17. Favorite Picture of yourself ALL TIME Why?

I’m not hugely comfortable with getting my picture taken. You can tell because most of my pictures are of me making the stupidest faces ever. So I don’t really have a ALL TIME favorite picture.

But…

I do have some ones I like a lot:

In this picture I can seriously say that I fell in love with SharkBoy all anew. It’s obvious that I love him so much.

16. Nicknames

As a kid:

Lipshizt. Dad couldn’t think fast enough to identify us when we were little rug rats being bad, so along with an accusatory finger and in an authoritative voice, he called us that.

DanMicheleJohnMichael. Same deal as above. He would go down the roster of kids until he hit the right one.

As a teen:

Ted the Head. Not sure why, but I think I was a bit of a egg head know it all in school.

Fart (or variations of…). During grade 5 phys ed. class, I was doing jumping jacks in front of Terry Dionne. As we hopped I could feel the pressure of gas build up until I couldn’t contain it any longer. With every landing, a small fraction of the overall fart would escape me. Bef. Bef. Bef. Bef. Terry went mental and started to cry/scream to the teacher that I couldn’t stop farting. I held that name for some time. Kids can be the truthiest of all.

These days I don’t have one. A lady at work calls me “Tee”. SharkBoy calls me “DeeAahr” every so often.

15. Something you miss

I’m beginning to think this challenge was created by someone who has been reading my blog. I refuse to do this one because of it’s obviousness.

14. Favorite Place to Eat

I mentioned yesterday that I’m excited to go have dinner at Olympic. I can unequivocally say that this restaurant has not changed (other than prices) in the last 20 years or so, proving that consistency is the number one reason why restaurants succeed. I’ve never been to any other restaurant where the service, food and ambiance has not wavered or faltered, an amazing feat here in Toronto, where restaurants come and go like reality TV shows. There are things I will order 99.99% of the time, like the baked Panzarotto, and there are things to avoid (I’ve not gone back to the Ravioli in a few years… yep… still small for what you pay for, still not all that tasty).

I also favour other places. For your info, here they are in no particular order:

Tokyo Grill – Yonge and Wellesley. Order the Chicken Katsu. It’s all I ate for a year while in media school.

Coras – Yonge and Carlton. Quebec breakfasts made hearty and unhealthy! YUM!

Belly Busters – Yonge and Glen Echo Rd. Cheapest, biggest subs in the entire upper part of Toronto. Order the Super Stack and a taxi back to your office desk.

Bus Terminal – Danforth and Coxwell. They use to have the weirdest decor before someone ratted on them to the city. Food hasn’t changed thankfully. Great place for a breakfast!

Church Street Diner – Church and Gloucester. Small booths means intimate and fun service. They know how bears want to eat.

Ok² Diner – Queen and Bertmount Ave. This is how you salvage a greasy spoon and turn it into something cherishable. Yummah!

Tango Palace Cafe – Queen and way out there. I use to walk there all the time. Still has all the intimate charm of an independent coffee house, and none of the attitude.

13. Something you’re looking forward to

Strangely I’m looking forward to having dinner with my husband on his birthday this month. I’m sure it’s because I want to shower him with birthday love and kisses, but really it is because we’re going to eat at Olympic Pizza. The best restaurant in Toronto.

I’m looking forward to creating a Sandtrooper backpack for my trooper armour but I’m coming up against that “just start it, already!” kind of inertia. I know I will ultimately mess something up and will have to redo something. But it will happen. I decided I’m NOT going to create a rifle for the suit, as that I’d feel really weird walking down the street with a long barrel (fake) gun, even dressed up as a fictional character. So I’m going to concentrate my creativity into the backpack and just have a  small blaster by my side.

Somewhere in my summer fun we’ve decided that maybe a weekend away for camping may be fun. I hope it’s to Michigan’s CAMP-IT campground. Always had a blast there.

At the end of summer, we’ve booked a crazy travel adventure I’m calling Three Cities, Two Girls, one Travel Cup. I may change that title. We’re taking Porter Airlines to New York City for a night (we have to use up our disastrous NYC flight credit) so we can fly with Virgin America to Los Angeles (damn you Virgin for closing your Toronto departures). We’ll spend a couple days doing Disneyland and D23, Disney’s annual archive convention and basically geeking out at the park. After that, we hop in a rental jeep and head up the coast and hit San Francisco where we’ll stop in at the Disney Family museum amongst other things. Yeah it’s an action packed week!

That’s the immediate stuff. Far off into the future, I’m looking forward to taking my twin god-daughters to Disneyworld one day. I think in about 8 years…

12. Dream house

I use to work for a catering company and that gave me the opportunity to enter into quite a few million dollar homes. These palaces had kitchens that could house an Airbus 380, but commonly, most were vastly underused by their owners. For some reason that made me seeth with anger. Such a waste.

When my father was a butler he use to have to pack up his things and move with the Old Lady down to Palm Beach, Florida for a few months over the winter. The Old Lady’s house was maybe 3 “doors” down from Donald Trump’s shitty beach house so you get the kind of house it was. I think the stucco was made from the blood of tiny children who used the bones from their brothers and sisters as support beams. It reeked of money. The house wasn’t any higher than three storeys but it was sprawling, wrapped around a pool that any 50’s film star would have enjoyed lounging around. It was a dream house, but not entirely my kind of home.

