It's a late hockey game tonight (10:15pm) so I'm just home having dinner & chatting with Heather.

The deck renovations are turning out pretty good. I've redone all the woodwork and soffit; there's just the fascia and decoratives parts to put up, and then I can paint everything, and finally replace the gutters. Replacing the gutters is what started all this -- the original gutters were brown with white paint from poor painting jobs. Next thing you know I'd removed the aluminum siding, found the rotting wood, removed that... It does look quite good already, being nice and square set.

We've knocked a few things off our wedding list. Last Friday we went up to Becker's and bought shoes for Heather (ballet flats that she's getting dyed). Then we went over to Bloor W, and bought our wedding bands. We found mine at Tiffany's -- a pretty standard plain band, but that's what I like. Unfortunately we couldn't find anything to match Heather's engagement ring, and so had to go back to Birk's to get the matching band. This was a different Birk's store than where we had our very poor Birk's experience, from which we swore we'd never buy Birk's again. This store was better, but it's still the last thing we'll buy from Birk's. It's too bad we couldn't find a matching style elsewhere.

Our wedding invites have started coming back. We realized when Maricar wrote out the return that we didn't make it obvious about stating your name on the return. We were worried that we would get all our returns indicating the number of steak and salmon meals, but no names. However everyone's written their name so far.

Leslieville was listed as one of the five "next hot neighbourhoods" in the most recent issue off Toronto Life! It said some nice things about the area -- "they come for brunch and stay to renovate the long-forgotten Victorian gems", "Converts swear they'll never head west again" -- hmm, sound familiar?

Joy Bistro has expanded with a really nice patio bar, called b-side. (The bar above is called OverJoy). Heather and I went for a walk after dinner on Saturday and ended up stopping there for a drink.

The Brickworks Bakery is moving into the vacant store beside Starbuck's -- that's great, because we needed a bakery in the neighbourhood. All I'm waiting for is a butcher, and fresh pasta store, (maybe a fishmonger as well) and then I'll be able to do all my grocery shopping on Queen E! very cool.

We had a minor flooding incident a couple weeks ago. There was a freak set of storms that day -- it absolutely poured for an hour at 7am, and then around 2pm it came down in sheets. The ground was saturated and had nowhere to go down -- and so it started to leak around the rear basement window. Heather was home and did a great job mopping and moving all the stuff away from the puddling which reached about an inch at its deepest. I had planned for some water in the basement when I built the shelving last winter, and so nothing was damaged. We haven't put everything back, because we're waiting for another storm just to make sure it's not a more serious problem. There was no water damage when I bought the house, and it hasn't leaked since we moved in, so I think we'll be okay.

I went golfing at Deerfield a couple Tuesdays ago, with Doaner, Craig and Chris. One of the reasons was to introduce Doaner and Craig, who are both coming down early to PEI (Tuesday before the wedding) to golf. The other reason was to tune up for my stag, which starts with a tournament at Deerfield. I shot a very respectable 44 on the front, had a terrible 14th (took a 10), and ended up shooting 96. I was very happy with my game -- Craig pointed out I wasn't transfering my weight to my forward foot, and once I fixed that, my driver started going straight! I was making great ball contact all day, and parred six holes (a record for me). We were all shooting well -- we were 40, 43, 43 and 44 after 9. Craig had a chance at breaking 80 for the first time, needing a bogey on 18, but put his tee shot on the 18th in the pond (although he didn't know he needed a bogey until afterwards). He ended up shooting 82.

Well I should get ready for hockey.