Everyone asks me how it feels to be older.
It’d be nice if the back pain went away as the years rolled by.
Pity…

Cake
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

The cake was good, though!

Since I’m rarely in Toronto and rarely in Toronto for more than a couple of days, I often miss my good and wonderful Torontonian friends.

However, in December, I get to stay a few more days, which I hope to be jam-packed with adventure. Or barring that, hugs and smiles.

I propose that we sally forth on Boxing Day and take over some establishment. An establishment, that perhaps serves food and drink?

Loons
416 Roncesvalles Ave.
26 December 2008 at 19h

( Facebook | Map )

I’m leaving in about an hour for Toronto and will be there until 28 Dec. Torontonian friends, I’d love to see you again.

girl_tm and I are also leaving for Paris on 29 Dec until 2 Jan. Parisian friends, I haven’t seen you in a very long time and it’d be lovely to get in touch again.

To show how small the world is, we’ll be staying in a Parisian apartment, swapped with someone I met the night before he left Montréal for the City of Lights. And this apartment swap was arranged through the miracle of the Internet. For all of its scariness, it sure is helpful!

Rob, Aleece, and Flora
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

(37 more photos)

One of the things I like about Toronto is that they have a bustling flashmob scene. I know we have a flashmob movement here in Montréal that has zombie walks and such. But Toronto has newmindspace.

When I missed their fête dans le métro in April because I was in Toronto, I wasn't going to miss their next event. An Easter egg hunt!

So I showed up at Lori and Kevin's place to help write messages and stuff hundreds of plastic eggs.

Markers
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Stuffing
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Easter eggs
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Then on Easter Sunday, we went hunting. I started out at Yonge and Bloor where I bumped into a guy and two kids who were looking lost. I reassured them that the hunt was on and we started out west. On the way, we met up with other hunters who had started in the other direction. When we hit Bathurst, we turned around and tried the other side of the street. For people who aren't from Toronto, here's a handy map.

Stairwell
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Broken half
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Good hunting
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Hey Simon, asked dwiseman, how would you like to go to a concert?.

I could tell she was really excited. She'd gotten tickets to the Rheostatics concert at the end of March. (So I'm a tiny bit late in writing this up.)

I wasn't very familiar with their music, but I was happy to go along. After all, I like Dee and I like concerts, so how could I lose?

When we got down to Massey Hall, in downtown Toronto, people were crowded at the front doors waiting to get in. It was their last ever concert, so the huge venue was packed with fans.

We made our way down to the front, right smack in the centre. We looked behind us and noticed some people wearing VIP badges. We'd gotten seats in front of friends and family!

The concert was beautiful, the encores amazing, and the love of the audience was quite evident. People shouted, thank you! and we love you! during the many, many applauses.

Anyway, here are some photographs.

Martin Tielli
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Dave, Don, and Tim
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Michael Phillip-Wojewoda
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Snow
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

I just came back from the most exciting morning.

Friday afternoon was a lot of tame fun. I had phở at Pho Hung with makemyway and springbird. Then we did some shopping, split an amazing veal sandwich from California Sandwiches, and ate a salad for dinner. That was pretty normal.

So was our trip to Lula Lounge. Makemyway and I went there to see jedward play with Samba Elegua. They're an amazing act! The crowd was dancing and laughing, well some of it, which was great for Toronto.

We left relatively early so that I could swing by Makemyway's house to pick up my camera. I had forgotten it there the night before. As I left her place, I realized that I had left my credit card at the lounge. So I tried to remember how to get back, paid my bill, and stepped outside. The band was packing up their gear, so I was able to say goodbye.

I was walking east when I noticed two people huddled in a bus shelter. I poked my head inside and asked where they were going.

You see, they were waiting at a Dundas stop for a streetcar. After hours. Which meant they would be spending a very long night in freezing weather. I surmised they weren't from Toronto.

Rodrigo and Francesca are actually visiting from Brazil. And they hadn't worn enough layers. I walked with them to College where we waited for a while, ducked into a convenience store to warm up, and caught the blue-night streetcar going east. I asked the driver to let them off at Jarvis, which is where there hotel is.

