our home and cherished land

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

@acemindbreaker​, I didn’t want to directly reblog this thread (there were some pretty pressuring bits in previous parts of the reblog chain, and I follow a no-guilt-trips policy), but I did want to try and answer your question.

You live in Saskatchewan, right? It looks like this is Saskatchewan’s version of the medication assistance program my family’s on.

IIRC, the Ontarian program specifies that to qualify for it your household must spend more than 4% of its collective income on prescription meds†, and the program acts to cap your spending at 4% of income (each quarter you only pay up to that figure, and then the program kicks in and pays for the rest of your meds that quarter). The Saskatchewan page seems rather more vague about what its qualifiers and effects are, but the information might be buried in there somewhere, and presumably it has *some* effect for *some* people.

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I was not involved in the decision to make No Frills our primary pharmacy (it was a while ago), but I assume my parents had their reasons to switch over from Pharmasave, and they were probably financial reasons. The No Frills website says there are only three of them in all of SK, so you might very well not live near one, but the general idea might hold. I don’t know what websites might help you in determining which pharmacies are cheaper than others, though: search listings seem to be clogged with places trying to smuggle(?) Canadian meds into the United States.

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(And the smuggling brings up something that may be worth noting, that in some cases the efforts of Americans to get cheaper meds are just trying to bring prices down to a level Canadians would consider full price, and to some extent the reason there is less Canadians can do is because there is less to be done. I still remember, shortly after we moved, how horrified our new friends were when they heard what my parents had been paying for their medications. But I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that: even when things are better than they *could* be, it’s often important to try to make them better still.)

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†so I suspect we’re going to get kicked out at the next assessment now that we’re making more, but anyway

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

Home!

*flop*

hooooome

The post here about unsecured borders of the world (which is to say, unsecured borders of the European Union) is going around again.

The last time I saw this post going around, there were a whole bunch of comments expressing shock that not all borders are heavily restricted. And while it did sadden me to see so many people unaware that not all borders are like…whichever borders it was they were thinking of†, it also saddened me to see them walking away with the idea that the intra-EU method is necessarily what it means to have a non-heavily-restricted border.

So, I’m repurposing this post I made in 2015.

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Shown above is the border between Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario. (Note that my description of what border crossings are *typically* like will be describing Niagara Falls, but Sarnia is the picture I had lying around, and the one time I went through Sarnia the experience was about the same.)

The border crossing itself took maybe two minutes, and mostly because the border guard chatted about the good things he’s heard about our town. One minute for the crossing itself is more typical, plus another minute for each car ahead of you in line (but we usually cross on weekday afternoons, when the lines tend to be short).

Usually they’ll ask you where you’re going (or where you went), why, and for how long. (*Occasionally* they won’t even do that, if you show the passport of the country you’re entering, but for the most part they still do it if you’re a citizen.) Most answers I have had cause to give (“shopping for a few hours”, “visiting relatives for a week”, “Disney World!”), they just nod and wave you through, and possibly make a note so they can check if you tell the same story on your way back. If you show a U.S. passport and tell them you’re going to Canada because you live there, they will sometimes ask why you moved, but they don’t press further if you just say you like it there.

While they reserve the right to search your stuff if you give inconsistent answers to their questions or have clearly-visible contraband or maybe show a passport from a country they’re on shaky terms with or something, they do not search you by default. If you went shopping, they ask you how much you bought (and sometimes to see your receipts as well), and if your answers indicate that you’re over the duty-free limit on anything they send you over to a nearby building to pay your import taxes, which takes a few extra minutes.

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I just wanted people to know that border security isn’t binary, that there exist places where there *are* guards and you *do* have to show a passport but it’s *not* a big ordeal.

