Happy New Year

From the Inukshuk household in an icy cold, snowy Toronto we send our very best wishes for a Happy New Year to you all.

When in ROM - My World Tuesday

In the early 1900s some Torontonians planned a museum for the city. One of international standing. The Government of Ontario and the University of Toronto were persuaded to fund the future museum.

The Royal Ontario Museum was formally created by the signing of the ROM Act in the Ontario Legislature on April 16, 1912. The Duke of Connaught, Governor-General of Canada, officially opened the new Museum on March 19, 1914. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) instantly became a success and an object of pride for Toronto. Today, the graceful structure of buff-coloured brick and terracotta, designed by Toronto-based architects Darling and Pearson, now forms the west wing of the ROM’s ensemble of buildings with the entrance in Bloor Street. Over the years the Museum grew with a number of additions and eventually broke away from the University of Toronto to become a stand alone entity. The Terrace Galleries were opened in 1884 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

A distinctive new symbol of 21st century Toronto, The Lee-Chin Crystal, was opened on 3 June 2007 marking a new age for the ROM as Canada’s premier cultural and social destination. Composed of 5 interlocking prismatic structures co-existing, but unattached to the original building except for the linking bridges. The challenging project is noted for it's engineering complexity and innovative methods.

The exterior is 25% glass and 75% extruded-brushed, aluminium-cladding strips in a warm silver colour. The unique steel beams in its design and manufacture range from 1 to 25 metres in length. Each lifted one by one to their specific angle, creating complicated angle joints, sloped walls, and gallery ceilings. Approximately 3,500 tons of steel and 38 tons of bolts were used to create the skeleton, and roughly 9,000 cubic metres of concrete were poured.

The result of the Studio Daniel Libeskind design is striking and unmistakeably another Toronto Icon. To me it looks as if a futuristic space craft teleported to earth and re-energised right on the spot occupied by the ROM, creating a fusion of the two, the old and the new, the clash of two dimensions. I really like it.
What do you think?




For more great photos check out My World Tuesday.

Slush, slush baby....

At the beginning of November I shared the view of a street here in the development where I live, showing the same view in each of the seasons over the past year entitled Full Circle.

First Snow

That same view formed part of a series of photos I shared showing the recent snow falls, now take a look at the results of the above freezing temperatures since Christmas Eve.

More Snow

The Melt begins

What snow?

Of course all this melting snow and the rain we've had leads to water everywhere, which will cause havoc when it freezes again. That's on the cards for Tuesday - expect lots of slipping and sliding!

Fans of the white stuff fear not - more snow is forecast for the second day of the new year. Watch this space.

What does yours say about you?

I make reference to your licence plate of course.

I haven't checked, but I'm almost sure there's no extra in the Inukshuk budget for custom tags, so mine are just a set of standard Ontario plates as issued by the DMV. I've made up a little phrase using the four letters to help me remember it, but still it remains unremarkable unlike this licence plate I saw in traffic a few days ago with accompanying plate holder and stickers.

Firstly, I apologise for the snow in these shots. It's almost unavoidable this time of year!

Right, with that out of the way let us return to the photos. I got as close as I could, any closer might just have been a tad expensive, so I'll tell you what the smaller print on the plate holder and stickers says.

The plate, GNLOGY, complete with a pic of a Loon, while the plate holder informs us that: Genealogists collect dead relatives.

The sticker points out: Genealoogy, so many ancestors.....so little, time, while the smaller sticker, top right, serves as most a useful warning: Caution, this driver brakes for cemeteries.

The yellow ribbon on the left is in support of Canadian troops.

Interesting the things one comes across in Toronto traffic and this was certainly way more interesting than the usual cell phone chatting, nose picking and coffee swilling suspects that share the road.

Thank you Blogger

What a wonderful surprise I had on Christmas Day.
The folks at Blogger.com chose Inukshuk Adventure as the day's "Blogs of Note" feature for 25th December 2008.

I am grateful and humbled for the acknowledgement and the opportunity for my ramblings and photos to be shared by a larger audience. Thanks awfully!

Blue Moon - Skywatch Friday

As a change of pace and to warm things up a tad, here's a photo from summer, with not a snowflake in sight!



