58 posts tagged “toronto”
A week or so ago I decided to get the H1N1 vaccine. I have asthma and I'd been reading that of the people who wind up in ICUs with this flu, the worst hit are people with asthma. I live alone and I don't want to be sick and miserable and alone, plus, I have a lot of travel (next weekend to see Cappy, plus US Thanksgiving and Christmas trips down there, too, plus some business travel) and I don't want to A) get sick from other people in airports and planes and large meetings, or B) be sick and potentially miss any of my Philadelphia visits. No fucking way. I'd rather spend a day in line than a week sick in bed, or in ICU.
The vaccine wasn't out yet in Ontario when I decided, it's doing a very slow rollout, but they'd posted the upcoming hours of some vaccination centres and one was a couple of blocks from my office at a municipal centre call Metro Hall, starting next week. Then, they moved up the date and planned one for yesterday at the same place. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. People in high-risk groups (including asthmatics) have been encouraged to get the vaccine, well, in fact, everyone has by the various government health bodies, but people NOT in high-risk groups have only been "encouraged" to let the high-risk people go first. (Until a new bottleneck in production and distribution was revealed yesterday, now, as of today, vaccination clinics are only doing high-risk people.
I got to Metro Hall about 8:35 a.m. I imagined I'd spend half the day there. It turned out people were in line from about 5 a.m. There were already about 650 people ahead of me. If I'd walked over instead of taking the streetcar, there might have been 100 more in that 15 minutes I saved. Here's what it looked like from my vantage point, the line snaking back and forth across a courtyard.
Being Canadians, the line was orderly and polite. The luckiest people (aside from the ones inside) were the ones closest to the building. Because it rained. Showers on and off, and then a couple of right downpours over the morning. At 11 a.m. Public Health officials finally came down the line handing out colored tickets for a particular time. I got 1:00.
That's the book I'm reading, Where Men Win Glory about NFLer Pat Tillman going to Iraq and the cover up over his death from friendly fire. I didn't get a ton of it read in line, though, because in the rain, it was hard to juggle it and the umbrella in such a way that the book didn't get water dripped on it.
With the timed tickets in hand, some people left to come back. I was among the first to get the 1:00 ticket, so I stayed in line, even though it was two hours (and likely longer) away. I didn't want to come back and find 400 other 1:00 had come back to the line ahead of me. What bugged me though, was that people could ask for as many tickets as they wanted (i.e. for family members at home who hadn't come to the line). So one person who was ahead of me could get three tickets, and jump 2 additional people ahead of me, because the 1:00 people had to let anyone with a 12:00 ticket ahead of them, even if they hadn't been in line before. That sucked.
It was about 1:00 before I got to the envied under-the-overhang spot.
Sweet, because it poured rain again by then. It was 1:45 before I got inside, then 2:45 by the time I got my shot. I was owed some lieu time from work, anyway, so it didn't matter that I didn't get to work before 3:15.
My arm now feels like it's been punched, hard, but at least I got mine. And the nurse, when I told her I wanted photos for my blog, let me hold up the process to get a good shot of the needle, and offered to take a shot of my arm after. What a champ for a woman who'd been dealing with the flow of humanity all day, in the vaccination zone, also known as Screaming Baby Central. These are good people working with far too few resources.
I think that word is "Ow!"
Here are some photos I've been gathering up this summer in my wanderings around the city that didn't fit in to any particular post. But I figured I'd share them, just for the heck of it.
I believe I've mentioned before that I like stone lions in their various forms. This is one of a pair framing some part of a big downtown bank building.
Then, some tall-masted ships in Toronto harbor, that, for a moment, appeared to be sailing in formation. There was even a third, briefly, but it got out of frame before I could get focused. This was taken from the penthouse patio at my building bout a half mile away -- I was not actually at the waterfront.
Then there was this week-long arts festival, of which part was a roving art project of an inflatable Big Red Ball that got moved from one part of the city to another. I caught it once, wedged under a concrete structure in the plaza in front of City Hall:
And another day, walking to work, caught it not-yet-fully-inflated under the overhang of a different bank building.
For the same week, red balls also showed up in the cathedral-like atrium/galleria of what I and loads of other Torontonians know as BCE place, but is now officially Brookfield Place. On the left is the facade of an old building that was preserved when they built, yes, another bank tower on top of it, and the function of this galleria is simply to connect two such towers. At least they did it with award-winning style.
This is what it looks like normally.
Finally, here's an odd view, from my window at work. This is the loading bay area at the back of a building that fronts onto another street. Those green things outside it are dumpsters, and the smaller ones inside are garbage bins. I don't know what the business there is (it's converted warehouse and factory space all around the neighborhood), but it's not a theatre.
But it really looks like it's begging for a puppet show.
Last night, around seven, after staying at work a little late, I headed home just as a severe thunderstorm was threatening. I walked, but stayed on the streetcar route so I could duck into a transit shelter, or hop a streetcar most of the way in case it started on my half hour walk. The sky kept darkening the whole way, and when I was about three blocks from home, the first drops fell. I ran to cross the street ahead of me and under the overhang of an apartment complex, and in that shelter dug out my umbrella. No problem! In the space of time it took me to do that, the rain started to come down like a monsoon, with the wind and everything. I was able to walk to the corner, and around the corner and down the next short block all under the building's overhang. So far so good, but I could see the sidewalks and gutters running like rivers.
