Instagrams, a set on Flickr.
Another round of photos from the life in progress, with cuteness and captions. Enjoy!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Toronto: Day 293 (Nice Ice Lady)
When I lived in Alberta, I hated winter. I hated waking up in darkness and leaving school or work in the black. I hated being wet of foot, dry of skin, and bone-chilled every time I came in from outside. I hated mushing around in heavy winds while snow accumulated on my forehead, melted its way down my face and glued my glasses to my nose.
I hated forty below for weeks on end and occasionally getting into cars that were iceboxes and shivering all the way across town in same, arriving–inevitably–five minutes after the crappy heaters had begun to pretend to kick in.
Here in Southern Ontario, we are reportedly having the worst winter in twenty or so years. It has snowed often. It has been twenty below three or four times.
Now, here, I have a warm feather-filled bag that covers me from crown to toe. I have sweaters, and thermal tights and toasty waterproof boots. Good stuff, none of which had to be bought by a parent who was weighing a certain amount of poverty against the general concept of Why buy quality for a kid who’ll outgrow this all in a year?
Even in the chill, it has been sunny, so sunny. The amount of light here is amazing. Hazy days seem few and far between.
And you may have noticed that I am nuts for icicles.
This isn’t a new thing. I would try to get good icicle pictures in Vancouver, or on our trips to the Prairies to see the kin. Opportunities were few and far between, but I tried. Here… ha! The old gutters on all these picturesque Victorian houses overflow, and ice over, and spill. Constantly! The resulting frozen structures are spectacular. They stay in place until the light’s good. You can get close to and atop them. You can get under.
Which would be how I’ve worked out that any patch of ground beneath a good series of icicles is also slippery as shit.
Anyway. It’s March. Nobody in Vancouver has sent me a crocus photo yet, though I did make a point of telling all my west coast loved ones that they should gloat. This winter, this unusually cold and terrible winter–as the locals would have it–I have been cold and miserable and sad to be outside all of twice.
It feels like I’ve gotten away with something.
I haven’t enjoyed everything. I am a bit tired of bundling up, which is a wearying chore. I have realized or remembered that the primary thing that I dislike about snow is the stage where it’s dirty and festooned in various types of dog waste.
I am also headed somewhere warm in a couple of weeks. And, in the meantime, here’s some ice for you all.
Friday Instagrams
Instagrams, a set on Flickr.
It has been a remarkably intense and stressful week, filled with medium-crappy incidents. The kinds of thing that aren’t life shattering in any sense, but that do make one grumpy and frustrated and less capable of appreciating the good.
There was good. Most recently, we had dinner with an old friend and her partner yesterday evening, and then went to his art opening. The recent snowstorm, which is where the icicle shot comes from, was thoroughly fantastic. One thing that I thought was going to be very hard turned out to be pretty easy.
Life. As always, the mixed bag. But here are pics and captions for you all.
Latest Cutest Instagrams
Instagrams, a set on Flickr.
An ice storm, Riverdale Farm, and an assortment of things from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
All captioned, as usual, for the folks who missed them on Twitter and FB. Enjoy!
Being the sentimental part of the #alyxkelly25 project
There’s a line early in The Winslow Boy
To which I say Fuck That! If I’m gonna make a big public fuss over my anniversary, let’s lead with emotion.
I fell irrevocably in love with my wife Kelly when I saw her dancing at a bagpipe funk concert sponsored by the Lethbridge Folk Festival, back in the late Eighties. I remember the moment. The thunderbolt. We’d been friends awhile, had gone to the concert together, but boom. Everything changed. And that night she slept over at my place and…
… and nothing happened. No romance, no heartfelt confessions. I was dating someone else, see.
(Which was a situation that went on, messily, for rather an embarrassingly long while. It took time for me to get my head out of Denialsville, otherwise known as my ass, and the rest of me out of the prior relationship.)
This thing K and I have, it is the billion dollar lottery win. It is the One True Love™. It is hearts and flowers; the glass slipper. It has the feel of fate, and tastes of the marrow-deep conviction that there is no other. All those schmaltzy “two hearts beating as one” lyrics and greeting cards may as well have been written for us.
And though it doesn’t feel anything but right, it’s easy to see from a distance that it’s weird, because I’m a pragmatic, tough-minded and generally rational being, with little patience for magical thinking. My head doesn’t take seriously the proposal that in a world filled with billions, each of us has one other half whom they might never actually meet. I’ve watched Tim Minchin’s lengthy, slightly NSFW, “If I Didn’t Have You” a hundred times because I love it. (Thanks, Linda C, for that!)
And my brain buys in, utterly. Perhaps especially the part of love being made more powerful by the trauma of shared existence.
Logic aside, I live the happily ever after implied in every Austen novel and romantic comedy. The right person came along for me, the One. And that, my friends, is that. I love Kelly with a passion that borders on worship.
I am incredibly, unbelievably fortunate.