Doors Partly Open

It just rained so much yesterday.  I got completely soaked, and my shoes are still wet, so I have switched to a very old pair of shoes, which incidentally aren't fully waterproof.  Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised but Torontonians were still coming out in droves to see some of the newer Doors Open sites, to the point that the lines were two hours long!

I'm in a bit of a rush, so I'll sketch out the outlines and then perhaps fill in a bit later.

I did manage to get to the gym by 9:30.  It's still not 9, but getting closer!  I decided to skip cardio and managed to get back to the house (with groceries) by 11.  It was raining a bit harder but still seemed manageable (little did I know...), and I decided that I ought to bike it just to make sure I made it to the organ concert at St. Andrew's, which started at noon.  (I probably would have taken TTC if the concert had been at 1.)  I did make a quick stop at the Riverdale Library and dropped off an overdue item (Bunuel's Obscure Object of Desire) and picked up Nabokov's Transparent Things.

I did make it to St. Andrew's with about 15 minutes to spare.  They had had a book sale on Friday, which was supposed to wrap around into Sat., but clearly that was impossible with the lashing rain.  The concert was great.  I'll write a bit more about it later, but I definitely understood where  "pulling out the stops," as the organist was just having to work extra time to pull out stops and change the sound of the organ.  There were some sounds I had never heard an organ make!  I also saw in the more elaborate pieces that he was pumping away with his feet as well.  Quite a performance.

I ran into work and got material scanned, including some notes I have made over the past few days at the Rex.  So that is always a relief to get things backed up.

Then I went to 8 Spadina.  I was going to check on two Doors Open events - the Netflix offices and the Toronto Star newsroom.  However, the lines were absurdly long, even with the rain.  So I just had lunch and then biked over to St. Lawrence Market.  They were having a Doors Open event in the gallery upstairs, though they didn't actually have the exhibit up, which seems poor planning.  Instead, they were offering guided doors of the vault upstairs.  Unfortunately, all those slots had been filled.  I talked for a while with my friend Andrea, and in the end they were able to squeeze me in.  

I like this painting over on the right, though I didn't get any information on it.  The painting to the right is actually a Kurelik painting featuring Mayor Crombie as sort of a civic hero.

I then biked home, though I had to pull over a couple of times when the wind and rain got too terrible.  If I had gone straight home, I perhaps could have made it to the framers, but it really was just too wet out; I was worried about the painting, even though it was wrapped in bubble wrap. 

I made it Jones Library and picked up Cannery Row.  I did manage to get even wetter going through a huge pool of water under the Jones bridge.  So I had to change all my clothes and dry out.

I wasn't sure I was going back out, but I did and saw Gary Versace and Mike Murley at Hirut.  It was a good show.  Of course, TTC managed to let me down yet again with a subway shutdown for a medical emergency on top of a scheduled shutdown for track work, so I had to take a replacement shuttle bus and then walked down Pape and finally made it home around 11.