It’s hard to believe I haven’t been there for a whole year! That’s the longest I’ve ever been away from the city. I’m excited, if a little bit stressed, because what started out as a nice relaxing vacation has become a fully booked plans-and-packing-palooza. Poor Stark, I don’t think I’ve allowed us any time to ourselves. Between back to back games of Scrabble, bouts of beer drinking with assorted friends, Mets games, Liza concerts, trips to Coney Island, five mile runs, and voyages out to the outer reaches of Westchester, every evening is now occupied. And now that my parents have sold their house and need to be packed by the end of August, every morning will be spent working and every afternoon spent packing and going through the last of my stuff in New York. Fun fun fun!!

In my positive news: Porter Air for the win! This will by my first time flying Porter, and barring some horrible disaster, I am well pleased. I booked a flight from Toronto Island Airport to Newark a few months ago for $99 bucks. Already that’s cheaper than Air Canada, and leaving from and heading to way better airports. Air Canada requires an hour long trip out to the noisy, hectic Pearson, where they inevitably leave three hours late with no reason or explanation, and then eventually arrive in La Guardia, an even noisier and more overcrowded nightmare of an airport, out in the nether regions of Queens. Toronto Island Airport, on the other hand, is a short cab ride and/or free shuttle ride away, conveniently located to downtown Toronto. The island is a thirty second ferry ride away from land. You could swim it, if you felt inclined to touch Lake Ontario with bare skin.

But, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. So, a few months ago I booked my flight. A few weeks ago, I realized I would have to change it to a week earlier. I called them, and not only did I not have to sit through five years of “Press 2 for French, press 3 for assisted suicide, press 4 to hold FOREVER AND EVER,” but a human actually picked up the phone after two rings. They were friendly and helpful and being that the flight I wanted to switch to was actually cheaper (only 59 bucks from Toronto to New York!!), THEY GAVE ME MONEY BACK. Who has ever heard of such a thing?

So, this morning I got up hella early to leave for the airport, expecting the usual hassle. No, I took my cab down to the cheery ferry dock, checked in, hopped on the ferry, admired the view of downtown on the short jaunt over the water, was through security in two minutes, dropped off my bag, and am now sitting in the clean, quiet, and peaceful lounge in a comfy chair with my FREE cup of coffee and my FREE cookie, typing away happily on my FREE Wi-Fi. What is this nonsense? This isn’t how air travel is supposed to be! Air travel is supposed to be overpriced and full of surly staff, extra charges, noisy terminals, and rude security guards. This is just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Get me back to Air Canada. I can’t take this courtesy and competence.

Massive List of Things to Do
1. Finish processing backlog of photos
2. Add new photos to portfolio
3. Update website
   • Redo this ugly blog page
   • Rewrite photography page intro
   • Change “Video” button to “Audio/Video”
4. Rework running plan
5. Organize audio files
6. Backup documents, photos, music
7. Watch Final Cut Pro and Garageband tutorials, download Audacity and Painter
8. Get creative rear in gear
   • Coney Island
   • St. Jamestown
   • Lesbian short
   • Don Q
   • 101 Unfinished Movies
9. Start packing for NYC!!!!

Life has been hectic lately. Work is out of control and, in addition to my regular job, I’ve also been doing some emergency copy writing, which is really fun, but also a crunch in terms of deadlines. I’ve been powering away at my running. I ran over 10K last week, which was exciting and also encouraging, as I registered for a 10K race at the end of July before I had actually hit that distance successfully and was starting to worry that I had hit a plateau and wouldn’t be able to increase my distance in time. I am starting to develop some tightness in my right calf that I’m worried about, though, and I’m hoping that stretching will keep it from becoming a problem before the race.

The article about the Canadian Club project was finally published in Time Out Chicago last week. It made the front page of the site, which was awesome. I’ve sort of reached a bit of a block while thinking about doing an adbusting blog. I just have a million projects going right now, and the thought of working on all of them at once has left me with no choice but to retreat to the couch to read magazines.

But, in exciting news! My parents came to visit and brought me two old cameras they had found while getting ready to move. One is a Cine-Kodak 8mm camera, which is really cool looking, but unfortunately 8mm film is no longer manufactured. And who can afford to process film anyway?

The other is a Voigtlander Brillant which, miracle of miracles, is a medium format camera that uses 120mm film! Stark and I are going to get the lens cleaned and buy some film for it, and hopefully many photographic adventures will be had.

