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Posted 3 years, 1 month ago at 14:15. 0 comments
Ian took me on a little driving tour tonight, complete with traffic on the 101. To all those wondering why I chose to take my life in my hands by going driving with Ian, he’s really gotten a lot better since high school. Also, he’s moved to a state where everyone drives worse than he does, so he tends to look good by comparison.
We ended up on Mulholland Dr. just after the sun went down and took in some pretty spectacular views of the valley at dusk. From there, we headed down Laurel Canyon to Hollywood and cruised up and down The Strip for a bit before meeting up with Ian’s housemate, Henry, and friend, Andrew, at Thai Palms for dinner. Sadly, Elvis had already left the building.
Ian and I returned to the Strip after dinner and wandered around in front of the Chinese Theatre for a while, taking pictures and star-gazing, before finally heading back home for a rest.
(Yes, I’m in L.A. this week, for those who hadn’t already clued in.)
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somafm | Filed under Dining, Friends, Travel
Posted 3 years, 2 months ago at 09:03. 1 comment
Kris and I just returned from a week’s vacation out East where we visited my parents at their “new” place — they’ve had it for over 3 years now, and the house itself is 150 years old — in Lockeport, NS. All parts of the trip were fun, save the insane amount of driving squeezed into two weekends on either end. At least we spent the night in Fredericton each time to break things up a little. We even managed to find not one, but two excellent restaurants in downtown Fredericton, something that we previously thought impossible. The restaurant review sites Kris visited for Fredericton rated places like Tim Hortons and Dairy Queen, no word of a lie.
As I went to put the photos online, I realized that I hadn’t put up any photos from our previous 3 trips out to Lockeport. I’m not really sure as to why; I’ll see if I can did up some of the previous photos.
Highlights:
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somafm | Filed under Dining, Family, Travel
Posted 3 years, 4 months ago at 14:50. 1 comment
Kristina and I have started going to the Carp Farmers’ Market every Saturday. They have a great selection of non-traditional meats, as well as grass-fed beef, local cheeses, and, of course, some fantastic produce. This week, representatives from the Ottawa Food Security Council were handing out copies of their Ottawa Buy Local Map. Supporting local farmers is a good way to reduce your ecological footprint and participate in the One-Tonne Challenge.
Also: tasty!
For instance, we had my Dad over for dinner tonight to celebrate our local bounty. The menu featured barbecued local bison, local corn, local salad, cherry tomatoes from our own garden, and fresh blueberry pie for dessert.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, leftovers are calling.
Current Tunes: A Tribe Called Quest - Steve Biko (Stir It Up) | Filed under Dining, Family, Ottawa
Posted 3 years, 5 months ago at 12:24. 0 comments
My long-standing bias against Toronto is still intact, but every time I visit these days I think it erodes a little more. This is thanks in large part to the friends, old and new, who live there.
Kris and I were in town over this past weekend for Lise & Cam’s wedding. We arrived Friday night to stay with Mike and Tyla. Feeling in a celebratory mood (more on this later), and also generally thirsty, we headed out to The Local where we met up with Madhava (whom I hadn’t seen in ages), as well as Beltzner, Chelsea and others whom I knew previously only through legend…and by legend, I of course mean the interweb.
The wedding wasn’t until much later in the day on Saturday, so Shaver played tour guide during the day, showing us around the Distillery District. You can always trust Mike to know all the best places for food, including the best chocolate ever. With an endorsement like that from Kristina, you can be sure we are quite serious. If you haven’t yet been, it’s a great little area, although it could have done with less dog. Speaking tangentally of beer, we even picked up some Mill St. Stock Ale from the Beer Store on the way out of town the next day to tide us over until our next visit.
The wedding (the original impetus for our trip) took place at the Vaughan Estate at Sunnybrook. Sadly, our camera forgot to make the trip, so you’ll have to settle for some stock photography and our insistence that it really was quite wonderful. Congratulations, Lise & Cam!
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somafm | Filed under Dining, Friends, Travel
Posted 3 years, 7 months ago at 16:55. 1 comment
There were precisely 3 hours of sun this past weekend, and Kris and I managed to time our trip to the sugar bush perfectly so as to coincide with them. We didn’t bring the camera, but you probably don’t want to see the heaping plates of maple-soaked pork products we put away at their buffet anyway. Mmmm…crackling.
Current Tunes: Public Enemy - Party For Your Right To Fight (Blak Wax Metromixx) | Filed under Dining, Ottawa
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago at 09:52. 1 comment
Kris and I caught up on our missed Valentine’s Day opportunity on Friday night. Dinner at Juniper was predictably excellent.
