Sometimes light falls on things in a fleeting moment. The subtlety of the moment can be so quick and startling that you suspect it was placed in front of you just so you’ll open your eyes and see.
The spring sky beckons to the heart starved by a winter that overstayed its welcome. “You don’t need to escape the cold any more. Come on, linger a little longer…”
It's blustery and damp. So far, that's what the winter has been: blustery and damp. Cold and clear is pleasant to walk in; blustery and damp gets down through your bones. Despite that, we walk over to the Distillery District to see the annual Christmas Market, and many folks and their families are braving it too. We sip some mulled wine under a patio heater and then check out the vendors in the booths lining the cobbled "streets."
We retreat back westward and land in C'est What for some cosy and a snack.
Walking home later, we've got homemade soup on our minds. Even the CN Tower looks as if it wants to hide under the covers.
Today I am participating in a long conference call and so I camp out in a vacant office so I can close the door and put the phone on speaker. The office overlooks Adelaide Street and one of my favourite downtown buildings, the Canada Permanent Trust building. I get watching the office workers on several floors and it strikes me that each floor is a separate world of its own, each person oblivious to the others moving about above and below. That gets me to thinking about the thousands and thousands of office workers moving about the the windows of all the office buildings downtown, like worker ants. The thought of being a worker ant makes me a little depressed so I turn my attention back to the meeting and get on with my job.
I love this building at the corner of Richmond and Spadina and its picturesque spot for a coffee shop tucked in the corner, off the street. That pink bike is part of a multi-location art installation; day-glo painted bikes which are a tribute to cyclists who have been killed in the city streets. Toronto is not a bike friendly city. As timing would have it, in the last two days the city has been working to remove bike lanes from a downtown north-south artery, spending much more money to remove them than the previous administration did to install them. Ostensibly the bike lanes are being removed to improve traffic flow. Funny thing though – just as the bike lanes are being removed, parking metres are being added. I can't work out how parked cars in what was once a bike lane will improve traffic flow, but then I'm not a civil engineer am I? Let's just hope there aren't any of those day-glo bikes erected for cyclists now navigating traffic amongst the parked cars and improved traffic flow.