Category: Life in general

Categories
Kingston, Ontario Life in general

100+ Kingston Independent Restaurants With Websites

This took a long time to do! And I suspect will take a bit of effort to maintain over time.

The biggest issue being to create the table with icons, it wound up being necessary to pull the table out as HTML, manually insert the Font-Awesome icon codes, and then update the table manually every time I wanted to add a line with the icons.

Compounded by the fact that I’m an idiot, and thought that doing a find-and-replace at the code level for “Street,” St.,” etc. to “St,” and “Road,” “Rd.”, etc. as “Rd” was a good idea. But I had RegEx turned on, so when I replaced “St.” and Rd.” every string with St* and with Rd* was replaced, including the word “Kingston,” strings like “Bistro,” and so on — including their URLs. But by the time I noticed it was too late to undo. So half my time on the table was spent fixing those mistakes.

Ultimately, I’d prefer to live in a world where chain restaurants are rare, Facebook is extinct, and people curate local information without being reliant on algorithm driven search. I use Google Sheets and Google MyMaps for this, so I’m not angling to make this some sort of weird purity test — but I’m hoping to use those tools to make people less reliant on Google’s primary product, and do a small bit to eradicate Facebook/Meta.

Categories
Just for fun Life in general

The Time I Did Not Steal A Van Gogh (which I now kind of regret)

"Wheat Field with Cypresses" by Vincent Van Gogh.
"Wheat Field with Cypresses" by Vincent Van Gogh. This was probably not the painting in question, but is kind of typical of the paintings that were in this exhibition -- known paintings, but not Top Five like Starry Night, Sunflowers or What The Hell Happened To My Ear.

So Back in the Day I lived in Sherbrooke, Quebec, which has a better-than-you’d-expect art gallery, the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke. A converted really huge three-story mansion.

There was a touring exhibit of impressionist painters that was hitting all the big Canadian galleries that year. You got your Monets, you got your Van Goghs, like one or two lesser paintings from a bunch of the big names. And for some reason, it gets a week at MBAS as well as all the bigger-city galleries. This didn’t get a ton of fanfare: an article in the local French papers and in the sole local English paper.

This is partly because MBAS building would be really big for a house, but it was pretty small for a gallery. I don’t think they had a budget for marketing or promotion at all. The total staff count in there at any point would usually be two people: somebody at the front desk / coat check who would also dash over if somebody was in the tiny gift shop, and a wandering security person.

So this travelling exhibition is up on the third floor of MBAS, and as a frequent visitor, I know a few things:

  • You just walk into the gallery. It costs I think $5 as a suggested donation. Nobody checks your ID or anything.
  • The fire escape, which you can access through a normal screen door leading to a small balcony from the always-open third-floor break room, is a set of stairs running right down to beside the gallery. It is always unlocked and unalarmed. I’ve seen enough people ducking out there for a smoke over time that I’m aware of that.
  • There’s one security person; on the day I drop by to see the Impressionists, it’s a women in I’d guess her 70s. They walk every floor, very slowly, so once they leave the third floor to walk downstairs and start over at the first, you’ve got probably a 20-minute window before they get back to the third floor.

Faced with the Impressionists, I also realize:

  • They’ve just, like, hung the paintings. Like you or I would. They don’t seem to be super affixed to the walls with some sort of weird backing systems, they aren’t locked or behind glass. They’re just there, wire on a nail style.
  • There are, at least to my ability to see them, no security cameras or anything. I’d never really cared to look before, but I’m suddenly motivated by the realization that
  • I can totally steal a fucking Van Gogh.

Spoiler: I didn’t. But man, I thought real hard about it. Not to keep, but just, you know, take it down, wander down the fire escape, loop the block and drop it back off. Or take it home for the night and drop it off in the morning.

Do I regret not stealing a Van Gogh? Hell yeah. I wish to this day I’d nutted up and temporarily stolen a Van Gogh. Maybe I was missing something and an alarm would have gone off and I would have been charged with attempted theft of a Van Gogh, but if you’re gonna crime, what a crime to crime.

