Aparkalypse Now; or, Greg and Capella take a ride.

We did some serious biking today.

After a morning of sleeping in and practicing, Capella and I biked west to look at an apartment (it was nice, and cheap, but had dingy wall-to-wall carpets that the landlord wasn't keen on taking out). Then we went along the Lake to downtown. Ordinarily the bike path peters out and you have to ride in the street through the downtown core, which is a pretty silly place for the bike path to end, if you ask me. I guess I'm not the only one who thinks so, because for this week only the city has transformed the east-bound lane (closest to the lake) of Queen's Quay Ave., the street that follows the shore through downtown. The right-hand lane has been covered with grass- like, actual grass- and the left lane has been painted down the middle to make a great bike lane. Between the bike lane and the streetcar tracks they've planted bright red geraniums. This whole thing goes for a kilometer through the city. At the eastern end there's a big gate, like the Arc de Triumph, but made out of bicycles that have been locked to posts and abandoned in the city. There's free movies at night, Adirondack chairs all over for people to hang out, all sorts of crazy stuff going on.

We locked up our bikes and wandered around for a while. There were free copies of the Toronto Star (the non-tabloidy one), so we picked up a copy and eventually found two empty chairs. We sat and read the paper and watched the boats sail by in the late afternoon sun. It was warm, but with a slight breeze blowing in off Lake Ontario. Heavenly.

We saw a guy making rock-balancing sculptures. He makes 4-foot towers out of rocks. We walked by just as he was placing the last two stones on a tower. The second-to-last rock was fairly small, and round. Then he knelt down in front of the tower, picked up the last rock- much larger than the previous one. Like, much larger- took a few deep breaths, and placed the rock on the tower, rotating it slightly until it found its place. As he stepped away, he made a short speech about how he hoped that his sculptures, and the transformation of the road, would help people to eliminate the word 'impossible' from their vocabularies, and that we wouldn't teach it to our children. When you're unstoppable, impossible is just a word.

The whole thing is called Quay to the City.

Jim, Anna, and Finn got back from California on Saturday. The house is very different with them here. Finn is a bit shy of two years old. He's learning his words, so most of his talking is names of things or people. On Tuesday Jim and Finn came into the room where I was practicing because Finn was curious. He got Jim to put him in front of the drum set, Jim picked up a guitar, and we had a little jam session before lunch. Finn was picking up the beat most of the time, and was pretty creative with different sounds from the drums and cymbals. Of course, he also likes to wail on one drum and play loud. I don't improvise much (or, really, at all) so for the first few seconds all I could think was "What key is Jim playing in? What the hell do I play? How about this?" Once I started playing I began to forget about that and played. Fun.

It's a little crazy with everyone here now, but at least it doesn't feel empty anymore.