Kim and I are off to New York this evening but I just wanted to do a quick update before we go so that I don't get too far behind on blogging.

Last weekend I went camping with Matt, Patrick, Toni, Verna and Luis! We went to Bruce Peninsula National Park near Tobermory and it was super fantastic awesome! I've written a page in my Trips section but I haven't posted photos yet (there are a lot of really good ones) so I'm not quite ready to link it yet. I'll do the photos after I get back from New York I guess.

This past weekend was Chris's birthday party and that was super fun too! We went Go Karting at the docks down near Cherry Street. It was really fun with some amusing crashes and spin outs caused by a certain Will Chau. Then we went back to Chris's place and used the building's barbecues to make delicious meat and grilled vegetables for supper. This was accompanied by delicious potato salad and macaroni salad as well as cake and beer! Then we hung around Chris's place chatting and playing Wii and trying out his fancy new bed. It holds more than eight people at once!

I purchased two new pieces of media this weekend too. First was an Apocalyptica CD that I didn't have yet. It's pretty solid, and delivers the awesome driving sound you can only get by four cellos played in heavy metal style. However the band seems to be branching out a bit and including more vocals in their music. I don't think I'm a fan of that as it puts the cellos in a more background/accompaniment role which is clearly not correct.

The other new media I consumed this weekend was the latest Futurama movie: The Beast With a Billion Backs. Futurama is awesome and this was no exception. There's just so much to see and the animation is so well done. Plus a lot of the 3D stuff is done in Maya and there are some cool bonus features that show the 3D work.

Today I'm just hanging out at home, making last minute preparations for our trip to New York and relaxing.

Last night I went to see Dave Matthews Band with Matt at the Molson Amphitheatre. It was a pretty good show, although I think I liked the first time I saw them better. The start of the show was pretty chill with lots of mellow jamming, but by the end they were going pretty hardcore as was expected. Unfortunately the early mellowness seemed to delay the crowd from getting into it and a lot of the people around us didn't seem to even be paying attention at first. It was pretty obnoxious. It got better as the night went on though and overall I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was also nice to be able to walk to and from the concert and avoid all the business on the streets and streetcars.

I was having some difficulty with a bug at work this morning so I took a walk to the distillery district to clear my head. I stopped at Soma Chocolate while I was there and saw a brand of chocolate bar I hadn't heard of before so I picked one up. I meant to wait on breaking it open until I wasn't at work, but it just kept staring at me and I was still having trouble with my bug so I just had to bust out the chocolate. Unfortunately/fortunately it was very good so now I have to blog about it at work while the taste is still in my mouth.

Anyway, the company is a small artisan chocolate company in the US called Amano Chocolate and this particular bar is a 70% made up of beans from Ocumare Valley in Venezuela. It's super smooth and the flavour is spectacular. I think I really like chocolate from Venezuela.

I wanted to make a quick point about tasting fine chocolate here. It's important to have a clean palate (so eat some bread or apple and then rinse with water). You also shouldn't bite down on it at all. Just allow the chocolate to melt on your tongue and the flavours will change and evolve as the melt continues. Mmmm...good!

Man, you write a blog post and then before you know it two weeks have passed and a bunch of stuff has happened and you haven't blogged about any of it. This is definitely a serious problem of the modern age.

So first up, I am now a certified lead climber at the Toronto Climbing Academy. I've been out lead climbing twice and it's going well. I'm gradually getting over the fear part which is important because I find the fear really hurts my climbing. I had to deal with that when I first started climbing top-rope and I found once I stopped thinking about falling I climbed much better. Now that falling is a much bigger deal it's back in my mind and making me more tentative in my moves. Hopefully I'll get control of that soon. I did a 5.11+ on lead this weekend, and I was able to get to the top, but I was over-gripping the holds so much that I still feel sore in my arms today.

