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Last night at around 10pm, Dave and I were sitting on the front porch chatting. A young man walked down the sidewalk in front of us. He was making farting noises with his hands. He stopped in front of our house. "Not bad, eh?" he yelled at us. We looked at each other with eyebrows raised. The young man then proceeded to give us a full sympnony of hand farting noises. It was quite a performance. He continued, periodically yelling, "Not bad, eh? Not bad, eh?", until Dave resonded, "Yep, not bad". The young man then proceeded down the street making slightly quieter hand farting noises to amuse himself.
Sometimes people are very odd.
Posted by Me @ 09:49AM [Link]
I was reading steph's entry about the dragonfly she watched laying eggs, and it made me curious to find out more about the gorgeous dragonfly Dave and I saw on our camping trip in July. We'd asked one of the Park Wardens about it, but he couldn't tell us much from our description. But thanks to the wonderful internet I found out that it's a Twelve Spotted Skimmer. It was one of the largest dragonflies I've ever seen - about 6 inches across.
There are more nature and camping photos from our trip to Presqu'ile. Nature is good. Nature ++.
Posted by Me @ 12:36PM [Link]
What's a groovy, swingin' young gal like me doing for fun on a Friday night? Why reading the BBC News Style Guide of course! Actually, it is fairly entertaining. It's also a decent reminder of how to write succinctly, although some parts are for broadcast purposes only. I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats. Not that I'd pay any attention. Have no fear, dear reader, my writing will remain as clichéd and sloppy as usual.
Posted by Me @ 12:39AM [Link]
So there I was gathering up clothes to put into the washer. I snapped on the bedroom light, took two steps and it flashed off. "Damn", I thought, "blown another fuse". I took my laundry down to the basement and tried to turn on the light. It didn't work either. "That's odd. I can't have blown all the electricity in the house" (I talk to myself a lot). I put the clothes in the washer and decided I'd investigate the power situation before putting any of the detergent into the washer (smart move Tara!). I went outside and everyone else was on their front porches looking confused, yelling across to neighbours in Portuguese or Italian and waving their arms around a lot. I walked down to the traffic lights - they were out too. I figured it was an outage like a couple of weeks ago when the transformer around the corner exploded in a huge fireball. I tried calling Toronto Hydro and got a recorded message saying that the number was out of service. I tried calling the operator. No answer. Curiouser and curiouser .
I called Dave at work. The phone rang and rang. I tried his cell phone. He answered. I told him the power was out. His power was out too. That's odd. The whole city without power? That explained why his work phones weren't working. There's something to be said for buying a cheap phone that just plugs into the wall with no extra power supply needed. His boss was on her cell talking to someone. We heard that Ontario and Quebec were without power. I decided to call someone far away, someone that would have internet access and could find out what was happening. I called Sabrina in London.
She was the goddess of information. My link to the outside world. Power was out across the east/mid-west. Cleveland, Toledo, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, Albany all out of power. Shit. Is it terrorists? No one knew. She told me to call back in a bit - or she'd call me if she heard more info. It was a bit scary. I wandered around the house aimlessly, wondering if I should continue working and use up all the battery on my laptop. I tried connecting to the internet via dial-up. I could connect to my ISP; I just couldn't get any web sites or download email. I guess their connection to the internet was off. I decided to conserve the rest of the battery in case I needed it for something important in the hours to come.
I tried calling my dad at the cottage - his power was out so the portable phone wasn't working - no answer. I tried calling my sister - no answer. But a few minutes later she was there. Apparently she'd been having trouble with her phones, she figured out that she could answer calls but not make any. The phone service answering machines seemed to be out. I called Dave again. Same deal. He could answer calls but not make any. No one at his work could make calls. They gave me the names and numbers for family that they needed to get in touch with and I called and passed on messages.
My mom was still not home after a couple of hours... I was getting a bit worried that her worst fear had come true and she was stuck in an elevator. But she eventually managed to get a lift home with a bunch of workmates that stopped in to use the toilets and call home. My sister and mom were safe and my dad was probably oblivious to the chaos because power outages are not uncommon at the cottage.
