A brief Montreal fling

A couple of days ago we spent a brief 2 days in Montréal to drop off G's Father at the airport and renew our visas as we returned across the border. Any excuse to enjoy Montréal at Xmas!
The next morning, we headed out amidst winter conditions through a route that took us through Vermont, New Hampshire, and northern Massachusetts. It probably would have taken us 6 hours had we driven straight, but we renewed our visas at the border just as a tour bus came through (we sat at the border for 3 hours). Anyway, the drive was gorgeous; here are some snaps. Here's the full Flickr set

Disturbing at so many levels

While reading a kid's nature book called "Creatures that Glow" I came across this passage regarding the Angler fish (which you may recall as the deep-sea fish with a flashlight from Finding Nemo):

During mating, the tiny male attaches himself by his teeth to the female. His body then fuses into hers--all that is left of the male is a small pouch on the female's side. The pouch contains the male's reproductive organs, which will fertilize the female's eggs.

Here's wikipedia's take on it:

When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these "parasites" were the remains of male ceratioids [...]

When it is mature, the male's digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death [...]

When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads [...]

This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.

Weird.

I'd better watch myself

We're settling into our new house and, by extension, our new life. It's kind of hard to deny that we have a certain commitment to our changed circumstances when you've just signed a 30-year mortgage. Anyway, it got me thinking about the last decade in Toronto, and a few flashbacks came to me:

• Port Hope, Ontario (a lovely small-ish town to the east of Toronto), I am walking down the main street with G., and saying "You know, I wouldn't mind living in a small town at some point. Something on a transit line to a city. Just to see what it would be like." "You'd hate it," says G. "Well, maybe. But would be interesting," I say.
• Antigua, Guatemala, 2005, I am walking the cobblestone streets with Cyp, an instructional technologist. "You know, I am thinking I want to get into this education and technology field. How do I go about that?" Cyp is offering some good advice; I would later apply for an Instructional Technologist position at Ryerson and not get it
• Toronto, probably around 2000, G. and I are musing over coffee, and I am saying "You know, I'd like to try living in the States. Just for a year or two. Just to try it out, see what it's like." "Well, you never know," says G. "You never know," I say.
  

Now I look at where I find myself; an instructional technologist in a small town in the intellectual heartland of the U.S., on a transit line to two major cities.

Before I do any more casual musings, I've got to start being very, very careful.