City in the Trees

Quiz Time!

2012-01-20T08:46:00.004-05:00

Q: Does the following headline date from 1967, 1990, 2012, 2025, or 2067?

Liberals vote to retain ties to monarchy, legalize marijuana

A: Yes.

Views of Six Points, etc.

2012-01-11T21:18:00.001-05:00

Views of, in order of appearance, the Distillery District, the downtown core as seen from the Gardiner Expressway, and Six Points and vicinity... courtesy of P-Doug and the new Canon PowerShot S100. :)

Six Points and new cameras

2012-01-10T20:17:00.000-05:00

It was sometime in September that frequent Trees flier Jim (hi, Jim--seeing as you're the only guy reading this thing) brought the Canon Powershot S100 to my attention, and said something to the effect that he'd be interested in it, perhaps after I bought it and tried it out. Well, Jim, whether you were serious, half-, or just joshin', it's come to pass.

I had thought perhaps to dip into the little pool of modest side savings I have deducted from my pay every month (not to be confused with RRSP contributions--that's 401K to you Yanks) in October. But it was, of course, right at the end of September that little Twinkle got sick, and mid-October when she died. Saddled as I was, and largely still am, with $14,000 in medical bills, I couldn't see my way clear.

But, I've reconsidered. The money is there; it won't speed up my repayment by much; and photography is one of my few hobbies. It's been about two years since I last hooked up with a new camera, and while the Sony HX5V does some jazzy things, I have to admit I've been disappointed in the image quality. Without good image quality, it really doesn't matter if your camera orbits the moon... you just have mushy, soft, JPG-artifact-laden images that have orbited the moon.

I was long a fan of Canon's PowerShot S80. I worked with that camera for two years and there was just something magic about it. The G9 that followed it was powerful but just a little too big. The W1 shoots 3D, but again, the image quality isn't all it might be. And the HX5V I've already pronounced on. I waited and waited for Canon to bring out the S90, but they didn't until a year and a half after I stopped waiting and bought the second hand G9. By then, there wasn't much point. Then came the S95. Now the S100, which is a really nice step up from them all.

I bought the S100 on January 3rd, after looking for low prices in town. To my amazement, for once, the Canadian price is in line with the US price. The lowest price I could find in Toronto (advertized) was $429, which is the low price I'm seeing quoted from US sources too. That place was out of stock and was saying "end of the month", so I turned to the next place, at $459. At the same time, I bought two non-Canon spare batteries for it, and a couple of memory cards at a nice discount... a 16GB class 10 SDHC for $40, and a blazing 32GB UHC for $130, both of them considerably marked down. Well, the 32GB was corrupt and didn't work. So I planned to bring it back and snag a couple of 32GB class 10s at $80 each, and pay the diff.

That happened last Saturday. I called up P-Doug and asked if he'd be interested in helping me shoot Six Points (more on that in a minute) and then going to Breyden's afterward. He was game, so I drove down, picked him up, and took him with me to the camera store on the edge of downtown. They were great. They took back the defective card and gave me the two I was after (oddly enough, the two 32GB class 6s they thought I wanted were about $100 more expensive than the class 10s! Explain that one to me...). So, we made the exchange, and this time, in the parking lot, we tried them both out, in the S100, the W1, and the HX5V. They all barfed on the second card (it even crashed the HX5V). So, back inside. They replaced that card, and we tried it out, and it was just fine. So now I have three class 10 SDHC cards; two 32GBs and one 16GB.

We mounted the W1 to the windshield and videoed our drive to Six Points in 3D. Six Points... well, it's a complicated intersection of three major roads (Bloor St., Dundas St., and Kipling Ave.) in the west end of Toronto, in Etobicoke. Until 1961 (or thereabouts), the road converged very close together, at grade. In '61 Metro rebuilt the intersection in a complicated fashion to keep the traffic going. Kipling was dropped to dive under bridges that sent Dundas over it. Bloor was broken off from itself, stopping dead on the west side of Kipling. And Dundas was forced to do double duty, carrying its own traffic, as well as Bloor's. An elegant solution, except for the ramps needed to connect Kipling to Dundas and Bloor. You need to be an owl to be able to see oncoming traffic when you're trying to merge, and the tie-ups and accidents have gained quite a reputation. So... Toronto's planning to rebuild the whole thing again and put it all back at grade, but now with Dundas Street swinging around far enough to the south that there's room for all the traffic.

Here's what Six Points looked like in 1947... (Bloor runs across, Kipling up and down, and Dundas diagonally upwards to the right.)

...here's what it looks like now (and, to some extent, how it's looked since 1961; the Westwood Theatre is the large, lonely building at the lower-centre-right)...

...and here's the plan for sometime around the middle of the decade. Bridges begone!

Also for the axe is the 50-something-year-old Westwood Theatre, blogged about last spring. I understand it's due to to be torn down this summer, but I think I've been hearing that every year for four or five years now. I was only ever in it once, in the mid-90s, to see A Goofy Movie with a friend visiting from the States, but still, I'll miss it. Dundas Street is going to be rerouted to go right through it.

Anyway, P-Doug and I drove a course I'd plotted through the intersection and several of its ramps to give people in the future the experience of what it was like, and in 3D, too. We parked in what used to be one of the entrances to the Westwood parking lot off Dundas, and I gave P-Doug the S100 to put through its paces. I shot 3D.

I'm really happy with the results. The interesting shots he took notwithstanding, the image quality is superb. P-Doug kept praising how wide angle the lens was, and it does come in at 24mm, which is still fairly generous among P&S cameras even now. At that end, there's a pronounced fisheye effect in the CR2 raw images, but it's wonderfully compensated for in the JPG conversions, both inside the camera in using Photoshop, which has included the algorithms for the S100's raw format in its latest update to its camera raw plug-in (6.6, I believe).

The image below shows what I'm talking about. RAW images to the left (well, actually, pixel-for-pixel uncorrected dumps of the CR2s into JPGs using XnView), Photoshop-created JPG conversions to the right. On the extreme right, a 100% detail look at just how fine and sharp the image actually is... and this is a JPG, too. (Incidentally, the views you're seeing here are of the end of Bloor at Kipling. Out of sight beyond the rise is the rest of Bloor Street. They once connected—at a slight dogleg—and will again, minus the dogleg, in a few years. The sign, the rise behind it, and the bridges to the right will soon be history.)

I'll have to see about posting a few of the shots we took over the next few days, just out of interest.

Still Yellow

2012-01-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

Saturday, on my way home from doing some photographic work, I was listening to Coldplay on the stereo, and I decided to listen to their song Yellow for the first time in a couple of years. I was pleased to find the song still has the beauty, sweep, and emotional punch to move me to tears, even played twice in a row. I don't want that song ever to become ordinary for me. I'm not really religious, but I can't help thinking of Jody and Jenny and, now, Twinkle when I listen to the chorus of that song. Pound for pound, note for note, Yellow remains for me one of the most beautiful and moving songs I've ever heard of. In fact, I'll go so far as to say, on a personal level, nothing comes near it.

Dreams on the weird

2012-01-05T07:23:00.001-05:00

A couple of nights ago I had, again, this recurring dream that's kind of plagued me for years. I'm in my early 20s and still in high school... six or seven years in. I'm cutting classes, missing classes, forgetting courses, realizing too late I've missed exams... Now, this was not me in high school. In the five years (there was also a grade 13 in Ontario at the time) I went to high school, I confused the time for one mid-term exam (and was allowed to make it up) and cut one class--to go to the office and file to drop that class, with the teacher's permission (and amazingly, I still got called to the VP's office!). I was yer own model nerd student... if not really the best student, but that's a different matter, right? :) I never flunked anything in high school, thought I'm pretty sure I got a pity pass in relations and functions in grade 13. But anyway... I think this is really about my years in university. Once the reins were off I did get pretty sloppy about attendance, I did blow some courses out my ass in the first two years, and I did find myself waking up to find I'd missed deadlines. I straightened out in third year.

[As an aside... a long one... once I went into my Chaucer class to learn we had till four that day to hand in our essays worth 30% of the year or something... I'd utterly forgotten about it. I left the class in a daze, wandered to the library, grabbed a couple of books, drove home—thank heavens I had the car that day—hammered something out, drove back, and in dread, handed in what I'd cobbled together. Got an A. Still can't believe it. Not the way I'd ever want to do it again.]

I think it's also about my job. These days, there's tons of red tape, paperwork, things coming from all angles from umpteen different people. It's very easy for things to slip through the cracks, and while I can juggle a couple of things that I'm proficient at and not lose track, managing everyone else's little bureaucratic dotted i's and crossed t's is not my forte. I think this is my subconscious stirring up.

* * * * *

The other dream, from last night, is a little more prosaic. I don't remember much except the end. I was in the forest, alone, wandering nature. It was an area of pine forest with narrow ridges that ran between ponds. Not confined to the trails, I was in and out of the ponds and streams as well as it suited me. I came up out of one pond onto a very narrow ridge between it and another pond, and followed it into the forest. For some reason, I turned around and came back. I noticed a pair of very large, very deep footprints in the mud near where I'd come up. But there weren't my footprints. I remember thinking, hey, great, another barefoot hiker, wonder where they are? But I noticed there was no heel mark, and the five toes were all in a line, each dotted with a claw. They were as wide as my hand is long from wrist to fingertips. Ah, I realized with some alarm, a bear. Not the kind of barefoot hiker I wanted to meet. I wonder where— I looked to my right to the other pond, and on the far bank, about 20 yards away, was a big brown bear. Grizzly. He noticed me at just about the same time. With a roar, he charged, splashing through the pond and up the ridge at me.

And, as per the cliche, that's when I woke up.

Crash

2011-12-26T17:30:00.004-05:00

This evening, Boxing Day, I find myself watching Crash. Not the more recent 2004 movie, but the one from the fall of 1996... David Cronenberg's strange little opus featuring James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Unger, and Elias Kotias about people who fetishize car crashes.

I have a lot of reasons for revisiting this movie. It has a kind of bleak fascination to it that appeals to me. I can't watch it often, but I do relish watching it every so often. One reason I like it is it's filmed in Toronto, and while they make an overt point of it being Toronto, they don't pretend it's Chicago or New York or hide the Ontario license plates. But I guess the reason I like it best is that when I saw it for the first time, I was still young.

I was working at a digital media studio with a lot of very young, starving animators just new to the industry. First job for most of them, or at least, first "real" job. That's how it was for me, too, even though I was three or four years older than most of them. The woman who ran the studio was ruthless and we all kind of lived like rats in a cage in a snake exhibit, knowing we were alright for now, but always wondering who was next for the python.

One of the guys I went to the movie with that night was a bright programmer who was one of the guys who did the work in Lingo to stitch the stuff we did together and make it work right when the disks went out the door. He and I were still working at the place then, though his days, unbeknownst to us, were numbered in months at that point. Maybe weeks. It's hard to remember now. There was a group of alumni of the place who used to get together and commiserate, both with each other and some of those still "inside". There was a high attrition rate at the place, voluntary and not so voluntary.

The other guy was one of the brightest stars I've ever known in my life. I was the last animator hired there, at the start of the year, and he was among the four who preceded me. He was very young at the time. Barely in his 20s. All the other four guys had had to move to Toronto, and were living far from home. This fellow was living with his sister, a teacher. He was an idea man. Driven, smart, articulate. In truth, even I could see he was already punching well below his weight, but we all have to start somewhere. Though I was half a decade older than him, he was in many ways my mentor that year. There was talk of our product going on television, and part of his job was to work it up as a concept. Our boss shamelessly squeezed work out of him like a Texas oilman wrings crude from a rag over a barrel. We were poorly paid, and there was no overtime, and he was putting in between sixty and eighty hours a week on the project, and, I found out later, drinking himself to sleep. He was doing good work, but the financing wasn't there, so his project was shelved and he came to work with the rest of us, pushing pixels.

What a summer that was. It was my first real, full-time job, and though the pay was lousy, I felt like I was on my way. The work we were doing was interesting and often, quite fun. We were frequently recruited to do voice acting for our characters and animations. We took long, boozy lunches where we expanding our nerdly girths. We played practical jokes on each other and did hilarious little side animations. Working together under that awful sword of Damocles, I found a bond with those people unlike any I've known before or since.

At the end of the summer, in August, that sword fell. On my friend. Our boss announced she had decided he "wasn't happy working here", despite his putting more hours and sweat and pure inspiration into the work than any of the rest of us, and let him go. I felt guilty about that. For me, fun as it was, it was just a job. When the day was over, I went home. I put in some overtime here and there, but nothing like him. Generally, I watched the clock, and when it said I could go, I left. I felt like if anyone should have been sent packing, it should have been me. Not him, the brightest and most creative of the five of us; for him, it was a vocation. Things were never the same after that. I won't say the good times ended, but we'd lost one of those musketeers, and the remainder wasn't quite the "more than the sum of the parts" it had been ever again.

I kept in touch with him and in the autumn, he and I and the programmer went out to see Cronenberg's odd movie. In some ways I guess it was the apex of my experience working there. It's hard to explain, but it's come to symbolize that for me.

I stuck it out for another eight months or so after that but finally I quit and went back to a half-assed part-time "full time" job in the industry. I looked before I leaped, but I didn't expect to be where I landed as long as I was, and my career and adult life sputtered for another three years before it finally gelled. In the end my life was something completely different from what it had been there, with them. No job is ever going to have that sense of fun and freedom mixed with peril ever again. There will never be that heady, dangerous, druglike euphoria. I realize, just now, that that's why Crash is so special to me. It boils down and crystallizes my own feelings of my life that year and reflects it back to me.

I was young.

Dancing at the feet of the moon

2011-12-18T07:53:00.001-05:00

I meant to write a few days ago that it had been two calendar months since Twinkle's death. Yesterday was nine weeks. I miss her. That black, ropy tail, the eerily human voice, the little gestures of familiarity and affection that were somehow all the more valuable and cherished for their rarity. I don't want to forget those things. I want to remember.

There is Ally now.

Ally is a small, light, year-and-a-half old calico who came to live with us Saturday last week. She belonged to a friend of Shelley's, Cagney, who came to the realization that she needed to find a new home for Ally sometime around the time little Twinkle was dying. A week and a half after Twinkle died, Shelley tentatively reached out to me to make me aware of this. Given that I didn't even have Twinkle's ashes back yet, I knew I would need time even to really consider it. It had been my intention to wait till the new year and see about finding another cat who needed a home. But this just seemed almost karmic. Through Shelley I expressed an interest to Cagney, and asked if she would be able to wait a couple of months, till mid-December. Cagney had not problem with that.

I went to Cagney's home in November to meet Ally. Ally was very friendly. Cagney and her boyfriend had gotten her when they were together, but had since broken up. Cagney was seeing another fellow and planning to move in together, but he had a cat of advanced age and was not sure Ally would be accepted. As well, Cagney travelled a lot on sales and felt Ally was not always getting the attention she craved. Cagney wept when she talked to me about finding her a new home. I knew then it was the right thing to do to help out. A week or so later, Cagney came by while Shelley was here to see what kind of a place Ally would be moving to. Max and Bonnie were confident and curious about the visiting humans, and I think that helped convince Cagney that my home is a good one for cats.

Saturday last week Cagney came with Ally and Ally's things. We both got a little misty as we arranged things... it wasn't easy for me, either, to see someone parting with a beloved pet. In fact, I'd been dreading that aspect of it. Having just lost Twinkle myself, it hits pretty close to my heart. But the good news is that Ally was of course merely changing homes and friends.

For the first two days I kept Ally isolated in the spare room. She knew there were other cats but didn't have to deal with them. Monday, I let her explore the place with Bonnie and Max in my bedroom. After two hours, I opened all doors. Adaptation began. It's been an ongoing process but Ally, at this point, has very nearly found the new way. Max still intimidates her a little and I hear the odd hiss now and then, but so far Ally's socialization has gone a lot quicker and lot smoother than Twinkle's.

She doesn't replace Twinkle. She isn't like Twinkle. But she does have a home provided by Twinkle's heartbreaking loss. I can't pretend I don't feel a little guilty or worry that I'll lose what was distinctive about Twinkle, particularly since she was with me only a year and a half. But this feels as though it was meant to be, somehow. It was the right thing to do.

And then there's Lexxi.

I volunteered to be a transporter for Toronto Cat Rescue last August, but till now, nothing has worked out. Wednesday came the call to transport little Lexxi, 6 months old, back from the Petsmart where she was awaiting adoption to her foster home again. She'd been spayed, but after four days, was not eating. Since Twinkle wouldn't eat, that really registered with me. So Thursday I drove to Brampton and picked up this tiny little thing to take her back to her sisters at her foster home. The young woman there was happy to see Lexxi again and Lexxi started to purr. I emailed yesterday to follow up and it turns out she got Lexxi eating again in just minutes. I feel good about that. I was in Lexxi's life for less than an hour but I might have made a difference.

Here she is in my cat carrier on her way home.

A moon without a Twinkle

2011-11-15T13:40:00.001-05:00

Today it's one calendar month since Twinkle died. In fact, in about an hour, it'll be a month right on the nose.

I got a card yesterday from the hospital that tried so hard to save her. It was signed by about twenty people, and they said some kind, wonderful things about Twinkle and me. I've been on a pretty even keel since Twinkle died, but that brought tears to my eyes.

Cats can't talk, of course; not in any way that meaningfully communicates abstractions. I'm not entirely clear on just who it was I shared my life with for a year and a half. An Ohioan woman I've been corresponding with since Twinkle got sickwondered recently if there'd been blood tests when I had Twinkle checked in theNew Year to start her insurance. So I went back over her records, right to thestart. No blood tests last January, but I really looked at the stuff the poundgave me the April before. It really breaks my heart, reading the records thatcame with her from the Toronto Humane Society. I kind of ignored them when Igot her because hey, I was her happy ending. But I look at them now...

Admission type: Return.
Date: July 6, 2009.
Age: 3 years, 6 months.
Must spay before adoption; "very nice temperament".

There's also a urinalysis, done just after she was brought back to the pound.One thing I notice is her bilirubin is negative—it was extremely high whileshe was ill before she died. It does remark that her urine was"turbid", but that the resulting microbiology test resulted in"mixed growth of doubtful significance". But the fact that they were testingher urine, and my experience with her, leads me to believe it's why she losther previous home... she was probably peeing all over their stuff, too."Return" chills me... it makes it sound like she's been in the poundeven before... though the fact she wasn't spayed seems to contraindicate that. The fact that she wasn't spayed by the time she was three makes me wonder, too... was she ever a mother, like Bonnie was when I got her? Is there a chance she left behind kittens who are a risk of the same autoimmune disease that ended her life so early?

But my heart breaks now, thinking of her sitting in those cages from July tillthe following April. Poor, poor Twinkle. Damn it, she had such a short, sadlife, and she just never really got a break. Am I ever glad I brought her homeand did my best for her. At least that was something, for a little while.

What I wouldn't give to be able to talk to her previous family... find out whatshe was like, how long they had her, why they gave her up.

A few more Twinklings

2011-11-08T07:26:00.001-05:00

A few things about Twinkle I decided I should record while it's still in my mind to do so.

I guess it was right around this time last year I was writing about Twinkle as a being, regarding her struggle to come to terms with how doors—in particular, the bathroom door—worked. You know, she never did figure that out... not in the old place, and not in the new one. Applying minor force to rotate a piece of wood around greased hinges was a concept that eluded her her whole life, bless her little heart.

But she was smart in other ways. When she got sick, but before I recognized it as illness, she took to hiding. Twinkle being Twinkle, I didn't take that as a sign she wasn't well. She tended to be more of a loner than the other cats and I simply took it she was amusing herself by finding clever places the rest of us couldn't find her. Still, I didn't like the idea she might be stuck someplace, in a box or closet she couldn't get out of, and I would look for her and call her name. I'm not sure which day it was, but once in my search, I came around the corner into the dining room and she stood and meowed to me from the bottom shelf of the wardrobe. It was a display of understanding, affection, and concern that still moves me. She understood I was looking for her, and she volunteered to let me know she was alright. She grasped all that, and she cared enough to respond. The thing that makes it kind of blue is that two shelves up, that's where her ashes now rest in an urn.

It was probably the Thursday before the Friday I first took her to the vet that she behaved in a very uncharacteristic manner. She leapt up onto the back of my chair and laid down behind me, putting her tail around my left shoulder. She seemed to cough and sneeze a little, and at one point, threw up a little of what looked like green phlegm. Again, I wasn't overly concerned. Cats cough stuff up all the time, and I took it to be a sign she had a cold or a flu or something. I remember that just before Jenny (a cat I had from 1989 to 2002) died, she came and laid at my feet, something she'd never done before. I wonder if Twinkle was saying something like good-bye, I love you, or maybe just, gee, I don't feel like myself, but being near you is a comfort. I don't know. I don't really think cat understand the concept of death, particularly their own. But she clearly wasn't well by then, and I wonder what exactly was on her mind.

