November 30, 2006
Withrow Park
The other half of my errand at the city archives the other week was to order more prints of historic photos of the area around our house.
So far, I haven't been able to find a photo with the house actually in it, though one has a fuzzy image of the house on the corner, next door but one.
Here they are:
Withrow Park — bob sled run
January 17, 1914
This toboggan run doesn't exist any more – the rink was built into the hill at the north end. It must have been perfect: a steep coast to build momentum, then a long flat slide. Much less challenging than the terrifying one in Broadview Park.
Withrow Park — Ice Hockey
February 10, 1923
This is the hardest to place. I think it's where the soccer field now is, more or less, looking southeast.
Withrow Park — skating
February 10, 1923
This is my favourite of the set. The photographer seems to be standing right at the corner of Carlaw and McConnell, looking southwest. There's more detail in the print than there is in this scanned image: the girl who has just fallen is saying something indignant to the photographer, and the girl standing just to the left is grinning broadly.
November 23, 2006
Torontoist
Torontoist has its ups and downs as an actual blog, but they have a really good thing going with user-submitted photos through Flickr.
Check this out.
Update: Tom's right - BoingBoing had it first.
November 20, 2006
November 18, 2006
Now we are one
Here's the birth story C. posted in December of last year. At the time, we referred to T. as the Snapper - now the Wuzzle and its variations (Wuzzlebean, Mr. Wuzzlebean) seem to be in a gentle transition to Little Bear. I'm DH:
My due date was Sunday, Nov. 13, and DH and I stayed sane by taking a trip out of the city to Cobourg, to check out an antiques-salvage store. We took a short walk on the beach afterwards, and watched the huge waves from Lake Ontario crashing mightily on the pier. We were both thinking about how much a little boy would have loved to sit in the car and have the waves almost breaking over the windshield. We'll have to go back in November one of these times.On Wednesday, I had a regularly scheduled weekly appointment with the midwives. I was to meet E, a different midwife, because K, my primary midwife, was scheduled to be off from Friday to Sunday. J, her student, was going to be on call, though, and she's close to being fully qualified, so she was our de facto primary midwife.
J did a vaginal exam and determined that my cervix was "on the move" – already 2-3cm dilated and 60% effaced. The baby’s head was at about -1 station. This was great progress, considering I hadn't thought much was going on. Though she didn’t say anything at the time, E told me later that her "midwives' intuition" told her she was going to be the one at my birth, that it would happen while K was away. I left feeling optimistic that things were happening.
I'd been having some contractions (very mild ones, as I was later to learn) at night on and off on Wednesday night. DH had a week of vacation to spend after the baby was born, and from Wednesday morning, he really wanted to start taking it. I was pretty adamant, though – I didn't know when the baby was coming, and wanted us to max out the time after the birth. Reluctantly, he went to work on Wednesday. It was the same story on Thursday, but he felt even more strongly about staying home. We compromised by making a plan that he would work Thursday but start the week's leave on Friday (which fit in better with his work schedule in any case).
So after I drove him to work on Thursday, I took a walk around Withrow Park to try and see if I could get anything happening. Nothing much was going on apart from the fact I was feeling tired out, so around 11.45am I snuggled in bed, put in some earplugs against the neighbour's piano practicing, and slept. Little did I know that DH had been calling to check on me about eight times, and – hearing no response – had become morbidly convinced that I was passed out in a pool of blood on the stairs or something. At around 1pm, he pounded upstairs, and I sleepily surfaced to see him ashen-faced in the door to the bedroom. (My first thought was that he'd been fired – why else would he be home in the middle of the day looking so upset?) I'm convinced in retrospect this was some kind of subconscious hormonal response – he felt the urge to return to the nest, as labour might be imminent or something.
Anyway, we both felt silly and laughed a lot, then decided that Thursday was obviously a write-off and we should just enjoy ourselves. We took a little snack and some tea and went to Cherry Beach, where a fine snow was beginning to fall. There are some great pictures of me – the final ones showing Thomas in utero – and of the winter sky.
