I might understand monsoons now

Wednesday, 17 July, 2024

This summer there’s been a lot of rain. I mean a lot. Not only rain but thunderstorms and wind. Last week it was because of Hurricane Beryl. This week I’m not sure.

Monday, which I may have more to say about, it rained very hard for a couple of hours. I had to be out for appointments so there was no way to avoid this.

On the way to the hospital, the first of the rain started. I had to call an Uber to get there
At the front of the hospital (Women’s College Hospital – a story I need to tell). I worked here for 12 years but it didn’t look like this then. They pulled the old building down and now it’s very modern and has become 100% ambulatory

Yesterday was a different but similar story. I woke in the morning to a dark day with some threatening clouds. I knew I had to go out at lunchtime for the third of my four appointments this week, so I hoped and hoped as I listened to the loud thunder out there somewhere. It didn’t take long for the rain to arrive. And I mean rain.

Threatening clouds and darkness in the early morning
The clouds gathered and got darker
The rain started and the horizon faded

It rained so hard we couldn’t see much outside. It came down like it would never stop, loud and relentless. I thought about my appointment and wondered if I could dare to step out in it even for a second.

It rained like this for three to four hours, letting up slightly just as I needed to leave to go out. When I got down to the apartment lobby, all the power went out. It stayed out for another few hours and I soldiered on. Leaving my appointment I was stunned to see brilliant sunshine, not much fun when you have had your pupils dilated, but again I pushed on. Some stores had simply closed up for the day – there were talks of this continuing late into the evening – while others seemed to be in holiday mode, relaxing in their doorways, chatting to people inside and out. Transit was ‘moderately affected – streetcars run on electricity from overhead cables, but I did manage to catch one and made my way to the Philipino shop that has a hot counter. They’d promised to stay open one more hour and I’d promised to bring something home if we couldn’t cook. I stood making my choice when the lights came on.

It was like a celebration in there. It felt almost like lockdown everywhere and I had a nostalgic moment or ten. Everyone was chatting, complaining lightheartedly about no hydro, no internet, no stove to cook on, food defrosting in the freezer…and it felt like family.

I’m glad to have had those moments and remembered only too well how people come together when things are rough, and here it was again.

We eat on the balcony if the rain isn’t coming in the wrong direction. We just pull the table in closer to the window and watch the weather

In total, Toronto had 10cm of rain. It was as much rain as usually falls in a single month in July. Cars were partially submerged, some even floating, basements (many which are apartments) were flooded and uninhabitable, roads and highways were closed. Today many still don’t have power 32 hours or so later.

So the climate is changing and climate emergencies are more frequent. Much like the pandemic, which was anticipated for decades, we aren’t prepared and I haven’t heard of anything in the works either. Maybe I just don’t know about it – not just maybe. All I know is it all felt apocalyptic yesterday. I didn’t feel scared but I did feel curious.

I didn’t take photos. It was too wet, then too hot, my hands were occupied and my battery slowly died.

Other than that, it seems I am old. Who knew! One of my Monday appointments, was supposed to be to confirm that, yes, I did now have arthritis in my hands and I needed a splint🙄. However, the lovely OT told with me great enthusiasm it was to offer me a walker (‘mostly covered by OHIP’ (Ontario’s health care system) .  The next day my appointment was to inform me that my cataracts were ‘mature enough’ for me to get them removed and I could have the first one done next week – what?!  I hesitated and said I needed a little time to organise my life. Perhaps many older people don’t have much else going on and, although my life is a bit sticky right now, I do have things to arrange.

Today I thought about my mother peeling hardboiled eggs as I attempted one myself. Then I thought about how she was younger than I am now on the particular day I was reminiscing about. This led me to consider my grandmothers, both of whom were proper little old ladies with their floral pinnies, beige lisle stockings, varicose veins, full corsets, and orthopaedic shoes while younger than I am now. I pondered it all.

My paternal grandmother,  Sophia (Sophie). In this photo she’s holding my brother John and so is probably not 70 yet
My dad with my maternal grandmother, Charlotte (Lottie) perhaps a little younger than I am now

Before today I’d thought of writing everything that’s been messed up in the last few days – crazy-making stuff that only now seems funny – but it’s not in the cards now, unless i need some material for my stand-up act. (I don’t have one.)

