Sick of Snow

So very, very tired of all this snow.  It is seriously messing up my life.  Last Sunday, they cancelled The Merchant of Venice in advance.  I mean better knowing it was cancelled than showing up and finding it was cancelled.  That would have been worse for sure.

The view of my back porch, which looks like it won't be clear of snow until April or something.

Actually, snow has been messing up my outings for even longer, since we had the first big snowfall on Wed. (so 10 days or so ago).  I was over at Hart House for a mentorship event.  It became pretty clear early on that most people had bailed.  I think in the end only 3 or 4 mentees showed up and maybe 10 mentors.  I talked to a couple of the staff attached to Hart House, mostly about Toronto (and Hart House) as it was in the early 90s.  All 3 of us lived in the East End, which seems pretty common.  (UT employees that were around since the 80s are more likely to be living in the Annex, but that was already a bit out of reach by the 90s...)  I called to make sure that the jazz show was going on at the Rex.  They thought it was a bit odd I would call, but I vividly recall checking with the Green Mill in Chicago to make sure they were open, only to walk over in the middle of a huge blizzard to find they were closed.  To be fair, that blizzard was several times worse than what we have faced this past week or so.

So I went back to work for about an hour, then went over to the Rex.  It was a sparse crowd, maybe 60% of the front area was full.  I did consider going back on Thurs. but then got caught up with other things.

Anyway, what makes the Merchant of Venice cancellation so upsetting is that they did schedule a make up performance (for today incidentally) but I couldn't move things around to make it work, and the other two nights last week I could have gone, they were sold out (and made very little attempt to shuffle things around and squeeze me in).  Now I don't care much for the Merchant of Venice at all, but I suspect they did a fine job (and Shakespeare Bash'd is down to just a single real performance per season).  So I am feel pretty raw about it.  Just in general all this snow is making me even more surly than normal.

I did debate going to the Rex on Sunday but just stayed home instead.  (Probably the smart choice.)  I think Fantasia was playing at TIFF, and I strongly debated going to that, but decided to skip it.  (I'm not entirely sure whether they went ahead with the show or also cancelled.  An awful lot of venues and museums called things off on Sun.  So I was particularly glad I had been criss-crossing the city on Sat., which I may get around to writing up at some point.)

There wasn't much playing at the movies (or at least that I wanted to see) on Family Day.  TIFF was completely shut down, which I thought was odd.  I was not really sure I wanted to leave the house to get over to the Rex, but I did in the end.  (The bus service was reliably terrible per usual, and I briefly turned around, then trudged on up to Danforth.)  It was actually a CD release party, and the group included Mike Murley, Neil Swainson and Reg Schwager, so I'm glad I went in the end.

I was able to get pretty much everything I wanted to yesterday, though again no thanks to the TTC.  I went swimming (which I hadn't managed to last Sat. because the 506 streetcar was delayed by 15 minutes).  They actually are rerouting the Dundas streetcar, so I had to walk to Parliament, where I just missed a bus, and the next one wasn't even showing up on the tracker!  So I had to walk over to the Distillery District.  I was not in a great mood by that point, even though the sun was out and it was a bit warmer.  I couldn't believe how terrible the service was at the little bakery right by the entrance to the Distillery, so I stomped out and dropped in at Corkin.  Corkin hadn't changed its displays up at all, so I went over to Thomas Landry.  

I liked this piece a lot, though not quite enough to buy it (at their price), even though it would pair really well with a few other things I own.

Jean-Daniel Rohrer, L'espris des lieux II, 2022

I made it over to Canadian Stage's Fat Ham, which is a reworking of Hamlet, in plenty of time.  Overall I liked this, though there were a few parts that were a bit troubling (almost glorying in how uneducated most of the characters were, and how Juicy was pinning his hopes on a digital degree in Human Resources from the University of Phoenix, when he seems a bit smarter and clued in than that, at least compared to the other characters, particularly when he then launches into a few of the lesser known soliloquys).  But overall it was good, and it was fairly short (90 minutes), which was even better.

Then in the evening we went up to North York to see Dimanche, which is sort of a wordless set of vignettes using a lot of puppetry and special effects to contemplate the end of the world after global warming wipes out all the icebergs and the major cities are all flooded.  Cheery stuff, but a lot of this was really interesting.  It was only 75 minutes, though perhaps 5-10 minutes could have been trimmed, as one or two scenes just went on a bit too long.

Today is all about music.  I have a Tafelmusik and an Esprit Orchestra concert, so I had better run over to the gym and get the day started.  Ciao!