King for not even a day

2011-10-28T10:32:00.002-05:00

I just read this morning, to my real astonishment, that atthe meeting of the 54 Commonwealth nations going on right now in Perth, WesternAustralia, the 16 Commonwealth realms, of which Canada is one (and host Australia is another), have agreed tomutually change the monarchy. After 300 years or so, the Act of Settlement thatwe all use to recognize the rightful heir to the Crown (16 separate Crowns,actually, but worn by the same person, which is the constitutional point ofcontention) is going to be updated. From now on, whoever is born first,regardless of sex, will succeed to the throne. No more older sisters beingsuperseded by younger brothers. If William and Kate have a daughter first, anda dozen sons afterward, it’ll be the daughter who one day becomes queen, whichwouldn’t be the case right now. Secondly, the provision that anyone in the order of succession who marries a Catholic becomes ineligible will also beremoved. The provision that the monarch must be head of the Church of England,and thus, necessarily a Protestant, will remain for the time being, however.

Well, it’s a start, I guess. I’ve had soft republicansentiments for a few years now, but I’m not lathering to see Canada instantlybecome a republic, and while we do have the monarchy (which we probably willwell into the foreseeable future), it’s a least a comfort to see it beginningto catch up with the first few decades of the previous century.

Reflections on a second Friday

2011-10-28T10:14:00.000-05:00

It’s funny how different sums of money can affect you indifferent ways. You’d think the larger the sum, the more distressing it wouldbe. I’ve found it be to be just the opposite lately.

When I first took Twinkle to the vet, her initial treatmentand the blood test they wanted to do was $280 or so. That made me grumpy. Thatwas eating into what I would, and wouldn’t, be able to do in practical termsover the next few weeks. It had an immediate abridging affect on my lifestyle.

Later, when I had to have her admitted to the hospital, andthe admission and first transfusion were going to cost $2500, it was a realslap. That was a sum of money I could understand on a personal level... it wasan amount of money I could envision saving up for several months; it was theequivalent of, say, a really good computer, or a good laptop. And the idea ofsuddenly having to spend it was kind of a shock.

But later, when we started getting into much bigger numbers,the shock began to disappear. When we were getting up around $8000, crossingover $10,000, and so on, the numbers began to take on a theoretical sense.These were numbers outside my daily experience. They were “occasional”numbers... things you deal with a few times a decade, buying cars and the like.These were long term numbers, amounts of money I found I was automaticallyresigned to thinking of as things to be paid off over years. They lost theirimmediacy, and in a weird way, they were more settling. Today I’m making thesecond payment on the $14,000 I spent on Twinkle. Two years from now, I’llstill be doing this. It seems unfair that I won’t have Twinkle two years fromnow to show for it.

Today also finds me dwelling on the forked timeline... thedifference between what is, and what I expected, or at least hoped for, by now.Today, in reality, I’m a day away from two weeks since Twinkle’s death (has it only been two weeks?). But inmy mind, I had expected by now to be seeing some real signs of Twinkle’srecovery. By now, I hoped, even faintly expected, that her red cell count would bestable and over 20. By now, I’d been seeing her taking an interest in things againand, while still easily tired, wandering around, maybe beginning to get back upon things like the couch and chairs. By now, eating a little on her own again, or maybe even only getting her meds through the tube. What I mean is, I reallythought that by now, she and I would be working out the “new normal”, as I’vecalled it, and adapting to her long term needs. I didn’t dread it. I washonestly looking forward to helping her get there, and feeling good about itevery time I looked at her for years to come, and wondering if, in some littleway of her own, she might understand and feeling something like gratitude, orlove, or whatever it might mean to cats. I’ll never know. Sitting here todaywithout her in my life, that seems really wrong to me. It should have been. Wedid the right things. It should have been.

Moneyball

2011-10-28T06:34:00.003-05:00

I was out with Larry, my former roommate, last night. Talked him into seeing Moneyball, the new picture with Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman (I'll make the joke here—I thought I'd "see more" Philip Hoffman in the movie than I did).

As everybody by now knows, it's the story of how the Oakland Athletics ball team used metrics to build a contending team out of disregarded players on a shoestring budget. The movie is largely caught up in telling the story of the resistance Pitt's character, Billy Beane (a once-promising player who never hit his stride, now the A's general manager), encounters in adopting this new strategy of Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill). Brand uses statistics to synergize the strengths of "lesser" players to eliminate the weaknesses of others. The underlying theme of the strategy is, in a nutshell, "slow and steady wins the race". The idea isn't to find players who can knock the ball out of the park, it's to find ones who can consistently get to first base. Find enough of them, the theory goes, and the runs will trickle in.

Beane's scouts, old men who men who've been in the game for decades, scoff at the new approach, and as they drift away, they badmouth the idea in public. The biggest obstacle is the team's manager, Art Howe (played with Sahara-esque aridness by Hoffman), who insists on his right to play the team as he sees fit, not as the numbers indicate. Consequently, the team fares poorly at the start of the 2002 season, and the public scorn goes to Beane for his apparently foolish experiment. When Beane and Brand conspire to rob Howe of some of his choices in an attempt to channel the team into their prescribed direction, its fortunes turn around, and suddenly it's Howe's coaching getting the public accolades. Beane's approach is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.

The A's attended, but didn't win, the American League playoffs that year, losing to the Twins, but what they did accomplish was the first, and only, string of 20 consecutive wins in league history. The movie goes on to say that the Boston Red Sox offered Beane their general managership, which he turned down; nevertheless, they adopted Brand's methods and went on to win the 2004 World Series, finally breaking the Curse of the Bambino.

The movie is well-acted; much of the tension understated as you would expect in a picture like this. Although I wouldn't call it a great movie, it's interesting and you can learn a lot about the game without it being shoved down your throat. It's one I'd pick up on DVD and watch repeatedly and let it soak in. That's one of the highest compliments I personally can pay a movie.

T(w)inkle

2011-10-28T06:07:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that two weeks ago, as I write this, Twinklewas home from the hospital for the last time. By now, I would have fed her hermorning 50 ml through the e-tube, and it would have been the little juncturebetween breakfast and her first meds, around 8. She had not quite a day and ahalf left to live. Hard to believe.

But what gets me writing here is the memory that I’ve beenwrong. I’ve mentioned here Twinkle’s predilection for peeing on things, to thepoint that my former roommate used to make the joke that her real name wasTinkle and the shelter had just snuck an extra “w” into her name to get heradopted. It eased off over time even in the old place, and I’ve been sayingthat once I moved into the condo, that was pretty much it, except for a fewshots she took at my sandals (still not sure what that was all about).

I realized this morning I was wrong. She did kind of keep itup even after we moved. The mat by the door. Before I moved, we had a mat bythe door for leaving our shoes on. Twinkle was apparently using it as her thirdlitter box, but it was a natural fibre and very absorbent, and we didn’t evennotice till around the time came to move. I ran it under the tap in the tub andwas astonished to see the water running out of it the colour of steeped tea. Irealized that even if I got it clean, there was no point in bringing it with meif that was what it was going to mean to Twinkle, so I threw it out.

When I got to the new place, I bought a large rubber mat forthe door. I noticed nearly immediately that Twinkle seemed to take this as aninvitation, or a challenge, and started going for it. I washed it once, shekept it up, and so I washed it one more time, rolled it up, and set it aside onthe floor of my bedroom closet, where it’s remained. I must have seen it (I wasgoing to say “a thousand times”, but obviously, that’s hardly the case afterthree or four months) scores of times without paying it any mind, but thismorning it all suddenly came back to me. I’m not sure how I could haveforgotten that... probably because, to the best of my knowledge, she wasn’tpeeing on anything else outside the litter box after I put that rug away.

Just for a moment, I thought about putting it back by thedoor, but that smacks too much of sticking my thumb in her eye after she’sdied. So, I guess I’ll chalk that round up to her, and maybe later on when theweather gets sloppy I’ll go out and find something else. I don’t think I’ll beusing that particular rug.

White dwarf

2011-10-27T16:40:00.000-05:00

Well, Twinkle's ashes arrived back at the vet on Tuesday. P-Doug offered to accompany me to pick them up, as he did 9 years ago when I got Jenny's back. He wasn't able to do it Tuesday so I put it off till last night. He arrived at my place and we went in about 8:30. I also took in the Kitty Kollars I ordered for Twinkle, but never got to use, and donated them to the hospital, in the hopes the next cat or small dog who goes home with an e-tube can use them and have a better time of it.

Twinkle's ashes were returned to me in a nice blue box that contained in it a blue velvet bag that had a cast of her paw print set in it, and under a divider, the little beige urn that is so much like Jenny's grey one. The card that accompanied it expressed their condolences and told me that Twinkle was cremated on October 19th, which was four days after she died, and three weeks to the day, I think, after I first noticed she wasn't that interested in food. It's hard to believe that it was only four weeks ago today that it really started dawning on me she wasn't well, and that a visit to our vet might be a good idea.

After we picked up the ashes, P-Doug and I first went to The Second Cup on York Mills near Leslie, but it was packed, so we went instead to good old Tim Horton's at little further east on York Mills. That's where we opened up the box over coffee, muffins, and smoothies. I guess we were there till about ten. I knew Twinkle was dead, but holding that little urn really underlined it for me... I'll never see that stern, dagger-eyed, pretty little two-tone face again, or that black, black, ropy tail, or hear that creepily human "meow" of hers. Never feel her feeding from my palm, never run the bathroom tap for her again. Those are all gone. Fourteen thousand dollars later, it's all about a little tan jar sitting on a shelf. It's hard to accept.

But I understand it. The speed and aggressiveness of Twinkle's disease has made me see that it was almost certainly genetic. She just wasn't ever going to live that long. Something just switched on, and really, her time was up. But we didn't know that, and we did everything we could to wind up her clock again. It just wasn't possible, at least yet. And so, I had this fiery little individual in my life for a year and a half. While I might have wished for a better, longer tale for her, I wouldn't have changed that much, at least. Brief though it was, she had a good life with us... me, Bonnie and Max, and while he was with us, Larry. That's all the consolation there is, I guess.

I haven't settled Twinkle's ashes properly yet. That's for this evening. I'm planning to take some photos and put them up to give those who've wondered some idea of what comes back to you, and how.

(Later...)

They had a flea market at work today. As fate and maybe Karma would have it, I found this wonderful little display, to hold her urn, and prop her little pawprint up.

This is the first picture I ever took of Twinkle. The day we brought her home, April 12, 2010.

Below are the photos I took of Twinkle the first time I brought her home from the hospital, Sunday, October 9, 2011. The bottom one is the last photo I ever took of her alive. She is in her sunbeam, looking away into the setting sun.

Recent movies

2011-10-23T08:39:00.000-05:00

Life goes on, at least for those of us still living, and I guess it's no disrespect to the memory of Twinkle if I start to mention some of the other things that have been going on lately. In this case, specifically, two movies I've lately seen.

The Thing

The first, which I went to see with Larry on Thursday night, was The Thing, confusingly named because it's the prequel of the 1980s movie of the same name, and not a remake, as the name might lead you to believe. I've grown to appreciate John Carpenter's movie more and more as time goes by, so I went in with ambivalent feelings. I wanted to learn more about the back story, but at the same time, I didn't want them to cheapen the original experience, which so often happens with these add-ons (witness the last three, "first" three, Star Wars movies).

I was pleasantly surprised. The movie gives the action lead to a woman, which is a nice change, but doesn't require her to get romantically involved with a young hunk or constantly require saving by a sacrificial avuncular older male. The character of Kate is scientific, sharp-witted, with just the right balance of sympathetic compassion and hard-headed practicality.

The movie tells the story of the discovery of the Thing, and the fate of the original Norwegian outpost in Antarctica. Since anyone who's ever seen the 1980s movie already knows they're doomed, the movie is largely about revealing how they underestimated the threat (not hard to understand; how big a threat is a 100,000 year old corpse, even if it is an alien?), and how the threat expands almost exponentially.

I was impressed with her ability to take a small observation and turn it into a means to separate humans from Things, or at least be sure who definitely is human. That itself was worth the price of admission.

The movie's not getting great numbers on Rotten Tomatoes, I don't think, which surprises me because I think they did a great job coming up with a plausible back story, and one that's true to the original right up to and including scenes interspersed into the credits. The two movies dovetail so closely they could be watched back to back, and one day, I'd like to do that. Recommended.

The Ides of March

I really like George Clooney, and I'm fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman too, so I was really looking forward to The Ides of March, which I saw last night with P-Doug. Essentially it's the fictional account of some of the cynicism behind the scenes during the Ohio primaries of a US presidential election, in which Clooney plays the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania looking to affix "Avenue" to that state's name as his address. Mike Morris, with Obama-style posters, says all the things the left only wishes could come out of the mouth of a US presidential hopeful with a real shot at the job. Not a chance, but it was nice to see.

The story's told from the point of view of a young assistant campaign manager (Stephen Meyers, played by Ryan Gosling) who is lured into a meeting with the campaign manager of the opponent. I can understand why this might be disconcerting to his co-workers, but I'm not sure why it would be newsworthy that Democrat campaigners, even those who are briefly opponents, should have things to discuss with other Democrat campaigners. It kind of seemed like a non-issue to me.

Similarly, the revelation that Governor Morris had a one-night stand with one of the interns, Molly, a young woman Stephen himself is seeing, did not strike me as earthshaking. A bit tawdry and sad, maybe, but not the kind of thing that's poison to someone on the left, it seems to me. That she'd become pregnant and was seeking an abortion might be, but since it was going to be handled in confidence, again, it didn't seem like a big deal. The character of Stephen seemed shaken by it all, and that read a little naive to me. Frankly, I would rather the crisis be not the kind of thing the Democrats seems to generate, which is trouble finding pants where the zipper stays up (ho-hum), as opposed to the kind the Republicans seem to generate, which if finding and fielding candidates who aren't running for the right to be the guy who gets to push The Button so that Jesus can come back.

I'll say this. It was a mature movie. It wasn't full of guns and threats and guys in dark glasses hustling people away in the middle of the night for smarten-up sessions. It seemed to me to be a glance into the world-weary dealings that are necessary to keep the average political campaign on wheels. I just wish the stakes of the issue at hand had been a little more profound.

One thing I did learn is that Ohio, apparently, has something called an "open primary", which means anybody can vote on who gets to be a party's candidate—including, significantly, the members and supporters of the other party. This strikes me as utterly insane. Who here thinks it's a good idea for Ford to have the right to make changes to GM's next model year, and believes those changes would really be in the best interests of consumers?

The movie's worth seeing, and it's extremely well-acted, but I wouldn't call it an Oscar contender, in my books.

A visit

2011-10-23T07:14:00.001-05:00

I had my first dream about Twinkle last night... at least, the first I remember. At least it wasn't upsetting. Among other things, like running around a mall trying to find a washroom (a sure sign I needed to get up and use the facilities in real life), and opening the door for the Prime Minister who was visiting his riding association in an office in the mall, I remember being with some young woman I was trying to get closer to (no one real that I can identify), and that she was with me as I marvelled over Twinkle, alive and frisky and rolling around in her cat bed, delighted to see me. I remember the young woman and I trying to work out how Twinkle could have died a few days before, and still be here.

I didn't wake up to the memory, but sort of remembered it in a by-the-way, oh-yeah kind of fashion a while after waking, which is unusual for me in remembering dreams.

Twinkle's timeline

2011-10-22T17:44:00.001-05:00

In trying to remember the sequence of things, I guess I owe it to myself to record how things went with Twinkle, while I'm still able to sort it out.

When did I first notice she wasn't eating? Maybe Tuesday, Sept. 27th? I'm pretty sure I'd noticed she wasn't interested in treats by Wednesday, because I was off that day. Thursday it was pretty apparent to me she wasn't well; she was sneezing and coughing a little, and threw up a little bit of something that looked like phlegm that evening when she uncharacteristically jumped up onto the back of my chair to sit with me. At the time, I took it for a cold or a flu, but I started to worry she might dehydrate, and I determined that if she was still obviously unwell in the morning, I'd take her to the vet. She was, so I did, taking a day of vacation.

I also remember now that during the week, she started hiding. That should have been a sign to me—it always is with Bonnie—but I didn't get "sick" from that with Twinkle. Of the three, Twinkle was the least likely to hang around with me. She was off on her own somewhere most of the time. I didn't take it as anything unusual. I don't imagine we could have done anything different if I had, but I didn't. I remember roaming around, trying to find her, and she seemed to find different spots. One evening, it all seemed like a game because eventually, she stood up in the little cabinet in the dining room and meowed to me... "Here I am." After that, she got really good at hiding, and I figured out later she was hiding underneath the old dresser in my bedroom.

When I took her in to our regular vet on Friday, Sept. 30th, she was there for a couple of hours. They thought it might have been an intestinal infection and they gave her some antibiotics she fought against. Just to be on the safe side, they took blood from her for testing. They charged me about $230, which seemed like a lot of money at that moment but looks like chump change in retrospect, and sent her home with me. At some point, I think it was Saturday, I saw Twinkle run and jump up onto one of the tables in the enclosed balcony to bird watch, and it made me happy. I think it was the last time I saw Twinkle well, or "normal".

At some point overnight Sunday morning, Twinkle's illness really became profound. I woke to find her lethargic and tucked in by the door of the condo. Aside from shifting to the other side of the door and trips to the litter box, that's pretty much where she stayed all day. It's where she was Monday morning, too, when I left for work. Somewhere around 2 p.m. that day, the vet called with the terrible news that Twinkle's blood test had shown she was extremely anemic, with a packed blood volume (PBV) of 12, when the normal is between 30 and 40. And remember, that blood was drawn Friday, before her Sunday morning downturn. The vet advised me to rush her to the Toronto Veterinary Emergency Hospital just north of them for a transfusion. He mentioned that I was looking at $2500. I blanched at the figure, but what can you do? I had an internal interview for another job in the company that day, and I barely had time to send medical emergency email and beg off before leaving. The bus ride home took around half an hour, and my appointment was for 2:45. All that way I was wondering if I'd find her dead when I got home, but no, she was still there by the door. I got her into the cat carrier and off we went.

The next couple of days were about securing a line of credit from my bank to cover the costs of Twinkle's treatment, and listening to reports of how low her PBV was, and that she needed a second transfusion. Somehow it escaped my good sense to go in and visit her on Tuesday, and I regret that. A pound cat, Twinkle must have wondered if she'd been abandoned again. I went into work Tuesday morning but found I didn't have the stomach for it, so I took the laptop and decided to work from home, with my manager's permission. And that's what I did for the next week and a half.

It finally occurred to me on Wednesday that, since she was only about a 7 minute drive away, I ought to be visiting her and reassuring her. I went in around noon and she was just a mess of tubes. One in her side to drain excess fluid from her abdomen. One in her nose to feed her. One in back leg, one in her front. The poor little thing. It was all about tests, and trying to figure out what was wrong. I'm not sure what day it was now, but they shaved her belly and ultrasounded her, looking for tumors. Nothing showed up, and none of the tests indicated cancer. Eventually they ruled out the blood parasite possibility, which largely left us with autoimmune disease.

I guess it was Wednesday night she got a transfusion of fresh blood from an on-site donor. Michelle was with me, visiting, as we saw Twinkle get the last of that blood. When I visited her on Thursday, she ate on her own for the first time in a week, and it was amazing to see. At that point, I was more or less convinced she'd get well again. Michelle visited with me again Thursday night and we watched Twinkle eat for me again.

By this time her PBV was holding around 17. Not great, but sustainable and on the verge of a new normal, something she could potentially adapt to. She started going off her food again, and we discussed the option of a feeding tube. Given that I'd have to give her medication at home, to be honest, I was anxious to have it as an aid to doing so... the idea of forcing stuff down her throat several times a day was anathema... I knew she'd wind up hating me, and then what was the point? But by Sunday, they were ready to release her and give her a trial basis at home, hoping the comfy environment would stimulate her appetite. The idea was to bring her back Tuesday if she weren't eating enough, and she'd get the tube. Well, she didn't eat at all for me, so I decided to be proactive and take her back on Monday, rather than wait. One more fresh blood donation and she got the e tube on Tuesday. They began feeding and medicating her through that. Given that I knew that was where it was going, I ordered two Kitty Kollars from a place in California on Monday. These are designed to ease the cleaning and protection of a feeding tube over the long term. The order came to just shy of $120, but I was looking forward to getting them and putting them on her.

By Thursday night, she was ready to come home again, with a reassessment scheduled for Tuesday. She came home with a bewildering array of medications, six or seven of them, including a new one that has only rarely been used with cats... generally it's intended for use with humans who've had organ transplants. We hung our hope on this one in particular, that it would arrest the process of her body killing its own red blood cells, and put her into remission. I came home and wrote up the schedule of feedings and medications that would rule my world for weeks, maybe months to come. I had a Magic Bullet blender to puree all the food she'd be getting through the tube, and I learned to feed her 50 ml over about 15 minutes. It was good to be close to her, to do something for her. It was a sad way to do it, but I'll always remember how good it made me feel. I was taking real, critical care of another life. I was doing my all to make a difference. I was in for the long haul.

Of course, that's not how it turned out.

My thinking was that if she could at least break even on Tuesday with regard to her PBV, that is, she didn't need another transfusion (and she was getting to the point, they told me, that her body would soon be producing antibodies and rejecting them), I was prepared to soldier on. I was prepared to give her one more transfusion, to give the drugs a real chance. If after another assessment they weren't working, well, I was steeling myself to have her put to sleep, since that would be our indication that we'd done everything and she really was never going to get better or have any kind of a life. But then she died on Saturday afternoon of the complications of her condition, and spared me having to ever make that decision. And now, I'm waiting to get her ashes back, in a little tan urn, to place beside the grey one that houses the ashes of Jenny, a cat she never knew.

