Queen & Bay, June 14 2007

Here is an impossible photograph that miraculously came out of my camera. Old City Hall is in the background, including the spire to the left of the photograph. Just below the spire you can see the left curved tower of new city hall, and to the right of that, the curved building which is the right hand side of the City Hall building. The top right hand corner of the photograph, where there are a few circular looking objects, is a photograh of the signs outside of where I was sitting with Linda. Of course, this photograph is spatially impossible, but aesthetically interesting.

eMilton

Man & Dog on Queen Street West

On the Edge of Etobicoke

I fell into the deep well of St Thomas Ontario for a few days, but I've recovered now after a nutritious dinner with David and Karon, and a long walk along the waterfront with Karon. It's 31 degrees in Toronto, and humid, but the breeze was blowing in off the lake, and the boardwalk was filled with rollerbladers, cyclists, walkers, runners. Notable was the guy on a bike wearing what looked to be a heavily padded shirt on which the design was metal plating.

Sailboats, at least 100 of them, were in the lake closer to downtown Toronto, and beside where we were walking the dragon boat races were ongoing.

Last night I slept on an airbed with a slow leak, so every couple of hours I woke up to find the tops of the totes on which the airbed was placed poking into my back, and my body enveloped in two large puffs of air mattress. Luckily it's an electric air mattress, so all I had to do was press a little button and it filled up with air again. I slept well, though.

Pictures at 11.

Samuel de Champlain with Astrolabe

This is the only photograph I took today. As soon as I took it, the batteries in my camera died. So this is it. It's that explorer, the French one. His statue is up on Nepean Point, facing up river in the direction he headed.

Of note from today: I wore a bright yellow rainjacket that I had bought from London Drugs for 15 dollars, and I hated it so much (it just felt wrong) that I left it in the coat check at the Museum of Civilization.

Have Visa, Will Travel

Now, I think I'll head off to the Museum of Civilization and see what, exactly, is meant by that word and what all the fuss is about.

National Art Gallery

this is the National Art Gallery in Ottawa as seen from the bench just outside the Nicholas Hoare book store on Sussex Drive. You can sort of see the spider just to the right of center.

So, the Nicholas Hoare bookstore is one of those bookstores that just has all the good stuff and NONE of the filler...the opposite of Chapters, which has 90% filler and a bit of the good stuff.

I bought Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (it's okay, Steve, I bought it in paperback, so it wasn't so expensive).

And Betty, as I wandered through the NAG, I kept making myself aware of the smells I was smelling. I have to admit, mostly I detected the odor of soap, but in the George Clutesi room, I smelled the scent of fresh paper.

I saw one exhibit, Betty, in which this woman takes personal objects that are worn or carried close to the human body, and puts them outside, inserting a bee hive into them. Over the years, honey comb accumulates on and around the objects, and her piece on display was a dress almost completely covered with honeycomb. The blurb that accompanied the piece talked about "inter-species collaboration" in art. For some reason, I thought of you and thought you'd like that.

So, I apologize for this photograph. It's pretty lame compared to the ones I saw on the racks in the Byward Market (on my way back to Home Sweetland Home, the B&B I'm staying at in Sandy Hill), which somehow managed to insert a field of tulips between the gallery and the road...how do they do that? I didn't see any flippin' tulips!