Okay, I’m not quite done ranting about the City yet.

Thursday morning the City turned off the water in my neighbourhood while they repaired something that was causing a flood on the street. Thursday night they turned the water back on.

Everything was normal except for the bathtub. When I turned the taps on, no water came out.

This morning I called the City to notify them so they could come and fix it. They informed me it’s not their problem. Since there is water coming into the house, they’ve restored water service to me and anything beyond that point is my problem.

“Call a plumber,” they said.

My plumbing worked just fine until they messed with it, and now I have to pay someone to fix what they broke? Is that reasonable?

Tensions are definitely escalating between me and the City.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

An old plumber friend offered to come over and fix it.
Before that could happen, the City called back and said they would fix it.
Before that could happen, it magically fixed itself!

I’m officially on holidays now until January 7th! No alarm clocks, no deadlines, no meetings, no work, and best of all – no commuting!

So this will [probably] be my last post ranting about OC Transpo or snow removal for sixteen days.

SNOW REMOVAL

I am very curious to know how the City prioritizes snow removal. My neighbourhood is STILL in very rough shape. Last night a sidewalk plow made a half-assed swipe of most of the sidewalks around here.

Around 12:30 pm, I was awoken by the sidewalk plow which was creating a little hill right outside my house. It kept backing up, putting its blade down, and then accelerating into the hill, over and over again. Sometimes the motor would just stop, and he’d have to restart it. And then he just backed up to the end of the block, left the sidewalk, and was last seen whipping down the road, having abandoned his hill of snow right outside my house. It’s still there, waiting for the freezing rain. Thanks Buddy.

The Civic Hospital area, where the big expensive houses are – my goodness, has it ever been nicely manicured by the snow removal teams. Not only are their streets plowed AND their sidewalks plowed, but all their snow has been taken away. The snow banks have been scraped down to the ground and removed. It was all done on Wednesday night. Here it is Friday night, and Carlington’s a mess. James lives in Mechanicsville, and he says it’s a mess too.

So I’m curious. Does the City allocate snow removal resources according to the relative ritziness of different neighbourhoods? Or is it just a coincidence that the higher-income neighbourhoods I pass through have been cleared first and better?

OC TRANSPO

I got to my bus stop at Gladstone and Bank at 4:00 this afternoon, just in time to see a westbound #14 arriving. Excellent timing, I thought. But it was full and it only let a handful of people on. Not me. So I started walking, figuring I’d catch the next westbound 14 that came along. NO WESTBOUND 14 CAME ALONG. I walked the whole hour and twenty minutes without seeing a single westbound 14, even though they’re supposed to come every 15 minutes. During that same period of time, I saw SIX eastbound #14s.

I’m lucky in that I only live 6.5 km from work, and that I’m healthy enough to walk that far. But there are a lot of people who can’t do it, for one reason or another. Frail, elderly, disabled, wheelchaired, baby-strollered people. Not only that, but I just want to get home fast. There are people who need to get where they’re going. Some parents, for example, need to pick up their kids at daycare before the daycare centre closes. (When my son was in daycare, they charged $1 per minute if you were late picking up your child.)

The bus system is becoming reliably unreliable. That storm was five days ago, and public transit is still in chaos. There’s something seriously wrong here.

Walk?

Walking has been an ordeal all week. Monday there were no plowed sidewalks. I was patient because 37cm of snow fell on Sunday and I’m a reasonable person. I clambered to work through the snowdrifts and didn’t complain.

Tuesday and Wednesday there were some plowed sidewalks, but it was still a lot of work to walk to work.

Today many of the sidewalks had a thick coat of greasy snow. I hate that kind of snow. You can’t get any traction, and it takes a long time to get anywhere because you slide back a little with every step. My friend says it’s like doing the moondance.

Walking has sucked this week.

Bus?

I take the bus home from work most days. This week has been a busing nightmare. On Tuesday I waited over an hour for the #14, which is supposed to come every 15 minutes. I’m told Wednesday was even worse. The woman beside me was almost crying because her feet were so cold. After work the last thing you want to do is stand on a street corner for an hour, slowly freezing, wondering if all the buses have been cancelled or something.

At one point I turned to the woman next to me and said “If this goes on much longer, we’ll have to eat somebody.”

I was just kidding. I wasn’t that hungry. But if I’d had a log and some kindling and matches in my knapsack, I would have built a little fire and cooked someone just to warm things up a bit.

Eventually a bus came. It was bursting at the seams with passengers. It was the most over-crowded bus I’ve ever seen outside of Greece. A very nice bus driver let us all on, even though we were crammed into him and the door and flattened against the windshield.

It took me an hour and 45 minutes to get home that day, and I live 6.5 km from work. I could have walked it faster, and I would have been warmer too. But how was I to know the bus was going to be an hour late?

And does anybody else wonder where all the missing buses go? I can understand that the buses will run late when traffic is bad, but shouldn’t there still be one arriving approximately every 15 minutes? Wouldn’t the 5:00 bus be there at 6:00, and the 5:15 bus be there at 6:15? Etcetera?

Anyway, the buses have been tortuous this week.

Car?

I don’t drive, but people who do tell me that this week has been hell on wheels for drivers. Between the snarled traffic, huge snowbanks, bad road conditions, reduced lanes, and pedestrians walking on the streets, it’s been slow, frustrating and hazardous trying to drive anywhere.

Taxi?

