Filed under: Get outta town!
A former student and current FB friend is joining the Ride to Conquer Cancer. Both her parents were diagnosed with cancer in 2009.
Not only is Melissa riding for the cancer fund-raiser, she’s also riding as part of a response to Rob Ford’s insistence that roads belong to cars. (Tell that to the Romans, Rob).
If you feel like donating, have a look-see at Melissa’s participant page, which you will find here:
Melissa’s Ride
Filed under: Get outta town!
Magic Fountains at the Plaça Espanya
Look, Driver! There are dads playing football with their kids in this residential area with the wildly winding streets. Slow down!
C'mon kids! Let's go to the beach! (complemenary bikes for hotel guests in Sitjes)
Ancient wall, ancient sea.
I have terrace envy.
The two of us with a friend on our own terrace in Barcelona.
Gaudí, you are both a madman and a genius.
poached egg, caulifower foam, crisped and deep-fried garlic... tapas from thr 20th wedding anniversary dinner.
Freshly squeezed tomatoes make for the world's most wonderful Bloody Marys
So… Barcelona was lovely… so lovely that Dear Spouse has been converted to the merits of Spain, or, more precisely: to the merits of Catalunya. The weather was fantastic, so we were out and about in the city every day… and the best way to see is city is on foot (which means that sadly I’ve biked in very few cities that I’ve visited as a tourist). We ate well, and cheaply, our apartment was lovely and convenient, and we had good company in his colleagues from the conference he was attending. We managed two day trips, one to Montserrat, and one to Sitjes. I’d wanted to see Sitjes on my last trip to Barcelona in 2007, but hadn’t had the chance. I’m very glad we took the trip this time. Sitjes is situated about 20k down the coast from Barcelona, but its hills slope more immediately into the sea than those of Barcelona, and so the town is all very much more compact. One exits from the central train and is at the beach in a matter of minutes. One of the guide books in our apartment said on the issue of whether going to Sitjes is worth the effort: “Do not try to convince yourself that the beaches in Barcelona are pretty; they are not. Go to Sitjes.” So we went, and yes, the beauty of Sitjes’ coastline is remarkable. Barcelona’s seafront charm is all about the quality of the restaurants and nightclubs (for beautiful people to get fleeced in), but not about a more organic charm.
Loads of people are cycling around Barcelona these days and the Bicing programme seemed much busier and more well-established than on my last trip. We did wish on a few times that the bicing programme wasn’t only for residents of the city. It would be nice, as a visitor, to be able to bike to places for dinner in the evening, or, as in our case, to a conference site.
I’ve been madly busy these past 10 days since getting home because it’s registration time at school, but I’ve still managed to go to the little farmer’s market that sets up on Thursday afternoons in Uptown Waterloo Square. Rainbow chard and scapes! Hoorah! Also managed a week-end out of town, in central Ontario’s cottage country where I did very little for two days. I did learn to perfect the Bramble cocktail (gin, lemon juice, blackberry liqueur, simple syrup, shaken over ice….mmmmmmm), and spent a fair amount of time in the water, went on long walks with my friend and her dog… I can’t complain.
All of this slowing down on week-ends means, however, that my weeks are way busier. I may have to go back to working on week-ends more in order to maintain my sense that each day is manageable.
Meanwhile, I ran across a link today that my cycling community friends may find interesting:
Enjoy!
I recently had to make a jaunt into Toronto for business. Because I have a fondness for the train, and because we live less than a kilometer from the train station, and because I get a corporate rate on train travel, I decided that the engine whistles were singing out to me to ride the rails for a day.
I rode my bike to the station where, rather like a Nederlander, I locked up my bike and hopped aboard. It is possible to take your bike on the train for some destinations (as, apparently, with the run down to Niagara-on-the-Lake where there do bike tours of the local wineries), but I had no ambition to ride at the other end, so I just locked the Blue Beauty and went on my merry way.
