Escape from the city

When I lived in Vancouver, I didn't enjoying going downtown very much. I didn't like having to find parking and I didn't like having to navigate around throngs of tourists that descend on Vancouver in the summer. But now that I'm in Toronto, I have very little choice but to love downtown...because I'm living smack in the middle of this concrete zoo. I think it's the body's way of dealing with change. Something in the back of my mind must have figured out that I was faced with two choices: learn to love living downtown, or face crippling depression. Thankfully, self-preservation always picks the option that avoids crippling depression. So now, instead of thinking about all the negatives of living downtown, I think only of the positives. Like how convenient everything is -- almost everything I need is a ten minute walk from my place -- and how there's always something to do. But despite this newfound love affair with the urban landscape, I still enjoy the occassional escape from the suffocating density of downtown Toronto and yesterday I had a wonderful opportunity to do just that at my uncle's cottage near Peterborough.

The last time I was there it was still officially summer, so seeing the scenery around the cottage and the lake in the Fall was a nice change. Of course, last time I was there the night time temperature didn't drop to 5 degrees either, so you can't win them all. On a related note, I'm quickly discovering these days that my counterfeit The North Face jacket and fleece that I bought in China for about 50 bucks is not going to hold up well in the winters here...I'll have to get a real winter coat. Anyways, before the sun set and the temperature plummeted, I got a chance to pick some apples from an apple tree in the yard. It hasn't really occured to me prior to yesterday that apples didn't just grow till they were ripe and fall to the ground into crates ready to be shipped off to Loblaws. I had to get a ladder and climb up to the top to reach most of the good fruit. It seems to me the whole process of fruit picking forces the picker to expend far more energy than he would gain from eating the fruits of his labour, as it were. But my short attention span and passion for novelty made me a happy worker for about 30 minutes, which, incidentally, is the maximum amount of time I can do something without becoming very bored.

All in all, yesterday's excursion was a nice break from the city. I wish I could go again, but I don't think the weather will permit another trip to the cottage until well into spring. Here comes winter...weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.


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