Final picture of The Snapper in utero:
Still no action, though, despite all the fresh air and exercise, so we had a good dinner and I went to sleep around 11pm. My usual pattern at the very end of pregnancy was that I'd wake up because I was uncomfortable after about two to three hours of sleep, and have to get up to watch TV with a heating pad for a while. However, on this night, I slept for five hours straight. Then at 4am – 3:58 to be exact – I turned over and my waters broke in a huge gush. For a couple of days, I'd been experiencing increased discharge, and there had been times when I'd wondered if my waters had broken. But like so much else in labour, when the real thing happens, it's totally unmistakable. Even though I knew how much liquid could be involved, I was still stunned by the sheer quantity pouring out over the bed, the bathroom floor, the hallway. . . The fluid was clear and maybe a bit milky, which was good news – no meconium. I told DH to go back to sleep, and he promptly rolled over and did so.I wasn't experiencing any contractions, but paged J anyway, since they wanted to hear immediately when the water broke. She sleepily told me that since I wasn't having any contractions, she'd check in with me before her seminar at 9am. K was going off call in a matter of hours, so it would be E attending the birth.
After paging J, it was a few minutes past 4am, and I was way too excited to go back to sleep. Things I did in the next 20 minutes:
1. Listened to Sarah Harmer's I'm a Mountain
2. Made toast and drank a big glass of grape juice
3. Posted on The Perfect World about my water breaking
4. Started to watch an episode of CSI: NY I had on tape.At about 4.20am, I had my first real contraction; again, it was totally unmistakable. I thought contractions would be like really intense menstrual cramps: a louder version, as it were, of the same type of pain. These were a whole different pitch. I'd thought I would sit and watch TV through what I imagined was early labour; I made it through exactly one contraction before thinking "I need to get into the shower for some pain relief."
Still thinking remarkably lucidly, I realized that I didn't want to just run the shower endlessly, since we might need the hot water later for the pool. I quickly fell into a routine that I sat on the edge of the tub between contractions and then turned on the shower full blast as soon as one started. Things became intense fast: I started vocalizing ("Mmmmmmmaaaaaaahhhhhh") and pushing on the wall with each contraction, letting the hot water hit my lower back.
I plowed through the contractions on my own for about an hour, but even in my spaced out state I thought they were coming closer than five minutes apart. It was time to wake up DH to start timing them. Armed with a pad of paper from his workshop and a pen, we started taking down times. I had an interesting labour pattern: a minute-long contraction, followed by a short break, then a shorter contraction (20-30 seconds), followed by maybe 3-4 minutes of break. I couldn't talk or focus on anything during the contractions.
After about 20 minutes of timing, we decided to call J back. J sounded a bit skeptical on the phone – had things progressed so quickly to active labour? – but after hearing me drop the phone and start bellowing through two contractions a couple of minutes apart, she decided "it may be time to come and do an assessment." She also gave us the green light to fill the pool, which we did. It was difficult to be in the pool as it filled – the contractions were still coming, and I wanted to be back in the shower to cope with them. DH helped by providing some counterpressure for my back and keeping the hose on my back throughout the contractions.
The midwives arrived together at about 7:30am, and took me upstairs to the bedroom. J also suggested trying to lie down for a while to try to space out the contractions a bit – they were still in a bit of an atypical pattern, with shorter contractions quite close together. But lying down was agony – the pain was just crushing when I was on my back. I literally clawed my way past J, pulling myself up with her shirt, to get out of that position. There was absolutely no way I was lying down, ever.
The exam revealed I was at 4cms, which made me unreasonably disappointed – for some reason I'd fixated on 6cms as the number I'd be at. But I still felt I could cope, especially since the pool was a lot fuller by the time I came downstairs. I'd imagined sort of floating the pool with my back to the wall, as it were, but it turned out even that semi-lying position was agony – I had to be forward all the time. I sort of knelt or crouched in the bottom of the pool, and with each contraction, lunged out to cling to the back of a chair we'd placed close by.
The pool was less than half full by the time we ran out of hot water, so DH and midwives boiled up great vats of boiling water on the stove and very carefully poured them into the pool. (I have no recollection of this – from my perspective, the pool magically went from cool and half full to warm and full.) As DH said in our later email baby announcement, he'd never known what the connection was between childbirth and boiling water before.
The midwives encouraged me to stop making "mmmmm" sounds and focus on open sounds like "Ohhhhhhhhh." E kept telling me to vocalize lower and lower tones, and as a pain-relief trick, it really worked. I'd go "OHHH…Ohhhh…ohhh" down the scale, and I felt that as long as I had one more note in my range downwards, I could cope with the pain. The contractions continued to be only about 45 seconds to one minute apart, so I hardly had any break. During that time, I'd subside into the pool and let the water cover me – so soothing. J continue to monitor the baby, who was doing fine, despite the hard and close-together contractions.