Two weekends ago I visited my mom for her birthday and had a really good time. My brother and I got her a new LCD monitor and so I set that up and I think she liked it quite a bit. On the Saturday I helped put together her new patio furniture and then made this really yummy chocolate mousse to have after supper. The recipe is from one of my random blogs, David Lebovitz...Living the Sweet Life in Paris and it was soooooo good. The author of the blog was originally a famous pastry chef and he also writes cookbooks. The blog generally talks about food and restaurants in Paris with a focus on chocolate and dessert. He often posts recipes and always posts photos of the food that make you want to lick your monitor. Anyway, the mousse turned out very well, but it was the richest stuff I've ever made. I accidentally ate too much of it too quickly and was in pain for about an hour afterwards! But I'm getting ahead of myself now. Before eating the mousse Kim and I took my mom out to a nice new Italian restaurant in Byron and had a delicious meal. Then we went back and ate the mousse before watching the movie, The Golden Compass. The movie was pretty well done, but I don't think the books translate well to movie form. Also, they chose to cut the movie off before the end of the first book so that they could have a happy ending instead of a devastating one. I was a bit disappointed in that because I wanted to see how they would do it. Oh well.

Last weekend was hot and I was happy because I like summer. Kim and I went to Toronto Island on Saturday to explore and stuff because neither of us had really been there (well I went to a concert that, but that didn't really count). It was nice! It was like a giant park combined with huge stretches of beach. It also has a small county fair-style amusement park for kids that was as tasteful and untacky as such a thing could be. Oh, and they have a "clothing-optional" beach too. We were walking along the beaches and basically stumbled onto it. There were no signs marking it from the direction we came in and thus we suddenly were walking through a bunch of naked people. And there were a lot of them! It's apparently a very popular place. I feel sorry for the guy who fell asleep on his stomach without putting sunscreen on his bum though. It was sooooo red!! Although we spent a good amount of time by the water, we never went in and we didn't really see anyone else in it either. It's not that the water was dirty, it's just that it was barely above freezing. Lake Ontario is deep and I think it must take most of the summer for it to warm up to something tolerable (but never actually warm). I tried wading out and had to stop quite quickly because the water was so cold it hurt my feet.

Now that I'm caught up on the past, it's time for a quick look to the future. I'm going places! First, in two weeks I'm going camping with Matt and Patrick and Toni and Verna and someone else in Bruce Peninsula National Park. It should be fun, although I don't think we're super organized yet. Then, I have the first week of July off due to a company-wide shutdown. So Kim and I are going to New York for four nights to see New York type things. We're flying Porter from Toronto island so it should be super convenient. It's also pretty cheap too, although the fuel surcharges are getting hefty. I wonder how much longer flying will be affordable? Finally, on Civic Holiday weekend, I'm going camping again. This time it is a canoe trip in Algonquin, similar to the one I did last year. Matt's coming this time and I can't wait. Algonquin is awesome.

I'm going to end this post with some photos I took recently. The first three are from doors open Toronto, while rest are from Toronto island. Enjoy!

MEC's Green Roof

St. James Church from within the adjoining park

The market plus some of the Toronto skyline

This random bird we saw on the island, no idea what it is

Beach on Toronto Island

The Toronto skyline from the island, one of the best places to see it from

Random artsy shot through the willow tree while waiting for a ferry boat

My last bar of chocolate from the order was the 70% Amedei Chuao bar. This bar is made from the same variety of Criollo beans as the Chocolat Bonnat bar I reviewed a few weeks ago and I was very much looking forward to what is considered the definitive rendition of these beans in bar form.

Unfortunately I was underwhelmed. The chocolate was good, but it just didn't do it for me the way the Chocolat Bonnat bar did. Plus the Amedei bar is four times as expensive as the Chocolat Bonnat. Combine all this with the fact that I just discovered I can get the Chocolat Bonnat bar at Domino Foods in the St. Lawrence Market and I don't see myself ordering the Amedei again. I will however explore their other, more reasonably priced bars, as the company overall impresses me with their dedication to delicious chocolate.

In other chocolate related news, I went to a little chocolate shop on Queen East last weekend after climbing. I can't remember the name or the address but it's on the south side of Queen street just a little bit east of Broadview. They mostly sold truffles but had a few other things too. I bought four truffles and they were all super delicious. My favourite was definitely the dark chocolate salted caramel. Mmmmm.

Amedei Chuao bar