I bid them farewell as I got off at the Yonge stop. Soon, the bus came north and a group of us boarded. Most of the passengers were a bit unruly because the bars had just let out. When we got to Eglington, a whole bunch of people got on the bus. They had been kicked off the previous bus, which we saw as we drove past. I asked a girl what happened and she explained that a guy got angry at some other guy and punched out a window. There were about four police cars surrounding the abandoned bus.

Since our bus was quite crowded, I did the only thing I could think of: randomly chatting with strangers. This passed the time until my stop came up. A very drunk man said goodbye to his friends and exited with me. I walked with him for a while and we struck up a conversation. It seems that he is doing an anthropology degree at York.

This didn't explain why he had misplaced his hat in one of his friend's pockets. Or why he hit on every girl on our way north. Or why he had difficulty opening his front door, which I passed on the way back home.

Wasn't that an exciting series of adventures? So exciting, in fact, that now I'm wide awake! It's a good thing that I'm good at falling asleep.

I am heading up to Toronto on the train this afternoon.

I have yet to pack. Or get a haircut. Or pay my landlord.

These things must get done.

Still, I will be in Toronto for a week. If you're going to be there too, then perhaps we should do something together?

The possibilities are astounding.

CN Tower
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

My mom came into my room with a printout in hand, showing it to me excitedly. Look, she said, they've got lanterns at Ontario Place. She suggested that I take some photographs there, and recognizing a capital idea when I heard one, I decided to do so.

See, a huge telecommunications company sponsored this lantern exhibition in downtown Toronto. Now, le Jardin Botanique does this every year, but Toronto doesn't have an annual lantern festival, even with its high Chinese population. They originally had it running until the beginning of October, but someone must have informed them about 中秋節, because they extended it until that weekend.

The trip to the harbourfront reminded me of how fun certain parts of the Toronto transit system are. I got on a clean and bright subway car, rode down to Union station, and transferred to a streetcar that brought me to Exhibition Place. After a walk through huge parking lots, I was able to see brightly coloured, Chinese looking, structures.

I crossed the bridge on to the Ontario Place island, where I had the privilege of paying $25 to get in. Once inside, I noticed that the place wasn't very well populated at all. This is unlike Montréal, where the gardens are often packed so full of people that you can't set up your tripod.

Since the lanterns weren't on yet, I spent some time walking around scouting locations. And taking photographs of the sunset. Some kids had congregated on the beach to skip stones, which looked like an awful lot of fun.

Once the sun had actually gone down, they flipped the switch on the lanterns.

Temple
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Phoenix at dusk
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

After a bit of photography, I heard the rhythmic drumming of a dragon dance. Since I found myself conveniently in front of a soundstage, I went over to see what was going on. Oh! A dance by some teenagers.

Dragon dance
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Clawfoot
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

I just want to admit that I lied today.

You know how I ran up the stairs and rammed my shoulder into the overhanging balcony? Well, I knew that I had become a photographer then when I instinctively cradled the camera instead of catching my fall.

And when I said I was fine? The bruise that's developing seems to indicate otherwise.

Reflections
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

When life gets busy, I stop posting to LiveJournal for some reason. I suppose that after a long day, it's just too much effort to write prose and edit photographs. Which is sad.

So to tide you over, here's a photograph of autumn. A little bit of serenity in the middle of busy North York.

The Moon
Originally uploaded by tracer.ca.

Last Friday was 中秋節, which is one of the two big Chinese festivals. The Mid-autumn festival is a time to get together with family and eat.

I really like holidays that involve eating.

One of the nice things about having holidays land on the lunar calendar is that the moon is full when it ought to be. Boy was it ever full that day. It hung low in the sky and was absolutely massive. It was at about this time that I got camera envy. I certainly wished for a lovely telephoto lens to capture it, but I left that task to other, more capable, photographers. Thanks, Paul.

月餅
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

I had some photography to do, so we had quite the late dinner. By the time I returned home, the kitchen was already buzzing with activity. The table was set for a great meal. We had bought roast duck from the Chinese butcher. And then we boiled some fresh lobster and soft-shelled crab.

Delicious!

We were so full afterwards that we forgot to go outside to look at the moon. But as I had discovered earlier, it was getting rather brisk. So it's probably just as well.

