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Okay. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Couldn't find a way to get my blogger phone app to accept my non-gmail account so I gave up. Thankfully, switching the blog wasn't too hard. Next up, my google+ one. I just wasn't made for this modern world.

How I Roll

This summer, I started bicycling again. I finally ran out of reasons not to bike when I saw that other people in my apartment building had no problem keeping a bike in their apartment. Besides, I took an 8 mile walk out Leslie Spit and back this spring and realized that all those cyclists passing me seemed to be having even more fun than I was having. So it was a no brainer. Sure, the bike takes up space but benefits have far outweighed this one minor inconvenience.

I live about a 5 minute walk from a Trek store so I went down and picked up this beauty:



That's my bike at Bike to Work day back in May. Oddly enough, I didn't start actually biking to work until the weekend after. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to take part in a mass ride down Yonge St. (with police bike escort, no less).



Out for a ride. My sisters will tell you I've worn sillier looking hats.

Since I bought the bike, I've pretty much stopped taking the TTC. As much as I love transit, I have much more fun on my bike. Even better, it usually doesn't take me much longer to go by bike than it used to by transit. Grocery runs, evenings out, I take my bike everywhere. It's amazing how many groceries you can fit into a pannier.

I intended to start slowly, only biking to work on weekends, when the traffic was quieter. It's just under 5 miles from my place to work by the most direct route (the always interesting Yonge St.). The thing is, I started doing it one weekend and just kept doing it. I never really looked at commuting as fun until I started whipping down Yonge St. on my bike. Since June, I've taken transit to work maybe twice. Now, I'm seriously wondering how much winter I'm willing to brave on my bike. The fall is a given. The winter? If the roads are bare, I see no reason why I can't do it. That's quite a change in just a few months.

Biking really is the best way to get around the city. You go fast enough to get from place to place in good time yet you go slow enough that you can enjoy the sights and sounds. You just don't get that stuck in a tunnel or in a car.

So, yeah, sometimes when I'm out there, I kind of feel like this guy:

Some pics that don't really explain my absence. . .

Nothing beats the zoo and a long lens.



I waited about 20 minutes for the elephant to turn around.



From Nuit Blanche last year.



My uncle on his beloved tractor.



My sister at her wedding. Word of advice to anyone with an slr camera - when that relative comes up to you and asks you to shoot their wedding, offer them a toaster instead. The wedding turned out well but was way too stressful for a hobbyist like me.

Canuck Book 13 - Holding Still For As Long As Possible by Zoe Whittall

I finished my troika of Toronto novels with this Zoe Whittall book. Whittall is a writer I've known of for a while. I almost bought her first novel (Bottle Rocket Hearts) on a number of occasions but never quite got around to it. After reading Holding Still, I realize I will have to pick up her first book soon.

The story revolves around a group of friends and lovers who live around Parkdale, the slowly gentrifying neighbourhood near the west end of Queen Street. Billy - a one-time teen pop starlet - has split with her longtime girlfriend Maria. She is trying to go to school but suffers from severe panic attacks. Josh is a transgendered paramedic who is starting to grow apart from his girlfriend Amy (who is a filmmaker). There are a few other friends that come and go but these are the main three.

I'll be honest. The book took a while to grow on me. Each section starts with interludes describing an emergency that paramedics are attending to. There's a very detached feeling to these that had me guessing, trying to figure out why they were there. There was no need to question anything, though. Whittall knows what she's doing. The more I read, the more I realized how well she put this story together.

Stringing the last three books in the Canada Reads challenge together like I did was an interesting experience. I witnessed three different takes on Toronto (four if you count Consolation's split narrative) that had surprisingly little overlap. I wonder how many other Canadian cities this can can be said of? Montreal, for sure. Vancouver? Probably. Any others?

Canuck Book 12 - Consolation by Michael Redhill

After reading Girl Crazy, I thought I'd stick with the Toronto novel theme. I'd been meaning to read Consolation for a long time. I was a big fan of his earlier novel, Martin Sloane, so I knew I would likely love this book. Of course, other books kept popping up so Consolation just never reached the top of the pile by my bed.

I'm glad I finally got around to it. Consolation tells two stories. The first involves a family coming to terms with the patriarch's death in late-90s Toronto. The father was a "forensic geologist" who spent his career sifting through the layers of garbage and debris on which the city stands, looking for clues to the past. Stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease, he left behind clues for a potentially crucial find on the site where the city is building it's new hockey arena.