Except… as you will see in the photo below, our mostly desolate train station has no bike racks. There is a skinny parking lot with no appropriate place for a bike, and no visibility to the station’s interior offices. There is a large portico on the east side, and it would be perfect for bike racks, but there are none; instead, there are a few lonely newspaper boxes. So… I locked the Blue Beauty to herself with both the internal wheel lock and my steel bike cable. The Old Dutch is heavy enough to deter someone from trying to walk off with her, and I decided to park her on the wide platform, in front of a window with a sight-line to the interior ticketing office, but I admit that I did worry a little about vandalism if not about theft. I’ve had my bike tires slashed in the past.
When I returned in the late evening, my bike was exactly as I had left it. I am curious about how many people in passing trains wondered about the massive blue bike parked on the train platform with no accompanying rider in sight.
In addition to finding my bike in one piece, I was met by my dear spouse who had ridden down on his bike to meet me. How romantic!
Kitchener VIA station: you need bike racks!
It’s been a good week.
I’ve stayed on top of the work rather than racing to be a step behind and I’ve even managed some down-time too.
On Monday my grad students impressed my socks off with their great research paper proposals. I’m really keen on the end of term reading I’ll receive from them.
Tuesday found me in Toronto to visit a dear friend who was over from Bristol. I actually landed at the central bus terminal right at the point when the local SPCA was rescuing a deer that had wandered into downtown Toronto and found herself disoriented and endangered. Though the take-down wasn’t pretty, she is apparently resting and under veterinary care and doing fine. Much better than had she been hit by a car. Certainly we are not accustomed to finding deer at Dundas and Bay, but on that morning we heard from many sources that the deer from both valleys that run N-S through Toronto can find themselves in the centre of the city because the roads are still pretty quiet in the wee hours, and in the fall when the deer are on the move all it takes is a little thick fog for them to wander right into the centre of things.
Anyway, my friend, Nath, who now lives in the UK picked me up at the terminal and we trotted all over town. Ezra’s Pound for coffee in the annex; Fragipane for some ginger molasses cookie treats for my boy (who recognized the bag on the counter when he came home late Tuesday night and took it upstairs for himself with a knowing grin; Curbside cycle to look at bikes for my honey for Christmas (he thinks he wants TWO new bikes — one similar to mine for commuting, and a road bike for I’m-not-sure-what) and to pick up a new front-mount basket for the blue beauty; the AGO to see the Tutankhamen exhibit (which was disappointing) and then a tromp back to the terminal to ride home on the Greyhound. Along the way, Nath and I shared many stories, good laughs, the comfort of an old, established friendship and the excitement of two folks who don’t get to see each other much.
My Wednesday wasn’t so exciting… just academic advising and other administrivia, and a tumble on my steps in the day meant that my walk to the speciality store for Montreal style bagels took about double the expected time. The bagels, however, were worth it, and it was a pleasant walk. The evening was glistening from earlier fog and rain, so the lights sparkled and reflected off pavement and windows in a cheerful way.
Yesterday was a grant reading day. OK… so that’s not so much fun. I like readng the proposals, but I hate knowing that there isn’t enough money to fund everything. That means that I end up feeling like I’m working in a triage unit. Thankfully, none of these decisions is ever taken alone, but I hate making my priority list. I find it often comes down to a question of whether $$ denied would mean a project in process would be aborted, in which case the entirely worthy and excellent proposal for new work must be denied. Arg.
Today I went out on the Blue Beauty to run some errands. There’s great buzz about a California wine (and I’ll grant that when Napa and Sonoma get it right, they REALLY get it right), and my dear spouse consumed a bottle with his brother in Toronto last night at some swanky advertising affair (yes, it’s really like Mad Men and I’m glad it’s my brother-in-law who works in it, not my spouse). So…. I went to see if I could get us some for less than the $100+ per bottle they were charging at the steakhouse in T.O. Short answer: yes. Two bottles purchased and tossed into the front basket.
