The longest wait of my life is the wait for the keys to our new house from our lawyer. I'm not sure what legal mumbo jumbo is taking so long, but its killing me.

UPDATE: The lawyer phoned as I types the final word in the preceding sentence. We now have a home. W00t.

Edit: The second longest wait of my life is waiting for Krista to get home from work so we can head over to our new house. I swear that she does this on purpose - making me stay in bed until 10:00 AM before I can open up my Christmas morning Star Wars presents.

From Superdickery.com, a compilation of unfortunate comic panels and covers.

Krista is away for the next ten very long days, leaving me to go feral in the vacuum that she has left. From the relatively few times that we've been apart, I've learned one lesson many times over again: I do very poorly without Krista. When we are apart, all of my worst habits rise to the surface - I become irritable, moody, eat poorly, keep poor hours and exhibit poor survival skills.

Case in point: While going for a walk this afternoon to clear my head (unhappy thoughts swirled around it in the brief hour that Krista had been gone), I wander into an unpleasant part of the city. Queen Street East, home to a patchwork of drug addicts and screamin' crazies slipped by me, its mumbling citizens hardly noticed by this Yuppie clad adventurer. When it finally dawned on me that the absence of streetcars had been replaced only by the smell of urine, I wisely decided to head north and then home. Dirty apartment buildings surrounding me, I stopped to read a small placard placed just outside a small pleasant inner-city garden. It read:

"Peace Gardens of Regent Park".

Like Pavel Chekov remembering the name Botany Bay, I told the sleepy Captain Terrell located in my brain that it was time to go. Fast. How I managed to get into the very centre of the neighbourhood without ever noticing is testament to why I should never be left alone. Had Krista been there (well, she certainly wouldn't have been there), I'm certain that she would have shepherd me back west of Church street before I had wandered too far into the unknown. Truthfully, if Regent Park is Toronto's worst neighbourhood, we're doing something right. Crazy-poor they may have been, but no where near the poverty of inner-city USA and not a gang banger in sight (they must have been asleep).

So I've managed to survive Day One without Krista, stab free and only a few dollars lighter for a I'll show her for leaving me alone with the bank account present and a movie ticket for Clerks 2 (the Globe and Mail which can eat my balls - the film was a good return to the original). With nine more days to go I'm not certain that I'll be able to make it without somehow managing to wander into Damascus, wearing only an American flag as a cape and offering hand drawn cartoons of religious prophets to the locals.

Hurry home Krista - please.

"I don't care who wins as long as it's not Italy. I need to sleep." - Overheard at my bank a few weeks ago.

So Italy wins the World Cup after slogging through a long game with France and ending with the worst possible end to a soccer game: penalty kicks. I love soccer, but hate it when I have to endure the final seconds of a match wich basically boils down to luck of the goalies diving in the right direction of the ball.

As a result of the game, the horns have been blaring for hours now and will continue to do so well into the night, fuelled by the alcohol consumed by Toronto's enormous Italian community. Viva Italia indeed.

Oh my. I'm so glad that I didn't come across this during my rave years.

I just woke up from an extended dream about teaching one of my Mother's Scottish Terriers how to stunt drive in San Francisco. There were no ninjas, pirates or Steve McQueens, but it was a crazy-cool dream nonetheless.

I just thought y'all should know.

Abstract cityscape, as seen in the reflection of the Ontario Hydro Building, College and University.

As soon as the warm weather arrives in Toronto following my long winter hibernation, I'm out the door faster than an incontinent dog to the nearest tree. Any excuse to get outside will do: I need to go cycling, I need to run errands, I need to loiter in public spaces "touching" squirrels and frightening children and their over-protective mothers. Summer is my opportunity to breathe diesel "fresh" air, stretch my legs and darken my skin that has been made translucent by working the previous eight months in a fluorescent lit concrete box.

Pride Week (this week), for me, is the pinnacle of the summer celebration, where the rest of the city apparently joins me in celebratng the diversity and warmth of the city. Today, about one million of my drunken friends crush onto Yonge street to strip down, expose far too much of their flesh and dance to booming House music spun by tight-panted male sailors on slowly moving rainbow coloured floats. If alcohol, music and naked Circuit Boys aren't the height of urban summer celebration, then I certainly don't know what else is.

The weekend is already successful: Friday night I spun a lengthy Peak Hour House set at mizalaina and sesby's house (along side the City's newest Funky House DJ krustukles) and spent Saturday taking far too many photographs of friends and floats at the Dyke March. Today is the main event however and I'm expecting to be declared an inebriated public nuisance before the Parade is over - I do have a Pride Parade reputation to maintain with the EMS.

Shift workers don't get a lot of sympathy from the rest of the world when they whine, I have to work five days in a row! Regardless, I feel absolutely exhausted and am not looking forward to the next thirty-six hours of night shift. I can only hope that the twelve hours of sleep last night and the hopeful three this afternoon will be enough to carry me through until Monday morning, where in a state of total delirium I'll start conversing with the skeletal corpse of the raccoon beneath my deck steps in my back yard.

Not everything is bad right now thankfully: yesterday in a zombie-like trance I started to poke around my Bank's mortgage website and found that I can afford a house - even an obscenely expensive house - which should just be enough to buy a hovel in the downtown core. I have the funds now and I can afford the monthly payments; all that remains is the inevitable anger and annoyance at Real Estate Agents, Bankers and Lawyers. What stands in my way now is my own lethargy, which is quickly becoming usurped by the lack of hot water in the morning, the neighbours slamming doors at all hours of the day, no one ever taking out the garbage, me being the only one that shovels the fucking driveway of snow ...

So in short - it's time. Time that I eeked my tortoise head out from its shell and into the world of real estate. May the non-existent manufactured deity have mercy on my bank account.

Aside: Any thoughts or recommendations on mortgages and/or housing is greatly appreciated - traps, good-to-knows, for-the-love-of-jebus-don't-go-theres. Thanks.

It's hard not to feel insignificant while walking the cavernous streets of Midtown Manhattan and there's little doubt why so many horrible romantic comedies have been written about New Yorker relationship isolation. Apartment blocks, with dozens of rooms stacked thirty or more stories high, must have been intimidating for the single crowd before the days of Speed Dating and Lavalife. As a married tourist however, the omnipresent towers only provide endless opportunities for amazing restaurants and high priced cocktails.

The place to be in New York is definitely Soho and the West Village (formerly Greenwich Village). Teeming with street life and small inner-city parks, a day could be spent watching Yuppies walk their foo-foo dogs, chess playing grifters schooling tough talking Hip-hoppers and J-Crew sporting gay hipsters rushing off to a mid morning brunch. Soho is a place where the best clothes and culture are purchased not from the multitude of high end chain stores, but from the racks of street vendors and sidewalk artists who are selling fashions that won't be popularized for another five years.

krustukles and I have been amused by the second language that most New Yorkers are apparently fluent in: honking one's car horn. While in Toronto, a honking of a vehicle horn is done as a last resort by a panicked or frustrated driver, in NYC honking is done as a complex communication. Honks are both short and long, sometimes to display one's displeasure, sometimes to attempt to speed traffic along and sometimes ... well sometimes for no apparent reason at all. As a result, the streets of Manhattan are a constant cacophony of horns and shouts of, "Move! You fucking fuck!" at all hours of the day.

The long transit to beautiful Newark, NJ and the short flight to Toronto awaits. Photos of our New York weekend getaway can be found here.