Summer hasn’t quite come to Wisconsin yet, but it should finally get here tomorrow. Temperatures around these parts have been slightly below average these past couple of weeks, reminding me of mid-spring weather back home in Toledo, and that’s definitely a good thing for my mood. Mid-spring weather was always my favourite in Toledo, that longest span of the year when everyone can keep their windows open twenty-four hours a day and no one runs their air conditioners, so the smells of new flora follow…

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For a few years around the turn of the millennium, the main clock at my father’s office was one of those clocks that broadcast a different bird’s call from its speaker for each of the twelve hours. The idea behind getting that clock for the office was to help us all be more aware of time, since it’s easy to tune out the same chiming sound , no matter how many (or few) times it’s made at the top of each hour. Maybe our brains…

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Recently, I loaded up the busiest intersection near my old house on Google Maps and went into street-level view so I could have a first-person Google Street View of it. As much as I recognize how every corner of that intersection has changed over time — although the Internet has been failing me in my attempts to photographically prove that some Toledo staples of my time, like Centre supermarkets and Gastown gas stations, existed before they were driven out by bigger competitors — part of…

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