I know it's been a long time since I've posted but  we've been on the move for the last few months and will be till the end of August. Ken and I went to Winnapeg, NYC, Halifax, PEI since the last time I blogged - my head is spinning!!! We're back in Toronto now but later today we're off to Prince Edward County then to Ottawa then back to Toronto till the end of the summer. So, I won' t be posting much till September when we return to Victoria... Back to normal!!!
Have a great summer!
:^)

Hello!

 Ken and I are now in Toronto till the end of the month. We've  rented a  small place, and it's kind of  like being students again, going to the laundromat, having to wash dishes - no dishwasher!! It's not so bad, I'm kinda liking the novelty - for now!  It's good to not take what we have back home for granted - we don't have a car here so I do a lot of walking and ride buses, streetcars and the subway, so it's always interesting to people-watch.

The neighborhood we're in has a Portuguese bakery that we frequent, Ken especially likes to go and mingle with the locals but I think the woman that works there thought he was a bit strange when he asked if they make sandwiches... she said "of course we make sandwiches, you just have to ask!" after all, the buns, cold cuts and cheeses were all in plane view...duh? When Ken told me this, I had to laugh! I know he was just trying to make conversation - awkward... but he's so sweet.

Anyway, I'm trying to finish off my book while I'm here but it's going slowly, lots to distract me! We also rented a short term studio space because only one us can work at the apartment at a time. The space is called RAID and there are about ten full time comic artists and graphic novelists, as well as a few that drop in like us, when in town. Ken likes the area because it's close to little Italy - a foodie paradise!

Hi all!

 I'm in Cambridge Ontario now, staying with my friend Cathy who I've know since grade one!!! If you go back to my archives in Jan. you'll see a class photo I posted, with her and me in the back row next to the teacher. I lost touch with Cathy for many years, then reconnected the year before we moved to Victoria in 1987, we've remained friends ever since.
 She introduced me to live theatre and when ever I came back to Ontario to visit, she would take me to Stratford or The Shaw Festival to see a play. The first one we saw was The Inspector Calls by J B Priestly - I was riveted!  After that I got  into reading plays,  I devoured work  by Hedrick Ibsen. The Enemy Of The People was one of my favorite plays and when I found out the Movie Jaws was based on that play, I was facinated. Ibsen  told stories of ordinary people, were as Shakespeare focused on Kings and Queens and their ordinary human traits that determine  fate.
Every year when I visited Cathy we would see more plays and of course I couldn't wait to see King Lear at Stratford . One year we took Alex and Ray to see Macbeth, I figured it would capture there interest because it had the highest body count!!!

Any way, at that time, plays seemed to me to be  the best way to tell a story, so I attempted to write a play way back in the 90s. I wasn't sure how to go about it but I had some good influences to help me with the process, I kept reading more plays and going to see more live theatre.   I felt comfortable with writing dialog, it was good practice to get me writing.  One day I may dust off the play I wrote called "Don't Let Go Of The Rope", I filed away in my closet. Who knows, it may appear in my third book.

I have no idea how to post photos from my ipad to this blogspot. I'm so frustrated with this I want to screem!!! I admitt I am a ludite but I do try hard to figure things out, my computer is in Victoria and I won't see it again till late August so I better figure this out soon. At least I have wifi here at my sisters place till Mon, then I'm off to see my brother for a few days - no internet there, maybe that's not such a bad thing! Anyway enough of my rant. I would love to show pictures of my ventures but if I can't do that, I'll write some words, how boring is that...no pictures! Oops... I know, no more rants!

The pages below below are some of last in my book, where we're getting ready to move to Victoria in 1987. At that time the Punk scene in Toronto was being paved over by the new music of the time , brake dancing was big and so was the boom-boxes that delivered the new sound, Rap was emerging and was the new kid on the block! Alex and Raymond were five and two at this time and we had lost interest in the new music scene and started to sell a lot of our records - portable caset tapes were becoming popular with the young people. We were thirty two and feeling our age, so, what did we do? We moved to Victoria "the newly wed and nearly dead!"

This is the last sequence I'll be posting for a while. I still have about five pages to do before I finnish off my book. I was hoping to get them done before we left for Ontario but that didn't happen :^( so now I'm on the road  till August. TCAF was the first convention we did - it was amazing!!! There were 400 artist there this year . I'll try and post some photos during my trip... if I can only figure out how to on my I pad! 

I'm off to Toronto tomorrow.  TCAF ( Toronto Comic Art Festival) is this weekend!!! 

Here are some pics I took at FanXpo inVancouver - another comic convention, at it's finest!!!