Weighing on My Mind

I'm not sure whether it is better or worse for my outlook, but the gym took away the scale in the change room and doesn't seem too inclined to bring it back.  Obviously, there are scales at home, but there is something about sticking to the same scale that I prefer.  I knew that I wasn't doing that well on my goal of losing weight (a lot of stress snacking lately...) but I was probably 10 pounds heavier than I thought, which was already 20 pounds higher than my interim goal.  And I might even have picked up another 5 (my life has been incredibly stressful lately).  

I know what worked for me in the past (when I hit rock bottom or near rock bottom and actually had to sew a few work shirts so my stomach bulge wouldn't force open the buttons -- fortunately I am nowhere near that nadir at the moment).  But it wasn't fun - skipping breakfast and having a restricted lunch.  I was hungry all the time,  And clearly it wasn't maintainable, though I suppose who knows what would have happened without COVID.  That really did change everything.

Roughly two months ago I had an unbelievable encounter on my block.  I was heading out somewhere and this guy came by and started talking to a friend of his, saying something about what a go getter he was.  And then as I walked past, he said under his breath but loud enough for me to hear him "But not you, you're just an asshole.  And you're fat and ugly too."  I didn't think there would be any point in trying to start a fight, since that seemed to be what he was spoiling for.  I don't think I've interacted with him before, though it is very possible he reads my "resting bitch face" as contempt.  Or he knows I work for the government.  Or he is one of the thousands of Torontonians driven insane by jealousy over anyone who got on the property ladder.  While my feelings were certainly bruised, I've put him in the unpleasant lunatic to avoid category.  But he's not wrong that I should lose weight.

I can't even imagine the shape I would be in if I didn't bike to work almost every day.  And I have been a regular gym goer for a while, inching back up to three times a week, but while going to the gym is important, weight loss isn't the main reason for going.  Unfortunately, my swimming has been cut back considerably.  The pool hours were revised to something that just didn't work for me, and now the pool is closed for repairs the entire month of August.*  I may try to go to the Regent Park pool from time to time on the weekends.  Anyway, it is clear that to lose weight, I have to really focus on improving my eating habits -- and to find a maintainable regime.

So for the moment I am trying to eat half as much cereal as I usually did in the morning.  My snacks during the day are almost entirely fruit.  I am generally only having a yogurt parfait for lunch, and for the time being I am skipping the spring roll I sometimes used to supplement the parfait.  The real problem is snacking at home after dinner (and late at night!) but for the time being I have stopped buying chips and crackers.  I will try to chew more gum and see about sticking with unbuttered popcorn if I must snack.  If this starts showing results, and my stomach can get shrink down a bit, which it actually does, then maybe I'll cut back even more on breakfast.  The flip side is I am going to be grumpy.  There simply is no way (for me) to lose weight and not feel hungry.  I may report back in a couple of weeks if I am back on the right track.

I've been fighting off the temptation to buy crackers, chips and ice cream at the store, but it would really help if I start seeing some results before my resolve weakens...

* This would actually be a good time to get that tattoo I've been considering, as I can't swim for 2 or 3 weeks after I get it.  But I am still waiting for that letter from IRCC.  I would feel awfully foolish to get the tattoo before everything was official just in case my citizenship falls through!

Theatre almost back to normal

I would say theatre in Toronto is pretty close to its pre-pandemic levels, though a few companies folded (East Side Players) and a few have gone pretty dormant (Nightwood, Shakespeare Bash'd).  Tarragon was one of the slower to return to live performance but it looks like the next season will be back to normal.  Canadian Stage is only doing one (rather than two) Shakespeare play in High Park (As You Like It), which I'll probably skip.  Fringe was definitely a bit scaled back (and they did a terrible job of notifying people about the Audience Pick shows on Sunday), but it's definitely moving in the right direction.  Summerworks is definitely moving hard into non-traditional programming, and I am not too interested in where they are going, but I might see a show or two perhaps.  That's pretty much the same story with Theatre Centre, where I really struggle to find anything that appeals to me.  But on the whole, I've managed to see a lot of good to great theatre, and I'm glad it's back.