And maybe I wasn’t missing something! Maybe I could have 100% stolen a Van Gogh. And for the rest of my life been dining out on The Time I Stole the Van Gogh.

But I didn’t. So instead all I have is The Time I Could Have Stolen A Van Gogh And Didn’t. Which is what you’re getting here.

Sorry.

Categories
Life in general Nerd

Welcome to Pontypool

Pontypool town sign with "TEAR THEM APART" handmade sign

The sporadically-updating horror podcast Tear Them Apart did an episode on one of the great sleeper horror movies of all time, Pontypool, last month.

Horror fans that don’t know much about south-eastern Ontario likely don’t know that Pontypool is a real place — in fact, I went to high school one town over, and spent a fair bit of time in Caesarea and Nestleton with friends, a short hop away.

Caesarea is even name-checked in the movie, and is the title of the third of a three-book trilogy by the author of the novel that Pontypool the movie was adapted from.

Visiting my folks last weekend, I thought I’d swing by the town to take some pictures for Evan Dorkin and Paul M Yellovich, the podcast’s hosts.

The Pontypool sign, with a quick best-efforts “Tear Them Apart” podcast call-out. I took it down after. I was really angering all the goats in the weird-ass half-farm next to the sign so I had to make it quick.

“Downtown” Pontypool, facing north. Note the telephone pole “TAKE BACK CANADA” sign. People think Ontario / Canada is pretty progressive, but it’s more like New York State: once you’re out of the cities, you’ll find a lot of the same regressive racist yahoos you find in any rural place. This was the part of the drive to my folks’ place where farms have STAY OFF MY LAND GUBBERMINT signs, and vaccine conspiracy lawn signs sprouted like weeds during COVID.

Grant Mazzy would probably be more at home here as a shock jock than the station staff would like to believe.

Same position, turning south:

That’s it. That’s Pontypool. The streets stretch out about a kilometre in all directions with mostly two-story houses of a mid-19th-century vintage.

The sign on the left of this photo is for the town’s only gas station (with integrated Tim Horton’s naturally; there’s nothing more faux Canadian than this foreign-owned chain that’s somehow convinced people it’s a Canadian icon, and that its coffee doesn’t taste like battery acid that briefly had a coffee bean dipped in it).

Tim Horton’s has grown in my mind in recent years to really represent the rise of the right in Canada: symbols are more important than reality, and being “Canadian” is more important than being Canadian. It’s not a Canadian chain any more, and the coffee and food are terrible, but it’s “Canadian,” so Doug Ford shills for Smile cookies and — okay, I’m getting off-topic. Tim Hortons sucks.

Behind the grocery store across the street you can see a little red sign; that’s the pharmacy on the first floor of a house. Facing the pharmacy, the only grocery/convenience store, and the only restaurant:

That’s it. That’s Pontypool. The streets stretch out about a kilometre in all directions with mostly two-story houses of a mid-20th-century vintage.

Not pictured is the town arena, which if you live in Ontario and I say “small town arena,” you’re already picturing.

The most unrealistic thing about Pontypool (the movie) is that it has a radio station that employs at least three people full-time. The most realistic thing about Pontypool (the movie) is the syndicated news break at the beginning that mentions a major drug bust in Caesarea. That 100% checks out.

The above probably sounds like I’m dunking on Pontypool; I kind of am, because I’m a bit triggered by the TAKE BACK CANADA garbage and have less than fond memories of COVID-area rural lunacy.

I grew up in a town about this size, and I’m sure it’s as much a mixed bag as that town was.

Anyway, that’s Pontypool-the-town, if anyone is watching the movie (it’s really, really good!) and wants to see what the real-deal place looks like.

Categories
Just for fun Life in general

Big Changes; Swift Action

Lots going on in my life these days; most folks who know me know this, but my last day at Smith Engineering was February 9, 2024. This also represents a step away from higher education marketing career-wise; big news coming, but not until March.

