Or should that be: “Long post? No time!” Wow, it’s been a little while, hasn’t it? The quick summary, then — among other things, I’ve recently:

• hosted a rather pleasant(!) visitor from Spain. This lovely visitor continues to try to convince me (by the sheer force of her extreme pleasantness) to move across the Atlantic. My resistance continues to weaken, in spite of the overwhelmingness of imagining “lightening my load” in life (house; tons of physical and emotional “stuff”) and making such a massive change. Exciting but scary (scary but exciting?). To that end, though, I continue to gather the information and “fiddly bits” I need to successfully apply for a residence visa.
• gone to my sister’s beautiful wedding in small-town Manitoba (well, technically it was in the second-biggest city in the province), where I had to MC the reception. I split the emceeing duties with the groom’s brother, but I haven’t managed to figure out whether I was the ‘M’ or the ‘C’ (fortunately I, K, E and Y weren’t able to make it).
• seen the latest great Robert Lepage play, called Lipsynch. This one was a walk in the park, as it was “only” five hours long! (the last one was six or seven hours, and this one — once it is “final” in a year or so — is supposed to clock in at around nine hours…) No one ever believes me, but his work is normally so engrossing (touching, funny, thought-provoking) that you truly don’t notice the time flying by. Plus there are always two lengthy intermissions where you can eat, drink and make merry.
• wandered among the scantily-clad people at the first of two consecutive street sales on St-Laurent (there was also one on Mont-Royal near my place). Being a bit unintentionally scantily-clad thanks to my “holey” underwear, I took the opportunity to make my biennial underwear purchases.
• continued to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous smoking neighbours and mysterious parking-space manipulators…perhaps some day these stories will be told, but not today.
• gotten sick (again) and gotten better (again, thankfully). I love jogging but suspect it may be one of the culprits. Instead of running (and speaking of “walks in the park”), I’ve started hiking up Mont Royal with heavy weights strapped to my back. I’ve been carrying a 30lb backpack and hiking up the mountain from my place, then up and down the “top stairs” (close to 40m vertical) a bunch of times (e.g. five times). I figured yesterday I hiked around 7km with a total vertical gain of 300m…not bad considering the elevation difference between my house and the summit is only around 140m. And though it’s practically downtown, the walk is through a beautiful green forest. What a great city: you almost feel like you’re in “real” nature — in fact, I could only barely hear the whine and roar of the Formula One on Île Notre Dame, about 5km away…
• continued working on my novel. Up to almost 150 pages (somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the first draft), though the going has been getting tougher, recently. Have I lost my momentum, with all the “other stuff” going on? With writing (as with life), I have bad days, then incredibly amazing days, followed by a series of not-so-great days to balance it all out. Consistency is not something I’m known for. Unless consistent inconsistency counts. That, I mastered long ago.

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