More Signs of Spring

Everything is greening up. All that rain we got last week has turned the grass bright green.

From my apartment window, I can see the weeping willows across the street showing their spring colours. They were the last to lose their leaves last fall and now they are the first to show green. The buds on all the other trees are starting to open up into leaves as well.

The magnolia trees are in bloom, as are the forsythia bushes.

I have always thought forsythias should have an "n" in their name, don't you think? Forsynthia. Get it? :)

If It Ain't Broke

I almost got a new sink today. When I came home from work last night, there was a note from the property manager advising that they would be coming in today to install a new sink in my bathroom. What I couldn't figure out was why. I hadn't asked for a new sink or discussed either of my two bathroom sinks with management at any time. Neither one of them were broken or cracked and they both work perfectly. One of them has two tiny spots where the enamel has chipped off - you can see from the photo how very tiny the one spot is, a little bit of white paint or liquid paper and no one would notice it.

This morning, I emptied out the cupboards under both sinks (since their note hadn't specified which one was being replaced) but as I was leaving for work, I thought I should just pop in to the management office and have a word with the superintendent to see what was what. I had been worrying over the time and expense they were about to spend installing a new sink to replace one that essentially had nothing wrong with it. Would they at least donate the old one to Habitat for Humanity or somewhere equivalent so it could be reused?

It was a good thing I asked! Turns out, it was a different apartment two floors above mine that was supposed to get the new sink. Someone had misread the numbers!

Which is just as well, because like the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!!

Terry Fox +30

On this day thirty years ago, Terry Fox started his now famous run. His plan was to run across Canada, starting on the East Coast by dipping his foot into the Atlantic Ocean, to raise money for cancer research. What made this run unusual was that fact that Terry had one artificial leg.

As most of us who around at that time can recall, he never made it to British Columbia to dip his foot into the Pacific. After running for 143 days, completing approximately 40 km per day - which is like running the Boston Marathon every day for 143 days, can you imagine? heck no!! - Terry was forced to stop in Thunder Bay, Ontario when the cancer that had caused him to lose his leg spread into his lungs.

By that time, he had raised $1.7 million and everyone knew who he was. Donations continued to be collected and a year after he had started his run, over $23 million had been raised in his name. (Sadly, he passed away two months later.) To date, that amount totals over $500 million and continues to grow.

As CTV News reported online: "Today, it's clear that Fox's legacy lives on. His name adorns more than a dozen schools across the country, more than 30 streets, one icebreaker, and a provincial park in the B.C. Rockies. There are also a number of cancer research facilities and research grants that honour his name, as well as the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award, which recognizes young Canadians whose humanitarian work reflects the ideals that Fox embodied.
People from 40 different countries run in his name every year and the Terry Fox Foundation is constantly funding research for new cures for cancer."

You can read the full story here: http://news.sympatico.ctv.ca/home/contentposting.aspx?feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20100411%2fterry_fox_stjohns100412

I saw Bon Jovi in a commercial yesterday, asking "what are you doing to change the world?" For Terry, this would have been an easy question to answer. I'm sure he would be proud to know that 30 years later, we still remember him and carry on his quest. We should all be so lucky to leave such a legacy.

If you'd like to make a donation to the Terry Fox Foundation, click here: http://www.terryfox.org/

(Many thanks to the unidentified photographer who took this image of Terry that I got off the Internet.)

Hippy Dippy Flowers

Today's lampworking class at Beadfx was about how to make what teacher Amy Waldman Smith calls "hippy dippy flowers". Three of us from yesterday's session returned today to learn the techniques involved in making these funky flower beads.

In this first photo, Deborah is watching Amy demonstrate how to start the bead. Here's a picture of one of the finished flowers Amy made - notice the polka dots on the petals (as compared to the ones below which don't have dots).

This next photo is of Tina melting some glass. She made the mistake of telling us her childhood nickname yesterday and then had to put up with us teasing her about it for the rest of our time together. She was a very good sport about it though! (check out her tattoos - I especially like the stars tucked just under her earlobe).

Here are a couple more of Amy's samples. I can't decide which one I like better. Sadly, these ones and the purple one above are all destined for the scrap heap, just like the demo beads from yesterday that didn't make it into the kiln. Such a pity, they were so pretty!

Guinea Pig

Lampworker extraordinaire Amy Waldman-Smith has been chosen to teach at Bead & Button this June in Milwaukee. To prepare, she is teaching a couple of practice classes this weekend at Beadfx and I volunteered to be one of her guinea pigs. Today, we learned how to make little beads, focusing on the details - making and decorating round and spacer beads with dots, stringers and twisties.

Here's Amy giving a demonstration for us:

and here are some of the beads she made during those demonstrations, all of which I really liked and all of which are no good, because they didn't make it into the kiln to be annealed properly overnight. They're perfectly formed and decorated but unannealed, you could grind them into dust with your bare hands (but please don't, they are glass, after all!)

Tomorrow's class is "Hippy Dippy Flowers", which is one of Amy's specialties and something I have wanted to learn how to make for a long time. I have tried making them on my own, without much success. Hopefully, after tomorrow, I'll have better luck!

