Month: July 2014

First birthday, that is. Logan is the Calgary grandchild of our friends Crawf and Ulli. Their Toronto granddaughter Hayden appeared here earlier in the month, also celebrating a first birthday. These kids keep their grandparents hopping. Thanks for the photos, Ulli.
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Logan shares his name with Canada’s highest peak, Hayden is a Canada Day baby.

Today’s walk started close to home, with a pass by Beach Studio on Gerrard Street East. There was Gwynne behind the glass window-wall that fronts his bright studio space. He was working intently on a new painting, so I hesitated, then decided to say hello.
I was welcomed with a big smile, offered a chair and shown some of his latest work. I like what Gwynne is doing very much. His work is colourful, original, bright and witty. It is also meticulously crafted. His style continues to develop as he restlessly explores new ideas and possibilities.
And here’s the latest. His designs will soon appear on Nuvango (pronounced New Van Gogh) mobile phone covers. Of all the choices available so far, I like the Giles designs best. I am almost tempted to get a cellphone!

One year ago today, the Saturn-circling space voyager Cassini snapped a picture of far away Earth. Rather than call the photo “The Day the Earth Said Cheese”, someone wisely came up with the Smiled title.

I guess this is sort of a planetary selfie, so perhaps it’s appropriate that we celebrate the snapshot by making a photo-mosaic of selfies taken in 40 different countries, as people wave to Saturn.

Click the photo, or here, for a hi-res view of the mosaic. Thanks for the memo, Joni and Mary.

According to this week’s Loblaws flyer, cherries come in 4 sizes: Large, Extra large, Jumbo and Colossal.
If you want small or medium size cherries, look not to Loblaws. Like Mayor Rob Ford, they do not sell cherries that they have never seen, or may not exist.

Hey, you don’t come back from Sue’s cottage and just jump right back into retirement. You have to ease into these things, so Danica and I rode our bicycles from our house to Sugar Beach today.
We stopped for coffee on the Muskoka chairs and then rode on through Queen’s Quay construction to just past the ferry terminal. One of these fine days, we’ll take the ferry (and the bikes) over to the Toronto Islands.

Inspired by the Honda Indy that’s roaring through town, I have attended to a long overdue speed up of the loading times for these pages. Now images are compressed before they shoot to your browser through the intertubes. They uncompress instantly at your end. Fewer entries are loaded onto the front page and scripty things run faster, too. As you see in the Pingdom readouts, about 3 and a half seconds of your valuable time is spared. You are most welcome.

“It’s time to give the job another coat of looking over.”
— Irish procrastinator, musician, author, actor and director Frank Smith
Photo by Bill Andersen
Multitalented Frank is seen in the photo above, just as he won a Thea Award at an Inn on the Park gala in 2001. His way with words is pure Irish magic and his sense of humour and dry delivery crack me up. I just heard today’s quote repeated by a friend and thought I’d better record it for later use.

Perfect weather for a bike ride, cool and no humidity. Not many others on the Waterfront Trail on week days, either. The big city is vanishingly far away and the lapping sound of gentle waves is soothing.

Long time family friend Bob Petrovic (aka Bozidar) has been entertaining his mailing list for years, sending all kinds of humourous and unusual pictures, cartoons and jokes. Here’s a standout that arrived today.

No lights, no traffic cops at this Ethiopian intersection, yet no crashes either. Just LOOK at those crosswalk pedestrians!
Torontonians would do well to remember that many of those sharing the road have come from places with traffic rules and conditions much different from ours. It doesn’t mean that newcomers are bad drivers, on the contrary … how would YOU do at the intersection above? But hey, the drivers around you might not do what you expect, and not just because they’re texting.

John Robert Colombo has decided to release his recently published A Rohmer Miscellany as an Amazon Kindle book, viewable here. It was a a slightly more challenging process to put this one online than it was to upload the previous Colombo ebook, Ghosts Over Canada, because the Rohmer book contains photo illustrations. Well done, JRC.
I am happy to have been given a credit for my cover design. It has been well received and I am pleased with it myself.