Jumbo statue in St. Thomas outside London

The Jumbo statue is located in St. Thomas about twenty-five minutes or so from my London home. The life-sized statue was erected in 1985 to mark the 100th anniversary of Jumbo's death. Possibly the most famous elephant who ever lived, "The King of Elephants" was killed when struck by a railroad locomotive in the southwestern Ontario city.

Earlier this year, the CBC did an excellent take on Jumbo, his life and death. Here is a link to: 
Jumbo: The Life Of An Elephant Superstar.

According to the CBC, "More than a century after his death, mystery still swirls around Jumbo. Was he really the tallest elephant in the world? How was he treated? Was his death part of a conspiracy?"

Unicorn-pig hats not made here

When I was in school I was taught how import trade was to early cities and city states. What they couldn't make themselves, they could obtain through trade. For instance, China prospered by trading jade, spices and silk.

I thought about this while prowling London stores after Christmas. Today China prospers thanks to strong global sales of unicorn-pig hats. Unicorn-pig hats?!

When I was a boy London produced a long list of stuff that underpinned our way of life. We made everything from massive electrical transformers to fashionable wool sweaters. We were capable of so much. The range of what we produced was staggering. Today, the range of what we don't produce is equally staggering. Transformers? China. Sweaters? China. Today, we cannot even make our own unicorn-pig hats.

But before I could post this, my one granddaughter assured me that this is actually a unicorn hat despite its piglike nose.

She tells me it's not nice to point out that its nose is rounder, flatter and more snoutlike than most. It's unkind, she says.

To underline her point she has called up a true unicorn-pig on Pinterest.

Christmas candles: a fading tradition

When I was a boy my grandparents' used to set out a display of Christmas candles on their dining room table. I heard rumours of lit candles being placed carefully among the branches of the annual Christmas tree by some families but I never encountered the dangerous practice myself. Although my immediate family didn't light candles at Christmas, nevertheless, I came to consider brightly burning candles a Christmas tradition.

When my wife and I visited a friend over the holidays, she had a Christmas candle display arranged on a table in her living room. It was beautiful, traditional and slightly dangerous. The candles do not just add a visual delight to a room. The candles are scented. As the candles burn, fragrances, such as cinnamon, are released into the room.

I hadn't encountered a Christmas candle display like our friend's in years. I was left wondering how many people are still continuing to follow the old tradition.

Heritage home in London (Ont.) area

This is the heritage home just outside London with the face-nailed hardwood flooring that I discussed yesterday. The century home has been well maintained. Where possible it is original and where necessary it has been upgraded: bathrooms and kitchen.

Yet, this home has not had its walls removed to create an open-concept living space. The kitchen is modern but small; the dining room is useful but closed in on all four sides. It's intimate. And the entry has a small foyer with a number of exits plus a staircase leading to the bedrooms on the second floor.

Homes like this are not inexpensive in southwestern Ontario. In Toronto a home such as this would be valued at more than a million dollars (Canadian). Outside Toronto, in a place such as the London area, the price may drop by as much as half. But a price of as much as $900,000 would not raise eyebrows in the right location.

This heritage hardwood floor is face nailed.

This face nailed hardwood floor is in a home outside London, Ontario. The hardwood flooring looked good, considering its age, but on closer examination it was obvious this floor had been face nailed.

No one face nails an entire hardwood floor today. I was left to wonder just how common this practice was in the past. The home in which this floor is to found is more than a century old. The owner assured me that more homes in the area had similar floors.

Clearly there is a heavy price to be paid in esthetics. But that said, and accepted, the floor is amazingly squeak free. I imagine if one heard a squeak, pull the nail or nail in the area, and replace all with longer ones. Squeak gone.

Was this a southwestern Ontario aberration or was this done in many localities a hundred years ago?

Not exactly the white Christmas of story and song

It was a white Christmas in London, Ontario. But it was not the white thanks to snow but on account of heavy fog. It was a white and green and all-too-warm Christmas. The grandkids are looking forward to skiing come January and I'm getting concerned.

Christmas was a once a time to receive a London-made toy

Christmas morning once meant getting a few toys, games or puzzles from Somerville Industries and made right here in London, Ontario. Not so today. My granddaughters toys all game from mostly from China with one coming from Korea and another from Germany. Canadian made toys are a rarity.

