Wrapping Up May Reading

I'm not even sure if I finished Joy Williams' State of Grace in early May or late April.  I have to say I didn't care for it all that much.  I am sure this is mostly because I was icked out over the relationship between the daughter and her father, a somewhat itinerant (and over-bearing) preacher.  I did find the scene where the mother crashes a car and kills her other daughter and then says to the narrator that she wishes it had been her (the narrator) that died instead to be grim and a bit gripping, but generally the book didn't move me, even with yet another car crash (this time caused by her fiancé).  I thought the periodic interjections by the Answer Man on the radio were interesting but worked better in the short story "The Lover" from Taking Care.  (Taking Care was definitely a more rewarding book for me with my favourite story being "Train.")

I am almost certain that I finished Dorothy Edwards' Winter Sonata in April.  This is one where just not enough happened to satisfy me at all.  In fact, if you read the blurbs on the back of the book, it makes it seem as if the tentative love affair started by the visiting cellist dies out as the seasons change, when in fact it doesn't seem as if the cellist even contemplated making any kind of move on his neighbour, not least because he spends over half the book sick in bed!  And then it turns out he is thinking of moving to the village permanently, so he may well have more opportunities to follow through.  Talk about false advertising.  I'm going to see if I can manage to donate this to a UT library, though a friend of mine may want to read it first.

Winter Sonata did, however, lead me back to the far superior A Month in the Country, and I reread this in just a few days.  I learned fairly recently that this was made into a movie, and I guess I will suggest it to the curator of Contours over at Paradise.

I think it was last week that I saw The Woman in the Dunes at the Fox.  (Somehow I left my spare biking gloves behind.  I tried to go right back inside, but the doors were locked.  I emailed them, but they haven't turned up so far.  Drat!)  This was quite useful, as there were a few points in the novel that I somehow overlooked (the fact that the villages wanted a sex show in exchange for letting the man out to see the sea and that he explicitly waited around to show the other villagers his water gathering mechanism instead of trying to escape).  I think I was kind of weary of the novel by this point and ready to return it.  So the movie brought out some elements of the novel that I had skated over, much like I did with Under the Volcano a few years back.  I will say that when I realized he decided not to escape for quite inexplicable reasons I really turned against the book and the movie to a lesser extent.  (I am glad that I didn't go to the book club talk on the book, as there was just a taste of this at the end of the movie, and one of the Torontonians kept going on and on, as he was so in love with his own voice.)

In terms of the book club at work, they are reading Murakami's What I Talk About What I Talk About Running.  I won't be in town, but just reading a few pages in, I found myself so alienated from Murakami.  He's like I just stumbled into running a successful jazz bar and then I decided on a lark to write a novel (after watching a baseball game), and then I submitted it and won this prize, and then I decided to sell the bar to focus on writing.  It may all be true, but it is completely insufferable, and I couldn't bear to read any more of his humble-bragging.  I didn't like the other possible book: Nigel Barley's Adventures in a Mud Hut, which is a somewhat snarky anthropological text.

It turns out it is next to impossible to borrow the Mud Hut book, so the club dropped it, and is going with Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go instead.  Interestingly, this is in very high demand at the library for some unclear reason.  I think tomorrow I am going to return the two books I didn't like to Robarts and then see if University College still has a copy I can borrow.  I also will check out the Hart House Art Museum, since it is open late on Wednesdays.

I just finished Dawn Powell's collection of short stories, Sunday, Monday and Always.  Sadly, I didn't like this much at all.  Most of the characters are quite unpleasant and not nearly as amusing as they can be in her novels.  I'm not quite sure why that is, but these stories just didn't work for me, with the single exception of "The Glads."  Interestingly, she was never able to sell "The Glads" to any magazine, probably because the ending is exceptionally dark.  I'm going to see if I can sell this and State of Grace to BMW or Seeker's Books.

In terms of what I am currently reading, I have just started The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos.  Fortunately, it isn't as long as I feared (a bit under 400 pages).  It is basically about a real-life uprising of the descendants of Mayan Indians against the Mexican elites, but it is set in the 1930s (decades after the actual uprising).

