Body Heat

Photo Credit: Mitsi Krzywicki

Even though the last half block is a bit harrowing, I've been walking the whole way to work most days this week. The temperature, with the wind chill, has been in the minus twenty five to minus thirty range. The walk is just under two kilometres, takes about fifteen to twenty minutes and, according to the government of Canada, poses a moderate risk that I'll freeze my nose off.

I dress warmly of course and have noted every day as I've walked over the freeze-dried sidewalks and crunching snow that it's not the clothes that keep me warm. I keep me warm. The clothes just make it easier. 

There's nothing like extreme cold to make you very aware of, grateful for and amazed by your own body heat. Without doubt the body takes some measure of what the conditions are and adjusts accordingly. When the cold snap began, I could not keep my hands warm in my gloves. By Friday this week, my hands were keeping themselves warm just fine.

How cool is that?

Why I Love Working at the Ministry of the Environment

On Thursday this week while I was on a teleconference with some people out at our science lab, one of them mentioned there was a sun dog in the sky. From where I was inside a monolithic wing of the Queen's Park complex, I couldn't see it at that time. 

But later that day, as the sun settled in the west, our intern came up to a bunch of us and said, "You can see the sun dog now." Then, as one, ten serious, highly-trained professionals, most of them with multiple university degrees, jumped from their desks to go to the window and see the rainbow colours of light reflected off of ice particles in the sky.

Molly's post this week is another meditation on winter.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Mishaps

Suddenly and without warning Apple reached out and told me my life would not be complete without the new Mavericks operating system for my Mac. So I did the only thing I could do. I welcomed it, all unawares, into my home. 

I'm in my sixth hour of downloading, installing, updating and iclouding the contents of my computer.

So you're all getting a rerun today. I wrote the following on Sunday October 19 2008. I called it 40,000 Car Crashes. Enjoy.

This Saturday a.m. was possibly the most perfect autumn morning in the history of the world. The sky was clear blue.  The sun warmed the chill edge off the gentle breeze.  The trees in Allen Gardens were a brilliant mix of gold, orange, red and stalwart unchanged green. I walked through the gardens on my way to shop onChurch Street. I had company coming for lunch and was thinking happy thoughts about what I was going to buy to feed my guests. I had just come out of the dappled shade of the north west end of the park and was walking toward the intersection of Carlton and Jarvis Streets.

A small red car westbound on Carlton didn’t seem to notice the red light and T-boned at high speed a grey van half-way through a left hand turn in the middle of the intersection.  There was a horrible bang and a gigantic splash of pulverized car bits that caught the early morning sun and made a glorious aura around the shocking sight. Hit with such force, the grey van bounced out of the intersection and slammed into one or more cars on the eastbound side of Carlton.

“Oh my god!” I said, a time or two, not really adding much. 

There were quite a few people at the intersection (mercifully, there were no pedestrians in the middle of the mayhem) most of whom had cell phones and were already calling for help.  The rest were checking on the health of the people in the vehicles.

The fellow in the red car, the one who’d caused this mess, was stunned but unbloodied – his seat belt was on; his air bags deployed – and was sitting in the warm embrace of shock in his vehicle that was 50% shorter than it had been mere moments before.  The front end wasn’t just smashed; it was practically atomized by the force of the collision.

There was nothing I could do, so I went and did my shopping.

Half a block from the terrible, horrible scene, the world was still bright and sunny and every person I saw was untouched, unconcerned and unaware of the awfulness less than 100 metres away. 

I, on the other hand, was really badly shaken. As I walked away from the scene, I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t burst into tears. I felt I needed to hold my head. I heard sirens before I got to the store and I hoped the people in the vehicles would be OK.

Twenty minutes later, I returned home the way I came so I could walk back into the scene of the accident. All the people in the vehicles had been taken away. Just the ruined cars remained to snarl traffic and impede the progress of streetcars. Firemen had spread sand on the street to trap gasoline from someone’s shattered gas tank.   

I wondered if there had been other witnesses who had really seen how it happened. All you have to do is look away for half a second and you miss things like this – they happen so fast. I really had seen the whole thing. At least I was very sure who had been at fault.

