my civic duty in the 19th century

This week I am in a downtown courthouse for jury selection duty. I dug my way back through my archives and apparently the last time I did this was four years ago. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago.

So I have now experienced this building in both Toronto temperatures, the 50 billion degrees below zero one and now the 50 billion degrees above one. Can't say I'm impressed.

Also, I figured I would use this time while I'm not at work to post here more, but the wifi is sooooooooooooooooooooo slow.

boil like a frog

There was a "heightened security alert" downtown last week that was apparently caused by some guy threatening to copy-cat the van attack.

Nothing actually happened. But still, fuck that guy.

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The Toronto District School Board has a program where adults can take classes in their empty schools in the evenings or during the summer. They offer everything from salsa dancing to basic car repair. I took a household electrician's class once many years ago and it was really worth it.

So I decided to sign up for intro Spanish, just for the heck of it. Duolingo has been great for learning to read, but less so for learning to speak it or understand what I hear. I figured being in a room full of people struggling with the same issues would get me past my initial reserve about mangling the language in front of people, and then after I could go join a meet-up group or something.

So because I am very very dumb, I signed up for a class in a high school. In July.

High schools don't have air conditioning.

It's my own damn fault, I know full well that schools are big brick ovens. There was even an article published about a year ago about how now that summers are getting longer and hotter what used to be about a two-week period of students rendered useless by the heat at the end of June has now stretched into two to three months. Last September was brutal, I can't imagine anybody being able to think clearly in that soup. And of course the online comments are full of people ranting about how when I were a lad we had no air conditioning and kids these days are so spoiled yada yada yada. Cause as we all know, the people who post to comment sections have never actually read the contents of these articles.

The school where the class is being held is one of the older ones in the city and a technical school to boot, so to say it's been subject to neglect would be the understatement of the year. And you know, it's one thing to read a headline about how the province has a $15 billion dollar repair backlog, it's quite another to be walking down the halls. Almost all of the lockers are some degree of broken. The paint is peeling, and there are regular patches on the walls where somebody has obviously filled in holes. None of the water fountains work, but it's probably just as well since I would lay down money that the pipes have lead in them anyway. In the bathroom there are only a handful of stalls that have doors, and there are obvious signs of mold damage everywhere. And of course, because the province had set aside the budget to cover 0.001% of it, our new Premier cancelled the funds.

It's become kind of a subject of horrified fascination for me. How bad will things get before somebody decides it's important? When kids and staff are regularly getting injured? Or will having roofs falling in on top of teenagers just become normal, like school shootings?

But you know, at least all those millionaires will be taken care of.