Documenting our worlds with cheap cell phone cameras.

Last year Michelle and I lost our kind, beautiful friend Kelley to colon cancer. While she was still alive, Kelley led her team, Kelley’s Angels, in the North York General Hospital’s Underwear Affair. They all dressed as Angels and rocked that walk. During the walk, Kelley and the team decided on the next year’s theme: Kel’s Angels. Time to get tough and gear up in our biker best.

Kelley didn’t make it to see this year’s walk, but the rest of us carried out that plan anyway, with a team twice the size of last year’s.

We geared up in our best leathers.

Teamed up with some wicked women.

And enjoyed one of the most beautiful days we have had this summer, walking and chanting and cheering along Toronto’s Beaches Boardwalk.

Together the Angels raised over $30,000 this year to help fund treatments and, hopefully, find cures for cancers below the waist.

This will hopefully be the final installment of the Hellhole Apartment Series. We have officially moved into our new apartment and tonight will be our Farewell to the Crack Den Party. Then I hope to never see that building again. So, in the spirit of Official Farewells, some more things I will not miss about our old apartment:

The management’s habit of stating the obvious:

And all the really positive language (and by “positive,” I mean “obscene”)
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I call this series “Crap I Found in the Stairwell (while walking down eighteen flights of stairs because the elevator is broken)”

Please note, this isn’t even the entire series, as I accidentally deleted half of them in a computer disaster.

You could furnish an entire apartment with the garbage people are too lazy to carry down to the dumpsters. There are…

Televisions!

Computers!

Bookcases!

Clothing!

Hunky male prostitutes!

Umm… portions of Ikea furniture and/or postmodern orange stairs to match the gray concrete ones:

Cigarettes and beer!

And lovely wall illustrations criticizing said cigarettes and beer (the conversational tone of these messages really creates a feeling of community, I think)

BONUS! From the garbage chute: Lovely art work!

Since I moved to Toronto nearly ten years ago, I have lived in the same neighbourhood. I have loved it dearly, defended it against its critics, and sworn that I would never feel more at home anywhere else.

Well now it is time to test that theory. That’s right, I am moving out of St. James Town. It’s a bit scary, but also exciting.

Things have changed around here. I am not going to go into it, because I could spend a year lamenting. Instead, I am just going to focus on my own building, and provide a little pictorial explanation of why it is that I am leaving this place.

Take, for example, the consideration my neighbours shower on one another. Imagine you’re out in the rain, it’s windy, your umbrella takes a beating… Why take the umbrella upstairs or dispose of it in the trash bin behind the building when you could just leave it in the lobby?

And when you do go upstairs, you want to leave a little something pretty to brighten your neighbour’s day. How about a bit of artwork?

Even more considerate than my neighbours, however, are the superintendents and maintenance staff. When they are fixing up those old apartments after a tenant has moved out, many of whom have done so recently for some mysterious reason, the maintenance crew doesn’t forget about the needs of the remaining tenants. They take out the fixtures, the toilet, the countertops, and leave them in the hallways for a week in case anyone else in the building might want them!

Sometimes they even leave the stuff in one of the elevators, in which, since at least one of them is broken at any given time, space is at a premium.

And because they know that their tenants appreciate art (see above), they even make sure that the garbage area out back is aesthetically pleasing.

Why shell out cash for the missing trap doors on the garbage bins when you can prevent overflow with a broken crate, or, if you have it on hand, a Picasso print!

Freakin’ beeeautiful. And when the tenants have again expressed their natural artistic talents in the elevators, our gracious landlords don’t suppress their individuality by taking it down. After all, we’re all art aficionados here!

Brings a tear to my eye. I’m going to miss this place. Except without the missing.

Queen West is mostly a nightmare of gentrification, but in between the clubs and boutiques you will find it is still full of relics of the old city.

You don’t see many phone booths at all around town anymore, let alone these receiver-shaped phones.

And you know it’s an oldie by the price—most phone booths have gone to 50 cents by now. I remember when they switched to 35 cents in 1998 and I was pissed.

The Big Bop closed this last January after 25 years on that corner. The building is historical and won’t be knocked down for any developments, barring any mysterious fires like the one that coincidentally occurred just after a strip of buildings wanted for condo redevelopment had been designated historical landmarks in 2008 (which the police took all of one afternoon to investigate…hmmm). The Big Bop was a cornerstone of Toronto’s club history. You can learn more about it and the historical context it occupied with this little video farewell to the place.

The Punk likes to sit in the window in the morning, plotting our ultimate demise.

She bats her pretty eyelashes and looks innocent.

But do not be fooled by her fuzzy little face and gentle demeanor…

She is plotting world domination.

And she is not amused.

Well by now Spring has pretty much sprung here in Toronto, but a few weeks ago the ice was still clinging to the grass, which made the discovery of rose petals randomly scattered on the walk in front of my apartment building all the more stark.

Happy Spring!

Spring is here!

Goodbye miserable gray chilling wet Toronto weather!

Some farewell shots:

We had a great time at the Olympic Games in Vancouver! We saw a couple of women’s hockey games live and watched pretty much everything else on any number of screens in bars around town. The whole city was abuzz, without having that overcrowded, frenetic feel that usually gives me agita when going to these kinds of internationally popular events. Overall, I would have to say Vancouver did a pretty good job.

And it didn’t hurt that I had some wonderful people with whom to share the journey!

We’re heading off to Vancouver!! We have properly invested in Olympic finery from the Bay.

The Bay mannequins wear their Team Canada gear…while apparently sitting on group toilets.

Off we go!!! See you in a couple of weeks!