Be careful. For the kids.

Sign spotted on country roads near Riviere Rouge this weekend. Classic. Can you imagine how the creative meeting must have proceeded for this gem?

"Ok, so we need to make this sign more impactful. It's not enough to say, 'watch out for our kids'. We need something to make drivers think twice about speeding."

"You're right. Let's add a visual. How about the silhouettes of children crossing the street?'

"Nah! Too boring. Been done before. This sign needs to scare drivers with the reality of the consequences."

"What would you suggest?"

"I'm seeing one child. A child who has just been hit by a car. His cherubic face turned towards the road, his eyes closed, his fate uncertain, no mother to soothe him..."

"But how do we know he's been hit by a car? Do we see the car? Taillights dimming in the distance? Skid marks?"

"No, no, too heavy-handed that. We need more drama. I don't know... maybe tear his shirts in a few places?"

"Oooh, yeah, yeah! And maybe he's only wearing one shoe! The other lost when he was hit!"

"Good idea. But the lonely shoe on the highway image has been overused. It's trite. Oooh! Oooh! I'm a genius! Let's also pull the sock off a little! The driver will definitely notice the missing shoe then. It will add another layer of pathos."

"You are a genius, boss! Should we also add some blood around the head?"

"Too crass there, junior. Crosses the boundary of bad taste. Get the artist on it immediately."

"Yes, sir!" 

Ms Julie returns home, sweet home

The train that I am currently on (VIA Rail train 668, Toronto-Montréal) is scheduled to stop in every village and hamlet between here and home. Thankfully, it is mostly populated by mid-term plagued students so the ambience is fairly quiet, leaving me plenty of time to bring you…

Highlights from The Word on The Street Festival! WHEE!

• Neil Bissoondath read to me.
• Peter Dubé, Andrew Hood and I posed in orange porta-potties.
• I beat up Derek Webster with copies of Maisonneuve magazine (the irony…)

Check out Ms. Julie’s blog for upcoming photos of the non-stop fun and hijinks.

Other random notes from my trip to Toronto:

• The Royal York Fairmount has fancy, lemony-scented toiletries that you will soon be able to see in my own humble water closet – but only during the Holidays and other special occasions.

• Hakim Optical must refresh their logo. I don’t care how catchy a TV jingle they use. Judging by the style of the glasses in the logo, as well as the psychedelic orange neon lighting, I must assume that they’ve had the same brand image since 1974.

• The squirrels in the Osgoode Hall gardens* are admittedly quite cute. Whether they are worthy of having two different sets of German tourists videotaping them is another story. Don’t they have squirrels in Germany? I pity the fools who get suckered into watching that footage (“Look Helmut! See the way they sit on their hind legs! Like humans! Amazing!”).

• On the train out, I was sitting behind a group of Japanese tourists whose members made themselves conspicuous by (respectively) visiting the bathroom frequently, taking pictures of… well, everything, and wearing a white surgical mask. The Michael-Jackson-esque mask raised two important questions: (1) Was she wearing it because she wanted to protect us from whatever contagious illness she had? Or (2) was she wearing it to protect herself from the insidious diseases we all must be carrying? As the voyage wore on, she lost all credibility when she started to wear it only intermittedly, and then eschewed it altogether when she stepped onto the sooty platform at Toronto’s Union Station. Go figure.

The juice is getting low on my laptop and we’ve barely reached the outskirts of Belleville**. Ugh.

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*I always make a stop in the Osgoode Hall gardens because Reggie surely visited the grounds during her honeymoon trip in late 1898 or early 1899.
**”Hey Mel! I can’t see you but I think I spot a Timmy’s from the train station!”

Ms Julie arrives in Toronto

Ms. Julie's second foray to the Queen’s City was a smashing success.

I departed on Saturday afternoon (I didn’t want to miss yoga!), arriving in Toronto a few minutes shy of nine o’clock. The sidewalks were already crawling with young beauties in too-high stilettos and college boys in their pressed white shirts hoping to make the best of this Saturday night.

A soft drizzle kept all our feet swiftly moving towards shelter. I love Toronto on a rainy night when the sidewalks glisten and clouds of fog mask the tops of skyscrapers. Although I didn’t have an umbrella, I chose to walk to the vegan restaurant I had already chosen for my dinner, covering the ground between York/Front and Queen/Spadina as rapidly as possible.

Equipped with newspaper and notepad, I enjoyed my dinner at Fressen’s bar, chatting occasionally with the dreaded-out barman and eavesdropping on the conversations of young, pretty Torontonians as they communally rehashed their lives. Or compared workout regimens. Or debated the colour scheme at their upcoming wedding.

The food was very good, blending beautifully with the chai latte that accompanied me home.

And then, like any girl with a week’s worth of tired tugging on her shoulders and a super swank hotel room, I spent the rest of my Sattie immersed in a soft bank of white duvet, occasionally poking my nose out to catch an SNL skit on the ridiculously large TV.

After all, Ms. Julie needed to look fresh for her photo shoots on Sunday.

Rowing Row in the rowboat

Do you ever get the feeling that you're too old to learn something new? Or at the very least, that you're no longer able to learn things in the same way you used to? I know it's the wrong attitude to have, and it's mostly inaccurate, but the universe is trying to tell me something here and I'm trying to listen.

EXAMPLE 1

This weekend I was lucky enough to be invited to a summer cottage/palace for a few days of overeating, too much wine, and sloth. Between two hammock naps, I followed Row down to the water and we took the rowboat out for a spin. I had never rowed a boat before. In fact, I'm fairly certain my hands had never touched an oar.

Row got us across the lake to the small island where loons, mallards and even the occasional beaver paddle around (I felt like I was in a Hinterland Who's Who segment). At the halfway point, I took the oars. It was hard. And it required a lot of effort before I understood the principles of rowing backwards, of pointing the boat in the right direction, etc. I couldn't find the fluidity of the motion and most of my strokes were uneven.

At one point, pleased with the rhythm I was setting, I looked to both sides and noticed that the paddles were barely skimming the water. I was basically rowing oxygen. *Sigh*

By the time we took the boat out for a second time though, I was showing big improvement, but some things still weren't coming naturally to me.

EXAMPLE 2

The NDG Y gang tried to introduce me to tennis. 'How hard can it be,' I thought 'to hit a ball with a racket?' Plenty, apparently. I was a hot, hot mess, no matter what racket they placed in my hand, no matter how gently they lobbed the ball.

The tennis balls gaily sailed past my racket with the insouciance of a brattish child, bouncing towards the fence with a sound not unlike "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah". I managed to return some serves, but I generally put too much power into the stroke and arced the (meanie) balls over the tall fence and into the adjacent play area.

Me: Where's my young and attractive tennis coach? Like in Caddyshack.

Some smarty-pants: I don't think there's a tennis coach in Caddyshack. Just caddies.

Me: Shut up and teach my racket to hit the fuzzy yellow things, ok?

CONCLUSION

I don't learn new skills as organically I used to. I have to learn to embrace research, coaches and diagrams with more gusto.

Road trip!

I was in Val David this weekend for some kayaking. Circumstances intervened however, and we ended up going to the beach, eating too much, and playing charades until 3am instead.

On our way to the beach, there was a vintage stainless steel mobile home (kind of like the one at right, sans the pool and merrymakers) parked in someone's front yard.

Just the sight of it made me want to steal it and take off on a road trip. You know... pack a few t-shirts, eat in terrible roadside diners, keep driving to the tip of Key West, roll in the sand, watch some lesbians get married in a sunset ceremony, and then drive home - just because I can.

Sigh. At least I can see the mountain from my office window...