The view from my office window at some point this afternoon ...


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Freezing rain. Is there any weather phenomenon ickier than freezing rain?

The school board has no actual policy on how old kids have to be to walk to or from school on their own -- but the school believes that 8 is too young and even 9 is borderline. There's no actual law, I am told by both the Children's Aid Society and Jewish Family & Child Services, on how old kids have to be "to be left alone" -- but the CAS " ( Read more... )

So, SP is participating in a study on the activity levels of Canadian children and youth (ages 5 to 19), for which purpose she has to wear a pedometer for a week and record the number of steps it says she's taken each day. (It's a very clever pedometer, with a failsafe string thingy and a cover that prevents you from pressing the "reset" button ( Read more... )

Toronto, much as I love the place, often doesn't seem to work very well. Now I think I've figured out why.

The newsletter we got in the mail today, issued by the municipal government, contains a very pretty bar graph showing how much money, out of the 2336,86$ in annual property taxes paid on an "average" home assessed at 387 000$, is spent on ( Read more... )

Goodness, it's been a long time since I posted anything! So, some observations from Toronto (and our household) in December:

1. We got some snow last week (and over the weekend, and earlier this week), and everything was very sparkly and white and pretty, but unfortunately I didn't get around to taking any pictures of the sparkly white and pretty ( Read more... )

This year SP wanted to take ballet classes instead of the kiddie music-and-movement classes she took last year and the year before. Being a total newbie to the scene, I enrolled her in a "junior dance" class at the dance studio downstairs from us, reasoning that it would be easy to get to, etc. It was pretty expensive ($650 for the year, plus a $70 ( Read more... )

Toronto, like quite a lot of Eastern Canada and the US Northeast, got some more snow this weekend.

Photo of our balcony on Saturday morning:

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1. Having a great time with the Commendable Crit Contest over at OWW. I've gotten to read some very cool stuff, and have had some extremely useful (if occasionally slightly painful) crit and commentary on some stuff of mine, and also several fun and thought-provoking side conversations. And have been revising like a mad thing. Writing ... well, not ( Read more... )

I've had quite enough, thanks.

The temperature in Toronto been 30°C* or higher (yesterday's high was 34.8!!°C**), all day and half the night, all this week. The other night I actually left the house and went across the street to the gas-station store in a tank top and shorts, that's how hot it was. At nine o'clock at night.

It's becoming ( Read more... )