Off the Cliff

Yeah well, that art gallery isn't going to view itself, now is it? So I cabbed down to the AGO, which confuses me by having automatic doors for wheelchairs everywhere but on its outer facade. Kind people let me in, but yanno. Somebody wasn't thinking. And I know they used to have a button outside but Ghu knows what they did with it. Anyway, I then discover why not to go in winter ie you must check your coat and it costs $4. But these niggles aside, got in and saw first the David Blackwood exhibit, disquieting etchings from his Newfoundland past, of iceberg calves and baleen whales and sealers wrecked on ice floes and dying of exposure and cold. This was a famous disaster that happened in 1914 when 78 men died after being stranded on the ice for 53 hours in the middle of a blizzard.

https://ago.ca/exhibitions/black-ice-david-blackwood-prints-newfoundland

Maybe because I'm a Capricorn, maybe because I'm a city child, just about the most unheimlich thing I know is the ocean. Mountains are a close second: was fantodded by the Alps at the age of 9 and never grew out of it. But mountains are just earth stood on its head, and they're always in the same place; oceans are water that never stops moving and there literally is no there there. Anyway Nfld is an island and you can't get away from the ocean, but I can never understand why anyone would willingly go out on the sea that surrounds it.

Then got to the Jesse Mockrin exhibit, the one that closes on Sunday. She uses Renaissance techniques to paint pseudo-Renaissance subjects, many inspired by paintings and objects in the AGO's own collection. I like her paintings even if I suspect I'm not supposed to. But colour! She has colours! How could anyone resist?

https://ago.ca/exhibitions/jesse-mockrin-echo

The other trouble with going in winter is that one must wear boots, and boots are not kind to that pesky neuroma on the sole of my foot. So though there are other things I should have seen, I figured two hours was enough and headed home. Took the TTC up to Dupont, intending to wait for the bus and finish by shopping at Loblaws. But oh lookie, here's a Shoppers, let's get some garbage tags. Which they no longer sell. Online or at Canadian Tired only, and how lucky I didn't make a special trip to find this out. Then I look at Dupont which is one lane as far as the eye can see, because condos, and after that sewers, so hell, will not kill me to walk two subway stops. Except that it nearly did. But I have more cushioning pads for my feet, and if it gets as warm as they say it will, maybe I can be in shoes later on this week. Phone says this was all only good for 6000 steps, but will take it.

Woke up at a reasonable hour, took meds, looked out the study window, saw snow, and decided to go bak to bed. Did, and dreamed of being back at Bedford with sibs and Aunt H trying to work out how we could live there and also sell to the Chuas. There was an official sort of man pressing the point, who was some sort of policeman, but who also at one point was dealing with a chubby baby. And Bedford was definitely Bedford except that parts of it were Bedford as renovated by the Chuas.  It was the sort of dream that leaves an all-day hangover: not unpleasant, just mildly disconcerting because, well, we sold the place almost forty years ago and my aunt died in 2000, and there I was at Bedford talking to her this morning.

Eventually got up around noon and breakfasted and all. Then by a judicious but generally unadvised combination of muscle relaxants and vodka, shut my back up enough so I could scrape the snow off the steps and path. And feeling almost like old days, lifted the compacted layer of ice and snow from the pavement in front of my house and SND's, who must be away this weekend, and then a stretch of NND's frontage. We were just at freezing today but tomorrow will see a fast plunge and the slush will turn to ice.

There was a video about making lentil pancakes: boil up a carrot, potato, onion, and red lentils, blend in blender, form into patties, cook in oil. I did the veg first and separate, then added the lentils and cooked till soft. Except that red lentils immediately turn into mush so that, when blended, I wind up with lentil soup. Am clearly missing a step. Maybe I should add the breadcrumbs I do not have, or cook some green lentils to add instead. Or just resign myself to lentil soup.

Nuit blanche last night, very annoyingly. Got off close to 4, woke  up at 9 something, finally got up at 11. Supposed to be warm today so I bit the heavy-eyed achy-limbed bullet and called a cab to go to the ROM. Bloor past Spadina is a parking lot for reasons known only to itself. One of which might be the extremely wide bike lanes on that stretch. I'm all for bicycle lanes but can't quite see why the ones by Mink Mile need to be two metres/ 6'6, especially as the ones farther west are much narrower, where all the restaurants, ergo all the bike couriers, go. Whatever, the ROM  is redoing the Chin Lee Excrescence so one can again, and happily, enter by the Romanesque entry round the corner, into the familiar rotunda from my childhood.

Must say the AGO is much more wheelchair friendly than the ROM, even though both were built when the concept of catering to disability didn't exist. Maybe the AGO's renovation is more recent than the ROM's, or rather the late 80s renovation that preceded the Excrescence. Because if you want to go to the third floor where the Flemish painting exhibit is, there's only one elevator you can take,  tucked away around a corner, because all the others involve stairs when you arrive there. And then one goes down these very narrow corridors-- I mean, not wide enough for two people to pass each other-- between the new interior walls and the old outer stone walls to get you to where you're going. My friend the architect's daughter said All architects are assholes (like surgeons, apparently) and while I wouldn't go quite that far, I'll opine that the ROM has certainly hired asshole architects. 

