1. Accomplishment for the day- 1 load of dishes, 2 loads of laundry, dust and vacuum and wash front hall and living room, finish boiling three sets of chicken bones for stock, and buy
a hiking staff online. I'd prefer something thicker and more Gandalfy, but with luck this will get me through the snow more comfortably than a cane does.
2. They've taken down the inner walls of Honest Ed's, the east and west wings, leaving the outer shell. This a mere eleven months after the store closed. The other buildings on Markham are largely untouched, and could happily have stayed open through the summer, like that inexplicable health food store on Bathurst, still operating while the entire rest of the block was vacated at the end of January.
3. Yesterday was grey and warm and mizzly and wanhopey, though again that might have been hangover from Friday's marathon. Today was freezing cold and bright, and I walked down to Bloor and back with, let's say, less pain than any time in the last two weeks. Also waited till mid-afternoon when all the Santa Claus Paraders had departed, and their suburban cars with them.
4. Kipling's
Tales of Horror and Fantasy is about the only thing I feel like reading these days, so a good thing there's so much of it. Eventually one gets used to his 'sink or swim' style of writing about the Indian Occupation. The Raj is what it is, though as before, when reading his autobiography, I find myself lacking sympathy for the white-skinned occupiers going mad in the Indian heat. Go back to Torquay if the heat bothers you; and no truly it was your decision to interfere in the running of the native states, so don't gripe about the officials you have to deal with. Twits.
(I must also wonder about that corpse hidden in the ceiling. Seems to me that if you put a body anywhere in an Indian bungalow at whatever season, you'll be uncomfortably aware of it in very short order.)