Twinkle was dear to me, not because she was a cuddly cat particularly, or very demonstrative, though she had her moments. She was willful and self-possessed, contrary and sometimes quite difficult. But all those personality quirks, in the end, were the things that endeared her particularly to me. I'm going to miss those things. The sad fact is I had her in my life so briefly, only a year and a half, that I think much of what I knew about her will fade quickly, and I'll largely be left with the broad strokes. But whatever... at least that's something, and it's a part of my life, what I've experienced, and who I've become.

Thanks, Twinkly-Dinkly. You were unique.

Effects

2011-10-18T07:42:00.003-05:00

It's funny how things change. Around a month ago, I applied for a sideways move inside the company. It was a closer fit to my previous job experience, I'd have a chance to work with someone I've known for a decade but never actually worked with, and I'd been learning a new authoring system. And, I won't lie, I was hoping there'd be a chance to earn a little more with the job change... such things usually come with some incentive. The site was just a little further from home than the office location we just left behind... about one subway stop. My hope was, I'd be able to work from the new office location, which is considerably closer to my home: a single bus ride of about 20 minutes or so.

Then Twinkle got sick. I was able to work from home and go a see her a couple of times a day in the hospital. When I was offered the position, suddenly that sounded like it was going to be a problem, and at that moment, Twinkle's convalescence was still an open factor. Could have been months; I was honestly figuring it would be. I understood the business need, but my priorities had changed, and my current position didn't cause a conflict. I had to turn it down.

It wasn't just that; I started thinking of other things. I didn't want a longer commute. They weren't offering me a higher salary, and even if they were, I really did not want to be on the TTC even longer, making a third connection twice a day. Not with the new location being so much closer. And given that I was expecting to be looking after Twinkle day in and day out, I didn't really want the added stress of having to ramp up at the same time. Even after she died and some of those problems went away, it didn't change things. I'd kind of soured on the prospect.

The other change was the TTC itself. I was surprised how I took to transit last year, especially in the winter when I was off the road and all that nonsense was someone else's problem. And I had pretty much decided that yeah, it being just one bus ride, I'd keep doing it. Something changed while I was looking after Twinkle. The idea of having to keep standing around in the cold, waiting for the bus, marching a city block between the building and the stop, and spending $111 a month on the pass suddenly stopped making sense to me. The thing that got me on the TTC last year was the fact that the parking at work was $180 a month, and then still $120 a month even after we moved. Here, it's free. The drive is much shorter; about 15 minutes pretty much straight north and south on regular streets. As Twinkle's bills mounted, I found myself doing the math, and where I'd been saving over a hundred dollars a month in gas and parking before, suddenly I was spending about an extra fifty or sixty. It stopped making sense. And to my surprise, I found myself favouring the car again. The drive is about 8km each way (5 miles). Even with prices what they are now, that's still only about ten bucks in gas a week, or so. And now that I'm set up to work at home, I've decided to make a habit of bring the laptop back and forth. So if I see snow, I'll just set up at home. The money saved will help me live a little more comfortably while I pay back the money I spent trying so hard to keep Twinkle in my life.

Like I say, it's funny how your perspective can change.

Glimmerings

2011-10-18T06:47:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd like to take a few moments and remember the ways in which Twinkle was special... not all of them good ways. :)

Well, I got her in April of last year. The Toronto Humane Society was going through some tough times and was about to undergo a reorganization, and they were trying to find homes for all the pets they were still sheltering (as I recall, they managed this). It was my birthday, and when my roommate Larry asked me what I wanted, I half-seriously suggested a third cat. He was okay with it, and we went to the shelter at Victoria Park and Van Horne and ended up with Twinkle.

When I first brought her home and isolated her in my bedroom, she was an extremely affectionate cat. Seemed very grateful to be out of the cage and into a much larger room. Not long afterwards she became aware of the other cats, Bonnie and Max, when we introduced them. Twinkle did not really react as well to them as she did to me and Larry. As I recall, the next six weeks or so were about Twinkle largely keeping to my bedroom, and my being awakened a few times each night by Twinkle's almost feral growling whenever Max crept into the room to look at her. At some point, Twinkle worked out that Max was a pushover, and started pushing him over. After that, she pretty much ruled the roost. I didn't seen Twinkle and Bonnie interact all that much, but Twinkle did like to occasional jump Max and put him on the run.

She peed on just about everything. I'm reasonably convinced that's what landed her in the pound, but I can never be sure. She peed on the couch, the armchair, cat beds, inside boxes, on anything soft lying around, and even once or twice the recliner I nearly always sit in at home. She utterly ruined a futon in the living room; we gave up on it and finally had to throw it out. One time, she peeped in cat basket right in front of the TV, while we were watching, sending drops up the screen. The only places she seemed to spare were the beds... thank goodness! Eventually, as she grew more at home, I guess, it tapered off, though my sandals were prone to take a hit now and then. I wondered if that weren't a specific message. The strange thing is, it pretty much stopped altogether when I and the cats moved into the condo last summer. A few times on the sandals, and that was it. If she ever peed on the rug or the furniture ever again, I'm not aware of it. My speculation is that since the new place wasn't soaked with years of the scents of Bonnie and Max, they were all "equal", and there was no need for Twinkle to keep asserting her claim.

Twinkle had a thing for the bathroom. Anytime anyone went in, she would squeeze in herself and climb up to the basin, waiting for whoever was in there to start running the water for her. She had a real sweet tooth for the fresher water, I guess. We got to the point where we left a slow, steady drip in the bathroom basin for her, which eventually started to rust a hole near the drain, and we had to have the building replace the basin (long overdue anyway). She continued this when I moved into the condo... the problem being that the mechanism there was a pull lever, making the flow much harder to regulate. But I managed.

While not as vocal as Bonnie, Twinkle used to meow at me to get my attention from time to time, usually in the kitchen in relation to treats, and when she did, she had a voice on her that sounded to me exactly like a teenage girl pretending to meow like a cat. It was slightly creepy how human it sounded. It even sounded less like a meow than someone saying the word "meow", clearly enunciated. I kind of treasured that.

Like Max, and utterly unlike Bonnie, she loved treats and catnip. Not long after I moved into the condo, I trained her to eat treats right out of the palm of my hand. It was a wonderful show of trust, I thought. That's something I'm always going to miss.

She wasn't a cuddly cat. She'd often lie in one of the cat beds near my chair, and didn't mind being stroked, but she was never really happy to be picked up, often balked at it and usually complained. A few times she really didn't want to be picked up. Once, she boxed my cheeks, claws in, just to register her displeasure. Another time, she leaned way back in my arms, eyes narrowed and ears flat, and I realized I'd better put her down, NOW. And I did.

Just before she really got sick, one night she climb up onto the back of my chair and put her tail on her shoulder. She was sniffling and sneezed a few times, and threw up what looked like a little phlegm to me. At the time, I was convinced she had a cold or a flu or something. By then, she wasn't interested in eating, and when she was still off the treats in the morning, I took the day off and took her to the regular vet. They figured it was an intestinal infection... if only, if only. But just to be sure, they took a blood sample. When the numbers came back on Monday, everything changed.

I'm glad that I had her, but it hurts that it was so brief, and the last two weeks of her life were such an ordeal for her. But of course, that was all in the hopes it would be a brief, quickly-forgotten bumpy patch in a longer, happier life, so I shouldn't regret it. It's just that, having moved, she seemed much more settled, and it would have been nice for her to have had the opportunity to really enjoy that.

For all her weird ways, for all her self-possession and introversion, I won't say she wasn't loving or affectionate... just on her own terms. I miss her, and to some extent I always will. But at least I knew her and I had these joys, and I hope, soon, that's what's going to matter with me.

Twinkling

2011-10-17T09:03:00.000-05:00

Some more musings about Twinkle, as time passes.

It seems to me now that probably what I was seeing on Saturday was a pair of heart attacks. I think the first one lasted just a few seconds, and was triggered by the stress of me trying to give her her eye drops. The second, and I hope there were only the two, was the spontaneous one that ended her life. Blood clots may have been involved in it; in fact, that makes sense to me as the likely trigger. In thinking about it, I suppose this is the best indicator that she really was not going to recover. There were just too many strains on her body with whatever disease she had... it was depriving her of oxygen and nutrients to begin with, and the treatments and two weeks in and out of hospital among strangers who were constantly doing things she couldn't understand took their toll on her as well. If having to put up with being dosed with eye drops was enough of a strain to cause a heart attack, then Twinkle had really reached the limits of her strength, reserves, and endurance. She really wasn't meant to live that long, I guess. Something in her genes, I think, just meant she'd live bright and short.

I was speaking with Michelle yesterday, and I asked her what she thought from the times she saw Twinkle in the last little while. She told me that the times she saw Twinkle in the hospital, she seemed viable and like she had a shot. But she formed the opinion, on her Friday night visit to my home, that Twinkle was a cat who had used everything up, and that the next thing to put a strain on her system would probably be the last. That turned out to be the case.

This morning I'm in a new office and location (same job) and trying to get arranged, and the place and experience are largely tainted with "this is life after Twinkle died". It won't always seem like that, I know, but right now it makes it hard to be comfortable here.

I'm all over the map about how I should be feeling. I'm sad, of course; I miss her; I ache to hold her again. But I'm trying not to screw that into myself. I know I could really mess myself up for a few days if I did. But what would that achieve to torture myself? I did all kinds of worrying about her when it made a difference, and now it can't anymore. It won't help Twinkle, and all it would really do is make my life so much harder for a while. And there's the rub—there's this part of me that feels like that's Twinkle's due; if she meant s0mething to me, shouldn't I be prostrate with grief? I feel guilty that her death hasn't incapacitated me. But I keep coming back to the realization that, as cats go, Twinkle lived the latter half of her life as a queen. For much of her time with me, she lived with two humans and two other cats; she never wanted for attention and affection, and she could have them on her own terms. She was never hungry or thirsty, never cold or wet, never in real danger. And when the time came, she was given every aid we could muster to help her recover. She just didn't have the means to make a go of it. It's very sad, but it's also a comfort, I think. I'm trying to see it that way. I keep trying to massage that into the wound. She sure was better off for knowing me and finding her place in my heart. And so was I.

Twinkle's passing has, somehow, also made me more aware of the hole in my life. Maybe it's because I had Larry for a roommate for two years, but I find myself wishing there were someone in my life. Not to belittle Bonnie and Max, who are pure joys, but there are other social aspects of being human that I'm beginning to feel aren't being met. Michelle found her fiance on a dating site and suggested I use that as my starting point, and so I'm looking into it. She's convinced there's someone for everyone, and that it's a big city. It's a hopeful thought. I guess the last couple of weeks have triggered some sort of fear of mortality and loneliness, or something. Anyway, I'd like to try to address that feeling. There may be someone out there, like me, who feels the same, and... who knows?

Little star lost

2011-10-16T07:18:00.001-05:00

Twinkle died, quite suddenly, mid afternoon yesterday. Shewas at home and I was with her. Despite the fact that she still really wasn’twell, it was completely unexpected.

I haven’t been blogging about the process of her treatmentand recovery because it’s been all I could handle going through it, and I had afew angels on my shoulders during the process to whom I gave frequent reports,and that was enough. But now that she’s gone, P-Doug has said I should write itout and put it into perspective, and I agree.

Maybe a little of her background first to remember who shewas. Well, when Larry was my roommate last year, he asked me what I wanted formy birthday. Since the Toronto Humane Society was undergoing a reorg and theyneeded to place their animals quickly, I suggested a third cat. That cat turnedout to be Twinkle.

I’ve had four cats in my adult life, and of the bunch,Twinkle was problematic in various ways. It took her over a month to getadjusted to living with Bonnie and Max, which meant me waking up several timesa night as Twinkle warned off a curious Max with a growl that sent goosebumpsup my spine. That settled down, but her propensity to pee on just abouteverything but my bed took a lot longer to sort out. She uttered ruined afuton; we had to throw it out. I had some very dark thoughts in relation tothat... about taking her back, about even having her put to sleep, because itseemed to me her life would be nothing more than bouncing from pound to homeand back to the pound. But I reminded myself that it was my idea for her tolive with us, not hers, and it was up to me to find a way to put up with it. Idid, and the episodes trailed off to at least a mere occasional incident as shegrew more confident the place was hers as well... I guess that’s what it was. Ithink I’m right in that because when I moved last summer, it stopped. Asidefrom peeing on my sandals a few times, which I’m sure was meant as some kind ofprotest (for what, I’ll never know), she quit doing it.

On the cat-to-dog spectrum of cat nature, she was furtherback on the cat end relative to Bonnie and Max. She was self-possessed, didn’treally take guff from me, and gave and showed affection on her own terms. Therewere definitely endearing things about her. One quirk I never really figuredout was that she loved to follow me, or anyone, into the bathroom, and see ifshe couldn’t get that person to run the water in the basin for her. Wedeveloped a rust spot in the basis at the apartment last year catering to her.I also got her to eat treats right out of the palm of my hand a few months agoafter we moved. I’ve had cats I could feed from my fingertips before butTwinkle was the first to trust me and put her whole head into my hand. I’mgoing to miss that daily display of trust.

She was energetic, she was the boss, she used to love tojump Max and put him on the run. Hard to believe it was over two weeks ago nowthat Bonnie and Twinkle used to quietly vie for position on the table by thewindow to keep a watch on the landing birds just inches the other side of theglass. Seems like yesterday. On the other hand, some of the things I’ve beenthrough with her more recently seem like months ago. Taking her in feels likeit was in August, but was itself in October.

So, as previously said, I took her in Monday about two weeksago. She was extremely anemic and needed a couple of transfusions over the nextcouple of days. I was very lucky in two things: one, the responsibilities of myjob made working from home an option, and two, the emergency clinic Twinkle wasat was about a seven minute drive from my home. I didn’t go in and see her thatfirst Tuesday. I was overwhelmed and guess I had a blind spot. But Wednesday Iremember she had been a pound cat and I was concerned she’d think she’d beenabandoned again. So, from then on, I did my best to get in and see her twice aday, and unless she was undergoing a procedure, I managed that. I don’t thinkthe was day in there she didn’t get a visit from me at least once.

Since she wasn’t eating, they’d put a little tube in hernose to feed her. There was fluid on abdomen and they had a tube in her side todrain it. A tube in her hind leg, another in a front leg. She was a mess, andit really broke my heart seeing her like that. But she purred for me, knew Iwas there, and seemed grateful to see me, meowing.

Michelle was goddess of mercy. She talked with me, sat withme, visited Twinkle nearly half a dozen times. Text messages went back andforth daily. She was as privy to Twinkle’s progress as I was, and I’ll alwaysbe grateful to her for her compassion and patience.

Wednesday night, they gave Twinkle a transfusion from afresh donor. She ate for me with surprising gusto when I came in on Thursday,both times, and it made my heart sing. I felt sure then that this was hercoming out of it. After that, she only ate on her own a couple of time, but itwas still good to see. After Wednesday, her PCV (packed cell volume) was low,but stabilized in the 17 range, give or take, pretty much from then on. Tubesstarted coming out. Ultrasounds eliminated the fear it was cancer, tests keptcoming back negative, and eventually they settled on an undiagnosed auto-immunedisease that was causing her to destroy her own red blood cells. The treatmentwould be immunosuppressant drugs till her disease went into remission, if ever.

She was well enough by last weekend to try going home for acouple of days. The idea was to see if she’d recover her appetite in a homesetting, which sometimes happens. I took her home Sunday. She seemed contentand comfortable at home, but her appetite was still pretty much zero. I’dwished for more but was ready for the next step, which was an e tube, placedthrough the left side of the neck into the esophagus. Not uncomfortable, I’mtold, and many cats live with them for years, though obviously we were hopingit would be just a few weeks or months for Twinkle. In a way, I was happy,because it meant she could be looked after at home, that I could be sure she’dget the nutrition she’d need, and I wouldn’t have to fight her every time Iturned around to give her the life-saving meds she needed. I saw it as a goodthing and settled in for what I started calling “the long haul”.

Sometime last week Jim, a fellow blogger and one withdedications that have always delighted and fascinated me, offered to put me intouch with a friend who had mastered the home care of her cats. I’ll call herAstra. Several times a day we exchanged emails about Twinkle’s condition andprogress, and I got encouragement and ideas from her. I told her it was likehaving an angel on my shoulder. Being able to talk hopefully with someone whoreally understood was a great source of strength and solace for me. Astra, inturn, put me in touch with Erica, and we engaged in a three-sided conversationfor days, days full of wisdom, sheered experience, compassion, andencouragement.

Twinkle got her e tube on Tuesday. At some point, she alsogot one more top-up transfusion from a fresh donor to try to boost her PCV over20 (turned out the donor was a cat owned by one of the technicians, which Ifound touching). It never got quite that high, but she did stay stable in thehigh teens and they figured the rest was a matter of her bone marrow catchingup. Thursday night they ready to send her home.

I have an enclosed balcony and my intention was to set herup there where I could keep an eye on her. Had a table set up for feeding andmedicating her, a cat bed near the desk, water, food, a litter box a littlefurther away. Once she was home, Twinkle quickly had other ideas. She wanderedoff to the dark seclusion, once again, of the front door. Fine, I decided, workto her comfort. So, for most of Thursday and Friday, we did our things there.Friday evening, a little before Michelle came for a visit, Twinkle wanderedinto the spare room, and figuring I’d have to fight to get her out from underthe bed, I put her on the bed, with a step down so she could use the litterbox. We visited with her there and to my joy, Twinkle climb into Michelle’s lapto be stroked. I decided to rearrange the spare room for Twinkle... but Ihonestly can’t remember if that was Friday night or yesterday morning. That’s ablur. But I wanted to give her a place she was happy, and maximize my access toher for food and medication. So I managed to get her out from under the bed andmove her, temporarily, to my bed, while I moved things. I put the box springagainst the wall, with the mattress beside it on the floor: a place for me tolie while feeding her. Put the cat bed near the rad, since that’s where I foundher sitting under the bed, probably for the warmth. Moved the food, water, andlitter box in. And I hope she was happy with that.

I went home with seven different medications. Combined withthe feedings, it was almost overwhelming. So I sat down with Excel and chartedout what she had to be given and when, and I pasted it up over the cabinet inthe kitchen. I started pureeing cat food. I would lie with Twinkle and countout the minutes and feed her 5 ml at a time. Took 15 or 20 minutes but I wassurprised how little time it seemed. I was helping her get well. I felt goodabout that. She took well to the tube, both for the feedings and the meds,though she was a little balky about it a few times. And it seemed hard on at 8Friday morning when I gave her four or five meds at a shot, so I decided I’dstagger those out over 15 minute intervals in the morning from then on, andyesterday morning it seemed to go off great.

I had eye drops I was supposed to give her... two in eacheye, once a day. It went terribly wrong yesterday morning and I’m always goingto wonder if that’s not what set it all off. It was hard giving her the drops,and some of the fluid got into her mouth. I don’t imagine it’s toxic, but itput her through agony for a few minutes. She was writing and moaning, and itbroke my heart. I swore to her, no more eye drops. Because she’d just beenthrough so much, I cut her next feeding an hour later down by half, just tomake sure she didn’t get nauseous.

After that, I had a three-hour window, so I met up withP-Doug at Swiss Chalet and we talked. It was good. I needed it. One of thething I touched on was, if the time came I should have to let Twinkle go, Iasked if he’d be there, and he kindly offered to. We split up about 2, and Ihurried to get cat food for Bonnie and Max and then head home.

Twinkle was a little drooly, which can be sign of nausea,and I thought it might be because she had so little on her stomach. Well, itwas time for one of her meds, so I gave her a mil of that, and went out toprepare some food, another half-meal of about 20 ml. Since it’s kept in thefridge, I had to warm the syringe in warm water, and that takes a few minutes.I heard a cat being sick and rushed to the foyer to find Bonnie horking up afur ball. I told her, “You could have time that better.”

But it was just a couple of minutes after that that Istarted hearing loud thumping. I found Twinkle twisting in her litter box,moaning, drooling. I petted her, tried to calm her down. It was the worst I’dseen her. My mind was racing... should I take her in, or would this pass again?Was she rejecting the medicine she needed to get well, and if so, how could sheever recover? If I took her in, what would the bill be? And if I took her in,was I admitting that the time had come to let her go?

I decided I’d better take her in. I grabbed the phone,called P-Doug and left a massage saying I thought maybe this was it, and toplease meet me there. I went back into the bedroom, and she was just gasping.Just a couple of times. And I realized she’d died on her own. It was hard, butit was quick. But so unaccountably sudden. She hadn’t been great, but she’dbeen stable, and comfortable, and there was every reason to believe in theweeks and months to come, she had a shot at some kind of recovery and a newnormal. But she was just gone.

I gathered her in a towel and took her in on the off chanceshe was in a coma or still needed help. She was just limp. I think that was theworst part; it was a horrible feeling. Called the vet as I got in the car. Theybegan resuscitation work but the doctor told me she wasn’t breathing and therewas no heartbeat, and by then it had been about 15 minutes since the spell. Itold them to stop. There was no point.

The doctor brought her in and we sat and talked for about 15minutes. His speculation was that it had been a blood clot, which cats in hercondition are prone to. As it turned out, he himself had had to have his owndog put to sleep a couple of weeks before. I decided to get her ashes back, ina beige urn the same style as Jenny’s grey one, as well as with a paw printmade.