The Blue Moon is classed as a Mega-Yacht and it called into Toronto for the Toronto Film Festival. Fabulous Other Half snapped this shot in the summer while motor boating off Toronto's water front.

Eighty-five-year-year old Richard Duchossois, a big name in horseracing, owned the third Mega-Yacht to bear this name until recently when it was sold for a reported US$ 39 500 000 to an unnamed buyer. Shhh, not a word, one wants to keep a low profile, you understand!

Here are some interior shots of this not too modest floating palace. (couressy of luxlist.com)

The Bridge

The Master Cabin

The Master en-Suite Bathroom
(I don't think one can cal it the head when it's this luxurious)

The Elevator
(but of course)

The Livingroom
(livin' large!)

For more wonderful offerings be sure to visit Skywatch Friday.

Goodbye Eartha Kitt - Purrrfect Diva

Eartha Kitt - RIP
By Wil Haygood Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 26, 2008;

In her fantastical life, Eartha Kitt came to like a great many things. Men, sex, bawdy songs. I personally know about the lemon sorbet, the mango sorbet and the strawberry sorbet.

I found myself dining with Kitt -- who died of cancer at the age of 81 yesterday -- at the swanky Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan several years ago. I was working on a book about Sammy Davis Jr., once a romantic interest of Kitt's. Kitt's office suggested the Carlyle. Being on book leave, without a steady income and counting pennies, I gulped: The Carlyle wasn't the place for a penny-pincher. But I needed the interview, so I dared not back out of the chance to talk with her. Kitt had known Davis when both were very young and both were hanging out at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

Arriving early on the day of our meeting, I was led to a table. There was fine sunlight, lovely wood and an attentive waiter. I looked at the prices on the menu and wanted to scram. Kitt was late -- first 10 minutes, then 20. She may have been born poor, but she traveled through life with the blood of a true diva. So, of course, she'd be late. But I fretted she might have forgotten, or changed her mind. Then I noticed heads swiveling toward the entrance -- and there stood Eartha Kitt, wearing a short, bone-white fur coat, white slacks and a canary yellow turban atop her head. She had a white poodle cupped in each arm. I gave a wave, and she strode over, the poodles twisting in her arms.

"Let's order!" she demanded. She said she didn't care to remove her sunglasses because it was still early in the day. It was around 1:30 in the afternoon.

A waiter came over and took the poodles away, delivering them to Kitt's suite upstairs. She had a gig going at the Carlyle, and most of the shows were sold out.

The next 90 minutes were unforgettable. There were stories of men she had conquered (Sammy Davis Jr. among them), foreign lands she had traveled to, songs she had sung. I remember what she ordered because I held on to the receipt for years to show to people: salmon, asparagus, white wine, two glasses, which turned into three glasses. I wanted to cry every time I saw her motioning for the waiter: "Water, please, and bottled." But every other minute brought forth some delicious revelation, a tale of a child born in South Carolina to sharecropper parents and who forced the entertainment world to take notice of her.

Consider the era she thrived in -- and the competition she faced. Kitt came of age when a bevy of sepia beauties were just starting to strut their stuff from Broadway to Hollywood. It was the 1950s, and Madison Avenue may have ignored these women, but they were seen now and then in the pages of Life and Holiday magazines.

Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Hazel Scott, Joe Lewis's wife, Marva, Sugar Ray Robinson's wife, Edna Mae, and Kitt were different from the darkly hued and heavy-set black women of 1940s Hollywood, women like Hattie McDaniel, Ethel Waters, Butterfly McQueen and Louise Beavers. Those women were known mostly for playing maid roles in cinema.

This new group of beauties changed the way that America looked at the black woman. They went to parties hosted by Joe Louis in Chicago or Manhattan; they hung out at Sugar Ray's nightclub in Harlem, their images reflected in the long mirror behind the bar. They all came to admire themselves in some of those old Negro periodicals -- Sepia, Ebony and Brown. Their pictures hung in hair salons in black communities throughout America. They competed against one another for movie roles: Kitt got "Anna Lucasta" alongside Davis, among other roles. And she had to sweat her way through the "Anna" auditions.

