Not too much is going on right now, I feel like I'm just biding my time until winter decides to go away. I did do my taxes last night though. But they weren't that exciting because I only get like $200 back. My RRSP is deducted directly from my pay cheque so I pas less tax all year long. Which is better I guess but it's still fun to get a big lump sum in the Spring.

I also signed up for the Zipcar service here in Toronto after a coworker shared an awesome deal with me (no application fees and a lower yearly fee, contact me for details if you're interested). I still might not use it that much but at least it isn't costing much to try it. I plan on making an Ikea/Costco trip as soon as I can.

Wing night tonight almost failed spectacularly. I was organising it because Jen had to study and it tends to fail when I organise. Tonight I suggested Le Papillon, a french-ish restaurant on Church street. I went there once a year or so ago and really enjoyed the tourtière, but apparently everyone else thinks the place is horrible. Each response to the wing night email was more negative than the last. It really put me in a foul mood. Anyway, I ended up just meeting Patrick, Chris, Matt and Toni and we went for food at the Queen Mother on Queen street west. It was really good, but I still have a hankering for some tourtière. After food we went back to Chris's to play Star Munchkin and watch the snow storm (with extra thunder and lightning). And now I'm in a less bad mood.

Can't let February 29th go by without a post!

This weekend was an unexpected long weekend as we in Ontario celebrate "Family Day," a new holiday invented by the provincial government. I didn't really spend time with family, but it was still a nice break.

Friday night my brother came to stay with us as he missed his connecting bus to visit his girlfriend in Belleville. Something happened (not sure what yet) that made it so that his bus left Waterloo two hours late. Of course he still had to stand outside for those two hours because it's Greyhound and they're not very good at telling the people standing in line in the cold what's going on. Ahh...memories. So Anthony stayed on our couch and we had some Pizza for supper. We also watched four episodes of "Flight of the Conchords" which is truly an amazing show.

Kim has an exam for a course for work coming up so I spent the rest of the weekend doing things that took me away from the apartment so she could study. Saturday I went on a big shopping trip for things that I've wanted to get for a while. I picked up a knife block with knives, new running shoes and shorts for the gym, season three of The Office on DVD, a bunch of books, some new batteries for my key fob, and finally, a Playstation 2! The PS2 I managed to get used from EB for only $40! It seems to work great so far and it even came with the network adapter! Not sure what to do with the network adapter but in any case I can now play Guitar Hero again! Yay!

Saturday night Kim and I joined Toni and Patrick and Adrienne at Matt's place for pizza and cake. The cake was a super tasty chocolate truffle cake from Dufflet on Queen West and was really really good. I got to talk to Patrick and Toni a bunch about fun camera stuff and even got to try out the wireless flash feature on their new Nikon D300. It's pretty cool what you can do with a proper flash and it made me rethink my original disdain for all things flash (I prefer the light of the scene, not artificial light). It turns out I just need to spend more money on better stuff. Haha. Anyway, after supper Toni and I went down to Chris's place to play Star Munchkin with him and Justin. It was very "Chez Geek" like and quite amusing.

Sunday I went climbing in the afternoon after watching a bunch of the Office with Kim in the morning. It was a good outing, and I did a fun climb where I was trying to emulate being shorter by never reaching more than three inches above my head. It made the climb much harder and really forced me to use better technique. When I got home Kim and I made some yummy pork chops with cream of broccoli soup and vegetables and rice. Then we watched a lot more of the Office; we're almost done season three!

Today I met up with Adrienne and we went to the Autoshow at the convention centre. I've never been before and it was pretty good. I'm not really thinking of ever buying a car so I was mostly interested in all the super fancy things but I did enjoy sitting in a Mini Cooper. If I were to buy a car I would want a small one, but most of the small ones I've sat in are very uncomfortable for me. The Mini wasn't cramped at all though so that was pretty cool.

Valentine's rose

Mercedes something or other

New Dodge Viper

Ooooh, it's a red car

Totally a southern belle car

A blue and white car!

That car has a trunk, awesome!

Lamborghini lineup

Lamborghini Countach 25th anniversary edition

Lamborghini Diablo

Lamborghini concept car

Maserati...nice

Ferrari

Mazda concept car...runs on Ethanol!