One thing that has been a bit harder to find is random Shakespeare comedies and tragedies.  Often smaller companies throw these things up in the summer as there are no rights to worry about, and it's almost guaranteed to find an audience.  I was really hoping to take my son to Macbeth or Romeo & Juliet, but no dice this summer.  I see that a small company is staging The Merchant of Venice at Red Sandcastle.  I don't like this play much at all and haven't decided whether I will go in the end. Interestingly, it turns out that Bard on the Beach (in Vancouver) is being ultra conservative this summer.  For all of June and July, they were only programming Midsummer's Night's Dream and then in August, they added Romeo and Juliet in repertory.  That's a bit too conservative for me.

Then I took a look to see what is going on up in Ottawa, where my son is heading shortly.  I have to say the scene is pretty dire.  GCTC is the main professional theatre, and it only puts on plays by Canadians.  On top of that, it is dedicated to showcasing non-traditional artists, which can go too far to the point it is pretty alienating to mainstream audiences, which is certainly where I find myself.  I was not at all surprised to see they are featuring Cliff Cardinal's radical rethinking of As You Like It.  Well, surprise it isn't any hot take of As You Like It but rather a 90 minute discussion about land acknowledgements.  For some perverse reason Mirvish is also putting this on but has at least been slightly more honest with its audience, but I think they are going to get a ton of complaints and will decide this was a bad idea.  (On a side note, Sky Gilbert is doing a pretty radical revision of Titus Andronicus, stripping it down to one hour, but this actually sounds pretty interesting.)  I'd say the only company that really catches my eye is Ottawa Little Theatre, and I'd probably see this new Norm Foster comedy if I happened to be in town, but I certainly wouldn't go up to Ottawa just to check it out...

So all in all, it's definitely better to be in Toronto than Vancouver or Ottawa if one is looking for theatre.  That said, I don't even want to see what is going on in New York or especially Chicago, as I don't want to bring myself down.

Toronto Photos (1980s)

I think I came through Toronto once in the 1980s on a family trip and then a second time when the train still ran from Detroit to Toronto (or rather a somewhat indirect route that crossed at Port Huron with a one hour layover for customs and changing the crew at the border!).  I doubt very much that I have any photos from those trips, but I suppose some might exist somewhere.  I have a few more, but still not a lot from my year here in 1993-94, as digital cameras were only slowly coming to market and I didn't have a camera on my phone for years to come.

But Avard Woolaver was here and was taking lots of photos.  Most were black and white, but he has enough colour photos to make up an entire book. 

I'm always a sucker for photos of the Sam the Record Man store, which I visited frequently when I was going to school here, and then on a trip in the early 2000s before it closed.  (I probably swung into the World's Biggest Bookstore on that trip as well.)

Anyway, this post over on Blogto got me thinking about Toronto's recent past.  I thought I had recognized some of the photographs, and indeed, I saw an exhibit of photographs by the same photographer at Ryerson in 2018.  At the time I thought I would order some of his digital albums of 1980s-era Toronto, even though I would be even more likely to order if he mostly shot photos of mid-1990s Toronto, which I have the keenest nostalgia for...

While it wouldn't have been possible, as I didn't have the right paperwork at the time, it does feel like a missed opportunity to not have stayed and bought up some property, as this was probably the very last time that houses were truly affordable in the city.  But it was not to be.  Sigh.

A Tale of Two Weekends

Technically, it was just one weekend, of course, but it seemed like two entirely different ones.  Friday through Saturday I was quite busy, then I did very little today, basically not leaving the house at all.

I mentioned in my last post that I was worried about it raining on our outdoor theatre (Driftwood's Bard on the Bus Tour), but in fact the weather was clear if a little hot and overly bright until 8:30 or so.  What Driftwood has done is fuse Henry IV, Part One and Part Two and Henry V into a single play.  I was looking over my notes, and it looks like I saw a condensed Henry IV previously, though I think they did Henry V as a separate stand-alone show.  (Of course I may be wrong.)  I thought Driftwood's version worked well but only captured the highlights of Henry IV.  Essentially all the battle scenes as well as Falstaff putting together his ragtag mercenaries was cut.  And there was a not very impressive wrestling match between Hal and Hotspur instead of a true sword fight.  The main focus was the Hal-Falstaff and the Hal-Henry IV dynamics, and pretty much everything else was lost from those two plays.  But of course that is generally what people remember from these plays.  I did hear someone grumbling at intermission that it was too confusing because so much had been cut, and that one probably shouldn't do the history plays as summer theatre.  Another person mentioned that he found Falstaff appalling (certainly a bit of a minority position!), but that he would be absent from Henry V.  Henry V had a couple of battle scenes and then Henry's courting of Catherine squeezed into about 45 minutes so was more broadly representative of that play.  However, they decided to bring Falstaff back as a ghost toward the end to speak his cynical lines "What is honour?" which are actually from Henry IV, Part One (incidentally a couple of scenes before the Hal-Hotspur showdown!).  It worked for me overall, but that guy must have been peeved.  I thought the actor playing Henry IV and the inn-keeper looked familiar, and it turns out I've seen him in previous Driftwood productions but also in most of the VideoCab plays.  Small world!  There is just another month to see the show in various locations, including a return to Toronto's Christie Pits park in mid August (calendar here).