Blizzard
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Last weekend, I rented a car to take a little trip to Toronto. It seems like that city keeps drawing me in. It's quite inescapable now. In fact, I seem to like downtown Toronto more and more each time I visit. It's very different from Montréal, but when you fall in with the right crowd, everything thing seems to just taste better.

Anyway, I rented a car. Surprisingly enough, the Pontiac handled itself well at fast highway speeds. A little on the loud side, but it handled very tightly for an economy car. So I was fairly happy about it. And gorbash_dragon did a lot of sleeping during our nighttime drives.

We arrived early Saturday morning during a thunderstorm. She got out of the car with her luggage and then I drove to where I was staying. letoams had kindly left me the keys to his apartment, so I was rather happy that there was some place to drop my stuff and collapse.

In the morning, it was time to take photographs. I had a little breakfast at the corner café, a place called Java Jive. The coffee was terrible, but the grilled-cheese was fine. Then I walked up Yonge to go to a tea party, but was mugged along the way by a cookery bookstore.

After a bit of walking with some rather heavy books, I made it to the place where makemyway was housesitting. She had two friends along, Chiara and Mariapia, and they were sitting at a table with a teapot and a plate full of cheese. There were no tea cups, but we made do with various random bits of glassware. The house, by the way, is rather beautiful and was furnished properly. But something seemed a bit wrong. The kitchen was mostly empty, even though they had a wonderful gas stove and high-powered range hood.

The house is ruled by a small white cat named Blizzard. He is so adorable and friendly. He seems to love everyone that walks through the door. He was also quite lazy in the heat. Toronto was quite hot that weekend.

Roasted pineapple
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

After meeting more people, who arrived slowly throughout the afternoon, I decided that I had to leave for sachachua's barbeque. I hailed a cab and went to Graduate House, where I peeked into the courtyard and saw a bunch of people eating at tables. Down the stairs I went and was welcomed to a bunch of food. We were treated quite well, including some very tasty cheesecake that Warren made himself. But it was so rich that I couldn't finish it.

I met quite a few geeks at this party, and we had a pretty geeky discussion. Then, secretsoflife and Makemyway showed up and we had an even geekier discussion. We talked well into the night, until people kicked us out of the courtyard for being too loud. Then, I decided it would be a good time to retire.

On Sunday, I had a little photowalk before meeting makemyway and her friend (whose name I cannot spell) in Kensington Market. We sat at a little place called i deal Coffee which is really serious about their coffee. In this little shop, they have their own roaster which takes up tons of space. And they have a piston-driven espresso maker, so they are literally pulling shots of coffee. How cool is that?

We walked around the market buying tasty things to eat. Then we went to Chinatown and got ourselves a fresh fish. Which we barbequed. Oh man, was there some good barbeque that weekend. heinous and Joe showed up in their super-awesome Fiat convertible. We took it out for a spin. Wow!

After dinner, I packed up my things, cleaned up the apartment a bit, and then took a nap. Then it was off to collect Gorbash and drive home. By the time I got her back to her place, I was so knackered that I slept in the front seat of the car until the sun came up. It's actually surprisingly good for that, because of the way the seats work.

Bubble machine
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

I went to Toronto a few weekends ago to see ioerror off on his way to San Francisco. We did way too much staying awake the night before, so when it came time to move, we were all a bit tired. Plus, he had a lot of luggage. Thankfully, we were all very cute, so the baggage check-in girl didn't charge him for overweight items.

That was the Saturday. On Sunday, I met up with secretsoflife for the Toronto bubble battle! We found each other at the Eaton's Centre. She picked up some bubble solution for her bubble wand and then we walked towards city hall. As we approached, we saw evidence that there was something already going on. A few long-lived bubbles were floating along Queen Street, getting more and more frequent as we got near the event.

We found people with bubble guns, people with bubble daggers, and people with bubble science. The people with bubble swords fared quite well, making ginormous bubbles that would float above us all.

I bumped into Lori, one of the organizers of Newmindspace, but didn't recognize her right away. Perhaps I was stunned by the pinkness of her outfit? I don't know.

We also found letoams, Y.P., and Sacha at the party. Sacha works for IBM doing open-source advocacy. Which means we should totally talk. Oh man, I should e-mail her with a link to these photographs.

After two hours of bouncy bubbly fun, we decided it would be a good idea to eat dinner. We headed for Fresh on Spadina which served food that reminded me of Aux Vivres. I'll have to take secretsoflife there the next time she's in Montréal.