“Coming down” from a job you’ve put a lot of your brain and identity into for years is a process. I was fortunate to be asked by friends of friends to house-sit / dog-sit for this very good, very silly boy for a week:

…which gave me a week of decompressing, partly getting ready for the Next Thing, lots of dog-walking, etc.

I’ve never really listened to Taylor Swift, but both of my nieces are bananas for her. Big Swifties. And there’s nothing wrong with that! I just run my own music server / support soma.fm, so my listening doesn’t generally include stuff I don’t intend it to. And while I’m trying to be less snobbish than I used to be, the culture around Swift wasn’t one where I felt compelled to seek it out and listen to her music.

But — time on my hands, and looking to reset my brain in some significant ways — I challenged my nieces that if they would make me playlists of up to 15 songs, I would give them an earnest listen.

And they did (their mom said it was “the hardest she’d ever seen them work on something like homework”). So I did!

I’m a big fan of my reMarkable, so I used it to write while I gave these songs a Whole Listen. I have no idea why anyone would be interested in these, but my wife suggested I post them for posterity, so if you’re looking for a 50-year-old man’s perspective on lists of Taylor Swift songs compiled by two teens, here y’go:

Taylor Swift – Set 1 (Bella)Download
Taylor Swift – Set 2 (Maddy)Download

I can’t say I’d be lining up for tickets (especially at these prices), but I have to say I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. And that it’s a lot more maudlin than I expected! I was thinking it was all pop bangers — “Look What You Made Me Do” is the only Taylor Swift song I can summon to memory — but there’s a whole subcategory of Swift songs I now call the “piano sads”.

Really impressed with the songwriting, the lyrics. Would be more enthused if she seemed to have any way of positioning herself and her life other than the present state of whatever relationship she’s in (but maybe, again, this is just a reflection of where my nieces are at in their song choices).

I’ve also been thinking a bit about why I’ve been so out of the Swift orbit; the fair question for myself, I think, is to ask why I’ve been quasi-avoiding this very popular, very successful female singer/songwriter, and would I duck out on male pop stars the same way?

And… having given it some thought, I feel okay. I can think of a number of Very Big acts that I’ve also never really made time for, across a number of spectrums, so I don’t think there’s anything there. But it’s good to ask yourself periodically where the “I’m not interested in what this person has to say” instinct comes from. In this case I think it’s just the form, and if I’m honest a bit of New Country stink in the background, that drove the disinterest.

On the whole, a really worthwhile exercise. I feel like I have a better understanding of a big piece of the zeitgeist right now.

Categories
Just for fun Kingston, Ontario Life in general Private

Darby Huk – Cryptids with Vices

My wife and I try to attend the Union Gallery’s annual fundraiser every year. It’s called Cézanne’s Closet; the format is you pay $100 for a ticket, and about 100 artists donate work to the gallery. You browse before the event, and then ticket numbers get called at random. If your number comes up, you pick a piece of art to keep!

It’s a ton of fun, especially as a couple — there’s always an interesting evaluation-and-negotiation phase to hit on pieces we both love.

This year, though, our #1 was identical when we compared notes: Wrong Turn at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, by artist Darby Huk.

Wrong Turn at Point Pleasant, West VA, by Darby Huk

We were chuffed! Darby’s a Master’s student at Queen’s University, and we could hear her on the Zoom call for the gallery event, so I knew she was in town.

Unbeknownst to Marisa, I reached out to her after the event and asked if she’d be interested in a commission of two more paintings to make it a trio of sorts (I don’t think this is technically a triptych, but I’m calling it that anyway), keeping with the “cryptids and vices” theme. Fortunately, she was into it! So we bought two more paintings from her…

¡Cumpleaños! Puerto Rico

and

Girls Night, Douglas, Wyoming

Together, they look like this…

Again, we’re super stoked! Now we just have to figure out where we can clear some wall space…

Categories
Life in general Private

Mourning, and happiness (and more mourning)

Best cat ever

Yesterday at around 5:30 in the evening, a great light went out in the universe and a great part of my heart died.