P-Doug raced back up to see me. We spent a little timeputting thing back the way they’d been so everywhere I looked I wouldn’t bereminded of the disjointment of my life over the past two weeks and the reasonfor it. We gathered up her meds and disposed of them. We put together thesterile, unused medical supplies. We talked for a little while, and then wewent out. Took the supplies back to the clinic; they’re needed there. Went tothe Working Dog Saloon but it was packed with a couple of parties, so insteadwe passed a couple of hours at the pub that used to be The Beaver and Furkin. Ididn’t drink, but we talked and I ate a little. Strangely, the evening was cutshort when G called us up because she’d fallen at home, and we headed back tomake sure she was alright. She was, but had tripped over one of the cats,Oscar, and come close to crushing him. He, too, was alright.

They gave me a few sleeping pills for the next few nights...I don’t want to be tormented by dreams; that I would find hard. Right now, I’mfairly emotionally stable. I’m avoiding looking at pictures of her because itseems just like poking at a wound to make it bleed and I’d rather just let itease slowly than in some big burst. I guess in the back of my mind, afterseeing her go through so much over two weeks, worrying about maybe gettingphone calls in the middle of the night about sudden downturns, or that she wasrejecting transfusions and her cell count was too low and there was nothingmore to do... I guess I was kind of steeling myself to have to make a decision.Even this Tuesday she was supposed to go in to see how she was doing, and I knewI might have to make the call then. So I guess what I’m feeling now is sadness,disappointment, loneliness, combined with a sense that, well, it’s over, andthe realization that, probably, she wasn’t really going to get better afterall, so maybe it’s good she didn’t just linger on in this semi-life for weeksor months where the big accomplishment for the day was a couple of trips to thelitter box. Something just went wrong, something we tried but couldn’t fix, andliving much longer just wasn’t in the cards for little Twinkle.

Well, the whole thing cost about $14,000. That’s going totake me about three years to pay off, probably. I don’t know what, if anything,I’ll get back from the pet insurance, but that’s how it is. I only wish I’dstill had Twinkle to show for it once it was all paid off. But I did everythingI could for her, right down to the tube feedings, and arranging things to workfrom home to look after her. I stood by her and I never gave up. I think in herown way, she loved me, and maybe even knew I understood how she was feeling. Isure hope so. For her part, Bonnie seems to know I’m sad, and she just lookedat me and crossed the room to be with me. The ironic thing is, when I gotTwinkle, I thought of her as the much younger cat who’d see me through therough times, one day, with Bonnie and Max. None of this seems right.

But I had her, a year and a half. And the little tigressdelighted me and often thrilled my heart. I just wish it had been a lot longerthan that.

There’ll probably be more later, but this has reallyrambled, and I’ll just close with my thanks to everyone who cared, and all ofyou who made this easier to bear. Thank you all so much.

Little star, revisited

2011-10-03T16:02:00.000-05:00

Well, I called the vet and they had the test results and they were not at all what I was hoping for. Turns out Twinkle was extremely anemic. They made an appointment for me at the emergency clinic nearby. I had to leave work and rush home (if you can say that of public transit). I was pretty worked up by the time I got here. I was half convinced she'd be dead.

She was sitting by the front door where I'd left her in the morning. In roughly a minute I had her in the carrier and out the door. I made the appointment, and she's there now. She needs a transfusion.

Low end is $2700; high end is $4000. And that's before they start treating her for whatever the underlying problem is.

So, my bank sent me a message last month that I was pre-approved for a line of credit. I scoffed at it but, like everything else they send me, I hung onto it. I just called them, asked the interest rate (something like 5%), and they told me to go into the branch near where I work tomorrow and sign the paperwork. Then I have to transfer about half the "low" end to chequing and pay by debit. Hopefully I can move that much in one shot using debit.

Meanwhile I'm looking at the pet insurance I took out last Christmas. Deductables, limits, co-pays... hopefully I stand to get at least something back, but still... if I recover half, I'll be lucky. As a side note I can say, and not with an iota of smugness, that if anything makes me grateful people two generations ago got serious about socialized medicine here Canada, it's this kind of thing. It's bad enough going through this for a cat I love, where I'm sitting there thinking, what can I afford? How far can I take this? How many years I am going to be paying for this? But just imagine if this were my child, my spouse, or myself I were asking these questions of.

The important thing is to get Twinkle back in good health. But if that goes beyond about ten grand, I don't know how I'm going to swing it. :(

Little star

2011-10-03T08:23:00.003-05:00

I’m in a kind of strange place today. One of my cats,Twinkle, isn’t well. She really hasn’t been herself since last Tuesday. After acouple of bouts of nausea and vomiting, she concerned me enough that I took herinto the vet on Friday, costing me both $280 and a day of vacation time.

I was told she wasn’t running a fever or dehydrated. Theytook blood to do tests. The best guess they had at the time was an intestinalinflammation. But aside from a couple of surprising bouts of activity, she’sbeen lethargic and disinterested in food pretty much since Thursday. She’sspent all her time since early Sunday morning lying by the front door. Shedoesn’t seem to be in pain, but naturally, I’m concerned. Even the other catsseem concerned.

The strange place in which I find myself is that Twinklehasn’t been the kind of cat you’d really warm to. She’s not really cuddly, she’sbalky about being picked up most of the time, she’s not above using her clawsto register her displeasure, and for the first few months I had her she hatedthe other two cats, and peed on just about anything and everything. I musedseveral times about taking her back to the pound but I realized it was my ideato bring her home... it was for me to put up with it and ride it out. And Idid, and she came around. She’s been fine with the other cats for the past yearand the habit of peeing on things seems largely a thing of the past, knock onwood.

And yet...

I like having her around with her quirky little habits, butas I say she’s not the kind of cat I expected to really have feelings for. So I’mkind of surprised to find how strongly I’m reacting to her illness. To see thepoor little thing just lying there, enduring whatever, really gets to me. I’mnot sure what’s wrong and I can’t make it better for her. I’m kind of scared Imight lose her, despite her being so young, and having only had her about ayear and a half. She’s been out of sorts for most of a week now and I’mwondering if setting it right isn’t going to cause me to incur serious debt. Iremind myself that that was a responsibility I chose. I volunteered to lookafter her; that was my idea. I can’t abandon her to illness because it’sinconvenient for me. I just want her back the way she was and I’ll do whateverI’m able to to make it happen.

I've realized that I do love her, after all.

Movies again: From Dusk till Dawn

2011-09-18T14:36:00.000-05:00

I'm weighing in with this one a little late... about 15 years. Nevertheless, I saw Quintin Tarantino's From Dusk till Dawn yesterday for the first time.

I honestly can't remember the last time a movie raised my expectations so high and crashed them so low so quickly. Not even the soggiest ending has so disappointed me. And it was a new feeling. I wasn't mad, I didn't feel ripped off (particularly since I didn't pay to see it; a friend brought it over)... I felt sad.

Now, when my buddy showed up, he did say something about "vampires". But I quickly forgot that detail when I started watching the movie.

Starts off in a liquor store in the middle of nowhere. The bad guys, Tarantino and George Clooney (as brothers Richie and Seth Gecko, respectively), are introduced in an extremely clever and quite novel way. I was a little let down when the scene descended into over-the-top violence, but I reminded myself that, hey, this is Quintin Tarantino we're talking about. You can't have a scene about a guy going to the bathroom without a five-alarm homicide (see Pulp Fiction). So, okay, accept there's going to be a lot of gratuitous violence and weed the plot out as you go. That usually works with a Tarantino movie.

The goodies are Harvey Keitel, in an admirably low-key job portraying Jake, a recently-widowered preacher undergoing a deep crisis of faith, and his teenage kids, Kate (Juliette Lewis) and Scott (Ernest Liu), all on vacation in an RV. The set-up here is believable, with the blase conversation and arguments nicely underlining the emotional cap Jake has placed on himself.

The baddies and the goodies all wind up at the same motel, where Richie first demonstrates what an especially bad baddie he is by raping and killing their hostage when Seth makes the mistake of trusting him alone with her. Not long after, Richie and Seth break in on Jake and his family, insisting that the family will conduct them all safely across the Mexican border in the RV. Seth assures them that as long as they follow the rules, they'll be set free afterward. Initially, Jake flatly refuses, even offering to go with them alone, but he is forced to include the kids when Seth makes it plain they'll all die then and there otherwise.

On the road to Mexico, Jake and Seth get into a conversation that, while prickly, serves as the first inclination of a bond between the two men. Richie's attentions, meanwhile, are focused on Kate, which pleases neither of the other two men. The scene at the Mexican border is key. Scott urges his father to appeal to the Mexican guards for help, but Jake realizes the likely outcome of that and gambles that playing for time is the better move. When the guards become suspicious, quick thinking on the part of everyone saves the day, and raises the stock of the family with Seth.

Successfully in Mexico, Jake drives the RV to the rendezvous, a biker bar called "Titty Twister" with sign noting it is open from dusk till dawn. When an altercation at the bar between Seth and the bartender threatens to end in violence, Jake is the voice of reason and compromise who defuses the situation. Sitting at the table together, the five begin to drink, reluctantly at first, but then with a budding comradery. When Seth reveals that he intends to drain the whisky bottle and then break it over the head of a man who touched him, Jake takes a fantastic risk by asking Seth if he's a loser. When Seth demands an explanation, Jake points out that Seth must be a loser not to be able to appreciate all he's won. He has robbed and killed, escaped a huge dragnet across Texas, and has made it safe and clear in Mexico. When Seth realizes the wisdom of Jake's words, he insists that Jake, who has refused to drink with him, share a toast. The two men toast one another's families.

At this point, exactly the one hour mark, the movie ends. As far as I'm concerned, anyway. What should have followed hits the virtual cutting room floor, and what is spliced on is... some other movie, where the names and faces of the characters happen to be just the same.

First, there is a long, gratuitous, and surprisingly boring table dancing scene, so long and self-indulgent that it had me wondering which casting chair enjoyed the baloney-pony ride that clearly paid for it. It also made it clear that we had 75 minutes of plot that needed to be Hamburger Helpered over the 100 minute mark. Well, even that's okay; Tarantino's padding is usually interesting for dialog, at least, and quite often character development as well...

But then come the vampires. Turns out the bar is nothing but the vampire equivalent of a spider web. The rest of the movie is nothing more than the typical zombiefest of huge monster body counts, the slow but sure attrition of human characters, and the retreat to ever smaller rooms and ever more meager survival resources. Tarantino allows himself to ignore that he has spent over the first half of this movie creating a handful of intriguing characters we've come to care about, and pretty much turns them into Star Fleet red shirts who've beamed down on The Wrong Freakin' Planet™.

At the end, everyone's dead but Kate and Seth, and despite the fact that they've lost everyone else in their lives, and everything they've been through together, they basically just take off in different directions after Seth hands Kate a stack of money, as if that would mean anything to a teenage girl who's just lost her brother and surviving parent. I watched it to the end, just to see how disappointed I'd be. You can probably tell: palpably.

I can identify the movie I wish Tarantino had made; the movie I thought he was making around the time Seth and Jake were having their passive-aggressive conversation and I was starting to perk up thinking, "Damn! This is gonna be good! How did I miss this all these years?" That was the movie where they end up at the rendezvous in Mexico, Seth and Jake have learned to trust and even grudgingly admire a few things about one another, and either something goes wrong with the deal Seth's trying to make, or else Richie's intentions towards Kate clash with Seth's promise to let them go if they follow the rules, and in either case Seth has to make a choice between his principles and his love for his maladjusted brother. There's a scene in the movie where Seth has to kill vampire Richie, and he says he hopes he can give Richie the peace in death he couldn't find in life. Why couldn't Tarantino have given us that scene as the conclusion of a taut, razor's edge thriller where the fates of characters we've come to care about really matters? Where was the scene where Jake recovers his faith (and is it necessarily in God when he does get it back)? What was the point of having Jake in a crisis of faith at all, if all the movie needed was some joker who could turn tap water into holy water? Honestly, I have never seen such promising cinematic potential so gratuitously wasted. I suppose you could call Tarantino a genius for being able to build something that impressive and then burn it down himself, but don't ask me to applaud it.

This could have been something the calibre of Reservoir Dogs. Instead, when Mr. Blonde says, "Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?", Mr. White turns into a werewolf.

Yeah, exactly.

" Oh, say I beg your pardon, but can you see...?"

2011-09-18T10:55:00.000-05:00

This is true; not a word of a lie. I once held a door open for someone in Erie, Pennsylvania, and she said, "Oh, you must be Canadian!"

There are worse national reputations, to be sure. But I mean, seriously, are you telling me it's so unusual to hold a door open for someone in the United States that your conclusion isn't, "Wow, what a nice person," but, "Wow, this person's from another country..."?

What's the thought process here? "Whoops, this person's being considerate. No American would do that. He must be a foreigner. But from what country? Well, given the geography, the most likely one is Canada. Let's check that. ...Hmm, yes, it says here that Canadians have a reputation for being polite. All indications are that this person must be Canadian. In fact, I'm so sure of that conclusion that I feel justified in saying so out loud!"

How could she lose? Either she's on the money, in which case she's going to flatter a Canadian, or else she's giving a sort of complement to a fellow American on the basis of a shared cultural stereotype... still a winning move. There's an off chance she'll actually offend a fellow American, who might respond with, "What, you don't think an American can be polite?" But let's face it: if he's polite enough to hold the door open, he's probably not rude enough to say that. So, like I said, a winning move all around.

But I think all Americans should do this. Regardless of whether they think the person they're talking to is actually Canadian or not, whenever someone is even the slightest bit polite, they should say, "You must be Canadian!" I think this would promote an ever-increasing level of politeness building on politeness, until at last, the US was indistinguishable from Canada in this regard.

Then, we could take over. Everything from Galveston to Alert would be one place. And at long last, that greatest of dreams would come true...

We'd finally have Alaska. :)

Movies, movies, movies

2011-09-14T10:14:00.001-05:00

Wow, it's been ages since I posted anything. Not much to say, occupying myself with other things, etc., etc.

Well, this one's about movies. A friend arranged with me to go out last night to a restaurant he found a while ago and we both like... imagine a gourmet greasy-spoon. Sandwiches and pub fare, meals largely under $10, but Beamers and Lexuses parked out front. I am not joking. Anyway, movies. I suggested we take in a movie afterward, and he approved the choice I threw at him. Back to this in a moment.

In the lead up to the movie, there were promos for five others. One sucked; one might be worth seeing, but to my surprise, three really peaked my interest. Of the three, two include George Clooney, two include Philip Seymour Hoffman, and one includes Brad Pitt. These are The Descendants, The Ides of March. and Moneyball. It's been a long, long time since I've haunted the theatres, but it looks like there are some solid cinematic reasons to line up and grab a seat this fall. I'm mostly writing these down here so I don't forget.

The Debt

Okay... the movie we went to see was The Debt. It's the story of three former Massad agents who undertook a mission in the mid-1960s, and how it is affecting their lives in the late 1990s. Helen Mirren stars in it, and for me, that means you can't go wrong.

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens.

The movie opens in 1997 when the Sarah, the daughter of two of agents (now divorced) is launching a book about her parents' mission, the story of which is a failed success: failing to bring a Nazi war criminal to justice, her mother, Rachel, managed to shoot him and prevent his escape. Things begin to go wrong when the third agent, about to be driven to the book launch, opts to step in front of a truck instead.

The action moves to 1965, Rachel, David, and Stefan, the agents in question, are sent to East Berlin to complete the investigation of a suspected Nazi criminal, Vogel, the "Surgeon of Birkenau", and, if the target proves to be him, to kidnap him and return him to Israel to stand trial. Rachel and David pretend to be a married couple trying to conceive as a ruse to get close to their target, who is now a gynecologist. Rachel and David develop feelings for one another but David balks, and Rachel turns to Stefan.

Meanwhile, the doctor's identity is confirmed, and the plan goes into action. Rachel injects the doctor during an examination and, in the guise of an ambulance crew coming to the rescue, David and Stefan abscond with the doctor. The plan is use a "ghost station", one of the pre-WWII transit stations West German trains may pass through but not stop at, to hustle Vogel out of East Berlin to Tempelhof Airport and out of Germany. The plan goes wrong, an East German border guard is killed, and three have to retreat to their flat with Vogel and hope for some other means of getting out.

In the interim, Vogel works on his captors, causing tension between them, and finally manages to free himself. But this time, we learn that Rachel did not manage to rise and shoot him at the last moment. Vogel escaped. The three realize that Vogel will simply disappear. Deciding that Israel "cannot be seen to fail" as a means to justify their own failure, they agree to say that Rachel shot Vogel to prevent his escape, and that they disposed of the body. And so the story goes for 30 years, the foundation of their reputations and careers.

This doesn't sit well with David. After a few years, and a long affair with Rachel, he announces his is leaving. 25 years later, he returns, and reveals to Rachel that Vogel has apparently turned up in mental hospital in Kiev. Hoping to relieve his burden, he suggests telling the truth. Rachel argues that the fiction has to be maintained for her daughter's sake. The following day, David kills himself.

Stefan, wheelchair-bound, convinces Rachel to go to Kiev and murder Vogel before he can talk to a reporter who has taken an interest in the strange old man's story. Through some astute intelligence work, she locates the man, but realizes he simply is a crazy old man and not Vogel. She phones Stefan to tell him so, but also that she has reached the same conclusion as David. She hangs up on him and leaves a note for the reporter, who is only steps behind her, that tells all.

And there the movie should have ended. But it doesn't. At this point, the script was apparently hijacked by high school boys, because at the last moment, Rachel sees someone disappear through a door, and follows to an abandoned part of the hospital, where she is attacked with scissors by none other than Vogel himself, whom she, in turn, dispatches with the syringe of poison she had brought with her for the mission. The last 90 seconds of the movie take a wonderful film about truth, redemption, keeping the faith with friends, and a mature worldly recognition that sometimes the bad guy gets away, and tosses it instead to an audience with a colouring book appreciation of morality. What a shame. What a real shame. It is the fatal flaw in an otherwise exceptional and starkly honest story.

IR Amuse her or she'll blow your head off

2011-07-17T10:05:00.001-05:00

IR Amuse her or she'll blow your head off, originally uploaded by Lone Primate.

Vicky's packin'! She ain't lion! :D

The joys of home ownership: fait accompli

2011-06-30T08:50:00.002-05:00

Well, it’s done. After all the years of imagining, and all the months of signing this and gathering that and then waiting, it’s accomplished. I’m in the new place.

In truth I’ve been moving stuff over slowly since the closing. Books, DVDs, and video tapes mainly; there were a lot of them. But they were all over there, along with most of the loose stuff in various drawers, by the time the big moving day came.

P-Doug had helped me break down my queen-size bed on Wednesday so I’d been sleeping on the mattress and box spring on the floor, kind of Japanese style. When I woke up just before 5 Saturday morning, and noticed my cat Max sniffing the cat carriers I’d set up. I figured strike while the iron’s hot, and I managed to quickly get him into it. Twinkle came into the bedroom, wide-eyed, looking at Max, looking at me, trying to figure out what was going on. I carefully dressed, willing her to say in the room till I could shut the door, and she did. I cornered her there when she tried to get away, and gently coaxed her into the carrier. It was a lot easier this time than when I took her to the vet. No blood loss on my part this time. Bonnie, I think, somehow knew the drill; she was hiding in the lining of the couch. I got her out and carried her to the bedroom, and with a little trouble, got her into the last carrier. Again, no scratches. The first job was to get them over and settled in the solarium of the new place where they’d be out of the way, but able to see us bringing in familiar things. I had that accomplished by 6 a.m.

Larry had decided to hang with friends Friday night. I needed his help to pick up the rental truck and when he wasn’t home by 7, I had to call him. Luckily, he picked up. He sounded like he’d only just gotten to sleep. Even so, he was back not long after 7:30 and we were at the rental place ten after eight. By 8:30 or so we were up the street at McDonald’s having a quick breakfast. Jay called while we were there, letting me know he was already at our building. We had to dash back.

Alongside Larry, of course, and Jay, I had the help of P-Doug and G and my manager from my previous job. Most of what we had to move by Saturday was just the big stuff I couldn’t move on my own. Took us a little over two hours to get everything into the van and about an hour to unpack it, but another hour to get it up into the unit (I’m informed that I’m supposed to say “unit” now instead of “apartment” because it’s a condo). Once the van was unpacked, Larry borrowed it and Jay went to help him move the gigantic TV friends of his gave him when he moved in with me nearly two years ago. Jay took off from there, and my former boss went home because her daughter had to get to a birthday party.

Once the move was finished, I could let the cats out. Max and Twinkle immediately started exploring, but Bonnie stayed in the solarium (when I’d first settled them, she wouldn’t even come out of the carrier). Hours went by before she even stepped into the living room.

After that, I took Larry, P-Doug, and G to Pizza Hut. We hung around there for about two hours, I’d say. P-Doug and G went home from there, and Larry drove me back to our place, where I picked up my car and drove home to... my place.

P-Doug had kindly put my bed together for me while Larry and I were dropping off the rental truck (grand total, $72). I went to bed about 10 and sort of lightly dozed for two hours. I remember thinking I couldn’t recall when the bed had felt so comfortable. It was the first night in nearly two years I knew pretty much for certain that Larry wasn’t in the next room, or that there was essentially no chance he’d be unlocking the front door at two in the morning coming home. It was a mixture of faint relief and lingering melancholy.