I cannot understand why the simple, injection-molded plastic pan flutes given two of my granddaughters could not be made in London as stuff like this was in the past. But they aren't.

Oh well, enough of this. It's time to change tack and wish all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Some believe saying merry Christmas is politically incorrect today. Try telling that to my Muslim neighbours. The ones with the Christmas tree. They say the season is fun. They enjoy it. The mother and daughter especially enjoy the tradition of baking sweets for the holiday. And I assure you that their baklava is a sweet. There can be no argument.

In London, malls are not the shopping destinations they once were.

Every year my wife and I take two of our granddaughters Christmas shopping. We tour the stores in White Oaks mall and when done the kids and I stop for mini Cinnabon. It is an evil delight. Grandma doesn't partake and that just underlines how bad having an icing-topped Cinnabon must be.

White Oaks was possibly the first mall in London. Built by a local family on a major thoroughfare leading from the core to the four-lane highway serving the city, the mall was a great success.Over the intervening years it has faced a lot of competition and, although it has been hit hard, it is still arguably the most popular mall in town.

That said, the stores were not packed. The wide corridors were not bustling. The line-up for a Cinnabon wasn't long. With the biggest anchor stores now gone, the mall, appears to be marking time, holding its own.

I see the images of malls found in other cities and posted by members of this group and I'm jealous. Our remaining malls are nowhere near as grand. In fact, grand seems to be the kiss-of-death for a London mall.

Our downtown once boasted a true high-end mall. It cost something in the neighbourhood of $135 million to build back in the 1990s. Today that mall has lost almost everything it once sported at its opening, including its original name.

The shortest day of the year

The Canadian singer Bruce Cockburn has a song "The Coldest Day of the Year". Well, yesterday wasn't the coldest day of the year, not even close. But, it was the shortest day of the year with the sun appearing to set just before five o'clock.

London is set smack dab in the middle of some of the richest, most productive farmland in Canada. The farm fields extend right into the growing city. It is not uncommon for the land to be filled with a fast-growing crop of corn one year and a rapidly-expanding suburban neighbourhood the next.

When you can't afford a trip to Europe

A fellow by the name of Ian Newton posted this to a Facebook page called If You Grew Up In London, Ontario, You Will Remember When...

I'm sure there may be more that could be said about our area's use of borrowed place-names. Kitchener, to the right of the route marked in blue, was originally called Berlin. The name was changed in 1916, driven by anti-German sentiment common in the region during the First World War.

Not far from London on the Lake Erie shore is Port Glasgow. It likes to brag that perch, pickerel, salmon and rainbow trout are all to found not far from the port. And I would not be surprised to learn a few kilt-wearing men could also be found in the area if one were to look. You see, Port Glasgow was settled more than two centuries ago by Scottish immigrants moving to the area.

Smart phones not made here

Everywhere I go I see folk using their smart phones to take pictures and to text and even, sometimes, to talk. These new tools seem to be ubiquitous.

As a Londoner, I see something else. I see a technology that slipped from our grasp. At one time, London was home to a massive Nortel plant. It made telephones, and not just for Canada but for the world. When I was in Tunisia back in the 1990s, I saw a Northern Telecom building outside Tunis on the way to Sidi Bou Said.

Nortel was such a powerhouse of a telecommunications giant that at one point more than a quarter of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange was claimed by Nortel.

But that was then. Today the plant is gone. The company almost forgotten. Telephones and most state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment are now made offshore. About the strongest lasting memory of the once giant company are the ones held by the workers who found themselves without jobs and without the pensions they had been promised. 

Giants can be very disappointing.

London kids love snow. No surprise here.

The last school day of 2019 is just around the corner and Christmas is less than a week away. And yet, snow is hard to find. Making a snowman is impossible and a snow fort is out of the question.

These two London kids aren't taking it lying down. They not only shoveled their grandparent's driveway, they shoveled the front lawn. And what did they do with the shoveled snow? They packed the snow in a large, canvas wagon and in a number of large, plastic garbage cans.

Now, they have enough snow to make a giant pile of the fluffy white stuff. And we all know what big piles of snow are good for, right? Jumping! And if it warms up a little, the stuff gets packable and a snowman becomes a possibility. These two are prepared.