However. Did indeed see the Flemish paintings in all their glowing colour and 16th/ 17th century extravagance. I prefer early Flemish myself, but the best we could do here was a school of Bosch copy of details from the right hand Hell panel in the Garden of Earthly Delights, and a rather pleasant Nativity by Hans Memling. Note also Michaelina Wautier, from the mid-1600s, a natural and pleasant contrast to some of her overdone contemporaries. Though the rooms of the exhibit were still pretty small and I had to be careful where I went with my walker: and when a tour group came through, wait for them to pass.

Then did a revisit of the Chinese collection on the ground floor, any number of Buddhist statues and the stone camels from the tomb area. I think we may have climbed on them as children, which people did in those days, and fortunately do not do now.

Having gone nowhere yesterday, I was determined to walk back the four anna half subway stops to get my steps in, and did, barely. The sole of my right foot has been panging me for several weeks now: physio thinks it's bunions, I think it's plantar fascitis, who knows. But I limped along gamely and when I passed Wiener's went in, with no great hopes, to ask if they had ever got the tree lopper in that was on back order since June. And they did! And it was cheaper than at 'we do not deliver' Canadian Tire,  and it fit in the basket of my walker, sort of ie it scraped the branches of any tree I passed, so I brought it home in triumph, go me. Of course it also weighs a ton and I hope I can lift it when it's extended, or even when it's not, but that's one itch scratched.

After two months, a brief respite from heat and haze lets me sleep with the window fan last night and wake to deep blue skies and pure white clouds and all the greens of summer. Because I was indoors all weekend and accomplished nothing, I went out to By The Way, the only affordable French restaurant in the neighbourhood even if its main raison d'etre is Mediterranean-Israeli. And it's closing in two weeks after 40 years of the present owners and a good ten more of its previous avatars. So I must get my kibbeh kuftas and eggs dilemma before the kitchen starts winding down. I am of course accablée by this. As if New Generation going wasn't bad enough. BtW and I had a lot of History together. It's where I had brunch on the last day of the old millennium, and a juicy burger on 9/11 to assure myself that certain things were still the same, and where I drafted letters in Japanese to various circles to order their doujinshi for people who wanted them.

I wore a tshirt instead of my tanktops and even if the high, not low, was 22C it was still marginally too hot. But I shopped here and there, including Fiesta. What have the Christiest Baptists put in place of the pollinator garden? Grass. What have they covered the whole lot with? Grass. What is the grass doing? Turning brown. When will they ever learn... Oh, and now I see why they took that big tree down in the far corner of their lot. (Why, not how. The city *must* have had something to say about that.) It's so they could put a proper fence around the whole perimeter. The tree created a gap that allowed people crossing from Fiesta to cut diagonally across the Baptists' lawn, which was fine since the cutters were mostly going to the after hours program in the church itself. But, says the lawyers' daughter, this is a bad idea because it leads to right-of-ways after 20 years and absolute r-of-ws after 40. So up goes a serious wooden fence on one side and a serious wrought iron fence on the other (which is handsomer than the previous chain-link, agreed) and down comes the huge old maple to make way for it. I still think it barbaric but then I have precious little use for Baptists at the best of times.

And we are in end of August times when cicadas sing and dusk comes at 8. I'm never sad to see summer go but I am sad about the encroaching dark.

Magnesium is a laxative. I had to learn this from Tiktok.

Well, that explains the summer stomach of the last two months. Which, true, has kept me from drinking but has also kept me from the Ontario cherries. Ah well. Have bought the less laxative kind and trust that it, and cutting back on the dosage, will return me to normal before cherry season ends, and will not result in a return of leg cramps.

Speaking of cherries, a cherry picker was hovering over the quondem Starbuck's at Christie and Dupont which had been seriously tagged up and down after its last avatar, a Popeye's, closed in the winter. So the facade is being cleaned up finally but at the cost of an immense amount of grit in the air. Whatever the taggers used for their metre-high letters was heavy-duty indeed.

So of course I took the upright walker over to Dufferin for my Vietnamese coffee. It really is an unwieldy beast. The good part is that I can, yes, walk upright with it if I remember not to hunch: hunching is now so habitual after four years that I must mindful my way out of it. The drawbacks however are multiple. Major one being that the seat is too low-- below knee height-- for me to sit down in with any assurance of being able to stand up again. Fortunately the kind city has provided  benches at intervals along Bloor, or rather, just off Bloor,  some of them in the shade.

The removable basket is insufficient and tends to remove itself from the poles it hooks on to. The rests for the arms or forearms are hard plastic and in this weather one sweats into them, and (possibly confined to me) they cut off circulation to the hands so my little fingers go numb. Intended for a feature but is actually a bug: if you collapse the walker sideways so as to allow passage into letussay narrow doorways, it also collapses forwards. This is for easy storage in the trunk of the car everyone owns, that takes you to wherever you're going. But it makes it extremely difficult to enter a store whose door is up a step and that opens outwards, like the banh mi place. So I will not be doing this again in a hurry. I know I've walked over to nearly Dufferin before and not died, and my phone would have me believe it's shorter to there than to nearly Spadina, but psychologically, as I've said before, west is much much farther than east.

