This may be short, as I have to go buy some groceries to fill the gaping void that is the inside of my refrigerator, but I wanted to at least do a quick vacation recap. I’ve got a notebook full of day-by-day comments on the film festival movies, which I will type up and expand upon a bit once I actually unpack my suitcase. But I thought a more general quick vacation recap might be in order. Also a chance to see whether a minor change I just made in the RSS feed has screwed it all up, since I don’t know the first thing about RSS feeds except how to click “subscribe” in Bloglines.

So. The vacation. It was great. I don’t think I realized how much I was needing a break until I actually got one. We haven’t been making our occasional weekend excursions to Toronto as often as we used to, so I’ve been really missing it. It was great to be back. I’ve been up there so many times in the last five years that it feels like home, even when we’re staying at a hotel instead of preying on Amy and Blake’s hospitality. We managed to up the number of movies we saw to 31 this year from about 20 last year, which wasn’t quite our goal of 35 but was still pretty damn cool. And of the 31 I’d say 29 were good to great, with only one that I really disliked and one that I enjoyed until it up and turned saccharine on me ten minutes from the end, so we made out quite well. I didn’t get to sample the excellent Toronto food or wander some of the great little neighborhoods as much as I liked since we pretty much just had to grab food on the run between movies, so we’ll go back soon for a more leisurely trip. We did get to have brunch with Blake, which is always fun. But mostly it was movie movie movie sleep movie, which would probably be incredibly annoying if I were doing it with anyone else in the world, but is a lot of fun with Len.

On the way back we stopped by Philadelphia for a couple of days to visit my sister at college and meet up with my parents for a birthday dinner in my mother’s honor. It was supposed to also be our relaxation time after the hustle of the festival and before returning home, but that didn’t so much work out. We wound up having to switch hotels, not having as much leisure time as we’d hoped, and taking an earlier flight home than intended. But it was still good to see my family even if they’re all in a bit of traumatic shock trying to adjust to the youngest having left for school, a situation on which I guess I have a bit more distance since I moved out years ago. Dinner at Morimoto wasn’t quite the experience I think any of us were expecting. My parents had last been there early on a weekday evening and I gather it had been much quieter and emptier, but late on a Saturday night it apparently becomes a hip place to be. A very loud hip place to be, made louder by its terrible acoustics, so we spent most of the meal shouting across the table trying to hear each other. But the food was good, so maybe I’ll try it again sometime when the crowd isn’t quite so much hipper-than-thou.

The rest of the Philly trip was just family time, bookstore time, and relaxation-and-reading time, and now we are home again. It’s good to have my cats back, and my own bed, and extra changes of clothes. And hopefully soon a refrigerator with real food in it that was not purchased at a movie theater concession stand or a streetcorner hot dog cart. But I am as always a little sad that our big annual festival trip is over, even though I have a visit from my sister in a couple of weeks to look forward to, and a rapidly-growing addiction to The Sims 2 to keep me busy. At least we’re planning to go to Sundance this winter for our anniversary, which will give me a bit of a festival fix. But I fear that I’m becoming a film festival junkie. I need to become independently wealthy so I can quit my job and just travel the world going to film festivals all year long. But I guess that’s not terribly likely, so I should probably go be productive for a little while before sallying forth in search of a food supply.

More to come once I unearth that notebook from the chaos of my suitcase.