In fact, it's no wonder my legs are sore

I don't feel like I accomplished much today, I walked to the old comic book store instead of driving or even running, so the whole trip lasted over two hours.

The first half of the trip was almost entirely consumed with thoughts of a silly comic strip idea- but I was too tired to doodle it out when I got back, so maybe I can do that tomorrow or friday. I'll almost certainly post the drawings here (facebook too, but it's hard to get excited about that) and they should get a chuckle. I basically wrote 5 strips in my head, and I'll draw them out in order of descending goodness - best to worst.

To avoid the sun I picked up my 8 year old tilly hat, thus feeling like a cowboy for the whole trip. My mind kept going back and forth between thoughts of "this looks silly" and "this looks awesome" like I was a live example of those miniwheats commercials.

The one with the adult that appreciates the healthy wheat side before turning into the kid who likes the sugared side. Yes, I spelled out the commercial for you, I'm not happy about it.

But yes, don't think a cowboy setting is what I was thinking of for that comic strip I just mentioned- because then you'd ruin part of the surprise..

I was going to say it wasn't yesterday, but it was... I was heading over to my friends place for that Ninja Turtles screening and so had 4 hours of time to just do whatever.

I exchanged nods and smiles with many people (though I gave more than I recieved) and spent some time in a No Frills just mentally tasting everything in the store before settling on a bag of trail mix (nuts and dried fruits, that kind of thing). As ever, the salt and vinegar chips were a serious temptation, and I bought a bag of porkrinds because they get referenced in the Turtles movie and I wanted to be cute.
I succeeded in being cute, but as expected the pork rinds were pretty grossesque. They tasted like rice cakes, but the kinds with that hint of flavour to them. And this flavour was a negative.

Anyways I just spent my time walking north along gladstone, munching on trailmix (I was determined to eat the whole bag so I wouldn't have to hold on to it any longer than needed). I saw a crazy front lawn with an assortment of plastic critters and had the impulse to just stand there, pretending to feed them, pretending like I didn't realize they were fake, until the owners came back. I didn't do that though.

I passed by the Cadbury factory and now I want to take a tour of the place.

I passed by this cool tucked away "Vintage Clothes" place, and I wanted to go in and ask the owner what vintage meant to them. Like, personally.

When I reached Dufferin Grove Park I was blown away by it- I've run past this park dozens of times on my way to work, and it always looked like just a bit of grass, and bit of trees, a bit of hills- but from where I was now they had an earthen kitchenette like something out of a Zorro picture, right next to a wading pool-to-be (in the summer) and a weird shack that had the history of the park right on it (did you know the Dufferin Mall was built on an old horse race track? well I didn't) AND working water fountains.

It was all pretty amazing to me, this is what I think of when I think "park" or "playground" and I didn't think Toronto could deliver like this.

Then I checked out the Bloor/Gladstone library, and it was really cool too- I read "The End League" which was a mostly lame Dark Horse comic book, and a "Goon" collection (also Dark Horse produced, by the acclaimed Eric Powell) but came pretty close to falling asleep.

I would have tried to rest a bit, but it was finally 6:30, and I was supposed to be at my friends at 7!

So, in retrospect, it's no wonder today feels a little less substantial.

I did finish "Scoop" today though, it was a great read, but I would've ended it differently. Or rather I would have ended it earlier, there were a couple great moments that would have been an hilarious punchline to go out on, but instead the final paragraph was more wistful (to my mind anyways) and didn't fit the rest of the book in that sense.

Ah, I was supposed to be working on comic reviews, but instead came here. Gotta be careful, that's the kind of slipshod attitude that results in poor quality articles that justifiably don't see print. Not that that happened to me recently. Of course!