Ms Julie returns home, sweet home

The train that I am currently on (VIA Rail train 668, Toronto-Montréal) is scheduled to stop in every village and hamlet between here and home. Thankfully, it is mostly populated by mid-term plagued students so the ambience is fairly quiet, leaving me plenty of time to bring you…

Highlights from The Word on The Street Festival! WHEE!

• Neil Bissoondath read to me.
• Peter Dubé, Andrew Hood and I posed in orange porta-potties.
• I beat up Derek Webster with copies of Maisonneuve magazine (the irony…)

Check out Ms. Julie’s blog for upcoming photos of the non-stop fun and hijinks.

Other random notes from my trip to Toronto:

• The Royal York Fairmount has fancy, lemony-scented toiletries that you will soon be able to see in my own humble water closet – but only during the Holidays and other special occasions.

• Hakim Optical must refresh their logo. I don’t care how catchy a TV jingle they use. Judging by the style of the glasses in the logo, as well as the psychedelic orange neon lighting, I must assume that they’ve had the same brand image since 1974.

• The squirrels in the Osgoode Hall gardens* are admittedly quite cute. Whether they are worthy of having two different sets of German tourists videotaping them is another story. Don’t they have squirrels in Germany? I pity the fools who get suckered into watching that footage (“Look Helmut! See the way they sit on their hind legs! Like humans! Amazing!”).

• On the train out, I was sitting behind a group of Japanese tourists whose members made themselves conspicuous by (respectively) visiting the bathroom frequently, taking pictures of… well, everything, and wearing a white surgical mask. The Michael-Jackson-esque mask raised two important questions: (1) Was she wearing it because she wanted to protect us from whatever contagious illness she had? Or (2) was she wearing it to protect herself from the insidious diseases we all must be carrying? As the voyage wore on, she lost all credibility when she started to wear it only intermittedly, and then eschewed it altogether when she stepped onto the sooty platform at Toronto’s Union Station. Go figure.

The juice is getting low on my laptop and we’ve barely reached the outskirts of Belleville**. Ugh.

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*I always make a stop in the Osgoode Hall gardens because Reggie surely visited the grounds during her honeymoon trip in late 1898 or early 1899.
**”Hey Mel! I can’t see you but I think I spot a Timmy’s from the train station!”