Hey! I have been in Saskatoon the last while, so I was too busy to write here. I don’t think I even really wrote in my diary this whole time either. I have seen my Mom a lot which has been nice. I’m staying with a friend and today we watched a hot air balloon seem to land in the city like, blocks away. I don’t know why a hot air balloon would land IN the inner city of Saskatoon, so we are watching the news now to see if they mention it. But Saskatoon doesn’t have a news station that we can find, so I don’t think we’ll get the quirky reason for why it landed so close to us. We didn’t hear people screaming as it came down so I suppose things are fine.

There’s been a lot of tornado activity out here, like multiple tornadoes a day. Saskatoon had a few tornado watch/warnings and when we went out to the lake there were more tornado warnings/watches. Most of the ones I’ve seen photos of online are lil skinny guys. So not SUPER scary. Still, I don’t want to be in a tornado if I can help it. Anyway, the reason there are so many tornadoes is because of climate change. I don’t know if I wrote this here already, but in my researching climate change I learned that Tornado Alley in the US is moving east, and that the tornadoes are more lethal because they happen at night when it’s hard to spot them. So it makes sense that Saskatchewan would get more tornadoes too. We always had them out here, I think it’s the frequency that has increased though.

I got one of my teaching jobs back for next year, which is nice. But I got turned down for this other work thing. I’ve been applying for work for the Fall semester, so we’ll see if anyone hires me, but having one class for Winter term is helpful and takes some anxiety off of me. I did also get a grant application in but I’m extremely dubious about that coming through. And I need to pay for dog and people food and rent so those are my priorities right now. Putting together enough gigs that I can live another day.

People have been sending me jobs in other parts of Canada, but rent is SO expensive everywhere and I’m in a co-op with reasonable housing charges so staying in Toronto with secure housing is more sensible. PLUS I do better in Toronto with other types of work too, we have a ton of film festivals and Industry stuff, there’s a good art scene, multiple universities and colleges, and I am popular on Grindr in Toronto more so than other places.

ALTHOUGH I did go on Grindr a bit in Saskatoon and had a small handful of nice hookups. Nothing ongoing though, just brief moments. But it was fun. So I guess I can’t act like I can’t hookup here too.

Madonna and Grindr tricked me into changing my Grindr app logo and it’s pink and is supposed to look like a rose I suppose, in the shape of the Grindr mask. But it looks like a prolapse. I thought I was deactivating the thing and it turned it on and now there’s no way to change it back.

Stuck with the Madonna Prolapsed Grindr.

ANYWAY! Being in Saskatchewan has been nice. I got to see the graves up at my reserve and help clean them off. My cousin and grandparents have headstones now and they look really good. I liked the chance to be out there with my Mom and Uncle Doug. And then I got to meet my new baby nephew today and he was super cute. I saw my sister too which was nice, she’s sweet. And some cousins.

I’ve been catching up with friends which has also been nice. I think I’ll have squeezed almost everyone in by the time I head back to Toronto this week. I’m sure I missed a couple of people though. And one is out of town so I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to see them when they come back.

What else? Aw not much. Just connecting with my people out here really which is important for me. I also got some saskatoon berries so hopefully I can remember to bring them home with me. I want to make pies. Pies is what is happening! I wish I had a chest freezer though, so I could fill it with berries and meat. That’s what I aspire to! I know I don’t have room where I live though. It’s too bad! I would need to increase my income a lot to move though, to a place with room for a chest freezer.

So anyway I head back to Toronto and my puppers soonish, and then I’m in Toronto until August when I’m back in Regina for a film shoot. I am not the director, only the actor. I am excited to act in someone else’s film for a change. I need to write another grant this fall. Always the grant writing. It’s still very frustrating to have ideas shot down financially. I’m thinking I am probably going to have to finish the climate doc with my own money, or do some kind of crowd funding. I still want to be finished in 2027. That’s my goal, and it’s just not a film I feel I can put away for another year, considering all of this gestures everywhere. I know there’s people saying films take years sometimes, but I don’t think this can wait.

And yet it keeps getting turned down for funding. But I intend to finish it anyway.

I still need to fix my bed. Mr. Muscles never came back to help me!

I rescued my bike from being tossed out on the bike room clean up day, so now I am thinking geez I should really use it. I could sell it too, but I wonder if I could get used to riding around Toronto. It’s kind of big, it’s a cruiser and an e-bike and super sexy looking. I am just terrified of getting doored. I have accidentally doored bicyclists myself which is why I’m feeling like I am cursed to experience this from the bicyclists perspective. Oh man I can just see it happening! Probably immediately ha ha. I don’t know, I also need to remember how to ride a bike. I do know, but last time I was a bit wobbly. And it’s been a while since the last time.

At least I have a helmet.

I’ve been having an existential crisis since seeing MRI scans of my own brain. If you look at it, it’s so clearly a disabled brain! I think most things are there, but there’s a couple of spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces, and gaps that are much wider than the gaps usually are. I got super anxious about it and was reading all these neuroscience papers about brain imaging and Bipolar Disorder 1 and ADHD. And the gaps generally correlate to where there are larger spaces in Bipolar Disorder 1 folks and ADHD folks. So it makes sense. My mom said “but it works really good!” Aw thanks Mom ha ha ha. She is going to bead it. I gave her a few different scans to work with so I’m curious to see what she does. The cool thing about brains is it seems they can compensate for differences really well, like building new neural pathways and so on. So I suppose what I can’t see is all the secret neural pathways that are making up for ways my brain is unusual. And I would like to think there’s some strengths in there I don’t know about. My memory is dog shit though and I’ve known that for a long time which is why I write everything down when I can. Now when my mom gets jerky to me because I don’t remember something, I can say there’s holes in my brain! Leave me alone!