Today it's just another home

A photographer with whom I once worked at the daily newspaper in London retired to Strathroy. This beautiful home is located just a few doors down from where my friend lives. I took this picture from my friend's driveway.

It didn't take much searching to discover something on the Web about this large, striking home. The following is from The Strathroy Historical Society Facebook site.

This stately mansion was built by Cyris Bixel in 1889. Cyris moved to Canada from Germany with his father, Matthew and the rest of the Bixel family in 1874. On moving to Strathroy, the Bixels founded the Bixel Brewery and from the size of the home Cyris built it is clear that the brewery was a success.

The home originally had 14 “very large” rooms. There was a drawing room, sitting room, dining room, kitchen, Pantry, china and cutlery room, conservatory, library, front foyer, two bedrooms, and a servant’s bedroom plus two bathrooms. It is surprising that such a large home originally  had only three bedrooms.

After Cyris died in 1895, his wife Emily married Duncan Campbell Ross who went on to become a member of Parliament for the area. In 1922 when Ross was made an Elgin County court judge, he and Emily moved from the grand home but the mansion stayed in the family until 1957. When the place was sold in 1957, the new owners made some changes to home's layout. For instance, the home gained an additional bedroom.

Practical, maybe, but no architectural gem

The new post office in Strathroy looks like so many other post offices in Ontario. The new post office is as ordinary and plain as the former post office was extraordinary and beautiful. The old post office was an architectural gem.

That said, I have had more packages of goods purchased online mailed to me in the past two years than I had in all the previous years of my life. Until relatively recently, other than at Christmas, I simply never mailed a package nor had one mailed to me. I can understand why Canada Post closed so many of its offices both large and small.

But, maybe Canada Post moved too fast. Today I get shirts sent to me directly from L.L. Bean and when I bought a replacement computer the other day I had it mailed to me from the Hewlett Packard offices in Mississauga, outside Toronto, and using Canada Post software I tracked its progress as it wended its way to my home over the course of two days.

I have never used Amazon and I rarely use Fed Ex. When I buy stuff online it usually comes via Canada Post. I wonder if the newish, smaller Canada Post offices will prove to be too small for the increased traffic.

The Old Strathroy Post Office

 

The old Strathroy post office was built in 1889. Although there is still a post office in town, and close to the old one as a matter of fact, the heritage post office with its visually wonderful clock tower is now a restaurant and hotel with eight luxury suites. You can read about it and see more pictures by clicking the LINK.

With covid-19 making shopping in person impossible at times, I am finding I have had to buy a lot online and have it delivered using, you guessed it, the post office. Seems funny that as postal demands increase, the post offices we are left using are much smaller and less spacious than the original post offices that dotted the province. 

If the original, large post offices had been maintained, it is quite possible the old, heritage buildings would be finding their second wind today.

Tape stops caterpillars

 

Masking tape girdles many trees in Southwestern Ontario. It seems the gypsy moth caterpillars are particularly abundant this year. According to many authorities, such as the experts at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, used correctly, bands of tape can reduce the number of caterpillars attacking residential trees.

The university claims homeowners can reduce the number of gypsy moth caterpillars in invading a homeowner's trees by putting up barrier bands of masking tape before the caterpillars start to hatch in mid-May. Caterpillars crawling up the trees get mired down in the tape bands coated with petroleum jelly and die. The bands also keep caterpillars from migrating to other trees or from climbing back up if they fall off the tree (surprisingly common!).

Windmills are big in Ontario

 

From some angles, the electricity generating windmills on the edge of the new subdivision in Strathroy, Ontario, seem to visually dominate the neighbourhood. Under some weather conditions it would not be surprising if the sound of windmills also made the windmills impossible to ignore. Some people contend the noise emitted from these huge installations can be quite irritating, especially to those used to the quiet of the countryside.

But it is not only working windmills that are raising questions. The huge, fiberglass blades are especially difficult to recycle when they are decommissioned on reaching the end of their 25-year
working lives. Disposing of them in a green manner is a problem. Burying them isn't green and
recycling poses s number of problems.

In Rotterdam the problem has been put off for another day as retired blades are put to new, very imaginative, uses. 

The Dutch city has a 1,200sq m children's playground called Wikado, with a slide tower, tunnels, ramps, and slides made from five discarded wind turbine blades.

Ontario's Largest Chain of Cannabis Stores

 

I don't smoke. No cigarettes or other stuff for me. So, after taking a picture of the True North Cannabis Company store in Strathroy, about twenty minutes west of London, I searched the Internet to learn more and I did learn more.The store is part of chain of recreational cannabis retailers.

Apparently four stores opened in March alone, some forty more stores are in the planning stage and the owners of the chain are dreaming of more. One has to wonder what these folk are smoking.

For a 2nd year Victoria Day fireworks cancelled

 

Before the covid-19 pandemic brought almost everything to a grinding halt, the Fanshawe Optimist Club of North London teamed with the Fanshawe Conservation Area to present one of the largest fireworks displays in Southwestern Ontario. 

Traditionally the Victoria Day event gets underway at dusk. This year, with the province of Ontario still in lock-down mode, the fireworks didn't get underway at all.

If you were wondering what Victoria Day celebrates, the answer is right there in the name itself: the birth of Queen Victoria who was born on May 24 back in 1819. In the middle of her reign Victoria Day was declared a holiday by the Canadian federal government in 1845. After the Queen's death in 1901 Canada’s parliament officially declared the holiday Victoria Day. Today the birthday celebration/holiday is only celebrated in Canada and Scotland.

 
Oh, I have a confession, my dramatic shot is complements of Photoshop. I put together a number of shots from a Fanshawe fireworks display from some years ago.