So, I approached a policeman and told him what I saw. I gave him my name and phone number. I was afraid I was going to have to stay, or “go downtown” like they do on the TV shows and not be able to feed my guests. But he just said thanks and let me go on my way.

I’ve seen at least 40,000 car crashes on TV and in movies and, so I’ve heard, your brain doesn’t really distinguish between the make believe and the real.

Yes it does.

Drive careful.

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Here's a picture of Molly when she was a puppy.

You can read Molly's post today here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Advanced Level Pedestrianism

Bruce and I spent New Years in Belleville, so we missed Toronto's New Years celebrations. 

Based on what's readily available on the Internet, the photos below represent the finest moments of the New Year.

Photo Credit: National Post

Rob Ford found one person still willing to have their picture taken with him.

Photo Credit: Guangming Online

And a bunch of mostly naked people (including one who recently had major surgery - check out the scar on the belly of the guy in the black trunks) threw themselves into Toronto Harbour. 

The biggest star of the season was the weather. First the December 21 ice storm and then the polar vortex.

As mentioned last post, what Bruce and I suffered from the ice storm was nothing compared to others. On the other hand, the sudden plunge into tremendous cold from the polar vortex after a mild day or two in Toronto tested to their limits our skills as pedestrians.

Skill One: Know Your Tools and Use Them Properly

For this skill, I had a short seminar before the vortex came. On January 2, we were still on holiday and I'd spent the day working on the dog's blog. But, I wanted to go to yoga, so I'd registered a spot for the 5:45 class. The studio's normally a thirty minute walk from here, but I gave myself a little extra time because the Weather Network told me it was 26 below with the wind chill. 

I piled three layers of clothes on me, doubled the number of socks I normally wear, put on my honkin' Sorels, my hat, my gloves and headed out assuming that I had fairly matched my winter gear with the weather.  

Halfway to the studio, at the corner of Church and Wellesley, I hailed a cab because I knew I would otherwise die before I made it to yoga.

In this lesson, the tool I failed to use properly was the subway. 

Skill Two: Know Your Centre of Gravity

I knew a guy in undergrad who'd come from Malaysia to Waterloo get a degree in business. Having grown up in a warm climate, he never completely comprehended the cold in Canada. He'd step out in sub-zero weather in a summer-weight jacket. And he never learned to walk in the snow. He did, however, have a knack for falling right. I'd watch him fall and pick himself up three or four times before he'd gone a block. I assume he thought this was how everyone got around in Canada in the snow.

Growing up in Winnipeg and Edmonton, I got my snow legs at an early age. The same way someone practiced at it doesn't even think about how to shift gears on a standard transmission car, a seasoned snow walker doesn't keep at top of mind the signals and responses required to stay upright. 

The key signal is the loss of traction; the response is a shorter stride. The less traction, the shorter the stride. Keeping sight of your centre of gravity is fundamental to keeping your feet when you're walking on ice.

Unless it's windy.

On January 6, the powerful cold that came down from the arctic brought with it winds gusting to more than fifty kilometres per hour. Bay Street acts as a kind of accelerator for these winds. This is where I was standing, shortly after five p.m. on Monday afternoon. I was very well dressed against the cold, but the ice underfoot everywhere was forcing baby-step progress. I was waiting for the light to change and standing on a zero-friction surface. The wind caught my heavy, large handbag which acted as a kind of sail. 

The headline flashed before my eyes: Fifty-Something Woman Killed By Handbag: Dragged Beneath Wheels of Car.  

Happily that did not happen, but it was a near thing I'll tell you.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Resolutions

Photo Credit: Kevan MacRow

Open House Overview

Twenty guests came to the open house on December 29 and ate and conversed heartily.

As you can see, the place was fairly festively decked out. 

In case you're wondering, this took hours to put together, minutes to take apart.

Photo Credit: Kevan MacRow

The little hemlock sported a few extra baubles this year.

Photo Credit: Kevan MacRow

Photo Credit: Kevan MacRow

Inside, there was lots to eat and drink. 

