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.

I've been wanting to update the look of my blog for a long time, so I started doing that yesterday. Well I don't like to leave things unfinished so I finished it today. I originally meant to go to bed in good time but this is more exciting I think. Feel free to leave comments on the new look, although I'm not likely to change what I have here for a while. Also, let me know if you see any bugs. I think it is good, but I didn't really put a lot of time into it so I'm sure I missed things. Entries now have titles, but I was too lazy to go back though all my old posts to title them, so there are only titles back until the point when I moved to Toronto.

I think having my laptop made this a lot easier. I spent Sunday afternoon on the couch developing while watching Nascar in the background. Yay for laptops!

Now I need to just replace the backend and my work here will be done for a time. I want to make the site database driven so that I can stop parsing a stupid XML file. It's really cumbersome and every time I look at the code I just cry. I think I will also make the image in the navigation box be random at some point, but I need to collect a decent set of images first. Bonus points to anyone who knows where the current image is from!

Last night was my Grandpa's birthday and my mom and aunt wanted to take him out to dinner at the Cove Room in Port Dover. I didn't really want to get a bus or train all the way to London just to get a ride to Port Dover so I rented a car and drove myself. I've always talked about how you don't really need a car in Toronto because in the rare instance you really do you can just rent one. That's fine to say, but I'd never actually tried it before so I'm glad that it turned out well and validated my opinion. I had no trouble renting (although I had to pay an extra $27 because I'm under 25) and the car got me to and from Port Dover without any problems. I also was impressed that I didn't miss an exit or get lost in the tangle of highways through Hamilton (QEW, 403, 407, 6, etc).

The restaurant was really good too, the specialize in Lake Erie perch which may or may not be a delicacy. I'm not totally sure about the story on that. Anyway it was good, although I did drench it in tartar sauce so I may have masked the natural flavours of the fish a bit. The restaurant also did something unique by giving complimentary salad. As soon as you sit down they put a selection of salads for sharing at your table, like coleslaw, cucumber salad, bean salda, mixed veggies, ambrosia, and a couple others. Also part of the meal was something called "celery bread" which was damn tasty. But I'm a big fan of bread in general so it's not hard to impress me. We had strawberry shortcake for dessert and then I drove back in the dark without any problems.

I still have the car until 2pm today so I'm heading out to Ikea, Costco and No Frills to pick up a bunch of useful things that would be too annoying to take on the subway.