Somerset & Cambridge.

Pic 953
Domtar

November 2, 2010

Two years ago:
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Graffiti

November 2, 2009

Three years:
Pic 258
Steppin’ out

November 2, 2008

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Shefford co-op

October 18, 2010

Two years ago:
Pic 606
Fairmont Château Laurier

October 18, 2009

Three years:
Pic 243
Yellow barn 2

October 18, 2008

Pic 244
No fishing

October 18, 2008

Local sushi joint & hipster coffee shop, 690 B / 692 Somerset W.

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Totem pole

August 21, 2010

Two years ago:
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Another flower, another wasp

August 21, 2009

Three years:
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Soup Noodle Beef

August 21, 2008

Puke fish

Same place.

Raw Sugar

My street corner.
That’s all!

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Prorogue this

January 24, 2010

Two years ago:
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Red Cap

January 24, 2009

Three years:
Pic 25
Yellow

Jan 24, 2008

Couple of ducks. Barbecued. Feelin’ no pain.

Leopard dress at Crazy Fashions.

Mystery vegetable. What could it be?

Somerset & Bronson. Yang Sheng.

Shrine in a dried seafood store. Shrine to what?

My street corner. The arch. Sushi 88 & Raw Sugar.

Somerset & Booth.

That’s all!

This is at Raw Sugar, 692 Somerset W.

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Park bench

February 23, 2009

Two years ago:
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Shazam!

Feb 23, 2008

You can visit Raw Sugar’s facebook page to find out more: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21717726987
Have fun!

Raw Sugar café, the coffee shop on my street corner (Somerset and Cambridge), is open at last. I went in for a coffee and met the owner, Nadia Kharyati.

I thought that building was too small for a coffee shop, but I was mistaken. Don’t forget that it used to be divided in two, with the back part used as a travel agency. Now it’s opened up and full of mismatched tables, chairs, and sofas.

Here are a couple of pictures.

Look, an organ

Attractive young women eyeing the muffins

It’s really nice in there. Good coffee too. And so far it’s not half as screwy as the Umi Café.

Raw Sugar has a facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21717726987

And a bowl of free buttons.

Umi Café also has a facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=23224718481

I think it’s amazing how important facebook has become.

Our Lady of the tow-away zone

Raw Sugar fights back

Raw Sugar, the other new coffee shop in Chinatown, has taken a long time to get open. Umi Café beat them by a mile and is now a jumpin’ little place. But Raw Sugar still has some tricks up its sleeve.

Strategic voting in Ottawa Centre

I think I’ll have to vote for the NDP’s Paul Dewar, just to try and prevent Liberal Penny Collenette from taking the riding. (Maybe I’m naive, but I can’t see anybody voting for the Conservative. I think this is a battle of the left.)

I like Paul Dewar and I’m happy to have him represent Centretown. I would have preferred to vote Green, but I don’t think Jen Hunter is ready.

Here’s Paul Dewar with his new glasses and goatee. Lookin’ good Paul!

Of course I took a camera. I found a lot of nice gardens on Cambridge St. Lots of sunflowers, and where you get sunflowers, you also get bees.

Not far from the yellow sunflowers of Cambridge is the stunning yellow house at Gladstone and Cambridge.

I love the yellow house! Too bad it’s just temporary. As I heard the story, the old house (formerly a pawnshop) is being held for a condo development. It began to fall into disrepair, and the city told the owner he had to clean it up, so he spray-painted it yellow.

Next door to the yellow house is a boarded-up brick house, part of the same land package I guess. Pigeons have taken over that one.

A couple of doors down, right next to the 7/11, is this place.

I think it pretty much sums up what’s going on in that neighbourhood — settlement of Muslim immigrants from north Africa. This is just a few blocks from Little Italy, now a well-established, prosperous neighbourhood, and Chinatown, whose population seems to be as much Vietnamese as Chinese, and which now has four Korean restaurants and two cool coffee shops.

I think this is a great place to live. As for my cat, he came back. We’re still working it out.

If he’s going to go out, I’d prefer him to go out in the daytime. Then he’d get tired and sleep all night. That’s the theory anyway. But as my cat always says, “Fat chance!”

He doesn’t even care about going out in the daytime any more, now that he knows how much more fun it is to go out at night.

I don’t know where he went yesterday. I think he might have gone a little farther afield than he was ready for, and maybe it took him longer to get back than he expected. Maybe he got confused and took a few wrong turns, and he probably tucked himself into some dark place to sleep. When he came in the house he had weeds in his fur and he was acting like he couldn’t believe he was in the right place. He went around sniffing at everything, as if he couldn’t quite accept that he was really back.

I couldn’t either. I really thought I’d lost him.

Lots of people warned me to not let him out at all, but that just isn’t going to happen. He’s way too insistent about it. He wants to go outside so much that I wouldn’t think I was allowing him to live his real life if I made him stay in.

Maybe what’s happening now is that he’s educating me. He’s teaching me that no matter how much I worry about him, he really does come back. But nothing can guarantee that he won’t get hit by a car.

Here’s a picture of my cat. It’s a reprint from this post. Don’t you think he has soulful eyes?

Zoom showed me this blog post from Yarn-a-go-go.com, about a cat who came back after being gone for four months. It’s good.
Yarn-A-Go-Go: Look What Dragged The Cat In
You should also click on the link for the eulogy, because it’s really good too. You’ll probably cry.

I don’t remember going through all this agony about other cats I’ve had. My cat Kitty seemed to fit in just fine on Bagot St. in Kingston, which is a rough sort of downtown street. Even when we moved over to busy Montreal St. she did fine. She went out whenever she wanted to, and I never worried about her at all.

It was only when we moved out to the country that she took off. She took a look at the house we were supposed to live in, took a look at the endless bush all around it, and took off like an arrow for the bush.

I know she couldn’t have survived the winter out there, but I still think she didn’t make too bad of a choice. I think of her living for one endless summer and fall, dining in style on all the little voles and shrews and stuff that they have out there in the woods, and when she was full she’d spend the rest of the day basking in the hot sun on a big flat rock in a clearing with insects buzzing all around and a soft breeze rustling in the trees, just like real cats are supposed to do. I like to think she chose a short life but a good one.

I was interested in this post on the Logan-the-dog blog, about how nobody owns cats in Israel.

When my cat disappears like that I start thinking I won’t have a cat any more, and I miss him. I live alone at this time in my life, and I like having a cat. I like having this cat. But even more than that, I feel guilty that I might have cost him his life by being so irresponsible.

Like I said, we’re still working it out.

Not only is a coffee shop opening on my street corner – Cambridge and Somerset – it looks like another one is coming in just down the street, at the corner of Somerset and Percy.

Here’s where I blogged about the first coffee shop: Coffee shop

The new one is called Umi Cafe. I don’t know for sure that café=coffee shop, but I’d say the pictures of coffee beans on their sign are a pretty good indicator. Umi sounds kind of Japanese though. Coffee and sushi?

This is right next door to the new Korean place, SooRa. In the old golf store across the street from the Tang Coin Laundry.

Here’s where I blogged about the explosion of Korean places in Chinatown: How much kimchi is too much kimchi?

Another Umi sign…

An Umi explanation. Most likely this also applies to the other cafe.

I can’t wait to pop over for a coffee while my laundry’s in the dryer at the Tang Coin Laundry. Hurray for not one, but two new coffee shops in Chinatown!!