Referring to the notes I made for last year's party, I reprised the salsa, guacamole and onion dip, and made rather than bought the hummus. Something new on the cheese board was a fig and olive tapenade, without the garlic and walnuts in the recipe, because I felt there was enough garlic already in the dips and I forgot about the walnuts. Another recipe I would try again is Festive Nuts, but never mind about the dried cherries; they don't add a thing.

My caterer from last year - Tiffinday - was closed for the holidays, so I went with everyone's contingency plan, President's Choice. These were remarkably good. I wouldn't hesitate to use these again the next time I'm in a pinch for decent hors d'oeuvres. 

Party Fashion Update

In the photo below, the busy hostess appears to be checking her party app on her iPad to make sure everything is in order before the guests arrive. In fact, I'm playing Yahtzee, or maybe Scrabble.

The dress should look familiar. It's really the only dress I buy anymore: a Holly Boatneck from Pam Chorley's Fashion Crimes on Queen West. I wore an unpolka-dotted version at the Amethyst Awards, and an off-white lace-covered version at my wedding.

Photo Credit: Kevan MacRow

What Was that You Said About Resolutions???

Right. New Year's Resolutions. For almost two years now, I have been trying to finish the blog I started about Molly the Dog. The last time I published a post was in July 2013. This year I resolve to change all that. I have about ten more posts to make before the sequence of stories is done. I will finish all ten in the next few weeks and publish one a week until the whole story of our silly little dog is told. 

If you haven't already seen it, the opening post to Molly's blog is here. And today's post can be found here.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Land Of Ice And Snow

Photo credit: Alfred Ng

Our small corner of Sherbourne Street survived the ice storm almost completely unscathed. We never lost power. The one small casualty was a teeny fuse in the adapter on the power cord to our modem. Surges that made it past the surge "protector" fried the poor little thing, leaving us bereft of wifi for about two days.

The Christmas miracle in our household was the prompt, cheerful, helpful service we got from Bell Canada in the face of our small crisis. Along with my wifi, my faith in humanity is restored.

Per the photo above, taken by local artist and photographer Alfred Ng, some trees in the Allan Gardens fell apart under the weight of the ice. Based on my count as I walked through the gardens the morning after the storm, somewhere between two and three dozen photographers recorded the casualties.

As sad as we were about the fate of some of the nice old trees in the Gardens, we were most interested in the seventy-foot-tall honey locusts in our back yard.

Photo Credit: CBC

But they were well trimmed and protected from the wind, so hardly a single branch fell.

We were very fortunate indeed. I wish even greater measures of luck to my subscribers for the balance of 2013 and all of 2014.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading.

Karen 

  

Solstice

It's 21 December, the shortest day of the year. 

Coming up next will be, for me, the longest week of the year with lots of things to do to feed various hordes of people and make the place look festive.

I offer for this week's post a re-run from February 2010, a reminder that there are connections among us we may not see, but that come in handy when you're doing your taxes.

******************************************************

On Monday night Bruce, our friend Angie and I were heading home for a nightcap after a nice meal out. We were down by the St. Lawrence Market on Front Street. We'd just turned the corner onto George Street. It was dark, cold and I was hunched inside my winter coat.

In the darkness, on the street, I thought I saw something in the gutter that struck me as strange. I was walking briskly along, so I was already twenty feet past the thing when I thought, "What was that? Was that a face??"

Had I seen a face in the gutter? "That's not right," I thought. So I stopped, turned on my heel and went back to see. Bruce and Angela weren't immediately aware that I’d broken ranks and were wandering away in the other direction on the sidewalk.

They realised I wasn't with them about the same time I got back to the strange thing in the gutter. It was a face. Betty Boop's to be exact. It was a beaded change purse. I picked it up.

Angie said "Ewwwww, what are you picking up out of the gutter?" 

My answer, when I'd had a better look was, "Credit cards, health card... all kinds of stuff."

I decided to take the purse home and see if I could contact the owner. Once home, I got online and reverse searched the address on the owner's driver's license to get her phone number. I called and got her answering machine, but she picked up after I'd explained why I was calling.

"You've got to be kidding," she said. When I'd convinced her that I really had no other reason to just call her up, she said she'd be right by to pick it up. I gave her my address and told her I'd be waiting for her.

