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I have a lot to report today! Because of course I do: it's Monday and I didn't write any blog posts over the weekend.

Before I get to the social stuff—all revolving around movies, of course—I have to share the biggest news: we finally booked our flights for Toronto in June for our anniversary, when we will be celebrating 20 years together! I am more excited about this than anything else happening this year, and I now have a lot of exciting stuff planned.

Since I am finally getting what I want with an anniversary trip to Toronto, I am already very much thinking I will lean into a scaled-back event four our anniversary in 2025. It could be something as simple as another overnight weekend in Portland—I will still want to do something, but it doesn't have to be far, we don't have to fly anywhere, and we don't have to stay long. I'm still dying to get back down there to ride the Portland Aerial Tram.

I mean, all that is to say: unless Shohit's stunning, first-time suggestion last week that we finally take a trip to India together next year gets time with our anniversary. That could work. I'd be likely to advocate against that, though. I want our anniversary trip to be specific to us and our relationship, and India, while very much tied to our relationship, is much bigger than that. So, we'll see. I mean, we'll see if we even wind up going.

Anyway, back to Toronto. I'm really looking forward to going there with Shobhit, because I feel like it's sort of North America's best-kept secret—it doesn't get a lot of representation or talk in media (aside from how many film and TV productions get filmed there—in North America, only New York and Los Angeles have more movies filmed there), and yet it's an incredibly dense, cosmopolitan city. And, much like Vancouver, because of its density, it feels much bigger than it actually is—it has a metropolitan population of 6.2 million, making it comparable to Atlanta or Miami and ranking it #10 in North America (#9 if you exclude Mexico City and narrow the parameters to just the U.S. and Canada), and yet it has the third-largest skyline in North America (#18 in the world), behind only New York and Chicago. When it comes to the population of the city proper, Toronto ranks much higher, fourth in North America, and if you were to judge by just its downtown core, it really feels like the third-largest city on the continent.

I know there's a lot of qualifiers going on there, but the point is: Toronto is a bustling and dense metropolis—and, in fact, when averaging the population density all over its metropolitan area, Toronto actually is #1 in North America. This makes Toronto unique in its urban feel, which I am all about.

Now, to be clear, Vancouver remains my favorite Canadian city—in fact, after Seattle, Vancouver is and always will be my second-favorite city in the world. Vancouver and Seattle are very similar in a surrounding natural beauty that Toronto lacks. Toronto is super flat, has no surrounding mountains, and although it sits on Lake Ontario and has the "Toronto Islands" right off the CBD shoreline, it also lacks the mass of islands and waterways that surround the Pacific Northwest cities. In terms of comparison, Toronto is a lot more comparable to San Francisco: greater density in a city that is itself very beautiful, but the surrounding nature just doesn't compare at all. Still exciting cities to visit, though.

And I am thrilled. As of now, all of these things are planned, confirmed, and travel booked where applicable: Barbara arrives for her visit on Wednesday next week; she'll accompany me to Olympia for Easter the following weekend; Lopez Island with Gabriel & other groomsmen April 5-7; Jennifer and Matthew visiting the weekend of April 12-14; Birth Week April 26 to May 5; Toronto June 12-17; Third Biannual Family Vacation August 18-20.

The one downside to the trip to Toronto is our flight there is a red eye, which is never ideal to me. There are two upsides to that, however: first, the flights there and back are direct—something that wasn't even available to us when Danielle and I flew there in 2019—and a daytime itinerary would have burned through the first day anyway. This way we arrive in the morning, and still have the entire day there. This basically gives us four full days there before the day we fly home, one of which will likely be a day trip to Niagara Falls. Even three full days will be absolutely more than enough to give us time to do everything we want to while there—including a relaxing day on a nude beach apparently frequented by queer people on Toronto Islands. I'm also hoping we can find a Groupon for Afternoon Tea somewhere on the actual day of our anniversary, June 14.

In any case, as I always do with big trips like this, I'm already deep into planning possible things to do, which is half the fun of traveling.

