Guillermo del Toro at the Art Gallery of Ontario

(Young Mako Mori's dress, from Pacific Rim, 2013)

The autumn is my favourite time of year.  Pumpkin pie becomes a food group, the temperature is cool enough to wear my favourite cardigans again, fall fairs dot the calendar and the perfect drive in the country is rich with the aroma of wood smoke.  My husband and I have been busy dividing hostas, planting mums, tidying up the edges on the flower beds, and we've finally worked up the nerve to rip the carpet from the stairs.  Youtube gives you all sorts of confidence to believe anything is possible - fingers crossed.

We ladies with dogs in the neighbourhood decided to start a book club.  The idea came about at a birthday party in August, the same party where I was taught how to sabre a bottle of champagne.  My husband couldn't believe how calm I was, to which my reply was 'Not my champagne, not my knife, not my house!'...what could go wrong?  Well, yes, the possibility of a nasty wound but, to my sheer amazement, it worked!  I'm not so sure about the book club though.  The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry was my choice, especially leading up to Halloween, but only one other person finished the book.  It's true what they say about book clubs, and in our case the discussion was even shorter than the norm!  I'm not sure it's a good fit for me and it wouldn't be fair to further twist the arms of my dear friends.  If they didn't get on with Sarah Perry, there's little hope for the likes of E.M. Delafield or Virginia Woolf, and I'm not very keen to leave my favourite authors behind for weeks on end.

 So while I get back on track with my reading and posts, here are a few photos from the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the AGO.  We visited last Thursday as part of an afternoon away from domestic duties and mundane errands, and SO glad we did. 

 Victorian family portrait with deceased family member

 Costuming and set pieces from the film Crimson Peak

 The Angel of Death from Hellboy 2

(the eyes in the wings are very creepy!)

 The Faun from Pan's Labyrinth, 2006

 Statue of H.P. Lovecraft

One of del Toro's many notebooks detailing script ideas.

As you walk through the exhibit a pianist plays suitably atmospheric music, although I did a double-take to notice the sheet music was on a tablet, rather than paper.  So much old, so much new and all an awful lot of fun.