It's just five short weeks, and then it's back to the bush for some more high-quality treeplanting adventures. The season's looming like a root canal right about now, especially since it starts these days AT THE END OF JANUARY, instead of March, like it used to, before global warming got all trendy.

But before then, I'm doing a reading at a certain large public Vancouver location. If you live in Vancouver, please get in touch with me via email, so I can plead and grovel for your attendance in a personalized electronic note. Because, uh, it never occurred to me when I said yes to the very nice organizing ladies that such a reading would be held in the Special Room, a frighteningly gigantic space with a million plastic chairs and savage lighting and not an alcoholic beverage within a ten kilometre radius. A place my writer-friend Kevin Armstrong once called: The Room Where Words Go To Die. I received the poster today--which normally I would have been super-chuffed about, as I normally dig this certain large public location immensely--and I lost a few bars of blood pressure upon discovering that I'm reading alone.

Don't worry about the location and the time. I plan to blog it to death in the coming weeks.

If you think you might be an employee of the above-mentioned place, please don't take offense. I love you guys. High school kids call up the help desk with questions that turn out to be their homework, and you'll basically research and write the answers out while they take dictation on the other end of the line. No questions asked, free of charge. In other parts of the world, you rebuff cops who enter your establishments demanding to know who took out such titles as How To Build A Shoe Bomb and Other Handicrafts for Teenagers. I move to the back of the bus for you people. Plus, I thought you were on vacation.