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I’ve updated my photo gallery to the new Gallery 2 beta. It looks pretty slick to me so far. I especially like the Random Image feature in the sidebar; it has caused me to revisit many of my older galleries today out of nostalgia.
Current Tunes: The Paperboys - Mary | Filed under Dining, General
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago at 09:50. 0 comments
The saga continues. After a week’s layoff, I thought I would be out-of-shape and out-of-practice, and I was, but I still managed to play better than (most of) the rest of the team, and we lost convincingly again.
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Now that business is out of the way, it’s Miller time:
- Kilkenny - my preferred beer, and many places in Ottawa seem to have it on tap (Thank you, Guinness reps).
- Keith’s - my favorite mass-market Canadian beer. I can’t pretend it tastes all that different from any of the others, but at least I can pretend I’m sitting on the waterfront in Halifax while drinking it.
- Victory Storm King Stout - the best stout I’ve ever tasted. The LCBO has carried it a sum total of once, and I think they’re waiting for me to go in there and beg before they stock it again.
- X.O. Beer - Anyone who’s known me for longer than one trip to the corner store knows that if they’ll put it in a bottle or can, I’ll likely try it (often twice). But beer and cognac? If it didn’t cost $3/bottle — and that’s the price at the Liquor store — I would be drinking this stuff all the time. It’s wicked tasty.
- Schneider-Weisse Aventinus - One could really slot in any dunkel weizenbier, but this is one of the few that I can reliably get in Ontario. Great memories of sunny days spent drinking on patios in crowded squares or alpine towns in Germany and Austria.
Current Tunes: Orbital - The Girl With The Sun In Her Head | Filed under Dining, Frisbee
Posted 3 years, 9 months ago at 19:25. 0 comments
It took a few days, but I finally succumbed to Kristina’s killer cold as well. It completely incapacitated me yesterday, and forced us to cancel our Valentine’s Day reservations at my favorite restaurant in Ottawa tonight.
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somafm | Filed under Dining, Family, Ottawa
Posted 3 years, 9 months ago at 10:35. 0 comments
January is always a family-centric time of year for me. I have two brothers who were born ten days apart at the end of the month — yes, in different years — so I end up seeing a whole lot of everyone.
Tonight, the family assembled to celebrate Bob’s birthday. Bob’s a little picky when it comes to food, so while my gift of homemade chocolate ice cream covered off dessert, for dinner, we headed to La Favorita on McArthur for some seafood indulgence. Oh my, was it ever good. We went the seafood platter route, which resulted in a truly prodigious amount of cooked aquatic life showing up at our table. At first I couldn’t even see the crab legs with all those pesky lobsters piled on top of them, along with the scallops, and mussels, and shrimp… I probably exceeded my mercury quota for the next decade, but I did my best to make sure that no mollusc was left behind. Highly recommended.
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Until now, I’ve been concentrating almost exlcusively on the single-player online experience of Halo 2. This past weekend, I started playing more of the team-based games, largely because Dan happened to be online and sent me a party invite.
I enjoyed playing the team variants with Dan and his friends because they all seemed focused on the mission objectives, Playing with the general Halo populace leaves something to be desired, though. At the lower levels, it was quite easy to dominate people or even whole teams who had no idea what they were doing. But as I started to increase levels to where I seem to naturally plateau (around level 10), some really annoying issues started to crop up.
Most matches pit teams of 4 against each other, but that doesn’t mean they will end with 4 players a side. Quite often, players seem to bolt from games if the team gets down by a few kills, leaving the remaining players to fend for themselves with reduced numbers. Good bloody luck, is all I can say. I’ve also had a real problem when the matchmaking server has put me in a match where I have one bar of connection quality while everyone else is at full. Due to the level ranking system employed by Halo, if I quit out of that game, I am automatically ranked last for that match (unless others also quit), but if I decide to play it out, I have little hope of being competitive while the other players run circles around my lagging ass. It can be incredibly frustrating.
Current Tunes: Sneaker Pimps - Post-Modern Sleaze (Flight From Nashville) | Filed under Dining, Gaming
Posted 3 years, 9 months ago at 17:29. 1 comment
Went out tonight with Kev to celebrate the recent getting together of his shit. Kev was miserable at his former job, so I think the combination of a new job and a real vacation will do him a world of good. Even if things don’t improve for him, at least he’ll have a change of scenery. 
The venue for tonight’s celebratory feast was Nokham, a nice, little Thai restaurant in our end of town. The place was packed, which is always a good sign, and despite a slow start, the service was good. The food was the real star, though. The red curry dish we ordered was outstanding, as were all the starters — spring rolls for me, and coconut-milk-based soups for Kev and Kris. Recommended.
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somafm | Filed under Dining, General