Saturday I was able to get up fairly early and get to the gym.  Then at noon, I dropped off my LP player at Ring Audio, which is all the way down Carlaw.  (I'm a little sad that they are going on vacation, and I probably won't have it back until September, but it will be good to get it fixed up.)  I also had a small bag of clothes to donate at Value Village on Queen.  Then I did groceries on the way home.  While it was quite hot, I ended up biking to 401 Richmond to see the gallery shows again.  I'm certainly tempted by a few of the pieces in the Unframed show at Yumart, but I think I'll refrain from buying another piece of art this summer.  This is the piece I liked the best.

Alice Burton, Memories of Edo II, 2022

After that I stopped in at work, then caught the train up and back to Robarts (as it is on summer hours and was closing at 5).  Then I had another hour to kill before a concert at Walter Hall at UT.  (Things would have been considerably easier if Robarts was open later on the weekend.)  I enjoyed the concert, particularly the Shostakovich Piano Quintet.*  I biked home and decided that Sunday I could take it a bit easier after getting so much done on Sat.

Indeed, I mostly read and took care of computer things today.  I finished Pym's Some Tame Gazelle and read most of Paul Auster's Man in the Dark.  I somehow stumbled across Joy Williams's Breaking and Entering (which I would eventually have gotten to because of its Vintage Contemporaries connection, but it might have been a long time indeed).  It turns out that she is a master of the short story form, so I added her to this list.  Apparently, her take on humanity has been getting more and more jaded, and her last two novels really focus on environmental collapse as discussed a bit here and here.  I think I'll definitely need to get around to these more recent novels, but maybe in a year or two.  In the meantime, I think I'll tackle Breaking and Entering as a bit of a stepping stone from Pym to the much, much darker Death on the Installment Plan.

It's evening, and it's raining harder again.  I hope that this time it actually brings the heat and humidity down, and it really has been pretty unbearable these past three or four days.

* I thought that just maybe the pianist had some star potential.  It turns out Stephanie Tang, who looks like she is about 15 but must be older than that, has a Master's in Performance and she lives most of the year in London and has indeed won a number of prizes already.  I'm not quite sure how she got involved with this festival, but I think it must speak to the fact that Jonathan Crow (and of course Tafelmusik) has really put Toronto on the classical music map.

Irregular Weather

It's been an interesting summer so far.  In general it's been very dry and lately quite hot, though not reaching the extremes seen in the UK and elsewhere in Western Europe.  Now it was supposed to be a wet summer, and I suppose that may still happen, though in general they forecast a lot of rain for the week and then it only rains one or two days.

That said, I wasn't expecting any rain on the 11th, which was the Sarah McLachlan concert over at Budweiser Stage.  I actually biked over and noticed a few clouds but didn't pay it too much mind.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that they upgraded me to a seat that was right in the middle of the venue, though it still wasn't covered seating...

Sarah launched into her set with "Building a Mystery" and followed this with "In Your Shoes," which are two of her stronger songs (at least for me).  The full setlist is here.  At that point it started sprinkling.  While I wasn't thrilled about it, I thought I could stick it out.  But the rain kept up, getting heavier, and suddenly there was a bit of thunder and lightning; everyone in the uncovered seating moved en masse to the covered area.  People were reasonably chill, and the ushers did their best and actually managed to find seating for almost everybody under the covered area (by the time she finished Adia).  Though I was no longer at centre stage I certainly wasn't complaining, as this was a pretty significant upgrade.  Part of me is a little sad that she didn't sell out the whole venue, even though that would have sucked for me and the rest of the attendees left out in the rain.  (And I certainly can't expect this for the other concerts I am going to out there.)  On the other hand, it was a Monday evening concert, and I don't think there was much promotion at all, so it was basically only die-hard fans that turned up.  It was a great concert, and I imagine clips will start turning up on Youtube, though I haven't searched any of them up.

