It has been an insane few weeks.

Last night I went to the second of two Fucked Up-curated Christmas shows at the Great Hall, to benefit the COUNTERfit Harm Reduction Program and the Barriere Lake Legal Defense Fund. Fucked Up performed at the first show, but last night’s lineup featured Bonjay, Ohbijou, The Rural Alberta Advantage and Sloan (playing all of 1996′s One Chord to Another!).

Serious nostalgia trip–I think the last time I saw the Rural Alberta Advantage was in maybe early 2007 (definitely long before Hometowns was released). I saw them a ton of times in my first year and a half of university, since they were friends of all the bands I was in, and I joined them once at a raucous show at the Embassy in Kensington (actual capacity: something like 25, attendance at those shows: felt like at least 60). It was pretty great to see them play again after so many years and so many shows under their belt.

They broke out “Summertime”, which I once covered at the only solo non-recital performance I’ve ever played in my life. I played two songs (it was at a cabaret/variety show sort of thing) and the other one was a Sloan cover, weirdly enough.

And Sloan … I’ve seen them something like 20 times–I hesitate to go count the actual number–and this was one hell of a fun evening. Horns for “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and “Take The Bench”, finally a chance to see “Junior Panthers”, “500 Up”(!!) and “Snowsuit Sound” in the encore … and then Leslie Feist came out to kick up the jams for “She Says What She Means”. Basically the best.

I also got to play a great show at the Rivoli last weekend–last performance of 2011–with the old Massey Hall crowd. Plenty of wonderful familiar faces in the audience, including a handful of former Massey friends who came to join us for the occasion, made it a pretty amazing night for all of us on stage. Damn, I love these folks.

I also received a Stockhausen LP and a sweet, sweet lunchbox for Christmas from my boyfriend, appeared in the Toronto Star (full article here), and signed an offer of permanent employment at my place of work–pretty happy to be sticking around with my fantastic coworkers.

Recently at work, in fact, I helped work on an HTML5 prototype for a huge agency pitch the company did in New Jersey at the beginning of December. We did really well, and the project’s taken on a life of its own, continuing to be built and refined; it will eventually (in January) be revised into a real project instead of just a demo, and I’ll be working on that too. It’s pretty neat to have been involved in something so huge only a couple of months after starting. Daunting, to be sure–and there were a lot of stressful hours and a few delirious late nights in the office, including one time where there were only two of us and they were filming a movie down in the alley outside our office building involving many teenagers shrieking at the same time; both of us thought we were about to be murdered, I think.

But here we are now and tomorrow’s the last day before the holidays and I have a job to come back to, some great things on the horizon (like Love is a Poverty You Can Sell at Next Stage!) and a trip home coming up fast. Things are all right! (even though we didn’t get Yu Darvish)