these are not my walls

Man, I am sick of being tired. And tired of being sick. Ba-da bing!

Seriously, there's some kind of sickness sweeping the courthouse, and my lungs are ickified. At least I now appear to be coughing some of it up, as opposed to those really painful semi-coughs where it just sits in your lungs and hurts like hell.

I think that if you quit smoking, you should get a free pass from lung illnesses for the rest of your life, don't you?

Here are some more pictures of Sudbury to entertain you, since there is nothing of excitement in my life to report:



This is the Grand Hotel, whose sign totally messed me up for the first few weeks I was here. I thought the sign had lost a few letters, and was an old "grand opening" sign. Turns out the Grand is only open on select days a week, and they change from week to week, and this is how they let people know. It's okay, I'm apparently about 15 years too old to hang out there, so it doesn't matter so much that the sign confused me.



This statue is in Bell Park, of which I posted pictures last time. There's something seriously disturbing about this statue, although I assume they mean it to be some delightful homage to Sudbury's history as a mining town.

Also, I apparently cannot type statue without first mistyping it as statute. That's enough law for me, folks!



This is the view across the parking lot of one of Sudbury's hospitals. It's right next to Bell Park, so that's the same lake. This is the hospital I went to when I got rear-ended in December - not that *I* thought that I needed to go to a hospital, but I can only take so much nagging from coworkers - and I actually sped through the ER waiting room quite quickly.

There's a bit of a hullaballoo going on right now about Sudbury's hospitals. A couple of doctors have come forward to talk about how the hospitals are understaffed, the equipment's old, there aren't enough beds, etc. It's being reported on as though it's a huge thing, and these two doctors are the only ones willing to come forward, but quite frankly nothing they're saying sounds remotely like news to me. Don't we all know that there aren't enough beds and equipment is old? Is it just that people in Ontario have super high expectations for their medical care? It's kind of funny. Not to mention that they're currently in the process of building a huge new hospital complex, which is set to open in a couple of years. Seems to me like they're already addressing the problem, then...



This is the big smokestack that you can see from basically everywhere in Sudbury. There are actually a couple of stacks, but this is the one that I can see everywhere, so I assume it's "the" smokestack that people refer to.

The two things I knew about Sudbury before coming here were a) big nickel, and b) this is where they faked the moon landing. I am apparently among a small minority that didn't also know c) it's got that smokestack! But now, through the power of me educating you, you will not be in that uninformed minority. You're welcome.