It started off fairly badly on Thurs. I left work early to go find the bus terminal for Greyhound/Megabus to pick up my father-in-law. It turns out that the station still has lockers, which kind of floored me. I have bus lockers play a small role in a short play I wrote, but I didn't imagine I would see them still in use. (Even here, you couldn't just stick something in them for months on end -- only overnight. I think ultimately I had to switch this over to a bank deposit box, though I can't recall at the moment.)
Since so few people stick around after the bus pulls in, they closed down the arrivals area 4 years ago.** But Greyhound has no way to track the actual arrival time, and the drivers don't even check in, so they couldn't even tell me for certain whether the bus from Detroit had arrived! I find that simply incredible. I didn't ask about Megabus, but I suspect they have a bit more data on their buses and drivers. I think Greyhound does in the States as well, so I am just absolutely baffled by this. Anyway, after 2 or 3 periodic passes through the departure area, I went outside to wait for the bus. As you might imagine, it was cold. And I was not very happy about all this. In fact, it was so cold, I only could bear to do a bit of reading (the departure lounge was just too far from the arrivals area, given that there was no good information on buses actually arriving, so I had to wait outside). Ultimately, the bus pulled in about 90 minutes late, mostly due to very inefficient border crossing inspections (a hand-search of all luggage of every passenger!) and getting slowed down by a Thanksgiving Day parade in Detroit!
After I got my father-in-law home and settled and we had dinner, I tried to watch Nebraska (for the second time!). This time I got about 1/3 of the way through and just felt like I was slumming it, and I stopped. I'll have more to say on this later. But it was a bit of a minor disappointment. As far as I can tell, some of the stuff that was supposed to "couriered" over here didn't make it for some reason, and my daughter hates the swim cap that did make it over. So that was more than a little frustrating.
Friday was another long day at work and I got home quite late. I had mostly finished up the Johnston translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is ok, though from my brief perusal, I like Falen's better. The truth is, it is such a common plot, that most of the artistry comes from the poetry, which of course is impossible to translate correctly. I'll have a bit to say about the duel that is so central to the plot in another post (though I am trying to finish up reading Chekhov's The Duel first). On the other hand, I've been quite taken by Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, and I am nearly done reading through those. So I guess that has been a positive development. (While Herzen's My Past and Thoughts was interesting, I think it was way oversold by Isaiah Berlin and my expectations were just too high, whereas Turgenev is meeting and occasionally surpassing my expectations. What has been paying off to some degree is having a much better grounding in the whole milieu that Turgenev was writing from, and I am sure this will deepen my reading of Fathers and Sons considerably.) Another positive is that the landlord finally came by and installed the railing to the basement.
Sat. we had a look at a 3 bedroom house just north of Pape Elementary School. It really wasn't as nice as I hoped and I thought the asking price was on the high side. Then I found out that this was a seller who was trying to start a bidding war and definitely expected to sell over asking (this is a technique that I despise that fortunately only seems to have taken root (in the U.S.) in New York and San Francisco). While I have known intellectually that it is going to be tough to find a place to buy in this neighbourhood, or ideally a bit further north in Riverdale proper, it's now starting to sink in. Of course, I have more resources than many, so we'll probably find something eventually, but it will be more than I want to pay, for certain. That (and a general lack of sleep) are probably the main sources of my discontent this weekend.
Well, there was another major issue and that is Bell went out around noon on Sat. and remained out until 5 pm Sunday. Some box outside the house blew out. This meant no phone, tv or internet for two days, and of course my work requires far more contact than that. I went back to the library on Sat. in order to use their wireless. As I was heading home, a bus was pulling up and I decided I might as well go downtown to work, so I did that for 3 or so hours. I ended up staying so close to 7 that I decided to swing by the City Hall to see them light the tree. I hadn't expected so many people. It was quite unpleasant actually, and then I was sort of trapped on the upper level. They took forever to light the tree -- 7:30, when 7:15 would have been far more reasonable. Then it was a huge problem getting out and when the police turned up for crowd control they actually made it considerably worse. It literally took another 30 minutes to get down the stairs and across the street to catch the streetcar. I was not at all impressed with the way the city handles crowd control, and I will avoid that place in the future for anything involving a concert or fireworks. I'm sure that it was made worse by them still not being done with the construction at Nathan Phillips Square. I was pretty starved by the time I finally made it home.
In general, I stayed up too late on Sat., which lead to the other disappointment of the weekend. I had planned to leave close to 8 am on Sunday to get to Young People's Theatre to see about the discounted tickets for James and the Giant Peach. Ultimately, I left at 8:40 or so, and didn't arrive until 9:15. There was a long line that moved extremely slowly. I guess there were 10-15 people ahead of me when they said all the tickets were gone. I was majorly bummed. It felt like such a scene from a Charlie Brown movie, and had I left on time I would have had those tickets. Fortunately, I had told my kids that they were only going if I could get the tickets (and they were just as happy to spend more time with their granddad). I can look into getting the discount tickets later in the month, though there are certainly no guarantees there will be any available. That actually reminds me that I have to look into getting my daughter into swimming classes. I think registration starts Dec. 6, so I have just a bit more time.
I went to Eaton Centre and was kind of disappointed in the various sales. I even thought the sleds at Canadian Tire were not very good quality, so I might as well just get something just as cheap from Walmart where I don't have to haul it so far home. (I guess one positive is that I am basically done shopping for b-day stuff for my daughter and Xmas presents for my son.) The clothes shopping did not go well at all, however. I was just astounded that 70% or so of the dress shirts at Hudson Bay Company were fitted or slim cut, when I hardly see young men wearing dress shirts at all. I found one shirt in my size. In general, shopping for clothes is extremely dispiriting for me, and then I start getting frustrating that my current job/lifestyle is not supportive of getting in shape at all...
I went home and took a nap (in frustration) after finding that the cable and internet were still out. Around 3 I woke up and thought I would try Sears over on Coxwell. Well, it turns out that it was just a mail drop place -- in other words you could have stuff sent there from Sears.ca but there was no store at all. This was just too much. I went home and found that the cable and internet was back on, and tried to get caught up. As frustrating as the whole outage has been, I will admit that it was much, much worse trying to get service restored in the UK and even in Vancouver, where Shaw was pretty useless. I have to admit that when I see it all written out, it strikes me that it was a pretty lousy weekend with far more downs than ups. I probably should cut this off here. The next posts will be far more focused on Turgenev and other Russians, and that should be a bit more uplifting.
Edit:
There was actually a fairly innocuous comment here that turned out to be nothing but spam. I'll try to be better about monitoring that in future. In response to the query about other recommended reading, I wrote: Do you mean the duel in Russian literature, or something else? In addition to Eugene Onegin and Chekhov's The Duel, duels feature prominently in Dostoevsky's Demons and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It is also somewhat notable when a duel does not take place in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I should be able to post on this next week or so.
* Actually my left ear has been bothering me for over a week. It gets a bit better, then seems to close up again. I definitely will have to have it looked at pretty soon. That is a major reason for my being out of sorts as well.
** This is just one of several examples of how Toronto is just a bit shabbier than I remembered. Conditions at UT's Robarts Library are another. I think Toronto is definitely constrained by a fierce anti-tax movement spearheaded by its outer (essentially suburban) wards. While Toronto might not be considered such a global city had it never been amalgamated, I think on the whole it would have been better not to have been forced together, particularly since Mike Harris intentionally drew the boundaries in a perverse way to add far more suburban residents into the city than one would ever have done were it not for political payback.
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