I'm not sure if I actually will read Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, though it seems like it would pair reasonably well with The Book of Lamentations.  As I said, I will likely be reading Never Let Me Go, and then on my trips to Ottawa and L.A., I think I'll bring along Dicken's Dombey and Son.  If I manage to get through all this, and there is any reading time left for June, I think I will turn to Lampedusa's The Leopard, Mavis Gallant's The Cost of Living and then Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow.  And perhaps Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Lord Vishnu's Love Handles.  After that, I'll just pick more from the top part of this list.

Edit (5/21): I was able to visit the Hart House Art Museum this evening.  The exhibits were basically UT art students' final projects.  I will say it has been quite a while since I've seen exhibits there that really wow me, but I do try to go two or three times each year to catch each new show.  I'm usually around campus for other reasons.  I was frustrated to find out that University College Library closed up on May 1 and won't reopen until the fall.  Had I known, I would have requested the book be sent to Robarts.  I'll go ahead and do that, but not until the middle of next week, as I won't be around to grab the book while I am traveling.

Transience (or The Flowering Trees of Riverdale)

This will be a bit more of a photo-essay.  As most people know, we went through cherry blossom season a couple of weeks ago.  It generally only lasts about a week.  I never go to High Park, since huge crowds turn up there with many people displaying poor behaviour (and it is a true wonder that more trees are not permanently damaged).  There is a very small grove of cherry trees at the northern end of Trinity-Bellwoods Park, but I only saw them in passing (coming back from MoCA actually).  I instead try to stop by the small cluster of trees just to the west of Robarts.  (Granted Robarts is nowhere near Riverdale, but these blossoms are even more transient than the apple blossoms and other flowering trees, so I wanted to kick things off with them...)  

While the cherry trees outside Robarts are a poorly kept secret, there weren't too many people there that morning, though there were definitely more people in the late afternoon when I stopped by again.  (I believe I was off to see Tafelmusik that evening.)

 
Basically the same view, but with crowds...

Then this tree is just to the north of Campbell House.

And then on to Riverdale itself.  I don't know what sort of tree this is, though possibly some sort of flowering apple or even crab apple tree.

 

 

And ending with a pretty tree on my block.

A week or two after the cherry trees start to lose their petals, then lilacs bloom (and last much longer).  I am not sure I actually have any recent photos of lilacs, but I'll try to snap one soon and post it here.  I actually have a small lilac in the back yard, but because it is largely shaded, it blooms quite a bit later.

 

These bushes are actually just across the street from a construction site for the Ontario Line, which will be my next photo-essay to follow shortly.

 

 

Mail Strike Redux

It's going to happen.  Canada Post workers are going back on strike this Friday, barring any last minute legal intervention (or an even longer shot settlement).  Not only are the union and Canada Post management very far apart, the most recent study of the situation indicates that Canada Post will never be solvent again and recommends a whole host of recommendations that would really gut the postal service, perhaps leading to almost no mail service in rural areas and vastly cut back service in urban areas (where the service at least comes close to breaking even).  As you can imagine, the union completely rejects this, and if the government accept these findings as the basis of any new deal, I don't think there will be any deal at all, and, in fact, the government may be forced to dissolve Canada Post (and break the union completely) and then set up something new that is non-unionized.  Hard to imagine that happening, but not completely inconceivable.  I suppose it is much more likely in the States, where they are very close to breaking their post office as well.

I still have one more CD in the mail from Japan, which might get caught in the crossfire.  Also, there is a package on the way from Dusty Groove in Chicago.  I may luck out and this gets in just under the wire, but most likely not, esp. as I probably have to pay customs duties on the package.  (Another compelling reason why I decided to stop having anything from Chicago shipped up here...)

I have switched almost entirely to digital delivery, certainly of bills and so forth, but TSO is in this really weird place where they want to force you to get tickets on the app (rather than emailing tickets) and if you refuse that, then they mail you the tickets.  They will have to change their practice if the strike has such long-lasting ramifications.  I will have to go through my recent mail to see what else can be switched over to digital delivery, which if adopted more broadly by more Canadians of course just further puts Canada Post on a death spiral.  It is sad of course to see how many institutions that have lasted generations are dying before our eyes.  This won't be the last, of course.