After a terrifying incident and bounce-back two years ago, Pooper started fading again five or six days ago, and… there was a long paragraph here about the circumstances of her passing, but I cut it out. It’s not important. It’s how the story ends, but it’s far from the important or best part of that story. It’s enough to say that she gave me kisses and snuggled in hard as she passed, and let out a familiar little sigh and was gone. I spent some time with her after, and Marisa and I went home on a cold night with the threat of snow in the air.

I could write a book about Poopercat.

Not like a children’s book; a 900-page epic. Full bore Tolstoy. It’s hard to describe her to people who didn’t know her; she was a boundlessly positive presence, open and trusting and loving and curious.

The beginning of the story is when Marisa and I went to the Societé de Protection des Animaux in Sherbrooke over a decade ago. Marisa wanted to find a dim boy cat because her beloved Ozzy had died several months before. We looked at all the cats in cages but none of them vibed. Then we went to the play room, and out of all the cats in the back of the room, a tiny calico with bright eyes bounded over to us. When I reached down to pet her she hopped up on my shoulder and nuzzled my ear, and when Marisa bent down to pat her she gave Marisa kisses as well. We hadn’t thought of a girl cat, but as we left we realized she was the one. When we returned two days later, she was gone, and we were terribly sad — until from the back of the play room a pair of ears and eyes emerged from a hammock, and then she bounded down and ran over to us like she’d been waiting anxiously to come take her home.

We took her home.

She was so scared when we let her out of her cage that she hid under the steps to the basement; I got a blanket and a book and sat there and read Don Quixote for over two hours until she eventually came out.

And then she was My Cat. We signed some sort of contract in that moment where we would be best friends forever. And we will be best friends forever. 
I’ve had other cats, and my family had dogs as a kid, but Moxie Parker was my first experience with pure unconditional love. She’d follow me around the house, squeak to be picked up and patted, and spend every moment she could with me. She thought I hung the moon and the stars, and I tried to meet that with my dumb imperfect human love as well as I could.

She made me a better person. Being the recipient of such pure and unconditional affection made me a warmer, more affectionate person. Her simple focus on simple joys — a good nap, a good meal, a sunbeam, and loving and being loved in return — helped ground me in what’s important and appreciate the joys of daily life and deal with some of its frustrations. She changed me, forever, for the better, and Marisa, too.

It’s hard to describe her personality, really. “Affectionate” is covered above, but also this undefinable combination of intelligence, curiosity, and enthusiasm for things.

She had a quality where you just wanted to make up and tell stories with her.

And we did. Over the course of over a decade, Marisa and I made up countless personae for Moxie Parker. The very first, I’d venture, was Moxie Parker, Girl Detective, when she’d bumble around the house and poke at nooks and crannies and explore. But the list grew, and grew, and grew, and her sweet silliness gave rise to our sweet silliness, and we were all sweet and silly together. Here’s the list, which we compiled several months ago. Much of it is incomprehensible to the casual viewer, because these were in-jokes that only three people in the world knew about and understood; two humans and one cat (or several dozen cats):

