About Alyx Dellamonica

Alyx Dellamonica lives in Toronto, Ontario, with their wife, author Kelly Robson. They write fiction, poetry, and sometimes plays, both as A.M. Dellamonica and L.X. Beckett. A long-time creative writing teacher and coach, they now work at the UofT writing science articles and other content for the Department of Chemistry. They identify as queer, nonbinary, autistic, Nerdfighter, and BTS Army.

Remains of the living room…

Kelly has most of our stuff packed. We’re more or less down to the things we will need in the days before we fly and our first days in Toronto (because we’re arriving before the truck.) While she’s been doing that I’ve been working on my novel, teaching up a storm, and making efforts to find good homes for our passes to the incandescent Open Door Yoga.

The remainder is what we’re calling “camping stuff.” You know the drill. Two plates, two forks, one pot, two towels, a suitcase each of clothes…

… and of course the cats and a mountain of electronics.

Remains of the living room. We are 80% packed. @kellyoyo has loaded almost everything!

If you are local, there is still stuff you could have for free, just for the low low price of coming to get it: there’s a wooden bedside table with one drawer, a quite pretty wooden shelf, a very efficient–if somewhat heavy–Ikea desk with two shelves, a trio of lamps and a couple of plants.

Some of us get evil twins, Buffy gets a perky twin

slayerI’m up to “Intervention” on the Buffy Rewatch.

Plas related to our relocation are coming along. We have firmed up locations and dates for services, arranged some important banking and medical stuff, and acquired a bed. (Our frame is busted and isn’t coming with. Anyone want a pristine queen-sized futon?) Tomorrow the Frog Boxes arrive and we start packing.

I am obsessing over the bird checklist at the Leslie Street Spit. There will be owl photos.

In the midst of this, my mother-in-law is in town, which is super-delightful! We’re cat-sitting for friends for a bunch of days. And we are saying a lot of goodbyes. Holy crap do I know a lot of people in this neighborhood.

Soon to be former apartment and stuff

So our apartment sold to a couple who renovate and flip condo properties. They will, presumably, get rid of all the 20 year old appliances we couldn’t be bothered to replace–and possibly the window blinds too–repaint, fix up the kitchen and bathroom, do things to closet doors and the fireplace, and generally shine the place up.

This rather delights me. It’s as if the house is about to get all the things I didn’t want it to have. Plus it means that the place as I remember it will effectively cease to exist, which is kinda cool. To me. And we don’t have to clean up all that well as we get out. Cool!

There are many things that K and I won’t be bringing with us when we go. This is our totally awesome but somewhat cat-scratched couch. Are you local? Do you want it? Let me know.
This fab (if cat-distressed) couch is staying in #yvr when @kellyoyo and I leave. Let me know if you want it.

Our goldfinch friends will be losing their favorite snack shacks. That part does sadden me a little.

On the launch pad, with extra dental craziness

wpid-Photo-2012-05-05-1037-AM.jpgSo yesterday I bit into a perfectly benign piece of chocolate and then spat out two alarmingly large chunks of silver tooth filling. These had been wrapped around a razor-sharp edge of tooth in a way that made slicing my tongue open on the thing an inevitability.

With that exciting challenge added to my roster, Tuesday went like this:

Fiction-writing.
Teaching & e-mail.
Commute to massage therapy.
Race madly to mentoring gig without eating lunch, for fear of shattering the tooth.
Beg dentist to find room for me in the afternoon.
Mentoring gig! With a farewell visit from my favorite bosslady!
Quick, light-headed lunch at Rue 909, with a side of answering more e-mails.
Dentist. Where things were OMG, not nearly as dire as I feared. (And where my dentist of 17 years said some extremely sweet things. If you want a nice dentist, Doctor Liu at Broadway Dental rocks the planet!!)
Run home, change to yoga togs, do not pass Go, run directly to Yoga for 75 minutes.
Heat and eat the dinner K had already prepped and…

…are you ready?…

Then our real estate agent came over and we signed a no subjects deal on the condo. It is sold, sold, sold and we are handing over the keys on the 24th.

My brain is entirely made of porridge. And I have realized I have to shower. Later, gaters.

Painted Ladies, the Pinboard

painted ladiesI have stumbled over a couple terrific art boards lately and have begun gathering up portraits of women as a result.
Many of the women on my Painted Ladies pinboard may be familiar to you–a lot of them are celebrity paintings by celebrity painters. Others, though, are newer or more obscure.

It has been fascinating collecting these, and what I’ve realized is that there’s a real difference between a photographic portrait–even if it’s fanciful–and something painted from scratch. The element of imagination is different: the painter imbues their subject with personality in a way that seems less about capturing reality and more about creating or amplifying it.

(From this you can tell I am not versed at all in art criticism.)

What was most exciting, though, was to stumble over Kneeling Girl, by Thomas Saliot. This is as perfect a picture of the protagonist of my next novel, a woman named Sophie Opal Hansa, as I could ever have wished to discover.

Today’s moving-related discovery: Revenue Canada will let us write off a ton of our moving expenses this year.