I'm back in Toronto for a little while and things got off to a rocky start when I arrived from Texas and at the apartment where I'm staying two weeks ago. It was probably the fithiest, most disgusting apartment I've ever been inside (the gross picture of swept up dirt above does not even begin to do justice to the amount of dirt and cat hair there was in this place. It was supposed to be "fully furnished with all amenities (cable, internet, linens, etc.) but when I arrived there was no T.V. no internet, no bed sheets, towels, etc. When the dirt was pointed out to the fellow looking after the place (the landlord is convienently in California) he recommended going to a nearby dollar store and buying a mop. I actually took pictures of the mess out of fear that people would think I was exaggerating when I told them about it.

Three full cleanings of the apartment later friends are no longer afraid to sit on the furniture.

Housing and internet problems aside, I've been trying to tie up the last few loose ends of my life in Toronto and I'm cleaning out puppet stuff from storage. I've been taking an inventory of furs, fabric and other miscellaneous puppet making stuff and going through all of the previously-built Bear Town puppets deciding what's usable, what needs to be rebuilt and what needs to be thrown out and/or given away.

Above is a box of puppets (actually the contents of several boxes) that I unpacked this week - some discarded pigs and chickens left over from a shoot a few years ago, pet store animals made from the 2004 Bear Town web series, a few small store-bought bear puppets, a granny character and an old version of Professor Jackal, one of Bear Town's villains.

I did a huge purging of puppet stuff when my old puppetry shop had to shut down in 2003, but it's amazing to see the stuff I still have lying around. A good chunk of it I'm packing up and sending to a friend who teaches puppetry workshops for kids, but they can't take all of it so if you're in or near Toronto and looking for fur and puppet building supplies drop me a line at beartown [at symbol] bear-town dot com and I might be able to hook you up.

Posted by Andrew at 12:12 PM | Permalink

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