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I guess I can get to what I actually did over the weekend now. I had my first Movie Night with Alexia in some time on Friday—she had to cancel the previous one we had schedule as she was just too tired from a busy work week, so we hadn't done one since February 9 (we did hang out since then, though, as we went to the Amy Miller show two weeks after that, on February 23). We got back to our Harrison Ford-athon, and we watched a 2002 film I previously never heard of called K-19: The Widowmaker. It tells the true story of a nuclear disaster on a Russian submarine, with a bunch of American actors playing Russians but speaking English, some with muddled, barely Russian accents and others not bothering at all. I read that Harrison Ford was paid $25 million for that movie, which is the equivalent of around $43 million today. Can you imagine? The days of movie star paychecks like that are clearly over. (Granted, Tom Cruise earned $100 million from Top Gun Maverick, but that was because he negotiated income based on ticket sales on top of a base salary of $12.5 million.)

Alexia declared the movie boring. I found it a bit overlong but also harrowing; there's a lot of people who suffer radiation poisoning—apparently scaled back from what would have actually happened, for the movie—and it's pretty awful. I was engaged by the movie, and am actually glad we watched it. But, I can't imagine ever going out of my way to watch it again.

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On Saturday I watched a whopping three movies, starting with a double feature Laney came over to watch with me at the Braeburn Condos theater: the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In from 2008; and the American remake Let Me In from 2010. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself slightly partial to the American version, and Laney seemed to agree.

When that ended, I had a couple of hours before I then went downtown to watch Bad River at AMC Pacific Place, a documentary about a Northern Wisconsin Native American tribe's ongoing battle with a Canadian oil pipeline running through their reservation. Because I had a three-shot margarita during the movies with Laney, I had a terrible time staying awake, and was nodding off constantly. I was genuinely afraid I wouldn't even be able to write a sufficient review, but between what I did remember from the film, and the unusually large amount of online research I did on the issue it focused on, I was pretty happy with how the review turned out.

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I met up with Laney yet again yesterday, this time to go to another movie at Pacific Place: Arthur the King, which I only went to because I knew Laney would be into it, as a dog lover. It's a Mark Wahlberg movie about an "adventure racing" team that bonded with a dog that sort of inserted itself into their team, and followed them for the most of their route covering hundreds of miles. The movie, while still pretty by-the-numbers when it came to story beats, wound up being better than either of us really expected, largely because of its unusually high production values.

When the movie ended, Laney agreed to walk with me to the Central Library, which I needed to go to in order to pick up a book on the last day they would keep it on hold for me. When we got to Pine and 5th, we were going to turn up 5th to head to the library on that street, but we heard bagpipes and decided to go check it out.

It seems the city had done a bit of celebratory things for St. Patrick's Day, which yesterday was, at Westlake Park. I got a video clip of a group of three bagpipe players marching through the park. And then Laney spied a selfie spot with an uber-green backdrop with an illustrated leprochaun and green beer, and even a basket prop (neither of us knew why there was a basket, but Laney picked it up for the photo anyway). Naturally we had to take up this photo opportunity.

We then walked the rest of the way to the library, and after that managed to barely catch a #2 bus up Capitol Hill. I got off the bus at Broadway with Laney and walked the seven blocks home from there, the weather was just so spectacular this weekend—sunny with a high of 68° yesterday alone. We only just turned off our heat about a week ago, and yesterday it got uncomfortably stuffy inside the condo.

Shobhit wanted to walk to QFC and then to Trader Joe's to get some steps in, and I walked with him. I helped him move most of the planter boxes from the balcony down to his p-patch, in anticipation of the re-siding project on the building later this year. After that we looked up the Toronto flights, and finally booked them, when we got back. He made a very tasty lentil and tofu dinner which we had with delicious bread rolls from QFC that we got off a clearance rack a few days ago. Then we closed out the day watching TV, this week's episodes of The Regime and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO.

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[posted 12:42 pm]