Picture of the Week: Lonely Dog

Cana­di­ans like pets, and in res­i­den­tial neigh­bour­hoods it’s com­mon to see peo­ple walk­ing their dogs after an early diner, no mat­ter the weather.
How­ever, unlike French, Cana­di­ans are well-behaved and they pick up after their dogs—streets here are not dot­ted with dog poop.

Picture of the Week: Halloween

North Amer­i­cans take Hal­loween seri­ously. As soon as the back-to-school dis­plays are gone, they are replaced by gooey can­dies and a wide range of mer­chan­dises sport­ing skulls, bats, pump­kins, skele­tons and the like. Be afraid, be very afraid…

Picture of the Week: Crazy frog

Observe the pic­ture. Sure, noth­ing spe­cial, just a reg­u­lar road in sub­ur­bia. Cars, lights, adver­tis­ing on the side… and a frog danc­ing and wav­ing on the traf­fic island.

A what?

Yes, a frog.

Oh, don’t you have men dressed as frogs danc­ing in the mid­dle of traf­fic in your coun­try? Aw, that sucks, sorry about that. You must live in a bor­ing place.

Picture of the Week: iSad

Right after it was announced Steve Jobs passed away, the Apple Store at the Rideau Cen­tre became an impromptu memo­r­ial to his legacy. It started with one post-it note, then two, three… and now the entire glass door that sep­a­rate the two entrances is cov­ered with lit­tle notes, some witty or empathic, writ­ten in dif­fer­ent languages.

Seven Things About Me

A while ago, Nigel tagged me for the pop­u­lar Seven Things About Me meme. I com­pleted it twice in the past, but the last time was in April 2008—so I fig­ured I was due for a newer version.

Picture of the Week: Campaign Signs

The cam­paign signs are back. On Octo­ber 6, we were called to the vot­ing booth once again, this time for the Ontario provin­cial elec­tions.
I knew who I was not vot­ing for (yes Con­ser­v­a­tive Party, I’m look­ing at you) but I was unde­cided between NDP and Lib­eral until the last minute. No mat­ter what I ulti­mately decided, I wish polit­i­cal par­ties would stop polling me over the phone dur­ing dinnertime.

Picture of the Week: Recycling

In Ottawa, house­hold waste (i.e. non recy­cle waste) is col­lected at the curb once a week. We also have two boxes for recy­clable waste: a black one for paper and a blue one for glass, metal and plas­tic. These boxes are picked up on alter­nat­ing weeks, black box one week and blue box the other. It’s actu­ally funny to see that most peo­ple can’t remem­ber which box to put out­side and they tend to copy their neighbour—if one per­son gets the wrong box and entire row does too!

Picture of the Week: Chalk

When I walked by The Bay the other day, I couldn’t help tak­ing a pic­ture of this stack of chalk, part of a “back to school” win­dow dis­play. I can still smell the chalk dust in my dream… yep, I’m traumatized.