I don’t have any strong opinions about what borders should be like in general: I don’t feel that I’m well enough informed on that, and TBH I’m mostly just trying to survive right now and don’t really have the energy to get well informed. (though I’d certainly be annoyed if they started making it an ordeal to go grocery shopping in New York)

But if you’re looking to develop an opinion on border security, please remember that “more borders should be like US/Canada” is a possible stance. There’s more than one way to guard a border, and you can think some ways are going too far without wanting to go full EU (and conversely, you can want to not go full EU but still think some ways are going too far).

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†If you’re someone who was shocked, let me know which borders you think of when thinking of country borders. I’m curious to see where exactly our experiences differ.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #(close enough) #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #the more you know

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

@sinesalvatorem, I was going to reblog your post [link], but I figure giving poverty advice in a reblog when the OP is about how one shouldn’t give poverty advice is asking for trouble (especially when OP has relatively few notes), so I’m pinging you on a fresh post instead.

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>>On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more.<<

Hey, look, a special interest!

(or, well, part special interest, part coping mechanism)

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(Disclaimers: I acknowledge that for any or all of these things, you [may already do them]/[may not find them worthwhile]/[may not be able to do them at all]. If anything in the rest of this post sounds like I don’t, that’s just because it’s sometimes easier to get the words out that way.

A more specific version that I feel is particularly worth pointing out: while I have had plenty of financial difficulties and qualify as “poor” by many definitions, I have never (quite) been *broke*. Some of these tips will be stuff like “how to spend $800 in one day in order to avoid spending $1,400 over four months”, and if you never have $800 on hand at any given time feel free to ignore that (though maybe file them away for if/when you reach a point in your life where you can afford to tie up some money for a while in order to spend less in the long run).)

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This has been kind of a recurring theme on my blog lately, but: housemates are so important. Finances are best played as a team sport: going it alone is sadly necessary in some situations, but it’s definitely Hard Mode, and being poor is hard enough as it is without adding more difficulty modifiers on top of it.

(It *is* painful to have to watch people you share finances with spend money in ways you don’t approve of, but–I remind myself at such times–it’s still completely worth it for all the bulk discounts and such you can get. (Although I’m sure there are *some* people out there somewhere who are careless enough with money that this would not be true, and obviously you don’t want to share finances with such people.))

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People hate on Uber-type things a lot, but honestly, they really can be a lifesaver. Delivery gigs are what tipped us over into being in the black for March†. (Up ~CAD$230 over the course of that month! God, it’d been *so* long since our money had been on any kind of upward trend for any significant length of time.) Some companies in some places will also hire bicyclist or even pedestrian delivery freelancers.

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People also hate on advice to avoid bank-related fees because sometimes when you’re poor they’re unavoidable, but it’s still worth checking that each fee really *is* unavoidable before resorting to it.

(You know why I switched from annual statements to quarterly? Because I found out while preparing the 2017 statement that my parents had gone below their minimum chequing-account balance (which incurs a CAD$11 fee for each month it happens) *eleven months* out of the year, and had been quietly shouldering it *even though the household as a whole had enough money to cover everyone’s minimum balances*: it was just disproportionately in the kids’ accounts because at the time only the kids were employed. I immediately insisted on providing my parents with an informal, indefinite loan to help them cover their balance††, and started doing more frequent statements so we can catch shit like that sooner.

(Apparently Dad was embarrassed and Mom didn’t want to ~burden~ her children when she was ~supposed~ to be providing for them. And I was like “You can use the money you’re saving in bank fees towards buying me food.”))

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You make a remark about the restaurants in San Francisco being expensive, and of course in this part of Tumblr I hear plenty about how high the rents are. To what extent does the Bay have generally high prices across the board (or for groceries in particular: grocery prices are about to be important), and how far away do you have to get from the Bay for things to stop having that markup?

The New York trick (travel to an area with a lower cost of living, stock up on cheap groceries to bring back) is harder in a place with no nearby-ish country borders or similar clear markers of “you are now entering the Cheap Zone”, but it might still be doable there.