"The camera couldn't conceal the fact that Eartha was not a beautiful woman," Philip Yordan, the writer of "Anna" told me.

But no one, absolutely no one, could have told Eartha Kitt she was not beautiful. She refused to be in the shadow of Horne or Dandridge. Kitt had a repertoire that ranged from nightclubs to Broadway to dramatic roles in movies and TV.

Maybe it was because she was born poor, and maybe that birthright either scars you or propels you into other dimensions, but Kitt fought harder than Horne, Dandridge and Scott for recognition. She took risks, kept an edge about her, singing sexually suggestive songs and parading her body onstage in a way that some thought was too provocative. Her rendition of "Santa Baby," for instance, could be described as For Adults Only. She wore her political beliefs out in the open, too, and was on Richard Nixon's enemies list. She was ashamed of Davis when he supported Nixon and told him so to his face.

I wrote furiously during our interview. I laughed -- loud -- when Kitt told me she had flipped Davis over her shoulder one day when he came to see her after one of her stage shows. Davis grimaced, but "I was just fooling around!" she said.

Lunch finished, I tensed as I got ready to ask for the bill. But Kitt wanted dessert. She tried a scoop of the mango sorbet. She loved it, so much so that she now wanted a scoop of the lemon sorbet. I wanted to cry. Sorbet at the Carlyle is not cheap.

She did not detect from my body movements that I was quite ready to go. "Let me try that strawberry sorbet, please," she said in that famously Kitt-enish voice. I smiled as my shoulders sagged.

But there were more stories! About her and Orson Welles, her and Sidney Poitier, her and Sammy when he tried to take back the engagement ring he had given her. There was more laughter.

Then the bill came: $138.06.

It remains, to this day, the most expensive lunch I have ever paid for. But it was Eartha Kitt, in white fur, with poodles. It was worth every penny.

Snow Mountain

This blog post may contain some snow.

Those of you who are regular visitors will know that there has been some snowfall in Toronto in recent weeks. This is because it is winter.

Toronto is not the only place that gets snow in winter. Therefore it stands to reason that I am not alone in filling blog posts with photographs of snow covered scenes depicting the beauty of a winter wonderland. Some people enjoy the snow. Some choose only to enjoy photos of snow. There are those who do not like snow. Tough luck. I'm surrounded by the stuff so I will blog about it.

Snow fall covers all in it's frigid blanket, even parking lots. These parking lots will need to be cleared of snow to allow shoppers to park their cars. If uncleared there would be no lines demarcating parking bays. This could lead to parking chaos. So, the lots are cleared by snow plows and the offending snow is piled into white heaps. A few parking bays are sacrificed for this purpose.

In many places the cold passes and the snow melts. With Toronto temperatures remaining below freezing these mountains of snow do not melt. This is the case for winters in really cold places like Toronto. Each snow fall brings yet more snow. Each time the snow must be plowed and the mountains grow, claiming more and more parking bays.

This is not too much of an issue in large parking lots with space to spare and thankfully not many cars disappear into these ever growing mountains of snow.

The same cannot be said for places where space is an issue. Think of sidewalks and driveways. The first snow is shovelled and piled on the space not needed for access and after each subsequent snow fall the piles grow higher and higher and more effort is needed to lift the snow onto the ever growing piles, while the access space shrinks as the bases of the snow mountains spread.

Roads already narrowed by the amount of snow continue through the winter to shrink and in some cases narrow roads become almost impassable. It is at this time that the city must send out the snow eaters. Huge machines that collect up the snow into trucks that transport the unwanted snow to dump it where it will not cause further inconvenience.

This does not happen every year. It all depends on the amount of snowfall. This year is not yet problematic although we have had more snow than this time last year, but there's a long way to go yet. Last winter it became necessary and the open field across from our apartment became a dumping ground for all the surplus to requirement snow. Night after night huge trucks came and went and a massive snow mountain began to dominate my view, the last of which only melted in May!

While there is the pretty side of the transformation into winter wonderland, there are also practical issues to be overcome. No wonder then that there are those who are not as pleased with arrival of snow.

An Outing - My world Tuesday

No, it's not quite what you think and yes, it features snow.