Ultimately, I had to step out into the storm to get the last block and a half home. Within seconds, my feet were sloshing in my shoes, my legs (bare) were wet, and my knapsack was running water down my back and onto my butt skirt, which soaked through my denim skirt to my underwear. I laughed as I ran the rest of the way home, only barely keeping my head dry under my umbrella. Even the ends of my hair were wet. My fabric purse was soaked.
This morning, I took out my wallet to pay for something on the way to work and discovered that the bills inside were still damp. Now THAT'S one hell of a storm.
Here's the postcard that AmyH sent me from Costa Rica. It has a cat on it! Thanks ever so, Amy!
I went a little out of my own neighborhood yesterday. All the way up to Bay and Bloor (trust me, going that much uptown is rare for me) to have a celebratory drink with my producer, Joan, for having gotten the film option contract for Godblog signed, sealed and delivered. We were at the Panorama Room, on the 51st floor of the Manulife Centre, and sat out on the terrace. This was the view out over the city:
And in the other direction, I can see my building in the distance. I put a little pink mark off toward the left where it is. I was surprised I could see it, because it's only 10 stories tall. I walk to work, which is just a couple of blocks from the CN Tower (the giant swizzle stick on the right). That's my day-to-day world.
Tomorrow evening I'm off to Philly for a three-day weekend with Cappy, and we shall cross state borders several times to see an array of people, and a few bands, too.
Here on the Toronto Islands where my writing retreat is, the main attraction for most people is the Centreville amusement park, and the parkland in which to picnic. Families from the cities and tourists swarm here all summer for a little getaway that feels like getting out of the city to a green, fun place. They come with their strollers, coolers, rollerblades, bikes and so on across the ferry, a five-minute ride from the harborfront. Day camps bring their charges here, in Day-Glow batches of matching T-shirts. Rides are ridden, ice cream and popcorn are consumed, picnics are had, strange, canopied quadracycles are rented and steered around by laughing family groups.
This summer, the ferries aren't running. There's a city employees' strike that's been on since the third week in June that has halted residential garbage collection, city-run daycares (and day camps), parks maintenance, permit granting for building, etc., and yes, the ferries to the Island. Centreville is closed, not because it's part of the strike, but because the people can't get here to make it worth keeping open. I wanted to bring Cap'n Crook here when he was up for a week in June, but there was just no easy way, and no point. The bike rental place and the snack bars would be closed, and the only way to get to show him where my retreat is would have involved a hell of a lot of walking. There's a community of people who live on the east-most end of the Island, and one of the private harbour tour companies has taken up service from the city side to only that end of the island, because those people have to get over to shop and work and so on. (There are no shops on the island, save concessions at the amusement park.) The boats are smallish and you can't take bikes on them, so it's not a replacement for the main ferries in any major way.
To get over here last Friday, the nine of us in this writer's group had to take a water taxi with our luggage and our groceries to a tiny dock close to the retreat centre. Had we not, it would have been a 45-minute walk from where the replacement "ferry" is landing at the far end of the island to where we are, on the west side, humping all our stuff. (I had to make a trip back home the day after we got here, having forgotten a prescription medication at home, and lost a half a writing day to the trip out and back.)
The lack of crowds is actually a bonus in some ways to those of us here to write, though our retreat space is set away from the noisy areas. But Centreville being closed is just kind of eerie. On the short walk to it, the first clue that this island hasn't seen its usual influx of people in a month is that the Canada goose poop is all over the middle of the laneways (no cars are allowed on the island except parks vehicles, which, of course, aren't rolling during the strike). This central avenue is usually full of people.
The swan boats are bunched up, not running over time with the loudspeaker calling, "Boat number seven, your time is up, please return".
Here's a central area in the amusement park.
It means no afternoon runs for ice cream and funnel cakes for us, either.
The public washrooms are standing open and empty:
You can't walk around settings like this as a bunch of SF/horror/other-disturbing-fiction writers without some really creative post-apocalyptic banter about zombie hideouts, getting picked off one by one as we separate in our explorations, walls that ought to be dripping blood to evidence a massacre and rotting in the hedge maze with no park staff around to pull lost people out. Oh, and the petting farm animals going rogue.*
Peacocks are shifty at the best of times.
Certain creatures seemed to be on sympathy strike
We actually think the birds are probably living healthier not being given bits of people's hot dogs, funnel cakes and potato chips all day, every day. It doesn't mean they couldn't have developed a taste for human flesh in their deprivation does it? You know, revenge? Work with me here...
On the writing front, I've now handed out a partial of my missing kid novel manuscript to the group to critique, and am also working on revisions to the other novel, Scamoche, that I have on the go, much farther along (working on a second draft now).
*I hasten to add that the animals are being well taken care of, by management staff. We talked to one of them who happened by as our group was out walking.