(I think the trick used by people who *live* in Cheap Zones is to use coupons *intended* for places with higher costs of living (with discounts sized accordingly), but which are technically valid there. Occasionally these can even be stacked: Mom almost always brings some coupons (from American websites) to New York.)

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Target does ad-matching: if you show them that another store’s flyer has a sale on a certain food, they will sell you that food at the other store’s sale price, letting you avoid the hassle and transportation costs of running all over town chasing deals. (note that Target does not match produce) The Flipp app [link] will give you the flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice.

Walmart does not do ad-matching as such (in America; Canadian Walmarts still do it), but if you scan your Walmart receipt into their app, they will issue you an e-gift card for the amount you *would* have saved if they allowed it.

There might be other stores in your particular area that do matching, but these are the only ones I found when I was looking this up in an Arizonan context recently. It seems to be less common in America than it is in Canada.

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Running ad videos and occasionally doing other stuff through Swagbucks is a nice way to get a bit of supplemental income. I recently helped Mom write a guide to using it [link], so I will direct you there. (please use the referral links, I’d very much appreciate it)

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If you have anything that gives you a discount on Amazon purchases and/or generates income in the form of Amazon credit (like, say, Swagbucks), bear in mind that Amazon has an ever-expanding selection of other stores’ gift cards [link] (including, notably, Safeway [link]), almost all of which can be purchased using Amazon credit.

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There’s this one program of incentives to encourage lower electricity use during peak periods [link] that I keep getting ads for from advertisers who don’t realise I’m not Torontonian, which is only available in Toronto and parts of California (weird list, I know). Is that applicable to you, or likely to become so?

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I haven’t done any freelance audio transcription for Rev [link] in a while, but you might be better suited to it than I am. (Maybe your picking-out-what-people-are-saying-at-crowded-parties ability would help you here?)

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>>At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.<<

Some grocery stores let you look up their prices online, making it easier to collect data for such lists and less painful (relatively) to keep making new ones for new places.

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I recently systematically went through the websites of every cell company available in this area and determined the single best phone plan for getting our house phone to do everything we currently need it to do while paying as little as possible, and I am very glad I did. If we hadn’t been careful, we could easily have ended up paying twice as much or more.

Unfortunately, there is essentially zero overlap between my available cell companies and yours, so I can’t just skip you to the end result of “Public Mobile is great; Freedom Mobile *might* be even better *if* you’re planning to only use your phone in cities”: you’d have to either do the comparisons yourself or find somebody more local who’s done it.

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Some restaurants and the occasional grocery store will give you free food on your birthday. The selection is heavily location-dependant; there are various websites listing the available things for a given place (example: https://www.favoritecandle.com/free-birthday-meals/San-Francisco/CA), though their information is often out of date and you’ll need to check with each restaurant’s own website. Most require newsletter signups (I have a dedicated email address specifically for newsletters from people who might give me free stuff); many require you to buy something else in order to receive the freebie with it, but there are a few that are outright free (except transportation costs, of course: plan your route carefully, and ideally have them be on the way to somewhere you were going anyway). Last year I got a muffin (Starbucks) and a large fruit slushie (Booster Juice): this year Starbucks has unfortunately stopped offering freebies unless you buy at least one thing from them per year (any time during the year, though, not specifically your birthday! still suitable for lots of people!), but I’ve found a couple more newsletters and am set up to get a bag of chocolate-covered almonds (Giant Tiger) and a hamburger (Harvey’s), plus another slushie. (And who knows, maybe I’ll end up at Starbucks at some point between now and November and regain muffin eligibility for this year.)

(maryellencarter, if you’re reading this, note that I’m planning to give you a pre-sifted list of these for your birthday: you don’t need to go figuring this out yourself. I’ll probably compile and send it in October sometime, so that there’ll be less time for circumstances to change while still leaving room for the restaurants to consider you to have been on their newsletter for a sufficient length of time beforehand.)

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My finances tag, “adventures in human capitalism”, might have some other stuff that I missed or covered in less detail here.