It's not about my outing, that was a while ago and you can read about that and a true confession here.

No need for me to go out anywhere for this blog post. Why? Well I'm glad you asked. Without further ado I'm outing a blog lurker.

Zee, as we'll call her, as that be her initial, has been a loyal reader of my blog from the very early days about a year and a half ago. Her home, up in the Toronto sky, is where I went on an outing for lunch just over a week ago. I dutifully shared photos of the view from her apartment and I also came clean about my fear of heights. So when we had the snow storm of last week I called Zee and asked her to take a few pics of the storm as seen from high up in a skyscraper and she was happy to oblige. Here are the pictures, taken and sent from Zee's iPhone!

Before I moved to Toronto I spent a fair amount of time researching all that I could about moving to Canada and in particular,Toronto, in the hopes that I would be well informed and prepared for what lay ahead. Arguably, mission accomplished. In this process I found a web forum populated by an assortment of wonderful people in various stages of the Canadian immigration process. Much useful information was gleaned as well as making contact with a couple who moved to Toronto some two months before we did. Soon after arriving we arranged to meet up for dinner.

One can get only so much from reading a persons posts on an internet forum, and we've all heard the tales of meeting people befriended on the web. With this in mind Fabulous Other Half and I made our way Downtown to the restaurant chosen at the appointed time. There they were, Zee and her man Bee. Within moments of sitting down, conversation flowed, no awkwardness or uncomfortable silences. As it turns out Zee and I share, amongst other things, a love for conversation. We went all out to impress.

It wasn't long before we began to meet each week for lunch getting to know each other and together, our new home city. Once in a while we meet on weekends to allow our other halves to join in the friendship. It's been over a year since we first met and our fledgling friendship has blossomed. I now count Zee as one of my dearest friends and look forward to our regular get togethers and exploration outings. Zee, thanks for your friendship.

That's as mushy as it's gonna get folks. So, as I told you at the beginning of this post, Zee has been lurking on my blog for over a year and in that time has been tempted to click on a few of the offerings on my blogrole and is now a regular visitor to more than a few of my fellow bloggers. So blogger pals, should you get an anonymous comment signed Z, you have possibly been visited by my dear friend, Zee of the Skyscraper. Now that she need lurk in the shadows of blogland no longer, will she consider joining us and start her own blog, perhaps?

Until then, enjoy the views of her world in the snow storm.

For more pictures from all over visit My World Tuesday.

Snow Storm - Warning, snow pics!

The weather channel promised a snow storm for today and low and behold that's exactly what we got. Way to go. So I sat in all morning watching the snow fall and catching up with all my blogger friends. In the afternoon I decided to go out and get some snow storm pics for this 'ere blog. Oh, plus I needed a few things from the store. Before going out I thought I'd see what's out there....

Are they sure it's so cold?
Yes, my balcony thermometer concurs. Take a closer look, that's right it's -11C/19F. Add wind chill and we're talking -19C/-2F. Now that's cold!

The gusting wind has blown snow right up into the covered stairwell, trying to get into the apartment. Thankfully the front door put a stop to that!

It's sure snowy out there!

And that way too!

Hey, who hid the stairs?

Just in time, the mini sidewalk snow plow!

Look at him all warm and snug in his cab, scaring traffic!

Bye-bye!

Oh, here comes the bus! See, the TTC (Toronto Transit) runs rain, shine or snow and here's proof. You can't even make out the road, but the bus rolls on!

I think I'll take the car, if I can dig it out. I'm getting my money's worth from them winter tires!

We're moving....


Making progress...

Almost there...

Check it out, I seem to have the store to myself.

Aah it's good to be back in the heated basement! The car, the car. I went back into the warmth of the apartment, to blog about my adventure!

My Hood - Skywatch Friday

Today I thought I'd offer a look around my neighbourhood. Well a few streets and views anyway. Yes, it's an excuse for more snow pics really, but when you're surrounded by it......and we're forecast to have more in the morning and even more again on Sunday. Perhaps I'll blog a few snow pics next week.
Well, only if you ask nicely.





For more wonderful photos check out Skywatch Friday.