Tornlake

Goodbye underwear-blue

No one told me how full-time commuting work sucks your life away like a giant vaccum cleaner -- the kind that can pick up weights and small children. The work is great and the people are great but GOSH I'm tired come Friday. And my house looks like no one's lived in it for months. It has an untouched messiness to it.

The GO-train is great for napping though, and for catching up with friends. I'm turning in to that annoying person who's carrying on into her cell phone while you're trying to read the Financial Times. Because I'm going the opposite direction from the majority of commuters my afternoon trains are a bit more colourful than your standard suits packed in like sardines. I get a lot of teenagers on their way to Jays or Toronto FC games.

Sometimes I wonder if they slot me into a category with them or the other 'adults' on the train. I never noticed how far away from 16 I was until I overheard a conversation between two teenaged girls that consisted of 'oh my god did you hear that person x did crazy act z with person y?' and 'oh my god I was so drunk I slid off b and vomited in c and kissed person d! Holy beer goggles!'

Okay so I have some of those stories still, but I say them more quietly and use less slang.

These teenagers tend to travel in unweildy packs -- that at least I've let go of. Except for this weekend when I go into the woods with an unweildy pack of friends to freeze our butts off in canoes. I can't wait. The walls of my cubicle are this funny blue-grey colour -- that classic men's underwear colour. I'm looking forward to some rich browns and lime greens and the red and yellow and blue of the campfire.

Hope you have some great colours to look forward to this weekend too.

SORRY!!

Bet you thought I'd given up, didn't you?

Well no such luck. I just took an extended hiatus, due to trying to finish a draft of my thesis, losing my job and then getting a new one, and going away on a week-long vacation out west. All of the above went extremely well.

So, it's officially spring, my crocuses and miniature irises are standing straight as soldiers, I've started commuting two hours daily (good thing I like the job) and I've decided that the Rocky Mountains are as close to paradise as anywhere I've ever been.

A little more on that commute: I purchased a vintage Pugeot bicycle to help me out with too-ing and fro-ing from the GO-stations. In Toronto, this little ride is considered quite fashionable. Vintage bikes, I was told by a source in the know, are 'hot'. Even hotter are baskets, bells, pink helmets and fake flowers twined in your wheel spokes. I opted for the vintage bike and a helmet (not pink). A back crate seems more practical than a basket.

The upshot of all this though is that in Toronto, it's cool to cruise around on a bike. In Oakville, where my new job is located, it makes you look like you live below the poverty line. No one rides their bike anywhere, and if they do, they don't wear a helmet because they ride on quiet residential streets for recreation, and their bikes are flashy, shiny, mountain-type rugged vehicles or triathalon bikes, not slightly rusted stilletto-framed Pugeots from 1965 with three gears and a broken head and tail light. When I pulled up to the bike rack outside my work this morning, a guy was locking up the sports-car of mountain bikes. We exchanged pleasantries but I knew he was steeling glances at my ride, and they weren't admiring.

Random pole: vintage or new-school mountain? What's your preference?

Wet Garden

I dug my fingers into my garden this morning. It was wet, cold, sloppy. Like a drenched dog that just swam a river. Not quite ready yet for much of anything.

The above analogy was partially stolen from the Toronto Star gardening columnist Sonia Day. But I liked it so much I decided to embellish upon it and use it for my own devices.

Ms. Day advised against taking a rake anywhere near the garden yet. The roots of perennials and tender shrubs are too near the surface, and the soil too wet -- they're liable to brake and get torn up by the rake. But she said I could use my hands, so that's what I did, raking with my fingers to move the soggy old leaves, twigs and bits of detritus from around the base of my bedraggled perennials and naked shrubs, picking out stones and odd bits of garbage as I went.

To my utter delight I discovered the translucent heads of daffodil shoots nosing up through the surface of the soil. They're that newborn lime-green colour. The colour of vulnerability. I'm terrified for them and praying they'll make it. If a soft little stem of cells and water can crack a roof of heavy soil and withstand the wind, sun and rain, then maybe there's hope for me too.