Dodgeville expands east

Rice Lake lit by the full moon.

Following a decades-old dream, Dodgeville expanded to the northeast last week, annexing a plot of land on the north shore of Rice Lake to be used by all Dodgeville residents for year-round recreational purposes. Risa and I just spent our first (cold!) weekend there, unpacking and fixing and getting things into order.

With a door-to-door non-highway route totalling just 110 km, it’s well within my single-day cycling range, even pulling a loaded trailer. That said, I’d be travelling with both wife and cat, neither of whom is likely to appreciate such a long ride, so we’ll be sticking to the car for now.

Of course, there are differences between this cottage and the old family cottage from my youth: TV, phone, high-speed Internet, running water, and an indoor bathroom chief among them. We’re looking forward to visiting the local towns, exploring the local backroads, hiking the local trails (both the Ganaraska and Oak Ridges trails pass nearby), and just generally relaxing.

Meet the new Dodgeville, same as the old Dodgeville

If you visit Dodgeville directly rather than through an RSS reader, you may have noticed that the site has gotten a minor redesign. The old theme, originally based on MistyLook, had served me well, but I thought it was time for a change. The new look is based on MagicBlue, a fully GPL‘d theme. The layout remains basically the same, but less dead space at the top of each page means that more content is visible on first load.

There are still a few kinks to work out, but I doubt that most people will notice. Please let me know if it displays hideously in your browser. Among other things, the new theme supports tags and makes posting galleries much easier. You’ll be seeing more of them in the future.

The Globe visits Dodgeville

For those of you who didn’t catch it, Dodgeville was featured in Dave LeBlanc’s Architourist column in Friday’s Globe and Mail. Mr. LeBlanc (to use the Globe’s house style) and I spent a sunny Sunday afternoon last month exploring three abandoned bits of Toronto infrastructure: old Don Mills Road, Pottery Road, and the DVP on-ramp at York Mills. Good times.

Another year in review

Although Dodgeville has been around in one form or another for close to fifteen years, this fourth incarnation celebrated just its second anniversary yesterday. My informal goal when I started this blog was to produce interesting, varied, and somewhat unstructured content on a regular basis. I like to think that I usually succeed. Dodgeville’s tagline, “Random wanderings and wonderings,” was originally intended to be a placeholder while I thought of something better. I never did, and it seemed as appropriate as anything else I could come up with to cover my mix of ramblings. I do try to make this blog less about me and more about the world around me, but I did occasionally bring my half-dozens of readers a little deeper into Dodgeville this year to follow our kitchen renovation. It was finished two weeks behind the original timeline, which was well within our expectations.

Dodgeville’s sophomore year was quite productive even though, as with its first year, most potential posts never quite made it beyond the idea or initial draft stages. You may consider it a blessing that a tiny fraction of the 5500 pictures I’ve taken in the past 12 months have made it into the blog. As with last year’s wrap-up, the pictures accompanying this post are a few of the many that I’d set aside for posts that I never quite got around to developing.

I changed workplaces around this time last year and much of my sights-of-the-city reporting changed venues with me: instead of watching red-tailed hawks and urban wildlife in and around E.T. Seton Park, this summer I tracked red-tailed hawks and urban wildlife in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Mount Pleasant has also been the source of some of my griping this year, but mostly I really like exploring the cemetery. You’ll be seeing more of it in the year ahead, too.

Following up on the previous year’s explorations of old Pottery Road and Don Mills Road, I paid visits to Indian Line, an abandoned DVP on-ramp, and Passmore Avenue.  Every time I think I’m running out of abandoned roads, another one pops up onto my radar. I hope to spend more time exploring hidden and neglected corners of the city this coming year.

Some of my favourite finds this year included a colourful garage door, notes to the cleaning crew, a leet car, a poorly-designed intersection, Eddie Shack Donuts, the city’s best bike lane (courtesy of the TTC strike), and a traffic camera watching the Don River.  I posted a number of my discoveries on Torontoist instead of here; they included a readymade on Merton Street, a very Toronto display of passive aggression, a touching neighbourhood notice, and a grossly inaccurate official notice.

Torontoist was also home to one of my most ambitious blogging projects yet, The Travails of Mr. Stickman. I spent about three months obsessively examining every commercial vehicle and piece of heavy machinery that I walked or biked past to compile the three dozen photos. It was a lot of fun, but I was happy to turn my concentration to something else shortly afterward. I also contributed about a dozen business names to the Great Torontoist Pun Hunt including my personal and long-time favourite, “Bin There Dump That.”

