Met the Landlord and Saw a Drone Show

We finally met our landlord in person. When we checked out the place for the first time, the guy that gave us the tour was the tenant moving out. We received our lease over email and made our legal arrangements remotely. We moved in without seeing our landlord or hearing his voice, although we did wind up talking to him on the phone a couple months in, because our laundry room flooded.

He's been pretty quick to accommodate, but arrangements had only ever been made over email or occasionally by phone. I'm not really complaining, he's been far less intrusive and much quicker to help than my previous landlord. I just haven't been in a living situation where I'd never seen the person I'm renting from face-to-face before.

But recently we've been having an issue with our shower. Probable mold due to worn down caulking, bloating the baseboards outside the bathroom and staining the trim at the base of the wall. Apparently our maintenance guy decided to make a career shift and there isn't an obvious person to replace him, so our landlord decided to come take a look at it himself.

He lives in Toronto. He brought his wife and one of his kids. We learned that he's only owned the place for about four years, so the guy that lived here before us was the first tenant and only stayed about a year. Our upstairs neighbour wound up running into us that day, and it appears that they had met our landlord before, so it's only us that had never met him.

They fixed a closet door that had come off it's frame, and they trimmed the branches off of a couple trees that were getting close to the house. 

The same day that we met our landlord, our local hospital was hosting something called Rally for Health. Bunch of food trucks, The Strumbellas were doing a concert, and there was a drone show.

I'd never been to a drone show before. It was pretty surreal

Each point of light is an individual drone hovering in the night sky. Apparently they were being operated from the football field of a nearby highschool

Still images don't quite do it justice. They were all in motion. This syringe was pumping itself.

This is for mental health. We were standing in front of a guy who was very enthusiastic. He seemed to be involved in setting it all up. So we overheard him mention what this symbol meant

The guy behind us shouted "WORLD'S LARGEST KIDNEYS! IT'S TRUE!" when this one came up. Don't know what that references. Maybe the world's largest kidneys came through Grand River Hospital? Maybe he's just talking about this drone show display?

This says "Care Never Stops" It's their motto. From this vantage point you can only see "Care Never Ops"

Engagement Photos

Me and Lee-Anne had engagement photos done. The entire album is pretty substantial, so we narrowed it down to 17 and I posted them on my Gallery blog. Here's a link: https://gryphonsgallery.blogspot.com/2023/06/engagement-photos.html 

This is not the kind of thing I ever thought about doing. I don't even think I knew what engagement photos were before I was told that we had to book them. Now that I see the finished product, I can recognize them as something I've seen other people post on Facebook. But I just thought of them as pretty couples pics, not considering the effort that had to have been put into making them.

Going through the process of having them done, I also realize that I've definitely seen people having them taken on the Iron Horse Trail and in Victoria Park. We had ours done in a little park near where Lee-Anne's parents live, one that we've walked in a lot. It's a cute spot, but the photos make it look like paradise.

As an aside, Brampton is really good for its network of parks. It also has a huge number of community centres, generally with really good resources. The city doesn't have the best reputation, but in these two categories, it's very strong.

I didn't know how to dress for the occasion. Lee-Anne told me to pick something that wasn't too dark, to avoid something pattern-heavy, and to avoid green because I'd blend into the foliage. I tried to bring a bunch of clothes so that we would have a selection, but she told me I was going overboard. Once we got to Brampton, she wished that I'd brought one of the shirts she'd told me not to take.

So we went shopping and I got four more shirts. Of them, she said I looked best in a dark green plaid. Seemed like it went against all previous guidelines.

We took these a little after we were flooded with wildfire smoke, so I was worried that we would be working through a haze. Thankfully it had mostly cleared up by that point. The photographer said that he had been taking pics in the smoke though. Wonder what that looked like.

The photographer scoped out the place a little before our session, as he'd never been there before. He found the bridge that's in some of the better pics. It's a tiny thing, maybe only eight feet long over a creek, but he used it for all it was worth. We weren't even aware of it when we requested the location.

