04 July 2026
RC Coffee
Linking up with Marg at The Intrepid Reader
3 July 2026
CHURCH ST. TORONTO ON
SATURDAY
At our corner, I took the back side of it a couple of weeks ago, but this is the better side.
A new mural on Queen St. W. taken from the streetcar, on our way to Chinatown.
We snuck inside the door of a restaurant for this photo.
We first came to August 8 in 2019!
Then during the pandemic. And that seems to be the last time!!
Yummy shrimp tacos, was surprised by the hard shells, but they worked!
Chinatown shopping pastries $8 and fruits/vegetables $7!
SUNDAY
That's me, this morning, along with the raisin coconut pastry above.
I did clean out some draft posts as well and got some scheduled ones done.
I booked Summerlicious for July 6! We each picked a spot, both hotels, as that is better value for the price. Many of the other places we would go to any time.
CANADA VS SOUTH AFRICA
Mark Carney joined the parade briefly with Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, shaking hands and taking selfies with the roaring crowds lining Yonge Street.
As he marched, Carney goaded revellers wielding water guns to drench him. The prime minister stumbled back as he was sprayed with water, feigning injury, and he continued the rest of the march, hair wet and pink shirt soaked through.
MONDAY
Monday Mural
Foto Tunes
12,000 step day!
I caught the 8 AM bus to get my passport renewed. I arrived around nine, took my time. I was finally served around 11:10, $186 lighter in my pocket, I opted for the $25 fee to pick it up myself! I don't trust the postal service!!!
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We have to check this place out!
I arranged to meet John in the King Edward Hotel. With no real plans we were going to try OEB on Toronto St. We were told 15 minute wait, at 15 minutes I got a message that they were "busier than usual, and it would take another 30 minutes", no thank you!
We decided on pizza at Pizzaiolo , it was good.
Not a direction we often take photos, looking south west from Adelaide. It looks especially weird as the CN Tower appears to be part of the pole!
The Pinnacle on the far left with crane, is at its finished height of 106 floors.
No, the Pinnacle Sky Tower is not taller than the CN Tower. While the 106-story Sky Tower recently claimed the title of Canada's tallest habitable building, the CN Tower remains the tallest freestanding structure in the country.
Old Post Office Museum I had visited it in this post Return to Sender - Address Unknown. Warning - 🐰rabbit hole ahead🐰!
This building was constructed in 1848 by blacksmith Paul Bishop in the Georgian style, featuring brick construction and a stone-clad cellar.
The 1848 brick townhouses actually sit directly on top of the stone foundations of the original "Jarvis House". That house was built out of squared logs in 1798 by William Jarvis, a prominent provincial secretary of Upper Canada.
Paul Bishop was a master blacksmith who operated his workshop just across the street. He collaborated closely with Thornton Blackburn—a formerly enslaved man who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad—to construct the very first horse-drawn taxicab in Toronto's history, known as the "The Central Cab".
During the deadly cholera outbreaks of the 1830s, the original Jarvis House structure functioned as a rooming house. After multiple renters tragically died inside, the landlord panicked and completely sealed off several rooms to halt the spread of the disease. Because of these walled-off rooms and tragic deaths, the property gained a lingering local reputation for being haunted.
Built in 1900, this distinctive red-brick, Edwardian Classical style building originally served as Toronto's Firehall No. 4. It replaced an older, mid-19th-century fire station on the exact same lot.
Designed by architect A. Frank Wickson, it features a grand, arched second-storey window. The large windows on the ground floor where the stage door and lobby are located were originally the open garage bay doors for horse-drawn fire engines.
The Hose Tower: The building features a prominent brick tower that was historically used by firefighters to hang up and dry canvas fire hoses after a call.
The Alumnae Theatre Company—North America’s oldest continuously operating, women-run theatre society—purchased the property after the fire station was decommissioned in 1970.
Hoarding around the new subway line.
The Globe and Mail Centre is a 17-storey, LEED Gold Certified commercial office building.