That Wednesday, we were going to have an office outing over to the Toronto Islands, but the forecast was for storms pretty much all afternoon.  In the end, it was overcast, but I don't think it rained that Wednesday, or if it did it was much later in the day.  That said, the weather wasn't great, and we postponed the outing to the following Wednesday.  As the time drew nearer, the forecast was for a reasonably clear day but then a storm starting around 6 or 7, so we decided to risk it but to leave just a bit early (the 4:15 ferry back).

It was quite the fun trip.  We went over to Ward's Island rather than the somewhat more popular/crowded Centre Island, which is where I went on previous trips.  We spread out a few blankets and chilled out for a few hours.  At some point a few of us went over to the beach, though I didn't get my feet wet.

The interesting thing is that the threatened rain didn't come at all, or at least not that I recall.  To be honest, the forecasts have been a real crap shoot for a while now.  The forecasts called for rain on Thursday and Friday, which bummed me out as I was supposed to be going to Barenaked Ladies on Thursday and then to outdoor theatre on Friday.

There is a quirky reason that I wasn't so disappointed in leaving a bit early, which is that I managed to get home by 6 pm.  There was a Zoom event that I had planned to try to listen to on the way home on my phone, but for some reason it simply wouldn't connect (and kept trying to set up a new Zoom event!), but I was able to connect from my laptop once I was home.  This event was a celebration of Gary Snyder's Collected Poems being published by the Library of America.  Gary Snyder actually came on at the very end, which was cool.  The event should be archived here.  I have ordered the book and should be able to pick it up in another two weeks.

In the end, it didn't rain at all Thurs., and it doesn't look like it will rain tonight, and it may not actually rain until Sunday (so I'll have to water the garden yet again!).  I kind of wish it had rained on Thursday after all, but that is only because the concert was postponed.  Someone in the band came down with COVID!  And they have rescheduled to August 30th, and I'll just have to hope that it doesn't rain on that date (or on any of the other outdoor concerts still on my calendar).

At any rate, I'll be heading over to the Shakespeare in the park soon and hope that the weather stays clear.  I'm looking forward to it, especially as it has been so long since we've been able to hold these events, so it is worth taking advantage of them before there are any more shut downs (as unlikely as the current government is to go in that direction unless their hand is truly forced).  While I don't think there were any site-specific pieces in this year's Fringe, I had a good time at the shows I did attend, which I'll write up a bit later.  I haven't entirely decided, but I'll probably go see Dusk Dances at Withrow Park in early August, and there are a few other shows with outdoor components, such as this Caribbean circus at the Bentway and then Outside the March's joint venture with Factory Theatre, which should be a blast.  

My Own Private Mandela Effect

It doesn't look like I have blogged about this previously, but I might have written it down in my journal.  At any rate, I have strong memories of being in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and seeing a banner or a sign for "Guston in New York," which I assumed would have pulled from local museums and private collections, much like the Beckmann in New York exhibit (which I wanted to get to but couldn't quite justify).  But I looked in all the chief locations for small special exhibits (the front room of the modern art collection where they had a Joseph Cornell/Juan Gris exhibit) and the space carved out for the Robert Lehman Collection and just didn't see it.  Thinking back on it, they have started using rooms on the first floor on the way to the African/Pacific Islander art, and that might have been where it was.  What is incredible to me is that, no matter how tired I was, I didn't just stop and ask someone, given that I like Guston's early and late work quite a bit.  Ever since, it's one of those things I (mentally) kick myself about.  

