Category: Photos

The cat was sick, a crouched peeing everywhere, on the beds, the couch, visibly uncomfortable.

An emergency run to the vet happened at mid day. All protocols in effect: cat delivered to door of vet with mask on, no entry for humans.

Time to kill.

The vet is at that funny intersection where Cherry St turns into Sumach and Adelaide turns into a ramp onto the expressway. A bit of a wasteland of streetcar tracks and highways. There’s talk of development (when is there not) and the vet location is even supposed to be a subway station eventually when they build that new line they’re always promising.

Wandering aimlessly I noticed a sign – a farmers market I’d never heard about. Who doesn’t love a good farmer’s market?

It wasn’t Thursday, it was Friday, but I had time to kill so I figured might as well wander down the block to “Underpass Park” a skate park plus underneath the expressway – the ultimate in urban.

And oh my goodness, I didn’t remember THIS much art…

A feast for the eyes – so many different styles, ideas, cultures, mark makings… What a way to make the ugly spaces beautiful.

Lens Artists: Under the Sun

Welcome to my balcony.

I’m pretty tickled to tell you that the chairs are from M in #304, the chest from K in #405, the plant on the left from V in #605, but then… that’s just the way things roll in this building.

For a while I was fretting about how many chairs and where to keep them and allowing enough space for people, and then I realized… I have no idea when I’ll be able to have people over again.

However, it’s a great place to sit and watch the skies. I’m not sure I even realized Toronto skies were so interesting before living here.

Like any July, the heat and humidity are offset only by the drama of the thunderstorms…

They linger, flashing for hours, or sweep in with tornado force winds, blowing umbrellas inside out, forcing the cyclists to push hard against the current.

It has just been announced that development of the empty space in front of us is now about to begin. Office buildings, they say – innovative, exciting, timber build office buildings are on their way. In fact, the ground-breaking ceremony was slated for yesterday morning, involving federal, provincial, and municipal layers of government – speeches and ribbons and all that brouha.

However, some protestors showed up – something to do with evictions, housing, the pandemic… was hard to tell, as the mic was immediately cut. Ceremony disrupted, the officials fled.

Here we watched the chaos from our balconies, thinking : yes, we are all plenty worried about pandemic economics, lost jobs, how to pay rent, but…

We are also worried about losing those skies –

Two swans appeared at the lakefront this week, giving the ducks some company. The ducks mainly seemed to have spring on their minds… or at least one fellow did, who kept trying to jump any and all females in his orbit.

Oh to be a bird …

Like most everybody else out there, we are in a state of emergency and movement is limited, but there is no fierce regulation keeping people in their homes (yet), so I still have my little circuit which happily involves not only the grocery store, but also the lakefront.

And it’s interesting to see what continues to move – the tankers that still come in from distant lands to deliver sugar at the Redpath dock –

The construction sites all around us that continue to pound and hum through days and nights –

And there, at the top of those metal structures, the tiny little dot in the middle, just a few feet away from the highway, a bird sings.

Spring continues to approach, indifferent to, regardless of human troubles.

From the balcony the skies are expansive, the weather ever-shifting. We are at the very bottom of the city looking north into it, watching….

Distance – Lens Artists Challenge