However it's a much different crowd west than east. In addition to the many cafés that have sprung up west of Ossington it also has most of the city's Ethiopian restaurants. On the way I passed an Indian gentleman in saffron robes taking the sun and a very large Grand Pyrenees in its summer-unfriendly shaggy coat. Coming back I passed an Asian family (I think: two adults and a teen/ early 20s guy who may or may not have been together) notable in that the younger guy was reading a hardcover book as he walked and didn't stop reading, or even look up, when he had to stop for a red light. What was engrossing him so? The lettering on the spine was faded but I could still make out 'Middlemarch'. Sugoi.

As for the walker, well, I shall still use it as long as I'm not intending to do anything but walk.

Motion is lotion, you say? Can't prove it by me. 8500 steps and all of them painful,  or at least more painful than they should be. But--

Got the (probably) last dark wash until autumn done and on the line. After removing dead mouse from basement, and why are there dead mice in my basement, I want to know? They should be outside providing food for cats, raccoons, hawks,  and coyotes.

Got clothes off the line before the grey clouds rolled in. Weather page insists the sky is clear and POP is 0. Weather page is not to be trusted.

Got Pride flag onto pole and-- back protesting mightily-- pole onto hooks on porch. With more protests and swearing, got pole fixed so that flag is less likely to droop in the middle. Still droops, but not as much.

Got to BoM for cash and negotiated the Bathurst and Bloor sidewalks thronged-- nay, black-- with the heedless youth of TO, or at least the heedless youth of Central Tech, released from class, travelling in groups, and not looking where they were going.  I *may* have bumped accidentally on purpose into a few backpacks, but heedless youth did not heed even that.

Got to Bakka Phoenix for my two Murderbot books. Thought of adding Fugitive Telemetry but will try it in Kobo first. I remember not being that taken with it.

Thought of going to my Brunswick local for a pricy dinner since I was there anyway, but the pierogies at Future's called to me instead. And a good thing, because local now closes at 4 on Mondays.

Finally got out to the super when the lying weather forecast said it would stop raining from 6 p.m. Of course it rained on the way back but at least I have soy milk now. On the way to, I passed Joti's house down the block and thought, 'Gee, that's a big squirrel', hiding amongst the deep greenery that our Irish weather of the last month has encouraged to run rampant. Only it wasn't a squirrel but either a large rabbit or a small hare-- not that I've ever seen many of either in this burg. I must assume it's someone's pet because, well, rabbits aren't native to downtown AFAIK. Skunks, raccoons, and coyotes, yes: but rabbits would fall prey to any of those, not to mention our urban hawks. It was either gone or hiding when I came back.

But equally, as I was watching the leporid amongst the greenery, the pure white cat who struts around from time to time was coming along the side street, stalked by a Korean family who I assume owns it. Cat consented to join them on the sidewalk across from me but dashed away the minute younger daughter made an attempt to pick it up. I don't see white cat very often, unlike Barton Cat who owns the corner a block down from me and lies, like Old Deuteronomy, in the exact middle of the sidewalk and Will Not Move. But clearly Snowy gets out from time to time. And shouldn't: the urban fauna mentioned above also attacks cats.

Returning from my jaunt down to the library and then to Sushi on Bloor-- which now has drinkable wine and a very nice waitstaff who helped me out of the restaurant's double doors-- I watched a garbage truck roll up the street and stop. Oddly, because pick-up was at 9:30 this morning. But this was mattress pick-up: guy lets down the back, takes what I would call a marlinspike or possibly a billhook, not that I've ever seen either, hooks it into mattress and hooks mattress up into the back of the truck.  Repeat two or three times (while the fourth car waiting behind him honks in that witless and arrogant Torontonian driver fashion: if you don't know when garbage days are, buddy, stay off the streets) then off we go. Enlightening, but I wonder at the specialisation. When do they pick up other furniture?

The quondem New Generation storefront is now a vegan sushi place that was on the other side of the street. I have absolutely no idea what a vegan sushi place can possibly serve, let alone how it stays in business, let alone how it moves into a spot that closed because the rent was too high. Can only think it's a money laundering outfit.

Otherwise have stocked up on wine to wait out the rainy next four days. Have also stocked up on masses of root veg because the ginger stew I made with same before turned out to be most tasty when it had time to age.

Made it to my closing restaurant yesterday and had farewell tempura. New Generation was only one of two places that does decent tempura, the other being the pricey Korean place and theirs still isn't as good as NG. They've been there 25 years and pre-covid had an all you can eat menu that kept the place packed in the evenings. Memory wants to give me a snapshot of reading Magnifico there eight years ago while indulging in their lunch menu, but memory is lying, of course. It was A Distant Mirror in 2017.

I gave them a thank you card signed with my name, which they wouldn't know, and a stick figure of me with my walker so they could place me. Sort of. Because though I've never seen anyone else with one, yesterday there was indeed another old lady with her rollator.

Disturbed night last night, natural fallout of having to be up at 7:30. Taxi was fifteen minutes early and at the wrong address (seriously, what is it with 543 not registering as itself?) but we got that sorted and he delivered me at TO Western in good time, in spite of Bathurst being its usual parking lot. Construction on the hospital side, sewer replacement on the other, plus what I suspect to be a condo going up near the corner.

Saw the orthopedics guy who says sorry, elbow is too foutu for arthroscopy, wanna replacement instead? Umm, do I? You can't lift things when you have a replacement, something like 'no more than five pounds, 2.5 kilos.' And me having to flip  mattresses and heft walkers up stairs so no I don't think so.