Today it didn’t rain and that’s enough. To sweeten the deal and the day, cocktails in a can will be available in Ontario corner shops this week. No big deal, you say? You have no idea! Yes, in 2024 this is just happening.  I say it all the time but I wish I drank. Or do I?

P.S. According to the Met offices, Tuesday was not a record day for rain. In fact, the day I went to the hospital to have Robin — 28 July 1980 — was quite a bit worse at 118.5mm. People roll their eyes when I tell them how heavy the rain was that day (the air was turquoise,’ I’ll often say) but, you see now, it really was.

 

When a highlight is a lowlight

Sunday, July 14, 2024

It was a pretty quiet week, the highlight being a bit of a lowlight.

(Restaurant review alert…)

That was going out for dinner the day after Krish’s birthday. We chose a Philipino restaurant we’d thought about for a while now. We’ve not liked the idea of this cuisine but then enjoyed the Philipino fast food we’ve had so were going for a real restaurant this time. I think we should have stuck to the fast food counters! We chose one prix fixe and one a la carte item. We started with grilled oysters, buttery and cheesy. I liked them. This was followed by a skimpy belly pork with some rice and a vinegary cucumber and tomato salad (more like a relish) and some sizzling kalbi ribs. The cassava and coconut cake finish was sweet and interesting. We enjoyed the kalbi ribs the most but at $26 we might have done better at the Korean place across the street and had some banchan to round it out. On top of this, the meats were dripping with grease and I ruined my new favourite top.

Pork belly with rice and tomato and cucumber salad
Cassava and coconut cake served in a banana leaf

However, silver lining, we got OUT. Was nice being adults for the evening.  And this week we are going back to Batibot the Philipino food counter down the street for some adobo pork – lots of it at a fraction of the price. (Well, I think we are.)

Not much happened until Saturday and that was a thrilling walk to a bargain supermarket down the street. Freshco has cheaper prices but we go there mainly because they have a lot of ethnic food on sale, like freezers full of Chinese dumplings, Korean noodles, Indian snacks and meals.

To get to the Freshco we have to walk under the railway bridge at Dufferin Street. I dread that bit of the journey but it’s the only way. To think how much I enjoyed walking through the Blackwall Tunnel and the underpass to the Isle of Dogs when I was a child. Now walking through these longer tunnels are somewhat terrifying. At least no trains thundered overhead.





At the east end of the tunnel is an engraved plaque that confuses many Torontonians since there is already a Queen Street subway station on the Yonge-University line. This, however, is the name of the tunnel – subway meaning underpass.


Once through the tunnel, Gladstone House, now a hotel greets you. It’s Toronto’s longest continuously operating hotel   Built in 1889, it has traditional light hardwood floors, restored exposed brick walls and works by local artists throughout the building.

‘The Gladstone’

By the Freshco is Island Foods, a popular Trinidadian roti shop In 1974, the first Island Foods. This isn’t the original location, of course. That was opened in Ruth and Ramasar Sawh, who arrived in Canada in 1968 with no previous restaurant experience, but with a desire to build a bright future for their family. Krish knows them well and we go by sometimes for their doubles and roti.

Island Foods
Shepard Fairey (@obeygiant) art by the Freshco
Mixed architecture by Freshco
Finally in the Freshco

I finished The Giver of Stars. I’d tried it twice before and not got very far before abandoning it. This time I stuck with it and, although the Kentucky mountain accents put me off at first, I quickly began to enjoy the character and story development. It got very gritty towards the end and that surprised me.  Recommended. After that heavier-than-my-usual read, I started a fluffy romance from Christina Lauren, whose books are fun to read if you don’t mind her common themes and frequent forays into soft-almost-hard pornographic paragraphs. Denise has sent me the entire audiobook of The Perfect Mother (Caroline Mitchell) so @Denise (hi!) , OK I will but you now have to promise to read a Jojo Moyes in return – unwritten law.

I have a very busy week coming up. I’m seeing a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist ( on the same day) a consultation for lens replacement, and getting a phone call from the Women’s College Breast Centre, as well going to lunch with my sister.

The fasting is going OK. Most days I can make it till noon, but there are definitely some rough patches. If I don’t make it a religion and circumstances allow, I’ll continue. Do I feel any different? I don’t think so. However, I am thinking about meals, mostly out. Where should I go next? Well, there’s lunch with Ruth but maybe also somewhere else. Thinking.