One of the nicest homes I’ve ever been in while staying in London was a converted stable that was only 15 feet wide, three storeys high and the top floor decked out with slanted skylight windows. It was hidden away from the high street in a long forgotten Mews. While it was very thin, it was very long and tall. Much like the man who occupied it. But that’s another blog post.

When I was a kid we had a cottage that had nearly all one wall made of glass – it looked out over the lake and partially into our neighbour’s yard so his late night drunken skinny dipping was something of a flashlight show. The rest of the cottage was a basic shack, but I did love that front wall. Until it came time every fall to cover it up with 5 layers of tarp and plastic. Then it was a chore.

I currently live in an apartment over a store. It’s long and has limited lighting, shitty air in the summer but massive amounts of room for the price we pay. I like it. But the neighbourhood is starting to bring me down. Most places in downtown Toronto are…

I think I’d love to live in Disneyland’s Monsanto House of the Future. It’s said they had the hardest time to bring that thing down due to how well the Monsanto company created their plastics. Regardless, I love how it brought the promise of a better future to all who walked past it’s plastic threshold.

11. Bible verse

You’re fucking kidding me?

I haven’t opened that thing in seriousness since I was in grade 6. I’ve flipped through it during boring weddings and funerals and that’s about it. Nothing memorable.

So I’m going to make up my own:

“And lo, the people gathered around the glowing dumpster to find the swaddled form of Carbuncle Jim. And Carbuncle Jim did say unto them: ‘Fuck off! Get away from my God damned dumpster!’ And yea verily, the people did move back.” – Book of Shantilly, Chapter 4, Vs 3

“Donna held the coupon of 2 for 1 ribs and ripped it in two. She gave one half to her sneaky friend and thus did they provide their unintelligent server with two, 2 for 1 rib coupons. And verily did they lie, saying that their two coupons were actually whole coupons. And like a miracle, the server did give them 4 plates.”  – Book of Thieves, Chapter 2, Vs 4

“Thou shall not use the word “then” as a measurement of choice. It is a measurement of time.” – Book of Grammar Nazi, Chapter 4, Vs 21

“Vincent did come upon a man lying prostate and in repose. Seconds later Vincent was arrested for an indecent act.” – Great Big Book of Sex

10. Something you don’t leave the house without

Uh. My pants. Duh!

Well even that is questionable.

Up until 4 years ago I was all about minimalist travelling. I had a chain around my neck with one, maybe two keys on it. Cash was in a wad in my pocket and at most I had a bank card. Now I drag around my iPad, iPhone, 12 keys on possibly the most useless keychain from Prada, ever (but utterly rocks, thanks Mike and Morwin!), a charger chord if I have my backpack, my DSLR if I want to take great pictures.

It’s been a gradual crawl to this point of “roll my shit” scarab-like travel. In 2000, I started out huge when I bought a Apple Newton to doodle on the subway with. After I got self conscious I opted for a 640×480 digital camera (pre-megapixel hype) that had a big colour touch screen on the back – way ahead of it’s time. Then the phone, then the better camera #2… #3… #4…

9. Favorite TV shows

Again, I think I talk way too much about TV on Twitter so I’ll do the image-per-category thing again and this time it won’t be so easy.

As A Kid

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As An Adult

I’m sort of shocked that my favorite shows as an adult are mostly cartoons… somethings never change.

Honorable Mentions
Cougar Town
30 Rock
Survivor
America’s Next Top Model
RuPaul’s Drag Race

The Blog Challenge continues.

8. Something you’re afraid of.

I was thinking about how in the grand scheme of things I don’t have any irrational fears. Like how hoarders have night terrors of moving companies  – you know – irrational stuff.

However, I am not fearless. A well placed spider will make me jump, but after that shock wears off I can crush the fucker with a super strong Kleenex.

That being said, the biggest ironic fear in my life is the act of travelling. Much like Jtree, I fear flying but love to travel (see #6). Know that I grew up in a decade when DC9 & 10s were falling out of the sky like rocks just because someone butted out a cigarette in their arm rest ashtray. Also all those Airport disaster movies had a big impact on my little mind. However, with that reasoning in place, I do not fear wandering eyes due to hours of repeated viewing of Karen Black trying to land a plane with one eye on the controls and the other on the landing strip.

There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club where Edward Norton dreams of being on a flight where the plane disintegrates all around him as it falls from the sky. This is what goes through my mind over and over again when I fly. Oh wait… here it is:

Weeks before I travel somewhere I usually have one or two really good nightmares about crashing.

To try to counter this fear I usually watch as much YouTube videos of planes crashing as I can ingest. To try to desensitize myself from the stupidity of my fear.

I’m also fearful of that ever changing grey area of human rights located in every airport. That’s right, I fear the Security Screening. I fear that at any given wrong answer, trip of the tongue, nervous twitch, you can be whisked away to a room and depending on some screener’s demeanour (or your own) you could never be seen again. Now I don’t behave like I’m on the Tower of Terror when I hit the custom officials, but I have been known to overshare. Like telling one official that I was headed for Disney and I was hoping my vacation would be magical. His response was to hold my gaze for a solid 10 seconds, change his expression from business-like to something that looked like I just confessed to a jello in sock fetish and decide then and there I was harmless. Wordlessly he stamped my passport and waved me on.

Grumpy guss.