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.

Bucket man

I fulfilled a lifelong fantasy yesterday and rode a bucket 45 feet into the air. York Mills Collegiate, where Risa teaches, was doing an outdoor photo shoot to mark their 50th anniversary and the official photographer was running late. As the husband of the event organizer, I was quickly drafted to stand in a basket at the end of a really long pole.

Looking straight down the boom that’s holding me aloft

That’s my new best friend Ian three storeys below me at the bucket controls.

1,100 York Mills students prove that high schoolers really can spell

All of the students gathered on the field behind the school to spell out the York Mills initials, paying homage to a similar image taken 20 years ago for the 30th anniversary. Risa is one of the few to be in both pictures — the first as a student, the second as a teacher.

I’m glad it wasn’t very windy.

Naturally, I made Risa take pictures of me up in the bucket after my official duties concluded. Weee!

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.