Thoughts on Brecht

This is not intended to be a truly all-encompassing post.  My thoughts on Brecht are not particularly profound.  But I wanted to pull together a few disparate threads on Bertold Brecht.  I did manage to see Three Penny Opera on Sat. over at Video Cabaret.  This was actually a student production from UT Mississauga, and they decided it was worth bringing the whole show/ensemble for a short run in Toronto.  This review seems fair.  It is definitely quite a bit updated from the original.  Now I had seen Three Penny Opera in Ann Arbor way back in the day (probably 1988 or 1989!), but I didn't really remember much of it.  And while I remembered the entire thing was pretty sordid, I had somehow thought that after Jenny grasses on MacHeath that she is murdered (which would make a lot of sense), and I totally forgot the weird, artificial ending where MacHeath is pardoned at the very end.  (I have to wonder if Brecht was nodding towards the ending of Tartuffe, which I find so objectionable; it sort of works better here, as Brecht was usually one to point out the artificiality of theatre.)  Even though the singing wasn't amazing, it was definitely an interesting night out, and I'm glad I saw it.

As it happens, I was sitting next to a mature student who had absolutely fallen in love with this show, and had seen it six times in Mississauga and six times in Toronto.  Wow.  Talk about obsessive.  I have certainly seen the same show in different stagings.  Though sometimes I really don't want an inferior staging to mess with an iconic version, which happened to me with a fairly blah version of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine out at UBC (somewhat threatening to overwrite in my mind a fascinating production from UM in the late 80s).  It's one reason I don't think I will ever go see another version of Letts' August: Osage County, and even moreso with Spamalot where I saw Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce and Hank Azaria!  But I don't think I've doubled up on the same production, with one exception of The Trojan Girls & The Outhouse of Atreus over at Factory, where you saw half indoors and half outdoors, and I wanted to see if switching the order of the inside and outside acts made a difference.  Also, I guess I have seen a couple of musicals twice where the touring version wasn't substantially different (Crazy for You and Come From Away).  But it is still very, very rare for me to think I need to see the same production of a play or musical twice.*  At any rate, I was babbling on about the tragic nature of Three Penny Opera to this student, who must have known that really nothing particularly tragic happens (on stage at least) in this production, but he didn't bother to correct me.

I'll see if I can track down the various programs to prove which Brecht plays I have seen.  I've seen almost all his major works (or at least the ones I care about) with one exception - The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.  I missed a fairly solid production in Chicago (I can't remember if I had been living away from Chicago or just returned and hadn't plugged back into the theatre scene, but, either way, annoying).  Then apparently there was a production in Toronto in 2013, right before I returned to Toronto.  (The list of things I just missed out on in Toronto in 2012 or 2013 is quite long and frustrating - Angels in America at Soulpepper, Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests, Lobby Hero (in what was probably a better production than the one I finally saw in Hamilton), Shanley's Savage in Limbo and a couple of others that escape me at the moment.  Interestingly, there was a 2 day workshop production of this at Canadian Stage in 2022 (that I completely missed!).  I do think after I finally manage to catch this, this will be the last Brecht that I actively seek out, but if some of the big ones crop up again, I will definitely go.

When I was at University of Michigan, there was a company called the RC (Residential College) Brecht Company, which is sadly now defunct.  I saw them do Drums in the Night and Three Penny Opera, as well as The Breadshop and the Brecht-adjacent Devil's Disciple by G.B. Shaw.  It sounds like they were losing steam by 1989 in terms of their big productions, though there were a few one-off productions that followed until 1993 or so, which sounded like they were quite interesting, and I would have enjoyed them had I still been in town.  At any rate, I was introduced to Brecht fairly early in my theatre-going "career."

Baal
Drums in the Night (Ann Arbor, 1988)
The Breadshop (Ann Arbor, 1990?)
In the Jungle of Cities (Chicago)
Three Penny Opera (Ann Arbor, 1989 & Toronto, 2025)
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (Toronto, 2018)
Life of Galileo (Chicago, 2016**)
Mother Courage and Her Children (Cambridge, UK, 2006)
Good Person of Szechwan (NYC, 1994 & Chicago, 2007)
Caucasian Chalk Circle (Chicago, 2011 & Toronto, 2018)
The Wedding (Chicago, 2011)

I know for certain I saw In the Jungle of Cities in Chicago, even though I can't dig up my theatre program.  I'm less sure about Baal.  There was a production at Trap Door in 2000, right before I left Chicago, and I would likely have seen that.  There was also one in 2009, though this was in Pilsen, and I didn't get to that part of Chicago often, so I don't think I went then.  Very curiously, Tuta Theatre (in Chicago) also did Baal in 2010.  I saw a few of their productions, including The Wedding, so it seems fairly likely I would have gone to their Baal, but the photos are not stirring up any memories, whereas the photos from The Wedding are bringing back memories of the show -- and I even found my scanned program from The Wedding, so that settles the matter.  Maybe I have not seen Baal after all, though that seems a seems a bit unlikely frankly.