Responding to hints from the midwives, DH made breakfast. I have a distinct memory of coping with a contraction while E sat reading the Globe, eating an English muffin and saying with almost a distracted air, "that's good…vocalize lower, Catharine." (DH reports that she seemed particularly absorbed by a 3,000-word feature on Conrad Black.)
After maybe an hour and a half, I experienced a contraction that forced a kind of low groan out of me and a pushing sensation. It was very intense and seemed to block out the world while it was happening. The midwives were alert to the change in my noises, and E told me not to push, but just to breathe through the sensation. That was difficult – I felt intellectually that it couldn't possibly be time to push, and was worried that I was in for hours of not pushing. However, after two more pushy-sounding contractions, E thought it might be time to do another exam.
J – I think somewhat surprised – pronounced me fully dilated with the baby's head descending. As DH later described it, at that point the midwives "beat to quarters." English muffins and Conrad Black were swept away, bags were broken into, equipment was set up everywhere. I have a recollection of J and E planning to call the back-up (baby) midwife, Tiffany, and one of them saying "tell her not to kill herself to get here, but step on it." Apparently Tiffany hadn't responded to their earlier heads-up page, probably because she thought I'd be in labour for a long time.
I pushed for only a few contractions in the pool, but when the midwives were set up, J helped me out of the pool and across the dining room to the birth stool. A mattress had made its unexpected appearance in the living room right behind it. (DH had wrestled it down from the third floor all by himself; the midwives didn't think I'd make up upstairs, like we'd planned, because the contractions were so close together.) I clung to the bottom of the birth stool like they showed me and started to push in earnest. DH was stationed behind me, and though I had no capability of communicating clearly with him at that point, I really needed him there. He squeezed my shoulders during each contraction, and the pressure was exactly what I needed.
Some women described pushing as feeling great, but for me, it felt a lot like work. I could feel my whole body squeezing down, and I had to kind of push into the pain. My face involuntarily contorted into a grimace and my hands clenched so hard they hurt. The midwives didn't count down the length of the contraction, but instead encouraged me to find my own rhythm. Generally I pushed for two to three intervals during each contraction. After every three or four contractions I would ask J anxiously "Is he coming down?" I had no real idea if any progress was being made. And even through my pushing haze, I was keenly aware of the midwives listening to the baby's heartrate, and was reassured when I kept hearing it was 120 or 130.
I pushed for maybe 45 minutes on the birth stool, during which time I pushed the baby down under my public bone. J encouraged me to reach down and feel his head, which felt utterly alien, like a squishy walnut. I felt curiously disconnected from it and just wanted pushing to be over. At that point, however, E announced that it was time to get off the birth stool and move to the mattress. She explained to me that it would be harder to control the baby's emergence on the stool and they wanted a more "controlled descent."
Well, I didn't much care about controlling the descent at that point: it meant moving, and it meant moving on to my back, which I'd already figured out was horrible. I think I said "I can't" or "I don't want to," but E took charge. Everyone helped me up, I took a step backwards and then found myself arranged on my back propped up by pillows.
The squeezing contractions didn't feel good on my back, though manageable, and it was hard to get into the groove of pushing in the new position. As the baby began crowning, the midwives were busily massaging my perineum with olive oil and applying hot compresses. The burning was intense – it honestly felt like someone was pressing a hot brand in a circle – and seemed to go on and on. I found it hard to push, but the midwives worked with that, getting me to do small pushes in between contractions and breathe through the hardest part of the contraction. Although it took much longer to get the head out, my perineum stretched beautifully without tearing, for which I'm incredibly grateful.
There was a sort of relaxation of pressure at one point, and J told me the head had been born. I felt very relieved and tired; I just thought I could stop at that moment. However, I had to push quite hard for the shoulders, and that last push almost wasn't in me. What made me do it was J asking Tiffany (who was charting in a chair in the corner), "has it been too long?" or something. Tiffany answered "It's OK – 30 seconds" and then, sometime later, "1 minute." Then I pushed my very hardest. J then said, "reach down and get your baby!". While I appreciated in retrospect their giving me the opportunity for what DH calls the "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar" moment, I just moaned "No!" and lay back and waited for someone to hand me him.
