I am happy.

Is everything perfect? Well, it never is. But it's always better than it has been, which is the most I will ever hope for and what I am entirely grateful for.

Here is the list of things I have been working on:

- I founded a zine collective, Stumptown Underground, and we're publishing monthly anothologies of writing, comics, illustrations, etc. We've actually been doing it monthly. It's killing me and keeping me alive, both at the same time. Working on it has been totally fucking inspiring. I am seeing the best of all creative people I know and I can't help but be forced to remember how beautiful life is.

- Planning for PZS is already going on and I am organizing again.

- I started an event with Los Moustachios called Movie-A-Roke, which has been a laugh.

- Myself.

Aaaaaaaaaand, I figured I should let you all know about some of the other fabulous events leading up to and during the Portland Zine Symposium...

• Cut, Copy, Collate - A Zine Construction Workshop: At the North Portland Library on Tuesday, July 14


• PZS 24hr Zine Challenge: At Cosmic Monkey Comics on Saturday, July 18th
Shuffleupagus - A Collaborative Zine Experience: At the Central Library on Tuesday, July 21 </li>

• IPRC Pre-Symposium Kick Off Dance Party!: At Holocene on Thursday, July 23


• Open Mic Zine Reading: At the IPRC on Friday, July 24th


• PZS Movie Night: At the Hawthorne Hostel on Saturday, July 25

In other news, Jeff's visit to Portland was pretty rad. My housemate, Ashley, let Jeff use his bike while he was here, so we biked all around, got some work on comics done (not as much as we should have, apparently we get more done separated), ate a lot of yummy food, and majorly celebrated Canada Day (with poutine from Potato Champion, pies from Whiffies, and karaoke). When he first got here, I still have to nanny for a few days, but then the family went on vacation, which freed up my time.

Jeff left Saturday morning and I spent the 4th of July with my neighbor friends (one who I've started seeing, Dan) and neighbor Dan and I biked to the Steel Bridge to watch fireworks in addition to bbqing and fire blowing.

Today is my last day off from nannying and the past few days I have gotten tons and tons of PZS work done, which is a relief, but not so much work done on comics..

I am feeling like life is moving too fast, there's too much that I want to do, all the time.

For months now, on an alarmingly escalating basis, I've been dumping time into organizing the Portland Zine Symposium.

I field all the emails, manually confirm all the tablers, recruited the talented John C. Worsley to take over our website and worked with him on maintaining it, have attended all but two of the meetings (I missed being at two in person, but I was at one of those via speaker phone), have handled the corn mug ordering process, am working with the screen printer for the shirts for this year, maintain the facebook page, and I've booked us an awesome wrap up party.


And it's all about to come to fruitition, friends. ( PZS is August 23rd and 24th.. )

I hope to see you there.


In other news, we still need volunteers to help out before/during/after PZS, which you can read more about here.