This weekend is Pride, and I’m hoping I’ll get some good shots of the crowds.

Now, on to some general notes on things I’ve seen and read lately. Not really full reviews, but just for my own future reference:

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Such exciting things have happened today:

Firstly, NICOLA GRIFFITH HERSELF wrote a post that quoted my review of her book. She says I’m funny. Nicola Griffith says I’m funny. Okay, I have to take a moment to regain composure.

And! There have now been a bunch of new ads made for the Canadian Club Fake Campaign. Three awesome ones by Trancer21, one awesome one by Robbie of the fantastic music blog Womenfolk, one from my partner Stark, and two others in addition to that! I have added these to the bottom of the updated original post. I’m waiting to see if I get any more, and then I’ll make a new post featuring the submitted ads.

Also, some fellow bloggers have written about the project:

A legal commentary by Rebecca Tushnet, whom I very much admire, and subtle arguments for subversive billboard alterations and culture jamming from Laura Quilter. Also, the project got a shout out from Shameless Magazine. Hooray!

It’s not too late - make your own Canadian Club ad now!

Today I registered for the Toronto Waterfront Half Marathon 2008! Woo! On September 28, 2008, I will possibly be succeeding at running, like, 13 miles… I think. How long is a half-marathon again? I should really work that out before September I suppose. Actually, speaking of distances, there seems to be some sort of bizarre tendency in Toronto to hold races of indeterminate distance. I’ll see a pamphlet or a poster or an ad on the train for some race/hike/walk for charity and I’ll think “Sure, I’ll do that. It might be fun.” So I look closer to see how far the race/hike/walk might be, as I dread accidentally getting involved with things like that walk for breast cancer that is something like fifty miles long and takes three days. But they never says the distance! Wouldn’t you think this would be a crucial piece of information to include? This has happened to me four or five times already. Sometimes the information concerning the location or the date is also omitted. Sometimes you go to the website and the information isn’t there either! Who are these people designing these pamphlets and posters and ads and websites? Perhaps we should hold a charity run to benefit them, as they clearly must be too stupid to fend for themselves.

So anyway, now that I’ve paid 70 bucks for this damn thing, I have to do it. It’s like when Stark used to ask me if I was going to change my mind and not move to Canada and I would say “Honey, of course I’m coming there, I have non-refundable tickets.” This story makes me seem like a real bitch, doesn’t it?

Besides the boring running crap, nothing much is new. I’ve been plugging away at the website, but there is always more and more to do. I have a million photos that need processing and I never read the instructions for this new recording device that Stark bought, even though I keep saying I will. I wasted all of yesterday trying to compress movies (again!) and failed. I hate compressing movies so much! Wahhhhhh!

This is a recipe for a soup that I adopted from something my mother came up with. Her recipe uses escarole, chicken broth, and no onion. My version uses broccoli rabe (rapini), which is a much more bitter green, and changes the flavor quite a bit. It’s a very versatile recipe - this particular version makes a lot of food. You can cut it down to 1 can of beans, 1 cup of broth, and 1 head of veggie, and it will still make quite a bit of food. Sadly, if you only use one can of beans, you lose the exciting tre colore effect, and thus don’t get to celebrate the glory of the Italian flag and its heritage of yumtastic food.

It is also a versatile recipe in terms of ingredients. Any hardy leafy green will do, depending on what sort of flavor you’re into. Rapini is bitter, escarole is more neutral. I think you can probably use kale, too, although I haven’t tried. I bet you could even use bok choy! Hah! It’s a party in my mouth and every leafy green is invited! You can cut out the onions, if that’s what you feel like doing. Or you could add more! Or more garlic! If it were up to me, there would be, like, five bulbs! Some people seem to think that’s too much. Hmph. Fools, I say. And season it any way you like. Mmmm… food. So here’s the recipe:

Pasta Tre Colore: Broccoli Rabe with Cannellini Beans

Ingredients

- 2 heads of broccoli rabe
- olive oil to cover bottom of a large pot
- 1 bulb of garlic (or MORE! Hah!)
- 1/2 red or Spanish onion
- 1 1/2 cubes of veggie bouillon cubes or 1 can (14 oz) low-sodium chicken broth
- 1 1/2 cup ditalini (raw)
- 2 cans cannellini (kidney) beans, one white, one red
- Seasoning (pepper, salt, oregano, rosemary)

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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.

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.