Monday Mural

 I'm linking up at Monday Mural 

May 2023 - Toronto ON

Taken on a visit to Stackt last week. Click here for other Stackt murals.

By Alfalfa

We had lunch here.

Fatspatrol

Monday Mural

  I'm linking up at Monday Mural

May 2021 - Toronto ON

Found on last week's excursion.

On the side of the Pembroke Inn which also features more of The Dreamers art inside.

A new Birdo in the same lane. To see more Birdo murals, click on the label.tag below this post - Birdo.

I just found out that this mural we found a couple of weeks ago is an Alfalfa piece with a Birdo head piece.

You can see each of their signatures along the top two corners.

Balzac

 Linking up at Marg at The Intrepid Reader 

Sunday Salon

Seasons 

Hearth and Soul Link Party

Weekend Coffee Share

Sherry's Pickings

What's On Your Plate (Monthly)

April 2021 - Toronto ON

Balzac's café inside the Toronto Reference Library (closed at the moment).

2019 - Yonge St. Toronto

Excellent article in the Washington Post on the Premier of Ontario - Doug Ford Must Resign.

An excellent article from Toronto Life saying that closing outdoor recreation spots doesn't make any sense. "I can tell you that over 90 per cent of the cases coming into our hospital are from essential workplaces and their households. Just before we got on the phone I was talking to a patient with nine family members who all tested positive, all traceable to one person who works in a trucking plant."

As of Wednesday DoFo has been MIA, claimed he was "exposed" to a colleague who had tested positive and was "working from home".

Weekend chores done, laundry and housework and time to play.

Monday Mural this week and last since I forgot.

Ditto Tuesday Treasures this week and last.

Monday John did a Costco run.

I received my anti-fatigue mat I ordered for the kitchen. I spend so much time standing there cooking and watching my laptop.

Then we go this news Ontario Winter Storm will be bringing 35 cm of snow!

Looking the window on Wednesday to see how much snow we got I see this! According to one of our doormen, the van was stolen at Costco and the police gave chase.

Thursday John felt it was safe to get his snow tires removed. This was the first year he ever bought snow tires (we are "normally" away in the winter) and he didn't need them!

Our order from Simon's arrived.

Turtlenecks for John, for cold golfing mornings, WHEN they are allowed to reopen.

New sheets, dish towel and red faux leather round placemats.

I love that they don't come wrapped in plastic, instead they each have a matching drawstring bag.

I finally, gasp, almost have my new sewing machine set up, it took some YouTube videos.

Friday we went for a drive after lunch. We've been obeying the stay at home directive, but had enough. We took the car and didn't interact with anyone.

High Park has closed off access to the cherry blossoms again this year.

As we drove along Bloor St. W.

We were headed to the University of Toronto cherry blossoms.

Then along Bloor and Dundas W for some mural hunting.

We took a couple of short walks and I found a gluten free bakery so I picked up a few things. I also went into Bulk Barn for Virginia peanuts.

Inside the bakery where I stopped.

Window shopping.

Birdo and Alfalfa

Lauren Pirie project.

Monyzak aka Mony Zakhour mural.

This mural by Ben Lory marks the location where Muhammad Ali trained to fight local boxer George Chuvalo. Hop over to this link and see a plaque commemorating that fight on Ossington, lots of murals there too!

Bakery items.

SOPHISTICATED SHAKERS

John chose the Boulevardier.

Loosely translated, a boulevardier is a man-about-town. A cocktail by the same name was created by Erskine Gwynne, the publisher of “Boulevardier,” a magazine for expats living in Paris during the 1920s. The drink was popularized after it was included in Harry MacElhone’s 1927 book “Barflies and Cocktails.” In it, the author credited the cocktail to Gwynne, a regular at MacElhone’s bar. It’s a tidy story, like the drink it inspired.

• 1 1/4 ounces bourbon (or rye)
• 1 ounce Campari
• 1 ounce sweet vermouth

COCKTAIL CIRCUIT - TO DATE

Mai Tai with orgeat which is new to us

Tequila Sunrise

Rob Roy required bitters which we had never bought

New York Sours 

Gin Fizz

Rusty Nail

Vodka Sidecar

Vodka Cosmopolitan

Negroni

The Perfect Storm

COOKING

Saturday, feeling lazy, pizza. First time done in air fryer, tasted great and took no time.

Sunday ham, mashed turnip carrots and mashed cauliflower and potatoes and Brussel sprouts.

Monday freezer chili I had made back for Super Bowl. I also made some pineapple/mango ice cream the frozen fruit has been hanging around the freezer.

