…the only bright spot in my otherwise miserable, sniffly, snotty, sore-throaty, shivery day.

A trichinosis larva and a botfly maggot walk into a bar. The botfly maggot turns to the trichinosis larva and says “hey buddy, I heard you like pork.”

The trichonosis larva looks the the botfly maggot right in the spiracles and says “indeed, I encyst upon it.”

(Shamelessly stolen from bash.org)

I guess you can tell from the recent dearth of posts that I’ve started back to school again.  It always takes me a few weeks to settle in to a new schedule and figure out how to breathe again - I spend the first few weeks alternately being lazy and panicking at how fast time is slipping away from me.  I’m well into it now, though, and feeling a bit more steady.

Speaking of Steady, thanks to a friend who is apparently The Hold Steady’s biggest fan (…groupie…stalker, perhaps?) I got my hands on a ticket to go see them at Lee’s Palace last night.  The show was marvellous.  Craig Finn is an energetic, quirky frontman - he never stops grinning and he seems to be having a personal conversation with every member of the audience.  Of course I’m deaf now, but I had a great night and met a new Scrabble opponent, so the sacrifice was worth it.  Oh yeah, and some chick beside me spent about twenty minutes trying to shove her way through to the front of the stage by leaning on me with her boobs and jumping up and down.

Bus stations are impossibly depressing.

I grew up riding the old Voyageur buses between Kingston, where my mom lived, and Toronto , where my dad’s family was, so heading down to the bus depot this morning to catch a bus to my mom’s new (well, new in the sense that they didn’t live here when I was a kid) house in Bracebridge (home of Santa’s Village!) felt like old times.

They cleaned up the bus station in downtown TO, but it’s still pretty dingy.

Beautiful downtown Gravenhurst, as seen from the window of the Ontario Northland bus:

This nice old lady was picking her nose the whole way:

More later; have to go celebrate mom’s 60th!