Sunday morning the Rogers guy came back again, between 9 and 10, I think. The week-and-a-half clusterfuck of getting cable turned on got solved, slowly, over about 90 minutes. He also managed to get the internet up and going before he left, much to my surprised; I’d been anticipating THAT taking weeks as well. After that I did a little shopping for things I needed, then back to the old place to help Larry move things into storage (more on this in a moment) and move some of my own stuff we’d left behind for reasons of space. As it turned out, he really didn’t need my help moving stuff to storage, so we just moved my stuff over.

Monday evening I came back to pick up luggage and a table, with the intention of sweeping up and mopping, but only the sweeping got done. Larry and I went down to the Wal-Mart in Agincourt and, once again, bought stuff we needed. Larry didn’t have a pot to... cook in... ;) so that was one of the things he bought. I promised to come back Tuesday night to mop the floors.

I didn’t.

I came back to mop the floors last night, Wednesday. When I got there, at quarter to six, Larry wasn’t home. There was still some stuff in his bedroom, but not all that much. I swept it out. I ran hot water into a bucket and mixed in disinfecting vinegar and soaked the places where the cats had puked up hair balls over the last few months, hidden from sight. I guess it was about seven when I was done. I took a red dry erase marker and wrote REDRUM on the bathroom mirror for whenever Larry got home. :) The last things I needed to take, mops, brooms, buckets, I took with me. As of 7 last night, I was 100% moved out. Only took a bit of May and essentially all of June, but it got done.

Tonight, with only hours to go before I can’t legally set foot in the place anymore, one last look, with Shelly, who’s still living in the building, in attendance. Larry might or might not be there; I have no idea. If I had no idea when I’d see him when we were both living there, I have that much less idea now. But I need to turn in keys and the laundry card and my garage opener. Hopefully I can get my deposits back.

And so, there it is. I remember when I started working in Markham, over 11 years ago, before the dotcom crash, and my manager telling me we all had stock options and in a year or so when we went public we’d have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I could buy a place... I really believed that. I thought I’d live there for just a year or two. Never imagined the last of my youth would evaporate in the place. But I liked it. Stem to stern, the place had my comfortable ass-groove worn into it. I saw all seasons there. If they’d ever turned the building condo, I’m pretty sure I would have been happy buying it. But it was rental money out the window month after month, so once Larry budged me by talking about moving out sometime this year, it was time to move on.

Which reminds me. Larry’s tale.

Larry’s job affords him significant (read: I’m jealous here) vacation time, and he decided to “take May off”. Despite this obvious easement, he didn’t manage to find a new place to live in the five weeks he was free to look around. There was always something he didn’t like. One Friday in June (I guess it was the 3rd, given the timelines here), I was driving home from the new place along the circuitous route that avoids all the traffic and lights, and I passed an apartment building I’d passed several times, and it suddenly struck me to inquire. I stopped, and it being just after 5, the woman who ran the building, who had no personal skills whatsoever, refused to see me. The man who worked with her (possibly her husband) finally cajoled a “yes” out of her as to my inquiry if there were any single bedroom places available. I told Larry when I got home, looked up the prices, and he went over the following Monday and finally landed a place. But when the time came to arrange the move, they wouldn’t let him move in on the 25th, the day I was – we were – intending to move out. He finally wrangled an okay to move in on the 30th. Well, on the 15th, they apparently got fired, and Larry’s verbal permission to move in a day early disappeared with them. So, for the past week or so, he’s been bombing his stuff into storage to smooth over the handful of hours between leaving our old place and moving into his new one (which happens this evening, essentially). All this despite the fact that I signed the deal March 13th. So the lesson here, kids, is when you know three-and-a-half months ahead of time you’re going to be moving, you might not want to wait till the last handful of weeks to actually find your next home. (Or, actually, for your roommate to find your next home.)

I went to Mars with DEVO

2011-06-19T06:09:00.000-05:00

I've known Dig since we were both twelve, and we've been through a lot in all that time. We keep in touch and we're still pretty much the same guys to one another we were way back then. Just before we turned 16, he brought a tape over to my house with a song by a band I'd never heard before. It was Freedom of Choice by DEVO. I really thought it was something. Not long after that we moved several cities away. Dig and I stayed in touch by mailing goofy little tapes we'd make... I still have most of them. As I settled in at the new place, something, I'm not sure what now, reminded me of DEVO and I started buying their albums. I sort of gave back to Dig by sharing the music and it became a touchstone for us.

He works downtown now right at Dundas Square and a couple of days ago he learned that the music festival playing there was headlining DEVO. I never got to see them when I was a kid, but we made a point of it yesterday. A couple of his friends from St. Catherines came in and after a trip to a pub on Isabella and an Ethiopian restaurant, we nearly missed the start of their set. We arrived just as they started. We were way back, and could barely see them, but there they were... DEVO. Man, was that something.

They did a set of about an hour, during which time they went through a couple of costume changes. When they threw their DEVO hats out to the crowd, oh man, did I ever want one. They came out in the yellow jumpsuits and it was like I was 16 again. Seeing that was a real kick. Everything they played was stuff I knew, but then, I know most of their stuff. They "left" the stage showing the video of the DEVO Corporate Anthem, but then they came back and Gerry asked us if we wanted to hear one more DEVO song... we had a "choice". And they played it... my first, my DEVO non plus ultra: Freedom of Choice. And Dig and I sang along with it. I'm not joking when I say I had goosebumps.

But not a DEVO hat or shirt to be bought! Strange! I wanted to give these guys my money and I couldn't give it to them.

So... Mars. Not surprisingly, I dreamed about DEVO this morning. Dig and I were winners of some ultra-fan contest and along with about a dozen other people, we got to hang with DEVO. At some point, we all went to some cottage on Mars with them where were could see Phobos and Deimos skating through the Martian sky. We had to put on special breathing apparatus to go outside. It turned out it was all just a joke the band was playing on us. They played a few pranks on us but it was in good fun and otherwise they were really cool to us in the dream.

Then I woke up and told you! Tah dah. :)

I, Homeowner: the first few days

2011-05-31T20:10:00.001-05:00

And so, there it is. I’m a homeowner. I can’t quite believe it, but it’s the case. I owe a lot of money, of course, but I’m the registered owner. Imagine that.

It’s strange being on the other side of those three months of planning and doing and long waiting. A sort of through the looking glass feel. In many ways, nothing changed. I’m still living in the same place; will be for almost a month yet. The real difference is there’s now this place in the city I didn’t have the right to go into before that now I do. On the other hand, a place I’ve called home for 11 years is about to vanish from my life. I won’t even be able to see it from the street. Can’t help feeling bad about that.

Well, here’s how it all went. I got the call on Friday just after one in the afternoon. My boss had given me permission to head out once I got the word, so I did. Took the subway to the bus, got off at the lawyer’s place, got handed a little envelope with the keys in it. The deed. Made a joke about expecting the Queen to fly over and tap a kneeling me on the shoulders with it. Then I left. My lawyer had told me that I became the registered owner at 1:14 p.m. I looked at my watch as I waited for the bus; it was 2:12. I hadn’t even owned the place quite an hour yet as I stood there. Bus to a subway to a subway to a bus. I guess I got home about 3:30 or so. I headed right over.

When I got there, I tried to go to the office to give them a void cheque for the condo fees but they were having a managerial meeting so I couldn’t. Never mind; I went up to my new place. Opened the door and stepped in for the first time. I hadn’t ever noticed it myself before, but my mother was right: the previous owner had been a smoker. I sort of wandered around the place for a little over half an hour, just trying to take it in. Tried the office again but no go. Headed home... my “real”, current home.

I’ve been avoiding the busy main streets and taking a residential roads route to and fro, and on my way back I passed a handsome apartment building I’ve admired before. This time it occurred to me to stop and inquire about one bedroom places on Larry’s behalf. It was seconds past five and they stood on ceremony that it was after office hours, but I did at least wring an acknowledgement that they had one bedroom places for rent. I got the contact info and brought it home to my roommate. I looked the place up online and found that they were renting for $850 including utils (but less parking), and that impressed him. As it turns out, he went over on Monday (today’s Tuesday), liked what he saw, and filled out the forms last night. I expect he’ll be dropping off the application today. Last night we decided to synchronize the moves; we’re both now aiming for Sunday, June 26th (was planning for Saturday the 25th but one crucial helper isn’t available for that day... right now, all it means is changing the date I’ve reserved the elevators in the two buildings).

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We decided to make Saturday washing day. For the first time in over a decade, I’d be able to do a wash without having to leave my place, spend money, or put a card in a slot. Larry suddenly remembered he had to help two friends, so he would have to come by later. P-Doug also agreed to come by, mostly for company, but as it turned out he was a big help. We brought over laundry, some dishes, my laptop and flat screen (for videos), laundry, and the patio table and chairs. I washed the chairs in the shower while he put the table back together. The patio stuff, which is currently in the dining room there, is only meant to be temporary. Since my balcony’s enclosed, it’s of little use to me, so it’s going to Larry, assuming he gets the place today, or another with a balcony. But we had to have some place to sit and do things, so that was the solution.

P-Doug and I took a quick excursion on foot to the new mall down the road. On the way we passed a garage sale where I spotted a sort of feline-looking version of a My Little Pony that I called “pink thing” and determined to get as a mascot on our way back. Larry called on my cell just before we got to the mall to ask if he should pick up a twin size mattress and box spring down in East York we’d seen earlier in the week. I asked him to, so he picked it up and headed north to meet us. We did a quick tour of the mall and headed back, picking up a Trailer Park Boys video at Rogers on our way. Alas, the garage sale closed up shop in the meantime so I missed out on “pink thing”.

We juggled cars so Larry could park his truck in my spot and the three of us managed to get the bed up to the spare room in one shot. After that, it was time to get down to business: laundry. I put in a load, added the detergent (I know, I know, backwards), and turned on the washer. It hummed, but I didn’t hear any water. We started fiddling with the in valves; opened them right up. Nothing. P-Doug looked under the sink but only found a cut-off valve for the dishwasher (boy, am I glad he found that). He advised me to call up the Maytag folks, but I figured it couldn’t have gone south in the 36 hours the guy had been out of the place. So, I hauled out the drier a bit and we had a look. Sure enough, P-Doug spotted the cut-off valves and opened them, and we were off to the races. Or the washes. At about this point, Larry, being bushed from all the running around, begged off to nap on the new mattress, still wrapped in plastic. P-Doug stuck around till about 6 watching Fall of Eagles with me, and headed home.

Larry woke up not long afterwards and we drove back to current neighbourhood to transfer money at an ATM and get a couple medium pizzas, and we headed back. While the washer and drier did their thing, we watched the Trailer Park Boys ep, and then more of Fall of Eagles. We ate one of the pizzas; I put the other, less a slice, in the freezer. Needing to go back to work after a month off (!), Larry went home about 8 or so, leaving me alone with my laundry. I did the last drier load and headed home myself between 9 and 10, leaving most of the laundry there (why move it twice?). And that was my first day.

Not long after I got home, Twinkle hopped up on the couch and merrily peed on it.

Sunday I went to Canadian Tire and bought a Bissell carpet cleaner with some upholstery attachments. First of all, I want to get the smell of cigarettes out of the place. Second, I’d like to take care of the carpets. Third, with Twinkle-cum-Tinkle now having far more soft, plush target area in her future, I figure this is probably going to be a sensible investment. I went over to my new place intending to get a start on doing the carpets, but two things stopped me (not counting lethargy): first, they recommended vacuuming beforehand, and my vacuum was at the current apartment; second, you need a Phillips screwdriver to attach the top to the bottom of the thing with four screws. So, I watched a little more of Fall of Eagles, ate a few slices, and took off. I spent the rest of Sunday throwing out videos I’ll never watch again, and packing most of my DVDs into a box.

This evening, I’m taking Shelly over to have a look at the place (and I’m thinking of bringing the vacuum to save myself the trouble tomorrow), and then we’ll have dinner at the local Firkin pub, as we often have before. Tomorrow (I’m working 10-hour days to take Wednesdays off this summer) I’ll bring that box of DVDs, vacuum the place, and get a start on cleaning the carpets. So, for any and all what’s interested, that’s where we’re at.

Systems

2011-05-25T07:40:00.004-05:00

Well, today is actually a calendar month from moving day for me. The 25th. Two days from now is the closing. I was out at The Working Dog pub with P-Doug on Sunday and he casually reminded me that, come Friday, I don't have to tote my laundry down to the second floor and spend money doing it. No, I can now drive it ten-to-fifteen minutes across town and do it essentially for free. So, the plan at the moment is for me and Larry to take the patio furniture over to my new place on Saturday and set it up in the dining room, plug in his laptop and the flat-screen monitor he sold me, and screen some movies while we indulge in a few loads of laundry. I've asked P-Doug if he'd like to come along and kind of christen the place; I envision pizza and (for them) beer.

Last night I went with Shelley down to Sunnybrook Park at Leslie and Eglinton. She and her fiancee found an off-leash enclosure there on the weekend and she's entirely taken with the experience. I basically just went along to keep her company, but as she found plenty of other women down there doing the same thing, I think I'll take a pass in future. It was, however, really interesting to watch the interactions of the two species: the dogs tearing around all over the place, full of energy and excitement, the place barely big enough to contain their joy; the humans, clustered in a tight circle, chattering and laughing, standing still and coolly mastering this little bit of the universe. It made me wonder what it would be like to cross over.

It did happen, just a bit. The dogs didn't utterly ignore the humans. They made occasional attempts to involve us. At one point, a large black poodle charged up where I was sitting and dashed off with my sandal in an obvious attempt to get me to give chase... if not me, then the woman who looked after him, who in fact did. For their part, the humans interacted with the dogs by -- well, first bringing them there in the first place -- but mainly by asserting control: planing off the extremes. Not too rough. Not too affectionate (ahem). Not too thirsty. Not too far. Leashes, throwing sticks/balls, bottles of water with matching bowls. Systems. Fail-safes. Provisions.

...You know, now that I come to think about it, buying a home is a little like being one of those dogs... excitements and new experiences under systems.

Goings and comings

2011-05-23T20:08:00.003-05:00

Saturday I decided to undertake a sort of grand slam of photographic archiving projects I’ve been meaning to accomplish for a while. Since they were nicely arranged in a more or less straight line westward, it was actually fairly handy to manage. In order, they were Westwood Plaza in Etobicoke, the unopened stretch of Sheridan Park Drive in Mississauga, and the reconstruction of Barnstable Bridge and its environs on Lower Base Line in Milton, which has gone into heavy overtime since last winter.

Since I had to talk to someone overseas on Skype at 3 p.m., so I had a tight self-set deadline. I left around 9:30 in the morning, heading west on the 401. I took the 427 south and backtracked a bit along Dundas Street to where it meets up Bloor Street and Kipling Avenue in a complicated intersection, called, not surprisingly, Six Points, which names the neighbourhood as well.

What little I know about Westwood Plaza (I’m not even sure if it actually is called “Westwood Plaza”; the theatre there is... was?... called Westwood Theatre) is that it opened in 1951 or so, when it was really on the edge of town... outside town, really; barely suburban at the time. It closed in 1998, I’m told. I can only remember being there once: in August of 1995, to see A Goofy Movie with friends. Not long afterwards, of course, it gave up the cinematic ghost. A karate dojo and a driving school remained in the plaza for a while, but even they eventually drifted away. I heard recently that the place is due to be razed this year, so I thought I’d better get going and take pictures of the place if it really was my intention to do so at all.

Six Points is an intersection where three major roads intersect, and in 1961, Metro undertook to rebuild it for serious traffic by means of ramps and bridges in a complicated jumble that, for all its ugliness and confusion, does allow traffic to get where it’s going (provided you pay attention to the signs) with a minimum of holdup. Supposedly the city now wants to untangle Six Points and recreate the at-grade intersections, with the idea of rerouting Dundas Street slightly to the south to avoid intersecting Kipling and Bloor where they intersect (in effect, ending the six “points”). If that happens... whether or not that happens... Westwood’s done for. Dundas would be routed through the land it now sits on. But even if Six Points isn’t changed, the city’s made other plans for the land.

Next stop was Sheridan Park Drive at Mississauga’s west border. It’s a strange street that’s really just two nubs of a street, connected by a big soup bowl of another street, Speakman Drive, in a relatively nice industrial park. Sheridan Park Drive is part of the road allowance of The Queensway, a street that was constructed west from Queen Street in Toronto near the Humber River in the 1950s and eventually made its way across most of Mississauga. Mississauga has a few valleys, though, and never connected all the chunks of The Queensway. Eventually one became Blythe Road, and another Sheridan Park Drive. I discovered it while getting seriously into maps in my early 20s, about half my life ago now. I used to wonder why they disconnected it. The truth, as I just discovered recently, is that they never actually built it. Sheridan Park Drive’s abandoned middle isn’t abandoned at all... it’s merely unopened. Well, again, change is in the air, and it looks like Mississauga’s intending to open that stretch at some point fairly soon. So I thought I’d record it.

I was down there years ago... decades ago... to look it over... one of my first little “lost road” expeditions, actually. I’d forgotten just how nothing it was. An impassible tract next to a cleared hydro corridor, which now features a bike path (I honestly can’t recall if it was there the first time I was there). It had been my intention to walk its length and record it for posterity, but it was so unimpressive that even I, uncharacteristically, decided “why bother”? I took some shots at either end, and I drove the parts that are currently open, as well as recording what Speakman Drive currently looks like, and left it at that.

Finally was the follow-up of the construction of a new two-lane bridge taking Lower Base Line across East Sixteen Mile Creek. Lower Base Line is known through most of Toronto and Mississauga as Eglinton Avenue (till around 1970, it was called Base Line Road in Mississauga), but Milton is still pretty rural and apparently don’t cotton to them thar new-fangled ideas and city mouse names, so... Lower Base Line it remains. Halton Region, of which Milton is a constituent municipality, also includes such retained bucolic, if perplexing, nomenclature as Upper Middle Road, so there’s every indication this is how it’s going to stay. But anyway...

I used to do a lot of riding around Halton in the early 90s with a buddy whose hobbies included just driving around, listening to music and shooting the breeze, so I saw quite a bit of backroads Halton. The two one-lane bridges on Lower Base Line, and the little parks adjacent to them, were reasonably familiar to me; even more so to him, as he reputed them to be make-out spots par excellence. About ten years ago, Halton decided these two one-lane, wood-decked bridges couldn’t cut the mustard and the time had come to replace them. The first is the more easterly of the two, which I discovered just this weekend is called Barnstable Bridge. Its successor was built at least two or three years ago... I have photos of it about that old... but it’s down in the valley and servicing it with a road that will bear, and safely conduct, the traffic was another matter, so it’s sat unused beside it for all that time. Till now. The road was closed at the heights last winter, and the new road is currently being constructed, mostly on the west side right now. I found out about that last week, and was excited by the prospect of getting some shots of this going on. This was really the jewel in the crown of the expedition this weekend.

I got to Sixth Line, didn’t read the sign, and decided Lower Base Line was closed at that point (it isn’t). So I drove up Sixth Line to Britannia Road, over to Fifth Line, and down, for the sensible reason that the bridge is much closer to Fifth Line than Sixth.

The route down on the west side is currently really torn up, because they’re putting in the drainage infrastructure. Fantastic photographic opportunity! But a daunting hike I almost balked at. Looking it over, it was just plausible enough that I decided to take it on. It meant a lot of climbing into ditches and back out again, balancing on scraps of the road about a foot wide, and dealing with mud and gravel, but I’m proud to say I took it all on and bested it. Coming through, I had a reasonably easy trek down into the valley.

The road’s being vastly widened, and they’re putting up an impressive curving retaining wall. The road now leads straight to the new bridge instead of snaking down to the little one-laner. When I got there, I was chagrined to find a family of four camped out on the old bridge. Just my luck. I worked like a sonovabitch to get down there, and the shots are ruined by the Joad family on a $2 Saturday outing. Uncharitable, I know, but I was thinking nerd daggers at them the whole time. I also noticed that the road on the east side was still intact. They’d come down a nice, even, paved stretch from the Sixth Line side. I could have been miffed but I wasn’t. If I’d come down that way, odds are I would not have bothered with the construction at the top of the Fifth Line side and I would have missed some valuable shots I got making a virtue of necessity, so it was just as well.

I shot what I could without being intrusive and headed up to the far side. There was construction equipment blocking the way at the top... apparently Lower Base Line was open that far. I noticed the family’s beat-up sedan at the top and recognized it as a car so badly maintained that I’d noticed it passing me going the other way at some point (you tend to notice things like a hood held shut by bungee cord). While I was up there, a middle aged couple came by in a pickup truck and we exchanged some brief polite chatter on the construction going on below. As they drove away, I heard the family on their way up the road. Thank goodness! The dad jokingly remarked to me “they” were ruining “his creek” down there. Having the place to myself, I was able to finally get some shots of the old bridge before facing the reverse trek up the west side and through the obstacle maze back to my own conveyance waiting for me at the top.

I guess I’ll have to follow this up in the late summer or early autumn... it’s due to re-open in October. We’ll see. I’m anxious to see if they preserve the old bridge for the park-goers. Its pier and decking date to the 1960s, but since no one’s even sure when its supports were first laid down, I think it warrants keeping it around, so long as it’s separated from vehicle traffic.