A second later, he was in my arms – surprisingly large, slippery, pink, and crying. The next ten minutes or so are a blur, and I find it hard to recollect exactly how I felt or what I said – but needless to say, it was very emotional. He had fair hair, which was unexpected. It just seemed amazing that he was here and labour was over, and I just wanted to sit and hold him for a while. I looked out the living room window and saw for the first time that it had been snowing: the year's first snow had arrived with the baby.
The Snapper, minutes old (about 18 hours after the above picture):
I was incredibly grateful to the midwives, who helped me deliver a 9lbs 9oz baby in about 5.5 hours over an intact perineum! It was a wonderful birth, and still makes me feel fiercely proud and happy to think about it.
Made from real dragon pork
The Times November 18, 2006Sausages affected by draconian trade laws
By Simon de Bruxelles
A SPICY sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned the manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.The sausages will now have to be labelled Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages to avoid any confusion among customers.
Jon Carthew, 45, who makes the sausages, said yesterday that he had not received any complaints about the absence of real dragon meat. He said: “I don’t think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages. We use the word because the dragon is synonymous with Wales.”
His company, the Black Mountains Smokery at Crickhowell, in Powys, turns out 200,000 sausages a year, including the Welsh Dragon, which is made with chili, leek and pork. A Powys County Council spokesman said: “The product was not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food.”
November 16, 2006
Starbucks, redux
I’m with Joe Clark – I think the Leslieville Starbucks is a good thing. Actually, I think the whole bien-pensant objection to Starbucks is a west-end affectation – ‘Drake, you ho,’ etc., etc. If you have as many Labradors as the east end does, the tall lattes naturally follow, and you have to buy them somewhere.
Besides, I like their coffee, though I refuse to play the whole tall/grande/venti/short game - 'Large and strong' seems to work.
However:
At Queen and Logan, the city should never have let them get away with removing the three bay windows from the second story of the building. They were a sort of commercial façade version of the Toronto residential bay and gable, and as far as I can see from about the same period. In general, Starbucks isn’t all that bad at site preservation, for a big company – doesn’t the King and George one still have a pressed tin ceiling? I'm too sleepy to notice, most Saturdays. (Update: Apparently not. It's a nice Victorian storefront, though.)
It’s bad from an architectural preservation point of view, but also bad for the new use – why wouldn’t you want three south-facing bay windows in a coffee shop? They would have been nice in white or off-white.
Before-and-after shots are at Joe’s site.
It's not a very interesting building, and now the new owners have taken off the only thing that could really be called an architectural detail.
Update: If I’m not totally mistaken, I think it’s at the extreme left of this 1934 picture of the Queen/Logan intersection, in a phase as a corner grocery. The bay windows seem to have been intended to go over an awning.
November 13, 2006
house research
I went to the city archives today to try to confirm the date of our house. We'd thought 1912 based on some very rushed research last summer, but I wanted to take a more careful look.
1912 seems fine, on sober second thought - the house doesn't exist in the 1911 city directory, and does in the 1912. If I'd had more time, I would have chased down the building permit, but building permits from that era are very minimal documents, from what I've seen.
Here's what the city directories say:
1912: Cochrane, Frank L.
1919: Cochrane, Frank L.
Ryam, Percy M.
1930: Cochrane, Mary E., Mrs.
Brash, Harold
1935: Cochrane, Mary E., Mrs.
Pidduck, Hester M., Mrs.
1940: Cochrane, Mary E., Mrs.
After 1940, city directories cease to be published, I think because of the wider use of phones.
So, for lack of a better idea: Frank Cochrane dies at some point in the 1920s, leaving the house to his wife, who then lives there through at least 1940, taking in lodgers. I assume the lodgers lived on the third floor, with a bedroom in the back room and a sitting room of some sort in the front room.
Next stop was the property tax rolls. Our part of Riverdale was assessed for the first time in 1913 for the 1914 property taxes, but as far as I can see Logan isn't on the rolls - perhaps I was in too much of a hurry.
In the 1918 assessment for 1919, howevever, I hit pay dirt:
Name: Cochrane, Frank L.
Age of Taxable Person: 33
British subject or alien: BS
Freehold or Tenant: F
Occupation, or S. M.W. or W*: Soldier
(ie., for women: single, married woman, or widow)
- In 1922, Frank Cochrane is listed as a clerk, and in 1925, Mary Cochrane is listed as the property owner, with no mention of Frank, which presumably narrows the range for his date of death.
If Cochrane is a soldier in 1918, then all kinds of records open up. The easiest score is his attestation at enlistment, all 600,000 of which are now on the Internet as image files. The beginng of his is above.