  • Moxie Parker, Girl Detective
  • Nurse Pooper (“I’m gonna nurse you STRAIGHT TO HELL!”)
  • Spooky Bumpire
  • GD Butters, buttery pat tycoon
  • Edgar Allen Poops
  • Shakespoops
  • Bumbee
  • Dark Pooper
  • Other Pooper and Other Other Pooper (“Burn it all down!”)
  • Cosmic Clown Pooper
  • Goat Ghost
  • Lawybler Pooper
  • Entrepreneur Pooper (Pöop)
  • Skritch the Almond Genius Pooper
  • Scanner Pooper
  • Broadway Pooper:
    • [End of Act 1] I’ve got Grouchity Face / I want my snacks and I want my space / I want to be swaddled in a special place / because I’ve got / Grouchity Face
    • It’s Me! It’s Me, Everybody! (musical)
    • Listen, Listen! (one cat show)
    • Don’t Stop Pooplievin’ (showstopper)
    • Get Right In There Clean The Butt (disco hit)
  • Flapper Pooper
  • Friend of Stan Tan, winning at chebs — a prolonged take on the old Devil and Daniel Johnson thing, including a mispronunciation of “chess” and a riff on an Ingmar Bergman movie, and more
  • Belly Newsletters! Rolling over on her back and sharing her belly; when you started to turn away, kicking the leg out a little for _even more belly_
  • 100% not a twap!//TOTALLY A TWAP — the state of enticing you to touch the belly before turning into a murder machine
  • Enemy of Morris B., lover of Tallsworths
  • “Good thing I brought my dancing shoes!”
  • Flee, flop or fart: the survival tactics in order
  • Grooming for the Queen
  • The “chubby hustle” when she was booting around the house in a hurry; “chubby rage” when Digby or another cat would provoke her to the point that she’d rassle.
  • Unto every generation, a Poopercat is born!
  • Pooper is accused of crimes by the Vatican and protests her innocence (Innocente! Innocente!) and is cleared and elected the new Pope (Bededicte! Benedicte!)
  • Defender of the Treasure (“Death to the twessul seekuls!”)
  • Pooperbucks: given/taken for snuggles/taking liberties. Kisses may cost Pooperbucks. Balances change radically and without notice (“It’s a volatile currency!”)
  • Doctor Poops, travelling time and space in the DARBAS (Dinner and Relative Breakfasts and Snacks)
  • J.P., her Quebec boyfriend, and his motorcycle sidecar
  • Face merge technology – the nightly habit of mushing my face and her face together, in the hopes they would eventually become One Face
  • Eye biggening exercises: the daily maximum cuteness routine
  • Kuddle Kween, her superhero identity — tiara, cape and a diaper (it gets busy out there)
  • Cuddle Cop, forcing herself in between Marisa and I in bed and pushing us apart when we try to spoon
  • Tapping for attention… since she was a kitten, she’d sit beside you and politely tap you with a paw for pats.
  • Chubby Bear: sitting on her haunches/back legs, paws up, and then leaning forward and licking her belly while still balanced on her rear end, front paws just kind of dangling in the air

Every one of those comes with stories. Every one of those could take an hour to explain. And there’s so much more.

I gave her “pony rides” when she was a kitten through a cat; I’m sure it happened in Kingston, but the clearest memories are Sherbrooke: I’d get on my hands and knees and she’d hop on my back, settle into a comfortable position (often facing backwards, for some reason) and I’d crawl around the house with her riding on my back like a princess, usually dropping her off at the bed in the bedroom, where she’d gracefully alight and then lie down for a nap. This sounds really stupid when I write it down, but I got a huge kick out of it, and so did she.

Her absolute passion for the Big Room, which is what we called the side deck and yard. One click of the door lock and she’d launch herself from her saucer bed in the kitchen and hustle to the door, practically knocking you out of the way to get out, where she would walk on the garden stones to avoid touching grass (lava!) and would loll in the sun, so happy that she’d just roll slightly back and forth on her back and squeak in the warm sunlight. When winter hit, the first time you’d open that door and the cold would hit her nose and she’d recoil, shaking her head quickly, looking at you like you broke it. But every spring, the sheer joy of going back out again.

Her excessive caution coming down stairs, leading with front paws and then both back legs with a deliberate hop, and — if you somehow got downstairs before she did for breakfast — listening to that unique hop, but faster than you thought possible.

Her tremendous fondness for boys, especially big guys with beards — she could walk into a room full of people and would beeline for the burliest man with facial hair.