One of the things that continues to surprise me about the city is how much of it lurks just out of sight. For the curious, there’s always more around the corner or a block away. It’s the primary reason why I continue to vary my commuting and walking routes. Although my schedule has put a crimp in my wandering for much of the last year, I should be coming out of the worst of my overcommitments just in time for the spring hiking and cycling seasons.

So what’s up for Dodgeville this year? Many more random discoveries, for sure. A couple more abandoned roads, I hope. More explorations in Toronto’s outer suburbs and rural surroundings, thanks to the extended day-tripping range I get out of the combination of the GO train and my new (incredibly zippy!) road bike. Some new Supermarket Finds are on deck in the next few weeks. And of course, there will be celebrations when the Chester Hill bike lane is finished early in the spring.

Dodgeville will also be getting a redesign with support for those newfangled tags and some other new content. For those of you who read the site directly instead of through an RSS reader, one of the improved features is already visible in the sidebar to the right. In addition to the cycling mileage counter of previous years, I’m now keeping track of my walking, public transit, and automobile mileage. In the first seven weeks of the year, an unexpected result is already emerging: I fully expected the car and walking totals to be inverted. I think I travel about 2000 km by car in an average year and I’m on pace to walk around 1500 km this year, so we’ll have to see if the numbers hold.

Anyway, thanks for reading for yet another year. Stick around; there’s lots more to come.

Kitchen reno part 3

The contractors finished the floor yesterday and the cabinet crew took over today, installing all of the cabinetry. There’s not much left for them to do tomorrow other than putting up the moulding and doing some finishing work. It’s almost beginning to feel like a kitchen again. We’ll get measured for the countertop early next week. After tomorrow, we’ll be at the halfway point in the schedule.

His Highness, displaying two of seven shavings from his recent trip to the Veterinary Emergency Clinic, tries to look unimpressed by all the fuss as he lounges on the new floor.

Kitchen reno part 2

The old floor and tiles have been ripped out, and the relocated electrical and plumbing roughed in. In the last few days, the contractor installed the new subfloor and finished and painted all the walls and ceiling. The bulkhead that ran along the length of the wall above the old cabinets has been virtually eliminated, with only a small plumbing vent that ran through it remaining in place. It’ll be hidden inside the new cabinets.

The new cork floor is to follow this week, with the cabinet installation scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Sometime after that, we get our appliances, counter, and sink. With any luck, we’ll be fully kitchened again on schedule by mid-September. With even more luck, the worst of the dust is behind us.

Kitchen reno part 1

Step One: Out with the old.

The contractor carefully removed the old cabinets, appliances, and fixtures, which we donated to Habitat for Humanity. The load filled up about half of a cube van. In contrast, with the exception of a couple of studs and a length of 4″ duct, the rest of the first day’s demolition detritus fit into three bags. Who needs a big ugly disposal bin?

And thus begins a scheduled six weeks of life without a kitchen. Tomorrow, the floor.

(No, we’re not doing any of the work ourselves. Knowing when to call in the professionals is a key to a happy marriage.)

Year in review

After months of behind-the-scenes work, countless design overhauls, seemingly endless sessions with focus groups, and three mass firings of my marketing teams, I made my first post on this blog one year ago today. I got a total of four hits in my first week: one MSN crawler, two from Yahoo, and one bot looking for a security hole. My first confirmed human visitor was still more than two weeks away.

That initial article was followed a few days later by my second post, in which I boldly declared that if I ever wrote about “how fascinating I find the squirrels in my backyard, you have my permission to give me 30 lashes with a wet noodle.” Exactly two months and twenty-two posts later, I wrote about the fascinating squirrels in my backyard. I held out as long as I could but those damn squirrels always get the better of me. I lasted almost an entire year before breaking my other vow and writing about what I had for dinner last night. Oh well. Otherwise, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of sticking to Dodgeville’s founding mission statement.

A few of my favourite posts and adventures from my first year include finding the old Martin Goodman Trail, taking a look at the abandoned monorail at the Toronto Zoo, chronicling my bike ride home from Niagara Falls, uncovering the Ontario government’s crackdown on street racing, exposing the moose that time forgot, finding a rock balancer in the Humber River, seeing a potential Christo project in Toronto, looking at the development of York Mills over a 20-year period, being hoisted into the air on the end of a very long stick, walking along the entire length of old Pottery Road, and, yes, watching those naughty squirrels. You really should see them going at it.

A number of those posts also appeared on Torontoist after I started writing for them in June. I’ve contributed almost 50 posts to Torontoist so far, only about a quarter of which I’ve reposted on Dodgeville. If you’re not reading Torontoist, you really ought to. Not just for my posts, but for all of the other great writers churning out heaps of local content there every day.