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†I don’t have a good picture of our finances after March yet: I’ve switched to preparing quarterly financial statements (formerly annual), but I haven’t finished collecting and processing the data from Q2, so right now it’s scattered around various bank accounts and credit-card records of four different people and I can’t see what it’s like overall.

††Honestly, I don’t really care whether they pay it back or not. Money used for things beneficial to me is mine for all practical purposes, and I’m not too concerned with whose bank account it happens to be in. (Mom expressed her gratitude at my “selflessness” recently, but I’m *really* not selfless: I’m just very aware that working together is in my own best interest. I don’t make anywhere near enough to survive alone: hell, often I can’t even contribute an equal share towards the group’s expenses, and have to find non-income ways to contribute like accounting and pest control. (I’ve gotten pretty good at killing houseflies. As long as they’re up against a window they’re easy.))

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #long post #death mention #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land

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Anonymous asked: Do you think the age to be an adult should be lowered from 18?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

theunitofcaring:

I think we probably shouldn’t primarily be using a discrete legal category of ‘adult’, and should try to transfer each right to people at the point where the coercion made possible by denying them that right is worse than the harm they can do with it. So the voting age should be a lot younger, the driving age probably shouldn’t be, teenagers should be allowed to sign a lease or check into a hotel, you should absolutely never get charged with sex crimes for taking naked pictures of yourself. 

And then in other areas we’re wading into some serious competing access needs. I’m one of those kids who really benefitted from having to interact with zero sexual content until I was 18, and I actually found sex-ed in middle school and high school mildly traumatic because it was giving me information about sex which I did not want to know and wasn’t allowed to opt out of knowing. But sex ed is still really important. I suspect lots of rights-and-access-for-teenagers runs into stuff like that, where some kids genuinely do benefit from being prohibited because they wouldn’t be good at opting out on their own, while other kids really need it. I don’t know exactly how to navigate those. I suspect in general we’re currently erring too far on the paternalistic side.

Here in Ontario, we have a little more progress towards having a staggered adulthood, though I’m sure we have a long ways to go and some of the unlocks might not be in the right places.

That one news story that was all over the place a few years ago, a 17-year-old who tried to refuse cancer treatment and the hospital forced her to take it anyway, is *extra* horrifying if you live in a jurisdiction where the age of medical consent is 16.

(it is a little weird that you can legally consent to *prescription* mind-altering drugs three years before you can consent to *recreational* mind-altering drugs†, though I am aware there exist ethical frameworks in which that makes sense)

I’m not very clear on what exactly legally happens at 17, but I do know my 17th birthday was when our bank started bugging me to take control of the investments my father held on my behalf. (I was, however, allowed to keep my youth bank account until my *19th* birthday (at which point it was transmuted into an adult chequing account).)

(Other banking note: when I first signed up for that youth account at 13, I was immediately offered a debit card, albeit with a pretty low withdrawal limit (a maximum of $100 in purchases and $20 in ATM withdrawals per day, IIRC). I just went and looked at the fine print on youth accounts, and there is no mention of a minimum age for debit cards. It seems doubtful that they would actually give a debit card to, say, a five-year-old if the parents said no, and presumably there’s *some* age before which you need parental permission and after which you don’t. (my parents said yes to the card at 13, so I did not test it then)

The youth account I had at an American bank from age ~6 – 13 did not give me a debit card, though now I wonder if they would have if I had thought to request one and my parents had signed off on it.)

I’d never really thought about it before, but I find that the idea of having a minimum age to check into a hotel feels intuitively nonsensical when I consider it. (I mean, we probably do have one, and I never tried to test it, and maybe there’s some non-obvious reason why it’s a good idea, but) My brain just goes “We serve unattended children at work all the time; why should a hotel clerk respond differently from a fast-food maker? If you’re capable of showing up, communicating your request for purchase, and giving the cashier enough money, and you would be legally allowed to have the thing if somebody else had gifted it to you, then you are old enough to buy the thing.”