This weekend was pretty lazy, I played some Mario Galaxy, read a bunch of my book and watched almost all of the first two seasons of the Office with Kim. Good times! We also made some really good chili (with a loaf of sourdough from the market) for supper on Saturday and I made some healthy Muesli stuff to eat for breakfast. It's oats with a bunch of different dried fruits and vegetables. Thanks Mrs. Jutan for the recipe!

Muesli...mmm healthy

Chili with shredded cheese and sour cream!

I went to see Cloverfield with Kim tonight after a quick supper of Butter Chicken roti from Gandhi Roti (mmm...roti). Anyway the movie was pretty good, obviously no deep meaningful content, but definitely one of the best monster movies I've ever seen. I read some critic say that this was what the late-90s remake of Godzilla should have been, and I think that was a very apt description.

It's all shot first person sort of Blair Witch Project style, but with a better quality camera. It's pretty shaky which can be disorienting and unpleasant at times, but I found that I eventually got used to it.

Whenever I see a movie about some sort of disaster and it's effects on large cities I think about how bad it is to be in a large city when anything out of the ordinary happens. There's basically no way to get out of the city and there are so many extra bad things that can happen (like buildings falling over when giant monsters fall into them). Anyway, I comfort myself knowing that Toronto wouldn't be a very interesting place for monsters or other disasters to come visit, so I'm probably OK here.

Last Friday Matt and Toni hosted a surprise birthday party for Patrick at Matt's house and it went really well. Everyone even managed to keep it a surprise. We had sushi and pizza and all kinds of other snacks and drinks and I think maybe thirty people showed up.

Saturday night I played Chris's new version of Ticket to Ride with him and Patrick and Toni. Board games are fun, but I never get to play any of the ones they have enough times to get any good at them. They always seem to have new ones.

Anyway, Sunday was climbing in the morning (which was excellent) and then I played Super Mario Galaxy with Kim for like 6 hours or something. The game is primarily one player, but a second can help with some small things as the main player moves throughout the level. Anyway Kim started a game while I was climbing and she seems to be a bit addicted now. It's pretty amusing.

Sunday night Kim and I went to the gym for some proper exercise and that went pretty well. We met Chris there and he showed me a couple stretches and things which is good because I'm pretty incompetent.

The rest of my Montreal trip was pretty good, although there wasn't much to report on. I spent most of the time working and the rest out with co-workers for supper and drinks. The hotel was really nice, and the flight back was as nice as the flight in. I really didn't get to see Montreal though, so that was too bad.

Rob is off to Australia for a year so we had a couple going away events for him this weekend. On Friday Kim and I met him with Patrick to go to the Old Mill Inn for a Winterlicious meal. It was a really nice restaurant and the food was great. Last night was the official going away party for Rob at a bar in Queen West. I think he managed to pull in about 50 people which was pretty impressive. We had a great time having drinks and food, chatting and play pool. I'm going to miss Rob so I'm glad there was a good opportunity to see him a bunch before he's off.

Today we cleaned a bunch and relaxed, and I played with Patrick's camera some more. Now that things are unpacked and clean I even took some pictures of the apartment for the blog. Tonight we're having supper with Matt and probably watch the new James Bond movie on his fancy new TV.

Kitchen and Dining Room

Kitchen

Bathroom

Bedroom

Den 1

Den 2

Living Room 1

Living Room 2

Living Room 3

View from balcony 1

View from balcony 2

View from balcony 3

View from balcony 4

View from balcony 5

View from balcony 6

View from balcony 7

Coffee table clutter

I'm in Montreal now! Specifically in my hotel room connected to sweet sweet free Internet. Having a laptop is a good thing.

I'm really impressed with my whole travel experience this evening. I took Porter Airlines from the Toronto island airport. In total it took three hours to get from my apartment in Toronto to my hotel room in Montreal. That's pretty damn good I think. Plus it was definitely the best flying experience I've ever had. I went to Union station and got on the free shuttle to the ferry dock. At the ferry dock there was a special Porter lounge where I was able to check in while I waited for the ferry. After the 90 second long ferry ride I was directly connected to the terminal where I was able to sit and relax for half an hour in comfy chairs with cookies and a cup of tea.