Christmas pagents are different today

When I was in public school almost seven decades ago, Christmas pageants were quite different. First they clearly called Christmas pageants. Today's event at École Élémentaire Marie-Curie seemed to be billed simply as the school's Winter Show.

There was lots to see and to hear⁠—students dancing, singing, playing musical instruments⁠—there was even a Santa Claus of sorts.

What was missing were camels, angels, a manger scene, wise men, shepherds and . . . Well, you get the idea. What may not be instantly clear is the missing strong religious connection may be a good thing.

École Élémentaire Marie-Curie is a French first language elementary school in the west end of London, Ontario. This is not a French immersion school with the goal of making English speaking children fluent in French. This is a school for families that speak French at home. This school is for parents who want their children taught in French, the language in which their kids are most comfortable.

While there may not have been any camels in the show, there was a dinosaur.

Labeling aside, there was lots of Christmas spirit filling the classrooms, halls and auditorium. Parents brought treats to share, the food drive boxes were filled with donations and in the auditorium families, clearly with different backgrounds, chatted and shared laughter.

And what did the children call the event. I talked with two and both agreed, it was the annual Christmas show.

The little guy is successfully competing with the chains.

It is just a small store but it often has just what you want and at a quality that puts the big chain stores in the area to shame. It's Remark. The family that owns it has one store in Windsor, one in Sarnia (I believe) and a third in London.

The other day my wife spent a quarter of an hour buying just three items at the Loblaws owned grocery store. Only two check out lanes were open.

We should have gone to Remark, as we usually do, ten or more check out lanes are usually open there. One is no sooner in than out. And the prices are very competitive. I don't know why so many folk feel big is better. It often isn't. Smaller is more competitive. It is successfully compete or wither and die.

Remark has been going for fifteen years in London. It shows no sign of withering and dying. And my wife and I, and even our grandchildren, are very thankful for this. We like the fresh navel oranges and the sparkling white cauliflower, the grandkids like the fresh, yeast-puffed, chocolate-topped doughnuts.

Heritage for Sale

York Developments, a local London developer, paid $30 million for some important land at The Forks of the Thames. Why is the land important? Some amazing heritage property is located there, such as a 19th-century courthouse featuring a unique castlelike appearance.

Rather than write a lot and quite likely get some of it wrong, I'm going to cut and paste from the Facebook postings of Butch McLarty, the nom de plume of a local historian who is quite vocal about the recent sale.

• Situated on a four-acre parcel of land, the old courthouse and gaol complex was designated a national heritage site in 1955.
• In 1980, many features of the interior and exterior were designated a heritage property under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.
• In 1981, a heritage easement was registered on title of the property by the Ontario Heritage Trust.
• In 1986, a few features of the interior and the exterior walls of the old gaol were designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.

The "Castle" Courthouse is not the only heritage property at risk with this sale. The old Gaol, located immediately behind the courthouse, is a busy conference, wedding and banquet centre.

The old Gaol was also designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act by the City of London on Nov. 17, 1986, protecting the exterior walls, the one preserved cell block and the interior trap door at the top of stairs and hanging hook (which were never used in an actual hanging since all executions locally were done in the jail yard).

Unfortunately, heritage protections on paper via laws and statutes don't always protect the heritage features of a property, interior or exterior, just like all laws are routinely ignored every day of the week. We've witnessed more heritage-related fiascos locally than I care to remember during the past 50 years.

The best use for this National Historic Site is to remain in public hands, as it's been since it was built in 1829. Private ownership by a land developer is not only long-term bad news for this site but also a breach of trust by Middlesex County that was gifted the property in 1979 by the Province, along with millions in cash by the feds and the province to renovate the old Gaol for modern-day use.

Seagulls: adaptable, quick thinking and bold

Out taking pictures downtown, I could not help but notice all the seagulls. The Thames River hardly counts as a sea. And both Lake Erie and Lake Huron are many kilometres away from the city. I wondered, "Why does London have so many gulls?" And it's not just London. My suburb, Byron, has oodles and the farm fields surrounding the city can have thousands of the raucous birds flying about.