But being only a subway stop's distance from the AGO I walked over there, because streetcars are hard to get onto with a walker and anyway Dundas is as much a parking lot as Bathurst, and for the same reasons. I wanted to ask why my membership card hadn't arrived yet, and answer is, because they're going to a phone code but haven't got the bugs out of it and it will be available in November. Didn't ask them What if you don't have a smart phone, because they assume everyone does. But anyway, took myself to the AGO Bistro for lunch, at hair-raising prices for not much food. The waitstaff were all very nice but were not the middle-aged professional waiters of the Before Times, and the coffee isn't as good, and the cocktails were a tad uninspired. Also, the membership I got no longer includes the discount. That's for people who shell out $110 and up. The waitress gave me the discount anyway but explained that even if my ticket said membership, it wasn't the *membership* membership.

Succeeded in getting myself home via TTC and only screwed up once at Osgoode Station, asking the attendant where the elevator was when obviously it was the big square thing just past the gates.

However, the day's other downer was yesterday's mouse who bypassed the tiptrap (and just as well because you have to remove the beasties something like 1000 feet from where you find them, which I measured once as the far side of Christie Pits) only to fall into the plastic rinse tub from the dishes and drown. I should empty it when I'm finished them but for some reason I never do. Fished him out, bagged him, put him in garbage, emptied tub and filled with highly concentrated bleach and water solution. May buy a new tub as well. But at least that's farewell mouse.

Back to, if not summer temperatures, certainly sumer humidity and consequent aches and malaise. Actually this is a very September thing, which I keep forgetting: the mug and brassy light and background allergies and general wanhope. Will be cooler on the weekend but will also rain. This is going to be a warmer than average autumn, they say, which is good from the pov of economy (no furnaces) but not psychologically.

Should hang up my orange Reconciliation shirt on the porch but see: rain.

Jonesing for dim sum but getting to Chinatown is... not something I'm up for. Walking is still not much fun and I'd have to walk from University because Spadina is now a parking lot, or rather, even more of a parking lot than before when the LRT at least had a dedicated pathway. Shouldn't have dimsum anyway-- too much pig.

Finished Trial by Fury, a Ferrars mystery (really, why isn't she at least as famous as Christie? lack of signature sleuth, I suppose) and Guards! Guards! because Pratchett is not merely easy reading, no matter how well you think you remember a book after umpty many readings, there's always something new. This time around, now I'm on Men at Arms, is the Duke of Eorl.

The rain this weekend broke all records except one, rainiest month. That honour belongs to last July. Buy some wood and google 'cubit'. But stats say it didn't in fact rain that much downtown. The airport got 150 mm over the two days, the Annex got like 38.

The trumpety flower that's taking over the neighbourhood is hibiscus. Can tell by the buds.

Once again, heading to the super, the intersection was blocked. Cars in some kind of accident, ambulance, fire trucks, and southbound traffic backed up to Dupont while the northbound cars whizzed past-- or rather, slowed down to gawk. People. By the time I got out there were police directing traffic,  or at least telling drivers to stop leaning on the horns, and some of the southbound guys- including buses- were able to inch past the cars and on their way. Unfortunately one of the cops saw me standing by the signal and asked if I wanted to cross, and I didn't have the wit to say Not in a rush, let these guys go ahead. So he stopped traffic for me and of course the northbound cars took over the single lane and stopped all southbound traffic, including alas the bus. Hope they got some real traffic cops in to sort out the confusion. Especially since what seemed to have happened was a simple rear-ender, and not the first time at that crosswalk. People *will* tailgate and when a car stops for the signal, bang.

The thing being that Christie didn't have to be two lanes. They widened the already wide sidewalks all up its length for no reason at all, with the results that it's not only constantly backed up, it's a bitch to bicycle on.

Walked over to the Bloor and Spadina postal outlet, the one I think is closer than the Dupont and Spadina one even though I know it isn't, and sent off my tax form and accountant's cheque. So that's done. 'Places on Bloor seem closer than they are' simply because it's the main drag, hence has shops and people and, let's be honest here, better sidewalks than grotty Dupont with its condos a-building and its multitude of utility cuts chewing up the sidewalk. (Utility cuts are when the hydro and gas companies rip up a newly concreted sidewalk or asphalted roadway to access the stuff underneath, then patch it with asphalt that sinks down or breaks up, depending, making life hard for people with walkers and bloody dangerous for people in wheelchairs, especially the motorized ones.)

Also on the main drag is Wiener's hardware, that Annex institution, so I dropped by to see what they had in the way of window fans. Nothing, same as the last time I checked, aside from 'whisper quiet' towers that don't do a great job of moving the air either. But this time I asked one of the oyaji when the fans would be coming in and he said they  *were* in, just down in the basement. Came back with the exact model I want, yahoo! because the air purifier is dead and the old window fan has started screeching as well. I know there's no excuse for these fans because you can't get in to clean them, much less oil the motor,  so they're essence of planned obsolescence. OTOH this fan was bought probably in the oughties and is pushing twenty years, so I don't feel *too* bad about getting a new one.

My cherry is fully out and has the sakura smell, which is ok but nothing like a plum or apple. And may fall in the weekend's forecast heat and rain and wind so look at it while it's here.