The heritage brick facades serve as a podium for the tower. This retains the historic street-level scale of the original Town of York.
Unearthed History: During excavation for the modern tower's foundation, archaeologists uncovered the historical structural remains of the 19th-century Berkeley House. Artifacts from the dig are now preserved inside the public arcade of The Globe and Mail Centre.
This older brick building visible along the street level is actually an adapted 1888 Victorian industrial site originally built as the Purifying House for the Consumers' Gas Company. The Canadian Opera Company (COC) meticulously preserved and converted it into their headquarters.
This structure serves as the administrative and creative heart of the organization. It houses the main rehearsal halls, extensive costume shops, and property storage rooms for their world-class productions.
Coffee at NEO Coffee Bar. Sheer deliciousness!
NEO vanilla cold foam and orange cream hojicha latte - house made orange cold foam, Japanese hojicha (green tea) and choice of milk.
Fun dog treats in a pet store. Beaver spoiler alert!
Since we only found 3 beavers today, I spent some time tracking down some more for later this week.
Raffi, the plumber came to check out what we needed doing and will return another day to complete, this is a cash in hand job, so we'll work around his schedule.
TUESDAY
John headed out to Turtle Creek to golf with a friend. It was a hot day, 35 C feeling like 45 C.
How hot? An entire transit line on the TTC's network shut down early Tuesday morning and remains out of service through mid-afternoon. The outage comes at the start of a brutal heat wave in the city, as humidex values soar into the 40s.
Toronto opening outdoor pools for late-night swimming amid brutal heat wave.
You have been able to walk the PATH underground from the Eaton's Centre to the Hudson's Bay for decades, since 1977! Now that the Bay is closed, the path is still in place and has had these murals added.
Despite the department store itself sitting empty and gutted, the PATH pedestrian network and the over-street bridge remain open. The landlord, Cadillac Fairview, maintains the corridors so that commuters can still use the underground paths to cut through the area, access Queen Station, and walk between the Toronto Eaton Centre and the surrounding office complexes.
Union Station samples. Meh, tastes like weak tea with barely a hint of raspberry! Needed an ice cube to cut the sweetness.
I received a note from the fan coil people, stating they are putting together a schedule.
I supplied the Appliance Heroes (washer/dryer vent/dishwasher) with photos. We exchanged various emails and on Friday I scheduled their visit.
WEDNESDAY
31 Days in Canada I will do a random post of somewhere we have visited in Canada, for the month of July. We have visited 10/10 provinces and 2/3 territories!!!
Well, that's annoying, we wait for summer, then on a holiday it is too hot to go out!
Toronto under orange heat warning on Canada Day as extreme weather blankets city. The Toronto humidex reached 47 C (117 F) today, the muggiest Canada Day ever.
Toronto under orange heat warning on Canada Day as extreme weather blankets city. The Toronto humidex reached 47 C (117 F) today, the muggiest Canada Day ever.
THURSDAY
Toronto is hosting its sixth and final 2026 FIFA World Cup match today with a Round of 32 clash between Portugal and Croatia at Toronto Stadium at 7:00 p.m. ET!!
It is another scorcher today! Great plans to go beaver hunting and lunch. Decided to skip beaver hunting and go to lunch. Found out that there is a FIFA game here in Toronto!
Even though it is at 7, after the chaos of last Friday's traffic 3PM road closures, we rescheduled lunch as well!
Ronaldo is here as this video shows the fans out in force yesterday when the team arrived! This is directly on our bus route!!!
Portugal fans take over Toronto streets unlike any other fan as, blowing Croatia, Ghana, Canada, Germany and Iraq out of the water.
FRIDAY
Weather forecast was 29 C, down from yesterday's forecast of 35 C!
John headed to golf. He managed to get soaked on the 17th when it rained and thundered. He said the temperature was 31 C feeling like 41 C when he got in the car.
I went for a haircut, since it was cloudy out, it was quite pleasant.