According to the BBC, seagulls are breaking their connection to the sea. With urban gulls, their only connection to the sea is their name and that connection is tenuous. There is no actual seagull. There are Great Black‐backed Gulls, Iceland Gulls, Kelp Gulls, Ring‐billed Gull . . . and more. Plus, no surprise, there are Hybrid Gulls. But there are no seagulls.

Quick thinking and very adaptable, urban gulls can be quite different than their waterfront cousins. They have learned how to live very successfully in the city. These are birds that most likely will never see the open water of the Great Lakes, let alone the salty, endless water of the ocean.

Shouldn't street lighting posts last longer?

While shooting pictures for this blog, I noticed that the concrete streetlight post I was using to steady my camera was cracked. It had a big, vertical crack extending for many inches right up through the centre of the post. This post would need to be replaced.

I'm not sure who made the post in question but I know a lot of concrete streetlight posts are made in Burlington, Ontario, by the StressCrete Group. These posts look good when new. That said, shouldn't these posts look good after a few years of use as well?

Cities are expensive. Replacing relatively new cracked concrete posts seems like an expense that would blind side the city. I wonder if these posts come with a guarantee or a promise of a minimum working life.

It was a fun, well-planned event but few came. Why?

Supposedly cities are great places to live as events held in a city draw on a much larger population base than events held in smaller towns and villages and therefore find it is much easier to attract enough folk to make the event a success.

Saturday, the locally-owned neighbourhood theatre, there is only one left in town, showed a family-oriented film. The tickets were $5. A combo of buttered popcorn, a child-sized drink plus a Christmas cane was $5. Tickets on the draw for a large, gift-basket were free to all children.

I took two of my granddaughters. One won the gift-basket and shared it with her sister. She wasn't as lucky as one might think. There weren't two dozen kids at the show. Not two dozen!

Neighbourhood folk had told the theatre owners how much they loved going to the theatre for a Christmas movie with their parents when they were young decades ago. How wonderful it would be, they said, if the little theatre would show a film aimed directly at families. Ah, the memories that could be created.

I bought our tickets online. I pictured a line-up going out the door and down the street. This didn't happen. I imagined my granddaughters having great memories of the day. They will have those. Winning the gift-basket was nice extra touch.

Did they enjoy the film? Yes. Had they seen the film before? Yes. Apparently cable had brought the film, Arthur's Christmas, right into their home and onto their massive 60-inch flat-screen television. It is getting awfully hard to get people to get out of their homes to share a community experience. The experience may very well have already been availble, and enjoyed, right there in their home.

Next time, I'm taking to Twitter and Facebook. I'm going to spread the word. I'd really like to see a lot more families taking part in the next family day event.

Twin towers overlook The Forks of the Thames

These two apartment towers are in the core of the City of London. The two towers are near the The Forks of the Thames. Although not the first downtown apartment towers, these two were among the tallest, if not the tallest, for awhile. The downtown core is slowly turning around and highend towers like these are indicative of the change in the fortunes of downtown. The number of people living downtown has gone up dramatically in recent years.

No home delivery

When I was a boy mail was delivered right to the home six days a week. The mail was left either in a mailbox beside the front door or the mail was slid through a slot in the front door to fall the the floor in the entry hall. Then, to save money, the delivery was cut to five days a week. Saturday delivery was eliminated.
 
Eventually some genius realized it would be cheaper cut out home delivery completely. The drop box was born. Today in many, possibly most, neightbourhoods in Canada, mail is not delivered right to the door but is left in a neighbourhood drop box for later retrieval by someone for each home.

There's been a lot of resistance to the drop boxes. I saw these in the first neighbourhood I lived in in London more than four decades ago. My present neighbourhood doesn't have these boxes. My mail is still delivered right to my door. How much longer this will continue is anyone's guess.

Water-blue panels in dynamic fan shapes once filled the arches

Looking carefully through my files, I found a photo of Museum London clad with the original deep-blue metal panels.

If you look carefully, you might notice the dynamic fan shapes filling the arches. These disappeared at the same time that the colour was changed.

It is too bad that the colour reproduction in the two images is so different. Different cameras, different chips and taken at different times. Ah, the weakness of photography. It has been ever thus. Film was just as bad. When I was studying photography I had to write a paper comparing skin tones when using Kodak film, Fuji film and Agfa film. Totally different looks.

