Photos of Food I Ate (before I ate it) 

“I ate alone while watching Netflix on my laptop”

For a certain Generation, “I Am Here” could very well be their motto. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, or Twitter, for some people, exclaiming, “I am here with someone doing something" has become an almost reflex reaction to any experience.

Photographing a meal and sharing that picture on your social networks quickly went from trend to cliché. Yet people still do it. Some genuinely wish to commemorate the occasion or capture the moment to try and recreate it later while others seem to be engaging in a kind of competition of who's-having-more-fun braggadocio. Or sometimes it's just fun to talk about what you did that day and sometimes that thing is an extraordinary meal.
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2014 Summer Sextodecimo 

Image from Michael Winkelman




Back in March I began a sextodecimo playlist for the Vernal Equinox. Well, that didn't happen. That's okay, it'll become the Summer Solstice Playlist. Oh too late. Maybe I was busy that day because again it didn't happen. Well, now the summer is on the descent and I can feel the desperation of cramming some more outside-ness into the week, the days or the lunch hour.
So finally, here it is. What I've been listening to lately. The streaming Grooveshark version above and The Rdio.com version below (account required):


Enjoy responsibly.

Bike Gripe (shouldn’t, wouldn't, didn’t) 

Welcome to the high intensity sport known as Urban Cycle Commuting. Image via Flickr

Despite not having ridden my bike for pure pleasure much this summer, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been a man about town everyday on one of my bikes. The last few weekends I’ve gone for little 70+ KM sojourns, more or less trying to find a new training route without much success. Worse yet, all of this biking purely for transportation has meant I’ve tired of riding and I long for a day when some automatic device would carry me from place to place. Not like a car or a motorcycle but more like a smoothly walking leviathan who would pick me up and swaddle me until I am delivered safely where ever I need to go.

I just want to get somewhere safely. Is that so much to ask? Apparently, it is. Even streets with bike lanes are crazy. My current problem is I have to go East-West across downtown, right through the core of the city. From about Sherbourne to Spadina, it seems insanely dangerous and akin to an American Ninja obstacle course. I’ve tried every route from Dundas to Queens Quay but the combination of road conditions, speed of traffic, drivers making illegal u-turns, drivers never signalling while they turn, drivers running red lights, drivers running stop signs (actually just add “pedestrians and cyclists” to that list too), and a general overwhelming number of a-holes have created the most intimidating cycling conditions I’ve experienced in 15 years of riding in Toronto.
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Kayaks and the City 

Photo from Robert's point of view, as Glenn and I put the “yak” in kayak

First, to my Ottawa peeps (and you know who you are), I sincerely apologize for not calling to say I was in town. Train derailments and Toronto obligations all conspired to make this visit a short and strategic strike on the nation’s capital. This summer I’ve failed to properly plan to do anything vacation-wise (as unwise as that is). Lately, I’ve barely been able to plan supper never mind a holiday. This would be a micro-vacation to Ottawa, city of rivers and canals, nature and culture. I think I kept hoping something would appear from a shimmering summery vapour before me like in an Arthurian legend. Nothing has. Instead I fell back on a plan that worked out very well a couple of summers ago when, lacking any better ideas, I simply booked off every Friday in the month. It has a remarkable effect. It only takes 4 days of your vacation time but seems to stretch the summer immeasurably. Like have four mini-vacations. Maybe one year I’ll take all the Fridays of July and August off to have a weeks worth of vacation distributed throughout the summer season. I also have to admit that summers in Ontario are usually agreeable enough that you don’t really need to go anywhere else. It’s the winter you really need to go somewhere warm. But getting out of Toronto any time of the year is always a relief.
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Seen in July (2014) 

A Sunday in Hell image via Art. Spoke. Soul.

Summer is full of sport; the World Cup, the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the Blue Jays’ winning ways, the Blue Jays’ losing ways… so it’s not too surprising that there were three sport movies in this month’s viewings. It seems with all the television shows in hiatus, there’s nothing on TV which I think explains why, despite being out at farmers markets and cycling through city parks and swimming, when I come home, I watch movies rather than television shows. Mind you, I think I saw three or four of these, either in a hotel or on an airplane so that may shoot a hole in my theory.
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