Edward Ka-Spel
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Two Thursdays ago, I found myself sitting in a hot tub, in a backyard, in downtown Toronto. The circumstances leading to this event are interesting, but beyond the scope of this review. We were basking in the setting sun and warm waters when my friend mentioned that he was going to the Legendary Pink Dots concert. A bunch of us got excited and he invited us to come along.

So we towelled off, changed into some appropriately black clothing, and hopped into a waiting van. We drove to Lee's Palace, where there was a small crowd of smokers gathered outside. After the requisite ritual of hand-stamping, we were inside. On the intimate stage stood four well-dressed men setting up their equipment. Loosely surrounding the stage was a decent crowd. Not too big, and not too small.

Their set started with slow, beautiful music. A languid saxophone meshed with the opiate vocals of Edward Ka-Spel. Here was an old Englishman, bedecked in sunglasses, singing with this charming druggy voice. It was like stepping into a dream filled with liquid music and anguished poems.

Niels Van Hoornblower
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

The sound changed into waves, like an ocean crashing on the beach. Niels van Hoornblower, the saxophonist, changed instruments throughout the set. First to an electric bagpipe. And then to a lovely flute. The bass-guitarist put down his instrument for a song and picked up an accoustic guitar. The range of sound that we heard was just gorgeous.

The crowd, all dressed in black and goth as could be, started swaying to the music. Some of them started nodding their heads in appreciation and tapping their feet. It was a beautiful sight to see. I made my way to the sidelines and caught a couple of photographs. And that's when Soandso hopped off the stage and mingled with the crowd. Every time he blew on his sax, it would light up and hit the faces of the audience.

The end came too soon, even after the extended encore. Afterwards, all of us sat in the van, happy to have been there. Happy to have gone together.

Article written for Akachic Records.

I'm off to Toronto now.

I'll be back Sunday!

Love,
Simon

I'm going to Waterloo this weekend.

It's an opportunity to see Timin and try to make amends.

I have sixteen boxes of Julie's books stacked by my doorway. In the morning, I'll lug them into the van. After work, I shall drive to Toronto.

Saturday morning, I will pick up holdenk and we will drive to Waterloo. I'll stack the books in the basement and then find people to hang out with. I think we'll have a marvellous time. You should be one of us!

Pizza pocket
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Last Wednesday was my last day in the Markham office, and also a day full of meetings. I have never been in so many meetings, in one day, in my entire life.

But enough with the whinging. I want to tell you about Wednesday because it was also a day of regrettable food.

My morning started off with a breakfast of leftover birthday cake. I had baked it for my mom on Sunday, and it was quite large, so there was plenty of it left over. This was the start of a nutritionally poor day.

When I got to the office, I was forced to eat a "pizza pocket". This wasn't very tasty at all. There was some bland processed cheese and a very sweet tomato sauce inside a chewy, fatty bread wrapper. Apparently, the co-ops eat this pretty often, which could explain why they all look malnourished.

Then, I drove to a McDonald's that was purported to sell the best Big Macs ever. A co-worker had raved that they looked like those hamburgers they put in the advertisments. dwiseman had raved at how they were put together with care by old Chinese ladies, right when you order them, and that they actually tasted good.

Big Mac
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Well, since it was my last day, we resolved to go there. I gathered up the co-ops and we bundled into the car. Then we drove to Pacific Mall where we scrabbled for parking.

We ordered some food, and I realised that I had no cash. I ran to an automated teller machine and back, just in time to pay for our order. We shuffled about some tables, sat down, and opened some boxes up. I have to say that although the hamburgers do not look like squashed messes, they are also not as pleasant looking as photographs done by food stylists.

I managed to actually eat the entire thing, although I was really full afterwards. It tasted pretty good in the beginning, but by the end I was feeling sort of sick. Dee marvelled at how inexpensive eating out at McDonald's was, and we had a discussion about how difficult it was to eat cheaply and well.

After we cleaned up, I had to hurry them back to the office so that the co-ops didn't miss their team meeting. I gave them plenty of time to spare, so I didn't feel bad at all. And they seemed happy that they just ate hundreds of useless calories!

I, on the other hand, had a second lunch meeting to look forward to.