Why is it a museum, not an art gallery?

Why is it Museum London? This question is so common that the museum has posted an answer online.

"Museum London is a multidisciplinary institution, housing and exhibiting works of historical art, contemporary art and historical artifacts. The term 'museum' provides a comprehensive description of what we do and references the artifacts we exhibit as well as both historical and contemporary art (i.e. Museum of Modern Art, New York). . . . The name was changed in 2001."

The museum likes to point out "the important historical aspect" of the organization. It presents itself as a guardian, if not "the" guardian, of great swaths of London history. Yet the history-oriented museum gets a lot of the history of its iconic building wrong—especially when it claims the original design of the building ignored its location at The Forks of the Thames.

Museum London brags that its current building, constructed in 1980, was designed by the renowned Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama. It was originally a deep, rich blue, a colour chosen to reflect its location at the historic forks location.

I attempted to get a photo showing the original appearance. I talked with a couple of people at the museum. When I mentioned the museum had originally been blue, they looked at me with complete surprise. Neither knew of any pictures showing a blue museum. It soon became clear that our guardian of local history knew very little about its own history, if a story going back less than four decades can be called history.

If Museum London wants to be an museum, it should act like one. It should address the changes made to Moriyama's creation and tell us why these changes, both big and small, were necessary.

Flood protection at The Forks of the Thames

Serious floods, ones inundating homes, are rare at The Forks of the Thames in London, Ontario, but they do happen. And when they do happen, they can be deadly.

Today there are measures in place to protect the low-lying area to the west of the North Branch of the river. One very important measure has been the increase in the height of the dike. When the water is not high, which is almost always, there is a well-used walking path along the waterway.

A perfect location for the seasonal newspaper staff reunion

The Marienbad Restaurant goes back some 45 years to March 8,1974. The historical building itself dates back to about 1854. It was the original home of Josiah Blackburn’s London Free Press. Later, it served as the Queen’s Hotel before being claimed by the Farmer’s Advocate from 1921 to 1965.

Saturday, it was the location for the annual holiday season reunion of The London Free Press retirees. A perfect spot for the meeting of the dwindling number of newspaper employees old timers. At one time, not that long ago, The local paper was a huge force in the city with hundreds of employees and work going on almost around the clock. The massive building plus its parking lots occupied a full block of downtown land.

Today the vast majority of the employees have been laid off, the giant Goss press silenced and the building closed and sold. The small, remaining editorial staff now works out of a collection of small offices in a building smack dab in the core of the city not all that far from the paper's original home in the Marienbad.

In many places brutalism needs protection

Brutalism was a global architectural movement exhibiting a formal quality both on the inside and on the exterior. Often built of poured concrete, hence the French name Béton Brut, or raw concrete, Brutalist buildings celebrated their constuction, presenting the building material boldly for all to see.

For three decades, 1950s through 1970s, Brutalism was the reigning style for institutional buildings such as Trent University in Peterborough, John P. Robarts Research Library at the U of T or the Ontario Court of Justice in London (shown).

At one time buildings lasted more than a century, often much more, before facing demolition. Today, 30-year-old buildings that are found to be completely out-of-fashion face the prospect of an early demise.

London's brutalist building is not threatened at the moment but, that said, the art in front of the building has been, to my eye, desecrated. Xabis, done 1974, was refurbished and during the redo the colour of the work was changed. It went from fleshtone to lifeless grey.

Beer here, beer there, today beer is everywhere

When I was a young man beer was only available from the Brewers Retail outlets. There stores were run by the major breweries in Ontario working together. They were relatively few and far between. To buy beer you had to go to the order desk, your order went to the back, filled and placed on an elevated line where it rolled to the front of the store, thanks to gravity. You picked up your order and left.

Back then beer came in stubbies, short, somewhat thick, dark brown glass bottle which boasted of a number of advantages. They were re-useable and because of their short, fat shape, a truck could carry more bottles of beer than when compared to today's tall, thin bottles.

Since every brewery used the same bottles, stubbies did not have to be sorted. If a store sold 45% Labatt beer, then 45% of the returned bottles were returned to Labatt. It was a slick system and many would appreciate it today. Sadly, the system was jettisoned.