Tuesday slow cooker short rib stew with potatoes, carrots, turnip, celery. I had some leftover vegetables from Sunday that went in to thicken the gravy, also leftover and frozen.

I baked a carrot cake and divided it into three portions and froze two while I made a cream cheese icing for the remaining piece.

Wednesday I was going to make deer battered shrimp wraps, but it got late (video call) so I just sauteed the shrimps with butter and garlic and served them in gluten free wraps with radishes, red onions, cilantro, cabbage and limes along with sour cream and hot sauce. Delicious.

Thursday lamb doner kabab, homemade tzatziki. I tried this recipe for gluten free pitas (GFJules) for the second time and they felt good as I made the dough but they turned out really hard. So I'm on the hunt for a better one.

The lamb doner kabab turned out amazing, almost like the real thing. I will publish my version of the recipe this week.

Friday steak fries and clean out the veg bin - cherry tomatoes, green pepper, onions and bok choy. This time John did the chips and the steak at (almost) the same time in the air fryer. We are loving the air fryer!!

WATCHING

We watched a mini-series Rebellion about the Easter Uprising in Ireland. Not well done at all, in fact we didn't even finish it. I know my history but this was so convoluted and confusing to follow. It also had bad reviews.

Tuesday movies:

Solace starring Anthony Hopkins

Eye of the Beholder was peculiar but intriguing although it had awful ratings. It was mainly filmed in Montreal.

 We caught up on our mural favourites, The Resident, 911 Lone Star, Top Chef, Top Chef Canada, MasterChef Canada, Blue Bloods.

Friday we watched 1917, the title indicates that it is a movie about World War 1 and depicts the horror of war. The technical brilliance of the filming is overpowering.

For my kitchen watching I am working my way through the Great Australian Bake Off seasons. I am happy with the judges, and liked the hosts in season 1, they weren't silly. But the hosts in season 2 and 3, where I am, annoy me to no end just as the early hosts on the British version.

READING

I never think to borrow magazines at the library but as I was browsing I saw a copy of Canadian Living and thought I would skim through it on my laptop.

It has to be 10 years or more since I bought a magazine.

There was a recipe for shrimp croquettes and earlier this week  I had seen a contestant on MasterChef UK make shrimp fritters. So I am thinking I might do that this week.

BTW my laptop moves around the house with me and becomes my TV/Netflix viewer in the kitchen. In the bedroom I will watch YouTube/DailyMotion on it.

On my laptop - Good Veg well laid out and lots of inspiration. We eat a lot of vegetables so I am always looking for creative ways to use them. I am intrigued by the chia jams.

This sounds like a perfect vegetarian dish for an appetizer. Tiny baked potatoes with spiced chickpeas. 

I learned that there is a gluten free Asian noodle called hor fun, a flat wide rice noodle available in the refrigerator section in Chinatown.

Savoury chickpea crepes    sweet chickpea crepes

On my phone - I finished Nomadland this is a very depressing book. I think that instead of focusing on "houseless" people it should be focusing on the disappearance of the middle class in America and Canada.

"At one time there was a social contract that if you played by the rules (went to school, got a job and worked hard) everything would be fine. That's no longer true today. You can do everything right, just the way society wants you to do it, and still send up broke, alone, homeless."

It is more like a documentary about Americans who lost everything in 2008 and end up living in cars, cans, trucks and RVs. These people are generally past retirement age who have to take jobs at Amazon, running campsites or picking beets for less than minimum wage. Their average income is $600 in Social Security. No pensions or savings, all lost in mortages and/or divorces.

At one point she is discussing all the blogs that popped up in the early 2000s "promoting" this lifestyle and I realized I knew George and had even met him several times. The George she describes is not the sad person she writes about.

She only ever points out the bad/sad side of their lives. 

I discussed this with a friend who also owns an RV and follows a lot of these people online they love this life. She was also a close friend of George, who passed away in 2019. They had known him since 2011. She thought George would not have liked being referred to in this way as it made him sound like a loony toon. Any time we met with George he was happy go lucky, loved to dance and loved Mexico with a passion.

Click here to read about our first meeting with George.

Click here to read about an evening out with George and a couple of other bloggers.

Here is an article from Toronto Life about a front line worker who makes good money who has to live in his van.

I won't even begin to talk about the big companies like Amazon who suck the blood out of these people....

And this book is written before the pandemic so I can only imagine what the numbers are like now.

It so happened that for Weekend Roundup it was the letter Q and I went with Quartzsite which features in the book.

On my phone - Park Avenue Summer based on a blogger's recommendation. A piece of fluff that I needed after Nomadland. Still interesting as it is set in the mid-60s and is full of fascinating insights into those times. Remember Carnation faBreakfast, runs in your stockings, smokers everywhere, Dippity-do.

