The full results of the CN Tower team climb have been posted online so I was able to find out that my time was 321 out of 1862 participants. Not too bad! When combined with the individual climb on Saturday I came in 878 out of 6051. Sweet!
Ireland is very soon (Friday!), but I'm a bit less worried than I was. I went out driving this morning with Sue so that I could reacquaint myself with the fun of manual transmissions. Despite it being five years since I last drove a manual vehicle it all came back very quickly. So now all I have to worry about is doing everything backwards on the wrong side of the super narrow roads with roundabouts everywhere and where all the road signs are different and I don't know where I'm going. Should be easy.
Yesterday was fun too. I went for a walk with Matt to try to find a small filing cabinet for my important papers and such. Both stores I attempted to visit were closed, but the yard sale I found on Craigslist was still good. We arrived at the place near Kensington but there was no filing cabinet on the lawn. So I asked the girl running it and she told me to come inside the house while she looked for one. She also didn't know anything about a Craigslist posting and looked confused when I mentioned it. Anyway, we went upstairs and looked around until she decided that she didn't have a filing cabinet and thus couldn't sell me one. I was a bit confused at this point but then she said, "why don't you ask the guys next door, they had a sale today too and just finished pulling all the leftover stuff inside." It turns out I was at the wrong place and really wanted the other sale. So I knocked on the neighbour's door and the guy did in fact still have a filing cabinet, but it was far too big and heavy and a bit busted up as well. I only need a little two drawer style cabinet that can hold legal sized file folders. I didn't end up getting one yesterday, but it was fun touring around the inside of random Kensington Market houses.
After our walk, Kim and I made supper for Matt. And by made I mean we thawed and baked the extra stuffed pasta shells that we originally made for Patrick and Toni last month. They were still delicious though and this time I made sure to get a couple pictures before devouring them. For dessert we had a delicious banana cream pie from Wanda's Pie in the Sky which we picked up while we were in Kensington Market.
After supper Matt and I had intended to watch Mad Max 2: Road Warrior but before starting we got a call from Jen and Jeremy. All of the Cityplace buildings south of Bremner had lost power. Jen and Jeremy were sitting around in the dark with a rented movie, Meet Bill, and nothing to watch it on. So they came over and we all watched it at Matt's house.
Simultaneously to the power outage in the other buildings, Matt and I were video chatting with Patrick on Skype using Matt's Macbook. Patrick had just arrived in Ireland yesterday and was hard at work helping his parents and dealing with wedding stuff. Eventually we convinced him to go to bed and get some sleep, but it was good to see him and talk with him for a while. We miss them already. I really need to get on to this "Skype" thing. Too bad my laptop doesn't have a fancy built in video camera.
Tonight I'm going climbing, although I'm pretty tired right now so I don't know how well it will go. I also might watch Gran Torino this afternoon instead of being responsible and trying to figure out more Ireland stuff.
Yay, I climbed the CN Tower!!! And I met my goal of being under 20 minutes. I did it in 17 minutes and 23 seconds. It was a stupidly large amount of stairs though. Soooooo many. Thanks again for all the donations everyone.
After climbing we all headed out for drinks and pool at the Charlotte Room. It was also a goodbye party for Patrick who leaves for Ireland tomorrow, never to permanently return again. I'm sad that he's leaving but happy for him to be moving on to the next part of his life. I'll just have to be sure to visit him in Australia as soon as I can.
We went for a walk along the concession and out in the field today and I took a few photos. Here is a small selection of the better ones.
Patrick and Toni are almost ready to leave the country forever (sadness) and so on Tuesday they had a party to help finish drinking all of the alcohol they accumulated in their 5 years in Canada. It was lots of fun and I definitely assisted with the alcohol drinking, to the detriment of work the next day. I got to play more with my new camera though so it all evened out.
Also this week, on Monday, I went with Keizo and lots of other people to the Blue Jays home opener. It was lots of fun despite the delay of game caused by drunk people throwing things at the outfielders. Honestly, who does that??
Right now I'm back in London. We're going to do some wedding stuff on Saturday and on Sunday I'll be seeing some family for Easter. Currently there are no plans for Friday but I hope to get out with my camera. I get Easter Monday off this year so it's a 4-day weekend, which is super awesome.
My Ireland trip is so soon and I'm so unprepared. I'm actively trying to plan this trip less so that we can just do whatever we feel like while we're there and not get tied down to a set itinerary. But it's hard to let go of the "plan everything out perfectly" mentality that I've used on past trips. Some things I definitely need to do include look into cell phones for Ireland, learn how to use the GPS we're borrowing and book a hotel in Belfast for our final night of the trip (our first night in Dublin is already booked, all other nights will be booked the day of or the day before).
Anyway, here are some photos from the alcomohol party, nothing super spectacular (due to the drinking), but there were definitely some decent shots.
I have to apologize for not updating lately, I've been busy and have not had the energy to make "proper" posts. Unfortunately I also don't like making quick half-hearted posts because I feel like if I don't do it right, why do it at all? Well the answer to that question is that crappy blog posts at regular frequent intervals likely add up to being better than moderate to good blog posts at super irregular and infrequent intervals.
So I'm going to post more. For reals.
Anyway, I do have sorta big news. I bought a new camera! My old camera, the Nikon D70, was a fine piece of equipment but was always meant as an intro to the realm of SLR cameras and I always intended to replace it if I got somewhat serious about taking pictures. Well I don't know how serious I am, but I do enjoy it a lot. So when a friend expressed a desire to own the D70 we arranged for her to buy it from me, freeing me to buy the new and improved Nikon D90 along with the Nikon 18-200mm DX lens with vibration reduction.
I'm very happy with the purchase but I haven't had much time to really try it out yet as I've been very busy since buying it on Thursday. Fortunately the controls are very similar to the D70 so I don't have to relearn much. I currently have one picture to post here, nothing special, just a quick shot of the pizza we made tonight using dough from a bakery in Kensington and delicious tomato sauce that I made a couple weeks ago.
