Category: Personal

You do see some strange things around Toronto. I’ve got three to report:

1) While I was moving in furniture and driving along John St. to Queen West, the car was swarmed by about 40 skateboarders, many in punk-esque white shirts and skinny ties. They stopped in the intersection, shook their boards in the air (like Critical Mass), lay on the ground and did fake midair ollies, and then took off. Strangely synchronized…

2) The morning after Nuit Blanche, Zhan, Ed, Michelle and I were having brunch at Cora’s… and saw Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) two booths down from us. Surprising that he goes for $10 brunch…

3) Paul and I were walking past Trinity-Bellwoods and saw a sack sitting next to the sidewalk. When people walked by, the sack would start yelling at them, and poke out a few puppets. Mostly, it was just surprising to find out that someone was inside the sack…

And, of course, Nuit Blanche itself – two weeks ago, from 7pm to 7am there were dozens of art exhibits, performances and galleries open for entertainment. A lot of the events seem to be taking place in public pools, which was… uh… an unusual place to see art performances. Entertaining, although the quality wasn’t as high as I’d hoped. It was great to see hordes of people streaming around the streets at 3am on a cold, rainy night!

The photo on the right was one of the performances: “How to respond in the event of an emergency.” It was a long sequence, involving some faked fracas on the sidewalk, and then the arrival of two “police” officers who proceeded to tango. I like the randomness of the idea, and the way it messes with your expectations in a public space.

At the start of September, I moved into a new home in the West Queen West neighbourhood in Toronto, and I’m just starting to feel settled in that place. The first thing to know about my apartment is that it is genuinely tiny: 250 ft², including the bathroom. Knowing that, I left all my furniture in Vancouver and bought new, space-conserving items when I arrived. But trying to combine furniture shopping with a heavy class schedule proved challenging, and I didn’t finish the process until last weekend.

The building is big, and undergoing major renovations. My suite had just been renovated before I moved in, so I got nice new appliances, kitchen and bathroom, and a fresh coat of paint. But the half-renovated/half-unrenovated situation leads to an unusual demographic mix in the building: some hipster bachelors in units like mine, and some lower-income families in the larger unrenovated apartments. It can lead to strange encounters, like when Zhan came over and we passed an elderly Chinese man in his tighty-whities in the hall, taking his garbage over to the chute. But that’s the charm of urban living, I suppose.

For all that I espouse the values of density and urbanity, I’ve only actually lived downtown once in my life, while I was in Montreal in the summer of 2001. So far, I’m quite happy with swapping semi-suburban Vancouver living for urban Toronto. I haven’t really taken advantage of the colossal range of activities around me yet, but I do appreciate the quick commute, the wide variety of groceries, and being close to many friends. Before, it was always a trip out of my way if I wanted to pick up concert tickets at Zulu, find an obscure magazine on Commercial Drive, go to a movie, or attend a meeting at city hall. Now, those stops are always on my way to other activities, and ridiculously close to boot. And yes, I’ve sacrificed a lot of space. I managed to carve my micro-apartment into two pseudo-rooms, and I have to make my bed double as a couch, and my dining table double as a desk, but it’s liveable. My building has a green inner courtyard, and I’m right next to the spacious Trinity-Bellwoods park, so I’m not really giving up much in the way of green space. And yet, I’ll really miss jogging among the giant trees of Pacific Spirit park.

West Queen West is a pretty great district. In undergrad, my universe never really extended west of Bathurst, with a few exceptions like Little Italy. Now, the renovations at the Drake and the Gladstone have put West Queen West firmly on the map, and this artist’s community is bracing itself to be overrun by gentrification… I guess that’s my role. There are dozens of galleries out here, and plenty of workshops and weird restaurants mingling in the backstreets. I’m still trying to find a good cafe, but everything else I could want is right at hand.

I’m catching up on my last few weeks worth of events. I moved to Toronto at the start of the month, and spent the first week staying at my parents’ house. They’ve been looking after a friend’s dog (Javi) for the past few years, and Javi’s owner is opposed to spaying… so Javi had just had her fourth litter at the start of August. The last litter arrived last May, sired by a viszla hound, and my parents kept one dog from that litter, Shanti.

So, there were eight five-week old puppies in the house, and life was very hectic taking care of them all. This time the father was a husky, and the puppies look very husky-like since Javi’s also part husky. My parents were on a cycling vacation in Ireland, so I was spending several hours each day letting the puppies run around, and cleaning up after them.

On the upside they’re all ridiculously cute, and it’s fun showing them off to the dog fans who cluster around the house whenever the puppies are playing in the yard. The five biggest puppies have now gone to new homes, with the three smaller ones nursing for an extra week without competition from their larger siblings.

Check out the photos and the video.

Perhaps I should feel like a neglectful gardener, leaving this blog to shrivel up and die over the dry summer. But I don’t.

A quick summary of the highlights: undergrad classmates Zhan and Ed came out for a visit in July, which included a Whistler hike, and watching a Jeopardy winning friend take home a cool 50 grand. I visited London, England in late July to attend my high school friend Geoffrey’s wedding in Winchester. I met up with other old friends there: Rachel and Anna were at the wedding, and Jacqueline from Australia is working for the BBC in London now. Some vacation pictures are up on my Flickr page with more to come.

August flew by far too quickly. I was working like mad, and preparing for my move to Toronto. Most of my free time was spent visiting with various friends, old and new; I’ll miss them all. The rest of it went to working on a new website for the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition, which should be going up soon. The highlight of the summer was my brother’s wedding to the lovely Jasmine at the end of August. We had a great, debauched wilderness bachelor party near Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, polishing off an entire Texas mickey of rye and too much beer to count. The wedding itself was perfect in every way, with a great crowd of family and various friends.

My work at TransLink wrapped up well; I’ll put up a post later describing that work, once I’ve figured out what I can actually say in a public forum like this.

And now I’ve just landed in Toronto. I have a miniscule apartment waiting for me once the labour day weekend winds up. I found it over the Internet (yay, viewit! thanks to sabrina for putting me onto that tool) and Paul inspected it for me before taking it. I just took a look at the place from the outside last night, and it looks like a great building and a spectacular neighbourhood (Queen just west of Bathurst). Now I’m gearing up for a return to school and the completion of my career change: transportation planning, here I come.

Over and out. And maybe now that I’m back at the blog, I can develop a less boring and functional speaking style. But don’t count on it – I’m a bureaucrat now.