The flight wasn't very full so I had my seat to myself and was able to read a bunch of my book while eating yummy fancy "root vegetable" chips (potato, carrot, taro, turnip, etc) and drinking free drinks. The plane was a fancy new plane that is super quiet and efficient and so on. Apparently it's more efficient and environmentally friendly per-passenger to fly this plane to Montreal than to take a bus or car. So that's fun too (as an aside, the train is still the efficiency winner for mass transit). The pilot talked to me a bit before I left and he mentioned that it's also really powerful and fun to fly. All the staff seemed really friendly and happy so it was a really good experience.

I left the plane and walked to pick up my checked bag, and as I arrived at baggage claim my bag popped out and I was able to pick it up and keep going without even stopping. I grabbed a taxi and although the guy drove like a crazy-person I arrived here in one piece and in amazing time.

I just checked and standard fare to Montreal by train is equal to standard fare by Porter (about $250). So if I'm ever going to Montreal by my own money I would seriously consider Porter just for how easy it all was. I really didn't feel like travelling tonight, so I'm glad it was so easy.

We had a successful trip to Ikea last week so we've been able to almost finish unpacking. The apartment is in much better shape although I'm not quite ready to take pictures of it yet. We got a rental van from U-Haul to cart all the stuff back home. They claimed it would cost $20 + kilometers which would be a better deal than the $60 delivery charge from Ikea. I know there are often extra charges but I thought I'd at least be able to avoid getting insurance. Unfortunately that is mandatory now so by the time everything was added up the cost was about $60. Which is equivalent to the cost of delivery. Fortunately we added value by using the van to get a ton of groceries from No Frills and Costco.

Also from Costco I picked up a spice rack. Matt had one at our old place and I liked having it because adding new spices to food makes it more interesting. So I got the big 25-jar spice rack hoping to store the five different spices I currently own and slowly accumulate new ones as I learn what to do with them. But when we got home and opened it, all the jars were already full of spices!! This may seem like a deal but I feel robbed of the opportunity to choose my own spices and learn about them. Plus I have no where to put the spices I already own, which was the main purpose of the purchase. I guess I can try to learn about the spices that came with it, but that feels too much like someone else making my spicing decisions for me. And I think empty jars would have been more motivating than jars filled with strange, even frightening looking substances.

Today I was in Ilderton helping Kim finish clean out her old apartment and we had supper with my Mom which was pretty good too. My cousins Shannon and David showed up just before supper because they were skiing at Boler Mountain all day (which is right next to my mom's place). They were able to stay for supper which was great since I normally only see them on holidays and other family events.

I had to come back to Toronto tonight because I'm off to Montreal on a business trip tomorrow. Plus I have to go to John's house in the morning to help test out some new holds for his climbing wall. Should be fun!

The trip back today was...interesting. I had two large suitcases containing the rest of Kim's stuff so I had to take a taxi from the bus station home. I maybe could have walked and dragged them here, but that would have been a massive schlep and I figured it would be better to take the $7 ($10 tops) cab ride. Boy was I wrong. "Something," is happening in Toronto tonight (no idea what) but when "something" happens the roads around our buildings kinda explode/implode on themselves with the result that driving times increase exponentially as you approach Front Street. Well all seemed well when I came in on the bus, but between the time I got off the bus and the taxi got to about Adelaide and Simcoe the traffic explosion hit. It took another half an hour from that point to get to my building. The fare was over $25 by the time we got here but I only had $20 in cash. Rather than spend time mucking about with my credit card the driver just took the twenty and drove off muttering all the way. If I had come into the city five minutes earlier I would have missed the traffic completely. And looking out my window now I can see that it is entirely cleared up only fifteen minutes after I got home. Crazy.

Patrick just got a sweet new camera, the Nikon D300, and he's looking to sell his old Nikon D70 so I'm evaluating it for a couple weeks to see if I like it. It's a nice intro-level digital SLR camera. I've been thinking of buying one for a while because I don't like how restrictive my point and shoot is (even though it is one of the most manual friendly point and shoot cameras around). I also like that DSLRs let you take photos in "RAW" format, allowing you maximum control over the final image and complete retention of all data. Anyway, I've been playing with it tonight and I present to you the standard "rock and dreidel on my desk shot" that I do when I'm playing with cameras (be sure to click for the full size version).

Rock+Dreidel on desk