Library holds continue to trot in with no regard for 'four weeks wait' notices. Thus Murderbot 3 appeared yesterday, which is a problem since my hold on Murderbot 2 was still showing umpty many weeks wait. But amazon gave me a credit for my delayed envelopes so I got 2 for about five bucks. At which point library tells me 2 is in transit. Oh well. Cancel that and proceed with Artificial Condition. Only it appears that what I thought was no.3 is actually no.4 and the real no.3 is 'eleven weeks wait.' (Really, Murderbot titles are as bad as Dick Francis' for confusibility.) Do I believe them and buy the kindle edition for 15 bucks, or do I trust that it will come in before my no.4 is due back at the library?

Bro was by on Saturday to pick up mail, which was not tax stuff, since he's already done his taxes, but an application for some government program that my accountant deals with for me. Weird that Service Canada would send his T5s to the new address but not this. Governmental right hand not knowing what the left does, even within the same ministry. But that aside, bro says he does an hour of duolingo French every morning, which amazes me. Quite apart from finding Duolingo annoying and thinking my French is better served by actually reading French, I can't summon the discipline for even mild language study. It seems pointless now. I know I'll never go back to France and certainly never to Japan so why bother? S-i-l was doing Russian because she intended to go there before Putin happened and for all I know still intends to after history deals with him, but my s-i-l is not a Johnson.

My front yard is covered in easy care ivy, which is fine by me, but I notice that the ivy has deserted the front third of the yard. Maybe there's too much dead wood,  or maybe-- as I noted today-- the ivy prefers to grow up the birch tree instead. I was happy to let it do that because ivy strangles trees and that would solve my problem with the birch. But not if it's going to denude my front yard. So have pulled down a good swathe and will pull down more once I get the clippers out because it's climbed out of my reach and clings tenaciously to the upper trunk.

Was feeling hungry on my morning erranding and not disposed for my pricey restaurants-- accountants must be paid this month so economy is advised. Thus I stopped by the Tim Horton's down by the subway station and stood in the very long line and listened to the babble of conversation around me in, conservatively, about five different languages I don't know. The Korean grammas like to congregate there, but there were also a goodly number of turbans and saris, also what I thought were niqabs but couldn't be because Eid isn't till this evening. Although the possible niqabi may just have been with the white guy who was ordering. And this is why I really don't want to move away from this area.

Up and moving at a decent hour so down the street I went for my blood draw. Swear that last November there was something about they only held faxed requests for six months. Appears they don't hold them at all because there's no record of me in the system. In the lab I've been going to for decades. Ah well. Call doctor, secretary says she'll fax the request again instanter. Reader, she did not. Waited ten minutes, nothing came through, waiting room is backed up with posted wait times of 40 minutes for the people who did have draw requests. Said I'd come back next week. Receptionist takes my number and says she'll call me when the fax comes in. Unlike my doctor's office they work till 5 on Fridays. Reader, she did not, so I assume the fax never arrived.

Went to the library to pick up a hold. Meant to ask the librarian if they could now print from emails, a service that was disrupted during the cyber attack, but there was only one librarian and he was shelving holds so I didn't get a chance. If they do, I can get my doctor to email the form to me and print it there and not have to trust the dodgy lab.

Saving grace was that I actually had two holds at the library so I am well-supplied with Flavia Albia's to get me through a rainy tomorrow and a snowy Sunday.

Then, in spite of resolutions to save money by eating at home, went to my old Japanese restaurant where they bring me my wine automatically, and had a bento. It's half the cost of same at the tony Korean place, so I allow me the indulgence. And I got something close to 6000 steps in from all the gadding about, so go me.

Otherwise my supermarket has started stocking frozen dumplings from Mother's Dumplings, famous Toronto restaurant as it says on the package. But only one kind, the pork and cabbage, and not the delicious pork and chive ones I got from Skip the Dishes earlier this week. My Skip credit got me mountains of food though as ever the chive pancakes were a disappointment. I should just stop ordering those because no one makes them the way I like. But my order arrived with blinding speed because, a first, my Dasher was on a bike. The food delivery guys all have fat wheeled electric bikes and congregate on Bloor these days-- well, everywhere, I suppose-- though Concerned Voices have been heard about them bringing the bikes on the transit. Because for sure these guys don't live downtown: almost certainly they come from Markham and Brampton and other northerly Here men say bee dragonnes outposts where, alas, all the best Asian restaurants are but that need a car to either get to or get around.

I had an actual honest to god conversation today. I don't know who it was with because we never got around to swapping names. But as I was creaking out to the super with my rollator, another woman was coming from the super with hers, and I wasn't sure we had room for both of us on the narrowish sidewalk. So I pulled over and remarked to her as she came abreast that rollators are great but also wide. And she said mine looked lighter than hers-- which it might be because hers had a very sturdy-looking iron framework-- and then we were off to the races. She'd just moved into the neighbourhood from Etobicoke, a section of TO so out of my normal round that I'm not even sure where it is. (West, apparently,  out by the airport.) Husband died, she moved into her daughter's basement apartment, doesn't know anybody in this area, so of course was happy to talk. She had a hip replacement, hence the walker, which was bought for her by kind family who didn't consult her on her preferences. Is resigned to being in a wheelchair eventually, though her daughter wants her to do tai chi‐ 'But I can't even stand!' I commiserated: I still can't stand myself though I work on it.

