Greyhound Rescue

A point of clarification: My sister Kim is not posing with "rescued" greyhounds. These are retired greyhounds that have been adopted by my cousin Susan. They are sweet, docile and friendly dogs; even though Kim's expression might make you think otherwise.

The weather's been pleasant in Toronto these days - good summer weather, warm, but not blistering or so muggy you can't stand to be outside.

So I was enjoying my walk home from work the other afternoon. I was just past the southwest corner of Sherbourne and Gerrard when I saw fifty metres or so down the sidewalk a light-beige-coloured greyhound pelting towards me.

It had no leash, no apparent accompanying human. But that was so unthinkable I believed with every fibre of my being that this dog was not running at high speed toward a busy intersection without someone who cared about it close by.

As it sped past me, I had to wonder.

So I turned to look back at the intersection.

The dog continued to run, full speed, into the road.

At that point, as I am wont to do, I started shouting "oh my God" and ran the few steps back to the corner.

Traffic was bad that afternoon. Construction on nearby streets had squeezed six or seven times the normal number of cars onto Sherbourne. 

Just as the light was turning red for north/south traffic, one last, frazzled driver gunned his vehicle through a quick left turn, right when the dog was in the intersection.

It was a bad moment.  

By some miracle the car did not hit the dog.

By another, the greyhound stopped its merry run toward an uncertain future, turned around as the light changed and placidly walked back across the street along with a small crowd of people.

As they approached me on the corner, I interrogated each of them.  

"Is that your dog?" 

"No," they all said.

The greyhound walked almost at heel with a denizen of the neighbourhood, a man with bags of picked bottles hanging from his arms.

I asked him if the dog were his. He said "no," too.

The dog was unaccompanied and needed help. I grabbed it by its collar.

I checked for tags. There were none. As I resumed my walk home, with the dog, the small plans forming in my head were that I'd call the Humane Society and the City Animal Control office to see if anyone had reported a lost greyhound. 

The thought also occurred that this might be the way to get a dog for Bruce in his retirement.

I was twenty metres or so south of the intersection when a man in a white SUV nestled in the unmoving grip of northbound traffic called to me. He said he'd seen the dog escape from the yard of a house about halfway down the block. 

I thanked him. His helpful tip reminded me that I had seen the dog before. It lived in one of the renovated Victorian houses just north of my townhouse. So that would be the first place I'd look for the dog's owner.

At that moment, I could see a young woman step onto the sidewalk just about where the dog's house was. She was obviously agitated, looking from side to side frantically, her phone in her right hand.

She saw me and the dog. I waved slightly at her and she came running toward us. 

I was happy to be party to the young woman's relief and give her back her dog. But I could not resist telling her how narrowly the worst had been avoided.

"He was almost hit by a car," I said over her many thank you's, "you have to be more careful." 

That satisfied me, but not the guy with the bags of bottles. He was right there and gave her a long lecture about the responsibilities of dog ownership and watching out for your pets. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Big Week - The Lost Edition

Equilibrium: June 27 2018

Equilibrium: July 13 2018

This is my second attempt at this blog post. The first time, this morning, when I thought I had everything about where I wanted it, I noticed that a photo caption was in the wrong font size.

I tried to change it, but it wouldn't budge.

I dove into the html function on the blog site, which I do not understand at all, but can make work if I poke at it cautiously.

This time I poked too hard. I removed one innocuous-seeming font command and wiped out the whole post (phooey). 

Could not get it back (dammit). 

Wrote it off as a bad job (wasn't that good).

Went and got my hair cut (trying a new style - sorta like a mushroom). 

Prepared lunch for company (charcuterie and cheese - it's too hot to cook). 

After lunch, dropped some dead batteries and household hazardous waste off at the "Environment Day" at Allan Gardens and picked up some compost for the garden.

Made reservations for supper at a restaurant near the Bell Lightbox theatre where we're going to go see Sorcerer tonight.

And now, all my other chores are done and I have no excuse so I should be able to get back to the blog post that blew up on me this morning.

But I can't. 

I made the mistake of using blog content to make lunch time conversation with someone who reads this blog. 

So, other than the completion of the soaring distraction, Equilibrium, at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton, I won't tell you why this was a big week. 

