Posts from — April 2008

The following photo of me with a visa application was taken in January of 2007:

I am proud to announce that today, over a year later, I have finally sent in my application for permanent residence in Canada. Stark and I have been working and working on that damn thing all this time, and every time we thought it was done, suddenly a new requirement would manifest itself. First there weren’t sufficient numbers of photos, so more had to be taken. Then the FBI had to be contacted, the doctor had to be seen, tax forms received, certificates ordered, essays written, calls to the Canadian Immigration HELP! Line made repeatedly, bottles of wine consumed out of stress. In the end, the application was one hundred pages long. One hundred pages! Look at this monster:

Up until this morning, we were totally overwhelmed by this process. Look at what this process has done to poor Stark:

But today, at approximately noon, we mailed that sucker off to the Case Processing Office. It is now officially out of our hands. We can stress no more about it, now it is Canada’s turn to be stressed! And let me tell you, this whole thing better work out, because I can’t afford a second application.

I don’t know why I’m on such a project kick lately. I think because the weather is improving. All winter I basically sat on the couch and stared at the wall. But now it’s Spring!! The sky is blue and it’s (almost what could be considered) warm outside! The squirrels and the dogs and the birds are at play! There’s some jackhammer that keeps waking me up at ridiculously awful times in the morning! All these factors have me all excited and eager to complete all these projects I started, like, two years ago.

First there is the Teta family photo album. This album was assembled by my grandfather, who seemed to think stapling photos into a spiral notebook was the way to go. My idea was to remove all the photos from that crumbling acidic paper, but not before preserving the book as it was originally assembled by scanning the pages. I also wanted to make some sort of animated book with turning pages for a website, but alas, that seems to require… programming. Ugh. So that’s a no go. But I’m still planning on making some sort of online album. Possibly I could use image maps to make it so that if you moved the mouse over certain sections of the pages, it would bring up a close up of some of the individual photos which I will have restored. This might be completed let’s say… ten years from now. I’m just writing this down now as a record of my ideas.

All that has been completed so far is resizing six of thirty-three pages and adding black backgrounds. Yes! ::pumps fist::

Here is the cover and a couple of pages. Click to make them bigger.

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I’m thinking of starting a new photo project, and by “new,” I mean “I already have a bunch of photos on one theme and nothing to do with them.” This new project will be along the lines of “Saints in a Bush,” but using with signs instead of lawn ornamentation. I’m thinking of calling it “Signs and Wonders.” Y’know, all my projects seem to have such a religious theme. Oh well, moving on.

I have a bunch of photos of motel signs from the Road Trip of Champions, but I can’t decide whether those should remain separate from the photos I’ve taken elsewhere, like the ones I’ve taken in Toronto.

Some recent signs seen in Toronto:

This dead or dying palm tree was spotted on Spadina, in Chinatown:

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Stark and I spent all last weekend painting our living room wall Erotic Exotic Red. It’s a color from Benjamin Moore, and as we couldn’t figure out exactly what was “exotic” about it or why, we decided what Benjamin Moore really meant was “erotic,” but didn’t call it that for fear of backlash from the conservative elements in North America. Also, the guy at the hardware store totally typoed the name on the can. Hah!

This week we went over to the less than amazing Canadian Tire in search of shades for the windows. Ideally we wanted curtains, but no one seems to sell the kind that use those little wheely runner things anymore (or possibly no one understood me when I asked them if they had curtains with “little wheely runner things”), only the kind that hang from curtain rods. As the apartment came with a pre-installed wheely runner thing track above the window, we didn’t feel like drilling even more holes for a curtain rod. Thus we ended up with “Roman shades” (Indeed, I can almost taste the Italian food every time I look at them), which we installed last night. They fell down three times and are now entirely supported by twist ties. Yes, we are classy like that.