Certainly not on days like today when everything hurts for no good reason and I have to wear boots, except I could have worn shoes, the streets were so dry. But you never know where ice will lurk. Like the other day coming up from Bloor and observing the ice berm as high as the sidewalk-- which is ridiculous, because we only got an inch or so in the last fall so where'd this five inch pack come from? Anyway after my shop I limped up to the LCBO and bought mickies of gin and vodka and had two vodkas and tonics and the day got much better after that.

I'm told 'mickey' is a purely Canadian term. It's 375 ml or 12 oz, whichever comes first, and used to be in curved bottles that fit between the calf and the boot for concealment purposes. My bottles aren't curved but they are portable.

Walked over to the Spadina Shoppers PO in the cold grey dank, with gunk on the wheels because melted snow + leaf detritus + mud/ clay from the many many condos a-building on Dupont. But parcel dispatched quickly, though my heart sank when I realized the one guy ahead of me had fifteen or so identical flat parcels to post and was in deep consultation with the clerk. Sat down to wait-- such useful things, Rollators-- but guy realized he couldn't mail his fifteen parcels the way he wanted, gathered them up, and went on his merry way. Luckily, because by that time there was a line of lunch-hour would-be mailers behind me. Still faster than the Bloor Shoppers for sure, but that's because there are fewer businesses and buildings on Dupont (see: condos a-building) than on Bloor, where the Shoppers is the ground floor of a high-rise apartment.

Then decided to try my luck on the Dupont bus and travelled back no problem at all. Could this be because I had a female driver who took things easy and asked me, getting on and off, if I was OK doing both? Oh, surely not, wottever gave you that idea?

I see there's a new anthology of Victorian detective fic. Have a hold on it, though the editor's article about compiling it gave me pause. He omits any Thorndyke because he can't take Austin Freeman's anti-semitism. Well, alright. But aside from the weird conviction that London's Jewish population tended to lisp, I thought Freeman was fairly well-disposed to his Jewish characters. Certainly they aren't all money lenders as in Sayers or money-obsessed as in Mitchell. And IIRC Thorndyke can read Yiddish,  which is more than any other Golden Age detective can do.

The last time I walked past Spadina, my phone said 4000-some steps. Today, in spite of doing 1300 in the morning, it will barely go over 3,000. This must come from carrying it in the breast pocket of my winter coat. Am certain I went over 5k in any case.

The reason I was limping two and a half subway stops was someone on a neighbourhood FB asked if anyone had a toaster oven going spare.  I have the beast I bought in early lockdown that is both slow and complicated to use and I could use the counter space. And because she has mobility issues too I said I'd bring it over to her street. What I'd forgotten was that three years ago I could still bike and had brought the thing home on the carrier. It turned out to be too big for the walker's basket so shou ga nai, I put it in a bag and put the bag on the seat with the bag handles looped over the walker's ditto, and gingerly trundled it over. Toronto may be all smug about its curb cuts that supposedly accommodate wheelchairs and strollers and whatnot, but all I can say is I hope I never have to use a motorized wheelchair let alone a standard one, because there's always a ridge of broken paving between the street and the incline, unless the incline itself is cracked and broken. Even taking things slow and using the lift thingy, I nearly lost the oven twice, once being actually rescued by a kind young thing who grabbed it as it was sliding off. I hear that Americans envy our accessibility but in the words of the old song, It's not that we're much better, it's just that we're less worse.

Still I got to see the houses with their decorations still up, on a blue and gold windy evening, so there was that.

Weather still mild so I decided to make it to the AGO. Alas, the jets were practising for the air show this weekend, meaning painful sonic booms, so to limit outside exposure I called for a cab. Beck has finally ironed out the kinks of its automated voice system ie the voice tells you what to do and if you follow the pattern (number, street name, street/ road/ blvd/ etc. disambiguation,  CITY) the robot repeats it back to you correctly. Alas again, they haven't got their drivers in working condition. My cell rings as I'm sitting outside, no cab in sight, 'I'm in front of your house now', the hell you are. You're sitting outside 534 and I'm at 543, the number I gave your robot. When I get in the car the driver's screen is large enough to read from the back and yes it says 543. If I do this again I swear I'm giving my address as 545. NND won't mind.

My heart sank when I got inside the gallery because the line went back to the entrance. Holidays, of course. But that was a tour group, and the real line was only a few people. Group reached the ticket taker a second before I did, but luckily she asked if she could let me in first. The Cassatt and Daughter show was interesting enough, though the patrons were as worth looking at as the pictures. There was a Kushner&Sherman lookalike couple that I knew couldn't be because the originals are in Europe now, and a woman in draped Raphaelite robes, and a tousle-headed little girl looking like the models in a number of the paintings. Also a tour group of maybe thirty kids in red tshirts for identification, 9 or 10 at a guess, who paraded through the exhibit rooms and straight out without looking at anything, much to the surprise of the security staff.

The exhibition had all ten of Cassatt's famous prints, as well as the oil paintings both she and her daughter did. Renoir reminiscent as to colours and subject matter. The prints have faded- IIRC because of the chemical composition of the pigments she used. But what most struck me, I'm afraid, is that she loved to do mother and child paintings and prints, and unless the kid is on a bus, the kid is naked. My expert's eye says these are 12 to 18 month olds, not babies as I define babies, and unless toileting was done differently in the early 20th century, you're risking disaster carting that child about without a diaper. Taking her into the garden to pick apples is probably the least dangerous place to do it, but you really are asking to have your own lovely dress ruined.

