Is it at all concerning that the favourite part of my day is fast becoming the part where the puppy snoozes after supper? Did I mention this is also the five minutes during which my glass of red wine is poured?

I witnessed an incidence of what can only in Ottawa be classified as police intimidation today. Had it happened in Calgary, however, it would have been a lucky, lenient break, but here in the town where street signs and lights are mere suggestions to pedestrians, it more than bordered on bullying.

It stopped raining sometime around 11 a.m. today, and I was lucky enough to even sort of see the sun come out as I was walking home to let little Echo for her noon-time crate-break. It was an entirely uneventful journey (consisting mostly of delusional coming-into-riches-allowing-the-quitting-of-the-job fantasies) until I hit Dalhousie and St. Patrick where a girl just outside of Alex Munter's campaign office decided to venture across St. Patrick against the light. It didn't seem overly dangerous to me, but that black Chrysler was driving too fast for my Western Canadian Sensibilities to entertain the notion of a jay-walk at that particular moment. The girl didn't even seem to notice, thinking it was more than half a block away, a perfectly safe distance for an Ottawan to saunter through an intersection. As I stood on the corner, watching, the black Chrysler in question accelerated rapidly and started blowing its horn. Now there's no way the girl was unaware of the car approaching, she just had the prevailing attitude that no harm would come to her as no driver would actually hit a person on purpose...after all, she was plainly in the intersection...the driver wouldn't dare...would he?

By the time she saw it was an unmarked car driven by an angry-chunkey cop whose screeching halt to his point forced the spill of his tim hortons coffee (not even stereotyping here - there is a timmyhoho's two blocks down and he clearly had a full steaming cup, part of which was dripping down his fist), it was too late for her to feign a behavioral anomaly. The cop, window rolled down, shaking coffee off a scalded hand, berated her in a way I would have thought officers around here incapable of (at least not without having six additional squad cars present as seems to be the norm round these parts...). He actually asked her whether she was trying to get hurt or if she was too stupid to be walking alone. Or maybe she just wanted a ticket? Right on the corner I was standing on. The girl was scared, embarrassed, and utterly intimidated. She just stood there, unable to speak, with the officer yelling at her through his open window. Really excessively abusive, but as a native Calgarian, and a driver who deals with similar pedestrians every time I try to leave the market, I was a little torn in my outrage. Is it so bad to have some attempt at law enforcement? I really don't know how I feel about the whole incident...at least not beyond the knowledge that jay-walkers really ought to keep an eye out for those mean looking Chrysler 300's...