Thus I found myself uptown, so I took my bike in for a little servicing. The rear lamp isn’t working. My bike repair guy could not figure out why. Anyone else had difficulty with the rear lamp on a dynamo on their Old Dutch???
While the bike was being serviced, I picked up a winter coat ON SALE — down filled, with a faux fur collar, removable hood…. $49! Woot! I also picked up some winter boot/trainers from Puma. They are like a trainer that goes 2/3 up the calf. Lined, winter-worthy, and with great grips for riding through the winter. Very pleased! And while I was out I found jeans and a knit -t-shirt for the boy. I’m so proud of the way he’s been handling himself lately…
Let me throw in some pics… and wish you all an excellent week-end.
ps: I’m hating the new image insertion feature on word-press. I really didn’t mean to have 2 copies of me reading files… I just want to get this post up and done so I can head out on the blue beauty to runa few errands before night falls.
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- Reading applications
Filed under: comments around town, commute by bike, Get outta town!, Hop on the bus Gus
‘K. My month has been one long laundry list of stuff to do.
Read through and judge the merits of dozens and dozens of grant applications.
Assess a small boatload of graduate research proposals.
Deal with the sale of my grandmother’s house, the movement of her stuff out of the house, and (we hope) settling her into a nursing home in December if she survives to that point. She’s currently in hospital (where she has been since the 36-hour heart attack at the end of August).
Deal with the impending loss of my grandmother… about which I’m alternately accepting and enraged.
Join and participate in the campus cycling committee.
Take our ‘monthly’ trip to the St. Lawrence market for the first time since September.
Adopt and get my grandmother’s 11-year-old Siamese cat settled into our house.
Try to help my mother deal with all that is going on while her husband is on a 3-week long trip in the US with his family of origin.
Settle accounts on my research grant. I swear that next time I need to build in funds to pay a CPA. Arg.
And then there’s the continuing saga of settling into the new house. Let me sum up with this: may I *never* have to set foot in an Ikea again in my life.
But on my tag points let me say the following:
I’ve been getting loads of comments around town on the silk flowers I have woven into my bike basket. I’m not sure if they encourage drivers around me to relax, take a deep breath, and enjoy the day, but as I go about my business, running my errands hither and yon, the flowers and the basket do make people seem more cheery.
Commuting by bike is becoming popular enough on my campus that it seems we are slated to get a covered rack to park at least 20 bikes in a central location. That means that there are enough of us who ride in the snow to make the structure a feasible budget expense. We’ve also persuaded the physical plant people to stop dumping the ploughed snow onto the bike racks in winter.
Commuting by bike is always practical and made my life in the borderlands of town more bearable, but now that we live in a central location, I find that cycling brings me tons of joy. I’m on my bike now more than ever, not just to and from work. I can easily hit 4-6 places with a distance of a few kilometres between each, but nothing long, dull and lifeless like the ride that used to take me across the North end of UW campus where there was nothing but empty, bleak space, people’s back fences, and cars. Now, I regularly run into friends, and walk or ride part of the way home. It’s just really, really nice.
Getting outta town remains one of the ways the living here is still bearable. If I lived in a town that wasn’t within an easy VIA or bus ride to a major cultural centre, I’d go bonkers. Tomorrow I’m going to head into Toronto to meet with a friend who is over from the UK for a few days to take care of her mum post surgery. We’re going to sneak off for some time at the AGO, and do our bi-annual catching up.
But my favourite thing about this month is that my long-time friend of 31 years is going to come visit me on Thursday. She’s a surgeon in Toronto. People tend to think that surgeons drive fancy cars. My friend has a morning surgery to do and when she’s finished, she’s going to hop on the inter-city bus to come to visit me for the day. I can hardly wait, and I love that it just blew my 17-year-old son’s mind when I told him that my friend was coming and that she’d be taking the bus. Some day he (and the rest of the world) will wrap their heads around the fact that we don’t all want to isolate ourselves in cars, that we don’t measure our freedom by the ability to drive, and that we like public transit.
