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Greetings from Dundas Square

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Have I mentioned lately how much I love Toronto? It just sort of feels like home when I get here. Of course, it’s a home I get to live in without having to commute to work or dealing with the fact that the heat doesn’t work very well outside for a good chunk of the year.

But still.

So far:

  • A really quick visit to Pittsburgh Friday night. I really need to start spending more time there.
  • Lunch with Sarah outside Buffalo and a visit to her amazing new house.
  • An uneventful border crossing.
  • Book binging and neighborhood roaming.
  • Much shawarma.

Coming:

  • Lunch today with an old friend from SF.
  • More book binging.
  • More Toronto exploration.
  • Montreal on Wednesday.

Pictures when I return.

Tuesday in the GTA

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It was a very soggy Tuesday in Toronto and I was extra damp after walking four blocks to a breakfast place I’d noticed last night only to find that it didn’t open until 11:00. Apparently it’s more of a bar and only serves hangover breakfasts.

Monday:

  • Breakfast in Kensington Market.
  • Lots of walking and subwaying (is that a verb?) mostly downtown, Danforth Village, and the University of Toronto area.
  • Lunch at the Coach House on Yonge Street, a quite wonderful old diner in a stretch of old low-rise commercial buildings that’s probably doomed.
  • More books, and I accidentally just happened upon he final day of the University of Toronto’s annual Friends of the Library book sale. Just walked on campus, saw a sign, and there it was. Love when that happens.
  • Dinner at Falafel Queen, followed by a nighttime drive around the city.

Today:

  • Soggy trek to an uneventful breakfast.
  • Back to the hotel to do some work that couldn’t wait till after vacation.
  • Lurked around The Beach and had lunch at a diner on Queen Street East that provided a great salad and a very terse (OK…rude) waitress.
  • Revisited that bookstore on Spadina and scored some amazing stuff, including a 1959 annual report from Loblaws.
  • Dinner with a friend and former coworker from SF who’s back in his native Toronto now.

Off to Montreal tomorrow.

So let’s face it…

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My life is a complete hellscape right now and everyone (myself included) is tired of hearing about it. Things don’t suck for me as much as they do for, say, anyone who lives within two hundred miles of NYC. Thus my whining no doubt gets tedious so I’m going to talk about something happy tonight.

And that happy thing is the fifteen pounds I’ve lost in the past four weeks. Note, mind you, that those four weeks even included a week’s vacation in Canada where I gave up even trying to be strict with my new foodscape (tonight’s running theme is the annoying overuse of “scape” as a suffix). I’m not really sure if it’s the actual mechanics of this “high fat, almost no carb” thing or the fact that I’m just consuming less in general and paying more attention to food overall, but it seems to be working. I feel better and I’m even sleeping better. Go figure. My doctor may actually have been right.

The torture, though, is that I’ve just returned from Canada but I can’t pig out on Mmm…érable and Coffee Crisp even though I still brought some of each back over the border. That kind of sucks.

Videolog: Fuck Christmas

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Fear
Fuck Christmas (1982)

Burned by the past two Christmases, which pretty much defined the term “suck”, I’m now done with it. As of this year I will no longer pretend that I care anymore. I’ll do the two obligatory family things unless I can find a good excuse not to but otherwise I’m skipping the whole damned thing from here on out. Suggestions for a new low-carb December tradition are welcome.

Yes, that means you don’t have to buy me a present.

Videolog: Remembrance Day

B-Movie
Remembrance Day (1981)

As with “Nowhere Girl”, there’s no legitimate video. This clip from a 2006 reunion tour was the best I could do. Or you could just listen here. Coincidentally, it popped up in the shuffle today, too. Maybe the iPhone knows what day it is…

Road trip photos

In case you care, photos from the Toronto-Montreal trip a few weeks back are now posted. I know I sort of fell down on the job when it came to the narrative. Blame it on an exceedingly busy month. I’ll try to rectify that soon.

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Fuck Christmas some more

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Not that I really needed any justification for this sentiment, but I heard my first Christmas music of the year in Barnes & Noble the campus bookstore this afternoon. What song was it? That stupid bloody “buy my dying mama shoes in case she meets Jesus on Christmas Eve” bilge, followed by some horrifically depressing and funereal organ performance of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” that nearly had the whole store in tears.

If I’d had any Christmas spirit to begin with, I surely would have lost it right then and there.