More Odds and Ends

Here's my favorite picture of downtown Winnipeg. Most of my pictures don't 'work' because my eyes and the camera rarely see the same thing :-) But this one's pretty good... I think it's the juxtaposition of the sign and buildings - and the left to right flow:


This was taken looking east from the southeast corner of Portage and Smith. I've checked Google street view and that scene is hardly recognizable now. The nearby buildings are the same but everything in the distance is totally different... And I'm sure the overhead wires for the electric buses came down a long time ago...

And while I'm posting photos, I took lots of cloud pictures in Winnipeg. The sky always seemed to be doing something interesting but the camera never quite captured it... Except for this "Scottish Terrier cloud". The picture was taken from our apartment balcony:


One thing the camera didn't fully capture is just how huge that thing was :-)

Now, here was another common sight at the Kent Towers apartments:

There was a garbage chute leading to a large dumpster in the basement garage and somebody (maybe thinking it was an incinerator) kept dropping burning stuff down there... My mom figured it might be the little old lady next door... Which reminds me of another story:
One day during the winter we kept hearing a faint "Hello? ... Hello?". We finally investigated and discovered that the little old lady next door had locked herself out on her balcony. It was about 15 degrees and windy - she'd been out there for 10 minutes and wasn't wearing a coat... Luckily the roof door wasn't locked (it usually wasn't) so I ran up there and tossed her a blanket (we were on the top floor) while Karina headed down to find the manager. The lady was OK once she got got inside and warmed up a bit... She was such a sweet person - she was just too polite to scream for help :-)

You know - it's getting really hard to decide what memories to blog about. Most of them are so random and irrelevant.
Like an argument between a bus rider and driver over an expired transfer... Or the time an old guy literally walked into the side of the bus as it was pulling away from the stop. He wasn't hurt but he was threatening to sue the transit agency so the driver had everyone on the bus fill out an accident report... Or the driver who (on an extremely cold day) refused to let people on the bus at the transfer center until it was almost time to depart... Yeah - I spent a lot of time on buses...
Or how people downtown used to "building hop" on really cold days (pausing to warm up inside of every door)... And all those parking lots full of cars plugged into electrical outlets (engine block heaters)... And all the time I spent in music stores...
And you wouldn't believe how many of my memories involve girls in short skirts... Or maybe you would :-)