Month: February 2003

This morning I had a rather harrowing experience on the 401 (very long, large highway). I was on a ramp that was joining with some other ramps to create the collector lanes on the 401 Eastbound around Dixie Rd. in Mississauga. As such, there was lots of nice empty pavement in front of me and the few cars around me, and so we were accelerating up to around 110kph. Suddenly, ahead of me in the lane on my left, cars started swerving out of that lane rather quickly. I caught a glimpse of what they were dodging from between bumpers: a concrete barrier, about 1.5m square, was skidding along in the middle of the lane. I was forced to move into the lane next to me to avoid cars that were swerving into my lane and decelerating – I’m lucky that the lane was there and that it was unoccupied. As I passed the commotion, I noticed a pickup truck that was pulling over onto the shoulder – which had another of these concrete thingys in its bed. Evidently, the barrier had fallen out of that truck somehow – I didn’t actually see it happen, so I have no idea how. It didn’t even look like two of these things would have fit in the pickup’s bed, so maybe it was balancing on the edge of the tailgate or something…

Anyways. The only reason I drove all the way into the city today was because I’m going to the Sleater-Kinney show tonight. Seeing that they only play north of the border every few years or so, I jumped on this once I saw the announcement in my weekly TicketBastard mailing. And I’m going with Jordan, which will be fun. Damn, that’s an old photo of her.

Man, there’s a lot of stuff to talk about.

I took the 14th off to spend with Sandy. We had an amazing time together, and I think (and hope) I’ve figured out how to balance everything together, like one of those plate-spinners. We went mini-golfing to The Putting Edge, which features glow-in-the-dark indoor mini-golf courses. Sandy loves mini-golf, and since we were there at 12:30 in the afternoon on a Friday, we were also the only ones on the course, which of course meant much horsing around and cheating. According to the scorecard, she won by two strokes, but who cares? The Putting Edge has a few arcade games as well – Sandy played a game of Simpsons Bowling as Lisa. I’ve always wondered what that game was like, and the bowling seemed extremely easy and the humourous phrases were pretty, well, humourous (after a strike: “I feel just like Susan B. Anthony – if she bowled.”)

Afterwards, since we were already in Burlington, we went over to Ikea, because Ikea is always fun. Picked up a new bedside lamp, and other knicky-knacky things. One thing that I’ve been looking for forever was a tiny little artist’s easel, which I finally found at Ikea, for 95 cents. Schweet. More about that later.

In the evening, we went to our favourite restaruant, the Carden St. Cafe (who finally have a website – woooo!). I never tire of the food there – it’s just so damn good. And the staff are excellent, excellent. We ended up with the booth right next to the door because I made late reservations and the owner? was so accomodating for us, she put up some partitions to shield us from the wind and then she actually ended up locking the door and using the other one!

After dinner we went to the movies. Sandy decided that she wanted to see Final Destination 2 again. Hey, it was good fun the first time, right? And this time I’d know what was coming so I wouldn’t have my head buried in her shoulder as much 🙂 Well, not 10 minutes into the movie and there was a very annoying black scratch right down the centre of the first reel. It was pretty obvious that someone had fux0red this print up, and bad. It was extremely annoying, especially for Sandy, as she used to be the assistant manager at a movie theatre and so she knows that this isn’t supposed to happen. So we went out to get the manager and complain, and probably get some passes. While she was dealing with that I ran into my old friend Mark from university, so we chatted for a bit. The manager offered Sandy either passes (which suck, because you can never use them for the first week of a movie’s release, at least) or we could go see another movie tonight. The only thing that hadn’t already started was Daredevil, and I guess seeing the trailers in front of every other film for the past month had brainwashed us into thinking it would be OK, so we went. Summary: it was god-awful. No more needs to be said.

After that we snuggled into bed.

I spilled a glass of water all over one of the bookshelves this morning. You’d think that the aftermath of such a boneheaded maneuver would have woken me up, but I’m sitting here sipping my second coffee of the morning. I mopped up everything as fast as I could, and had to throw out half a ream of paper because it was soaked all the way through. Also, books don’t like to be wet, and what happened? The brunt was poured right onto the shelf where all of our recently purchased Sluggy books are. In a word, fuck.

After that, I had to run around to find my security pass (in my shirt pocket, hanging in the closet), cell phone (in the back pouch of my bag), grab a sweater to put on, and what did I forget? My headphones. For me, I may as well have left a third of my brain at home. Listening to music keeps me functioning at work. By 2pm, I’ve got my headphones on if I already haven’t been listening all day. Crap on a stick. We’ll see if I make it through the day…

I think ‘cull’ is my new favourite word. It just rolls off the tongue, and it can be applied in a variety of circumstances. I always thought it meant to select for purposes of destroying (eg. to cull a herd), but apparently it only means to select from a group.

Yeah.

News front pages from around the world – cool stuff. If only the images were then linked to the stories online…

Today’s caffeine intake: high.