Category Archives: Toronto

Installation Art Along the Shores of Lake Ontario

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…..Inuksuit made with 21st century rubble

Colonel Sam Smith Park, on the shores of Lake Ontario, at the south end of Etobicoke was recently extended into the lake with landfill. It is one of Toronto’s newest and largest waterfront parks. Much of the park was created in front of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital and the RL Clark Filtration Plant. The waterfront lakefill area is mainly naturalized with grasses, shrubs and small trees. The shoreline is a combination of rocky headlands, cobble beaches and protected wetland. This blends further north into the mature trees and mowed lawns of the former hospital grounds and now the site for Humber College.

This is the park that Frances, my husband and I walked through every day (when I’m not at the cottage or away). This morning on our usual walk to the point I noticed that there were more pieces of installation art that someone has created, using the bricks and rubble from the landfill along the shoreline.

The sculptures were intended to look like inuksuit, a native stone landmark or cairn built and used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America.

An inuksuk was originally built as a travel marker for camps, hunting grounds, food caches and sometimes burial grounds. For more information about the inuksuk, check the Wikipedia site, here.

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Wildflowers in T.O.

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…..back to our morning walks

Today started out as an exceptionally beautiful day.

As hard as I try, I can’t keep up with my husband and the dog on our morning walks. I watched from a distance today and counted K’s steps and discovered that we both take the same amount of steps in the same amount of time but my stride is so much shorter, due to my shorter legs.

Frances runs twice as far as both of us but today she kept running back to me to make sure that I was okay. How sweet!  I’m not upset that K walks ahead of me and he doesn’t worry about me. It works for both of us and so when I stop to take photographs I take my time to get that perfect shot and then continue on my way. Sometimes I run to catch up and occasionally K will stop at one of the benches and waits until Frances has one more swim and I come into view. Here are a few of the wildflowers that I observed on our walk this morning.

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Getting Back to Normal

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….with fitness and eating

We did an incredible amount of walking when we were in Ireland but my eating patterns were out of whack for me. I rarely drink beer so when we went to pubs I would have a pint of cider. I would rarely drink more than one glass and half way into the trip I realized that I could order half pints. With most meals I ordered mineral water but occasionally I enjoyed a glass of wine and one evening my husband and I shared a bottle of wine that came with the meal.

We were hoping we would be able to have a few light meals in our hotel room and only eat out once a day. We quickly discovered, however, that our rooms did not come with bar fridges and we couldn’t keep anything cool. One evening in Westport we went into the local grocery store to buy some vegetables and fruit. We also bought a small bottle of salad dressing and some ham to put into our salad.

Earlier in the evening we stopped at a small cafe and enjoyed a platter of cheese and a few crackers and a glass of wine. After we brought our selection of veggies and fruit back to our room we discovered we weren’t as hungry as we thought we would be. We ate the raw vegetables and hummus.

What were we to do with the salad, ham and dressing that we purchased? I think I’ve mentioned this before but Ireland was going through a heat wave while we were there and the hotels don’t have air conditioning. Well it was a few degrees cooler outside the hotel than in the room so I opened the window on the second story and placed the perishable foods on the window ledge.

The next morning the ham was gone. When I looked down to the street I saw the ’empty’  ham container lying on the sidewalk. We’re not sure what got on the ledge but there were a lot of very large blackbirds in the area. Do they eat meat?

Today, before breakfast, my husband, Frances and I started up our usual 5 k walks again. Frances was in a bit of slump since coming home yesterday. I think she was missing her buddy, Lucy. Going for a walk to the lake was just what the doctor ordered. Frances was in a better mood after she had her swim and K and I were energized for the rest of the day.

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Living Without Electricity

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….little did I know that this was going to happen here in the city, yesterday

When I wrote the following story there was no warning of the storm to come. We set record rainfall levels here in Toronto. In two hours 90 mm of rain fell and continued to fall until 124 mm fell in total. We haven’t had this much rain since Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Roads, highways and underpasses were flooded and closed. Over 300 000 homes were without power in Toronto and at one point 80% of Mississauga was in the dark. We had no power for 10 hours. Luckily our basement stayed dry but thousands of basements flooded.

The biggest story yesterday was how the GO train ended up in a flood zone and started to fill up. Passengers were stranded on the train for over six hours and had to be rescued by the Marine Unit.

GO train flooded

People inside the train

The irony is that if I had stayed up at the cottage for one more day I would have missed all of this. Here is the story I wrote on the weekend:

Living Without Electricity

….power failure? what power failure?

The one time I’m happy about not having electricity at the cottage is when we have a power failure. Up here a power failure can last for days. I’m sitting here in semi-darkness with only a few candles burning and a couple of oil lamps aglow. I charged my laptop before I left the city on Friday morning and now, Sunday evening, after writing 4 stories and up loading all my photos I still have 30% left on the battery.

It’s not that we can’t get electricity up here, we can. When we first started building in 1989 there was no electricity on this side of the island. People had been up here for 20 years and more and got along just fine without it. In the mid 90’s Ontario hydro installed power lines up to Big Sand Bay. Many cottagers didn’t want it at first but slowly, one by one, cottages started to be powered with electricity. We are one of the few last hold outs.

People often wonder how we manage without power. Well my fridge runs on propane, I use my BBQ as my main source for cooking and our water pump is generated with gas. As I said earlier, I light the place with oil lamps and candles, and battery operated lanterns and in recent years I’ve started purchasing lights that are solar powered. Don’t get me wrong, there are days that I wish I had electricity, like on rainy days when I have to cook outside. Of course that could also be remedied with a propane stove. Lugging propane tanks back and forth, off and on the island can also be a pain but it’s better than the alternative (cooling with ice and cooking over campfires).

At least when there is a power failure I’m not leaving because I can’t keep my food cold, my water pump doesn’t work and heaven forbid I can’t watch TV or play video games. I’m happy with my battery operated radio and my favourite station, CBC. I also read a lot, walk, swim, play board games with my neighbours, and occasionally paint. The one convenience that I do have and don’t need to have electricity for is my land line phone. Cell reception up here is very dicey. We can receive messages but we can’t always reply. Literally, directly north of us lies hundreds of kilometres of open water. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a cell tower in the middle of Georgian Bay any time soon.

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Luckily our fridge kept our food cold and nothing in the freezer defrosted. I did put a few things in my cooler bag with ice packs to take some stress off the fridge. I lit candles, used flashlights and battery powered lanterns and I was able to keep in touch with family and friends through texting. My little transistor radio and Twitter kept us up to date with the news.

My husband and I had a huge salad for dinner and we kept ourselves entertained with a marathon game of scrabble. I won. Teeheehee!