December 28, 2006
Trees, part 2
Two of the trees in the October, 1913 picture below are definitely still there. The perspective in that photo no longer exists, because of trees there now, though.
A couple of others near Carlaw and McConnell are probable matches, but I'm most confident about these two:
(1) is one of the large trees which were transplants in 1913 - in the photo below, it's supported by planks. It's now just to the west of the older park house, which didn't exist when it was transplanted. It has a very characteristic thick branch pointing off to the north, which makes identification easy.
(2), a maple near the front door of Holy Name, which faces Carlaw, is an interesting case - it's already a mature tree in 1913. My theory is that it was planted in maybe 1880 to shade Carlaw when it was still a country sideroad. There are a couple of very old maples on Carlaw above Gerrard - there's an enormous one in a front yard at Carlaw and Langley, and I wonder if they weren't originally rural shade trees.
December 27, 2006
APPJ 440
We've been getting around to replacing the car for a long time, and today we finally got our act together and bought a gently used 2006 Matrix. All the Matrices on offer are light grey, for some reason that makes sense in Cambridge. We traded in my ancient Corolla for $1,238.74, which is a tribute to C's negotiating skills.
I'm very fond of the Corolla, but when I say it was dirty, I mean that there were sprinklings and small piles of earth here and there from garden expeditions. A small friend, at the time aged maybe two and a half, looked at the passenger seat some time ago, and said solemnly: 'I think your car is a little bit dirty.' Gardeners' cars are, I think.
A car accumulates all kinds of odd things: there was a watch and four tire pressure gauges in the glove compartment. The gas cap is a different shade of blue from the rest of the car because of a mistake I made in the Canadian Tire automotive paint section, and the right front bumper has a munch in it from a mistake I made turning a corner.
There is also a persistent smell of dog, strong, faint or dormant depending on the season. One reason to sell the Corolla now, apart from wanting to go through the winter with a new car, is because the dog smell is fainter. All the cars of my childhood smelled of dog, and I always took it for granted, but it has been made clear to me many times that that isn't a universal assumption, and I yield to the majority.
It was a car that was tolerant of being ridden hard and put away wet, saw us through all kinds of dramas and crises (if memory serves, I drove it to my father's funeral), and it certainly didn't owe us any money.
December 23, 2006
Trees
I know less than I should about this sort of thing, but some of the enormous ancient maples in our part of Riverdale - the ones with a diameter over three feet - seem like they must have been planted before the Playter land sale in 1912, which triggered much of the development on and around the Danforth.
As far as I can tell from the city archives site, the answer seems to be that the builders worked around existing trees in many cases, unlike the common practice now. Here are some examples. Images link to larger versions on the archives site -
May 11, 1912 - New houses on Carlaw seen across Withrow Park - a large tree can be seen behind one of them. I think the streets on either side are Wroxeter and Strathcona.
February 24, 1913 - Logan at (I think) Grandview, seen from the middle of Withrow Park. These houses would all have been new. It's hard to see, but there's a fairly mature tree at extreme right in front of a house on Logan.
February 24, 1913 (again) - Looking northeast across Withrow Park toward Carlaw and McConnell. There are at least two mature trees visible near the corner of the park, but a third is harder to see - see below.
October 1, 1913 - Withrow Park under construction. This is the most revealing picture of the set. Again, we're looking across the park toward Carlaw and McConnell, from north of the modern west playground. At centre-left and centre-right, we have really large freshly planted trees, 25 or 30 feet tall, which I think are silver maples.
If you have the budget, this is one way of getting a mature tree cover in a hurry. I'd be interested to see if these two trees still exist. At right, we have a man and team of horses filling in a garden bed with topsoil.
This area actually floods all the time - I have the impression there's a natural spring there.
January 17, 1914 - In this shot, what looked like one tree south of Holy Name (centre) turns out to be two, fairly close together.
December 16, 2006
a better way
Ian Stevens, the person behind the crazedmonkey.com blog, has been tinkering with ways to integrate the TTC system map with GoogleMaps ever since the API was released last year. The latest version, which somehow overlays the .pdf official map with the GoogleMap of the city, is just the slickest thing ever, and much more useful than the map on the TTC's site.
I'd need to understand the mechanics of .pdf files much better than I do to see how it was actually done - Stevens seems to have been able to peel off the black background on the official map and replace it with a translucent one, while also linking it to the 905-land system maps.
For each station, he includes a link to the wonderfully obsessive ttcrider.ca station diagrams, which show which car you should get on for maximum efficiency for every single station in the system, in both directions. (Eastbound to Chester: third from the back will unload you right beside the stairs.)
The next step is a GoogleMap-based trip planner. Google seems to want to get into the interactive transit map business, although it’s only done small systems so far. The largest place covered is Pittsburgh.
The TTC has been flirting with GoogleTransit, but an article in the Star today makes it clear that it’s just beginning a very cumbersome, indefinite bureaucratic process which may or may not involve Google at some future point. It was under discussion in March, and now it’s … under discussion.
My bet is that some bright kid in a basement will come up with a working model first. As with its marketing fiasco (link, link, link), it's not clear when the TTC will catch up with its fans.
Update: Some folks in Seattle remind us that GoogleTransit is still in beta:
I'm trying to get from my home (Columbia City) to my work (Bellevue/Factoria). Normally I would just walk two blocks down to Rainier and catch the 7 running north which would take me to I-90 where I'd catch another bus across the bridge to Factoria and walk a couple of blocks to work.Instead, Google has me walking about 10 blocks roughly NW, then catching a bus at Rainier and Genessee that takes me SSE to Rainier and Holly ("as the crow flies" rather than by following any pesky street grid) before taking an abrupt 170 degree turn to the NNW and flying (apparently) directly to Belltown. At this point I'm to transfer to a boring old terrestrial bus which takes me the rest of the way to my destination.
While this sounds like an interesting trip, it takes about three times as long as my, admittedly not as exciting, normal commute.
Beta indeed.
December 10, 2006
for better or for wurst
We finally found the time to try out the sausage-making attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer. We had a hard time sourcing the casings - it turns out that there's a butcher out at Danforth and Woodbine who sells them.
Making sausages is a two-person job, it turns out, with one person feeding the contents into the filler and the other shaping the sausages as they're filled. They look pretty plausible, if we do say so ourselves.
