A weekend post

I often find myself wishing I could record my thoughts, and then upload those words to my blog. I spend a lot of time in transit each day and my thoughts could very well work as decent blog posts. But when I finally get to a computer those thoughts are gone, or life is too busy to rehash them. For example, after the last post, I had a really long conversation in my head about the use of potentially derogatory words in different contexts and how actual meanings of many words get ruined forever by those words being attached to specific circumstances. It was a pretty good conversation, too. And one that you'd be reading if only I could have recorded those thoughts.

Instead, I am posting other words and some visuals.

Friday night, the boy and I went to the Royal Ontario Museum for what used to be their free Friday evening event. It's now $5, which I didn't know until we got there. Luckily the boy had a credit card. It's been about 5 years since I've been to the ROM and I was pleasantly surprised that our admission included the current Italian Arts and Design exhibit in addition to their permanent exhibits.

It was really nice to walk around and look at the Greek sculptures - I showed David the one I had to draw while I was in college as a part of my Life Drawing class. I got 100% on it. Yay me! - and the Egyptian artifacts, and even shed a tear for the taxidermied animals in the Biodiversity exhibit. That one really got to me. Again. I do understand and appreciate that these animals are so out of reach for most of the population, and that we never get to see them up close, but I do always wonder *how* they died. My hope is that their deaths were natural. No matter what the cause of death was, though, I still looked the tiger, cheetah, owls, sea birds, moose - and all the other creatures continuing their lives after death in the ROM - in the eyes and told them I was sorry they died. David caught me looking at them and petting the glass boxes the animals are kept in. He told me I looked weird and creepy.

The Italian Art and Design exhibit was a bit of a let down. I was looking forward to seeing lots of great product design samples, but I couldn't help but think that I'd see more interesting Italian product design at William Ashley. Thankfully we didn't pay the full $18 admission.

After the museum, we walked down to the Night Lights event being put on at the U of T campus. The event was planned by a group called Newmindspace. From their email:

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Due to light pollution, some of our night lights have disappeared!
To bring back the sky's twinkle, we have decided to make some stars of our own.
Join us for an evening of starcraft, constellation installation and a tower of light visible from across the city.
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I was very excited about this event. The installations that were promised:

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Stars* Hundreds of LEDs will be suspended from helium balloons to create an artificial starscape, creating our own constellations and a twinkling Milky Way that should be visible for miles.

String of Diamonds* Long strings of LEDs will be suspended from a weather balloon. As the wind and participants move the cord, the string will appear to glitter.

Faeries* Much like the shoes hanging from our telephone wires, pairs of LEDs will be strung together and hung from trees in Queen's Park like couples of faeries.

(fly)light by Pearl Chen* An animated sphere of 500 green LEDs.
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But when we got to the muddy field to see the spectacle, there were only 2 balloons flying with some LEDs hanging from them and not much else. We took a few photos before heading home after what was still a great evening out.

one of the balloons with lights strung to it




streaky light effects




more streaky light effects

That night, a distraught sounding email was sent out by the Newmindspace organizers. At the beginning of the night 300 lights were stolen, costing the group over $500. I still can't believe that some disrespectful and inconsiderate idiots would do something so vile. There is a donation button on their homepage - if you live in Toronto and know about the events Newmindspace has put on in the past, maybe you'll consider a small donation to help them recover what they've lost, and encourage them to continue their positive projects.

Saturday was the most easy-going day I've had in a while. After a lazy start, I got a cart full of groceries then headed back out to shop for my Vegan Pal downtown. Somehow a few extra items just for me ended up in my basket at almost every store I went to. When I got home I had the urge to watch a movie. I'd heard about Me, You and Everyone We Know from Michelle and it was on Movies On Demand, so I put it on. I watched about 10 minutes, got a phonecall and then ended up turning the movie off in favour for a nap. A 3 hour nap. It was gloriously self-indulgent. The boy was working on a project while I snuggled up with a cat on the couch and woke up only to move to the bed. I'd been horizontal so long that my feet felt a little sore when I walked on them this morning!

Today we met up with a group of people for some photo takin'. This is a monthly group and our first time hooking up with them. The photos are uploaded to a flickr pool and are based on a theme. This month's theme: Toronto Transit. Here are two of my favourite shots from the day - though not related exclusively to Transit.

Birds on the (l)edge



Sculpture outside Union Station

I didn't get many inside shots because we were accosted by security, who told us photography is not allowed inside the station due to potential security risks - and they'd just got off a level 2 security alert so all personnel were on the lookout. In other words, there was a recent bomb threat. Yipes.