One of the arguments that people use for the legitimacy of AI generated art, is that when photography was invented many traditional artists opposed the technology because it was able to capture the beauty of nature, which previously could only be done by artists that had committed their lives to the craft. Over time, our legal systems decided that photography could be done in a way that used enough human creativity to be considered art, and now this is relatively unquestioned. The idea is that the outrage, followed by eventual acceptance of AI art as a valid form of human expression is inevitable.

That argument mostly just turns me off of photography, but listening to the person that did our photos and his process, there definitely was an artistry to it.

He gave us a lot of prompts. He told us how to hold hands. For the walking pics he told us to bump into each other intentionally. He had us tickle each other. He told us to tell each other our favourite date stories etc.

This picture was surprisingly uncomfortable to take, but it looks really relaxed.

In this one, she's sitting on the railing of the little wooden bridge. I'm scared of heights, and even though it really was just a slight elevation over a creek, I had to work through some nerves. She was fine though.

This one isn't in my collection of 17. Lee-Anne told him about a bridge she used to walk on with her dad when she was young, and that it had recently been renovated. So we took a detour and checked it out. The photographer felt a creative inspiration. So, because of the improvisational nature of this shoot, I really like it conceptually. I don't feel like it quite bore out in execution.

For some of these shots, he had me lean against the safety rail. Terrifying.

Here's one where she looks like she's just falling into my arms, but this actually took some muscle on my behalf. Not the way I would choose to lift her normally either. Good for visuals but not efficient on a biomechanical level.

And then I just really like this one.

Canadian Wildfires 2023

 There were a few things I wanted to blog about, but I guess I've got to talk about the wildfires.

Due to the dry weather this year, forests in Nova Scotia and Quebec have come up in flames. The fires have spread rapidly and gotten out of control. The resulting smoke has wafted into many nearby cities. In Kitchener, a haze formed over the sky and there's been a kind of campfire smell. 

Our family Whatsapp chat has been popping, with everyone exchanging notes on how bad the smoke has been in their respective areas. I have family in Toronto and New York where the air quality is said to be really bad. My New York connections have said that it is indeed as bad as the press makes out, whereas the people from Toronto say they've avoided the worst of it. I've got people in Guelph, Brampton, and Northern Ontario also saying that they've been effected.

Wildfires are not new to Canada, and indeed we had some pretty nasty ones in recent years, but this is the first time that I've experienced such a sensory impact to city living. I'm not being chased out of the city or choked out by smoke, but the effect is still unignorable.

It's interesting to see people re-adapt some of the COVID measures without being told to. A lot of people are wearing masks again to filter the air, and some people are staying home to avoid exposure. I don't think these things would have been instincts pre-pandemic. I guess this is how we respond to natural disasters now.

In 2020, Australia dealt with some really destructive fires, and in the following years the Southern US had the same issue. I guess it's our turn.

I used to think that climate change would turn Canada into a tropical paradise before it burned us up, since so many places are warmer than we are and they're able to sustain life. It would obviously be bad globally, and people would migrate away from the more impacted areas creating issues of population density. Canada would eventually suffer the same as everywhere else, but I thought it would take us a while to get there.

I suppose the difference is that those warmer places had a much longer time for their environments to adapt to that climate, whereas the ecosystem here is equipped for colder temperatures and it can't keep up with the speed at which we're warming.

Despite having a low population compared to our size, Canada hasn't done great in terms of environmentalism. I've heard that we're heating up twice as fast as the global average, and that we were the worst in terms of emissions among the G7. This is partly due to the fact that we're such a vast and sprawling country, so things need to be travelled over longer distances, and we're also a major oil producing nation.

I'm getting some mortal pangs, similar to the feelings of early COVID. In a way this is even worse, since the pandemic was a threat to humanity, whereas this is a threat to all life on Earth. 

We live on a planet that is home to the only carbon-based life in the Universe that we know of. Our proximity to the sun and our abundance of water is nothing short of miraculous. We consider ourselves the most sophisticated animals for our self-awareness, compassion, and innovation, but while almost every lifeform contributes to the ecosystem, humans are the only species that inhibit it. If we cause the end of the miracle that sustains all life as we know it, think what losers we'd be.