Sunnyside Mall.
PS12 - Bedford III
Sunnyside Mall.
This guy asked for Parcel Pick-up and then took the employees away
with him.
I think there should be a rule that says, if you're going to drive
a Hummer (even an H2), you have to use it for more than groceries and/or
taking the kiddies to school.
Limit 12? Yes, it's the far reaching effects of the Soda Shortage.
=) It's hard to get enough Pepsi to feed your family nowadays!
My <sob> camera... can't manually set anything... I even used 800
speed film here.
I kind of like winter, but I'm not keen on shovelling snow, or the
bad roads, or the lack of (overtly) pretty girls...
Okay, I admit that these pictures are getting a bit repetitive. Part
of the blame lies in the long delay between PS11
and PS12.
My stepbrother and his friend preparing an area to play hockey.
I slipped going through here a bunch of times. I usually hurt myself
a bit.
This shelter's a tad drafty.
Some birds making good use of the Moirs Mill Pond before good ol' Sobeys
fills it in.
Probably the only decent picture I've taken in months.
I think this is a grass alley. I'm not sure what it was a forethought
for.
Village Centre, in the early morning. In the evenings it's filled with
cars, trucks, and teenagers. Ah, I miss youth. But I never hung out with
people when I was that age, so I wonder if I ever have been young.
Councillor Goucher's elevated office.
A stream runs right underneath the building.
Our cat.
Curled back up. He gets suspicious of me sometimes; it's hard to allay
his fears.
The Sun Tower.
The infamous balcony over the Sackville River.
I hate these things!
My mom doesn't even try to keep the squirrels away from the bird feeders.
It's just ridiculous. The squirrels are getting stupid now, too; you could
just reach out and GRAB AND SQUEEZE AND CHOKE THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT
OF THEM if you wanted to. I've been tempted to give them a good swat once
in a while, but I restrain myself because I don't want to hurt them and
I'd probably get infected with some Squirrel Disease if I touched one.
My alma-matter, Sandy Lake Seventh-Day Adventist Academy. I've written
disturbingly little about my SLA experiences, although it was there that
I discovered creative writing. I wrote a few things that were well received
in oral readings - especially pieces called "The Kicker" and "The Acid
Avenger." I need to dig those pieces up and put them on the website, but
a lot of the excitement of the readings would dissappear. Heck, maybe I
should just write them again.
SLA was mentioned a bit in "Mr. Barry Has Nothing On Me," and did inspire three completely fictitious works: "A Mistake," "Joey," and "What Resides." "Joey" is a good story but the other two ramble and just kind of suck. Characters from SLA also made it into "The CPA Revolution" and probably too many of its prequels / sequels. Now, though, I've kind of let go of the horrors of being there (though, as bad as it was sometimes, Bedford Junior High was worse), and I appreciate the positive experiences more than I dwell on the negative. "Joey" was a good story to vent with, but when I came back to do "What Resides," I had to bog it down with all kinds of rambly junk to make it different from "Joey." I'm really sick of writing workshops now.
One of the streams feeding Sandy Lake.
Farmers Road, Bedford
Some pictures taken on one of my foot journeys from Sunnyside to home.
Meadowbrook Drive, Bedford
I love Oldsmobiles. I hope GM doesn't shut the brand down. The problem
with Oldmobile, though, is that it's stuck in a weird niche, or rather,
it doesn't really have a niche at all. At GM you have your Chevrolet division
which emphasizes power, performance, and dependibility; you have the Pontiac
brand which delivers the same things in a cutting-edge style; you have
Buick which is a little upscale, and then Cadillac which is a lot
upscale (Cadillac is being reinvented as I write this, and I like the results
so far.). (Of course you also have the GMC brand, but it tends to be reserved
for trucks and white-box vans.) Oldsmobiles are better than ever now -
those new Auroras are something else - and they've come a long way from
the days of the Ninety-Eight (a good car - my mother has one - but a little
blah), but for some reason people are overlooking something like an Oldsmobile
Aurora for things like Toyota Avalons and value-line Lexus and Acuras.
I think people should give Oldsmobile a new chance because, well, if driving
a Chevrolet Cavalier versus a Toyota Corolla makes the Corolla seem loose
and pokey, imagine what the difference between the Aurora and Avalon would
be!
Granted, I don't consider sport-utes the forté of Oldsmobile.
The girl who does these driveway drawings might be turing towards activisim.
One day I walked by here, and she had traced two long, vertical, hollow
boxes. The boxes were labelled "China" and "Canada" in cursive writing
at their tops. In the "Canada" box was a triple-scoop ice cream cone. In
the "China" box was... nothing. (I didn't take a picture because I was
short of film.) I was thinking, "This would not be a veiled political comment,
would it?" =) Actually, she probably just didn't finish her drawing - I
imagine she might have put in some dish involving chopsticks in the "China"
box. Her chalk was still in her bucket in the driveway.
This is amusing. Yes, that's a Ford Mustang being used as a Driver's
Ed car. (It's like Young Drivers has gone from being the hallmark of safety
to being an expensive route for rich kids to learn to drive in the car
their daddy will get them when they get their liscence.) I said to the
girl driving, "We didn't have such fancy Driver's Ed cars when I was a
kid!" Anyway, I hope she doesn't drive up onto the curb. Such an action
failed three people consecutively just before my own driver's test,
which I passed even though I hesitated at a flashing green, almost stopped,
then went through when the people on the other side weren't moving. I lost
15 points for that, but the guy testing me felt pretty good about my driving
overall, and, in his words, I "passed myself."