The other story follows the life of a young chemist who moved to Toronto from England in the 1850's to run a store he bought sight unseen. As his main business fails, he gradually moves into the new field of photography.

The strange thing about this book is that, as much as I loved it - and I did love it - I couldn't help wishing the author would have focussed on one of the stories instead of splitting the book between the two narratives. Of course, as the book progresses, you do see why the author has set the book up this way. Quite frankly, this is one of the best Toronto novels I've read in a long time. It's a book that sticks with you and makes you look at the city and its myriad construction sites in a very different light.

Canuck Book 11 - Girl Crazy by Russell Smith

I have a weakness for Russell Smith novels. It's funny because, in a lot of ways, Mr. Smith writes books I feel I shouldn't like. They are always full of characters who are big on flaws but short on redeeming qualities. Add to this the fact that Smith sometime writes like a caricature of the knowing hipster - the one who knows all the right bars and all the right people and all the reasons why most people don't measure up to some invisible yardstick of the trendy - and you have a writer who should be avoided.

Only it doesn't work out that way. I buy his books as soon as they come out and tear through them. While I rarely wind up liking the characters, the stories pull me in and the details, those precious details, begin to ring true. What I like most about his work is that he is a Toronto writer through and through. It's hard to imagine his stories and characters without Toronto looming in the background. Each book offers me a chance to look at the city in a way that is both completely valid and yet totally different from what I normally see.

That's why I picked up Girl Crazy as soon as I saw it in a bookstore.

Basically, the story goes like this - Guy falls for girl. Girl comes from wrong side of tracks (if that's possible anymore). Guy becomes obsessed. Sex. Drugs. Some danger. Some confusion. Some bad decisions. That's about it.

Oh yeah. The guy isn't just obsessed with the girl. He seems to be obsessed with women in general, hence the book title. Don't worry. It's not as creepy as it sounds.

Of course, it's the details that make the story and Smith scores big. I really don't want to give you more information than that loose outline because I wouldn't want to ruin any part of what is a very good book. There were times when I thought he might have gone too far with things, might have slipped from character to caricature, but he manages to walk the tightrope yet again.

The 100K Club

For those of you who do not live in Ontario, the province of Ontario is required by law to post the names and salaries of any provincial employee who earns more then $100 000 a year. Every April, the list is released and the Toronto Sun gets all hot and bothered with righteous indignation because. . . well because that's what the Sun always does. It's just another part of Mike Harris' dubious legacy that Ontarians have to live with, like the 407 and megacities.

The actual premise of the 100k club isn't that bad. It's nice to get an idea of where the money goes. Ostensibly, it should help to keep people accountable for their use of public money. That's all well and good. Unfortunately, the list is seriously flawed for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that the threshold is too low nowadays, making the list too large. I know that 100k is a lot of money but it's not as large a sum as it was in 1996 when the list was created. Where the list was once the domain of managers and bosses, you now have large numbers of the workers winding up on the list because of overtime payments. If the threshold was adjusted each year for inflation, you would have a much smaller list.

A smaller list would be more useful. Right now, the list has grown large enough that it gets tuned out. Sure, the comments section of the newspapers will be overflowing for a few days with people venting about the waste. Soon enough, though, it will all die down for another year. A smaller list would serve to highlight the worst offenders, making it harder for them to hide amongst the masses.

The other reason why the list is ineffective is that there is no context. You have the name, the organization, the position and the salary. That's it. No explanation of why the person earns what they do or what they do to earn it. No differentiation between those who crack 100k by working lots of overtime and those whose base salary is already above 100k.

It's easy to gasp about the nurse or the TTC ticket collector who makes 125k a year when all you have is a number. If we were told how many hours that person worked in a year to earn that sort of money, I'm sure it would seem a little less excessive. We would then have to look at the institution and not the individual to find out why there was that much overtime available in the first place. More than likely, we would find out one of two things. First, that it's cheaper to pay the overtime than it is to hire another person. Second, that some positions are short-staffed because of shortages of skilled employees. This means that the ones with the skills and the willingness to work long hours can earn big money.

In the case of people whose salaries are already above $100 000, I'm sure that most of the people are earning a fair salary for their skills and expertise. With the way the list is set up, however, we have no way of understanding that. There's just page after page of people earning lots of money with no explanation of why they earn that much. It's hard to get a balanced understanding of the issue when we are offered the bare minimum of information.

I'm not opposed to the list. Someday I'd like to be on it. I just think that it needs a revamp if it is to be of use to anyone other than newspaper headline writers.

If you want to check the list out for yourself, go here : http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/publications/salarydisclosure/2010/