So now I was ready for a latte at the 2nd floor café in the Galleria Italia, except I couldn't find the galleria. You used to run into it without trying, but they've blocked something off so I kept going round and round, on the admittedly smooth floors.  I could smell the coffee but couldn't get to it, and the maps all lied. Finally found a security guard who said to go through the African exhibition and turn left. Which did, and at last found the long wooden gallery the runs along the front of the building. But there was no coffee shop there. Or tables or chairs or indeed anything at all. It's been four years since I was last here and the place *looked* the same but... no café. But I think this was where the tour group was trying to get to, because the map implied that the Galleria was the other side of the Cassatt.

Totally confused by now, not to mention footsore even with my walker, I went back to the ground floor where the pricey restaurant is. They found a table for me-- being crippled has its uses, since they were going to put me on a wait list-- and I had very pricey  bread and very pricey paté and very very pricey wine, and my server told me the café is now on the ground floor and no wonder I could smell coffee in all the wrong places. And I do think that guard might have mentioned that there was nothing in the Galleria Italia itself and if I wanted the café, it's moved. Since you have to leave the AGO proper to get to the restaurant,  it being  the other side of the gift shop, I couldn't even go back to get a latte there. Once out, you're out. However the gift shop already has next year's calendars and I got a satisfactory modern Japanese artist, which consoles me for much. 

Then took transit back home. Taking a wide walker, even one that folds, on the Spadina LRT among all the shopping Chinese grannies and grandpas is an interesting experience, because they have walkers too, as well as many many bags of groceries, and we're all squished together Tokyo-like. But people were very kind about giving me their seat and helping me get the beast onto the car: because you do have to step up, and even worse step down, over a not inconsiderable gap,  to get on and off. No way you can use a wheelchair, motorized or not, on those cars, which means no way are they disabled accessible I-don't-care-what-you-say.

And when we got to the subway they were cracking down on the fare jumpers.  Unlike in the past, they scanned everyone's ticket, including old folk with their walkers, and pulled miscreants out of the queue and kept them there. In the before times when it was just me and my staff, the checker pointedly ignored me as I went past with my card all ready for scanning. But this guy had clearly had enough. The two women who'd failed the test were trying to argue with him and he was having no part of it.

I didn't have to walk home from Bathurst- -there are up escalators at Christie, though one of them requires climbing three steps to get on and whose screw-up was that, I sometimes wonder-- but I had a hold at the library, and if I pushed it a bit I could also get a latte at Ninetails. Which did: and maybe sun and pleasant temperatures just put Torontonians in a sweet mood (except subway inspectors) because people continued to open doors for me very helpfully. So a good day with much exercise: but I still wonder if I'll ever walk unaided again.

Got out to the super yesterday and stocked up on hot weather food (cold cuts, lettuce, bread). Got home as the black clouds came barrelling in from the north. In spite of which I don't think it started raining until much later. Today was drier and breezy, but the sidewalks are still yellow from  both the lindens and the  maples, so I stayed in and was moderately productive: dishes, laundry, vacuuming up the seedlets in the front hallway...

Being unwontedly limber, I got downstairs to weigh myself before breakfast. Not as bad as I'd feared, not as good as I'd hoped. And I strongly suspect that I've dropped a kilo or so in the last few days, what with the appetite killing/ water drinking hot weather, and a noticeable lack of coffee shops and their pastries. Balanced by gin and fizzy drinks, but the gin is almost all gone now and won't be replaced. 

My Pride flag fell down when one of the elastics holding it snapped so I brought it inside and hung it in the front window where it catches the setting sun. Also blocks the view so I can hang my laundry from the living room chandelier and not feel self-conscious.  Laundry bingo is a necessity in this house. The basement gets damp and moldy in the summer so I can't hang things on the lines down there too long, but I don't want to put my underwear on the lines outside, supposing it's safe to hang anything there. (It may be now: can't see any cherries left and the birds seem to have departed.) So it's wheel hangers from the Korean super for underwear until we get back to furnace time. Never did like putting underwear in the dryer,  since heat eats the elastic. 

Is there a form of Covid that has no symptoms except joint pain? Tuesday's acupuncture worked for half a day but yesterday I hurt. Had a massage yesterday and today I hurt more. Maybe the fact that it's gone unseasonably cold has something to do with it? though I hurt all weekend in the warm and mug.

I walked anyway, to the laundromat where something like 2/3 of the machines were out of order, a record even for them. That includes the washer with no sign on it- maybe they'd run out- into which I dropped two loonies before registering that it was a cyber washer and if it had no digital display it wasn't working. The one next to it, with the out of order sign, did have a display but by then I wasn't up for betting four dollars and yet more detergent that the sign was on the wrong machine.

So took me off to my old coffee shop which is now a fair hike, and was greeted with open arms by David the barista, who has learned to project his voice finally. Still couldn't hear him because Zoe the owner and her friends were conversing right behind me and the place has concrete floors and walls. Ambient noise is not my friend.  Said  hi to Zoe, remarked on her change of address to the family co-op, discover that her bf is working at my old daycare where his father also works. Very much a family affair all round.