People I've talked to complain that when they've gone to take their driver's tests that they've been failed for things that (in their minds) are insignificant, such as going 60 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. Well, DUH! If you're going to break the freaking law, you ought to fail! Keep your damn eye on the spedometer, stop on all the stop lines, make sure your wheels are pointing in the right direction when you go to pull out, and use your mirrors for more than just vanity! I don't care if your father taught you how to drive - I guaran-damn-tee you that if any of us were to be randomly given a drivers test just from our current driving, we'd fail! People who say that they should be tested on how they normally drive are idiots. Do you know that nine out of ten people think they're better than average drivers? Anyway, take a damn defensive driving course, and your instructor (if he's any good like mine was, I had a great, though a tad cynical, instructor by the name of Mr. McCloud) will be sure to tell you that if you dare nudge the speed limit (limit), you'll be assessed a "Dangerous Action" and the examiner will tell you to turn around and head back. Actually, he or she may drive you back.
I'm not a very good driver - especially in intersections. But I do stop on the stop lines. It's an ingrained habit now.
Miss this bus, and you'd better bring a sleeping bag to the stop -
it makes one trip each way a day. This route actually used to pass through
my 'neighbourhood' but they cut the service since no one was using it.
Well, I'd be using it now, but probably not that much because I
tend to go out on random outings when I'm done whatever it is I have to
do downtown, and I enjoy long walks such as the one I'm taking from Sunnyside
to my house when I take this picture.
Spring. That magical time of year when a young man's fancy turns to
love and freshly-surfaced gravel streets.
When I go for long walks in my winter shoes, the dye from the inside
gets all over my socks.
The waterline.
Hey! That's a fire hydrant! No parking, now!
I'm wondering how this car even got out here, let alone suffer such
an unfortunate accident. Was there a monster truck rally out here or something?
The brush grew back fast!
Me, shortly after a nasty fall on a path just off the trail. I got
myself lost trying to take a shortcut through the gravel pit to avoid having
to follow the waterline all the way to the Hammonds Plains Road and back
in again. I made it to the gravel pit, and I took the right path out of
the gravel pit, but then I made a wrong decision at the following cluster
of paths and I kept running down one rough one in particular, and then
back to the decision point, and then back down, and then back to the decision
point, and then back down, and then "I think I might be lost, but at least
I know the way back to the gravel pit where I can exit through another
driveway and get back on the second leg of the pipeline." (where I was
before taking the shortcut path to the gravel pit) I had just watched a
documentary on Search and Rescue situations and techniques, and it was
filmed in Nova Scotia because Nova Scotia has the highest rate of missing
persons per capita in the country. Now that's reassuring! But it taught
me to be skeptical of my feeling that I know the way, and it helped me
make the final decision to backtrack to where I knew the way, even though
that would mean a much longer walk. So I got back to the decision point
and looked around and then something clicked. I ran down another little
path and then - BINGO! I found the right path back to the first leg of
the waterline. Boy, that was scary. Did you know that Search and Rescue
sometimes finds people wandering through neighbourhoods, convinced
that they know the way back to where they started? They also figured out
why young children don't respond to searchers calling their name - when
the kids are picked up, they tell the volunteers that there were a bunch
of "one-eyed giants" after them. Ah, a bunch of volunteers in the woods
at night with lights on their heads. Kids, if you're reading this, they're
trying to help you.
You can see I've got a fair bit of mud on the left side of me. You can also just make out a red spot in my left hand; I got opened up pretty badly right there. Anyway, my story is pretty anticlimatic, and the scar is almost gone now, but you can probably catch this great documentary on The Nature of Things sometime.
A duck and a horse. Only one of them is our pet. Neither is really
appropriate, if you ask me. Oh, by the way, that duck is really, really
stupid. Or stubborn. I'll be driving the van down the hill and he'll just
tentatively waddle in front, not really wanting to move out of the way,
and in fact staying so close to the van that I can't even see him over
the hood, so I have to creep down really slowly, stopping frequentely,
and honking the horn. It's almost worth the hassle, though, because it's
really cool to see a duck fly up from a standing start just a few feet
in front of you. They're like little Harrier jets.
The next few pictures I took are from an excursion up to (and over) Jack's Lake, and back down into West Bedford again through a far-away leg of the waterline.
Yikes, someone had a spill of some sort here.
The walkway over a marsh next to Jack's Lake.
Jack's Lake.
I'd say this thing's about due for repairs, but it got me safely across.
Just walk along the middle underbrace there, because if you walk to either
side of it, a board may break on you.
I decided to save the rest of the Jack Lake trail system for another
day, and I took a utility path up and out to find this strange road - not
the waterline like I expected. (See a trend here?) I'll have to find out
where this goes someday.
Taking a 'right' on that new road, I found it intersected with the
waterline. Nearby, I found a little road from the waterline to the highway.
Maybe it goes underneath the highway and leads to the upper Basinview Drive
area, I thought. I was expecting to come out on the highway in sight of
Exit 3, but instead I came out on the hill leading down to Exit 4. I had
gone FAR farther up into the hills than intended - or, more accurately,
I wasn't aware that the path I intended to walk would take me this far.
There's something awesome about walking out of the woods onto a 100(400 if you're in Ontario)-series Highway.
213, under sunny skies and dark clouds.
This is impressive to see fully extended.
A kind fellow from the Power Company inspecting our line.