no, no, no! Second Cup! ALLways Second Cup in my cup. that's part of being canadian, too. loyalties. some are loyal to Tim, others are loyal to Second Cup. i will go WAY out of my way to get a Second Cup coffee over a Tim Horton's coffee. and then some of us are just loyal to caffeine, no matter how we can get it.

i drive regularly in toronto traffic. it gets worse and scarier every day. stop light and signal change violations top the list. but even the vilest offender will screech to a blessed halt for a pedestrian, or at least feel guilty about it if they don't.

peter t. has a lot of good comments. our culture is one with the land, the land, the land. and one can't take the weather out of the land. we are a handful of people in a huge cold land.

there are many different kinds of us. we have a variety of accents, a variety of skin~colours, a variety of educational systems, a variety of stepdances, a variety of coffees. but we are together at the mercy of the rock, the trees, the plains, the mountains, the lakes, the oceans, the snow, the ice ... the vastness and strength of this huge gorgeous land. a lot of us pocket ourselves down near the border, for a variety of reasons, but mainly to keep warm*.

~black walnut *who would say something quite different if this were a typical hot humid August day, but it's not, and the crocuses are covered in snow this morning, and i may even head back to the woodpile this morning.....