The lily of Don Valley

About the title of this blog, And Quiet Flows the Don Valley Parkway--this is an improvisation on the title of the well-known novel by Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov and a rather slow-moving freeway that runs up the Don River Valley on Toronto's Eastside.

So far, though, it's a novel well-known by me and one other colleague at work who has a Ph.D. in Russian literature. I don't know that she found it especially amusing, but I can read Canadian facial expressions about as well as I can read this novel in the original Russian.

For the record, no one was particularly amused about my reference to The Umbrellas of Sherbourne either. (Sherbourne is a TTC subway stop on Line 2.)

Feh, you want gems, go to Africa.

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I tell ya, I'm wasted on most people here. But I don't know where I belong and never have and haven't figured out yet where I'm going in the future. South Africa seems too dangerous and deadly. Europe seems too easy-breezy. Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, too far away. Antarctica, colder than a month of snowy Mondays in Toronto.

Latin America maybe? Latin America seems just right. It's where I always saw myself anyway. Maybe the time is right to explore, especially now that I've worked hard enough to save some money and might one day work lazy enough to take a vacation or two.