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. The owner had come with her partner, just in case, I assume. The purse had simply fallen out of her pocket after she'd run some errands on George Street. It was handy I'd found it because she was flying out to Ireland the following day, and it would have been very hard to manage without her credit cards.

I gave her the purse. She offered me a reward. I said "thanks, but there's no need. Why don't you give the money to the food bank or something?" She said she'd do that. I wished her a nice trip, closed the door and they went away.

That's the first story about how oddly things align sometimes. Now for the second.

On Tuesday night, I took my first crack at my tax return. Every year when I do my taxes online, I write down my user name so I won't forget for the next year... and then I forget where I wrote it down.

I forgot this year, of course, and requested the online system to e-mail me my user name.

When I hit the "Send/Receive" button on my e-mail so I could retrieve my user name and do my taxes, I noted, to my dismay, that I was about to receive more than 3,000 e-mails.

This happens sometimes with Bell. Some glitch in the system tags every e-mail in my account on their server as undelivered, so the server tries to send thousands of messages at one time. Because it can never send them all successfully, every time I contact the server the system tries to send them all again. Long and short of it, after several attempts to clear the glitch I had over 9,000 "unread" messages in my inbox, but still didn't have my user name to do my taxes.

Bell, for its part, provides only the appearance of customer service. They encourage you to call their "24/7" technical support line so that you can hear the recorded message that their offices are now closed. They want you to log onto their live chat service so you can sit for twenty minutes staring at a message that says you're second in line and need wait only one more minute. They provide numerous means to send them e-mail messages so they can ignore them all.

This was driving me crazy. I couldn't get any e-mail because Bell kept trying to send me every e-mail I'd ever been sent for the past three years.  No one at Bell was going to help me.  And I didn't know how to solve the problem.

Then, on Thursday morning when the alarm went off, I got out of bed, put on my slippers, walked down the stairs to the "office", turned on my computer, logged onto the internet, and Googled "Bell Mail." When I got to the Bell Mail site, I logged onto my account. There they were - 3,442 e-mails - with a helpful message from Bell that I had "storage issues." I wiped all the old e-mails off the system and, when I called up my Outlook e-mail and hit "Send/Receive" I got only those e-mails sent to me since Tuesday. Problem solved. Now I get to do my taxes (hooray!).

But how did I know how to do this? Bruce suggested that I had done some "good thinking," but I assured him I had not been "thinking" at all. I'm not sure I was even entirely awake.

What made me take another look in the gutter on Monday night? What "tech support for the collective unconscious" told me what to do on Thursday morning? 

Beats the holy heck out of me. But I really hope that lady makes that donation to the food bank.

Thanks for reading! Have a safe and happy holiday!

The Real Me

First things first. For the information of subscribers for whom I do not have a current e-mail address and who are looking for something fun to do over the holidays, you are invited to:

Bruce and Karen's 

"Stay in Shape for the Holidays"*

Festive Season Open House

Where: #2 - 280 Sherbourne Street, Toronto

When: Sunday December 29, 2-6 p.m.

*The "Stay in Shape" theme has a lot of people quite worried but there is no cause for alarm. All we mean by it is that you can drop by and, between Christmas and New Years, keep your eating and drinking skills honed.

It's quiet at the office this time of year. The legislature has risen, inducing diminished anxiety levels above my head so the frenzy of e-mails and phone calls has all but stopped. Many people have taken their vacations before the winter break so the hallways are comparatively clear of scurrying bureaucrats looking to give me and my team more work.

The usual austerity measures (at least for those of us who don't work for the local power authority) apply, so, while we have fewer pressures on our time, the team still needs to have holiday season fun on the cheap.

This week we did this by sharing profiles of ourselves featuring avatars from South Park, Mad Men and other applications (I note in passing that the only term in current English to have fallen further from its original meaning than icon is avatar). 

As the only true baby boomer left on the staff, I eschewed South Park and explored my options on Mad Men. Here's how it turned out:

But, everyone else's South Park avatars were so funny, I have decided to give it a try.

I hope to see everyone at my party. Who knows, I might even get a hair cut.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen