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Conserve energy, raise your energy bills

CBC reports today that we’ve been so successful at energy conservation, Toronto Hydro is hurting due to lost revenues and wants to increase our prices.

Okay, let me see if I understand this:

  1. The government spends a ton of our tax dollars to encourage us to save energy.
  2. We (reluctantly, in some cases) comply.
  3. Eventually, we not only feel good about saving energy, we pay less on our hydro bill.
  4. Toronto Hydro complains that we’re not using as much hydro, so they have to raise our rates. Obviously, they thought that we wouldn’t actually conserve any energy in spite of the huge publicity campaigns and tax breaks, and didn’t build decreased usage into their planning scenarios. (Or maybe they need the cash to prop up their city wifi network boondoggle when they start charging $29/month for it and usage drops to zero. Or maybe they’re still paying out Wanda Liczyk’s severance.)
  5. Eventually, we pay more on our hydro bill.

What’s wrong with this picture?

2007 03 22 Comments (2)

TransitCamp picked up by MSM

Last Sunday’s TransitCamp gained main-stream media coverage in today’s Toronto Star:

…last Sunday’s Transit Camp, a day of out-of-the-tunnel thinking on how to improve the Toronto Transit Commission, specifically, its clunky website, its shelters, its subway cars and the way it communicates with its riders.

The 100 or so campers were young, in their 20s and early 30s, mostly people who work in the communications and tech industries and university students, all madly in love with transit. The TTC is symbolic of their relationship with the city…

There’s a romantic connection between a certain type of young person and the red streetcars that are a symbol of the city.

The reporter seemed to be quite fascinated with both the age and the facial hair of the attendees — TorCampers as the lost hippie generation? — but gave a well-balanced view of the event (AFAIK, since I wasn’t there) as well as an accurate description of the BarCamp way of life.

2007 02 11 technology Comments (0)

Rocketing to the airport

When I flew home yesterday from Jacksonville (where I’ve been blogging all week on my business blog about the ARIS ProcessWorld conference), I thought that I’d give the Airport Rocket a try. It’s TTC route #192, an express bus from the airport to Kipling subway; it only stops once or twice along the way and is regular TTC fare with free transfer at the subway.

I had read about this route on Joey deVilla’s blog several months ago, and the combination of arriving at evening rush hour on Friday (when there’s a lineup for taxis, and the traffic downtown is wretched) and having only a light bag on wheels made me give it a try.

The bus stops first at terminal 3 (right at the start of the arrivals level, near post C12), then goes on to terminal 1. It picked me up at terminal 3 at 4:30pm, then picked up at terminal 1 at 4:38pm, and pulled into Kipling subway at 4:55pm. I was très impressed.

It took me just under an hour in total to get home because I have to transfer and take the Spadina streetcar down to Queen, but if you live on the Bloor-Danforth line, it’s likely faster than a cab, especially at rush hour. Also, you have to love $2.75 rather than $50.

2007 02 10 travel Comments (1)

And now, a very Canadian weather moment

I know that we’re all happy to have a very rainy November behind us, but this is a bit much. Wind chill of minus fucking 16?? [That's Celsius for my American readers, so about 3F] I just went out to run some errands, and ended up taking the streetcar for routes that I normally would have walked. At least it’s beautifully sunny, or at least I think that’s what it looked like through my frozen eyelids. And now, at 4:45pm, the sun is setting. Yeah, I hate winter.

Canadians will talk about weather anytime, anywhere. I can imagine two Canadians on the deck of the Titanic as it sinks below the waves: “Cold wind night out tonight, eh?” “Sure is, although I remember this one night in Winnipeg when it was -50…” Or a conversation in hell, talking about how it’s a “dry heat”. I’m not sure if that’s because we’re just too polite to point out that the ship is sinking, or if we just grow up in a culture that’s dictated in some part by the weather, and therefore we end up obsessed with it.

2006 12 07 Comments (0)

Spaaaaaa

I can’t say enough good things about the Body Blitz spa. I was there last week (my 3rd or 4th visit), and it was heavenly. First of all, partaking of the “waters” before your treatment is a blissful experience, especially on a chilly day like last Thursday when the heat was not yet on in my condo and I had been feeling cold all day.

It works like this: you book a massage, body scrub, or whatever else that you want from their service menu, then you show up an hour and a half early for a free visit to therapeutic waters: soak in the big warm salt water pool for about 15 minutes, then off to the (hot hot hot) steam room for 5, a rinse in the shower then a minute in the cold plunge pool, then 5 minutes in the dry sauna, another rinse and cold plunge, then 5 or 10 minutes in the hot green tea pool before returning to the salt water pool to finish the cycle. Women only, bathing suits optional.

