Grand enhancement for Jeep

Esteban Jaramillo

They say a man's home is his castle; grand old Queen Anne house takes the adage literally

To call the house at 494 College Ave. anything other than a castle would seem wrong, so we’ll call it the Castle. It’s three storeys tall but seems taller, 115 years old but seems older, and it is right smack in the middle of a neighbourhood, right in the middle of a city, where its turreted existence inspires confusion, bewilderment and a touch of awe. It’s a place both out of time and out of place, but somehow, it feels like it’s exactly where it belongs.

“It definitely stands out around here,” says Ryan Lavallee, a 33-year-old man who lives two doors down, on the second floor of a house without turrets of its own. “Kids are always stopping to look at it. Even adults do. I have.”

In 2015, Vanh Thiep Hoang looked at it, and couldn’t stop. Hoang had come to Winnipeg with his family from Vietnam, where he worked as a surgeon. He marvelled at the Queen Anne-style castle — its gabled roof, its orange bricks, its ten-foot ceilings, and its playful disregard of convention and defiance of expectation. It cast a bit of a spell.

“It reminded me of palaces I’d seen where I was from,” and of buildings in Ukraine, where he studied, says the 63-year-old Hoang, who emerges from the castle’s front door wearing board shorts and metal-rimmed glasses, his thick head of hair as attention-grabbing as the castle he calls home.

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Canada names Beijing flag-bearers, won’t boycott opening ceremony

The two-time Olympic gold medallist in women’s hockey and three-time Olympic short-track speedskating champ are each fine choices in what can be a fraught business for the COC.

Paramedics asked to take on HSC emergency room duties

Paramedics received an urgent call for help from Manitoba’s largest hospital, as staffing levels in its emergency department dropped to desperately low levels over the weekend.

On Sunday, advanced care paramedics from the Winnipeg region were asked to pick up shifts at the Health Sciences Centre adult emergency department for the first time, due to short staffing.

“They’re an excellent resource to be able to help staff and support the emergency work,” HSC chief operating officer Dr. Shawn Young said during an unrelated news conference on the Manitoba Legislative Building grounds Monday morning.

“Working in triage, working in (resuscitation), they have the skill sets and the tools to be able to provide that service exceptionally well.”

Dark mornings fuel school safety fears

School officials are fielding complaints about Manitoba’s decision to abandon biannual clock changes as they urge children to wear bright clothing and take other safety precautions to commute to class in the dark.

The St. James-Assiniboia School Division board office has received two formal complaints related to the province’s new year-round time zone — Manitoba Standard Time (MBT).

“Both were concerned about student safety in the dark and one questioned if we would be changing the start times of all our schools,” said Tara Smith, chairperson of the board of trustees.

Smith said in an email that the division, encompassing Deer Lodge, Westwood and surrounding areas, has no plans to adjust schedules at any of its kindergarten-to-Grade 12 buildings.