The funny thing about blogging is that you never really know what’s going to stick until after you throw it at the wall. I wasn’t planning to write about the abandoned Toronto Zoo monorail because I figured that a picture of an old concrete slab wouldn’t really interest anyone but me. And yet that article is among the most consistently hit week after week, and the version I wrote for Torontoist became my first contribution to be referenced by a Wikipedia article. Who knew?

And then there are the dozen posts that are forever in the queue, but which never quite make it out for some reason. And don’t forget the dozens that are still just scribbled notes and haven’t even made it into the official queue yet—almost a hundred ideas in waiting at last count. All in good time.

The pictures that accompany this post are a few of the hundreds that I’ve wanted to incorporate in posts but haven’t (yet) been able to. Since I started this blog, I’ve taken almost 5000 pictures of the city around me; you should be happy that I don’t post about everything I see.

Yet I still mourn some of the articles that got away because I couldn’t get a picture or didn’t have my camera with me. Among these, I’d include a plane we saw being towed down the highway (within a few weeks of our Suzuki and a half sighting), a bicycle decorated with a lion-like fairing (including full mane), and an awesome homemade cargo bike. Although I carry a camera with me at least 90% of the time I’m out of the house, apparently that isn’t enough.

Of the 135 articles that did make it out of the queue in the first year, the five most-viewed represent a pretty good cross-section of the site’s content:

1. The Dark Knight. People love a cat in a uniform. So much so that in just a little over three months, this post has garnered twice as many hits as the next most popular article. The picture itself is hit even more, thanks to numerous direct links.
2. Cyclist’s revenge. People also love a tale of vengeance with a heart-touching ending that will reaffirm your faith in humanity. Or something.
3. Promise versus practice: Canadian Tire. It amuses me to no end that a lot of people seem to reach this page when looking for the store’s address. It’s fallen way down the Google listings recently, but it was really popular until a couple of months ago.
4. Highway Traffic Act roulette #1. In which the provincial government tackles the scourge of street racing.
5. Bike Train II: The long way home. What I didn’t mention in this post or subsequent comments was that I trained all spring and summer long to ensure that I could tackle the ride. I pushed myself farther and faster almost every weekend so that I had a decent shot at making the distance. I added an hour to my standard weekend ride each month from April through July until by I was up to almost six hours in early August. Still, the ride almost broke me. After taking my final snack break in Mississauga, it took me half an hour to talk my ass into getting back on the saddle. I’m glad I did, but it was close.

So that’s been my first year of blogging; I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far. I’d like to thank my millions dozens of readers—at least three of whom are not related to me by blood or marriage—for coming along with me as I’ve explored the city, uncovered various curiosities, seen various sights, and thought various thoughts. There’s much more on deck for this year.

Dodgeville’s got a new gig

Starting today, I’m contributing to local superblog Torontoist. I’ll be posting mostly eye-on-the-street, found-Toronto, sights-that-amuse articles similar to my recent spottings of Spider-men, water tanks, and bronze plaques. My first Torontoist post appeared earlier this afternoon.

If you’re my biggest fan and don’t want to read all of Torontoist just to find my witty prose and colourful pictures, fear not: at least some of what I post on Torontoist will show up here a day or two later. Dodgeville will also continue to receive content of its own.

On a related note, Torontoist is hiring new contributors. You too could be paid for blogging.

A mission statement of sorts

Actually, it seems that it’s the second blog entry that’s the difficult one.

One of the reasons that I’ve resisted starting a blog for so long — aside from sheer laziness, of course — is that I’ve seen far too many get bogged down in the mundane details of the author’s life and I wanted to be sure my own site could avoid that fate. The various incarnations of my web site over the last 13 years have been notable for their near-complete lack of detail about me and my life. I’d like to continue that tradition, so if you catch me writing about what I had for dinner last night or how fascinating I find the squirrels in my backyard, you have my permission to give me 30 lashes with a wet noodle.

That said, I intend this blog to be about all aspects of life in and around Toronto, with a focus on the city as experienced on foot and by bike. I realize that I’m not breaking any new ground here — there are at least a jillion Toronto-centric blogs — but I hope to be able to bring a slightly different perspective to this very broad topic.

Like most new bloggers, I have a handful of issues that I’d like to concentrate on. Either you’ll see the patterns starting to emerge over the next few weeks, or you’ll see the blog sporadically updated with short meaningless entries before I abandon it entirely. Your guess is as good as mine at this point.