Category: Toronto

Far and slow

I took my Dutch bike in for servicing today (to get my brake pads replaced) and calculated some usage statistics.

Indeed, on the ride from home to the bike store, I crossed 7,000 km of total distance on the bike.

One interesting element of that is how it has nearly all been done at a modest pace. 90% of all my travel is at less than 19.3 km/h and 50% was under 12.2 km/h.

It’s a hauler, not a racer, and I am often occupied with tasks more complex than just getting from Point A to Point B.

Libraries are the best

A couple of weeks ago I decided to read John Green’s book, Everything is Tuberculosis, in part as research for the novel I am writing about a tuberculosis outbreak. Initially I considered buying it, but remembered the weak state of my finances and checked the Toronto Public Library system. A library 150 metres away had it available immediately.

Yesterday was the due day, so I swung by to drop off the unfinished book. The librarian asked if I was done with it, and I explained that my effort to renew it was rejected for a short-loan book. She offered to check it out again for me immediately and — when I showed her a place the book was tearing — she offered to fix it immediately and then check it out for me.

While waiting I spotted Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees and leafed forward to the chapter on symbiosis with fungi. This is the passage that prompted me to take the second book home too:

Later, more mycelium networks can be seen in Devonian trees, in the first ectomycorrhizal interactions in pine from 156 million years ago, and today most trees form some sort of associative network with a fungus or two or even three or more. Like most of our own relationships with other species, these are not relationships of simple benevolence or mutual support. Although some fungi will kill trees and some not harm them at all, most sit at an awkward interface, a balancing point between support and harm, where the forest network can turn on a coin and the fungal support network quickly change into the digestion matrix. Trees use fungi for their own advantage, but they sometimes lose. (p. 118)

If anybody needs me, I will be in the digestion matrix.

Late spring flowers

Flowers are coming up gloriously across Toronto. I have been enjoying the rich red and alien shape of Canada Columbine and, in the last few days, seeing the pink of Common Milkweed flowering, with flowers emerging in clusters. Black Cohosh cultivated on campus is already producing flower wands, just still green instead of white, and it is spreading in rhizomal clusters around where flower wands appeared last year.

I am checking iNaturalist daily for when the Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) bloom begins, at which point I will be leading a city-wide search to improve the data on where this plant is present.