So when I realized there was this big Guston exhibit that had become somewhat notorious because it was postponed for several years (due to the "challenging" Klan paintings and not because of COVID), I decided I needed to go to make up for my previous lapse.  Guston Now is coming to the National Gallery in DC in 2023 before heading over to the Tate Modern in late 2023, but it was going to be in Boston until Sept. 2022.  I decided that there was no point in dallying.  Between COVID roaring back or even more cowardice on the part of the art world, there is no question it might be cancelled again if someone Tweeted something mean about Guston loving the Klan.  (Incidentally, not waiting to see a recent Romare Bearden exhibit in Atlanta served me well, right before COVID hit!  I still haven't blogged about that trip but I will try to later this summer.)  I like Boston reasonably well, and it is easy to get there on Porter, so I booked a quick trip out to Boston, almost entirely to see this exhibit, though the fact the MFA also had a solid J.M.W. Turner exhibit at the same time helped settle the decision.

TRIGGER Warning -- I'm sure it's already too late, but be warned that this post will display, below the fold as it were, paintings containing ironic or rather sardonic mages of the Klu Klux Klan.

Philip Guston, Gladiators, 1940

Philip Guston, City, 1969

Philip Guston,The Studio, 1969 

Philip Guston, Flatlands, 1970

Philip Guston, Cellar, 1970

Philip Guston, Rug, 1976

After seeing the exhibit in Boston, I decided I should risk opening up the scars and see just what exactly I missed out on at the Met.  But I couldn't find anything on their website that referred to "Guston in New York," and in fact the only Guston exhibit from the past 20 years was a full-blown Guston retrospective that ran from Oct 2003-Jan 2004.  It's a challenge to reconstruct whether I was actually visiting New York over those dates.  I was still in Chicago, connected to Parsons Brinckerhoff, but a bit in the dog house (certainly by 2004) and they weren't flying me to New York nearly as often as before.  That said, it's possible I was there.  What is not plausible, however, is that I would have skipped a major Guston retrospective.  There were 75 or so paintings in the show, and I think it could only have been shown in the major exhibition area on the second floor, and I literally never missed a major exhibit if I was in town.  So this leaves a few unlikely scenarios -- one, that I saw a banner that hadn't been taken down or was up prematurely or two, that they did have a smaller exhibition at some other time that simply isn't on their website.

For the time being, I will assume it is the first option and that I have been misremembering missing out on the Guston retrospective (that I was likely not even in town for...).  I spent a bit of time comparing the retrospective catalog to the paintings in the Guston Now exhibit.  There was quite a bit of overlap, particularly in the early figurative work and then the later Klan paintings.  The Met retrospective did have a slightly larger number of abstract paintings and a few more non-Klan late paintings of legs, though I have seen a few in other museums.  One of the few pieces that I had wished I had seen was this one (from a private collection).

Philip Guston, Sleeping, 1977

That said, I do prefer Couple in Bed, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, which was in the previous retrospective, and is one of the very first images you see when you enter the Guston Now exhibit.  I'm not 100% sure I did see this in Chicago, though probably I did at some point.  

Philip Guston, Couple in Bed, 1977

I'm having quite a senior moment and can't remember for sure if I saw Green Sea either on some trip to the Art Institute (and can't turn up any photographic proof), though I think it is fairly likely, as it was probably on view for some time after the Modern Wing opened, given that Green Sea features in one of their publications listing master works from the collection.  I actually just emailed them to try to nail down the dates it was on view, and I'll keep searching through my vacation photos.  Frankly, it's a shame it wasn't loaned to the Guston Now exhibit, given that it is just gathering dust in storage somewhere...

Philip Guston, Green Sea, 1976

On the whole I would say that Guston Now was a reasonable substitute for whatever exhibit I missed in New York all those years ago, and I can probably lay my feelings of missing out to rest.  I do wish, however, that when I visited the Walker in Minneapolis Bombay was on view!  Given that the Walker never has much of their collection on view, preferring to focus on contemporary artists, it might be a very long time before this rotates on view again...

Philip Guston, Bombay, 1976

One final image that deftly combines Klan imagery and Guston sleeping is simply titled In Bed.  It is held at the Centre Pompidou.

Philip Guston, In Bed, 1971

I'm pretty sure I would have remembered this on my visit to Paris, and it doesn't seem to be on view at the moment (and I don't think it will join the Guston Now exhibit on it's London leg, though I might be wrong).  It seems relatively unlikely I will ever see this in person, though never say never, I suppose.

