It's the annual Wonderboy weekend, I'm just waiting for Craig to pick me up. As the kids say, you can follow the Wonderboy happenings on Twitter.

It was a short week for me, with the holiday Monday and taking Friday off. Roach was supposed to be in town this week, but his flight got cancelled from Bermuda last Saturday, so he'll be hanging out in Toronto for the week after Wonderboy, which means he didn't get in the darts practice he was hoping for.

I'm hoping the ice is frozen over up at Kirk's. It has been around 0C this past week in Toronto. One of my favourite parts is playing hockey on the lake on Saturday afternoon.

So the warmish weather has exposed a slight design flaw in the backyard. I had designed the patio and pathway to drain rainwater away from the house, and also not into the neighbour's yards. The water is funneled in between the pathway and the main patio, and through the gate. It worked great in summer, with rainwater going where I intended. However, in winter, when it's around 0C, the snow melts slowly and pools around the path, and then freezes overnight. So there's now a nice sheet of ice as you enter through the gate. I'm not sure yet what to do about it.

Also the lock on the gate isn't lined up anymore. The gate itself is still square, so I am wondering if one of the posts is rising or sinking with the ice. This is easier to fix, but I'm waiting until spring to see if it changes again.

I redid some of the shelving in the basement. I had built in space for 16 bottles of wine, but we sometimes have up to 20. Also, the location was close to the heating duct, which probably isn't good. The shelving is a mix of Gorm shelves from IKEA and kijiji. I had it all figured out, until I realized that the shelves I bought from kijiji were pretty old, and IKEA had since changed the dimensions (IKEA now sells 30" shelves, and mine are 34"). I ended up just buying lumber from Home Depot, and making my own, which actually turned out to be cheaper. I think IKEA changed the sizes, because you can get three shelves from an 8' piece of lumber at 30", but not 34". I'll post a pic soon.

Home Depot had a sale on big house plants, $10 for tropicals. I bought a Dracaena Marginata (Dragon Tree), which dropped most of its leaves, but is still hanging in. We thought it was worth a chance at $10.

Well I should get ready to go soon.

Buzz is evil

So Google has their new social networking tool, Buzz. I tried it out, and it seemed pretty cool. Until I realized all the default privacy settings are not private:

- My email address is viewable to followers of followers (and I can't seem to turn this off!)
- My frequent contacts are automatically added as followers by default
- The list of who I'm following and is following me is public by default (and to turn this off, I had to create a public profile, go into the settings, and then turn this off) (if you don't create a public profile, I couldn't find the option)
- Even if you decline to join Buzz (as Heather did), as far as Buzz is concerned, you're still in
- My Picasa account activity was automatically added to my stream -- I had to turn that off

So overall two thumbs down. I'd give more thumbs down if I had them. What the heck is Google thinking?

I took the afternoon off yesterday, because Heather and I had tickets to Body Worlds at the Ontario Science Centre. We were booked for the 3pm slot, which we figured would be after the school groups had left and before the afternoon crowds showed up. It was pretty cool, and our timing worked out well. There were only two other couples at the exhibits as we went through. My favourite was the nervous system one.

We had dinner last night at The Chef's House, which is the George Brown student restaurant. We originally had planned to order from the Winterlicious menu, but they were featuring chefs from their italian post-graduate class, and so we went for that instead. It was excellent, and very affordable. I had the four courses for $32, and Heather had three for $25 (we shared dessert). The appetizer was prosciutto and pickled vegetables, which was a great combination. Next was tortellini, in a butter-sage sauce; followed by pan-fried whitefish. Dessert was chocolate cake. Mmm good. They have overhead cameras on the prep areas, so you can see how the meals are prepared.

We walked in for dinner, and saw that there's now signs up for Sync Lofts, which is on the north side of Queen St just east of the DVP (there used to be a strip mall that was recently torn down). I signed up on their site just to see what they're proposing:



Today we're going to try the coffee-rubbed pork chops again, but this time with decaf. I'm trying to find a place to buy just a small amount of decaf coffee beans.