Filed under: Get outta town!
We ran away from home for the week-end so that I could present a paper at the Society for Medical Anthropology at Yale, in New Haven. Dear Spouse and I rarely get away together, so this was an especially cherished conference jaunt. I did a fair amount of work, intaking the wisdom of several plenary presentations, being choosy in attending sessions, connecting with new folks and re-connecting with colleagues from long ago.
There will be loads of developments that arise out of the week-end, no doubt.
However, I’m first going to have to get over the flu that I seem to have picked up from the coughing jerk on the plane. I had to leave my grad students to their own devices with a film and email comments yesterday while I tried to sleep off much of the fever, hacking, sniffling etc. Thanks mister.
[Side note: I am so grateful I do not live somewhere that the desperation levels are so saturating the general population that purchasing cold medication requires handing over my passport and having my purchase logged onto my passport.]
Anyway, it was a great trip. We flew into Newark and rented a car (because it was cheaper and gave more freedom for two people than if we had just taken the shuttle to New Haven). We drove along the coast on Saturday and got in some time on the seaside, and a stop at a roadside clam-shack. We also did a little shopping and I was delighted to get a new Dooney & Bourke canvas tote. I’ve nearly worn my old one out; it’s threadbare at all the edges.
We had some really horrific food on the night we landed. It was one of those situations in which you pick what’s close to the hotel. It was a step back into the heyday of 1970’s steak and seafood. An iceberg wedge with Ranch dressing was part of the meal!
Far better were the deep fried clams up the coast.
In town, however, for the duration of the conference we did manage to get well acquainted with a Yale institution: Claire’s Cornercopia, a vegetarian café. Claire’s was great, though I’d say that it still adheres to the general principle that everything in the US needs to be bigger, sweeter and/or saltier. I’m thinking of getting some Claire’s recipe books, but if I do, I’ll cut the sugar and the salt by half.
We had dinner with colleagues at Thali Too, a lovely Indian restaurant behind the Yale bookstore. I think, however, that I’d have been less likely to get hit with the flu if we’d not been sitting outside on a fairly chilly night.
Finally, Dear Spouse and I had dinner at a little place on the Green called ‘Zinc’. Zinc restored my faith in tortellini. Neither tough nor mushy, the tortellini were filled with savoury local cheeses, and served with a parsley and walnut pesto that was divinely flavourful. And astringent braised plum, with frozen plum mousse and fried pastry crême was a lovely desert for us to share. I was only disappointed by the wine selections — mostly middle-range and predictable wines from France, California and Italy. I love all those regions, but I want to have the good stuff with a good meal. I also think that Canada produces some gorgeous wines now, and there wasn’t a single one on a list that was 2 pages long.
Anyway, I enclose some photos from the trip, including one of an Electra outside Claire’s. Dear Spouse thought the Electra pretty adorable, and I admit it’s got a very cute styling to it, so even though I don’t generally find the Electra’s worth the money (IMHO, they are overly pricey bicycle-shaped objects, built for visual appeal rather than the long haul). On the upside, at least *someone* in New Haven is riding a commuter bike instead of driving everywhere. And that’s my last observation from our trip: it’s nearly impossible to get from a-to-b by foot or by bike in many US cities — even if they are short distances apart. Expressways cut off pedestrian routes, sidewalks may be completely absent, and public transit is made marginal in the grand ideology of the middle-class. New Haven has the potential to be a beautiful walking-city and cycling city, but for now, it isn’t.
Filed under: Get outta town!