Rock Star Radio

Every weekday afternoon, the DJ desk for Toronto's classic rock radio station Q107 is manned by none other than Canada's own guitar hero, Kim Mitchell. If you grew up in Ontario in the 70's, you've probably heard of his band, Max Webster. If I said to you, "do you know that song about the patio lanterns? or how about the one about going for a soda?" and your answer was yes, you'd know exactly who I'm talking about.

Max Webster was actually the first band I ever saw perform live. If you can believe it, they played at a dance at my high school when I was in grade 9. At the time, I had no idea who they were. I remember I won a record album at that dance, "Night Moves" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band - I had no idea who they were then either, although by the time I was in grade 13, I'd pretty much worn the grooves off that album!!

In addition to having recently released his 8th solo album, Kim has been doing this afternoon drive time radio gig since 2004 and in my humble opinion, doing it quite well. He has a relaxed style of introducing songs and making conversation, often throwing in an interesting bit of trivia about what it's like to be a rock star on tour. These tidbits are often told in a very self-depreciating manner, from the perspective of a member of the humble opening act as compared to the point of view of, say, the egotistical lead singer of the rock band headlining the tour, and it's always interesting to hear that sort of behind the scenes information from someone who was there living the life. On Friday afternoons, he does what he calls a "traffic jam" where he plays guitar along with somebody else's song, just jamming along with the tune, which is always fantastic (if you're a fan of electric guitar and who isn't?). He even posts video guitar lessons on the Q107 site, which really makes me wish I had taken guitar lessons instead of piano when I was a kid, so I could play along. Maybe it's not too late to start?

As it happens, Q107 broadcasts from above the Hard Rock Cafe at Yonge and Dundas in downtown Toronto. They have a broadcast booth at street level that passersby can peek into, where the DJ and the producer work live. The other day, I was at the restaurant for dinner and my friend and I went out into the lobby to take a peek at Kim. Here's a shot of how he looked when we first arrived.

One of the waiters told us if we knocked on the glass, Kim would come out to say hi. We did and he did. He was a little quieter than he seems on the radio, but very friendly and kind. Asked our names, shook our hands, posed for photos. Here's a shot of him and me, getting cosy. It was certainly a thrill to meet him, we felt kind of giddy about it for the rest of the night. I still do, to be honest! :)

If you'd like to read more about Kim Mitchell, here's the link to his website: http://www.lobsterlightinginc.com/normal.html or you can check out the Q107 site: http://www.q107.com/DJsandShows/KimMitchell.aspx

A Tourist in Toronto

Don't you just love being a tourist in your own town or city? I think this is something of which we don't do enough. For me, it's usually only when I have people visiting that I take the guide books off the shelf and have a look through for recommendations of where to go and what to do that would best represent the best of Toronto, when I could and should be doing it more often.

I took yesterday off work to tour about the city with a friend of mine who had grown up in Ontario and was visiting with a friend of hers who had never been to Toronto before. We started off at Casa Loma, the mansion in the middle of the city that was built to look like a castle. I hadn't been there since I was a kid, one of those places I had always meant to go to in recent years only I never seemed to get there, until yesterday.

The house was built by Sir Henry Pellatt, completed in 1914 at a cost of $3.5 million (which, you can imagine, was a staggering amount back then. Okay, it is today too!) It is still lovely, although not as beautiful as it would have been in its heyday, as it has been owned by the City for many years now and set up for visits by tourists and school children (many of whom have left their mark by writing their name on the brick on the walls of the turret tower) but a lot of the original beauty of the "bones of the house" remains and several rooms are decorated with either the original furniture or pieces similar to those that would have been present at the time. Sadly, Sir Henry and his wife Lady Mary only lived there for 10 years before a number of unfortunate circumstances (such as the stock market crash of '29) culminating in financial ruin forced them to leave their 98 room home.

After lunch in the small cafe set up in the basement of the house and a trip through the tunnel to see the stables, garage and potting shed, we jumped back on the subway and headed to the Royal Ontario Museum. We spent a couple of hours zipping through there, checking out the dinosaurs, the new bat cave (I was brave enough to go in with my two companions - even though they aren't real bats, it still kind of creeps me out), the biodiversity section with all the stuffed animals, both the First Nations and Canadiana exhibits and a little bit of Greek history for good measure.

By then, we were exhausted and needed a visit to that iconic Canadian institution, Tim Horton's, to refuel our energy with a drink and a donut, after which we took the subway down to the CN Tower. Luckily, we had decided to go up before dinner instead of after, because visibility was already reduced because it had been raining all day and fog was moving in quite quickly. It was still enjoyable and we had fun having our picture taken on the glass floor. We knew it was time to leave when the last of our 3 cameras advised that its battery was completely depleted.

Dinner at a Mexican restaurant and then home to recharge our batteries, both for our cameras and our bodies!! Boy, did my feet and back ache by the end of the day, it felt sooo good to sit down.

All in all, it was a fun day and I really enjoyed playing tourist with my guests around the beautiful and fascinating city that is Toronto.