Flowers, like this large hibiscus, are signalling that the end of summer is nie. Large seed pods are taking the place of the once bright flowers and soon leaves will be falling and many plants will be bare.
But look closely, seed pods are quite beautiful in their own way. These seed pods are a fitting replacement for the hibiscus flowers they replaced.
A city's infrastructure is expensive to build and to maintain. Cathodic protection of aging watermains is claimed to add about 15 years of life to the system. Watermains corrode, crack, pit and scale and eventually fail.
To slow this progression, crews have fanned out across the city to connect sacrificial anodes to aging ductile iron watermains. The attached anodes will corrode rather than the watermains to which they are attached.
The huge tube between the men on the right and the truck contains a drill that is creating a deep hole to access the watermain and to hold the sacrificial anode equipment.
Garage sales can be an adventure, especially for a child. When this little girl spotted the tent among the stuff for sale, she knew she had to have it. No more blankets tossed over chairs upended in the living room. This tent does not need stakes. It can be erected anywhere, even in a living room.
The kid got the tent. Then she got an invitation to go camping. Outside. Not in the living room. And so, within days of becoming the proud owner of a small, two child tent, she spent a night with a friend in her bright blue garage-sale-tent.
Life can be grand.
This old postcard from, I believe, the '40s shows Dundas Street in downtown London at a time when the core easily attracted workers, shoppers and folk just out for a night on the town. Note the two large cinemas on the left side of the street.
Today there is a lot of talk, and action, about how to make the core more attractive, more pedestrian-friendly. To this end one section even has had the sidewalk area merged almost seamlessly with the roadway. The city planners call this approach a flex-street.
My wife and I used to live downtown. My mother lived downtown with me and even in her 80s she would walk the few blocks from my home to the core to do her shopping. She would not do that today as the stores she liked are all gone. Closed.
I believe my mother would tell the city planners that she was happy walking on a sidewalk beside a traffic-carrying street. What interested her were the shops. No shops, no cinemas, no reason to visit.
It amazes me to see all the photos posted online of impressive buildings found still standing around the world despite being hundreds of years old.
In the world in which I live, heritage buildings are consistently disappearing. They burn, they get old and are taken down because of lack of maintenance, they are torn down to make way for a new building. The one danger buildings in my world do not have to face is war but that has not been enough to save a large number of them.
The impressive "Y" building that once stood in downtown London burned one winter some decades ago. All that's left are memories and fading photos.
Folk with red, itchy eyes and runny noses in the fall in Ontario sometimes blame the easy-to-spot goldenrod for their discomfort. If they do, they are wrong. Goldenrod with its bright yellow clumps of small flowers is not the culprit; the guilty party is the much less easily spotted rag weed that also blooms in the fall and often grows nearby.
Why this error is still being made amazes me. I learned this fact when I was in public school in the mid '50s. Yet the CBC and other media regularly run articles informing folk of the truth. Maybe most folk do know the truth but it has become the fall go-to-story for the fall on a slow news day.