Backgrounder:
In 20-some years of living in this province, with only brief interruptions to do residency requirements elsewhere, and with 9 years in the S/W Ontario region, I had never been to Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Things have been dreadful here with the teen-aged boy — who seems to want the perks of living at home (money, someone else to cook and to clean, toys, expensive bike parts, vacations etc), and none of the responsibilities (regular school attendance, general sobriety rather than general imbibing in one thing or another, general helpfulness at home) and who tends toward the “If I don’t get what I want I’ll punch a hole in the wall and then complain that we live in a shitty house”. Most of this behaviour has developed in the last year, and the worst of it in the last few months. We are stymied. And exhausted…
So yesterday we ran away from home and went to Niagara-on-the-Lake for the day. We went to the new Olson Bakery and Winery at the Ravine, poked around the town a little, and hit a new winery, Hidden Bench, in Beamsville.
Things I love about the Olson bakery:
1. One or the other of the Olsons is always there. In our case, it was Michael Olson working the floor, the counter, the cash while we were there. What a nice and committed man he is. Celebrity chefdom has not made him even the tiniest bit pretentious.
2. The commitment to local produce, cheeses, cured meats etc. We bought two local, artisanal cheeses, and a package of 16-month prosciutto… and intend to share information with friends in town who have opened a créperie as their post professorial retirement business.
3. That they carry food grade lavender and rose petals and rose water. I bought some of each because I haven’t found it anywhere else!
4. That they bake their breads in outdoor wood-ovens whose hard-wood smoke wafts over the grounds most invitingly.
5. That Anna Olson’s galette pastry tastes like a combination of shortbread and shortcake.
6. That their servings are not too big.
7. That their BLT sandwich is actually a salad.
8. That they provide lap blankets for those who wish to sit outside even though the weather is still chilly.
So: we want to go back, and we want to take our bikes next time. Getting there any other way than by car is not possible from here without about 5 bus changes that go out of the way before getting there. But we can put our bikes on the rack, and go back… ride around the wine region, through the little village, and along the waterfront… and I am really looking forward to doing that in May.
We will also go back to see the series of 10 one-act Noël Coward plays that they are mounting this season. I love me some Noël Coward.
So… some links https://stylocycle.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=133&message=7in lieu of pictures:
The Olson
I had some errands in Toronto yesterday and so took the opportunity to pick up my new bicycle seat to replace the one that came with the Batavus (and which I’ll transfer to my old Trek to take it up north this summer for trail riding). The seat that came with the Batavus is itself comfortable enough, but the springs are a little rigid and the roads here rather more than pocked and pitched, so I could really feel it in the tuckus.
I went to Curbside Cycle as I intended and ended up settling on the Brooks seat because the Lepper seemed actually to be too softly sprung after years of people testing it out in the shop. Keep in mind folks: this is the last seat I intend to buy.
This is the seat I bought, though I took the women’s model which costs rather less than the men’s because it is smaller.
I also took some pictures of the very stylish new bikes that Curbside has in for spring:
Rides that look like sweets.
I also stopped in at the Frangipane pattisserie to get some nice things for my students to sample — comparing *food* to that stuff we get in the mass-produced market, that destroys our earth and can sustain neither our bodies nor our souls. The lovely owner at Frangipane was happy to oblige my desire to take some snaps of her creations. Her pâté de fruit shaped like butterflies and bunnies made me cry they were so delightful, but I gave all the remains away to my students today so that they could taste something so divine as a fruit sweet made from nothing more than gelatine and puréed fruit, set and crusted with a little sugar.
Frangipane's delights
Spring!
I also had the good fortune to be able to meet up with my dear friend, Michele (with one ‘l’), who had flown in from Thunder Bay. I haven’t seen her since flying up for her wedding 3.5 years ago, but we do stay in touch. It was really great to hit the AGO with her and see what I think will be a very controversial art installation. We also wondered in and through and pondered at length the permanent piece I wroter about before: The Index. I’m glad that one is permanent because liek many of the pieces in the Thomson gallery, I want to visit it again and again.
Here is the lovely Michele:
Skullanimals!
Yesterday was a perfect day. And I got to and fro courtesy of Greyhound Canada. If I can’t get from a to b on the Blue Beauty, I’m more than happy to take a seat on the bus.
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