P.S. Okay, I went and Googled it and apparently hotel rooms are a little like sex, in that it’s kind of 16 and kind of 18 depending mostly on who you can talk into what. [http://hotelassociation.ca/pdf/Renting%20Hotel%20Rooms%20to%20Minors.pdf] Note, however, that it appears to be *much* harder for a 16-year-old to talk the higher-ups into letting them have a hotel room than into letting them have a sexual partner. A 16-year-old is assumed capable of consenting to sex unless somebody can come up with a good enough reason why not [http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/faq-age-of-consent-law-canada-1.3851507], and assumed incapable of consenting to a hotel room unless they can come up with a good enough reason why. (and a 14- or even 12-year-old can sometimes be allowed to have sex under the right circumstances, and never allowed to get a hotel room)

(How much you want to bet that nobody involved in deciding what any of the ages in the above paragraph should be directly compared the two acts? made any attempt to ensure we didn’t end up with stricter standards for a smaller deal?)

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†Alcohol, tobacco, and–soon–marijuana [https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/pm-trudeau-says-cannabis-will-be-legal-in-canada-on-oct-17-1.3981228] are all at age 19 in Ontario.

Tags:

#reblogged from a person who’d reblogged it to avoid the first-degree-ask bug #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #my childhood #medical abuse mention #nsfw text?

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Daily Planet cancelled at Discovery Canada

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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{{Title link: http://www.tv-eh.com/2018/05/23/daily-planet-cancelled-at-discovery-canada/ }}

*Fuck*.

But, I, I just–

I only just got a chance to start watching it again! And now you’re telling me that that’s *it*, that I’ll have the *series finale* *tomorrow* and then *nothing*

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I…I guess I’ll go watch the penultimate episode. Not watching it won’t help anything.

…anyone have any recs for news sources focusing on neat sci-tech stuff?

Tags:

#apparently Bell can’t afford Daily Planet any more than I can #fuck #oh look an update #our home and cherished land #oh look an original post #the power of science

Swagging in Canada

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{Title link: https://swaggingincanada.blogspot.com/ }}

Mom asked me to help spread the word about her new website, so here it is!

It’s a guide to earning supplemental income through Swagbucks (a site I previously mentioned in this post, though not by name). It’s got some pretty good tips, and while it’s aimed at Canadians, some of it still applies elsewhere.

(Fun fact: between the three of us who use it, we got about $1,500 from Swagbucks last year.)

Tags:

#she’s excited about making her own website #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #signal boost #our home and cherished land

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

You know, as long as I’m thinking about it, let’s run the numbers here, maybe y’all can point out some things I’m overlooking that would make living either more or less expensive than I’m estimating.

Keep reading

>>Depending on what kind of deal I could get on my internet service, it could cost anywhere from $50-$100 a month.<<

…holy shit, I thought paying USD$80 for four people was bad. (I mean, it kind of *is* bad, I’m pretty sure we could save a couple dozen dollars a month if we hadn’t gone and locked ourselves into these guys’ email-address system. We were all young and foolish once.)

>>estimate that everybody’s car drives at least 15k miles a year<<

That’s approximately 40 miles/day on average (including weekends). Does that seem like a reasonable assessment of what a job-having!you is likely to need? It seems kind of high to me; maybe USAA is assuming a pretty long commute?

(Would it be feasible for you to pull your actual figures from when you were a call-center worker by looking at old bank records and such? My own estimates of what my family is likely to spend in the future always start with a baseline of what we actually spent in previous years. I have Google Sheets breaking down our expenses (and incomes) for each of 2016, 2017, and 2018 (updated quarterly) by category.)

>>And iirc my grandfather used to say that you should budget as much for car repairs / maintenance as you do for petrol<<

Mind you, petrol was rather cheaper in your grandfather’s day. I don’t know about you, but our car-repair cost in 2017 equalled 55% of our petrol cost.

