Ottawa is burning

All night there have been sirens blaring. They sound like fire trucks, but sometimes I can pick out an ambulance. Maybe police cars too, but mostly fire trucks. I don't know where the fires are, but the trucks keep going.

I live on an ambulance route for two hospitals, so sirens are nothing new to me. This frequency of sirens, however, is unsettling. They've been going for a good portion of the night, and they sound more urgent than normal.

With the amount of rain we got yesterday, nothing should be dry enough to burn. Or at least, it should burn slowly. If people's houses dried out enough in one day to become large fire hazards, then I'd like to know how they did it.

Tim Hortons has fancy new cups. They're back to being brown, which is a welcome change from the reddish 40th anniversary ones they used all last year. Don't ask me why, but coffee just tastes better out of a brown cup.

Also, Boston cream is the doughnut of the month, and I've been eating them as my regular doughnut for a while now. I've been listening to Dropkick Murphys a lot recently, and, unless it's traditional or otherwise indicated, every Murphys song is at least tangentially about Boston. Logical conclusion: I belong in Boston.

I've been there a few times, and honestly it's the only big American city I could ever see myself moving to. I have no desire to move to the States right now, but if I ever do, It'll be to Boston. I love that town.

I want to sit in Quincy Market with a big bowl of chowder and watch the crowds. I want to get on the T and take the red to the orange line. I want to go to John Harvard's Brew Pub and order a jug of beer. I want to walk along the boardwalk smelling the ocean winds blow in across the harbour. I want to watch MIT students nail a 300-long sequence of Perfects in Dance Dance Revolution (I saw 2 of them do it simultaneously, it blew my mind). I want to go barhopping in a kilt and sing drinking songs on the T.

Maybe some day.