All week I've been watching the sakura blow about on the wind. My tree is almost entirely empty now. Two weeks since the first white appeared, which is good innings. Two doors down's speading branches still glow white in the fairy lights of two doors down's garden, but have begun to blow away too.

Went out walking amid the front lawn dollar store offerings. Got small coloured envelopes, useful for tips if I ever go back to Doordash and grocery delivery. The last three years have depleted my stock of (many) decades, since I belonged to a letter writing generation. Also found several large and sturdy reusable bags which will serve for putting records out front, should we ever have a day that isn't threatening rain. That day was today, and very nice it was too, but the rest of the week is up in the air.

Had bulgogi, then looked for the new coffee shop down Bathurst that people have recommended. They have good lattes and cookies, but the sound system was cranked up to painful, so I ate outside and read Thorndyke on my phone and observed the mammoth towers across the street that have replaced Honest Ed's. Mostly or maybe all are to be rentals, and maybe in the course of time I might find myself there. Or not: I give myself another ten years at most, given how everyone dies at 84, and if I never stop being crippled I may opt for a retirement home instead. Though those will be increasingly harder to come by as the python bulge generation starts moving into its sunset years. Friend who was sussing places out for her parents says it's already like trying to get into Harvard. Given that, half of me thinks I should seize the day and indulge in sugar and alcohol, for tomorrow we may die, while the other half says to exercise more and drop weight so as to remain as active as possible as long as possible. Right now I do both and neither, which is not quite good enough.

There's a postal outlet two subway stops east of here, and as it's in the same direction as work I never think of it as being that far away. A bit of a hike with the walker but not as far as my old massage studio. There's also a genuine post office one subway stop to the west, but that's so faaaar. Now distance is partly a mental construct so I decided to go west to mail my tax return. That, and the fact that the lineups at the east outlet are always hideous, and especially so in April. And lord it was so faaaar. Seems like I was walking for hours. 

But it's a nice PO, in a degentrifying stretch of the main drag where in happier days, a decade ago, my acupuncture studio was. Angry guys yelling at the world, bars catering to same, and occasional panhandlers. (I don't count the ones west of me as panhandlers per se, they're just the regulars.) But I got a chatty clerk who excused herself halfway through printing the amazing number of labels a special delivery requires, to talk to a woman and her dog in the other line and give the dog treats. Woman is from the local vet clinic who took care of clerk's Shih Tzu in its last days; clerk now has a little medallion with some of dog's ashes in it. So that was my human interaction for the day.

Then I walked back along the main drag and strangely it wasn't any distance at all. Distance is a mental construct indeed. But I stopped at the Vietnamese restaurant across from the subway station and got a banh mi and coffee which I ate in the sun by the Chrstie Pits, the local park created by a glacier who knows how long ago. (Google: starting at least 72,000 years ago, finished about 12,000 years ago. )  It's now definite: whatever that restaurant does to its coffee, it disagrees with me. Not enough condensed milk, maybe? But it's been heartburn all evening, as it was the last time I had it.

And since last night was a ferocious nuit blanche, in which I got to sleep some time after 4 a.m. solely by an exercise of will, I hope the walking will get me to sleep at a decent hour tonight.

Occurred to me that it's time I read that booklet on the Primavera I've had for the better part of 40 years,  and no I don't recall where or when I picked it up. Turns out to be about the restoration work done on the painting but also includes historical background and interpretations of the painting pre and post treatment, with lovely full-colour plates not only of the Primavera itself but of other works. (Botticelli was a practical joker, did you know? He doesn't look like one in his self-insert in the Adoration of the Magi but so he was.)

This is not only happily reminiscent of reading Magnifico, which I did seven years ago-- and how did 2016 get to be that long ago? yes, yes, covid, but also the Trump years which I blotted from memory. But also hearkens much further back, to high school, and the Florentine Shop and a Time-Life book on the Renaissance with pictures of various interiors,  and possibly The Agony and the Ecstasy (book, not movie). It wasn't the first fully-furnished mental time/space construct of my life but was one of the most brightly coloured. These constructs are always made of scraps of this and that, bolstered by random conflations-- the university gothic of Victoria College, that I passed through on my way home from school, and the clear blue sky of a November late afternoon through the  arched windows thereof, and the golden background of some Fra Angelico angels, all came together to make a seamless whole, which then was echoed in the backdrop to an early scene in the Prokovieff Romeo and Juliet, pale dawn sky over a narrow cobbled street. 

And of course the real Florence did nothing to contradict my version, but wouldn't matter if it did. Mine is a Renaissance Florence of the mind and quite divorced from reality. Though if I'd seen a lot more baroque wretched excess there, instead of an almost Quakerish restraint,  I might have felt different. Rome certainly was all baroque wretched excess, even if the last time I saw it was when I was an ignorant twelve who knew no art history. But Rome sorted very well with the kind of Catholicism I was then neck-deep in, all relics and holy cards and glorious martyrs. Which of course had its roots in the baroque Counter-reformation of the sixteenth century. And by the 16th century my Renaissance was over, replaced by men in trunks and beards who all died young of syphilis.

No, back to the serene beauty and balance of the Primavera, and its newly (in 1984) revealed glowing colours.