Stay tuned, I guess.

 

A birthday, not mine – and Beryl

Wednesday, July10, 2024

Quiet days yet busy in their own way. I have now made three different soups from my chicken stock. A laksa with chicken, a pho with chicken (photo last blog), and a Chinese soup with shrimp and tofu. Eating on the balcony is relaxing, much more so than on the coffee table.

And diet update – well, who knows. I start eating at noon and finish by 8. The mornings are the hardest. By 11am I am usually feeling quite woozy. This is expected. My other choice is to start at 11 and go till 7pm but that might be hard to do. After a week, if my blood sugar continues to not cooperate, I’ll know that’s the better plan. I’m mostly buddying with Krish as he does this, but maybe I’ll benefit.

I’ve flipped through way too much Netflix, Prime and Roki screens to find something to watch. I miss live TV but I don’t want to be one of these ‘I never watch TV’ people.

I went out briefly again yesterday to meet a friend, Esmeralda, who is visiting her old home of Toronto from Bologna. We ate in the Portuguese cafe where they served me a matcha latte, disappointedly from a sweetened (ugh) mix. This friend is one of the few I have that seems to drift through life, as I have, letting the waves carry you along while you make decisions based on the scenery and the weather. No forward plans, not really. I’m not sure this has served me.

She has talked for some years now about moving from Bologna and she’s now thinking perhaps the Azores (she’s from Macau so has a connection with Portugal) or Bolivia. I envy her the ability to even think about this. I talked to Krish about how the single woman I know are usually keen to have a relationship but, when it comes down to it, they love being able to make their own decisions, without conferring with anyone else. I’m a tolerant and cooperative person but this sounds perfect in some ways.

I went into the Dollarama to buy a paintbox and a sketchbook, partly to finish a birthday project for Krish (it’s TODAY!) and partly to have something more creative to do from the balcony than blow bubbles.

Out on the street  lady yelled at me angrily when I took this photo. What was in my view was one group of homeless people on the corner. They gather here on each corner and across the road daily. I told her ‘I take photos every day.’ She raged on

The weather was very warm and stiflingly humid.  In my haste to get back and cool off,  I forgot I promised to get cilantro to make mango salad and cold spicy tofu today.

Last night I took hours to watch a video on how to make a ‘paper dancing man’ – I watched it over and over, stopping it and cursing the large Pause button that covered my view of the instructional video, and I made about six, all of which failed. I wondered then worried about the state of my brain or at least the wiring that made it so impossible to translate what’s in front of me to an actual creation. How can I even pretend to be an artist when this is the case? I seem to manage really, but my dolls were the first thing that I could just create without getting tangled up in directions, left or right, purl or plain, up or down, which way to turn this, how will it look when I turn it inside out? This morning I got up and pretty much breezed through my final and acceptable version. Then I wrapped the little present, started on some applique tissue design on the outside and wrote the card with more applique hearts made from Post-Its. Needs must.

Why such trouble with the dancing man? What goes on during the journey from brain to hands? I shared the video with my brother and sister, over Messenger – as a test – could they do it to see how long it would take. My sister was characteristcally quiet and my brother (who I knew would spring to the task) left the chat and came back within about five minutes with a video of his creation. Well, damn! Anyway, here’s the video that shows you how. Want to try it?

Hurricane Beryl is passing through. The intemittent rain has been heavy, the sky has been mostly leaden.  There have been a couple of very windy periods with some huge rain.

The rain was a loud, heavy and furious curtain

We stayed indoors and even our plans to go out for dinner were foiled, so we will go out tomorrow instead. We planned where and when and that’s almost the entire battle around here. The plans were not foiled by the weather but rather the inability to choose where to go. This is far from new. It happens all the time. 

Krish went for food and I finished up the present wrapping, and made a bunch of salads for lunch, including the mango salad now that Krish had bought the cilantro. We ate on the balcony and somehow didn’t get wet.

Birthday lunch – beet, squash and orange salad, baba ganouj, cold spiced tofu, mango salad and naan. We ate on the balcony and the meal was fun

I listened to more of The Giver of Stars and managed to nap. The book is good – it’s about an English woman who is living in Kentucky with a new husband who has never touched her. She gets hired into a new visiting library scheme in the Kentucky mountains and this will change her life – I’m already sure of it. Jojo Moyes manages to write love stories where the romance isn’t the only focus. Strangely, this is rare, and makes the story feel more real.