People in the neighbourhood were starting to arrive home from work, leaving their car radios on at top volume with all the doors open so everyone could hear the news. Some of the radio stations were out. It seemed like they had no backup generators. The news was on all the radio stations that were left. Even the music stations had gone to constant news.
I'd talked to Sabrina again and she let me know that they were claiming that it wasn't terrorists, just an overloaded grid. No one knew where the problem started. A fire in a power station in Manhattan, a lightning strike, a fire in a nuclear power plant in Ohio, not a fire in a nuclear power plant - just an overloaded nuclear plant ('cause that's so much better you know), it started in Canada, it started in New York, it started in Pennsylvania. Who knew? What I wanted to know was how they knew it wasn't terrorists when they didn't know how or where it happened.
Dave finally got home from work. Luckily we've got a gas stove and a barbecue so no problems cooking food. We'd eaten the last meat out of the freezer the night before so I wasn't too worried about food spoiling. We knew it was going to be hours before electricity came back on.
But I wanted - no needed - to know what was happening. What was the news? What was going on? When were the lights going to come back on? Would it be hours or days?
I went upstairs to see how many batteries my old ghetto-blaster took. As I turned it around the heavy metal speaker (the thing is almost 20 years old) fell on the top of my foot and I screamed. It was excruciatingly painful. I took the icepack out of the freezer and sat while the ice melted and my foot throbbed. I went through one ice pack. Dave got me a little transistor radio to listen to. I used up another ice pack. My foot was starting to feel better.
My sister called. She was taking my mom to the emergency room with a broken finger. Apparently they'd been out by the garden pond and my mom had been standing up on the rocks and had lost her balance. She'd managed to leap over the pond, but crash-landed on the other side, breaking her finger and dislocating two knuckles. My dad called a few minutes later (he'd finally plugged in the old phone and found out that the blackout was huge and that Mom had hurt herself). Dave joked that my sister had better watch out since with my grandma getting shingles, me breaking my wrist and hurting my foot and my mom breaking her fingers there was obviously a curse on the Colley-Cleveland women.
It got dark. It was still really hot. An overnight low in the mid-twenties was forecast, but the humidity made it clingy and sticky. No air-con tonight. We sat out in the backyard with the tiki torches going and listened to our neighbour playing guitar. We stared at the stars. I've never seen so many stars at night in Toronto. We could hear low voices in all the backyards down the street. I was still compulsively listening to the news every few minutes.
I decided I needed to go for a walk. My foot was feeling much better - using it would be good right? So we took a walk around a long block. Along Dupont to Christie, down Christie to Bloor, back to Shaw and up Shaw to our house.
Candles flickered in the windows of every house but everyone was out on their front porches - it was too hot to stay inside. Crazy people were out biking and roller blading in the dark. The cars swished by with headlights that destroyed our night vision. People had their battery-operated radios on full blast out the windows. People out smoking and drinking and eating junk food while watching the world drift by in the gloom. Kids had glow sticks they waved around. Flashlights flickered and waved in faces as walkers tried to avoid crashing into each other on the sidewalk. There was a general sense of jovial fun and excitement mixed with boredom. Lots of people were out wandering.
We stopped in Christie Pits, the closest park, and watched the stars. We could hear the voices of others doing the same on the other side of the park. We could see flashlights dancing as people picked their way down the hills. I wondered how many people were taking the opportunity for a little naked mamboing under the trees ;-)
We walked up Shaw street. It was eerily silent. No hum of electricity that is the background soundtrack of city life. I could smell all of the night flowers, honeysuckle sweetness drifting around me. I heard crickets in downtown Toronto for the first time ever. In fact I almost stepped on one on the sidewalk!
We got home. My foot was hurting again. Sat for a while longer and then decided there wasn't much else to do but sleep. Dave slept on the couch in the basement - it was too hot for him upstairs in the bedroom.
We woke up the next morning and our power was back on. But it wasn't on everywhere. I went to the hospital to have a new cast put on and I was lucky I had one of the first appointments because they closed the hospital to all outpatient and elective surgeries about 2 minutes after I checked in. They'd decided it was necessary to conserve power in case they had to use the back-up generators again. I wandered around the city a bit. It was quiet. The Eaton Centre was closed. I couldn't get any errands done because everything else was closed too. Traffic lights were out on one block and the next they were working. Strangers were still in that "disaster mode", chatting with one another and complaining about inconveniences. It took me an hour and a half to get home because the subways were out and I had to take hot, stinky buses home.
