Last week having been the musical, this week’s essay is about “Tabula Rasa.” Which is one of my favorite episodes, as it happens.
Enjoy!
photo by Kristy Boyce
“The Color of Paradox”
The Color of Paradox
“The Cage”
The Cage
Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto
Mount Pleasant Cemetary, Toronto, a set on Flickr.
My weekly routine is going to take me past the oldest cemetery in Toronto every Wednesday, and it connects in two directions to parks I want to explore. So you can expect to see more pictures of graves mixed in with the birds.
The epiphany that came yesterday, along with my first decent shots of bluejays and cardinals, is that I like to shoot gravestones because of the part of my writerbrain that is always looking for cool names.
There’s some morbid in there, I’m sure. But if you tap through you’ll also see something genuinely life-affirming: it’s a plot for a couple of married guys, and it made me laugh and then cry.
Let’s get musical (musical!) on the #Buffyrewatch
“Once More, With Feeling” is without a doubt a contender for the BtVS episode I’ve seen the most. The other things on the ballot would be “Hush,” “The Zeppo” and “Dopplegangland.”
When Kelly turned 38, we rented the Pacific Cinematheque theater in Vancouver and showed it, along with “Hush.” We issued an open invitation to all of Vancouver fandom; I’d say about 150 people turned up to sing along. Many of those were from the choir now known as Out in Harmony, so it was an especially tuneful singalong even though the theater’s acoustics were quite bad.
We have the soundtrack. We sing it on road trip. You probably do, too.
All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that I’m maybe a season and a half from the end of this rewatch. Which is thoroughly amazing to me, and makes me want to ask whether anyone else has a long-term project on the go whose end is, perhaps, heaving into view.
Toronto Day 64 – The Skunk Made It!
Happy news: the construction workers from the other day watched my skunk friend successfully use our improvised bridge to climb out of the fountain. They also told me Animal Control had showed up a short time later, ready to ride to the rescue. I was very pleased to hear it, and was also rather delighted that the bricklaying dudes cared enough to keep an eye on the little guy and update me.
We had a full-on thunderstorm last night, for hours, and it was spectacular. I expected it to be more amazing than watching the heat lightning over the Sierra Nevadas, and it was. I hadn’t expected it to compete with prairie thunderstorms for sheer noise, drama and staying power. But, in fact, it was flashing and booming most dramatically for hours on end.
I couldn’t quite get ’round to looking up how to do a long lightning-catching exposure on my camera–though I will, at some point–but this was one of the many amazing cloud formations we glimpsed while watching it all unfold:
Thunderstorms were one of the things I missed about Alberta, all those years ago when we left. It is extremely nice to have them back.
Our view of the sky is bounded by the courtyard of our building, which gives us a very Rear Window perspective on the nearest neighbors. Last night as we were staring out at the thunder we could see several folks out on their decks, doing the same thing. We can also see straight into the building’s party room, so we were able to watch people setting up for a birthday celebration. It was quite the operation, since they had to ferry stuff in and out of the building in the downpour.
There’s excellent sky and people-watching here, in other words.
Toronto Day 62
photo by Kelly Robson
And then, when I would get the I wanna go back to that place, where was that place? itch, I didn’t have to try to remember its address–which would be impossible. Or even its name–honestly, that’d be pretty unlikely. The incomparable Sense Appeal was, until I looked it up, “that place with the black and white bags that I posted on Instagram.” But I didn’t have to know! I just scrolled through my check-ins until the answer turned up, in red and white, complete with map. Turns out it was less than a kilometer from the house.
I am apparently the only Yelper currently active in the West Queen West area, though. Eight weeks of trying to track my own movements has netted me a handful of Dukedoms, on just about every place I’ve been more than twice. True, I’d been auditioning a lot of coffee houses, looking for the all important remote work site, but still!
Speaking of apps, the one that counts the number of days I’ve been here would also like you all to know it’s 160 days until December 25th.
Toronto seems to have more work-at-cafe culture than Vancouver. A lot of places are jammed with computer-using busy people by as early as ten, and there’s a very serious air about it.
Also, they seem to think you should be tall. One of the reason for all the auditioning was I kept finding perfectly nice places whose tabletops were too high for me to either write long hand or safely type.
Seriously! In the end, I had to go to MEC and buy an inflatable camping pillow. Which I now carry in my portable office along with all my other carp! How crazed is that?