At the end of it, you can lounge around the pool for a while until you are called for your treatment, and you head off into the rooms at the back for a massage, scrub or mud bath. While my friend Rajani went for her massage, I indulged in “the sampler” body wash and scrub with the mint-lime sea salt scrub.

Totally relaxed, we headed over to Johnny Banana’s for mojitos and the best chicken enchiladas this side of Mexico City. I read a review for Johnny Banana late last summer just after they opened, and visited for the first time before they even had their liquor licence. I can’t find the original online review, but everything that I’ve had there has been fabulous, especially the chicken enchiladas with green tomatillo sauce that we both had last week — not on the regular menu, alas. They’re in a bit of a funny location, on Bathurst a few doors north of Queen, so miss much of the Queen West walk-by traffic but definitely deserve a closer look (and taste).

2006 10 04 food & wine
health Comments (0)

Toronto Public Library versus the banks

Why is it that when I check out a book from the Toronto Public Library, by the time that I walk home and check online that activity is already recorded, whereas if I make a withdrawal from my bank’s ATM, it doesn’t show up on my account online until the next day (if I’m lucky)? I’m pretty sure that CIBC has a bigger budget for customer-facing internet applications than TPL, so why don’t they show it?

2006 10 04 customer service Comments (0)

Moving hell

Seems like it’s the time of year for people to be moving, and almost every one of them has a horror story to tell. I was reminded of a post about moving that I had read some time ago on Joey deVilla’s blog, the comments on which resulted in him getting some nasty phone calls from the thugs at Quick Boys Moving, when my sister Betty had a slight moving catastrophe last week.

Betty moved 6 doors down the same street in her Toronto neighbourhood, from a 2-storey house to a flat on the 2nd and 3rd floor of another house. She called around for movers who would do a moving job without a truck, which was apparently something that they’re just not programmed to accept, since it really just needed 2 or 3 guys and a couple of dollys to cart the stuff down the sidewalk. Finally, she found Desi Movers, and had two (two!) discussions on the phone with the owner telling him that a) no truck was needed, and b) there’s one flight of stairs at the start, and two at the finish. No problem, he said, quoted her a price, said that there was no minimum number of hours, and said that they’d be there at 8:30 sharp last Monday.

The only thing that arrived at her place at 8:30 sharp on Monday was me with her coffee, and we waited until almost 9:30 for the movers to show up: 2 of them, with one dolly. The movers whipped out a contract for her to sign that a) had a four-hour minimum, although she estimated that three would do it, and b) it was an extra $15 per man per set of stairs. She called the owner, who first had to be convinced that they were not going to use the truck since it was parked practically in front of the new place anyway, and then told her that the guys didn’t want to do the move because she was apparently depriving them of their stairs bonus. Now, she should have had a written contract before starting, and he really should have come out to see the place before giving an estimate, but this is the type of moving-day extortion that is so common that I wasn’t completely surprised when it happened.

She prepaid them for 3 hours, with the agreement that she’d pay more if they went over that time, then we proceeded to have the 3 slowest hours of moving that I have ever seen. Two pre-schoolers with a rickety wagon could have gone faster at some points during the morning. When the couch wouldn’t fit up the stairs at the new place and the landlord (who lives downstairs) was taking the door and part of the door frame off to accommodate it, they mostly just stood around instead of moving the remaining boxes out of the old place and down the sidewalk to the new place. One particularly heavy box was just left at the old place, and a heavy one at the new place was left on the porch until they were prompted several times to carry it up the stairs. At one point, they just stopped going upstairs in the old place, leaving 12-15 boxes up there, then at 12:30 they got in the truck, told Betty that they had another job to be at, and drove off. To say that she was furious would be a serious understatement.

