Photo: "munch" by christian jackson, member of the theGentries Flickr pool.

What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):

Still not convinced? A young girl in Cornwall with no known pre-existing medical conditions died of H1N1 this weekend, and new reports suggest that a 13-year old boy died here in Toronto as well. I'm not for pushing the fear agenda, but I'm also not engaging in increasingly pedantic arguments about the vaccine. I'm simply getting it as soon as I can, and hoping that it protects me and those around me.

The Leafs have won their first game of the season. I got a giggle out of ivortossell's tweet: "Pity about the Leafs. The only thing they could have excelled at was failure, and they blew that too." We'll see how they fare on the rest of this 5-game road trip.

A cat burglar appears to be targeting single women's homes in Kensington Market. Ground-floor dwellers in the sketchy neighbourhood really shouldn't be leaving windows and doors unlocked.

In school news, the fate of some 37 low-enrollment schools in the city is going to be decided soon. Amalgamation makes a lot of sense, because it'll allow for a better allocation of resources and will save money, but having to travel farther to school will not be fun for parents and students.

City council voted down Mayor Miller's proposal to increase garbage collection fees, instead opting to offset the increase by using a portion of the money saved during the summer municipal workers' strike. Although it's a symbolic gesture (given that it amounts to about $5 per household), I'm glad we're not paying a little more when we got far less.

And the CBC unveiled the new and improved version of The National last night. The most obvious changes include a standing and roving (rather than sitting) Peter Mansbridge, lots of in-studio monitor picture-in-picture style lead-ins, and sleek new graphics. While the changes didn't fully impress some folks, I like the changes... and am especially glad to see that they are still allowing viewers to watch the entire program online every night.