I made it back in time to talk to my buddy overseas, by the way. :)

Earth calling North America

2011-05-20T13:18:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I wonder.

Someone left a whack of A4 paper in the printer the other day. At first I was annoyed, but then kind of intrigued. You hardly ever see this stuff (hold that thought). So I went looking to find out why the different standard exists. Well, it seems that, unlike letter and legal, which are pretty much arbitrary and seem to have been established mainly because they met someone’s aesthetic sensibilities once upon a time, rounded off to the nearest half inch, the A paper sizes are based on some scientific principles. A5, for instance, is exactly half the size of A4; A3 is twice the size of A4. But not only that: the proportions also scale up. The paper size is based on the golden ratio. One side is always a ratio of the square root of 2, and the other the same ratio to the number 1. A0, the paper size it’s all based on, is one square meter in area. I like systematic stuff like that. So, I thought, hey, why not mess around with working with A4 paper for my own purposes... be a little avant garde, at least on this side of the pond? Word and FrameMaker both have no problem with A4 dimensions. Printers are fine with it. The binding system I have accommodates it.

But can I actually find A4 paper anywhere? Can I, hell. Despite the fact that I live in a city of five million, and one stuffed to the rafters with immigrants from over 100 different countries to boot, and despite the fact that 90% of the planet uses A4 paper every day, here in Toronto I might as well be on Mars as far as getting my hands on any goes. You have special order it in. Can you believe this? I get that we don’t use a lot of the stuff, yet, but given how prevalent it is everywhere outside North America, this is embarrassingly parochial. I remember when a friend in Ireland sent me a set of Guinness drink coasters he’d gathered around Dublin, mounted in an A4 frame whose glass cracked in shipping to me. I went looking for a replacement frame. No luck. I finally had to get glass specially cut. That was six or seven years ago. Still nothing’s changed. I can’t believe this; I really can’t.

...Where's the "tah dah!"?

2011-05-20T12:37:00.002-05:00

I haven’t blogged much about the process of buying a new place for a while because pretty much everything that had to be done was done a long time ago. But what was then months became weeks, and as of today, I’m a week away from the closing date. It’s funny; that still doesn’t seem as momentous as I always thought it would. What I’m finding daunting is the idea of moving. Not sure why; after all, that I’ve done before. I’ve never bought a home before, but that seems... I don’t know... just so automatic. Not that I wish it were troublesome, or a real hard slog, no... just that I always figured it would be thunderclaps and trumpets at every step, and it really wasn’t.

Yesterday was one of those moments. In getting all the ducks in a row, the real estate lawyer suggested we meet up, transfer the remaining funds, and sign the paperwork. Wednesday evening I took the bus up to a branch of my bank and squeezed out all the money I’d set aside. I got used to seeing over $20,000 in my chequing account for several months... I’m sure going to miss that impressive sight! It all got sprayed out on a single bank draft, which I handed over to the lawyer yesterday afternoon. He processed it and issued me a receipt while on the phone to some other real estate lawyer. Not much ceremony there. No fanfare, not even direct eye contact as I handed over the biggest chunk of my own money I’ve ever held in my hand in my life: $23,200. When I was a kid, that would have paid off 60% of the first home my parents bought in one fell swoop! Now it’s not even 20%, and the place I’m buying is a lot smaller. ...Anyway, I wanted it to be more than just perfunctory, but... hey, maybe when I get the keys.

So, pretty much everything is accomplished now; it’s just waiting for the bank to the pass the money through, and sometime around... now... next Friday, the lawyer puts the keys in my hand, and I enter the status of North American middle class homeowners/subclass mortgage holders. I try to make it seem like a big deal thinking this is the last weekend I’m strictly a renter; next weekend, I own a place, but it just doesn’t seem as impressive as it should. It’s just, “ah, crap, I gotta get my ass in gear and move in the next five weeks”...

* * * * *

On the current home front, after eight months, we finally have our balcony back. Larry noticed Wednesday that the railings were back up, and yesterday I happened to notice the board nailed across our door was gone at last. We moved the pent-up junk out of the way and stepped out into the spring evening sunshine for the first time in a year. It’s nice to have the option, but I noticed the railings are now glass at waist level, which means stepping out in puris naturalibus alfresco, however briefly, is no longer really an option. Oh, well. I’m moving anyway. At least we have a place to grill burgers for the next month or so... starting this evening. Waste not, want not. :)

Speaking terms

2011-05-16T12:38:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago now I wrote up an entry here about how I lost touch with Shelly, even though we live in the same building. I took a gamble and printed it up and put it in the mail slot of her apartment, then followed up with an email a few days later. To my immense relief, she replied pretty quickly and held no grudge at all. She was ready to pick things up where we left off.

Later that week we met for dinner at a local watering hole and got caught up. She’s living with her fiancée, a man somewhat younger than her but suited to her in outlook. During the interruption in our communication, she lost both her cherished cat and, even more terrible, her mother. I felt especially badly for being first too stubborn and then too scared to try to re-open the channels. But at least I finally did wade in and the water is fine.

I’ve seen her for lunch a couple of times since then and once on a walk with her new dog, a lab-poodle mix who looks a lot to me like a little spaniel; beautiful, lively little thing that makes me want a dog all over again. It’s great being back in touch, and even though the convenience of meeting in the lobby will go away again, I’m only going to be about a ten minute drive away, so it should amount to much the same thing. I’m bound to meet her fiancée sooner or later so I hope we hit it off well enough that my being around once in a while won’t be too awkward. I hadn’t quite forgotten how pleasing it is to be around her and talk with her, but actually getting back into doing that really puts a fresh coat of paint on it.

Unconditional

2011-05-16T07:24:00.001-05:00

As often happens, I was in the men’s room when I heard the new song (well, new to me, anyway). It’s one of those places where it’s quiet and you tend to be alone for a few moments, so you pay attention. The song, as it turns out, is No One’s Gonna Love You by Band of Horses.

But no one... is ever gonna love you more than I do...

No one's gonna love you more than I do.

I suppose it’s meant to be reassuring to someone you’re spending your life with. But the song has a faint desperation and even a bit of a melancholy to it. It’s gorgeous and soaring in its way but I find it painfully depressing. As it’s rolled over in my head these last few days, it’s kept reminding me that my cat, Bonnie, is thirteen this summer. She’s in good shape, as far as I know, but I can’t help thinking that, you know, most cats are lucky if they get past about sixteen (though it’s not entirely rare for them to), and that mushy, iffy three years or so seems so, so short. It’s hard to explain, and I think a lot of people with spouses and children would be apt to wave it off, but... it’s almost less what I’d say to her if I could as what I’m tempted to believe is true about her with regard to me. Almost daily she’ll stare into my eyes, looking back and forth between them, reaching a paw out, and the knowledge that if I live long enough, I’m going to lose that, is almost more than I can stand. I honestly don’t think there’s any less conditional love in my life than hers. Humans always have conditions; we can’t help it. She wants to be with me wherever I am at home; she doesn’t want me to leave in the mornings. She’s scratched my arms trying to keep me from going. I find myself cutting short my excursions because I don’t want to leave her alone for too long, knowing in the back of my mind that my time with her company is, indeed, finite. So there’s all that in the chorus of this song.

I hate being the kind of person prone to mourn what I haven’t even lost yet... but on the other hand, when the time comes, I’ll be able to say I didn’t take it for granted. I do adore her, and the best part is, I’m convinced she knows that.

The Rhythm of Youth

2011-04-21T08:23:00.001-05:00

I turned 43 recently. Forty-three. That's a serious age. Jack Kennedy was my age when he became President of the United States. I'm at a point where I realize I'm probably cresting the hill at this point, if I haven't already, and all the bright future has really whittled away to keeping warm with the embers I've gathered to myself. I've always, always had a romantic, reflective bent, but it's increasingly appropriate as I get older.

It started with me thinking about religion, and the phrase "ideas for walls" springing to mind... which immediately took me back to that summer. Half my life ago. Slightly more than half, now, actually. But to start I have to go a little further back than that.

I met Shelly in high school. She was just starting, and, about three years older than her, I was more than half way through. She was intellectually mature and we were introduced by a mutual friend whom I'd impressed with my writing. It was spring, and by the time the school year wound down, we were dating. It wasn't anything that serious, though as a teenage boy I was doing my best to move it in that direction, of course. I’m a little unclear as to the hows and whys of the situation now, but at the time she was living it a city well over an hour’s drive away, and coming in with her dad every day to go to classes here. She continued coming in after the school year ended to spend her days with me. Much of the time I had the house to myself, and it was where we really got to know each other. At least preliminarily. She was wise beyond her years and had already determined what she was and wasn’t ready for, and she stuck to her guns. I’m not complaining too much... the things she was ready for were pleasant enough. Believe it or not, a lot of what we did was just write together. She had an ear for language that I secretly envied her, being that much younger, and frankly begrudged her. Nevertheless I admired it all the same and it was the basis for everything else.

That was a great summer. It was my first romance. But it came to an early end when we happened to meet up with that mutual friend who’d introduced us and I let him goad me into making some unsavory suggestions about what we’d been up to. She literally walked away from me, vanished, and that was the last I saw or heard from her that summer. The integrity of her self-possession at that moment left me thunderstruck, and it impresses me right up to this day. You don’t forget a moment like that, or how awful it leaves you feeling. Or how empty the rest of the summer, and maybe your life, is after that.

Incredibly, she returned to the same school, and the same long trip in, in the fall, and I managed to patch things up, though they weren’t the same. We were friends, but that romantic potential had evaporated. Eventually her family actually moved into the area and so she spent the rest of her high school years going there. She met other people, found other circles of friends, but somehow we managed to stay in touch. By the time I was in university and she was the one most of the way through high school, my role had become that of the unrequited lover who hung around in the lobby of her apartment building late into the night to listen to her moon over other guys and try to offer my sympathy. It sounds pathetic, I know, but it was a time of emotional growth for me. I learned a lot about her, myself, and life in general putting myself through that. One thing I learned was that part of my motivation was wanting her to notice me again, in that old way. And amazingly, eventually, she did.

We started dating seriously again the spring she was turning 18 and I was turning 21. And yes, now it was a lot more serious. She didn’t give herself to me all at once. She let me discover her over weeks. It was glorious. The potential, the anticipation, the uncertainty, the yearning. There was nothing like it before or since in my life, and there never will be. It’s funny the things you dwell on. Learning the things that pleased her or didn’t; what her breath smelled like, what her mouth tasted like. Responding instinctively to things and surprising myself that somewhere back there, there were things I already knew without having to learn them. It was the most magical time of my life.

Her brother had a copy of the Men Without Hats album The Rhythm of Youth that was most of a decade old by that time. We copied it on tape and those songs (along with, notably, Enya’s Orinoco Flow) were the score of our relationship that year, wherever we went. That’s what its various songs evoke for me to this day. Now she had this strange idea that if she didn’t actually go to sleep in someone’s bed, if she was at least on the road home by six in the morning, then she could claim she hadn’t “slept with” that person. It was a sort of game I think she enjoyed playing with her parents. I didn’t see the point; her folks always struck me as good, natural, down-to-earth pragmatic people who understood how the world worked, and why Shelly felt the need to essentially lie to them for lying’s sake always frustrated me. But anyway, I spent a lot of mornings driving around with her as the sun came up, prolonging my time with her, playing little games and enjoying her company. Lingering while saying “good night” while people were getting in their cars to go to work. And then driving home again to get some sleep myself. I had dreams that, in a year or two, we’d be married.

At some point she became disenchanted, and, unbeknownst to me, began to drift into a relationship with my best friend, who lived in another city. Mutual friends broke the news to me, and that was that. Or so I thought. She managed to break the ice with me again after a few months, and, I’m a little ashamed to admit, she made her way back into my life and eventually my bedroom, too, despite the fact she was officially romancing my buddy. The thing was, I wasn’t the one who gave up on her. I never stopped wanting her in my life. And she knew she had that power over me, and she was, I think, delighted to use it. Sometimes I think it wasn’t so much me as the influence she wielded over me that was the attraction for her.

Shelly wasn’t, isn’t, the kind of person who should be married. She finds other people far too interesting and isn’t inclined to limit the scope of interactions if she finds the person intriguing enough. I don’t mean to suggest she’s indiscriminate, because she isn’t, but she’s not the sort of person for whom conversation over tea and crumpets suffices when someone truly dazzles her. When she eventually did meet a man she thought to marry, I remember her discussing her misgivings with me. This fellow was not the sort inclined to allow her to have intimate friends... but then, most people aren’t (though I’ve since discovered from observation that such relationships are possible given the right mix of personalities). She did marry him, with the best of intentions, and for some time, managed the traditional role. But eventually she did find outside interests. She played the same sorts of ‘not really a lie if...’ word games with her husband that she’d practiced with her folks. Not wanting to rock the boat and hoping to weather the storm, I guess, he let himself be convinced until eventually he couldn’t anymore, and their marriage utterly disintegrated over about a year of trying to reconcile. Just like in the old days of standing around in the apartment lobby, I was recruited to be a sounding board during this time. That was harder, because it was a lot more real. But the marriage did end, and eventually she moved in with the fellow she’d been principally seeing on the side.

Why am I saying all this? It’s a long story to tell just to say that eventually she moved into my building. But it’s all prologue for what happened. After a year or so, I think she, or he, just decided they needed more personal space. She got in touch with me and inquired about moving into the building I live in, mainly because it’s essentially walking distance from where she works. For myself, I was delighted. Yes, I won’t lie to you and say that the possibility of picking up where things left off never crossed my mind; of course it did. Thoughts like that won’t stop occurring to me till I’m dead. But I’m old enough now to know they weren’t realistic, and I didn’t hang my hat on them. But what I did know was that I’d have was a good, old, dear friend, right here in the building, just an elevator ride away. Dinners, movies, just doing stuff on a whim, suddenly all became possible, and with someone I had the majority of my life in common with. I can hardly express how much the idea appealed to me.

It wasn’t how it worked out. We hung around a bit when she moved in, but it wasn’t much social. We had a few dinners and we took some walks for exercise, but the hoped-for just doing things didn’t really happen. I did get several calls to help her do stuff, get stuff, move stuff, change stuff, and so on. Yes, friends do that. But being that handy was turning out to be mostly that, and not much else. She had talked about accompanying me on hikes on the weekend to get exercise, but every time I tried to actually make concrete plans, she had one objection or another. Finally a couple of months after she moved in, we penciled in a Saturday morning. I won’t go into the details but when the time to get together rolled around, she called up and offered me an excuse so transparently false that I was actually insulted. I couldn’t help it; it was so disrespectful I was honestly hurt. I’m not 17 with something to prove anymore and I didn’t need my feelings shielded; I also knew her far, far too well for her to need to make stuff up. We mumbled our way through the rest of the brief conversation and hung up, but I think we both knew a line had been crossed. And yet another summer went by where not a peep was exchanged, despite her being just a few floors up from me.

As usual, it was she who broke the ice, and I have to give her full props for that. She took the chance. And, as usual with us, it was in the autumn. The problem wasn’t the gesture itself, though, but the approach. Basically it chided me for overreacting; there was no acknowledgement of wrong or anything remotely like contrition in sight. I could only shake my head. All I needed was something like ‘I’ll try not to let you down again’, and I would have been ready to move on. Trying to make me into the bad guy because I wouldn’t consent to be treated the way I was was not the way to go, and I said so. I gave her the last word in the exchange, which is not typical for me, and left it at that. That’s where it’s stood. I’ve seen her once since there, quite recently, in the elevator, and that’s it. I wanted to say something, but... what? What do you say on a 10-second trip to the 5th floor with three other people there when you’re not even sure you’ll be acknowledged? Still, it’s amazing how I saw more of her in all those years than I have with her literally living right on top of me.

I guess the reason I’m writing this now is the real regret I’m feeling because I’m about to move, and all that opportunity to easily hang around with one the brightest lights of my life was squandered. But I don’t see how it could have been any other way if Shelly will insist on the right to treat others however the expediencies of the moment move her, and if I, finally, will not agree to accept that. This is how it had to be, unfortunately. There’s a good chance I’ll never see her again, and that really is a sad thought. The other reason was the realization I had yesterday that we somehow reversed roles. Where she stood on that day, so long ago, when she turned and walked away from me rather than consent to have her friendship taken for granted, that’s where I found myself on that morning a couple of summers ago. It took me all those years to find the kind of spine that girl had always had, but I guess eventually I did. My need to be respected by the people I care for finally overcame my obsequious need for their approval no matter what, and oddly enough, I suppose I have her example, and the deep admiration I’ve always felt for it, to thank for finally getting there, at least in part. But am I better off for it?

Meanwhile, “the great ones remember”.

Lawrence Avenue pony truss bridge

2011-04-01T06:46:00.002-05:00

Jim over at Down the Road, in a very kind and gentle (and probably inadvertent) way, made me kind of get off my butt yesterday and put my bridge where my mouth is. :)

I found out about this bridge about ten years ago when someone casually mentioned it on their photoblog and posted a picture of the abutment you see below in a recent posting. I did research and found aerial photos of it, crossing the Don as part of a rather scrotum-like course that once carried Lawrence Avenue East into the Don Valley and across the East Don. It's only been in the last couple of years that I've actually come across photos of that bridge from a human perspective. I put a few things together for Jim's benefit, but it occurs to me now that, now that I have them gathered at last, I ought to do what I've been meaning to for a while and post them. Someone out there might really love to see this.

Here's what the area looked like in 1947.

For context, here are increasingly wide views of the area today... the last corresponding with the 1947 view above, more or less.

Here's a shot of the bridge, looking southward, I think, dating from probably the 1940s.

Here are a couple of shots taken by James Salmon in the 1950s. The bridge was closed at the time, apparently. I suspect this had something to do with Hurricane Hazel. I suspect the bridge was open to traffic again prior to its removal circa 1963, when the current six-lane course of Lawrence was opened about a hundred yards to the north, and the Don Valley Parkway was constructed out of the south up the road allowance of Woodbine Avenue. There never was a corner of Lawrence and Woodbine, but technically there kind of was, if you see what I mean. These views look west.

Weekendy things

2011-03-28T08:07:00.003-05:00

Nothing exciting here, just sort of life navigation stuff for myself.

Saturday I decided to go down to the city archives again. I haven't been there in ages. This time, instead of just pulling the aerial photos and taking pictures from them, I thought I'd actually pull some of the collections. What I had in mind was stuff from the 1960s from central North York. Specifically, the photo collections of the work rebuilding the intersection of Don Mills Road and York Mills Road; the attendant extension of Don Mills Road north from York Mills Road where it used to end till the mid-60 (it's now continuous with Leslie Street north of Steeles Avenue); and the construction of the Don Valley Parkway at Leslie Street in 1963... the latter, I'm hoping, to include a number of views of the old, meandering route of Lawrence Avenue through the valley, including the little one-lane pony truss that once crossed there that I mentioned in a recent post. When I got to the archives, though, they told me they only pull collections on weekdays, but that I could email a request on a Thursday or Friday and it would be waiting for me on the Saturday. So I think I'll try that. Apparently all three of these collections are in the same box, probably with other stuff, so it should be a nerdblast. :)

Lawrence Avenue once crossed the Don here via a one-lane pony truss bridge. DVP exit to eastbound Lawrence Ave. seen through trees beyond on far side. Note that this abutment has apparently fallen into the river in the past year or so.

Having nothing else planned, I hung around the archives for a bit and resorted to photographing the aerials. I wanted to see what the area where the building I'm buying into looked like at various times. Most of the neighbourhood was built during the early to mid-1960s, but my building wasn't constructed till 1975. While I was looking at the plates, I decided to have a look at the construction of the Don Valley Parkway. The DVP (and Hwy 404, north of the 401) largely assumed the route (or at least unused road allowance) of Woodbine Avenue from the vicinity of Lawrence Avenue northward. Essentially nothing's been left of that part of Woodbine in Toronto since 1977; it only resumes being a regular street north of Steeles in York Region. So it's kind of weird seeing "Woodbine Avenue" intersections with York Mills, Sheppard, Finch, Van Horne, etc., where there are now just bridges. Seeing homes along a road that's now eight to ten lanes of asphalt. One plate, from 1960, was especially interesting to me. It's been hard, in aerial shots, for me to pick out precisely where Woodbine used to end above the Don Valley. It sort of trails off, literally. A bit of its allowance was used by Lawrence Avenue in its tortuous route crossing the Don. But, Saturday, I finally spotted it. It used to end right here. South of this, it was just valley. Woodbine resumes (and still exists as such) way down here, not counting its short stretch as "Woodbine Heights Blvd" on the little promontory just to the north. But in the 1960 shot, right at the end at the barrier, is this sad, lone little house. And looking at it, I thought, wow, that's sad; it probably got creamed when they put the DVP through a few years later. Then I looked at the 1971 plate, and was stunned to see the house was still there! Its driveway fed from the little road right to the north, serving as parking for the new townhouses. And to my amazement, I'm pretty sure the place still exists, with a few additions, and its driveway now on Geraldine Court. It's this place, right here. Imagine that place at the end of a long country road, surrounded by nothing but trees on the edge of the valley. Now look at it. Driving by, would you ever imagine? I'd love to have a look at this place from the road and try to picture that.