 

Boston jaunt overview

Aside from a couple of scares related to misplacing my passport and PR card, the trip to Boston went very well.  I was fortunate to be taking Porter and flying out of Island Airport.  Indeed, unless I can't help it at all, I am only going to fly Porter for the next 18 months, since Pearson and Air Canada more generally have proven to be completely incompetent with breakdowns at every level.  There was a very short line-up to check in and show my passport, but the security line was quite short, and even coming back it was only about 15-20 minutes to get through security.  Oddly enough no one looked at my ArriveCan app, though they did on the way back from Washington DC.

Anyway, we landed in Boston just after 1.  I figured out how to catch the Silver Line (actually a busway) and took it to the ICA, which was free for me due to reciprocal privileges.  I thought the exhibit on figurative painting was the main reason to visit.

Doron Langberg, Bather, 2021

Celeste Rapone, Soft Core, 2021

I wandered around the Seaport a bit but couldn't find anything I wanted to eat.  Somewhere between there and the Financial District, I ran across a Panera and grabbed lunch.  I finally figured out how to catch the Green Line and headed over to the Museum of Fine Arts.  I think I arrived just slightly after 4.  I had timed tickets to the Turner exhibit at 5:30, but I was able to check out other parts of the museum in the meantime, and I started with the Guston Now exhibit.

I'll write more about the Guston exhibit separately, but my main reaction was that all the fuss and furor was overblown.  Yes, there was an entire room full of Klan-related paintings, but it is incredible that modern sensitivities are so fragile that visitors can't be trusted to put these things into context.  I guess a great big trigger label needs to be pasted across Picasso's Guernica to satisfy people who don't want to be challenged by art.  But what can I say, I am an elitist art snob who happens to think being taken out of one's comfort zone is important at least some of the time...

The exhibit had a few of Guston's earliest works, was relatively light on his abstract period and then turned to the later figurative works, leaning a bit heavily on the Klan imagery and maybe was a little light on the charnel-house aspect of many of his late works.  I particularly liked this painting (held in Amsterdam though I don't recall seeing it on any of my visits there).

Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973

After that, I mostly looked at European art while wandering around and waiting for my turn to enter the Turner exhibit.

Paul Signac, Antibes, The Pink Cloud, 1916

The Turner exhibit was good.  They had managed to get the Burning of Parliament from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and quite a large number of paintings and prints from the Tate Britain.  I probably had seen many of them while in London (and of course Cleveland), but it was still powerful to see them all in one place.

Certainly the most interesting paintings were all nautical ones.  Here are two I liked.

J.M.W. Turner, 'Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!', ca. 1846

J.M.W. Turner, Peace--Burial at Sea, ca. 1842

After the Turner, I went through the American room.  As it happens, I was looking for the Hopper, but I didn't see it at first.  The American rooms were dominated by 18th and 19th Century works with a few early 20th Century paintings (mostly Sargent and Cassatt).

William Merritt Chase, Reflections, ca. 1892

John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra, ca. 1880

I finally asked some volunteers, and they pointed me to the third floor, which I hadn't realized existed.  While it is on the American side, and most of the paintings are by mid-to-late 20th Century Americans, there were some European artists as well, such as Max Beckmann.

Edward Hopper, Drug Store, 1927

Jackson Pollock, Troubled Queen, 1945

Max Beckmann, Double Portrait, 1946

It was a fine set of rooms, but it was a bit surprising how little post-Impressionist art the MFA had in its collection (or at least on view), compared to the Met or the Art Institute.

It was around 7:45 when I finally left the MFA.  It was actually open for a few more hours, but I had seen quite a bit and wanted to grab dinner before checking in at the hotel.  I was a little disappointed at the scarcity of restaurants in that part of Back Bay.  Certainly there would have been more in Chicago.  I saw a big Whole Foods, but I didn't feel like going in there.  I finally found a sushi place, which was pretty good.

At the Oasis Guest House thy had upgraded me, which was nice.  I was pretty tired from all the walking, so I read a bit more of Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread (which I picked up on a trip to Pittsburgh) and crashed.  I thought the free Continental breakfast was pretty good.  

I had a bit over an hour before the Isabel Gardner Museum opened, so I wandered around Back Bay a bit.  There was some delay in getting into the Gardner but I was able to get my free pass after all.  The Gardner is a bit like a mix of the Barnes Collection (if Barnes has stopped with pre-Impressionists like Whistler) and the Cloisters.

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882

Of course, one of the biggest stories about the Gardner is the 1990 theft of several masterpieces. In my mind the Vermeer was the greatest single loss. I do hope it (and the other paintings) will be recovered in my lifetime. I wandered around for close to two hours before I decided I really ought to be getting over to the airport.