My gift was a success – as predicted, the wrapping was the biggest success. So I’m going to try to draw and paint more. Little things and maybe more paper crafts. They feel disposable, a bonus these days.

The gift-wrapped box, in which the robot toys were, and my final and only successful paper dancing man.

I think about my discarded arts and crafts supplies, though. I’m pleased I was able to pass them along to someone in Hackney, but sometimes I look over to see them here and they’re gone. I took a lot of pleasure in gathering those things – the fabrics, from donations, from remnants in the fabric store in Stoke Newington, cut from old clothes found in charity shops. Then there was the lace, the buttons, the beads and brooches, the felt, the embroidery threads, colourful and some metallic. The pipe cleaners and glue gun and fake flowers to pull apart to make skirts for the little Day of the Dead and the Christmas peg dolls. The paints and the pencils and who knows what else. It will be a challenge to collect a new box or three. Looking forward to that.

Meanwhile, it’s Toronto, it’s Parkdale, it’s Hurricane Beryl leftovers and it’s Krishna’s birthday and it’s been a pretty good day.

In which I try a new direction – back in Parkdale

Monday, 8 July, 2024

(Does that sound Dickensian? Bronteish? Not sure.)

At any rate, I went out for a short while today, just ordinary errand running, and it occurred to me that I’m waiting for something big to post here. Maybe that’s not necessary and it means weeks go by where ‘nothing big’ happens or things seem bleak and I can’t bring myself to put it into writing – it might feel too real or put people off, but it’s still my life and I can’t really imagine a day when I don’t see or do something that makes the day easier. So here we go, me deciding to blog no matter what, when I want, and…have I said this before?

Today I felt determined and made a To Do list. I had little work and a full day ahead, a day that promised to be very hot with the usual humidity so I didn’t have or want to commit to very much.

We are in a loft condo. When we took the place we saw it as a one-month stop gap. When we moved in, we were not at all happy but that balcony and shower sold me in the end and after a month our landlord gave it to us off of Airbnb – always a plus.

Our loft building on Brock Street. Our balcony is towards the back, five floors up
The electrical box in front of our building has elephants. They feel like friends but guards

There are two bedrooms – one is empty and we are storing things there. There are two bathrooms – one with a tub, which has become Krish’s and the other (en suite) is quite far the nicest walk-in shower I’ve had anywhere and that’s mine. The kitchen and living room are open-plan. The kitchen is small. but there’s an island at least or there’d be no counter space at all. The living room is narrow and is saved by  French floor-to-ceiling doors leading to the balcony spanning the living room space. There are no curtains and it opens the space and the view. And I like the view – in this immediate area it’s all houses and nothing tall (except this building at seven floors) and the trees are higher than the houses, so from up here there are trees in every direction. There are birds and my birdsong app says they are  mostly sparrows and cardinals. I haven’t seen the latter yet. Krish has shown me hawks (two circling each other at times) in the sky. They never land.

The sanity-saving balcony
The tree line view at sunset

We are back in Parkdale again, this time a bit further east (closer to downtown by three or four streetcar stops). I like this area better than the first. We have a greengrocer, a five-minute walk away, something that other places have lacked. And Krish has easier access to all the supermarkets he likes to visit. So all in all, despite a bit of a rough landing in this place, we’ve found it works well. If only the streetcars weren’t in such a mess, but that’s another story.

A homemade quick chicken pho for lunch on the balcony

I walked along the street opposite, admiring the overgrown gardens, to the next main road.  It was a hot 30-degree, 55% humidity day. First a visit to the post office where I was delighted to find no queue. Next a visit to the greengrocer – an Alphonso mango, three limes, and two Ontario pickling cucumbers for a salad. Krish and I are trying to stay within a fasting period. We’ll see how it goes.

Inside the greengrocer

I folded clothes, filed papers, worked an hour, sent in my timesheet to be paid in a couple of weeks, and listened to the final 90 minutes of my audiobook  House by Christina Lauren. A very odd book – boy meets girl, boy lives in a house that’s ‘alive’ – it takes care of him and always has, until he meets girl and jealousy takes over and tries to entrap him and kill her. Yes, that’s odd but interesting. All done. And now I start Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, my new favourite author.

The neighbourhood here on Brock Street
I’m always looking for the overgrown wild gardens