Today beer comes in an assortment of bottles, different colours (green, brown, clear), different shapes and some carry their name in raised letters. A truck today cannot carry as many bottles of beer and sorting is a must. At least, the bottles are still returnable and most are returned as there's a deposit.

The Brewers Retail is now called the Beer Store and it no longer has a monopoly on selling beer, Some grocery stores also sell an assortment of beer. The grocery store shown is clearly proud to announce that it carries beer.

Should newer construction be given the respect given heritage property?

I bet you're thinking that this is just a picture of a suburban home. If so, you'd be both right and wrong. Note the siding and then look at the garage door. They match. Another home in my area had the same treatment but the front door at that place also featured the home siding.

As a general rule, the siding colour matches or, at least, coordinates with the colour of the garage door and front door in new homes. These two homes are the only ones I know where it is not just the colour but the actual siding that matches. It must have been an extra cost exterior accent offered by the subdivision developer thirty years ago in London.

The second home no longer has the rare matching features. The garage door was replaced with a dark grey one and the front entry door has been replaced with a black door. It matches the new, black eave troughs and the black matches nothing else. The once unique home has lost its uniqueness, unless you count the fact it now sports lots of uniquely unmatched colours and shades.

You may not agree but I feel the way we treat our built heritage is wrong. If it's old, it gets almost automatic respect. If its not old, too bad. Our art gallery, at the Forks of the Thames in downtown London, was originally blue to refect its location at the forks. Today the building is dark grey. I guess the architecturally designed building wasn't old enough to rate protection.


A lot of buildings do not age well. Features that gave them visual sparkle are lost with the passing of decades. It doesn't take many years to mess up the look of a structure. How to provide protection, guidance and assistance without making people get their knickers all in a knot over losing their god-given-right to mess up the look of a building is one tough question. (Often it comes down to cost.)

I've noticed that by the time a building is being argued over as a heritage structure, the building may already have been modified. If the building under discussion is still visually intact, the remainder of the streetscape may not be. Buildings do not exist in a vacuum. They shine best in the right environment. Think of Old Quebec. Now there is place with sparkle.

My Byron neighbourhood in London originally had some unique properties. One by one these places are being modified and updated out of existence.

An Alternative Beauty Store: Huh?

An Alternative Beauty Store: Huh? A store for the attractively challenged?

Are you wondering what exactly this store is or does? I was curious and stopped my car in front in order to take a quick picture. Immediately a lady came out and began quizzing me. I never did find out what this place is about. Possibly it sell beauty parlour supplies? Your guess is as good as mine.

Lots of icicles but not much storm

It was billed as an fearsome, winter ice storm and there was certainly ice. If I had been caught on the road and had to drive on the stuff, I'd have been concerned. But the storm didn't leave many areas devoid of power. Few, if any, powerlines were downed and the salt trucks quickly had the roads clear of ice. The ice coating just wasn't all that thick and nor all that heavy.

Still, the winter season is young. Technically, it hasn't even arrived at this point. Southwestern Ontario may yet get hit with a bad ice storm. When a storm is bad, one can be without power for days. This is something that rarely happens but when it does it is a true disaster.

Braving the Cold for Santa

Thankfully the Hyde Park Santa Clause Parade is held during the day. It can be awfully cold in London in late November. One can get very cold waiting for Saint Nick to make his appearance when the temperature is hovering under freezing.

There are floats and marching bands and oodles of free candy given out by passing paraders but eventually the wait for Santa begins to feel impossibly long. Everywhere there are kids  huddled together for warmth or snuggled with a parent under a warm blanket and wrapped inloving arms.

At that point, Santa makes his appearance. He passes by, the children cheer and the parade is over. It's time to go home and get warm.

A Rainbow Post for December 1st

When my granddaughter Fiona was only 5-years-old I took her to Niagara Falls. She loved it and immediately asked for "her" camera. She had claimed my aging Canon S90 point-and-shoot as her own.

She shot this and that, aiming the camera here and there, she even shot almost straight up into the sky. I was puzzled. The Falls were immediately in front of us and yet she was swinging about excitedly shooting pictures.

Fiona had realized there were more pictures to be taken than just falling water and a rainbow in the mist. There was the blue, cloud-specked sky with soaring gulls.  And Fiona shot these other pictures as well.

