Margin Notes: Walks, Power, Cooking, Q

The CN Tower loomed in the distance as seen near Lambton Park in Toronto, Ontario on 24-January-2010. The newly-rebuilt Dundas Street bridge over the Humber River is in the foreground.

TORONTO, ONTARIO - It was very nice to return to my normal Sunday routine today, which I had not followed since 29-November. I slept in, listened to CBC Radio One's The Sunday Edition from 9 to noon, took a walk out to the Humber River to watch the Expressway train go by, and then it started raining, so I came back to my computer. I could do that every Sunday.

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I have taken a fair number of two-hour walks to downtown Toronto from where I live in the past year or so, a distance of about ten kilometers or six miles. To put this in perspective in previous places I have lived, that walk would be equivalent to:

• My parents' home near Beaux Arts Village, Washington all the way to Interlake High School in Bellevue, Washington
• Safeco Field in Seattle, Washington, all the way to the far end of the University of Washington's main campus in Seattle
• My grandparents' house near downtown Kennewick, Washington all the way to the Columbia Center Mall in Kennewick, Washington
• Stanford University's central campus all the way to the downtown Mountain View, California Caltrain station
• South Station in Boston, Massachusetts all the way to the Alewife subway station in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Perhaps needless to say, I have never taken any of those walks. In some cases, I have never even walked half that distance from the starting point.

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After taking a walk, it's time to cook a meal. Thanks to the new Toronto Hydro usage web site I talked about previously, I now know based on the spikes at mealtime that it costs me about $0.50 in electricity to cook dinner off peak, and about $1 on peak, which helps puts eating out in perspective.

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I had been thinking recently that I hadn't eaten chicken cordon bleu for a long time, and considering that I hadn't seen it pre-prepared in the frozen foods section for less than about $7 a serving in some time, I was thinking about getting ingredients to make it myself--something I haven't done in probably seven years. Then, I noticed a No Name brand "Ham and Cheese Stuffed Breaded Chicken Breast" for sale for less than $2 a serving. The difference between that and chicken cordon bleu is lost on me and I thought it tasted pretty good, so I guess I won't be on the spot to cook it after all.

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Jian Ghomeshi will be on the spot this week. His CBC Radio One show, Q, is apparently being sampled on public radio in the United States this week. So far, the stations I have noticed advertising the trial are KALW in San Francisco, which will run the show at various times of day during the one-week run, and North Country Public Radio in New York state, which will run it at 1 pm. Personally, I have a hard time seeing what kind of station in the United States would run a show that is so fundamentally focused on Canadian culture, no matter how good it is, but it will be interesting to see how it goes.