DWT

NaDruWriNi Post #2 - actual meandering

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 05:35:20 GMT

So in Post #1 I mentioned doing a Virtual Scotch Tasting. This is something my sister organized and I'm absolutely sure that it was sourced from some sort of Fancy Food Place in the Beaches that probably no longer exists (or at least if it does, no longer offers such tastings as I can't for the life of me find the slightest hint of such a thing). For someone who doesn't live in the city and isn't typically into Fancy things my sister is unusually highly looped into such things as her bosses live in the Beaches and are very much interested in Fancy Things that then get spun as Fancy Things are good things to do for birthdays. When the scotch was sent I remember being maximally amused that it was mailed to Pickering (and did not break!) when I could have probably walked straight down my road to the place in normal circumstances and picked it up in person. I could have walked straight down the road as I sometimes joke that I live in the Upper, Upper Beaches, which is a fun-poke at the real estate agents who gave some of that name to the hunk of land north of the Beaches but south of me (well, sort of, technically south and a touch west as there is an amazingly firm historic boundary here called VicPark that None Shall Cross for the sake of spanned neighbourhoods from the lake all the way up to Steeles).

(Now on to the Auchentoshan three wood, by the way -- def. more my thing than the Ardbeg).

The virtual scotch tasting was a 2021 birthday. My 2020 birthday was dinner at the Lahore Tikka House with a gift of an envelope full of Irish notes as we'd planned to take my Mum there to visit her cousin. In the intervening time there was Covid, and escalating dementia to make such a trip meaningless, and the Tikka House being closed for an age due to a fire. So none of that was great.

I was back in Little India (much better neighbourhood name than the Upper Beaches, even if it is otherwise framed as the 'Gerrard India Bazaar') at the arse end of August and was super pleased to discover the Tikka House had finally reopened and was back to its former glory but also surprised to find Udupi Palace had moved from its rather distinctive location to a more mundane one across the street.

If you keep walking east from Little India eventually you walk right into Kingston Road and if you keep walking along that you'll then find yourself outside the bookshop I found myself outside of when I scored my now curse'd O'Rourke book (much better scores were Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and, hell, even the Nick Hornbys). I acquired this heap a few years ago on my way back by bike from something or other. I was going along bike-lane-less, streetcar-track-filled, Kingston Road as I was trying to find the least insane way both east and north back home not quite having had it fully cemented in yet that the hills just get Worse and Worse the further east you go (these days I try to already be as north as I want by Sherbourne if going by bike).

Anyway, just wanted to note this bit of meandering as it stuck out to me how sort *local* everything was for me tonight (from my store walk to where the scotch came from to That Damn Book) and just wanted to underscore as it somehow makes things seem so much more home-y even in this here fourth largest city in North America).

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Weep for you must scroll: 2019 'Nice Life-y Things' Post

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 05:10:58 GMT

OMG. Excepting an IRL digression into discussing the attractiveness of Shannon Hemmett relative to Bowie and Annie Lennox basically all I've been doing since my last post is trying to scroll FB events back to January 2019 to do the next missing installment of the Nice Life-y Posts. I think this experience has pretty much sealed that I'll have to do whatever it is I'm going to do for 2020 and 2021 if not tonight then at least this weekend as I can't afford to sit there for another 30 minutes in a future day scrolling a mouse wheel. o_O

Drinking: gin and citrus. ( Posting: The 2019 *Nice* Life-y Things )

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The endless Write in the Journal fail. :)

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 07:48:21 GMT

So clearly still doing a fantastically poor job at writing here more frequently buuuuut tonight is NaDruWriNi so you're gonna get This One Post fueled by lazy gin sours (a lazy gin sour is just gin and lemon simple syrup. If I was feeling ambitious I'd have tried something like this but I spent hours out of the house today, for the for the 1st time since March, enjoying the world so I'm so very not feeling ambitious!).

I'd said in a comment in a previous post that I was going to write in my next post about the social trick of writing here more but I suspect I will not have the brain for that on multiple gin sours and so am going to pivot a bit into the semi-related topic of my Very Nice Day Today (spoiler: I'm not going to get to the bit where I explain why it's related today).

Before there was Covid I used to do all sorts of things in the world. You can tell this from my (2015, 2016, 2017 & 2018) Nice Life-y Things posts. Now there is Covid mostly what I do is sit at my kitchen table next to my fridge. If you've had cause to join a video call with me you will Most Certainly have seen my fridge (fun fact: before Covid I never sat at this spot of the kitchen table. I sit here now as I dumped all the stuff I need to work at this end of the table so I could still have the bit I used to sit at every so often still available to me).