Cannabis and Coffee

June 2019 Front St. Toronto

June 2019

John asked for my mother's chicken a la orange and I decided to find a slow cooker version that turned out really well.

He had picked up a bag of frozen haddock at Costco so we had breaded oven baked fish and oven sweet potato fries with mushy peas.

I thought the Tony Awards show was great this year but it is giving me the urge to go to NYC!

Ain't Too Proud was up for best show and we were pleased as we had seen it last October before it premiered on Broadway.



Monday dawned wet and gloomy. Decided to stay put as it is game 4 for the Raptors tonight so they will be shutting down the streets around the arena. It will totally mess up the bus schedule. Last Friday game 3 in Oakland put the schedule behind by thirty minutes when I took it at 3 PM and it just kept increasing the delays as the afternoon wore on.


Movies

Cold Pursuit - liked it didn't love it.

The Conversation - borrowed from the library online, made in 1974 mystery thriller. This was intriguing.

Chicken wings and fries were on the menu but I used a different used a different wing sauce and the improvements were great.


Our Raptors lost by one point on Monday night but still have two games to take a win!! BUT we only needed one game!!!!!!!!!!!😍

Tuesday I planned a trek downtown to include John's hankering for a burger.

First stop was the OD store on Queen St. West. Why? To see this.

OD Toronto is a consignment store selling and displaying some of the city's rarest streetwear collectibles and sneakers from brands like Nike, Supreme, OVO, and Bape.

The skateboards are under the glass floor.

And we came for this!!

Walking along Queen West to lunch.

It's not often that we find graffiti art painted on trees, or in the case of the “Hug Me Tree,” (Hugging Tree), on a tree stump. This favourite piece of art is located on the north side of Queen Street West, a short distance west of Peter Street. It appeared for the first time in 1999, painted by Elicer Elliott, a graduate of Sheridan College. He has since become one of Toronto’s best known graffiti artists.
Click on his name in the tags below this post for more examples of his work.

After completing the “Hug Me Tree,”“ Elicer Elliott placed a tag on the tree – “H.U.G.”- the name of his graffiti crew. As an afterthought, he added the “Me” to the tag, and Queen Street’s famous “Hug Me Tree” was born. It's been hidden for the last couple of years due to construction hoarding, but the new MEC store is now open.

View while we had lunch, west corner.

We checked out Graffiti Alley, an ever-changing outdoor gallery. I've featured some of these on Monday Murals over the years.

Another Uber5000. It is almost impossible to get a whole picture as it is behind a locked link fence. Click here to see a full photo.

The late Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip group has been added.

Then we walked to Front and Bathurst to check out Stackt.

For years, this 2.5-acre lot at the corner of Front and Bathurst sat vacant as the city debated its fate. The parcel of land is destined to one day become a park, but for the next few years, it has been leased to Stackt, Toronto’s newest fully-accessible market built out of 120 shipping containers. Stackt is a mix of event spaces, retailers, restaurants, services, galleries, and it even has its own brewery. With the shipping containers occupying only a third of the land, the remaining outdoor space has been landscaped with AstroTurf, a beer garden and a gravel pavilion that will soon feature a giant fire pit to keep the space animated straight through the winter months.

Monday Mural will feature more murals. Pigeons by Fats Patrol.

Alfalfa

Click here for murals.

We'll be back to explore the shops.

Walking Front St. east bound.

Massive construction site.

Crazy basketball fever.

John got his weekly golf league game in and he had requested lamb chops for dinner. I tried this recipe.


I headed out to return a meat thermometer that John didn't like and to the market for the chops.

Along my walk.

Union Station Food Market

Berzcy Park, in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood, recently got a makeover that includes a new fountain by landscape architect Claude Cormier. The fountain features 27 cast iron dogs.

Thursday, and of course, it was raining. I had seen the new permanent Kusama Infinity Room at the AGO in April when it opened.
We lucked out and there was no one there when we took a chance to see if we could get in.

This painting always catches my eye.
Frederick Varley’s Immigrants

This piece absolutely mesmerized me.


Source - AGO
Toronto-based Kent Monkman is an internationally-renowned Cree artist whose fascinating works explore themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, resilience and the complexities of the Indigenous experience. Known for recasting popular figures in art history with Indigenous people, Monkman’s works often highlight how Indigenous people were traditionally misrepresented and objectified in art history.