By the time I got home my foot was killing me. We were supposed to go to the cottage, but all the gas stations were out of gas and we didn't have enough in the car. I decided to go to emergency (all the other doctor's offices were closed) and have my foot checked out. I was just a bruised bone - not broken. The power went out again a few times, they said there'd be rolling blackouts all week. We got some gas on Saturday morning and stocked up on food. It was time to go north, to the cottage, where it doesn't really matter if there's no power, and "air-conditioning" means "the windows are open". It was good to be out of the chaos.
Posted by Me @ 01:50PM [Link]
So I'm catching up... I've had a fairly eventful couple of weeks.
I woke up the morning after I returned from the UK to an empty fridge (of course). Craving my daily dose of Cheerios and my morning cup of tea, I decided to walk to the grocery store on the corner. On my way back, carrying the groceries, I ran for the traffic light (it seems to take at least 5 minutes to change). I tripped and fell.
I ended up with a knee and palm scraped up and embedded with gravel. My knee was swelling and I had a very sore wrist. A kind man helped me home with my groceries. I cleaned out as much of the gravel as I could and lay on the couch with an ice pack on my knee and another on my wrist. My knee started to improve, but my wrist just seemed to hurt more and more. Sabrina, who is oh so sensible, told me I had to go to the doctor.
I made an appointment and traipsed down to Mt. Sinai Hospital. Went through the SARS screening process. And finally saw a doctor who poked and prodded at various parts of my hand and wrist until she hit the spot that made me scream in agony. "You may have a fractured scaphoid." she said, "You'll have to have x-rays and get a scaphoid splint. If it's fractured you'll have to come back tomorrow for a cast. The ER sells the splints but you may also be able to get one at a pharmacy". I got my x-rays and left the main part of the hospital, walked around the building, into the ER, going through the whole SARS screening thing once again - only this time I had to wear a mask. 
I plonked myself down at the triage nurse's desk and explained that all I wanted was to buy a scaphoid splint. "Oh no", she says "you'll have to register into the ER and wait for a doctor to see you before you can get one of those" BLAH! Not another 5 hours of waiting around! So I called a bunch of pharmacies - none of them had the right kind of splint - and then resigned myself to a lengthy wait. I was sure that my wrist was just sprained. After about 3 hours a doctor finally dropped in, poked my wrist so that I screamed in agony again, called up my x-rays on the computer and declared my wrist fractured. He then proceeded to slap on the worst cast I've ever seen.
When I finally went back for a proper cast at the fracture clinic both doctors marvelled at how awful the cast was. It was about 3 inches too short, it had crumbled at my thumb (I'd had to tape my thumb so that it was properly immobilized) the edges were all rough and I was starting to get nasty eczema from the plaster rubbing against my fingers. Not good. But now I have a fabulous baby blue fibreglass cast that is much lighter and nicer on my skin. I'm still typing with one and a half hands though.
I got some lovely flowers from my Mom and Dad and some other lovely flowers from Dunstan.
I'm slowly recovering. I can't really use my right hand (luckily I'm left handed). My knee got infected, but it's almost better now. I'm a lot less irritated by my injuries then I was in the first week. The doctors said I'll have to wear a cast for at least another 6 weeks, but more likely another 3 months. If the bone doesn't heal properly by then, I'll have to have surgery - but I'm trying not to think of that. Apparently there's a risk I'll get arthritis in my wrist, which would suck. I'll never run for another traffic light again.
PS. To rudy. Sorry, I didn't come up with a better story about how it got broken. I'm terrible at lying and I can't tell a fake story without laughing. I thought about using your "swinging on the chandeliers" story... but it's not very plausible. I have had about 5 people tell me I should kick my husband next time instead of punching him. That seems to be the most popular theory of how I broke my wrist :-)
Okay my arm is tired. I'll write up my account of Blackout 2003 later this afternoon.
Posted by Me @ 01:12PM [Link]