[Now on my 2nd lazy gin sour]

So. A few days ago I learned from my local Councillor in an local FB group that the somewhat famous Water Treatment Plant (yes, really) at the foot of my street was going to have a Dia de los Muertos light display projected on the side of it after dark. Having done Sweet Fuck All enjoyable around the city since the WHO declared the pandemic March 11th some outdoor art in a week with a 20°C streak seemed like Just The Ticket.

I originally thought I'd do this yesterday after work, but, due especially to the whole Dumped Into Darkness aspect of the time change, I wasn't feeling super inspired to barrel down a hill ('cause the Water Treatment Plant at the foot of my street is actually at the bottom of a Big Ass Hill of varying grades that, like most of Toronto, tips toward Lake Ontario) on my bike in the darkness (particularly since with the whole 'have barely done anything since March' thing I'm pretty dang out of practice with being on my bike as well).

This meant The Better Plan was to go today while it was still light out so off I set around 4:20 knowing sunset would hit around 5. Since the display wouldn't start until 6:30 I also decided to go The Long Way 'Round and start at one end of the beach and meander my way back to the appropriate side. So in order to do that I used the new Danforth bike lanes for the 2nd time this pandemic (1st time was to go the bank) to get to the Woodbine bike lanes and wind up at the beach.

I knew I wouldn't be thrilled from a global pandemic perspective about what I'd find there as there have been multiple stories of social distancing fail centered specifically on Woodbine Beach but I wore my mask in the crowded bits and leaned into outdoor is better than indoor and minded myself as best I could. First I locked up my bike and beelined to the water while there was still light. Then I split my time between a log on the sand where I could best see the sunset over the city and a rock on the shore where I could most enjoy the water. To my surprise, while on the log, I got a phone call from evening_tsar. I think this is the first time I've gotten a phone call while Out And About In The World, which is kind of amazing in this cellphone age of ours. I answered and would say we mostly talked about what had just happened in the US, which I think bar none was the most popular topic of conversation in the western world today.

[3rd and final gin sour. Not actually remotely drunk -- not even tipsy! -- should have gone with the vodka creamsicles as the speed with which I can suck those back should have assured drunkenness]

As darkness really started to set in some cops pulled their dune buggy uncomfortably close to my rock and I started to wonder if there was a post-sunset ban on being on the beach and so I decided to move on before they actively directed me to. I made it back up to the boardwalk and sat on a bench until you couldn't tell any more if the reddish orange in the sky was still the sunset or an effect of the street lights. I retrieved my bike from lock-up and started the walk with along the wooden boardwalk in the darkness. I could have rode on the adjacent trail but I'd wanted to walk to better listen to the waves (I love that sound) and look at the stars.

It took about 40 minutes to make it to the other end which meant I'd be between 15 and 25 minutes "late" to the 6:30 start but since I was pretty confident it would either be a repeating or static show I was OK with that. Once I made it to Queen Street I locked the bike again and headed up the steps to the plant. Somewhat to my surprise it was a repeating show but it was only repeating on one small corner of the building. With something as large as the edifice of the R.C. Harris is I liked the idea of the projections being spread out across the whole faces of it (especially in our current circumstance to trying to avoid crowding) but can certainly appreciate the extra challenge logistically that would be.

The displays were beautiful and in my luck I happened to walk up right as they were starting one of their rounds such that I wasn't even sure if it was the case that something had gone wrong and they were starting late overall. I stayed for 3 rounds of the showing, which in the end, only ran about 10 minutes: once to properly watch it, once to capture some favourite images (I think most of you are most likely to be able to access a small selection of these on FB) and one last due to a bit of capture fail in the 2nd 'round.

Then it was back to unlock the bike in order the push it up the worst part of the hill (the steepest grade here is right before the lake) which happens to conveniently get me to the street I'd just noticed this past Thursday (as I biked to my local post office) has a burrito place so I also stopped in there to take one of those home for dinner. It was absolutely delicious and my only regret by the time I got home and ate it is that I ordered the 'regular' instead of the 'huge'. :)

As I nommed away on it I tuned back into the Light It Black event, which I'd been previously been listening to all day since I woke up at half 9 that morning. This was so enjoyable I was then more than an hour late to the Zoom chat going on in part in the service of NaDruWriNi (and at this point wholly in the service of NaDruWriNi as it's just the_siobhan and I left at this point.

And, good holy god, it's now quarter to 3 so I'm officially going to pack this in!

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