Anyway, I have seen quite a lot of Brecht, all things considered, though not many (any?) of his shorter one-act plays.  Aside from Arturo Ui, I would probably most like to see another production of Mother Courage and perhaps his version of Antigone.  Sadly there was a very good production of Mother Courage at Trap Door in Jan. 2024 (when I was still willing to travel to Chicago for pleasure), but I didn't go.

 

* That said, I would probably see Something Rotten! again if the Mirvish picked up the production that was at Stratford last year, though it doesn't appear they are doing so.  I am toying with the idea of seeing Some Like It Hot at Mirvish in 2026, though I don't know if any of the cast would be carried over from the Broadway version and indeed what other changes might be made for the touring production.  And perhaps the next time The Book of Mormon swings through Toronto, I'll see that again.  I remember when that was such the hot ticket.

** I actually made a special theatre trip to Chicago, where I saw this production by Remy Bumppo and Annie Baker's The Flick at Steppenwolf.  While theatre in Toronto is at a good level, it just does not compare to the quality and breadth of what was (and surely still is) available in Chicago.  Sigh.

Longer, long-distance reads

As I just explained, I really don't want to be making the trip between Toronto and L.A. often, and I probably will quit my job if this becomes a regular trip I am expected to make.  I don't mind going to the West Coast in general (in moderation), and I do hope that we win some work in Metro Vancouver -- and that I can make a trip to Vancouver, perhaps in late July or August.

Nonetheless, I probably should make a list of the books I would be reading on really long flights (or indeed the train to Ottawa or Montreal, which I am likely to be taking in late May and then June).

I was looking over this post (about my reading gaps) and seeing which really long books I still need to read, which is now slightly different from what I was thinking here.  It seems as if I only could read two more novels by Dickens, I think it should be David Copperfield and Great Expectations.  Great Expectations is not actually all that long, but David Copperfield is.  However, I think I would probably read Dombey and Son next.

Followed by:
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies (reread)
David Copperfield
Terra Nostra by Fuentes
The Golden Notebook by Lessing (reread)
Emma by Austen
The Bride of Texas by Skvorecky
He Knew He Was Right by Trollope
Larva by Rios
The Brothers Karamazov (reread)
Divine Days by Leon Forrest
Buddenbrooks by Mann
Bleak House (reread)
The Recognitions by Gaddis
Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon (reread)
The Power Broker by Caro
Women and Men by McElroy

I don't really think I will stick to this order, but it helps organize my thoughts on reading or rereading really long books.  As I said, I think I would quit long before I made 15 or so flights out to L.A.  

It may well take me through retirement to get to all of these really long books (as it is not comfortable to fit them into my regular reading cycle).  At that point, I would probably read Fontane's After the Storm, Tolstoy's War and Peace (and perhaps reread Anna Karenina) and then Grossman's Stalingrad and Life and Fate.

Needing a Break

I'm just super frustrated by so many things right now, including that my email provider completely swallowed an email to a friend, despite my having tried to save it as a draft a few times.  I just don't feel like going back and retyping it, even though the note wasn't especially long.

I'm really frustrated by everything going on south of the border and wondering why the Dems just seem so completely feckless and disorganized.  I'm really unhappy about hearing all the issues people are facing crossing the border.  While I am expecting no issues on my upcoming trip to L.A., I am at the point where if I need to make this trip on a frequent basis (due to work), then I will find a new job.  I probably should find a whole new line of work, but it's a little late for that unfortunately.

I also just read an article about how Doug Ford is going to be ripping out even more bike lanes and telling cyclists to fuck off and go use the side streets (ignoring the fact that Toronto doesn't actually have parallel side streets to its main roads).  Unfortunately, this is a case where the institutional power is all concentrated at the Provincial level, and the courts have told dissenting municipalities to go fuck off as well.  I'm feeling we are at the the point where all civil, democratic means of changing the situation for the better have failed, and we shall see what comes next.  I personally cannot defend or support "the system" any longer, even though what comes next will likely be even worse. 

