I had an interesting dinner last night with people in the photography industry. It was an unexpected event and was quite happy to be a part of it. There were two other photographers, one fashion designer/student, one makeup stylist, and one model to round off the table. They each had their own fair share of interesting stories to tell and it was just interesting to listen to them considering what their roles in the industry were.

As it turns out, I had met one of the photographers last summer when a group of us from TPMG went to Elora Gorge. It’s a small world. The food was prepared by my friend’s friend, whom had prepared a Sicilian Italian course and a South Asian Fusion course. I had the latter and although it was on the spicier side, it was quite flavourful and I enjoyed it. It was a small and not too rowdy of a bunch, but still quite nice to hang around with.

Lately I’ve been a little more pre-occupied with U&I as I prepare for my next issue, which has been long overdue. I also just recently got the quote for the order, which I was planning on doing, and let’s just say I had to take a deep breath after reviewing it. It is quite expensive to go nation-wide and at the moment, I have no idea how I’m going to go about it. Somebody please help! Ahh…

Now, I just came back from my first Mandarin class of this year. I have once again found myself enrolled in a Mandarin class, which runs the entire school year, every Saturdays from 8:45am-12:15pm. The class is much larger than the last one, and we have even more of a mixed level this time around, which I’m sure will make it more difficult for the teacher to prepare lesson plans for.

There is this one Korean in my class who seems to understand Mandarin quite well and during the break, came up to me and started speaking Japanese. I was quite surprised… and even more surprised with her answer to my question of how she learned Japanese. She said she watched a lot of anime and basically learned from TV. I don’t know how many Japanese TV shows I’ve been watching lately and I have yet to improve on my Japanese skills. Actually, that’s a false statement in hindesight. I probably don’t know it myself but I do get the sneaking suspicion that I am doing a good job at at the very least maintaining my Japanese level, and hopefully increasing my vocabulary, which is my main goal now-a-days.

In any case, it’s September now. School has started and it’s another brand new season to start things off. Let’s see how long I can keep this schedule up now.

I was lucky today. It all happened so quickly I just hope I did the right thing. The Word on the Street festival happens in Toronto and other major cities across Canada on Sunday September 24th, 2006. I’ve gone to the festival for a couple years prior and for a while now I wondered if I should take the plunge and see myself on the other side of the booth for a while. This passing thought came now and then and I really didn’t do anything about it.

Until today of course.

Out of the blue, I suddenly decided to check out their website to see if I would be able to register for a booth. Not expecting anything from it, I signed up on the form telling me that they will send me the 2007 info pack when it is ready.

Within 10 minutes of my filling out the form, I get a phone call from a festival staff enquiring about my enquiry into exhibiting in this year’s festival. She sounded a bit rushed but she told me that the event had been sold out for over a month and a half now. However, they had a cancellation just this week and they were looking for someone to take its spot. Fortunately the booth was a half booth, which is more than enough for me. Spanning 10ft wide, it will be just enough for me to put up whatever I need to promote my upcoming issue, which will be released nationwide.

All of this is getting quite exciting and I am once again happily getting into the mood of going full force with U&I.

Let’s now hope for the best.

Not only is my entire family’s birthday within the first 11 days of May, the coming month will be very busy as I start to concentrate my efforts on getting my U&I Magazine more established within the photography community.

Contact – the month long photography festival – is the largest of its kind in North America. Silly me, I missed the deadline to take part in it as an exhibitor or advertiser. The best thing I can do is to support my fellow friends who are being exhibited in the festival.

The Photobloggers meetup is also being held in mid May, which is going to attract photobloggers from out of town. They will also announce live, the winners of the 2006 Photobloggies, which is an annual awards presentation celebrating the best in photoblogs from around the world. On this same day – and location – I am also planning on launching my Spring 2006 issue of U&I Magazine with perhaps some specials for the big event. My summer issue may also heavily focus on photobloggers from around the world so I’ll be sure to give everyone a head’s up on that.

This will also be the month when I start doing some more administrative work in terms of trying to get some distribution and advertisements for upcoming issues. I’m rounding up contacts as I go along and hopefully these will all lead to something substantial.

I would love to get more exposure for U&I Magazine as I know it’s something of value to many people around the world. By the summer’s end, my goal is to have something substantial completed – or at the very least in the final stages of being completed. This will be a lot of work on my part, especially doing this with a full time job. But this is what I am thriving for right now, and so this is what I will do.

Of course all of this won’t be possible without the occassional break from work. So my friend from Brazil will be visiting for the first three weeks of May, and so I will do my best to juggle all of this together.

All I can say is, this should be fun!