>>Meat is fucking expensive, okay? :P<<

It occurs to me that you, too, have a generally cheaper country to the south, not so far away. Can you pull any New-York-style exploitation of cost-of-living differences in Mexico? It’d be pretty bargain-hunty, but I seem to recall you once went to a Mexican dentist to save money, so there’s some precedent. (There are extra language-barrier and border-security issues compared to Canada-to-America cost-of-living tricks, though. Not sure how big those effects are.)

For smaller-scale bargain-hunting, you can try checking around to see if there are any little butchers or anything that sell meat cheaper than your usual grocery chains. The cheapest meat seller in this county (that I know of) is a non-chain grocery store that we overlooked for ages until a friend told us about how cheap their steaks were.

Also, did you get that PM I sent you a while back about how to use Amazon credit at Safeway?

(The offer to sell you Amazon credit at 10% off is still open, if you ever want. Conversion-via-electronics is workable, but it’s a pain and it means the 10% lost goes to some random person on Craigslist. You could pay in USD and I’d deal with the currency-conversion issues myself (and maybe figure out a trick that’ll let me funnel it directly to New York trips and never pay any conversion fees at all; still working on that).)

I also keep a spreadsheet of food prices expressed in cents-per-calorie. Some of them are much cheaper than I expected, notably peanut butter (as cheap as ramen!) and bananas. Plus, even when you’re specifically looking for meat, there’s a lot of price spread between different meats. (Mom occasionally says stuff about not really being able to afford a diabetic-friendly diet, and I always tell her there’s still *relative* cheapness to be found even within medical restrictions. If she thinks she ought to spend less on food, she can replace some of her canned tuna with (non-canned) chicken (which costs half as much).) I can’t be too specific without more knowledge of your own local food prices than I have, but some things to keep in mind.

>>Do any of you know what one normally spends on this sort of thing?<<

I don’t. My expense-tracking spreadsheets work at the granularity of a transaction, which means most sundries get lumped in with groceries under “things bought at grocery stores”.

>>I am reluctant to switch too much up on that, as due to some interesting bits of luck, I am currently month-to-month rather than on a contract.<<

Is that difficult to come by in America? (And here they told me Canada had some of the worst cell plans out there, far worse than America.)

Recently I systematically went through every cell brand with coverage in this area and compared their plans (all of them had no-contract options, though they weren’t always front-and-centre), which is why I was able to find Dad a $40/month plan big enough to cover his work needs. The main thing I learned was to *never ever* buy from a flagship brand: buy from a little reseller or offshoot brand instead. (Holy shit, do the Big Three ever overcharge on their flagship-brand plans.) But, again, the Canadian cell-plan situation is famously weird, so I don’t really know what Arizona is like with that.

How much mobile data do you have? How much do you need? How much data can you offload onto non-mobile-data versions of the same thing? (…she says, as someone who carries an offline copy of Wikipedia with her at all times and has memorised the location and size of every public Wi-Fi hotspot within walking distance†.) Can you arrange to downgrade? (I know you need some mobile data for mental-health reasons, but like with Mom eating chicken instead of fish, sometimes there’s still room to do less-expensive versions of a necessary expensive thing.)

>>Laundry. Roughly $5 a week at the laundromat for one large load of laundry. This covers the amount of laundry I generate, which I know because my aunt hauls me to the laundromat every week. Still, it adds up; $260 a year for laundry, not counting detergent (which goes under Sundries). *sigh*<<

Does that mean it’s safe to assume the Hypothetical Apartment won’t come with a washing machine and dryer? I’ve always had a washing machine and dryer in my house, so I have no idea how to optimise laundromat usage. (My laundry optimisation looks like “run the machine during off-peak hours to reduce its electricity cost”.)

>>Clothes. Once again I haven’t the faintest notion how much these actually cost.<<

I haven’t bought much in the way of new clothes since I started keeping track of expenses (I haven’t finished wearing out all my clothes from before), so neither do I. When I do buy clothes these days, I generally buy from thrift stores, but I suspect you’d have a lot of trouble trying to find anything there in your size.