The two pages of the form are here and here.
Cochrane enlisted in the 116th Battalion in Uxbridge,on January 14, 1916 saying that he was 29 and a telegraph operator by trade. The 116th was raised in Ontario County, which is now Durham Region.
He had previously been in the 109th Battalion, between August 16, 1915 and November 24, 1915. The 109th was raised in Lindsay.
There are two documents I'd like to see:
So:
- Cochrane was able to buy the house as a 26-year-old telegraph operator. Other occupations along our stretch of Logan in 1918 are: Packer C.N.R., Conductor, Safemaker, Salesman, Painter, Cutler, Plumber, Clerk, Shipper, Foreman, Builder, Draftsman, Carpenter, Butcher, Mang. Agent, Asst. Mangr., Traveller.
- Why did he enlist twice in rural areas northeast of the city? It could be because of his background in Peterborough - he may have been trying to arrange things so he would serve with friends and relatives - but also possibly because it was easier to join in farm areas, where recruits were hard to come by.
Could he have had health problems? This would explain his first discharge, in a period when the CEF was sucking in recruits by the tens of thousands and conducting door-to-door searches for shirkers (Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War is a good resource for the city in this period) and perhaps also his early death.
November 11, 2006
Good fences, redux
C's long-running house project, which we've been at least discussing since before the Wuzzle was born, was finished yesterday - installing an iron fence of the same period as the house, more or less, around the front garden.
We found the fence in August in the architectural salvage yard in Cobourg, sent it out to be galvanized and painted, poured a bit of missing concrete ourselves, and finally had it installed yesterday. We don't know much about it, other than that it came from Eastern Europe. I'm looking forward to snow piling up on it.
What it needs now, of course, is a garden to go behind it.
Field and stream
You read it here first (unless you read it on BoingBoing):
Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!
I assume this would leave little mysterious feather tufts in the bird after the pellets had melted, tasting of lemon pepper, garlic, teriyaki or honey mustard, as the case may be.
November 04, 2006
Renovation highlights
March 8: Concrete removal begins from the front yard. March 22: I get to thicker concrete, and eventually give in and call the professionals. March 28: The demolition crew arrives, and is appalled by the nuclear-shelter grade concrete. The jackhammer man ignores cries of ‘This is my house!’ from Mr. Concrete. March 30: The demolition crew finishes, looking pale and drawn, leaving concrete fragments and piles of earth in their wake. April 18: The plywood floor, southern barrier and fake-wrought-iron railing come off, and the Withrow Park view opens up. April 20: The basement stairs are framed in. April 24: Framing finishes, and the end of the porch roof is opened up. I think the raccoons have moved (wrong). April 25: The historic face of the house is exposed. I think the raccoons have moved (wrong). April 29: The porch ceiling is exposed. The raccoons have not moved, but their damage to the insulation becomes clear. May 1 (a): The porch ceiling comes down, covering me with raccoon detritus. May 1 (b): An adorable baby raccoon is rescued. May 2: Insulation under the bay window. May 9: The porch ceiling is finished. May 10: The raccoons, who have now moved in next door, are driven away by CFRB. May 17: The end of the porch roof is covered. May 30: Work on the front of the porch: 1 May 31: Work on the front of the porch: 2 July 25: The upper porch is finished and painted. August 9: C. buys her fence. August 17: The new porch floor is painted and installed. Aug. 23: Railings are framed in, and balusters cut and painted. Aug. 29: Balusters are installed, and the new face of the house becomes clear. October 8: Garden, part 1: We have 600 pounds of horse manure, and brace for double-digging. October 15: Garden, part 2: The double-digging is done; not as grueling as expected. October 23: Garden, part 3: A large collection of stray plants have a home, and the bulbs are covered with chicken wire.
Scots wha' hae wi' Wallace bled
A young corporal, back home after being wounded in Afghanistan, where he was a rifleman and infantry company piper, wants to know if anybody else wants an arid-pattern pixellated camouflage bagpipe bag cover, like the one he carried in battle at Panjwaii. They can be custom-made in Petawawa, for $65 or so. Now you know.
(The army.ca discussion board is one of the more frustrating Canadian things on the Web – as a wise friend once pointed out, the people who would be giving moderators grey hairs on most other sites actually are the moderators. Also, they all loathe the media, which I don’t take personally, but gets tedious. The noise-to-signal ratio is very high, to put it mildly.)