Come back next week. I'll try again. 

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Older Than It Looks

The slab-like mid-70's vintage twenty-three storey highrise on the southwest corner of Carlton and Jarvis Streets was once the Primrose Hotel. A family of falcons lived somewhere among the raised, illuminated, 3-metre-tall letters that spelled the hotel's name high on its eastern wall.

I imagined they lived in the second "R."

Some years ago, due to delays in the construction of student housing elsewhere, the University of Toronto took over the entire hotel and, as a temporary measure, turned it into student digs.

The change turned out not to be temporary.  Since 2015, the building has been The Parkside, a privately-owned residence for Ryerson, U of T, OCAD and George Brown University students. 

The falcons still hunt the Allan Gardens, though workmen removed the sign they lived in long ago. 

Now, something else is happening on the sunny side of the building.

I noticed this on the last day of the Pride weekend. I thought someone had screwed up, and started at the end of the celebration something that should have been completed at the outset. 

The rainbow bands are part of Toronto's next building-sized piece of art, joining the Phoenix in St. James Town and the thing-I-don't-have-a-word-to-describe up by Yonge and St. Clair. 

The new mural's called "Equilibrium", a work in progress.

New Media Reviews

I've been watching Scishow on YouTube for many months now. The videos feature well-spoken young people talking as fast as they can about science for four to fourteen minutes. I think the first one I watched was about how pain killers work. My all-time favourite is the one about memes. They are terrific. If you have never seen them, you should check them out. 

The oldest things in my house: a 400 million year old trilobite fossil and a 16 million year old mosasaur tooth, both excavated in what is now Morocco, purchased in support of Scishow at Scishow Finds.

Because I'm old, I edge my way slowly into new-fangled ways of transmitting information. Take podcasts for example. I never listened to them. Couldn't see the point. 

Then a friend of mine told me about Gilbert Gottfried's podcast. So I loaded an app on my phone and tried it.

Gottfried's show didn't grab me, but the app pushed a bunch of others my way, including Pod Save America, which, if you can stand the non-stop barrage of all-American-end-of-the-worldism all the time, has some things to commend it.

Nothing tops Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, though. It's the way podcasts should be done. Listen to The Prime Minister and the Prof (or the King of Tears) and see if you can resist listening to all three seasons. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

The Wait Is Over

Never-before-seen photo of my maternal grandparents
on their wedding day in 1920(?) in Poland:
Emma Schmidt and Bruno Lohse

My American Cousin

A person I've never met and still would not be able to pick out of a crowd e-mailed me this past week. She and her dad and her uncle match a portion of my DNA, which I have made available for all to see on 23andMe.

She thought we might be related, so she asked for some information.

I gave her what I knew of my mother's father, the deeply mysterious Bruno Lohse, who, other than a notice of his death in the paper and a record of his son Alfred being wounded at Dieppe, had left no trace of his tenure on the planet that I could find.

She sent me some photos, including the ones above and below, showing the members of a comfortable-looking bourgeois family. According to her, the Lohses had a textile factory, destroyed in WWI, in Alexandroff, Poland.

Bruno had five siblings. He was the youngest. His oldest brother, Reinhold, landed in Ellis Island, with a new name - Loos - in 1903 when he was 23 years old. Reinhold was my contact's great-grandfather. He was twelve years older than Bruno.

Bruce's Last Day On The Job

Bruce's stellar career came to an end on Thursday June 28, after 35 years, 7 months and 22 days at the Canadian Tax Foundation.

Holy cow. Bruce and I have been together for a long time.

Doug Ford's First Day On The Job 
  
I get ridiculous pleasure from being right about how some political decisions turn out. Amid the massive cloud of speculation around Doug Ford's cabinet, I had said that Vic Fideli would likely get a big, shiny portfolio like Minister of Finance.

I was right.

I'd like to make another prediction: the massive cost in political capital and actual dollars of cancelling cap and trade will be Ford's signal out-of-the-gate mistake.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Canada Day!

Karen
  

Social License

One of 1,864: off shore from Kingston, a Thousand Island

Once in Toronto after my long weekend in Winnipeg, I hopped on a train to Kingston to the Duncan Gordon Conference Centre, which I blogged about four years ago.