(Mom is somewhere around your size, and she managed to get a 50%-off birthday coupon from a Canadian plus-size clothing chain after signing up for their mailing list.)

You could really do with some housemates who don’t suck so you could get some bulk discounts happening, but if that were actionable advice you’d probably have done it already.

*hugs*

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†And keeps being surprised and kind of horrified by how little attention her offline friends and acquaintances pay to minimising their data usage. (Do you know how many people I’ve met at Wi-Fi-blanketed Pokemon gyms who *didn’t know* they were in a Wi-Fi zone? (No wonder they’d been so surprised when I told them I was able to play Pokemon Go 1 – 2 hours/day on a 100 MB/month plan.) Do you know I once had a friend burn through her entire month’s allotment in four days, and she neither knew nor cared why?)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #disordered eating?

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

ok so i’m pretty sure i know at least one or possibly two people in toronto

so one of the players from my d&d group has a question for y’all

she says “me and my gaggle of rich white friends are planning a road trip to canada, toronto is only like 8 hours from chi town so like not terrible, i was wondering what’s like fun stuff to do besides niagara falls and excessive drinking”

so uh, yeah. any suggestions? :-)

The CN Tower is neat if you’re okay with heights. (The elevator hurts your ears a bit, though. Try to swallow a lot or otherwise relieve the pressure.) There’s a transparent panel in one part of the floor. I’m not sure if my Girl Guide leader ever gave me the picture she took of me lying on that panel, with the ground far below as the backdrop, but that exists somewhere and you might like to do the same.

Casa Loma could be good, but I’m not sure what it’s like when they’re not hosting a big Girl Guide event.

There’s a biggish† amusement park in Vaughan (just outside Toronto) called Canada’s Wonderland. I’ve been there, like, once, over a decade ago, but I think it was decent?

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I’m guessing from the Niagara Falls mention that it’s more of a “general Southwestern Ontario” thing than a “just Toronto” thing, so further out stuff:

Hmm. I mean, I went on a lot of field trips in my teens, but I feel like a lot of them are…like, they’re nice, but not in a *distinctive* way. (Also, some of them were *only* for school and school-like groups: the Woodlawn Memorial Park cemetery in Guelph would be pretty dull without their (great) school tour.) There are plenty of other museums in other places that are just as nice. Still, a general “always check out the local museums when touristing” policy will serve you pretty well here as it will elsewhere.

Some exceptions and possible exceptions to the general “check out museums”:

Last I heard the Ontario Science Centre (in Toronto) was kind of overpriced if you don’t already have a reciprocal membership with another museum††, but I think they’ve added more stuff since then and might be worthwhile now? And you might be rich enough not to care in any case.

The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (in London) is basically just their website given physical form (a bunch of plaques and some screens with videos). If you’re interested in their stuff, just read the website (…if your computer can handle it): don’t bother showing up in person.

You note that most-to-all of the people in your group are white, so probably don’t go to any archaeology museums (the one I’m thinking of is the Museum of Ontario Archaeology in London) unless you’re the right kind of woke masochists (or are on the opposite end of the caring spectrum and aren’t bothered by Let’s Talk About These People Your People Oppressed at all; you do you, none of my business how many fucks you actually give about people as long you treat them okay). It’s too awkward otherwise to qualify as “fun stuff”.

(I kind of want to check out an archaeology museum in Europe someday. I bet they’re less awkward.)

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I can’t give a whole lot in the way of restaurant recommendations, because my ability to take pleasure from food is somewhat limited. (Like, I *can* enjoy food, but I don’t really enjoy fancy food much *more* than plain food, and it never gets to the waxing-rhapsodic kinds of levels I’ve seen other people reach.)

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The fact that you phrase it as “a road trip to Canada” implies you aren’t already in Canada, so maybe some more national-level stuff would be useful.

