Week off!

Reading week!!!!

The shitty thing is I am expected to actually do reading. Instead of doing that I watched Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle three times. That movie is great.

It turns out that awesomemobile had busted a gasket. $200 later four of us piled into awesomemobile and drove to Boston.

Hanging out with Andrew was cool. We did a bunch of touristy things this time like go skating on the Frog Pond in the Boston Common. We also drank a pint at Cheer's, which is actually called the Bull and Finch Pub. Norm was not there.

We checked out a party in a Harvard grad student's dorm. We didn't just crash it, Bana lives there and asked if we wanted to come. They were doing a wine tasting party. I expected many white men with bonded teeth and cable-knit sweaters knotted about their shoulders. Instead it was just a bunch of people having fun and trying wine. It seems I can hold my own in a discussion with Harvard grad students, but I was drunk so it's hard to say. I thought I was being witty and sophisticted, but it's totally likely I was just telling fart jokes. PULL MY FINGER, IVY LEAGUE BOY!!! Actually, I think I was talking about the pope a lot.

Andrew and I drove out to Salem Mass and went to the Peabody Essex museum, which was totally amazing. Salem is so cute! Ok, fine, they did have some witch trials, but they've cleaned up and have all sorts of random psychics and haunted houses and such. There is also a liquor store in Salem called the bunghole ("we're not #1, but we're right up there"). It even has a website, www.thebunghole.com.

Evidence of Winter Glee

I forgot to mention below in # 4 that the snowman says "Free Cider". I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse.
The free cider was pretty good. Much better than the one I bought for $3 that I spilled all over Jenny. Damn, that free toque they gave me is ugly.

Winter glee and Beavertails

I'm currently in Ottawa, enjoying reading week and hanging out while Awesomemobile (my bitchin' and elderly '92 Mazda 323) gets fixed. Hopefully it won't be anything major or expensive and I can drive to Montreal early in the morning and pick up my party peoples and we can all go to Boston...assuming the snowstorm doesn't close any roads. You know, there are a lot of factors working against this trip, but I'm sure my excessive winter glee will cause everything to work out.

Winter is great! Today I skated the length of the Rideau Canal and back (that's 7.8 Km x 2!). The best part is I can still walk! My very underused ass and hip muscles are pretty painful though.

Today was the last day of Winterlude, which is a lot like the Québec City carnival, only it's more canal-centric and lame. I see from their website that Winterlude was started in 1979 by the National Capital Commission (or, as we call them in Ottawa, 'sugardaddy', since the NCC seems to fund everything around here, via the federal funds they collect from the rest of the country - take that, other cities!). I also see that `Last year, an estimated 616,000 fun-seekers took part in Winterlude activities. More than a third of those visits were by people from outside the Capital Region`. The Capital region has about 750,000 people living in it, according to the current sign. So everyone around here tends to get in on it, since there's very little else to do. Also, they block off the major streets near the canal to run the 'sno-bus'/'bus-o-neige', so people might say they participated in Winterlude activities because they had to drive a 20 minute detour, which is sort of participating. Kind of.

People mostly just skate on the canal and look at the ice sculptures. They have a bunch of zany crap going on to entertain those under 12 and over 50, like junior figureskating shows and lumberjack stuff and mazes made out of snow and discarded x-mas trees and clowns on skates. I remember being really enthralled with it all when I was little and then becoming way too cool for it at about 13. Today was proof that the coolness factor has eluded me once and for all. I skated around with my friend Wendy and I started counting the ways in which we'd become lame Ottawa people, like those we used to make fun of:
1) I never really got properly dressed and was wearing jeans and a hoodie over my pyjamas, reasoning that I would both save time getting dressed and be more warm (for some reason I incongruously applied eye liner though). I would never ever do this in Montreal.
2) We didn't give a shit what we looked like and wore MEC ski jackets and boy skates. When we were in highschool we would have at least worn dainty white uncomfortable figure skates while mocking the middle-aged civil servants for looking lame in their ugly jackets and weird velcro skates. MEC jackets were cool then.
3) We took the free red toques that Canadian Tire was giving away as part of their skate-a-thon thing. Wendy's cooler than me because she didn't wear her toque since it would mess up her hair. I didn't wear a hat for grade 10 and 11 for that reason. When it got really cold, I'd wear one of those ear-band things, but I took it off when I got a block away from school.
4) Wendy took photos, including one of me hugging a giant inflatible snowman. That reflected badly on both of us and made us look like tourists. That's a big no-no for locals in a city that's occasionally overrun with tourists.
5) We refrained from swearing in the presence of little kids.

It was really fun, and I don't care if I'm dorky for saying so. I just got new skates and they're really comfy and warm and my hideous Canadian-Tire-toque kept my ears warm.

To top it all off, I got a free Beavertail because my brother is working one of the Beavertail's huts. If you've never had one, it's deep fried dough dipped in cinnamon and sugar. Oh, yeah, the real name is 'Hooker's Beavertails'. The ones on the canal are soooo much better than the ones in the mall in Montreal because they deep fry the dough and it gets all crispy in the cold air. I really want one of the old school sweaters that the 'Tail employees had to wear. They said 'hooker's beavertails' and there was a picture of a beaver. My friend Kris kept hers and brought it with her when she moved to Halifax, to much acclaim. When you wear those outside the Ottawa-Hull region people tend to assume it's ironic. Nope, the Hooker family was 100% serious.

The very glamorous life of cleaning cat shit.

A few days ago I went to Pur and got my hair dyed and cut by the wonderful Nick. It's pricey, so I can only afford to do this a few times a year, but they do such a good job I feel it's well worth it. The problem is that Nick styles it so it looks awesome, but then I sleep on it or have a shower and ruin the effect. I not dextrous enough to use things like curling irons, so I just try to ride out that initial styling as long as possible.

I emerged from the salon feeling very glamorous and generally movie-star like. I felt like going out somewhere fabulous and saying things like 'dah-ling, we simply must do lunch'. Sadly those article summaries were due the next day, so I went home and prepared to write them.

Frikken Pantaloons took a poo on the carpet, so I got to clean that up while watching the OC - but with really great hair. Since the whole glam thing was shot to shit, I ended up cleaning the rest of the apartment and eating macaroni and cheese out of the pot for dinner.

good times

This was a good weekend.

Andrew managed to show up in Montreal. We were fed a whole bunch of yummy fondue goodness, stumbled upon some Chinese new year celebrations and got some drink on. Unfortunately, Andrew got all sickly, and the blue air in Hatter's didn't do much to help that. But their poutine is soooo good and the beer is sooo cheap.
Andrew reverts to being five when he's not feeling well, which is actually pretty endearing. It was the cutest thing ever when he fell asleep on the couch and Pantaloons fell asleep around his neck. He's pretty allergic to her though.

The paper due tomorrow is sort of a downer. I've finished my application to the Master's program I'm hoping to do next year (cause I'm a loser and I'm still in undergrad) and now I feel great because I don't have to think about it anymore until I get a letter back from McGill. I really really really hope they let me in. But there's a pretty good chance that they won't. I should have stapled a fifty to the application. Maybe I can find out who does the admissions and make them muffins.

I probably should have gotten at least some work done with weekend, but it's so nice to just take a vacation from it all every once in a while, even if it means staying up all Sunday night again.