I went to the market, so crowded with tourists, and got 3 lbs of ground pork for $10, some tzatziki, green peppers, asparagus, broccolini, heirloom tomato.
I packaged up the pork when I got home into 4 X 12 oz.
Front St. looking west towards downtown.
Don't tell John, but I found a beaver on my own. We're supposed to be doing the hunt together.
So that is only 3 this week, bringing our total to 34/51, but we'll get serious next week!
AROUND TOWN
Seriously??
FIFA STORIES
UPCOMING
SUMMERLICIOUS BOOKED JULY 6 / 13
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Jul 10 - 12 City Hall Art Show
July 14 - passport pickup
July 20 - 23 Family and Blue Jays
July 26 - Leonard Cohen Reference Library
July 31 - Black and Blue
Aug 1 - Beatles
TBD
Raffi
Fan Coil
Appliance Heroes
COOKING
Saturday - ham colcannon potatoes. I used the rest of the packaged kale slaw
Sunday - pot roast - homemade stock, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions
Monday - leftover pot roast
Tuesday - curry leftover pot roast with green peppers onions and rice
Wednesday - cheeseburgers and potato salad
Thursday - lahmajoun
Friday - steak loaded baked potato
WATCHING
I finished Traitors Australia Season 2
I also watched Grantchester season 11 episodes 1 - 4.
John watched Traitors Ireland so I ended up re-watching it with him. It turned out I had never watched the last episode!
We continued with The Good Flight. Watching it I wondered how they had so much information about Epstein, that we hadn't heard about in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic???
The Good Fight aired its Epstein-centric episode on May 28, 2020, which focused on fictional, conspiratorial theories surrounding his death.
News about Jeffrey Epstein did make headlines in 2019, but the government documents and high-profile identities linked to him were kept sealed until the massive document drops in 2026.
For years, many of the co-conspirators, visitor logs, and investigative documents were shielded by the legal system.
The 2026 Revelations: The true scope of his network didn't fully break onto the national news until the U.S. government was legally forced to unseal and release over three million pages of the Epstein Files.
The Good Fight got so many specific details right because the writers based the entire script on unclassified investigative journalism, public flight logs, and known anomalies that mainstream news outlets had already reported by 2020. The show didn't have top-secret leaks; instead, it meticulously organized existing public facts into a single, cohesive timeline.
The showrunners, Robert and Michelle King, heavily researched the factual oddities surrounding the case before the episode aired:
The Inoperable Cameras: The episode explicitly mentions the broken security cameras outside Epstein's jail cell. Mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post had already confirmed this failure in late 2019.
Donald Barr’s Sci-Fi Book: The plot involves a bizarre sci-fi book written by Donald Barr (father of then-Attorney General William Barr). This was a real, highly publicized internet deep-dive from 2019 that connected the Barr family to Epstein's early employment at the Dalton School.
The Flight Logs: The characters track prominent politicians and figures traveling to the island. Journalists had already successfully sued to release partial flight manifests years prior, which provided the basis for those character interactions.
Memo 618 is a fictional plot device in The Good Fight that serves as a metaphor for how the super-wealthy and politically connected bypass the legal system. In the show, it is a mysterious directive passed quietly to judges and government officials. When invoked, it forces them to immediately drop cases, let wealthy defendants off the hook, and sweep illegal activities under the rug.
READING
My book had a character named Al, and I kept having to re-read the sentence as I read it as AI Artificial Intelligence!
Ashes to Ashes I'm having a hard time getting into this, I loved Finch's other series with Lucy, but perhaps it's because I started in the middle of the series.
As many of you are already aware, Gail Bowen shuffled off this mortal coil (as she would have put it) on June 25. She was peaceful, loved and ready.
Her earthly life ended as many of us suspected it would: she finished her last Joanne Kilbourn novel, sent it off to her publisher and then called it a day. Despite her worsening health over the last few months, she never complained, never fell into self-pity and soldiered on as only she could.
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