned for a special Sunday post-CN-tower-climb edition of This Week's Picture!

Karen

Turtles and Cats

On a pretty Sunday morning in September, Bruce and I walked around in the Don River Valley until we found the Brickworks (hint: the most direct route on foot is NOT by way of the footbridge that crosses the river by Riverdale Park, which puts you on the wrong side of the river).

The Brickworks has everything you would want in a public space.

It's green.   

That little bob in the water in the middle of the shot is a turtle.
Even harder to see than the turtle are the many, many small fish in the water.

It's historic. Below, mounted on the outside wall of one of the old buildings, is a photo of the Toronto skyline, Maddeningly, the date the photo was taken is not shown. However, it is dated by the writing style of the picture caption, which says: "The sky-soaring pen of building construction dips its trowel-like nib in the bottomless well of Don Valley Products and records in enduring masonry their claim to the ever-changing skyline of this Canadian Manhattan." They just don't write them like that any more. 



The presence of the brickworks also proves that there's some things that will always be true - such as, when you build something in a river valley, there will be floods.

Here's the Brickworks after Hurricane Hazel:

Here's the Brickworks after the July 8, 2013 flood.

Photo credit: YoungeStreet

Something else we saw that same day revealed another perennial truth: cats will ensure humans see to their needs. 

These happy cats - with soft beds and clean dishes full of food and water, have made themselves at home on the steps of derelict houses slated for demolition on Glen Road. 

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CN Tower Climb Update

I wish to extend my thanks to my readers who have made a pledge to my fundraising campaign that will culminate in probably the longest climb time ever in the history of the CN Tower. I'm also glad to know who's reading my blog! Thanks!

The big day is October 20. There's still time to donate. Here's a link to my site.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week! 

Karen

Strange Coincidences

It is not just famous athletes who retire, return, retire and return again.

In the footsteps of greats like Magic Johnson and Rocky Balboa, I have also returned to the sport of gritting my teeth, grabbing the rail and hauling myself up 1776 stairs to raise money for the United Way.

As has been so much the case these past few months, this turn of events is all the fault of my former boss. He has climbed the CN tower so many times they have a chair in the lobby with his name on it. Because I now do what he used to, evidently that extends to CN Tower climbs. I hope it stops there.

This will be my third time and, I solemnly swear, my last. When I climbed the tower in 2011, I raised $2,500 to provide services to people who really need our help. That's my fundraising target for this year, too. Here's the link to my site. Thanks for your support!

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Everyone remembers "Gus," the xylaria polymorpha growing in my back yard. Here's a picture of another Gus, the Boston terrier pup who has just moved in with a colleague of mine. He gets walked twice a day by a person who doubles as a wedding photographer and who sees a strong resemblance.

Thanks for reading!  Have a great week!

Karen