Sleeping with us — me — almost every night, starting out standing on my chest and getting pats, then settling in between or behind my knees for the night. Always coming upstairs for naps, usually lying beside me, where she’d snuggle in between my torso and my arm, rest her head on my arm, and give a little sigh before falling asleep. As she was getting older, I made a box to help her hop up on the high bed in the bedroom; it had a little wobble to it, so every night I would lie there, waiting to hear her soft tread, then the wobble of the box, then her ears and eyes peeping over the side of the mattress, before she hopped up for a cuddle and some sleep.

COVID couch cuddle time: once I transitioned to working from home, it became a lunchtime ritual that I’d lie down on the living room couch; she’d clamber up, climb on my chest, practice some face-merging, then snuggle in so that she was nestled on me and against the back of the couch, wiggling into position and then letting out a sigh — that little sigh! — of contentment before falling asleep. Sometimes I’d doze too, sometimes just lie there for a while. If she didn’t get her couch time at lunch, she’d get angry, and barge into my office in the early afternoon and squeak until she got pats.

Her love/hate relationship with Digby, who she called the Goblin — sometimes playing with him, sometimes chasing him around the house in a state. He’s a skittish cat, which would trigger her to get at him, and if there was a loud noise anywhere in the house, she’d get up from her saucer or bed and go looking for him, looking all the world like she was rolling up her sleeves, to see if he was vulnerable and ripe for a chasing.

Her distinctive, swaybacked, “skatey-legged” walk, gliding rather than stepping, a kind of side-to-side motion with her low center of gravity and determined gait.

Her morning routine of having Marisa pick her up on a kitchen stool, holding her like a baby, with Marisa trying to steal kisses and Pooper putting up the “no paw” to keep Marisa’s face away from her face.

The way she could make me happy just by walking into the room. The way she _lit up_ a room.

She permeates every room of this big old house. There isn’t a couch or a chair or a vent where I don’t expect to see her snuggled up in having a nap, or a stairway or a hallway she shouldn’t be hopping down or skating along. Last night was largely sleepless; I can’t lie in our bed without the absence of her weight and warmth next to me turning into a terrible abyss. Every room I enter I catch my breath because I’m hoping to see her.  

Somewhere up in that list of things is “Unto every generation, a Poopercat is born!”, which started as some sort of dumb Buffyesque riff on the idea that a cat of her spirit is gifted to every generation, and — like the Buddha — if one Poopercat passes, another great spirit rises somewhere else. And, in between fits of doing things I thought only happened in books and movies (crying so hard you pull a muscle behind your eyes; literally collapsing in tears; making sounds you’ve only ever heard in horror movies featuring mutant woodland animals), this is an idea that gives me profound comfort.

Two years ago, when she was very very sick, I made a cot and slept next to her in her saucer bed on the kitchen floor, by the warm vent, for three nights. She was too ill to move. I laid there and gave her pats and wept and asked her, and the universe, for please, just a bit more time. Just a bit more time basking in the warmth of her. And I got it; she recovered, miraculously, and there was two more years of kisses and fun.

So I can’t complain. Not really. I got a full complement of Poopercat, and then I got two extra years. That’s a triumph.

And now, unto a new generation, somewhere on this big dumb planet, somebody who really needs a Poopercat will find one.

Somewhere on earth, somebody is meeting a cat for the first time, and the cat is saying “I’ll be your best friend forever if you’ll be my best friend forever.” Maybe it’s in India, or Spain, or Iraq, or the Russian Steppes. Somewhere, a cat and her person are meeting for the first time, and making a deal: it can’t last forever, but for as long as it does, there will be a bond of unconditional love and trust and friendship. Somebody will know what unconditional love feels like, and will grow and become better and stronger for it.

That’s the one thing that makes it okay right now: the idea that somebody is finding their Poopercat today, and making the deal that I made. It ends with heartbreak, but the joy on the journey far outweighs the pain at the end.

There will be cuddles and silliness and lolling in sunbeams and time on the couch and snacks and careful hops down the stairs and stories and laughter.

And love, and love, and love.