This is not an isolated incident, by any means. When I moved back to Toronto from southern California in 2002, my furniture arrived in a big truck (as you would expect) from Alex Moving and Storage, a North American Van Lines agent in Orange County. The movers, who I think were just tired and cranky from driving all night, decided that they couldn’t park the truck in front of the apartment building (it was common for moving trucks to park there, although technically not legal), and they couldn’t get the truck into the back laneway in spite of all the other trucks of that size that I’d seen get into exactly that same spot. So they drove away with all my furniture, and their local affiliate, Blue Bird Moving, called me to extort an additional $US827.63 from me to offload my furniture to a smaller truck and bring it back the next day — which is more than it cost to have movers move the same load of stuff from that apartment to another one about a year later. That’s after I already paid Alex Moving $US4,500 to get the stuff here in the first place. To top it off, they damaged some leather furniture — furniture that had been shrink-wrapped to guard against just such damage before leaving California and somehow was mysteriously unwrapped somewhere along the way. The insurance adjuster who visited from NAVL said that I would certainly be eligible for compensation since the damage would take a few hundred dollars to repair, but his final report (ever faithful to the company, I suppose) deemed that it was all less than the $100 deductible. One such episode would be bad enough, but to be screwed by the NAVL agent in Orange County, the agent in Toronto, and their insurance company, all on one move, was a bit much.

Then this morning, I saw this post on Feministe about her particular moving hell, and realize that incompetent/unscrupulous moving companies are just part of life everywhere.

2006 09 05 customer service
rant Comments (21)

Amusing ma bouche

Having had a great lunch at Banu earlier in the day and a lengthy nap in the afternoon, Damir and I celebrated my birthday at Amuse-Bouche, a fabulous little restaurant in our neighbourhood that opened last year on the spot of Susur Lee’s former Lotus restaurant by Jason Inniss and Bertrand Alepee, both formerly at The Fifth.

We’ve only been to Amuse-Bouche once before, and on that occasion we each ordered a starter and a main; since they specialize in small, perfectly-prepared dishes, we ended up stopping at the pub on the way home so that Damir could eat another course or two. This time, we decided to order the 7-course chef’s tasting menu, or what Damir referred to as the “Fear Factor menu”.

The food was outstanding. First was the amuse-bouche, which was not part of the tasting menu but is served to everyone: a lobster panna cotta with a small pile of chopped lobster meat on top, served in ceramic Chinese soup spoon. Just two bites, but a great hint of what lay ahead. We ordered a half bottle of the Vitteault-Alberti Cremant de Bourgogne sparkling wine to get things kicked off, and toasted my birthday.

The tasting menu started with the chilled fennel consommé with a thin (but quite large) slice of white tuna, topped with a tapenade crisp with olive oil and chipotle emulsion. This would have been much better on a hot summer evening than the chilly rainy one that we had; I liked it but found it incompatible with the weather, and Damir wasn’t keen on the broth and left some behind.

After this inauspicious start, we moved on to venison tartar “millefeuille”: raw minced venison with an ultra-thin potato crisp on top, accompanied by truffled mustard “ice cream” and cornichon beignet. The venison was perfect: velvety and tasty, and the smoky mustard blended with it nicely. The tempura-friend cornichon was a bit odd, and too greasy for both of our tastes, but otherwise this was Damir’s favourite of the appetizers.

The third appetizer of the night was perfectly pan-seared Quebec foie gras, served with the tiniest wedge of a ginger-infused French toast, a spot of white port jelly, and other tasty dots of flavour on the plate. Like the other plates, the decorative dots and swirls turned out to be incredibly tasty garnishes. I love foie gras, and this was my fave appetizer.

The fourth and last appetizer was a large scallop — listed as a bay scallop, although large enough to be a small sea scallop — wrapped in smoked duck and pan-seared, and dressed with a morel emulsion. The duck tasted like a very rich and salty bacon, and complemented the scallop well although I found the dish a bit salty overall.

As a palate cleanser between the appetizers and the main, we were served a tiny ball of blueberry and lavender ice: two flavours that I wouldn’t have thought to put together, but really worked.

By now, we’d moved on to a bottle of a 2003 New Zealand Pinot Noir, the name of which I have totally forgotten but it started with an “A” and was 6 or 7 letters long…you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to find, but I haven’t so far. Nice taste of black cherry, complementing the variety of dishes nicely. There’s still something vaguely disturbing, however, about having a waiter in a fine restaurant remove the screwcap of your wine with a flourish.

Our main course was roasted breast of duck with a soursop puree and coffee and cardamom reduction. Beautifully cooked, still rare on the inside, and definitely a winner with both of us.

The cheese course remains a mystery, since I didn’t catch the name of the cheese, but it was tasty: a small round of a quite salty cheese in a thin layer of puff pastry, served warm so that the cheese was quite soft and runny inside.

Last was dessert, the only course that differed between the two of us. Damir had a delicious little crème brulée with fruit garnishes, and I had a rich, dark chocolate mousse/ganache.

