Month: July 2013

Best Time Of Day? Make that ONLY Time of Day for me. It’s too hot outside for walking after 7:00 a.m.
At this time of year, I envy those who say they love the heat and humidity. There are many such people, but I’m certainly not one of them. Best get my 10,000 steps in for the day as early as possible and then do a lot of the siesta thing under a fan.
Look at those lows in the forecast for the week! Until Saturday, they are where the highs should be!
August weather seems to have moved forward into July. Does this mean August will be like September? I can only hope.

Click the image and you’ll see that Sam Javanrouh, photographer extraordinaire, is ending his 10-year (!!!) habit of posting an image a day. His site will remain up, so we can still cruise through the magnificent photos he has made of our city. He will also continue to post to other URLs, just not daily.
Danica and I once heard Sam speak at Hart House. He explained that when he first arrived in Toronto from Iran (over a decade ago) he thought T.O. was ugly. Not content with this outlook, he wisely determined to find beauty where he was perceiving none. Go back through some of his work to appreciate what he accomplished.
The links to his ongoing work are available at his now-frozen Daily Dose Of Imagery site. Nice that he finished up with a Beach shot of our Leuty Life Station.

I wonder how long those new condo towers will remain standing. What’s with the 2016 date? Must include some towers that aren’t finished yet. We certainly have plenty of cranes on the skyline.

…and I’ll have made 2000 posts. I split the blog in two at the beginning of last year, leaving the first 1429 entries here. They go back to June, 2004. I’ve added 421 entries to this current section. I plan to plug along until I hit the 2000 mark, at least.

(Detail of a larger image)
My sister says she has a lot to learn about her camera, but the examples she sends look pretty sharp to me. I suppose she’s right… there is a lot to learn, both for stills and for video… but she’s off to a great start.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews is resigning.

For Torontonians, this would be the world’s easiest “What Is It?” puzzle, but when I first arrived here from Vancouver, I had to ask what these oddities were for.
Perhaps B.C. is the only province with a climate so mild that these huge storage facilities for road salt are not needed. Toronto is peppered with them. (Sorry about the pun).
Does anyone know if these pyramids are common elsewhere in the country?

Out for a walk along the Martin Goodman Trail, I wondered what was behind the large earthwork berms that line the misnamed “Lakeshore” Boulevard. The berm itself has grown to be quite lovely, covered with native grasses, wild flowers and maturing trees. A hop over the top showed what it is hiding.
Beyond the tangle of pipes and concrete blockhouses, there really is a lakeshore. On the East side of town, the waterfront area is valued for the space it offers to accommodate sewage treatment plants, streetcar barns and natural gas electrical generators.

Hot, humid weather offered the perfect atmosphere for our annual Festival of South Asia held on Gerrard Street East this weekend. My shirt was wringing wet by the time I got home but I would never want to miss all the colour, music, food, costumes and customs on show.

Our so-called “Little India” is as much or more our “Little Pakistan”. It’s been a bit depressed, business-wise recently, but today the street was packed from curb to curb. We have some new restaurants… even an Irish pantry… and a few other new businesses suggest that things are looking up.

The festival is SO Toronto… a mish-mash of old Ontario carny stalls and kiddie rides, heritage actors from the CUPE union, South Asian drums and dancers, bangles and saris from India, cooking from Lahore and every kind of attire imaginable. And too much to photograph!

We have 478 days to go before we can vote Rob Ford out of the mayor’s office. October 27, 2014 is too far away.