Anyway, after that, I made my way through town to my new neighbourhood. I thought I'd check out the grocery store across the road from my new place. It's a Food Basics, the chain I use most often, and I was really impressed with this one when I went inside. It's easy to imagine getting off the bus in front of it, picking up the couple of things I'd need in an evening, and just walking home, or wandering over first thing on a Saturday morning. I think I'll enjoy that.

Sunday, just for the sake of remembering, I was supposed to visit with Dave in Hamilton. We were going to do the pub in his neighbourhood at noon. He had to back that off to late afternoon so I decided to make a virtue of necessity and suggested to my folks that I swing by. I could show them the cheat sheets for the place I was buying. Then Dave had to cancel altogether so it morphed from a trip to see him to a trip to see my folks. I was there four or five hours; it was a nice little visit. Probably see Dave in a couple of weeks.

And now the silence

2011-03-27T20:03:00.002-05:00

It's been a flurry of activity in the past month -- and it is exactly a month; it was Sunday night, four weeks ago right about now, that Larry brought up his plans to move out that prompted me to get serious about looking for a place to buy. Look at all that's happened since then.

I started looking at listings.
I contacted an agent.
I met the agent.
I got a mortgage broker.
I got mortgage pre-approval.
I got a real estate lawyer.
I arranged to be shown, and actually viewed, four different places.
I made a decision based on location, amenities, utilities, transit, and price.
I made an offer on the place of my choice, and signed off on a counter-offer.
I withdrew $25,000 from my RRSP and handed over a $5,000 deposit.
I signed for a mortgage.

Now that is a powerful list when I consider that a month ago, I'd never done any of those things (aside from looking at listings now and then), and now I've actually done all that. And in under a month. Two months from today, if it all goes to plan, I'll be handed the key.

Two months. That's the problem. There's been all this activity. Scores of daily emails. Now, it's largely down to a couple of routine chores for the lawyer (title search, title insurance), and a long wait. If the closing were now, it would seem real. But there's no tangible result for me. I've done all this, and now... nothing. Silence. My pros are off doing other things, at least for now, and I sit here looking around, trying to think what I have to throw out, and how long before I really need to get serious about doing that. But otherwise, it's just business as usual. Despite all that.

Of course, once mid-May rolls around and there are all those last-minute things to do involving the closing, that'll change. And then there'll be June where I'm living here, owning there, and hauling the small stuff over on my own a little at a time each evening after work, and getting the feel of the place before my friends help me move the big stuff, and I say good-bye to this place after eleven years that have taken me from a young man to a middle aged one. But, just for now, it's been a whole lot of crescendo without a climax at the end. Just... silence, now. Two months is a long time to wait for the cymbals.

The joys of home ownership

2011-03-24T07:29:00.000-05:00

I’m still over two months away from moving the first box, and it begins already.

Tuesday my agent got the building’s status report and passed it along to my lawyer, and I heard from him yesterday. There were a couple of things I didn’t like.

First, the condo fees are good for this year, but are estimated to do up about $70 a month next year, apparently to rebuild the contingency fund, because they’re spending $2 million working on the parking garages, 2009-2012. I already thought the fees were high, and this takes them to all the more rarefied air heights. I think I can manage it, but I sure hope they come down a little once the fund’s rebuilt.

Secondly was this stuff about parking spaces. Some homeowners would have to move spots. Some, apparently, would even have to “make other arrangements at their own expense”. This was extremely vague. Bad enough if it meant I’d have to rent a spot somewhere while paying condo fees… but what if it implied a reduction in spots and that I potentially lost my parking spot? Neither one of those agreed with me, especially the idea of the latter, which for me was a definite deal-breaker. Anyway, it was cleared up by my lawyer: the work in the vicinity of my spot was already done, so it’s not an issue in either case. But it’s funny how focused you get when real money’s on the line. This wasn’t something where I figured I’d just cross my fingers and trust my luck – this was something I told the lawyer “I need to know, not guess.”

Oddly enough, I’m still looking forward to this and I really want it all to come together.

Weird stuff

2011-03-24T07:16:00.003-05:00

Okay, so last night I had a dream I woke up from. Nothing spectacular, but interesting enough I thought I’d record it. I was on the street in someplace that was supposedly the neighbourhood I live in, but it looked more like something closer to downtown. Crowded tree-lined streets that wandered just a bit. I was carrying a huge load of laundry in my arms. A young woman wanted to know how to get to Kennedy Road. I knew it was parallel to the street we were on, but I was disoriented and had to ask a passerby which way was south. Orienting myself, I could direct her to Sheppard Avenue, and then to Kennedy. I think she got the gist of it because she thanked me and started in that direction, but I followed after her, lugging my laundry, telling her more than she needed to know about getting there. She finally said good-bye and gave me a parting shot I couldn’t quite get, but took for “Nice puppy,” which was weird because I didn’t have a dog. But when I looked down, there was a bold, orangey-coloured chipmunk at my feet, striped, almost like some kind of jungle cat. And when it stood on its back feet and leaned on my knee, I was surprised by how large it was… the size of a cat. It let me pet it, though I had no food to give it. I had the vague sense it would be a pet for me from then on, and that’s when I woke up, needing to visit another room for a few moments. :)

Now here’s a waking one. I’ve been listening to an audio book about the turbulent romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Yesterday morning, the narrator said something about letters Burton wrote to her that she apparently never answered, but “she treasured for the rest of her life”. That sounded like the kind of remark you make about someone who’s already dead, but I was pretty sure she was still alive. So when I got into work, I checked on Wikipedia and, sure enough, they gave her death date. Then I noticed it was this month, this year. Then I noticed it was recent. Then I noticed, OMG, that’s today! She died yesterday, March 23. And there it was, already written up on Wikipedia. Now that, that was weird.

Pony truss trip to Norwich

2011-03-22T17:41:00.001-05:00

Saturday P-Doug and I headed west along the 401 to the vicinity of Norwich to photograph a wonderful little pony truss bridge that's been well-maintained and is still in use on a road called Middletown Line over Otter Creek, just south of a hamlet called, appropriately enough, Otterville. Sounds like my kind of place. :)

Modest, serviceable one-lane pony truss bridges of this sort used to proliferate all over southern Ontario. Most of them went up in the 1920s, replacing older wooden structures all over rural Ontario, and were themselves slowly replaced mostly in the 1960s as urbanity came to what had been places with slower paces. The northern parts of Toronto saw any number of these bridges vanish about this time. A notable one for me was the one that once carried Lawrence Avenue East across the East Don River until about 1963, when it was superseded by two six-lane box girder bridges a few hundred feet to the north, and then torn down.

N.B. Thursday, March 24, 2011 -- So apparently P-Doug was a bit miffed I didn't record that I'd found his ability to locate the bridge without recourse to a map during the whole drive quite impressive... so I'm correcting that oversight now. :)

Up until about 1960 or so, this is almost exactly what you would have seen crossing the East Don River westbound on Lawrence Avenue East, including the sharp turn to the right. That view vanished in 1963, but you can still get a sense of it here, below, in Otterville.

A little later on that day we were in northern Peel Region, exploring a trail that used to be a rail track, with an eye to coming back in warmer weather. Below you can see that there are beavers in the area, as well as human beings out to best them. Hey, Paul... Paul Bunion...

Heading home, these are some shots of the 401 eastbound from about Pearson Int'l Airport to the Don River.

More milestones

2011-03-22T17:25:00.000-05:00

Well, today it's official. I've got a mortgage. I was in to see DD today and it's all signed off. I've declined the life insurance -- anyone who survives me can sell the place and pocket whatever equity's in it; I won't care -- but I've signed on for insurance in case anything happens to me that I survive... injury, illness, job loss. It's $74 a month or so but it's also some piece of mind.

Also today my agent, SC, was sent the assessment from the building, which he dropped off with the lawyer, NW. I've been told NW will likely contact me tomorrow about his findings. Hopefully everything's okay. I'd hate to have to start all this rolling again for some other place now. I've kind of emotionally invested myself in the new location and what it means for my lifestyle and transit. I expect it'll be fine, though.

Naturally when I was out with P-Doug on the weekend we got talking about it all. He suggested rather than trying to do everything in just four days at the end of May, why not rent the place one more month and use June to move things over? June will be paid for here as last month's rent, and I'll make my first mortgage payment June 10th, so there's no overlap. It does mean another month's rent out of my pocket instead of into savings, but the sanity-saver of four more weeks (if I need them) to transition seems worth it.

It's hard to imagine walking out of this place and locking the door behind me for the last time, after ten years. Though I've only rented it, this is the first place that was ever really "mine", and when I look around, I see myself. It fits like an old shoe. I'll miss it. But I'm still looking forward to having something that really is mine.

Fall On Me

2011-03-19T21:47:00.001-05:00

This is one of my favourite songs ever. I don't know what inspired me to look it up this evening but I did. I remember seeing this video years ago, back when I was in high school, I think, and running out to buy the album on the basis of hearing it just that once (couldn't get the song on a 45).

The song has a new poignancy just lately; the lines "buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky" bring to mind my ongoing purchase of a condo apartment several hundred feet up in the air. In a way, it does seem like a rather unnatural, highly presumptuous thing to do.

Changes

2011-03-18T09:57:00.002-05:00

When I got off the bus this morning near work, I became aware of this strange new sense I had of the city. I’ve lived in Toronto-proper (as opposed to “Greater Toronto”) for nearly 11 years now. For all that time, I’ve been renting. I would have told you before that there’s no difference between owning and renting in terms of how you view the place you live, but this morning I felt it.

Admittedly, I’m not there yet, but I’m on the verge of home ownership. A few more things have to happen and then it’s official. But so much, so many big important steps have been accomplished, that I’ve started thinking in a new way. So while I was walking, and glancing up at the skyscrapers, I suddenly had a very real sense of attachment to the city. I’m in the process of putting down definite roots here. I have a stake in the place I can’t just pull up at a moment’s notice and float away to somewhere else from. There’s gravity and some permanence to what I’m doing now. I’m going to own some little part of Toronto, and all the infrastructure that accrues to it, instead of just borrowing it month to month from someone else. Like I said, I wouldn’t have believed there’d be a difference. Home is home. But I’m beginning to sense that there is. It’s a small, but real, revelation. It’s empowering. I wonder if, and how, it will change my outlook. I just hope it doesn’t prompt me to become some conservative old curmudgeon.

I like being a liberal old curmudgeon, thank you very much. :)

Like old times

2011-03-16T20:02:00.001-05:00

I worked late this evening to try and get ahead on some stuff; took the bus home just to see what it was like. Might be interesting to start taking it home and walking up my street. I might even take it to work, catching the route, 85, at Don Mills Station. Might give that a whirl tomorrow morning and see what I think.

Anyway, I got home about quarter after six. I had plans of roaming to my new neighbourhood to see what's in the little plaza across the street. I started supper (now half-cooked in the fridge), and I was just going down the hall to see if I could interested Larry in the drive when I met him on his way out to see friends. But they really weren't expecting him till later, so to my surprise he agreed to come with me.

We were driving down our street and turning to take a side road to Don Mills Road, and he was talking about how they make fun of Justin Bieber songs at work. We both burst into peals of laughter when he brought up a Justin Bieber "Never Say Never" poster and joked about changing it to "Justin Bieber: Never Say Beaver". He went on to suggest "Never See Beaver", but he said "you just know he's getting laid". It was hilarious. It made me feel like old times. It's not that we don't have a laugh around here every so often... it's just it had that feeling of 'before' about it... back when I'd see him a few times a month instead of every day. It made me a little wistful.

So, we got to the plaza, and saw what was there. Not all that much of use to me, but it does have a drug store and a discount grocery store about five minutes from my front door, so I'm not complaining. But the place has been there since the mid-1960s, and I imagine scores of businesses have been in and out of it over the years. I pointed out my new place to Larry, standing at one end of the plaza; you could just see the unit between another building the steeple of the church. I think I'll always remember that.

Just to have a look, we got back in the car and checked out the larger mall a couple of minutes away. It's got a few more amenities, like a stationery store and liquor store (not much use to me at the moment, but at least I know it's handy). It's about a ten minute walk from my place, and given how busy the parking lot's been every time I've been there, walking is how I'll be going to it, I think. Last Saturday when SC and I were trying to work out an offer for my new place, we tried to get to the Tim Horton's there (it's always Tim Horton's, isn't it?) and we couldn't find a spot! Well, that's not really true; there were a few on the east side, but I figure he thought it was too far to walk. That's how we wound up at the satellite office in the industrial park.

Well, Larry and I had a quick look around the east end of the mall, then bailed and went to Wendy's, bringing the stuff home. As I write this, he's out with his buddies.

------------

While I'm here I think I'd like to remind myself about Monday, the day I took off work to get some financial ducks in a row. Really, that was out of the way by 11 or so... not long after. I had to get stuff for the cats, so I drove down the 404 to the DVP. Dummmmmb. The interchange southbound at the 401 was, as always, a clusterfuck. I don't know why I keep insisting on trusting my luck with that. It took me about ten minutes to get past it, and I immediately got off the DVP at York Mills Road, my first opportunity to exit, and then headed south down Leslie. Got the cat litter, etc., down on Eglinton, then picked up stuff at Wendy's (yeah, yeah, I eat there a lot... grilled chicken sandwiches and chili, usually), and went home. I worked on my blog here, trying to work up the guts to call the real estate lawyer, and then finally did later in the afternoon. Nothing special... I just wanted to remind myself what I did that day.

Note to self

2011-03-16T19:36:00.006-05:00

You don't have to read this if you don't want to. :) This is just me, deciding to make a note of the important dates in the process of buying a place so that I don't forget. I'm already finding the timeline kind of confusing. (Note; March 17th: items in red immediately below are erroneous; see note at end of post.)

February 28, 2011 (Monday) -- Chat with Larry where he reminds me he's moving on. (This was actually Sunday, Feb. 27.)

March 1, 2011 (Tuesday) -- Started looking at listings. (This was actually Monday, Feb. 28.)

March 2, 2011 (Wednesday) -- Contacted SC (now my real estate rep). (This was also Monday, Feb. 28. What follows is correct to the date.) Met with him, along with Larry, at Tim Horton's. Larry opts out of going in on a place. I determine to go ahead on my own.

March 3, 2011 (Thursday) -- Met with SC for first showing, a one-bedroom in the building in which I'm buying. Didn't like it (as explained elsewhere on this blog). Did sign to have SC represent me as eventual purchaser, though (standing in the kitchen of the place I didn't like!).

March 4, 2011 (Friday) -- Contacted DD to be mortgage broker on SC's advice.

March 6, 2011 (Sunday) -- Submitted mortgage application to DD.

March 9, 2011 (Wednesday) -- Informed by DD of mortgage pre-approval.

March 11, 2011 (Friday) -- Go with SC to view three properties. Impressed by first one; not really jazzed by other two.

March 12, 2011 (Saturday) -- Go with SC for second look at first property from night before. We go to one of his company's satellite offices and prepare an offer.

March 13, 2011 (Sunday) -- Seller counter-offers. I agree to price. P-Doug and I meet SC at Tim Horton's and I sign off on the agreement.

March 14, 2011 (Monday) -- I take the day off to go to my branch and withdraw $25,000 from my RRSP. I contact NW on SC's advice to act as my attorney.

March 15, 2011 (Tuesday) -- I get bank draft for $5,000 deposit; give same to SC. Mortgage papers forwarded to me by DD. Discuss same by email with NW and DD; meet DD in person at 4:15 to discuss terms and sign mortgage contract. On returning home, send requested information to DD to satisfy loan terms.

--------------------------

At this point, I'm waiting to hear about the building assessment from NW. I think that's largely it, until some time in May when the down payment has to be made, and all the closing fees have to be paid.

Closing date is slated for May 27, 2011. First mortgage payment due June 10, 2011... first of about 910. :)

So, like the song says, "hats off to Larry"... he didn't "break her heart", but I guess he got me off my ass.

--------------------------

N.B. (Thursday, March 17) Okay, see, it's important to do this because I've learned I already have it wrong. Emails I exchanged with SC on Feb. 28th, the Monday, show I was much faster out of the gate, and started looking that day. That means, too, that my chat with Larry that got things rolling happened on Sunday, Feb. 27.

The next steps

2011-03-16T08:49:00.000-05:00

The process continues. Yesterday saw me withdraw $5000 from one of my chequing accounts, now flush with the pilfered arm and leg of my RRSP, and hand it over to my rep at lunchtime as a deposit. I was also emailed the mortgage agreement by my broker. That was the most daunting thing so far. It was, not surprisingly, several pages in length. I wasn’t bothered so much by anything actually financial in it; there were few surprises there – it was all the assurances they wanted. Do I really have a job at such-and-such salary, is the property really worth what I’m paying, is it fire insured, do I have the money for the promised down payment… etc., etc. Again, I’m not bothered by the fact they want to know these things, but I was a bit bewildered by the breadth of the requests. How was I to come up with some of this stuff?

As of Monday, after the previous post, I now also have a real estate lawyer; recommended to me, like the broker, by my rep. In email, he explained some of the basics of the agreement, and pointed out the things he’s responsible for providing in due course. That took a load off.

My mortgage broker and I also mutually wanted to meet to discuss the agreement, and as fate would have it, his office is a ten minute walk from where I work. I wandered over there yesterday and we talked for about an hour. That was great. He really cleared up what he needed from me to send to them, and when I got home, I got it together and scanned it and emailed it to him. So, one more thing is signed on and backed with documentation. I even know when the first payment is due. At this point, there isn’t a lot left; it’s mostly stuff the lawyer handles now. Then the closing costs, the transfer of title at the end of May. Then the real hard part: actually packing stuff up and moving. I’m glad there’s still over two months.

I also took the bus home along Sheppard Avenue for the first time yesterday, as I was smack-dab in the middle between two of the subway stops. I found it, Route 85, reasonably brisk, which was a blessing because by the time I was heading home, I had to pee with an ever-increasing urgency. As a result the ten minute walk home up my street wasn’t as enjoyable as it might otherwise have been. :)

Happened so fast

2011-03-14T07:49:00.000-05:00

So, well, Friday I was scheduled to look at three places, and I did. It was the first one I had my eye on. It was gorgeous. Really, it was pretty much everything I was looking for in terms of amenities, location, price. The other two places didn't impress me but the first one did. So, Saturday, we went back and had a second look. I was still impressed. That afternoon, we made an offer.

Yesterday, I was out at a pub with P-Doug waiting for the call from my rep that they'd counter-offered. They came right up the middle of the $5000 difference. So, P-Doug and I paid the bill, took off across town, and we met up with my rep at a Tim Horton's, where I signed. Yeah, I signed a home purchase sitting in a Tim Horton's. How Canadian can you get?

Today I've begged off work so I can go to the bank, open my RRSP, and transfer money out for the deposit cheque and, eventually, the down payment. It all happens at the end of May, which has a nice air of breathing room about it. Anything shorter than about a month would have seemed too abrupt, I admit.

It isn't real to me yet. It hasn't actually sunk in that I won't be living here next summer, but in that nice place I visited a couple of times last week. I can't explain it. I'm not nervous or excited or depressed, or much of anything. I feel good that I've taken this step, but it doesn't seem as momentous as I always imagined it. It just feels like something I needed to do that I put off for years, but finally tackled. Maybe that'll change... but you know what, I hope not. I hope it always feels like this: a simple, mature thing I did that thousands and thousands of other people do every day, that was a responsible thing to do. I don't want to be awed or frightened or cowed or ecstatic about it, because I think they're all overreactions. I like that this feels normal.

Nerd dreams

2011-03-11T09:03:00.003-05:00

I mentioned recently that I seem to go through these periods where I have dreams I remember. I seem to be in one at the moment. Last night’s dream wasn’t what I’d call one of my classically weird ones, but it was one of the compelling, interesting ones, in which the world’s just a little askew.

In this one, I had the silver car I had previous to this one, and I was driving it back to 1970 to take photos of a construction site. I was puzzled when I arrived there, trying to figure out where it was, and I finally decided it was the reconstruction of the intersection of Winston Churchill Blvd. and Erin Mills Parkway. I can’t show you what that intersection looked like before the reconstruction, nor afterwards, for that matter, because it doesn’t exist. Winston Churchill Blvd. and Erin Mills Parkway are Peel Region’s sixth and fifth west concession roads respectively, and as such they run parallel to each other 7/8 of a mile apart. Big points to anyone who can tell me the Freudian aspect of this detail. :)

Anyway, when I got there, Erin Mills Parkway was in the process of being upgraded from Fifth Line. It was a scar of reddish-brown dirt six lanes wide, with big yellow construction machines scattered on it, momentarily stopped for lunch or something, I guess. The road dipped down under the railroad underpass they were building, and at the top of the hill, beyond what had been the level crossing, was a very busy Winston Churchill Blvd. that reminded me more of Queen Street in Streetsville or Dundas Street near the Junction… lots of low-rise storefronts/apartments that don’t actually exist on Winnie anywhere (went straight from country road to suburban drive with no little towns on it in between).

This is where it gets interesting. Right in the middle of the road was this old farm house. It was due to be razed, but hadn’t been just yet. A family was still living there. I was with them on their porch, shooting the scene with a digital SLR camera. They knew I was from the future and were impressed the camera had no film. It was no big deal to anyone I was from the future; in the world of the dream, that kind of thing happened. It was like living in the old country and being visited by relatives from the New World or something. They didn’t ask me questions about what was going to happen. They were more interested in my impressions of the time they were living in.

