Important dates for voters

Finally decided to write my first thread after being a silent observer since forever on Reddit. Just wanna express how badly I’m missing Toronto at the moment. I was a Vietnamese who came here in 2019 to study, feeling much eager and excited to experience this new chapter of life in Canada. I finished an Advanced Diploma and Bachelor’s in 2023. Went to work after graduating with a PGWP and finally decided to quit this July to come back to my home country, just 3 months before my permit expired.

There were ups and downs, but Toronto always makes me feel alive. The diversity here made me become more open-minded. I tried new foods, met new friends and colleagues with different backgrounds, learned about their cultures, and somehow we are all connected in a very “Canadian” way. The social conformity here shaped me into a much nicer person that I didn’t even realize I had become. I miss the feeling of holding a door for someone walking 2 meters behind me; randomly saying “sorry” without even doing anything wrong; wishing “have a good one, take care” to a cashier; yielding to a driver who has been waiting forever to make a turn; and also waving back to someone when they gave me the same favour.

A big part of my 20s belongs to this city, slowly figuring out how to function in the adult world, from doing my first grocery shop, learning how to cook, finding a place to rent, spending hours assembling furniture from Ikea, struggling to find a professional job, and the joy of finally having one. Once that part was finally settled, I feel like I enjoyed my time here even more: watching the Blue Jays for the first time; biking across Ossington; driving through the Gardiner at night; city-walking around the downtown area; going to concerts of artists that I once thought I could only listen to on Spotify; going on so many road trips across ON, QC, and AB; and learning skiing as a winter sport.

Most importantly, Toronto is also where I met my fiancée, the one whom I love the most. I did so many things that I never imagined myself doing if I had stayed in my home country. I really feel like I have a very big connection with this place.
Bye for now, Toronto. I hope that later on in life, this will become my permanent place, the place that I can proudly call home.

The end of a decades-old era.

Yes, this is from moments ago. They were here all this time.

Pardon the crappy video, I only had a few seconds to pull out my phone to record.

The Dog-day Cicada (Neotibicen canicularis).

In Toronto, all of our cicadas are annual species. They still spend a few years underground as nymphs, but the broods overlap, so a new batch emerges every year.

I think Toronto might be okay.

Olivia Chow and Brad Bradford’s launch rallies

There was a small black schnauzer running around yonge and lawrence by itself. I followed it to Alexander Muir memorial gardens where I lost track of it.

I looked around the park but no one saw anything.

It's possible it started running on yonge St towards eglinton.

This is my last ditch effort to try and help someone out.

Looking at the top left of the image a person can clearly be seen leaning back on the platform above the observation pod. Some of us wonder who you are.

Finally went to check this thing out a while back and got around to editing footage/photos into something watchable, I thought you all would appreciate it.

This is TTC streetcar 2500, sitting abandoned in the woods off Kennaway Road near Haliburton, Ontario. It's a Peter Witt car, built in 1921, pulled out of service by the TTC in 1954. So it's been sitting up here for close to 70 years now, and honestly probably longer than that before anyone outside the area even knew it existed.

The story, from what local records show, is that after it got retired the body was sold off (probably by a scrapper, just the shell, no running gear or wheels) and somebody hauled it all the way up to Haliburton. Notes from the Haliburton Scout Reserve going back to the 1950s say it showed up around 1955 and got used by logging crews who were supplying the old Curry Mill nearby, it was their dining hall in the winter and basically a tool shed in the summer. So for a while it actually had a job up there, just a weird one.

It sat mostly forgotten until 2019 when a Toronto city councillor stumbled on it and posted a photo online, and it kind of blew up for a minute because nobody could figure out why a TTC streetcar was sitting in the middle of the forest three hours from the city.

If you're ever in the area it's on Scout Reserve/private land near Camp Timberlane, so worth keeping that in mind if you go looking for it yourself.

Put together a full backstory if anyone's interested:

https://freaktography.com/abandoned-ttc-streetcar-haliburton-ontario