Here at my writing retreat, the retreat center has a resident cat, CJ.
CJ's been here at Gibraltar Point since before I started coming out eight years ago. The last few years, we'd seen not so much of him because there was another cat, Slate, a dark tabby, who hogged all the attention. Also, CJ's favorite buddy was a musician who was here at the centre (a converted school) long-term, who stayed in one of the portable classrooms out back that had been converted to a music studio. Slate died in the spring, and maybe the musician's gone, because this summer, CJ is showing up multiple times a day. He goes "Yaowww!" outside the windows of the communal kitchen when he wants in, because he knows that's where someone can usually be found, and "Yaowww!" very loudly in the corridors where his voice really carries, especially at 3 a.m., when he wants someone to let him back out. If you show up, you get to pet him, then he leads you to one of the doors to outside.
Speaking of doors, I locked myself out of my room at 11 p.m. last night. In my tiredness, I walked out of the room, pushing the button to lock the door, and grabbed my memory stick instead of my room keys as I left for the kitchen. Yes, I get the irony of taking my "memory" "key" with me. The retreat staff are home over the water in the city on the weekend, but someone turned up a master key after we determined that we couldn't get in through my window, and I was getting resigned to the idea of sleeping in the lounge.
This morning, another of our group got locked out of his room. Hardware, not wetware problem that time. Something about a malfunctioning doorknob. I think it's fixed now. Two days in and two lockouts. This could become a round robin all week.
Today begins my annual weeklong writing retreat on the Toronto Islands. There are 9 of us this year, and I'll be workshopping a chunk of the missing kid novel I'm working on.
Here's my room at the retreat centre:
Why, yes, those are fresh flowers on the table. It's not the most upscale place in the world, but the staff are very professional and they certainly attend to details.
I face west this year instead of east. This is my view (shot through the screen).
This is a needlepoint hanging on the wall. Isn't the skill of being a stiltwalker that you aren't supposed to need another big stick to keep you upright? But what do I kow about stilts?
I've already encountered the resident cat, CJ, in fact, let him in when he meowed to come in and snuck a few pats.
This place on the Toronto Islands is nice and removed from all hustle and bustle, but this year in particular, it's even quieter. There's a city workers strike on in Toronto, in its third week, and that means the ferries that run from the city to the island (a trip of only a few minutes) aren't going, and the people who come on day trips to the amusement park in the main part of the Islands, have spent nearly half the summer not being able to use it, so even though the park isn't run by city employees, there isn't enough business to keep the part open. (My group came over in a water taxi today.) We took a walk out to see the ghost town amusement park, but that'll be tomorrow's post.
(just e-mailed to the editor of the Toronto Star)
Vit Wagner's article on the new Winnie-the-Pooh sequel brings conflicting emotions. One, I want to read the book, because Milne's original continues to delight me even as an adult with his masterful use of language in such seemingly innocuous stories. Two, as a novelist myself, I seethe at the insult in Wagner's choice of words: "David Benedictus, who provided the text for the new book". Benedictus *wrote* the book, like Wagner wrote this article. Creative writers struggle enough without being denigrated as mere "text providers", and worse yet, by another writer.
Laurie Channer
author, Godblog
(I could have gone on at length, but I've found they almost always print my letters if I keep them short and pithy.)
Last night I went to the Neko Case concert at Massey Hall here in Toronto, the biggest venue she says she's ever played here. (It holds a few thousand people.) She commented that we have the cleanest garbage strike going on that she's ever seen.
I went because of raves about her music (filtered out from all the raves about her hotness) that I've read from my Vox neighbors (I'm looking at you, Cap'n Crook, and you, Hotrod, in particular) and a coworker (also male), who is a fan. Without having actually listened to any of her music before, I saw she was coming, ordered a pair of tickets, figuring one of my Toronto friends would want to come with and then decided in the intervening weeks before the concert, that I now wouldn't search out any of her music before the date of the show. I would go and be surprised. Once in a while, I like to know nothing about a movie or a performance before I go, and allow myself to have no expectations. I was the first person I knew who ever went to see the first Stomp tour, and I went only because of the poster. Totally blown away when I saw the show.
Totally blown away last night, too. Love her voice, love her lyrics, love her vulnerability on stage (all nervous about being in Massey Hall, tugging at the waistband of her tights, under her minidress, which had a few endearing creases in it -- little wardrobe issues, just like the rest of us chicks). She wore red shoes with a brown dress that was decorated with orange and yellow. They didn't match at all, but women know that it just feels great when you're wearing red shoes. She even told us the chain store she got them in. I'm now a big fan, just not the drooling male kind. I noticed a greater-than-usual number of redheaded females in the audience. There were six or so within easy sight of me. Usually I'm the only one in a large number. Neko calls to us, I guess. I heard.
Note to opening act Jason Lionel (I think that was his name). No more than 50% of your band should be wearing hats on stage, and only one of them can be a trucker cap. And that one in a trucker cap shouldn't be you, with it pulled down low enough that the audience can't see more than the lower half of your face.
