I like reading blogs. For the most part I read the blogs of my friends, but they have become fairly reticent of late (thank you, Word of the Day). So, I've been forced to branch out into reading the blogs of strangers. It's more interesting than I thought it would be because some are extremely well written and hilarious. Now I'm not saying that my friends are illiterate shut-ins, but none of them are English majors and a lot of them are like me, just blogging about what happens to them. Which is exactly what I want from my friends, so that I can keep up with them. So yeah, my friends are awesome. But their blogs fill a different purpose for me than the random Internet blogs.

I've added two such random blogs to my links page, although currently one is not available to the public (she gets paranoid sometimes and makes the blog private for a week or two). The available blog [redacted] is incredibly amusing. I just caught up on the archives tonight and this will definitely be one I follow for a while. It may be a bit offensive, but only if you're offended by inappropriate and occasionally crude remarks about various and non-specific groups of people, activities, world events or New York City.

I'd like some more random blogs to read but haven't found any others yet. If anyone has a good one let me know.

To complete the title of my post, I want to buy more plants for my house and possibly my desk at work (although work decorations are an area I'm extremely lacking in so that will be harder). This weekend Matt wanted to buy a cactus so I went with him to a random store that sells plants on Queen street. I was hoping to get an orchid because, if I had to pick a favourite flower, that would be it. Anyway, the orchids at the place looked pretty sickly, so I got a cactus like Matt. The one I picked appeared to be in flower as it had 3 nice looking pink flowers growing from the stalks. I was happy and took it home. However, upon closer inspection of said cactus I noticed what looked like hot glue around the base of the flowers. Yep, the place glued what I now realize are paper flowers to the cactus. Very disappointed, I ripped them off and threw them out because otherwise the cactus would be a plant of lies, and no one likes lying plants. Cactii have a hard enough time being liked as it is being covered in prickly things. They should at least be honest. Maybe I'll refrain from watering it for 6 or 8 months and then give it a bunch all at once to encourage it to flower. That's how it works in the desert right?

I recently posted that I didn't think I'd be able to handle the stress of playing poker for real money. Well I played for cash last night with Alex and a bunch of his roommate's friends. Turns out I was wrong and I handled the stress just fine. I think I'll go buy myself something nice.

Yesterday morning I swam a kilometre right after getting up. Today I went climbing hard for two and a half hours. The result is that I'm incredibly sore, but my brain is alert and happy. I've been less than happy lately due to a combination of things, so this is a nice pick me up. It's amusing because I'm really just tricking my brain with a natural drug, id est, endorphin.

Climbing was fun today because I went and bought new climbing shoes this morning (I think the endorphins are also increasing my desire to be a consumer). They're more technical shoes that give me more control and precision on extremely small foot holds. The translation of that is they smash my toes all together and bend my foot so that all the weight is focused on the big toe. So right now, my feet hurt, but I'll get used to them and they'll shape to my foot a bit after a few outings. They're not really meant to be comfortable. They do in fact improve my climbing though so I'm happy I got them.

I finished watching the Office (up to the last aired episode) and I can't wait for the next new one. I also watched Thank You for Smoking with Jen on Saturday and it was pretty amusing and thought provoking at the same time. I do recommend.

We (nine of the usual peoples), went to see Fido tonight and everyone loved it! I'm glad that my over hyping was completely justified. I guess it's pretty hard not to love a Canadian zombie comedy.

After the movie we went back to Chris' place and played Wii until about 10 minutes ago (living in the same building makes getting home pretty quick). That was fun like always and I totally destroyed Chris in Tennis.

Now, instead of going to bed, I'm going to go Mike Jutan style for the rest of the evening and watch the last three episodes of the Office. The show just keeps getting better and better and I'm glad I decided to watch it. Too bad I'll be all out of episodes soon though.

Fido is coming to theaters on March 16th!!! It's one of the movies I saw at the film festival last summer and definitely one of my favourites (although they were all good). I hope that it does well enough to justify DVD distribution, I'd totally buy it.

We went to Lick's tonight for wing night. They have mighty fine burgers there, but it's all the way up at Eglinton, so we had to take the subway. I haven't done that in a while so it was kinda fun actually. It's been even longer since I've been on it during rush hour. I think I'm happy with that though. Walking is better for me, both because of the exercise and by staying out of the dirty subway.

I did most of my taxes last night (still missing one thing that I have to claim but that won't change anything) and this will very likely be the last year that I get them all back. I only worked 4 months last year, and I was in school and I've already contributed a ton of money to an RRSP so it was pretty easy to get them back. I don't even have to use all of my RRSP contributions to get it all back.

It is super easy to do them online now that I've done it before. The site remembers all of my unchanging information so it's just a matter of entering the numbers from all the forms I get and then it tells me what I get back. So I'll file soon and then I'll get lots of money! Yay!

At the request of Adrienne I just added an RSS feed to my site. So, if you use a fancy RSS reader you might now be able to be notified when I make new posts. I don't use an RSS reader and I don't know how to set one up so it is completely untested. I'm waiting for Adrienne (or anyone) to confirm that it works. Assuming it does, enjoy!

Some people at work play poker (no limit Texas hold 'em) every Friday at lunch and I've joined in for this "season." It's the first time I've ever played and it's been really fun so far. I started back in January so I've played a bunch now and I think I'm starting to get better at the part of the game where you try to figure out what people are doing. The cards and the chips are really just tools for determining what everyone else is thinking. Anyway, I'd say I'm not doing too bad. I'm 7th overall in the standings (of about 15-20 people) and I just made a huge gain by finishing 2nd in today's event.

Sometimes people also play after work, but it's much less formal and serious and everybody lends chips when you run out so there is no real worry about losing. It gets silly fast. I find I don't enjoy it as much because there is nothing riding on it. It's much more fun when you have something to lose, even if it is just meaningless points in a contest with no prizes. I don't know if I could handle playing for money though. Way too stressful!!

I normally watch a bunch of TV on Thursday nights but the OC is done now, and Grey's Anatomy wasn't new this week. That leaves Scrubs, which is normally an excellent show, but they wussed out and did a clip show this week. I hate clip shows. And adding a joke to the clip show about lazy writers and such doesn't make them better. That's all for this evening.