28 Reasons I Love Hamilton... Reason 2

Why write 28 reasons I love Hamilton?

1. Hamilton is a CITY.

2. The Location

Hamilton's in a good spot, and it has connections.

Hamilton's in a good spot.
Halfway between Toronto and the border.
Proximity to Niagara and London and Kitchener and Waterloo and Guelph...
Surrounded by farmland that produces great stuff (if we don't build over all of it ;))
Near the lake, so our climate's great.
We've even got this handy escarpment thing running through the city.

Of course, there's connections to everything.

Freight Rail.
Water.
Air.
Bus.
Trails.
Highway.
Passenger Train.

And I like that in a city.

• We can drive to Guitar Centre in Tonawanda without too much trouble.
• I've commuted to Toronto on the train for a month (the sunrise over the harbour... incredible).
  
• I often eat food grown on Hamilton farmland.
• If I need to fly, I prefer to have an airport in my own city.
• The GO goes to Niagara now.
• The Bruce Trail even goes through the middle of our city via the escarpment.

And all of that works for me.

I love where Hamilton is located, and I love its connections.

upon getting a cup of coffee a few minutes ago

my brother remarks "this cup is bumpy... it's like drinking Braille"


Starbucks was giving away free coffee today for Earth Day to anyone who brought a travel mug.
Yonge and King on the way to work... check.
Queen and Yonge at lunch... check.
In the Eaton Centre on the way to a meeting after work... checkity check check.

(Not a single one on my way home in Hamilton though... too bad, huh?)

In the words of David Letterman: "Way too much coffee. But if it wasn't for the coffee, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever."

:D!

After work today I met with Cyril, the lead pastor of our old church in Toronto - they're changing locations, they've had leadership shifts, and overall there's a lot of really exciting stuff happening. Very awesome.

today was very interesting

today, i studied in this very cool non-profit coffee shop in Toronto for several hours.

and then, i had a couple hours left while Jarod's tattoo session was finished, and my brain was completely toast, so I visited my old church.

and i'm very glad i did.

of all the churches i've been to, Freedomize worship is my favorite. There's nowhere else I've found a combination that resonates quite so much with my spirit (and my tastes, let's be honest). The setting is uncrowded, friendly, deep, warm, rich. I felt close in worship today, both at Crossfire this morning, and at Freedomize tonight, and that's a rarity for me.

i'm most excited to hear some news though: among news of many people having babies and exciting new developments in their lives, I also found out, though I'm not clear on all the details yet:

- the church just signed all the papers and are moving to a new location downtown which they (at least partially?) own - on College near Bathurst. (sounds a bit familiar, eh?)

- they're renovating it with quality materials: it needs a lot of upgrading (still sounds pretty familiar to me...)

- they're having some work days next month to help get it ready (the familiarity continues...)

- the church that owned it before still meets there, apparently

- the artists in the congregation are doing a bunch of artistic-type stuff for the new building.

- one of their two new pastoral interns lives in downtown Hamilton. I met him and his wife tonight and we're going to connect this week sometime

- another couple from the church (that Jarod knows better than me) like Hamilton a LOT

- Since I'm in Toronto weekdays, I'm going to connect with Cyril (their current lead pastor) for coffee sometime this week and find out more.

it's amazing how much can change when you're away from somewhere for a while, and it's always great to go back and see what God is doing somewhere else.

I wasn't at all expecting/thinking of going there tonight, but I was really glad I got the chance to.

I'm hoping Jarod and I can put something towards their new building when we get the chance and maybe make it down next month to help. I'm pretty excited about it and I hope to have more details after this week about what's happening there.

God is great.

I've been playing a lot of Dustin Kensrue lately. I think I need to write a blog post later about just one of his songs, maybe more of them.

an unexpected view.

I'm almost halfway done my month in Toronto (testing people's hearts for all kinds of things), and I'm enjoying it a lot.

I work with good people at a great hospital.
I've been doing a lot of work on my own, which is great. (the upside to working at an understaffed place, I suppose).
Doing the actual testing is very easy - in doing the intepretations I'm finding out where I know it well and where I don't.

I've also got the chance to observe a lot of new things: working in various ICUs and post-ops as well as with outpatients, and there's many more things I'll be starting next week.

So far, so good.

And getting there has been fantastic.

I like the GO train a lot, and I was hoping it would prove consistent and workable.

And it's been great - fast, smooth, reliable and comfortable. It's well-surpassed my expectations.

And there's a bonus.