I rarely take a taxi. But last night I was at a party in Chinatown, and around 10:00 I decided to treat myself to a cab home. I called Blue Line. They told me they could send a cab if I didn’t mind waiting.

“How long?” I asked.

“Anywhere from half an hour to two hours,” he said.

Half an hour to two hours? If I wanted to wait half an hour to two hours, I’d take a bus.

I walked.

Bike?

I’ve seen the occasional bike out there, but I haven’t talked to any bikers about how it’s working for them this week. They’ve got to be going faster than everybody else, right?

Snowshoes

I was impressed with the woman on snowshoes going over the Somerset Street railway bridge. She gets bonus points for ingenuity. But sidewalk conditions weren’t consistent enough for her to leave the snowshoes on. Sometimes she had to carry them.

Public costs of various methods of transportation:

I got this breakdown from Ottawa City Councilor Diane Holmes today:

The total public cost (not user cost) per passenger trip:

Car driver: $2.50

Transit user: $1.76

Cyclist: $0.24

Pedestrian $0.10

(source 2003 “Costs of Travel Report” Delphi/MCR for City of Ottawa)

You’d think if they wanted to encourage us 10-cent pedestrians, they’d make walkability a priority in this city.

Stompers wanted

Tonight on my way home from work I stopped at the Plouffe Park skating rink to help Carol stomp snow. Volunteers need to stomp all the snow inside the rink down so it gets compacted before the rain starts on the weekend. Carol and I stomped for an hour and got about half of it done. (If you’re around Preston and Somerset and have a few minutes to spare, please go help stomp for a bit. It’s the rink right behind the Plant Recreation Centre.)

Carol was saying that as bad as sidewalk conditions are now, they’re going to get a lot worse if the City doesn’t get rid of the snow before the rain starts this weekend. Those mountains and humps and banks and ruts will all be frozen into place by Sunday, immortalized till Springtime.

Happy last day of Fall, by the way.

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A few weeks ago I was downtown photographing the Portrait Gallery Swap Box on my lunch hour, and my hands suddenly got painfully cold. The next thing I knew, I was in Zeller’s on Sparks Street, warming up and gravitating to the mittens section.

Because my hands were cold, I bought warm mittens for Dave X.

Tonight I tucked a few little extra things inside the mittens, and wrapped them. Then I put the package in my knapsack. My mission this week will be to find Dave X. It’s not always easy finding homeless people. I mean, you can always find homeless people, but you can’t always find the specific one you’re looking for.

He’s an interesting character, Dave X is. He’s 57 years old. He doesn’t drink or smoke or do drugs. He refuses to work, panhandle or apply for welfare. He won’t use the shelters, but he’ll go to some of the holiday meals being offered by churches. The rest of the year he lives on peanut butter, bread and bananas. “I like them best when they’re lightly freckled,” he says wistfully.

His only source of income is found money: change on the sidewalk, bills he finds inside pockets of suit jackets at thrift stores, money dropped by drunk people getting into taxis at closing time, spare change under the drive-thru window at McDonalds. And in the summer he borrows friends’ yards so he can have yard sales.

He’s looking forward to turning 60 in three years so he can get an old age pension and maybe rent a room somewhere. He says the Found Money business isn’t as lucrative as it used to be. “There’s more competition now,” he says.

It’s been a brutal winter so far for homeless people. I hope he’s not sleeping under a blanket of snow tonight.

If it’s cold tomorrow, he might be hunkered down at the library. I’ll start there.

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A couple of weeks ago I asked you for tips about how to achieve that Christmasy glow with a minimum of time and effort. And you responded with tons of excellent ideas.

Nancy, Patti, Deb and Malva all said to get a real tree, even if it was just a small one. So I got a 4 foot balsam on Sunday evening. But by Monday evening I had to admit it was an odourless balsam, which was kind of disappointing. And I was in a bit of a cranky mood because it was Monday and my tree didn’t smell Christmasy and I wasn’t feeling Christmasy and blah blah bah humbug.

So I stomped into the kitchen and made Megan’s Christmas brew, only I wasn’t making it to drink, I was making it to smell good. So I went heavy on the cinnamon sticks and cloves, and I threw in a peeled clementine orange. Before long, it started to smell incredibly yummy and Christmasy and I stopped being irritable and I stopped resenting Christmas and I started humming O Tannenbaum! and decorating the odourless balsam.

My house smelled wonderfully of Megan’s Christmas brew for two full days. (I’ve got another batch on the stove right now).

What else? Well, David suggested I replace some ordinary light bulbs with red or orange bulbs, so I did that. This gave my home that warm, hospitable, red-light-district glow. There were a handful of Christmas treasures left over with nowhere to go, so they gathered companionably in the lamp’s rosy glow.

Lots of people suggested a wreath. I haven’t done that yet, because I’m not sure how to attach it to my door. Last year I tried to hammer a nail into the door so I could hang BJ Santa (my mother named him that years ago; I had nothing to do with it). But the door is too hard to hammer anything into it. Suggestions?

Meanwhile, I hung BJ Santa on the back door, where he lends a certain warm, inviting, perverse charm. (Speaking of perverse Christmas charm, have you heard about the Rogue Elf?)

The mannequins love a little extra sparkle at Christmas, so I decorated them next.

And then I put out my little collection of Saint Nicks. One of the things I do like about Christmas is going through the Christmas box and finding all the treasures I’d forgotten about. Like the collection of Santa Clauses.

There! Now I’m all awash in Christmas minimalism. I might even bake some gingerbread, if I can find a nice easy recipe.

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