Lots of tangents here.

If you look hard at the bottom window of the house you can see a black blob and brown blob. Those blobs are two ceramic horses. If I hadn't been on the tracks I would have gone over to that house and photographed the window. It reminds me of a house in Guelph's Ward neighbourhood. The house is set on a street corner and has a variety of plastic and ceramic horses lined up in the window.

There's a house in my neighbourhood (also a corner house) that has Precious Moments figurines lined up in the window. What is it with figurines and windows? Is there a lines-figurines-in-their-front-window type?

When I was a kid I won a few Precious Moments figurines in church for memorizing verses and whatnot. I was a good little memorizer. So much so that I can't get those damn verses unstuck from my mind. One day I went for a sleepover at the house of a girl from my church who was the minister's daughter and also the girl I came to fight in grade 6 (re. the Kentucky Fried Chicken part). In her room, which was very pink and girly, was a cabinet filled to bursting with Precious Moments figurines. She must have done a hell of a lot more memorizing than I did.

As is true in all stories of this nature, the minister's daughter got knocked up out of wedlock (which you may know is about the worst thing that can happen to a minister's daughter) and the kid they thought would amount to no good did not. When I first heard this I laughed at the irony of it all. I also laughed because I really disliked that girl fairly intensely. But then I had the sudden realization that it couldn't have been easy for her growing up with all that pressure and expectation. And I wonder; is it harder living with the pressure to succeed or the pressure to fail?