And suddenly my dad was there, looking like he does today. I have the impression he’d come with me. But when I looked at him again, he seemed younger. The next time I looked at him, he looked like he would have been back then, a man considerably younger than I am now. He seemed really happy and self-confident. I didn’t think of it in the dream but I wonder if he meant to stay.

Anyway, that was pretty much the run of the thing. Nothing wild or truly weird. Just stuff I found nerdishly interesting. I love dreams like that.

A step closer to bank slavery :)

2011-03-10T14:37:00.001-05:00

I seem to go through these jags where I blog a lot and then take a break (in other words, long periods where I can’t be arsed). This seems to be one of those stretches where I’m inclined to tap the keyboard.

So anyway, without further ado. Yesterday I heard back from the mortgage broker. I hope it doesn’t sound arrogant to say that I wasn’t really too concerned I’d be turned down flat; my real concern was, being a single guy who’s middle aged now, what would anyone be willing to lend me? Turns out, a lot more than I expected. Now, mind you, the sum is amortized over 35 years, and doesn’t take condo fees into account, but that said, it approaches 300K. I was just hoping the clear the 175K hurdle… that’s the range at which older places that have the room and amenities I could be happy with become possible. I don’t want to spend anything like what they’re ostensibly willing to lend me; I couldn’t pay that off if I lived to be 90. But it’s sure good to know I can make this happen. It’s just figuring out what and how now, I suppose.

There’s a fairly nice town home not far from where I live now that’s for sale. It’s around 200K, and I’m not sure I want to spend that much, but the condo fees are lower than most places in towers (partly because you’re on your own for heat and electricity… but oddly enough, cable and water are inclusive). A couple of things I don’t like about it are that it’s ground level and the parking is surface. Now that I’m taking the subway to work and seeing my car on roughly a weekly, rather than a daily, basis, I’m not sure I want to leave it sitting in the open for a week at a time… that just feels like I’m begging for the thing to be stolen. Besides, I don’t really want to leave it sitting exposed to the weather, either. So much as I love the location, if the place doesn’t make me fall in love with it, it’s already a dubious prospect.

Not too far away are some substantial two-bedroom units near the Scarborough border. They’re between 175K and 185K. They seem to be about the same size as the apartment I’m renting, and the condo fees include pretty much everything but the net and the phone. The bus is right out the front door, goes to Yonge line, from which it’s one stop to work. Alternately another bus takes you to the Sheppard line I’m taking to work now. Either way, a bit longer than the commute I have now, but not that much. Parking’s underground, and no more leaving the apartment do laundry. I’m very much in favour of that. You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve had about half a dozen t-shirts ripped off over the years. Some people really have no shame at all. Enough of that crap. There’s a supermarket and a drug store literally across the street. These places are top of my list right now. They’re both in the same building. Let’s just say I’m pretty interested.

Anyway, the real estate guy I’m working with is talking about bombing through five places in two hours, probably tomorrow night. I wonder what it’ll be like. Will I see some place I really want and die a little knowing I realistically can’t afford it (no matter what some bank thinks)? Will I hate the places I probably could afford? Or will I maybe be lucky and find a place I can really imagine settling into and loving, and being able to afford at the same time? It’s kind of exciting. I wish I’d done this five or ten years ago, though. Probably couldn’t have ten years ago, but five? Possibly. Wish I hadn’t put it off. Well, I haven’t done it yet, either! And if I don’t see any place I like, I guess I still won’t. Much as I’d like to stop wasting money renting, I don’t want to just grab a place I hate and have to try to unload sometime, somehow.

So there it is. Another milestone. Even if I don’t buy anything, I’ve taken the steps. Someone’s shown me a place. I’ve been pre-approved for a mortgage. I’m actually flirting with home ownership and I’m getting winks and kisses blown back. Nice feeling. But aside from marriage, hard to imagine a more real, grown-up thing to do. That’s still a little scary… though not as scary an idea as it used to be, years ago.

Well, we’ll see.

The latest 15

2011-03-08T15:35:00.002-05:00

I remember hearing somewhere that men, reputedly, think about sex every 15 seconds. I highly doubt that's true, but all the same...

Today I was contacted by a former co-worker who likes to get together to compare career trajectories from time to time. It's been over a year since we've sat down to this. It's always lunch, but this time it's dinner on a weekend. Me being a man, I indulge myself in a pleasant little fantasy that we are about to embark on an affair.

We're not, of course. She's extremely married, with two kids who constitute about 80% of her conversation. While she enjoys a decorous bon mot, in truth, she's so demure that it's hard to conceive (pun intended) of how she acquired two children in the first place. Perhaps under lettuce leaves in the garden?

Nevertheless, brief flashes of the tall, unrestrained Amazon bursting free of layers of WASP plaster-of-Paris do smolder, almost smokelessly, in the back of my distracted mind. LOL :)

More looking back

2011-03-08T12:57:00.004-05:00

One year ago today I sat in a meeting with a VP at the company I used to work with and walked out of it knowing I wasn’t going to become official manager of the department I’d been running for nearly a year, but was going to be working under someone junior to me who had quit when I started, prompting my change of jobs. I took a minute to look back at the post I wrote when I changed jobs last year. Thought there were a few things I might comment on.

My reasons of leaving: well, I’m hearing from people more closely-connected to the old company than I am that it’s in some trouble. The parent company spent much of last year trying to unload it, unbeknownst to them. At least till one prospective buyer accidentally phoned them directly, spoke to our president, and prompted a minor heart attack in the man the following day. This was sometime last summer, I gather. More to the point of my reasons… I’m hearing that, surprise surprise, the person they hired to manage documentation blew a deadline – as she did years ago, before I started there. Just shrugged and went home with it not finished, as did her junior, the guy I managed for over a year (little disappointed in him, I have to say). Friday, 5 o’clock, off they went. Clients didn’t get the documentation. While my boss ran things, while I ran things, we never, ever let that happen. This one, so great she was going to be my boss, she’s at risk of being fired. This is largely to the advantage of other department heads, “friends” of hers, who praised her into the job, probably in the expectation she’d drop the ball and ask for the extension that THEY used to have to ask for when THEY dropped the ball. All in all, I’m sorely tempted to email the VP who hired her and ask, “Hey, how’s that working out for you?” Apparently his time’s up, too. He’s here from England on a work visa, and I don’t think it’s going to be renewed. Cheerio, old bean! Don’t let the maple door smack you in the bum on the way out. Anyway, while I’m not happy about having to quit, I suppose it was for the best.

My commute: I really don’t mind taking the bus and the subway as much as I would have imagined this time last year. I guess I’m used to it now. It’s often a drag; it means I can’t get around during lunch or right after work like I used to. But gas is currently 123.5¢/L, about a third again as expensive as it was when I stopped driving to work, so I guess I don’t mind not having to routinely pay that!

We changed buildings a few months ago. I’m a little further from the station now, which means going outside to get to work, or to go to the food court, both of which used to be elevator rides. That I don’t much like. Nicer building, though. Looks classier.

The company: I guess the biggest change is, like dozens of other companies around the world last year, we got acquired by IBM. No layoffs, no dislocation, not even any immediate big changes. But damnation, do these people love meetings and blue tape (three meetings today, one in ten minutes…). You almost need to check with someone just to go to the can. On the other hand, they’re way into helping you build your career, and even move around between positions and locations in the company. So if I can adapt to the culture, it could be a great place to pursue my career. I sure hope so, because I really don’t want to have to look for another job again.

I guess on the whole I’m better off than I was. I have regrets: I’ll never like being essentially chased out of the last company, or being milked like a cow for a crucial year and then being traded for some idiot’s magic beans and missing my chance to really manage. But, you know, one door closes, etc. So here I am. I can do none other.

Looking back at the blog, and looking ahead...

2011-03-06T18:39:00.004-05:00

When I started blogging, nearly seven years ago, I was originally working with LiveJournal. I kept that blog for about a year before I began to switch over to Blogger, to City in the Trees here.

I’ve had recent discussions with a fellow blogger whose work I admire and follow closely. He suggested moving over to WordPress for some of the features there. I looked into it and while a few things intrigued me, some other aspects, like the requirement to pay to embed video and the not-quite-accurate conversion of my Blogger formatting, were enough to dissuade me. Nevertheless, it got me started on a different project: finally porting over my LJ entries to City in the Trees. I’ve spent most of the weekend reviewing, reformatting, and reposting the entries here.

Not all of them made it. A handful were complete rubbish, puzzling babblings I made while drunk, and they were dropped as being without value, either to me or anyone else. But, on the whole, I think about 90-95% of them are now here. Pretty much anything prior to May, 2005, will be from that period.

Obviously in reviewing them, I’ve had to read them, some of them for the first time in many years. I’m struck by how my focus has changed, both in blogging and in my life.

For one thing, most of the early entries are centred around Jody, a friend I knew online for ten years, and who died in his mid-20s of cancer. I was obsessive about it, but I think that’s understandable and excusable, though I have to admit—with a little bit of shame—that I find myself now surprised at the focus of it. I don’t remember it looming as large in my life as it apparently did. I also find the spiritual references a little strange. In thinking about it now, I do remember I was trying very hard to connect to something deeper at the time. I went through a lot of that over a couple of years. What’s lacking is any indication of when I finally gave up on that. I know I did at some point. I know it isn’t real for me now. I don’t think it was then, either, though it’s abundantly clear I wanted it to be.

Another thing I noticed is that my posts back then were largely about either what I was feeling, or the mundane day-to-day things going on in my life. I suppose there’s still some of that, but nowhere near as much. My postings now are much more sporadic and I don’t feel the need to blog about things like baking spaghetti squash or that it snowed yesterday. Now it seems to be much more about the exceptional things (explorations, weird dreams, strange observations, concerts, movies, political events, and so on). It’s less about me, and more about what I think about things out there.

I also notice, with rather a degree of discomfort, that six or seven years ago I was spending a lot of time sitting around boozing, and writing about sitting around boozing. It’s particularly striking in light of that fact that I essentially undertook three months ago to give up drinking altogether for a year, without anything like that level of alcohol in my life anymore. It’s been a long time since my idea of a good weekend was sitting around with my head swimming, stuffing down pizzas, and then agonizing about it the next day. Relatedly, I noticed a constant bemoaning of my increasing weight... oh no, 205! Oh no, 215! Oh no, 228!! Well, yeah. It’s currently 233, and that’s down from 251 at the start of December. 228 once seemed terrible... now it’s a goal for the month. Why did I let that happen?

Blogging has a bad rep... even I was amused by Ron James’s tweaking our noses about it: “I just brushed my hair and now I’m eatin’ chips!” There’s a narcissistic aspect in sharing your thoughts with the world, sure. But I’ve also found it valuable in remembering what I’ve done, where I’ve been, what I was feeling, and when. I suppose a diary would serve the same purpose but it wouldn’t be as fun, and there'd be no chance of interesting feedback or anyone building on what you've said or asked. Anyway, if nothing else, it’s providing an impetus to stay the course in terms of watching what I eat, and keeping the bottle at bay.

* * * * *

Other things. I don’t talk about my home life much here anymore... at least, not like I once did... but I’m on the verge of some changes that I suppose warrant mention, if only for myself one day. I’ve known Larry for about 20 years, and for the last year and a half, he’s been subletting my spare room. Well, he’s expressed an intention, “no offense, but...”, that he wants to strike out on his own, probably this summer. He raised the matter late last fall, when I was switching internet providers and he thought I was doing so to accommodate some increasing need for bandwidth. So this has been in the back of my mind for a while.

His living here has landed pretty lightly on me. I haven’t changed my lifestyle much at all. And his contribution to the rent has been valuable. It’s enabled me to wipe out both an outstanding loan of around $3500 and credit card debt of around $6000 in the space of about a year of assiduous application on my part. The only debt I currently have is a car loan, and I ashcanned the credit card last month (I’m currently using a net-rechargeable pre-paid MasterCard from Bank of Montreal for things like online purchases... using my own money, rather than borrowing someone else's). His help with the rent is money I admit I’m going to miss.

I also realize I’m going to miss him. I lived on my own for nearly a decade before he moved in, and at first I was kind of worried we might really get on each other’s nerves and damage the friendship. To my relief, that didn’t happen. He does his thing, I do mine, and every so often we put on a movie, order out for roast chicken, and have fun heckling. He’s a blast at it. I guess I’ve grown accustomed to having someone else around, even if we’re not interacting. I’m not alone. If I want to talk about something, or make a joke, or bounce an idea of someone, he’s right down the hall. Sometime this year, that’s going to end. It’s going to go away. He’s gonna go away. The weird thing is, as used as I was to being alone, I’m really not looking forward to going back to it. Kinda sucks, to tell the truth. I expect we’ll still be friends but it’s not going to be the same. It’ll be like it used to be. I’ll see him a couple of times a month... maybe. He's always been a social butterfly. After sharing space for about two years (or whatever, whenever), that’s going to be really weird. Now I’m afraid that will end the friendship, not with a bang but a whimper. I dunno. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

In truth, his latest admission of it has kind of spurred me to action. It happened like this: last Monday (N.B., March 17th: it was actually Sunday, the day before), we were sitting around in the living room, talking animatedly about buying new computers this month. Kind of by accident six or seven years ago, my main computer is here in the living room, and Larry remarked that I should get a big flat screen TV so I can connect the computer to it and watch media on it. Sensing something was up, I asked what was wrong with the big Sony rear projector we have (technically, it's his, so my immediate reaction was, is it going to disappear sometime soon...?). There was a moment of silence, and then that "well, no offense" soliloquy opening. And I guess at that moment, I decided I didn't want to be stuck here by myself again. So...

For my part, last week, I started looking for a place to buy. I’ve been lamenting flushing $1200 a month down the toilet in rent for a long time now but I've always had too much immediate debt to really move on it. Now there's a chance. I’d like to start building equity, and hopefully own a place I can retire in one day. It’s a big step. Geographically, financially, it really ties you down. I asked Larry if he were interested in going in with me, at least for a couple of years, to build up some equity, but he’s politely turned me down. He wants his wings. I guess I can’t blame him, though in terms of what he’s said he’d like to acquire himself eventually, I think it’s a mistake. But that’s strictly my opinion, and I don't presume I'm right.

Anyway, as I say, I’ve started looking around. I’ve signed with an agent. I’ve sent my info to a mortgage broker. I’ve looked at local listings. I even went to a showing on Thursday... ugh, the place was awful. It was two-thirds, maybe half the size of my current apartment. It looked chintzy, and it seemed like the last time anyone took an interest in remodeling it Saturday Night Fever was top of the box office. Empty, too, and had been for a while, I think. This could be a long haul. Especially since I have no idea, yet, what anyone’s willing to lend me. I suppose I’ll find that out sometime this week. But the ball’s finally rolling. I should have done it years ago, but at least I’ve actually made the first move, for real, at last. I wonder if this time next year, I’ll be blogging from my own place.

And I wonder if I’ll be seeing much of Larry in it.

My dreams are against me!

2011-03-04T13:39:00.001-05:00

Another aspect of dreams I’ve been having lately stems from the fact that I went on the wagon for a year in mid-December. I’m trying to see if I can go a year without drinking at all. I used to drink by myself when I was bored, or on weekends, just to get a buzz and sit back and enjoy movies. It was never a problem, but it was A) expensive and B) kind of disquieting. It wasn’t hard to imagine it going from chillaxing to something necessary to get through the day if it went on long enough. So I quit drinking at home last summer. Made it strictly a social thing.

Then I noticed I was really looking forward to the weekends… getting out with guys to heft a few. One day one of my friends baled at the last minute, and I recruited Larry, my roommate, to head out and go instead. He was game, but afterwards I started wondering if I was drinking to be with my friends, or going out with my friends to drink. Unrelatedly, and at about the same time, Larry mentioned that a bunch of his friends had just come off a year of self-imposed sobriety, and I started wondering if I could manage that myself. So, a week or so before Christmas, I just decided to give that a go myself.

We’re coming up on three months now during which time I haven’t touched a drop. Except in dreams. I can recall about a half dozen dreams so far (including one last night) – and who knows how many I don’t remember – in which I’m out with friends at a pub, and I order a beer or a mixed drink, and I’m two or three mouthfuls in before it dawns on me I’ve blown it. My dreams keep rapping me on the knuckles. I’ve been out with friends to pubs a dozen times since I went dry and, of course, I’ve never once made this mistake. I haven’t found it at all difficult (this is not to say I haven’t thought it would be really nice to have a drink or a beer or two from time to time, usually at the oddest times). And yet, for all that, I’m a miserable failure at even this simple and obvious task when it comes to my dreams. I must be masochistic or something.

John Lennon and his what??

2011-03-04T09:21:00.005-05:00

I had a weird dream last night; the first dream I’m able to remember in quite a while. I was out at a mall with Larry and we passed this kind of kitschy, junky storefront. There was a little TV there running an ad for these weird, cartoony Beatles action figures. The ad was kind of light and 60s-style and some guy was singing a little ditty about each of the figures, including the following:

♪ “…John Lennon, and his phallus…” ♪

I kid you not. So Larry and I both looked at each other, laughing our heads off, and started going through the figures. We found some, ostensibly of John, but they looked instead more like Albert Einstein or Mark Twain (I guess it was John in disguise, like in Yellow Submarine). The figure was posed like an Oscar statue, and sure enough, there clutched in his hands was a large, black, rubber dildo. Well, it was hilarious, and we had to have a couple. Larry shelled out, using his bank card. But instead of $7.14, the girl put in $714 (I have no idea why I remember the number so exactly), and he didn’t notice till sometime later when we were in a restaurant (a sort of faux 1950s greasy spoon with high tone 21^st century prices) and he looked at the receipt and started freaking out that he wouldn’t be able to pay his share of the rent. He went off to find the salesgirl and somehow she wound up in the restaurant with us. She was a plump, good-looking 20-something with freckles and short reddish hair (kind of a grown-up Peppermint Patty, I guess), a good sport about it all, and she and Larry started flirting and getting into one another. I remember starting to feel jealous of them and like a third wheel. Well, there you go; my dose of surrealism for the night. :)

We love you too, honey...

2011-03-02T09:14:00.002-05:00

So this morning on the subway I was treated to an interesting sight. I'd actually speculated about this kind of thing before but I'd never actually seen it. I settled into my seat and because I didn't have a book with me, I just listened to my MP3 player (an audio book about Richard Burton and Liz Taylor's stormy romance). Just before the train left, in stepped a ponytailed man in his forties. He sat down in the side seats in front of me. There, on his neck, peeking out from the collar of his leather jacket, in carefully scripted, flowing cursive letters at high as a man's thumb, was tattooed Fuck Off, running from under his right ear towards his throat. If there was more to the missive, I'm not privy to it.

I've occasionally wondered about, but never thought I would actually see, something like that, unless possibly on a part of the body usually only seen at the beach (and probably a nude beach at that), but there it was. Every time this guy goes to work, or buys milk, or kisses his wife, or hugs his child, or sits on the subway; or you happen to meet the Prime Minister or the Queen, the President of the United States, the Chancellor of Germany, or the Emperor of Japan — there it is: Fuck Off. Intimidating? Yes, and no doubt intentionally. Pitiful? Far more so. He rode two stops and left, and I had to wonder what kind feelings the people waiting at home have concerning his arrival.

Nerd hat!

2011-02-26T10:48:00.002-05:00

Been a long time since I posted anything here; going on for two months! Not much has occurred to me to say or even to write down so I can remember it later. Hey, it's winter. It's pretty much just get through the cold days and wait for things to warm up to start living again... :)

And with that in mind, several weeks ago, I was visiting a buddy I've known since we were kids. He's always had a flair for building useful little gadgets from scratch, and while we were in an unusual little hardware store in his neighbourhood, I hit him with a longstanding idea I've had for a hat camera mount. It suggested it only half-seriously, but he took it on. They were selling nondescript baseball caps for two bucks, so I grabbed three and we went home to his workroom. He'd pointed out earlier that he'd discovered that 1/4" wide rods with 20-to-the-inch threads are universal for camera mounts. Using bolts, nuts, and washers to those specs, he drilled a hole in the peak of one of the caps, and voila, the shutterbug nerd hat was born.

Here's what it looks like, unmounted, and with the IR-converted S80 on it. It also works with the HX5V I used to shoot these pictures.

I actually tried it out at my buddy's place... his wife was highly amused at the sight of me wandering around with a camera on my head. I imagine so will other people be this summer when they meet me on the trail. The idea is to video things with an almost human's eye view, while leaving my hands free for photography. Like I said, a nerd hat. :) And just for good measure, here's a quick vid I shot a while ago just to test it out with the weight of the S80... seemed manageable. The cats were unimpressed, unfortunately.

P.S. Excuse all the junk in the living room... they've been "working on" our balconies since sometime last summer... >:/

This is the book I'd write

2011-01-10T21:08:00.003-05:00

Well, no, not really. :) It's just because of this weird, funny shot I took of Bonnie last week. That, and all the slogans on the walls of the vet where I took Twinkle for her first check-up last week that went on about how great your dog thinks you are.

...Actually, I think it's funny how much it looks like the cover of Roger Ebert's book, Your Movie Sucks.