After almost three hours and 9 courses (if you count the amuse-bouche and palate cleanser), we definitely didn’t need to visit the pub for a top-up.

As a wonderful complement to the food, the service was sublime. In a tiny space — 10 tables? — there were at least 4 wait-staff, and any one of them might be dropping by the table to top up the wine, clear the plates, bring the next course, fill the water glasses, or fold your napkin if you left the table. We never felt rushed, and had a generous amount of time between courses, but didn’t feel like we were waiting around. The restaurant itself is a lesson in space management: a tiny patio in front (rained out the night we were there), the small number of tables inside, a tiny serving bar along one wall for the staff to open wine or pour drinks, and a kitchen that was no bigger than the small one in my condo. The tables are close-packed, but the result is more cozy than cramped.

2006 09 05 food & wine Comments (3)

Birthday lunch at Banu

Saturday, I turned 46, and had the good fortune of being surrounded by friends and family who like to feed me. After seeing a review for Banu last week and passing it on to Pat, she and Betty decided to take me out for lunch there. The restaurant bills itself as an Iranian Kebob Vodka Bar, and we were not disappointed in any of those respects.

Lunch @ BanuWe started with Nan o Paneer, an appetizer plate of sesame flat bread, a sheep’s milk cheese that I had never tasted before, fresh herbs, walnuts and watermelon slices. This was the only dish that I took time to photograph, and only then after we’d demolished most of it; the others were so good that we tucked them back before I even thought of the camera again.

At that point, we moved on to the vodka. There are several varieties on the menu, and they’re served very cold and on ice so that you can sip them with your meal. I had the Wokka Saki from the UK, which is a grain-based vodka flavoured with Japanese sake (LCBO #602573): a distinctive taste of sake, and very smooth. Betty and Pat both had the Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka from Poland, pale greenish-yellow in colour and a really lovely aroma and taste (LCBO #35840). We also had the tiny glasses of fresh juice: sour cherry for Betty and I (yum!) and pomegranate for Pat.

For the main course, I had Koobideh, which was the most delicious minced beef, formed into kebabs, grilled and rolled with herbs in lawash flatbread. All of their meats are from the Healthy Butcher, an organic butcher in my ‘hood, and I don’t know how much of the taste was from the high-quality and organic nature of the meat versus the preparation, but it had an amazing rich taste, and very lean. In addition to a side dish of diced cucumber, tomato and onions in a light herb vinegar dressing, there was a little dish of powdered sumac to sprinkle on the grilled meat. The evening before, I had been walking with Ingrid near her sailing club when the weather turned too rough to sail, and we were looking at the now-ripe sumac and I commented that it was edible but had never eaten it. Now I have, and can say that it imparts a slight citrusy flavour as well as (so I’m told) being a good source of Vitamin C.

Betty had a dish of saffron-infused grilled chicken breast chunks, which I can’t find on the Banu menu online — the lunch menu is slightly different from the dinner one shown there. Very distinctive taste of saffron, as opposed to it just being used as a colouring agent.

Pat, always a “balls to the wall” eater, had Dom Balan, the lamb testicles, which were marinated in vodka before grilling, and served with a tasty pickle side dish. The testicles themselves were reminiscent in flavour to sweetbreads, although a bit too mushy in texture for my liking.

To accompany all of this, we shared an order of Adasi (lentil salad) and Mast o Moseer (yogurt with shallots, served with more lawash flatbread).

At the end of all this, the server delivered some tiny squares of a baklava-like dessert: definitely flavoured with orange-blossom water like a middle-eastern baklava (as opposed to the Greek variety that uses honey), but it seemed to have a layer of crushed nuts in the middle rather than just layers of pastry, and sported a tiny little puffed pillow of pastry on top. Not sure if this is standard practice or because of the birthday cards on the table, but definitely a nice finish to the meal.

The decor is really lovely: all Mediterranean blues and whites, with a small waterfall fountain near our table by the front, and music that could be Iranian pop/jazz or something else entirely. Unfortunately, because of the rain, we didn’t have a chance to smoke the hookah on the patio; I remember smoking a mild, apple-flavoured tobacco through a 3-foot-high hookah in Dubai and was looking forward to repeating the experience, even though I don’t smoke.

Discovered via blogTO.

2006 09 05 food & wine
friends Comments (3)

Amazing CNE by night photos

Some beautiful long-exposure photos of the rides at the CNE by night — you can feel the motion! Via blogTO.

2006 09 05 photography Comments (0)