We see that in The Academy, where Monkman reframes historical works of art including Nicolas-André Monsiaux’s Zeuxis choisissant des modèles, which depicts Zeuxis as an artist in front of a blank canvas and several nude women models. Zeuxis amalgamated the models best attributes – using them for his painting of Helen of Troy. (The painting is on view on Level 1 in the Richard Barry Fudger Memorial Gallery, Gallery 125.)

The painting also reinterprets the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons — which depicts three men struggling as they’re being attacked by serpents. In Monkman’s version, five idealized European men are at the centre of the painting – cast as objects in the Indigenous artist’s creations.

On the far right, above the depiction of Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau working on his painting Self Portrait Devoured by Demons, is Monkman again, but this time as himself – making The Academy a double portrait of him in male and female roles. Monkman stands behind the easel wearing a traditional Cree Coat, caught up in an interaction with French Neoclassical painter, Jacques-Louis David. (Morriseau’s work can be found in the J. S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian art in the AGO.)

On the left is a woman who appears to be Harriet Boulton Smith. Her husband William Henry Boulton is behind her, playfully kicking up her skirt. (Boulton Smith donated her art collection and historic Grange estate to, what’s now known, as the AGO.) Look closely and you’ll find you’re actually seeing Monkman’s glamorous gender fluid alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle – a recurring character in his work. She’s creating a drawing while waving sweet grass and wearing a gown similar to the one Harriet wears in her portrait now on view on Level 2 of the AGO.

Artist Mike MacDonald is often referred to as the grandfather of Indigenous media art. Of Mi’kmaq and European ancestry, the Nova Scotia-born video artist and photographer was one of the first Indigenous artists to use video in a fine art context. He began working with video in the 1970s and ‘80s and frequently used it to explore the natural world and his Indigenous heritage – much like what he created in his work Seven Sisters,currently on view.

Seven Sisters is a multi-screen video installation shown on seven different monitors of various sizes, similar to the Seven Sisters mountain range in northwestern British Columbia. MacDonald first encountered the Seven Sisters mountains in the 1980s when he was invited to northern British Columbia for the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en land claim case, in which the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en First Nations took the government to court in an effort to regain jurisdiction of their territory that was being destroyed by clear-cut logging.

Created in 1989 using aerial footage taken from several vantage points, Seven Sisters showcases the grandness of the landscape with lively mountain goats and beautiful flowers and plants. However, it’s also a document of the devastation that clear-cut logging had on the area, indicating that if action is not taken soon to protect this unique environment, perhaps this will be the only way to see it.

As it uses several cathode ray tube (CRT) TV monitors, Seven Sisters presents unique challenges for the AGO conservation team: this type of TV is increasingly hard to find and maintain. Some of the monitors on display here at the AGO are the result of our keen-eyed team salvaging functional but discarded TVs.

Maybe it’s the sound of the soft music or the sight of the vibrant colours that draws you into the space; either way, I Rise, the new exhibition by Canadian-Maroon artist Winsom, captivates your senses. Inside this new two-room exhibition filling the south end of the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art, you’ll find incredible large-scale multimedia installations of photography, sculpture, painting and more that explore themes of freedom, resilience, renewal and African spirituality.

Winsom is an Afrocentric artist who was born in Maroon. She later moved to Canada and currently works as an artist, activist, mentor and healer.


Winsom: The next room in the exhibition, Jumping the Boa, is about death.

FRIDA!!

Winsom: Here you’ll see an altar with images of people who are all meaningful to me. Odetta, the jazz and blues singer, pushed me to continue working on my art. There’s also Emily Carr, my mother, Marie Catherine Laveau (a voodoo priestess from New Orleans), Harriet Tubman, Frida Kahlo, Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson and Canadian painter Doris McCarthy.

Lunch in members' lounge, a cheese plate and smoked salmon with cream cheese.

The big game is tonight! Traffic was so crazy with streets closed off for the game that was being played in Oakland!!!!! It took us 45 minutes to get out of the downtown core and then another 30 minutes to get home because there was a three car pileup on the Gardiner....

While I was out John was making dinner. Shepherd's Pie a la Gordon Ramsey.
Delicious and enough for tomorrow!

YES WE WON!!!!!!

Downtown on Friday for a pedicure.

Royal York hotel lobby renovations are completed and it is looking very art deco with a bar area in the middle of the lobby.

Raptors everywhere!

BOOKS

Finally finished the John Lennon biography, a long satisfying read.

Started Swimming Across the Hudson, annoying, immature narrator.

LINKING UP WITH

Beth hosts Weekend Cooking where you can post anything food related.

Saturday Snapshots is hosted by A Web of Stories.

Seasons

Say Cheese

Monday Walks

Monday Morning Blog Club