Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Does this mattress smell of pea?

On Saturday I was working on the roof over the deck. I have a 16' ladder that folds down to 4' high, but it's a bit difficult to raise and lower when it's extended the full 16'. It jarred my shoulder when I was lowering it, which only started hurting in the middle of the night. (I think I irritated my rotator cuff). Anyways, Heather suggested icing my shoulder, and grabbed a bag of frozen peas from the freezer for me. It made it feel better, and I fell asleep.

When I woke up, the bag of peas was pretty much defrosted. There was a tiny leak, and some liquid from the bag had seeped into the mattress. At which point, we wondered, just how do you get a pea smell out of a mattress? (Heather washed it with hand soap and a wet towel and it was fine).

My shoulder was okay in the morning, which was fortunate because I had a tee time at 1:44pm at Crosswinds. It's out in the boonies, about 45 minutes west of Toronto. Craig's friend (Pete -- originally from PEI -- last name Rogers) had an expired raincheck for $166, which he talked the clubhouse into accepting. So the round cost us $25 each! My putting wasn't good and my chipping was bad, but I still somehow managed a 93!

Heather and I are the proud new owners of an iPod, which is charging and syncing as I type. It's our wedding gift to each other. (A guy at work bought an iMac, and Apple has a special where if you buy an iMac and an iPod you get $260 off -- so we split the difference and I got the iPod for very cheap). So instead of selecting our favourite CDs for our drive to PEI, we will have our full collection. We feel very modern.

Last Wednesday we went to LeeAnn's dentist (Stephen Diana) to get moulds made so we can whiten our teeth before the wedding. (LeeAnn's a dental hygenist and it's her wedding gift for us). Bernice and Marissa actually are patients of Stephen, so they hitched a ride and the four of us had a road trip to Georgetown in rush hour. It took no time at all for LeeAnn to take the impressions. Later Stephen came out to talk with us, because he grew up in Malton and was in my sister's grade. We talked about how there's an instant bond between people who grew up in Malton, moreso than what we've seen in other neighbourhoods in the GTA.

It was getting late by the time we drove back to Toronto. I had been hankering for Dupont Chicken, my favourite rotisserie chicken place which is near Marissa's house. We drove down Dupont but didn't see it. Made a u-turn, and then saw a fenced-off area cleared for condo development. Oh no!!! my favourite place was gone! We resigned ourselves to try another restaurant in the area. There was another Portuguese restaurant nearby (Eduarda's Kitchen) that looked busy, so we tried it out. It turned out that it was the same place, they had just moved (and changed their name...) It was excellent chicken and we stuffed ourselves. Then Bernice bought some custard tarts for dessert, which were also amazing but after which we were more than full.

This weekend I'm hoping to finish (& start!) the front walk. I've bought flagstone and limestone screening from Rock Valley in Vaughan, and have spent a grand total of $71. It's a really good place for rocks. It looks like it should be pretty easy to lay out.

Anyways the iPod finished syncing and I'm now listening to Arcade Fire and singing out loud. Heather's laughing because my singing isn't that good. In fact I don't even know if I should be using my singing and good in the same sentence.

I should go cook dinner.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Our street was a large construction lot today. Apparently our street is fairly flat east of us, so the city's decided to raise the street 2" in front of our house, gradually sloping towards the east to allow drainage. That means that the sidewalk needs to be raised, which means our front walk also needs raising.

The city sent a crew that ripped up the sidewalk and our front walk this afternoon. Fortunately for me, I was also planning to rip up the front walk at some point to replace it with flagstone. Also fortunate was that Heather was home to see the notice from the city (nice advance warning...) and so we called the crew supervisor to ask them not to replace the front walk. (But still having them do the harder part of ripping up the old walk and disposing of the waste).

So now I have two house projects on the go.

The crew was really fast -- they started on our street around noon, and by 6pm they had torn up the sidewalk and affected people's front walks, put down the forms for the concrete (except ours :) ), and poured concrete for most of the sidewalk. If only I could complete my projects that quickly. (Although they do have much cooler tools).

My stag was this past Saturday. It was really fun. Most of my university friends came out (mostly from out of town). We started off at Deerfield at 1:30pm, playing best ball because there were a lot of non-golfers. I had Craig and Ram in my group, and we won, finishing one under! It was a perfect day for golf, about 22C and a bit of a breeze. It was a really slow day on the golf course, though -- it took almost seven (! ) hours to finish the round. I thought it was our mini-tournament that slowed everyone down, but it was the groups in front of us. After Doaner had organized poker at his condo's party room. I crashed in Doaner's condo (along with most everyone else) around 5am, a long day of drinking.

Sunday I took it easy (Heather had gone out with Sue and Nadine on Saturday and wasn't doing too well herself).

Last night our Ultimate game was against a group of high school kids (judging by the ???? '07 on the backs of their tshirt) (actually it said the name of their high school but I've forgotten that detail). We could have beaten them, but didn't play a very smart game on offense. I also haven't learnt to judge Ki's throws very well yet -- he throws it harder than Craig, and I usually slow up expecting to then catch up on a deep throw, but I can't catch up to his throws. Next week is the last game of the season.

My previous team is getting back together in the fall, minus Robin. He's a really nice guy off the field, but I've never enjoyed playing with him, and neither did a few other people on the team. Anyways, for the fall it looks like I'll be playing Ultimate on Wednesdays, and hockey on Thursdays. So I may not run into cousin John until next summer.

We've been getting a lot of RSVPs for our wedding! According to our handy-dandy little spreadsheet on Google, we've received 32 out of 59 invites. The invite asked for an RSVP by August 20th, so we're expecting a few more this week.

We're still getting used to our garbage day switching to Wednesday mornings. We were cleaning up after dinner this evening (Heather has a bit of a sniffle so I made my tom yum goong shrimp soup) when we remembered by accident. What with the whole sidewalk being freshly poured, I wasn't quite sure where to put the garbage. I opted for in front of our neighbour's house across the street (Freda's house).

Thursday, August 09, 2007

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.