I'm awfully depressed about everything, and it is hard to stay motivated.  And then my will power slips (because nothing really matters), and I get frustrated that I am gaining weight instead of losing it.  I am about 5 pounds worse off than when I really started to watch what I was eating (back in the fall I guess).  I briefly made some progress, and then winter hit and work got really terrible, and I gained about 10 pounds.  I think I have lost about 5 of that, but I need to lose 15 pounds in the next two months.  That is unlikely to happen, but being back on the bike does help.  And this week I will make it to the swimming pool twice and the gym once.  Maybe I'll actually get to the point where I made it to the gym twice and the pool twice, though that will likely be a challenge, given how often I am working late or going to plays or concerts or indeed just being away from home (and finding hotel exercise rooms to be quite pitiful). 

It's interesting because I have been at least considering whether I should try Ozempic or one of the other wonder drugs.  There is so much stigma around them -- because of course "if you had the will power," you could lose the weight on your own.  But that's likely not the case for genetic reasons, as well as the fact that junk food is cheaper than proper food, and we are all over-stressed these days.  Someone (not me) started a thread about this on a bulletin board, and within minutes someone came on to basically say that once they buckled down, they were able to lose all this weight and that the drugs were essentially cheating.  It was such a confirmation of this article.  Indeed, the guy circled back another time to do even more fat shaming, and I would have blocked him, but the board's software is so out of date, I can't do that any longer.  Sigh.  But I do wonder about the long-term impacts of taking these drugs, and in fact there was a very recent study saying that the drugs were incredible, but once you start, you are essentially locked into taking them forever, as the minute you stop, the weight comes back incredibly fast.  Super depressing...

While I have stayed super busy and engaged in the arts scene, I missed out on two events that I really wanted to see.  In one case it was totally my fault, whereas in the other case it was 10% (at max) my fault and basically the fault of the theatre company for completely failing to advertise their event.  The DSO was going to play Shostakovitch's 10th Symphony, and I had pencilled in on my calendar forever, but I think I got very busy due to getting ready for a conference and somehow I never ordered my digital ticket in time.  I probably thought there was a Sunday concert, and I could stream it after that, but it was gone.  I emailed immediately afterward asking if it was possible to buy into the stream for another day or two, but I never got a response.  There is still a chance that the concert or part of it will turn up in their digital archives, but it is still really frustrating, and I just don't know how I let this slip.

The other one is even more frustrating because if you miss a live theatre event, it can be years or even decades before there is another chance to see it (and it is even harder now that I pretty much am ruling out traveling to the States for 3+ years unless I absolutely must for work).  I had been checking out the upcoming productions at DPS and Concord Theatricals (formerly Samuel French), and I had noticed a few plays of interest coming up in Toronto, including Posner's Life Sucks and a student production of Arcadia.  I have seen Life Sucks in Chicago but really wanted to see it a second time.  I forgot to get my blog post up in time, and then got busy.  So that was on me.  But then I never heard anything about it.  It was a two week run that was completely under the radar  No emails from Theatre Centre or prompting from any of my actor friends.  And SFYS is defunct where I might have heard about it.  No reviews in the papers (since only one or two plays get reviewed each month these days, and pretty much only Coal Mine, Soulpepper and Crow's get ink -- Tarragon has been completely shut out this season).  Mooney's closed down, and there just is not a decent site that gathers up all the plays in a timely fashion.  I finally saw Slotkin review it but it was basically the last day, and I simply couldn't rearrange my schedule to go.  I am truly pissed.  And it doesn't help that I went back to DPS to see if it was playing somewhere else, and they seem to have revamped the website to eliminate the Current Production search feature, which sucks beyond belief.

I had stumbled across a poster about Three Penny Opera over at Video Cabaret, but lost track of dates and then I found out it was closing this weekend.  I went to buy tickets but it was completely sold out, except Thurs. when I am off to The Fox to see Woman in the Dunes.  I did put myself on the wait list for Friday and Sat. evening.  If that doesn't pan out, I might go back over to The Fox on Sat. to see Cronenberg's The Shrouds, as this date works a bit better for me than the late May dates at the Revue.  (I was thinking it might turn up at Market Square, but so far no.)  I mean I did end up scoring a ticket from the wait list for Lowest of the Low, so it might happen, but I can't count on that.  I think this is a case where it is 50/50 my fault for dropping the ball but equally their generally poor promotion (outside their circle of friends and fellow students who have managed to sell out three shows, so more power to them but sad for me...).

