Definitively Final Update from Toronto
3 July 2002Jesus it's hot. The city is baking. Baking and stinking with garbage strewn everywhere thanks to a city workers' strike. I am so glad to be leaving. I have that permanently dazed feeling that comes with being blasted by intense sunlight all day then sleeping poorly all night.
In a few hours the internet connection goes bye-bye; the computer disappears tomorrow; Vita and I fly to Vancouver on Monday. So this is definitely the last entry from Toronto. I'm not sure when I'll be hooked up again. Probably not for at least a month, though I will check email.
Annette and Madeleine are already in Calgary. We will spend a week or two in Vancouver then drive back to Alberta (in my parents' minivan, which they have offered to us, a gift we could not refuse despite all the horrible ideological ramifications — so very, very embarrassing).
We're lucky enough to be leaving Toronto before the Pope's visit (it's "World Youth Day" — what could be lamer and more irritating than half a million enthusiastic young catholics roaring into town?) and the worst of the garbage strike (okay, that's more irritating, particularly in the heat of summer) but won't arrive in Calgary until after the G8 summit/riot (except that as veterans of 1. Mai in Kreuzberg we wouldn't mind throwing a brick or two) and the Stampede (when everyone in Calgary, without exception, dresses like a cowboy for ten days).
Mads is in excellent form these days. Chatting up a storm, proto-sentences in both English and German (but never mixed, thank god). Growing like a weed and quite fearless, loves to leap across great chasms (okay, about 50 cm) at every opportunity. Last weekend we had some old grad school friends over for a barbecue, each couple with two kids apiece, the oldest only four. Utter mayhem. Incredible the destruction five beasts that age can wreak upon a home. It was horribly hot and humid so we had them running naked through the sprinkler, which was great fun until Maddy hunkered down and took a shit on the lawn. The kids all had to line up to have their feet hosed off before we let them back inside - it looked like a British airport during the foot-and-mouth crisis (only with small, naked passengers — they looked like Teletubbies waiting to be strip-searched).
Here's Maddy hanging out in the art gallery cafe after sleeping through most of the art, as planned by her parents. That mark on her nose is due to a face-plant on the neighbours' deck. No lasting damage.
Toronto was fun, sort of, but I'm really looking forward to Calgary. Not just the excellent sporting opportunities, but for a chance to feel settled again. Once we knew we were leaving we really disengaged and the city hasn't made much of an impression on us, apart from our immediate neighbours and their three lovable basset hounds, with whom Maddy is terribly infatuated.
Finnegan, Hobbs and Molly (left to right)
Vita the cat is also in capital fettle. Free access to the garden has transformed her into a dangerous huntress. Lately she's taken to killing mice in our bed at four in the morning. The sound of her incisors penetrating their little skulls is something I will not soon forget. Crunch, crack, pop. Then I have to get up and dispose of the corpses in pre-dawn darkness.
Okay, it's really time I put this all away and got back to work. This time we have packers coming. It's so much more civilized than our last move.