I headed back for the T and eventually made my way back onto the Silver Line. I think I managed to get to the airport by 1. I was hoping to go standby on an earlier flight (than 3:55), but I forgot that Porter only has a handful of flights, and in fact the check-in desk was closed until 1:50! I wasn't thrilled about this, as I was going to have to eat lunch at the airport. I think this happened to me in Pittsburgh as well. It's one of the downsides of flying Porter.

While there wasn't any food outside the security check-in, it was possible to go over to Terminal C and they had a Dunkin Donuts, so I had a quick lunch there before heading back to Terminal E and checking in for my flight. It was pretty uneventful waiting for my flight, but I will say that that part of Logan Airport had plenty of seats, which was a nice change. My flight was on time and it was a smooth ride back (and I even had an empty seat next to me on the flight itself!).  As I mentioned, even dealing with security was no problem, though the shuttle bus to Union did get snarled in Jays traffic.

On the whole, a good, if somewhat exhausting, trip.

Passport Follies

As has been widely reported, it is extremely difficult to get passports renewed these days, particularly in Montreal and Toronto.  Now most of the issue is people trying to get them for the first time or those needing to go in person.  On-line renewals aren't too bad in general.   Nonetheless, it is a huge mess and contributes to the impression that the government simply can't run anything these days, especially since most government employees are now back in the office or should be.  No question there is an enormous backlog in the Immigration office, not helped by the influx of desperate Ukrainians trying to immigrate to Canada.  Even for minor services, the wait times are well over a year, and many people's plans are being endangered by this inability to just process visas in a timely fashion.

I'm not in any particular difficulties over the delay in processing my citizenship application, but it is frustrating how long it is taking.  I went back to the website, and as far as I can tell, I am through all the steps  and just need them to invite me to a citizenship ceremony.  Of course, that it what I thought before.  I'll then find out if there are additional steps to get the passport, or if that is included.  By this time, I'll probably have to do something to update my son's status as he turned 18 while we were all waiting...  One thing that I will need to decide relatively soon is whether I will wait 6 months or a year or if I will immediately renounce my US citizenship.  I had planned on staying dual longer (despite the continued drawback of filing taxes in two countries), but the onslaught of horrible case law coming from the Supreme Court, the insane interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (which in itself is an abomination!) and the complete structural imbalance/unfairness of the federal system makes me feel it is time to cut my losses.  The US cannot be fixed, and I have absolutely no interest in paying even a tiny tithe to prop it up.  The U.S. has also burned a lot of bridges by essentially shutting down all consular services, so it is literally impossible to get an appointment to renew my daughter's passport (and I'm not allowed to renew it by mail).  There's a very good chance she will have her Canadian passport in hand before we can even get in to see someone about renewing her US passport.  

Anyway, on a different note, I certainly haven't been travelling much, but I did go to DC in May.  I decided to make a super short trip to Boston, primarily to see the Guston Now exhibit at the MFA.  Then two days before my upcoming trip, I was scrambling to find my passport.  I tore up my bedroom twice and started in on the living room.  Then I remembered that my passport had curled in the extreme heat/humidity of DC, and I put it under something to flatten it a bit.  After some retracing of steps (from two months back!) I found it wedged under some books in my bookcase.  Truly a terrible place for it, and I won't do that again!  While I am loathe to do it, I may start using one of those under-shirt passport pouches because my typical move is to put my passport in my front pocket but 1) it gets sweaty and 2) it interferes with my wallet.  I actually pulled everything out of my pockets to pay for lunch (in Boston) and then left the passport on the counter!  Not my best day.  Now I was keeping the PR card in a different pocket but that was where I would keep the phone (when sitting down).  Just as I was getting settled on the plane for home, I needed to check something on my phone and apparently just pulling it out of my pocket caused the PR card to disappear.  I was having a panic attack and was going to tell the cabin crew I needed to go back into the terminal to look for it when another passenger pointed it out under the seat.  So that was equally terrible, and I clearly need a better system!  Though I don't recall having nearly so much trouble on any previous trip.  Maybe it is all just subliminal, me telling myself to hurry up and get a Canadian passport tout de suite.  Of course, all I can say is it's out of my hands.