Anyway, just a few more things to be disgruntled about.  I guess it could be worse.  I could be a Leafs fan...

Edit (05/16): I think I am going to be extremely sore for a while about missing Life Sucks.  It really wouldn't have taken more than one email notice from Theatre Centre.  I would have been able to squeeze it in somehow, even if it meant rescheduling A Strange Loop and paying the $8 charge this time around.  In fact, I wouldn't say I'm sorry I saw A Strange Loop, but I didn't like it very much, and I would absolutely have preferred going to see Life Sucks instead.  I did manage to get off the wait list for Three Penny Opera, so that's at least one fewer regrets.  And I managed to score a couple of free tickets to some plays in development over at Canadian Stage in a few weeks (again coming off the wait list for a piece by Erin Shields).  So that helps a bit.  Also, when I am extremely grouchy, sometimes donating to charity puts me in a slightly better mood.  So far I have donated to the Canadian Red Cross and the Heart and Lung Foundation.  I'll likely give to the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund this afternoon, and that may also help a bit.

Nickled and Dimed to Death

I guess these are all small things, but oh so annoying.

I am heading over to see A Strange Loop at Soulpepper on Sat.  I think I'll find it interesting, though I am definitely not the target audience, and indeed I generally am not that big on musicals in the first place, with a few key exceptions.  Anyway, what was not made clear (or at least I definitely missed it) is this is such a challenging role that the lead is taking off every Wed. and Sat. matinee!  (Honestly, that feels a bit extreme.)  Of course, I had already booked a ticket for a Sat. matinee and thought, well I really ought to switch that.  There was a bit of a hassle, and I had to downgrade my seats a bit, but I managed to get this done.  And then after I thought everything was settled, a different person from the Box Office wrote me back saying that there was an $8 ticket transfer fee.  I wrote back a pretty salty email, saying that this was part of a subscription, as well as I thought it was misleading to not have the lead actually in every performance, and I would never have booked that date in the first place, etc.  I guess I just really was annoyed by the constant nickle and diming, esp. as the original person I was talking with did not mention an extra fee.  They ended up just sending me the ticket without collecting the extra fee, though maybe I used up all of my karma for the week.

I had recently put in an order from Dusty Groove.  It's quite a decent jazz store in Chicago, and they do a good job with shipping items, even internationally.  I definitely miss dropping in on the store, which I used to do all the time while living in Chicago.  At any rate, I ended up putting in an order.  Normally I ship to a friend still living in Chicago, but I won't be going back to Chicago any time soon, so I investigated the cost to ship up to Toronto.  It definitely cost more but not a ridiculous amount more, and this was offset by not paying Illinois sales tax.  However, when the package arrived, it was over the de minimus limit (which was supposed to be raised in any event), and I ended up paying $20 extra dollars in GST.  Which makes it that much less likely I'll be ordering again from them in the near future.  Darn it...

But the most annoying has to be this poster I was working on for a conference that was in town.  First off, I was never granted permission to go, even though I had the poster accepted and it was just down the street.  So that really dampened my enthusiasm.  Then my hours supporting the other conference activities were cut substantially, and I ended up having to do the research for the poster on my own time, which understandably started to drag...  I did finally pull all the data and putting the poster together (pretty late at night), but I was also disheartened by the fact that the data didn't line up with what I was expecting to see, which made it particularly hard to come up with any punchy findings.  So generally it was a disappointment all the way around.  Anyway, I finally got it done, though far too close to the conference deadline, but then I needed to actually print the poster.  I uploaded it to the Staples website after asking someone who said it would be ready the next day.  Well, they definitely gave me bad advice.  The next day I waited quite some time and then finally started calling in the afternoon, but I never managed to talk with anyone in the print shop.  The conference had already started by this point!  

This morning I decided enough was enough, and I biked over in the morning, only to find that the poster still wasn't done.  However, if I forked over another $20, they would turn it into a rush job, and I would have it in about 30 minutes.  So I did that, though with very poor grace.  I think next time I will just go to The Printing House instead, which is just a bit further up University Ave.

So just a few of the many interactions leaving me annoyed these days...