After almost 3 weeks with no climbing I'm out of shape. Tonight was rough, but I'm going to make up for it by climbing on Friday and Sunday of this week as well. The trip back from gym tonight would have been better if the weather was either warmer or dryer. Stupid cold rain. My fancy birthday green tea+jasmine is making it better though.

Last night we went to Cafe Polonez for wing night which is Rob's favourite Polish restaurant. I was definitely impressed. I had the pork goulash on a potato pancake with a random, high-value Polish beer (strong, large, cheap -- 6%, 500mL, $4.50). The food was amazing. I got to try a pierogie as well and it was excellent as expected. There were so many other things on the menu I want to try, so I'm definitely going back.

I visited Kim this weekend at her apartment in Ilderton and it was a nice relaxing time after my busy trip to San Francisco. She had to work on Saturday so I slept in and spent most of the day writing up my journal for the trip. I didn't quite finish before she got home, but I got close enough to finish it on the train back to Toronto today, so take a look if you're interested. Saturday night we had a good meal out with dessert at William's.

Today I visited with my mom for a bit and she made me some yummy apple crisp. Mmm...apple crisp.

I want to buy a bunch more games but I haven't really had the chance to play the ones I've already bought so I feel a bit weird buying more. In particular I want Guitar Hero 3, because it's awesome.

I got back from San Francisco late Tuesday night and I must say it was an excellent trip. I had a great time seeing the sights, visiting ILM and chilling with Mike. I'll be adding details and lots of photos to the Trips section of the site, hopefully this weekend.

Last night Matt and I attended the second Tafelmusik concert of the subscription we got. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I found that because I knew what to expect in terms of size and content I was able to enjoy the music more this time. The only strange part was that in the second last movement of the final piece the man in front of us turned around and in an angry voice told Matt to "please stop doing that!!" As far as I could tell Matt was sitting perfectly still and not making any noise. The people behind us also could not figure out what the problem was. We never found out either because the guy left very quickly at the end.

I failed to blog for two weeks once again, but this time I'm going to say it's because I was busy preparing for my trip. The trip I'm on right now! Yes, I'm in San Francisco and it's pretty awesome. I visited ILM today and wandered around downtown a bunch and I'm meeting up with Mike in a few minutes to head to what sounds like a really awesome party. Good times! I'm keeping notes again, so when I get home I'll add a new section to my trips page and fill in all the details with pictures and stuff.

Two weekends ago I went climbing in John's new cave to celebrate his acquisition of holds for the roof. It was pretty fun and we took a video of me completing the "first successful traverse." I was going to put it on YouTube or something to make it a bit more manageable for those with "lesser" Internet, but I'm pretty lazy so I just uploaded the full uncompressed video to our server. Download it if you like, but be warned it's 124MB. I love having well over 200GB of web space to play with.

Someone should follow me around and poke me saying, "Shouldn't you maybe update your blog today? You have stuff to write about you know." But no one does that so my blog goes untouched while I sit around watching Simpsons reruns or playing Wii.

Speaking of the Wii, I recently bought three new games for it: Sonic and the Secret Rings; Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess; and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. They're all awesome. I'm currently playing Sonic and Matt is playing Zelda. I'll probably start playing Metroid in parallel with Sonic though because I really want to play it too.

The weekend before last Kim came up to visit and the big event of the weekend was a dinner party at our house with Matt, Adrienne, Toni and Patrick. It was Matt's idea and it went really well. We had mixed green salad with red and yellow raspberries topped with balsamic vinegar dressing; garlic cheese bread with fresh parsley; cheese ravioli in a creamy onion sauce; and a really big, really tasty caramel chocolate cheesecake. Mmmmmm....so good. Then we played some Wii at Chris's house for a bit.

This weekend just past Kim came to visit again and we went to see Cirque du Soleil: Kooza. It was fantastic! I would recommend it but it's all done now so there isn't much point. After the show we got supper at Da Gianni and Maria's Trattoria which was good as always. I had the pomodoro gnocci and Kim had the lasagna. For an appetizer we shared a plate of tomato slices topped with the best fresh mozzarella I've ever had. Soooooo good. I like food.

Now I'm starting to think about my trip to San Francisco. I'm going for a week leaving November 7th and I want to be sure I see a bunch of stuff so I need to plan out my time.

We switched our thermostat over to heat last night. The heat already had to come on this morning, and when I got out of bed it was chilly and my bathroom floor was cold. And now sitting at work I have to wear a sweater because it's not warm here either. Come back summer!

On my recent trip to France I used a Eurail pass to get around the country by train for slightly less money than if I had just gone to France and bought train tickets. I'm still not sure if it was worth it given the changes that happened with my trip, but whatever.

Anyway, the Eurail people ask you to fill out a survey and mail back your itinerary when you are done your trip. In exchange they send you a present. I chose to get a set of flag pins, one for each member of the European Union. Well my gift came today and I had completely forgotten that it was coming. So I opened the package and took out the pins and this is what I saw:

My pins of the EU

Yes, two pins are missing. And yes, the package is sealed. But it couldn't be a mistake. Perhaps there are only 22 countries in the EU? So I checked Wikipedia. Turns out there are 27 countries in the EU! I'm missing five of them and even if all the spots in the package were filled I'd still be short three pins!

So I figured out the missing countries and they are: Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. Wait a minute, 22 pins + 7 missing countries is a total of 29, not 27. So I must have two pins that are not part of the European Union! I checked again and they are Croatia and Norway. So what the hell is up with this?

Perhaps the pins are only for the countries that are connected by the Eurail system? Wrong again! There are 25 countries in that set, so I would still be missing three. Which three? Well that would be Montenegro, Serbia and Switzerland.

So anyway, nothing about this set of pins really makes sense. But they're still kinda fun.

I'm still pseudo-neglecting the blog here, so I thought I'd do a quick weekend post to at least keep up to date.

This Saturday, Michael came to visit and so did Keizo. Michael was just in town for something to do with a Chess club at his new school and Keizo was here to run the half-marathon on Sunday. I hadn't seen either of them in a while so it was awesome to see both. Especially Michael who has been absent for almost a year I think. Matt and I had Burrito Boyz for lunch with him and played a bunch of Wii. Later, I went with Keizo and many others to supper at the Hot House near the market. It was about the same as usual but the service was really really bad. Especially given that we were such a large group!

Sunday I was up bright and early to go bouldering in Niagara Glen with people from work. It was a perfect day for it and we all had a great time. Real rocks tend to be sharper on the hands though, ouch! When I got back I went rollerblading with Chris and then we met up with Matt, Rob, Patrick, Toni and Will for supper at Epicure. I ate out way too much over the weekend, but I also had A LOT of exercise so I think it balances out.

Tonight was wing night and we went to the Butler's Pantry out on Queen West. The food was good and cheap, but I was most pleased with the walk. It's a nice night tonight, and Queen West is always fun to walk along because of all the shops and other interesting things to look at.

Alex just dropped off my new Renderman teapot that Mike got for me at Siggraph this summer. Awesome!!! Now I have one from each of the past three years sitting on my desk at work. Plus I got the cool Maya/Max/Motion builder long sleeve shirt that they gave out a Siggraph. Swag rules!

2007 Edition of the Renderman walking teapot

I'm just posting a photo I took after the concert a couple weeks back. I did it while we were waiting for the ferry to take us back. We had an awesome view of the city all lit up and sparkling. It was neat because I've never seen the city from that far south before. Also, the water was so calm which made for some awesome reflections.

Toronto at night from the island