I'm sure everyone at The Falls Saturday came away with a shot like the one on the right. The image that was missed by many was the rainbow high in the sky above the falls with soaring gulls adding extra interest.

Fiona didn't miss this picture. Now, I'm trying to open my eyes to all the picture possibilities around me. I'd like to shoot like a 5-year-old.

Santa is on his way

Today was the annual Hyde Park Santa Claus Parade. Although you can't tell it from this picture, there were thousands of Londoners lining the parade route to see Saint Nick.

London has two Santa Clause parades: a city run parade that takes place at night on the city's main downtown street and Hyde Park event that takes place on a Saturday morning in a northwest suburb.

The Hyde Park parade is a community event attracting lots of local participation such as the Western University marching band.

Some prefer to mow and not blow or bag

I find one of the strangest urban practices to be the bagging of fall leaves. I find it downright weird. I didn't do it as a kid and I don't do it now.

My dad was a farmer before his health forced him to quit and move to the city. He taught me that leaves will break down and disappear back into the soil if treated correctly. He called leaves nature's fertilizer. We were poor and my dad was not about to discard free fertilizer.

We had a small, open-topped, caged-off area at the back of our yard, created with a heavy gauge wire mesh. We tossed our raked leaves, along with any grass clippings when we had them, which was rarely, into that cage. The coffee grounds from our percolator, if you have to ask google it, were also dumped there to be mixed with the leaves. The leaves always took longer to decompose than anticipated but they did break down eventually.

The London Free Press reports city leaf collection extended.

Today, I have a different, even easier, approach. I mow them rather than rake them. My electric lawn mower is called a mulcher and does not even have an ejector shoot. Grass clippings and leaves are chopped small and left on the lawn.

When I started writing this post, I realized it was all conjecture. I did a little research. It didn't take long to confirm that dad was onto something. According to the Princeton Primer, the makers of Scotts Miracle Grow have studied this approach and concluded mulched leaves not only provide valuable fertilizer but the mulch does not result in problems with thatch as some have argued.

Whether ground up or piled in a corner, leaves serve as a natural fertilizer and increase the capacity of the yard to absorb rain. The more organic matter a yard contains, the more moisture it can hold, which helps buffer the yard from extremes of rain and drought. A soil rich in organic matter welcomes the rain, which in turn reduces runoff into the streets and, collectively, the amount of flooding downstream.

One doesn't have to be a Princeton grad to understand that when "nature's miraculous trash-free economy is allowed to function, we're spared a big mess in the streets and the considerable municipal cost of hauling, grinding and mechanically turning leaves at a distant composting centre."

Is this an invasive species?

Is this a miscanthus grass species? If it is, then this may well be one of the grasses often found along roadsides and agricultural fields. It is called an invasive species but it didn't invade; it was invited in to be used as a decorative ornamental plant.

Miscanthus grasses are native to Japan, China and Korea. They made the leap to North America near the end of the nineteenth century. Fast growing, the foreign species spreads fast, displacing native plant communities.

The dense, dry stands are highly flammable and have even been spotted in distant California. Just what that state needs: another fire hazard.

And why did I start this post with a question? Because this might also be pampas grass. In some areas, like California, pampas grass, cortaderia selloana, is considered invasive but not in Ontario.

March winds in late November

A special weather statement was issued this morning forecasting wind gusts up to 80 kilometres per hour. Homeowners, outside the city, living in farm homes exposed to the full force of the windy weather could experience gusts as high as 90 km/h. Environment Canada said a sharp cold front would blast the London area Wednesday afternoon.

By mid afternoon the neighbour's flag was flapping wildly in the wind, neighbourhood trees were threatening to topple onto lawns and the air was thick with wind-blown leaves.

The Lego public school

Byron Somerset Public School was opened in the early 1990s. It and the many suburban homes surrounding it were all built on land reclaimed from a former gravel pit. A new school on new land in a new neighbourhood demanded a new look. Byron Somerset got the new look in spades.

My kids went there. It was just a short walk away. Did they like the look? No. The little school, it has less than 400 students, was called The Lego School by the students.

Today, almost three decades later, some of metal panels are badly chipped, some are bent and there are many signs of wear and tear. Still, I must admit, it has aged better than I ever thought it would. It is aging rather gracefully.