#toronto-move

What do you love about where you live?

Toronto, Day 1074. I am sitting on a bench in Nathan Phillips Square, a few weeks shy of our third anniversary of moving here. I’m looking at old City Hall and the new Toronto sign that was installed for the Pan-American games. This vast public square is a five minute walk from my door, and if the rooftop garden was open I would be…

According to my handy-dandy day-counting app, we’ve been here for 565 days now. I’m poking my nose into my second Ontario winter, and am curious to see how I feel about it now that the cold and snow lack, a bit, for novelty.

What’s far more significant to most of us about this time of year is less the dig for coats and toques packed away months before, and more the monolithic…

Propitious Birds (Toronto Day 532)

A thing about living right downtown here is I mostly see sparrows and pigeons. Starlings, sometimes. Grackles and gulls, for sure. I’ve had cardinals and finches in the tree outside my window, there’s a young raptor who taunts me on Queen Street when I’m out without the big zoom camera, and I can go to the lakeshore for ducks and cormorants. It’s not as though the birds aren’t here.

But, day to…

Launch of the Kitten Channel: We currently have just-weaned three kittens in the house, now named Lorenzo, Chinchilla, and Bailey. This isn’t a permanent thing. We never agreed to take the whole litter, but they all needed rescuing. Bailey will go to his forever home as soon as he’s seen a vet. It’s both a lot of work and a lot of fun. You’ve probably seen the cuteness. Here’s Renzo.

Getting…

Moved! (Toronto, day 346)

The past five or so days have been both gruelling and immensely gratifying. Final packing took up all of my Thursday. Getting everything relocated and unpacking it was the dawn-to-dusk Friday task. Kelly joined me after her work week ended; I set something of a backbreaking pace, and she matched it heave for heave. She is, officially, a trooper!

Saturday and Sunday were spent organizing all our…

I am still working on answering Blaise’s question: are editors still needed? And I’m pondering your other questions, excited about answering them, and grateful to know what interests you. If you haven’t weighed in yet and there’s something you want to know, tell me! I’m happily building up the list of requests.

In the meantime, a few current snippets of news from the land of Dua Moving Insanity:

It has almost been a year.

It’s no coincidence that we’re moving, again, as the anniversary nears. The plan was always to rent a place here for the first year, scope out the neighborhoods, and then commit. Kelly and I were both so unfamiliar with Toronto that to do anything else seemed nutty beyond words.

(Though jumping in without a clue is how we chose our Vancouver neighborhood, also sight…

I want to get back into a more regular habit of updating you all about things going on in my life, but Life has been thwarty. Much of what I might write here, if I could, would be storytelling about other people: “I did X with person Y, and they did this…