Every morning, I get to see the sun rise over the bay. The tracks curve around the bay and at the side of the train the ravine drops off, giving an unobstructed perspective on the bay and the water. Towers and factories rise in the distance, and the sun comes up blazing. It's been a while since I've seen the sun so strongly, no buildings or vehicles or anything in the foreground.

There was one day last week where it looked like the clouds were parchment, torn back by a mighty hand just to let the sun through. There was another where the sun hid behind an island, refusing to show itself but illuminating the water brilliantly. When I come back in the evening, I don't see much of the setting sun behind the other buildings, but the water's lit up like diamonds.

Perhaps before the end of the month I'll bring a camera. I'm no photographer, but some of these would be great to capture.

- There's more than one spot you'll find a single chair by a tree, overlooking the tracks.
- Waterfowl flying around the bay and red-winged blackbirds in the trees just outside the train.
- In Burlington, there's always people walking their dog along the manmade hills that serve as sound barriers between the tracks and the suburbs.
- There's a lot of great angles and lights along Hunter in the early morning walking to the station.
- And in Toronto, it's looking much more European in parts as scooter, motorcycle, bike and moped parking takes significant space now at Union and some of the side streets along Yonge. There's one street in particular where there's always a dozen or so lined up. We're not Firenze or Portland yet, but here's hoping ;) Though I still am thrilled that Hamilton's scaled much better than Toronto for that kind of thing and have seen several here as well.

On a somewhat-related note, the Nano (aka the $2000 car) has been in the news for a while now, and I think it's one of the scariest bits of news we've ever seen. 100,000 people have been selected by lottery to get the first shipment of Nanos, the rest will have to wait for theirs.

100,000 Nanos to start, and they're talking about selling 250,000 every year.

Jarod and I had this conversation a few minutes ago:

Me: "What happens when you get a nation of a billion people, most of whom don't drive, into cars?" (Yes, I know it's actually around 1.2 billion and only some can afford this car)
Jarod's: "You say goodbye to Mother Earth."

The reason the Western world can sustain this lifestyle is because it's the Western world - we're small in population, we have enormous amounts of land to sprawl on and forests to mitigate our emissions. But more than that, we make other countries who live nothing like us make a lot of our products and we ship out a lot of our waste out again. In short, we don't see the consequences and most of the world doesn't live like us.

And I'm not setting myself up as great here. I consume/produce just as much as most people.

Sure, I take the train now and I hope to get an electric car when/if we need one again, and we've located strategically for transportation and hope to buy strategically later for transportation. But that's a tiny part of my very-typical North American lifestyle, no matter how much I think I do ;)

But when you get a nation of that size moving into cities (about a third of the population now), gaining skilled jobs and becoming a rising consumer class who wants to live like the Western world, they certainly cannot be faulted for wanting convenience, status, speed. (Though given current gridlock problems I doubt speed will matter much). They're marketing this both to singles who want status and families who want to have cars. And cars are just the beginning. But over the long-term, I don't think we're going to like where this puts us environmentally.

It's paradigm-shiftin' time.

coming up next month

Since I've always liked things like food and paying my phone bill, I'm doing heart tests in Toronto for a month (as part of a longer program training me to do a lot of heart tests in a lot of places).

Because of this, I'm commuting via the GO Train - possibly even the convenient new 7:17 one.

And.... this is great! here's why:

1. great location: I'm not going to Windsor or Ottawa for a month - that's a big relief.

2. great walking: I get to walk on both ends of the commute - walking places is one of my favorite things to do, and right now I only get to a few days a week.

3. great use of time: I have one uninterrupted hour in the morning and one in the evening on the train to/from work. Instead of pulling together scraps of my time, late nights and one afternoon. essentially, I'm getting two more usable hours in each day to work instead of giving up time to commute. And I'll have the time to fulfill my priorities because of it, in an environment I have to stay in one place and focus on what I'm doing. That's a big win for me.

4. great opportunity: I can see people I haven't in months or years; return to places I used to frequent, pick up things I can't get here (Burrito Boyz!) and learn from a great teaching hospital in an area i know - and then come home every day!

5. great time frame: it's one month. so whether it turns out to be an excellent month or not, it makes a good test run. And it lets me know if I could do this again in the future without compromising my job here - maybe even improving it, or if it's something I really could only do part-time.

Yep, pretty great so far.

I also go for this training at the end of this month -- I missed the opportunity to do it last year, so I'm glad I can do it now. It may seem too pre-programmed to some, or too much of a "one-size-fits-all" (well, "four-sizes-fit-all" really) way to go about doing premarital counselling, but I've seen it used successfully by so many people of different ages and affiliations, I think it'll be worth it to have those tools.