In 2014, I attended a two-week course there, billed as "executive training." Readers may recall that all I got from that experience was a case of shingles.  

This week, I went to CAMPUT's intensive energy regulation course for members and staff of energy panels across the country (for the benefit of subscribers, those include the British Columbia Utilities Commission, the Manitoba Public Utilities Board and the Ontario Energy Board). 

The course has been held every year for the past fourteen years. I went because one of my managers told me it would be a quick way to understand how energy policy gets implemented.

He was right. The course was terrific. My one regret is that I missed the first day because of the long commute from Winnipeg.

Shy

While I am glad not to be at the Ministry of the Environment - especially since the election - I struggle with the transition to my new role. 

I don't know anybody in the energy sector. After twenty years in the environment gig, I could walk into a room, no matter how big, and know just about everyone in it. I used to be the person who went around to the newbies and introduced myself to make them feel a bit more at home. Now I'm the one looking for just one familiar face - just one - so I can be spared the agony of being alone in a sea of strangers. 

I am fundamentally an introverted person. Talking to strangers is something I've learned to do, not love to do. So this past week was a lot of work. I spent most of my spare time in my room recharging the batteries in my devices and in my head. 

Madame Chair

Thursday was "moot court" day at the course. We had to pretend to hold a hearing. The issue was whether or not TransCanada Pipelines could recover the costs of its move from Toronto to swanky offices in Calgary from the "rate payer", which is to say its customers - people like you and me.

We were separated into groups representing the different parties before the National Energy Board. I was in the group representing the Board itself. Our group had to pick our roles. Three were to be the panel. Three were to be board counsel. I wanted to be on the panel and said so. Because I volunteered so quickly, my group nominated me to be the chair of the panel. 

At that point, I became "Madame Chair." The low stakes of our play acting made this funny, and we riffed on the joke for the rest of the course, even as I bade farewell to some folks from the Ontario Energy Board when our train arrived in Toronto on Friday afternoon.

I've had worse nicknames.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Monumental

Kim at the foot of the RCAF monument, Waterfront Drive, Winnipeg

It's not that I ignore infrastructure in Toronto. I just get so used to seeing it day after day after day that it fades from my notice.

In a fresh environment, I am more aware of the effort that's been made to make a space something notable, as with Waterfront Drive in Winnipeg. 

Kim and Carol ham it up in front of the inukshuk in Lily's Garden, Waterfront Drive.

There are multiple trails and spots of interest along Winnipeg's showcase avenue, and a ball park, children's playgrounds, the suspension pedestrian bridge to St. Boniface - with the Forks historical site on the one end and Fort Douglas Park at the other. 

Graffiti on a big old train trellis

The suspension bridge

Bugs on the bridge 

We missed one monument. 

A tragic boating accident in 1963 took the lives of my mother's brother - my Uncle Ernie - and his youngest son - my cousin Robbie.

They were buried in Elmwood cemetery, a four minute drive (or twenty minute walk) from our hotel. 

The cemetery's grave search function on its web site gave us the section and plot number. After about half an hour of searching and kicking clean the surfaces of overgrown grave markers, we ascertained the spot where they must be, although no stone was there.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Human Rights

Mahatma and me: Kim, who took this picture,
wouldn't let me make bunny ears behind his bronze head.

Our major stop today - besides the Scots Memorial by the Red River and the obligatory stroll through the Forks Market - was the vast, impressive, bunker-like, window-clad corkscrew that is the Human Rights Museum.

The exterior owes a lot to Gehry. The entry is very like the way into a bomb shelter. 

Inside, it's a Piranesi prison.

Two Perspectives 

The museum from our hotel:

Our hotel from the museum:

There Really is a Scots Monument

The Last Thing I Expected to See in A Museum

That would be a prominent picture of someone I knew in a significant moment in the history of human rights in Canada:

This is Anne Mitchell. I worked for her when she was the Executive Director of the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy. I thought her background was in international development; I had no idea she was an anti-apartheid crusader in Canada. 

And here's the whole photo: Anne and Joe Clark and Margaret Trudeau(?).

Thanks for reading!

Karen