If you haven’t had Tim Tams before and are curious about them, they sell those at Zehrs (a grocery store chain of moderate fanciness/pricey-ness). Imported from Australia and everything.

If you haven’t had Mars bars before and are curious about them, they sell those pretty much anywhere with an impulse-buy rack. I don’t think they’re imported from Britain, but it probably doesn’t matter. They’re basically the same as Milky Ways in America, though. (to be confusing, Milky Way in Britain refers to what both America and Canada call “3 Musketeers”)

The best flavours of Tim Hortons bagel are Tomato Asiago (not as pizza-like as you would expect, but a different kind of good) and Garlic Parmesan, with Chive getting an honourable mention. Get them toasted and buttered for best results. They’re not available all the time in all branches, though, and tbh I don’t actually know if they carry them at all anymore; it’s been a while since I ate there. The fruit slushies are good too, and the muffins are decent. I don’t tend to buy anything else there (I don’t drink coffee).

(In general–and this might seem obvious to you already, I don’t know, but just in case–keep an eye out for interesting-looking food you wouldn’t be able to get in your normal location. I’ve lived here long enough that it’s kind of hard to dig through my memory for which things struck me as strange at first, though I could probably go “oh yeah, that was one of them” if somebody presented me with one.)

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(JT, let me know how this goes if you can; I’m curious.)

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†I went googling to confirm the name and Wikipedia calls it “the country’s largest”, so maybe I’m just spoiled by having seen Disney World.

††If you travel a lot and like museums at all (and haven’t already done this), maybe look into whether any of your local museums are part of a reciprocal-membership agreement and get a membership there. Back when I was an upper-middle-class South Jerseyan, my family had a membership at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and it served us well throughout the East Coast. (Would probably have served us well out West, too, if we’d ever gone there.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #the more you know #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post #food

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

colchrishadfield:

A country for all seasons. (at Canada)

Tags:

#weather #our home and cherished land #yeah pretty much #although the thing that happens in Jun – Aug or so doesn’t always reach a point where I’d be comfortable calling it ”summer” #”summer” should be consistently 25+ C and spending much of the time 30+ #southern Ontario often just kind of hovers around 20 for a few months before deciding to start heading towards fall #which to be fair is great for cooling costs #last year we almost never ran the air conditioner at all

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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brin-bellway:

Okay, we were talking and got curious, so I’m going to post this sample and ask for your input.

From what you can hear in this recording, where do you think this person is from?

(Apologies for poor audio quality.)

@injygo replied: ‘instinctively, I think “lives in Minnesota but family is Irish”’

Huh, interesting. That is not any of the answers I was expecting.

(Everyone else: please submit a guess first before reading below the cut, as there are spoilers.)

Before seeing your response, I’d have phrased the real answer as “southern New Jersey (far enough south not to be Joisey), moved to Ontario but late enough not to have much effect, subconsciously overcorrecting her accent and ending up more British than the British guy whose song she is singing”. (Although to be fair, British guy is probably at least somewhat attempting to sound American, so that gets complicated. And everyone sounds American if I listen to them long enough†, so I’m likely to underestimate how British Phil Collins sounds anyway.)

(The “we” in “we were talking” is me and my, ah, *friend*, as in “so my, ah, *friend* is having this problem…”. I just wanted to make it slightly less obvious that it was me, to encourage people not to factor in stuff they already know about me when deciding.)

What does a Minnesota accent even sound like? *looks up some examples*

Apparently it’s similar to “rural Canadian”. Hmm. Possibly Ontario has had more influence on my voice than I thought? I wonder if my brain is doing the “this voice is familiar and therefore normal and therefore American” trick to its own sound output.

(I wonder if I should try doing the accent meme again…)

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†I think my brain gets like “ah, this voice is familiar, so therefore normal”, but without changing its definition of what “normal” means.

Tags:

#replies #accents #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land

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