Coming up to the end of a particularly long week, I'm looking forward to a busy weekend. Tonight Anne and I are going to the Opera to see Madame Butterfly. It's not my favorite opera, but should be a nice break nonetheless.

Tomorrow the Usual Suspects are getting together at Molly's for dinner... and on Sunday, I'm going to break the barbeque out of winter storage (well, actually out of the cover it's been hiding under) and grill up the first steaks of spring!!!
posted by Tom at 4:43 PM | link | (0) comments

A nice weekend. Finally finished playing Europa Universalis yesterday (the last sixty years of the game were really boring because I exhausted the tech tree and had pretty much unlimited cash so I bought friends all over, conquered India, and also built a micro-empire north of China running west all the way to the Black Sea.

Moved on to Hearts of Iron, the sequel to Europa Universalis by the same folks: a WWII simulation. Mostly similar mechanics, but with a much more complex economic model. Started playing as Germany and within a year had run out of oil to fly my planes.

Today after church we went curling. It was actually a lot of fun: we got lessons in how to throw the rocks without falling down (much), and how to sweep, and how to keep score. It's a lot harder than it looks. Next step: to challenge the Christ Church Deer Park choir to a friendly match, and beat them. :-)
posted by Tom at 6:00 PM | link | (0) comments

The ongoing battle vs. the clothes moths continues. A setback this week: I didn't appreciate that the bug spray people would insist on the closets being fully emptied. They were far from fully empty: I have big closets with lots of stuff in them.

Curses.

So anyway, they're going to come back on April 1st (yeah, right) so I've got a couple more weeks of living out of a suitcase at Anne's to look forward to.

Of course, on the good side, I've been living at Anne's all week which has been really nice...
posted by Tom at 5:50 PM | link | (0) comments

If you haven't seen it yet, go have a look at Odd Todd. Hilarious.
posted by Tom at 5:11 PM | link | (0) comments

We had a wonderful warm and sunny weekend in Toronto. I spent a good chunk of the weekend doing a spring cleaning and moving stuff up to Anne's to get clear of the bugs (and bug spray) but we also had a great dim sum lunch at Kowloon on Baldwin to celebrate Anne's birthday. Other than that it was a pretty quiet weekend. The feeling of spring is in the air, hallelujah!
posted by Tom at 10:03 AM | link | (0) comments

Just a quick reminder, in case you haven't looked at the book review section of this site recently. There hasn't been a lot of activity here recently, but yes, I do occasionally get time to finish a book. If you follow any of the links on the bookwork section through to amazon.ca, anything you buy will generate a small revenue back to me for maintenance of this site. I do appreciate your custom!

posted by Tom at 4:14 PM | link | (0) comments

So, yes, the clothes moths. They started out in the linen closet, but I put in moth balls and after a little while that seemed to have effect: it drove them out into the rest of the apartment. After a while we figured out that they'd established in the downstairs coat closet, so I moved the moth balls down there and I've put my best coats into suit bags in prep for taking them to be dry cleaned.

Fortunately the condo corp is already planning a sweep to do pest control, and they've agreed to come in and spray for moths without charging me anything. The bad news is that I have to move all my clothes out. So as things come back from dry cleaning, or I do laundry, I'm moving the clean stuff up to Anne's. By next week most, if not all, of my clothes will have moved. I expect I'll need to move the cat as well.

Very Unhappy.

Also, it's snowing. Again. This winter is the longest one ever. Grrrr.
posted by Tom at 8:01 AM | link | (0) comments

Grrrr. I have clothes moths in my apartment. Very Unhappy.
posted by Tom at 6:06 PM | link | (0) comments

Anne's in the house!
posted by Tom at 8:48 PM | link | (0) comments

Anne and I had a nice day up in Midland & Penetanguishine yesterday with my parents. We were celebrating Mum's birthday with a nice day out cross-country skiing in Awenda park. We covered a lot of ground -- about as much as the two days of our previous ski weekend combined. 16km! We then had a great dinner out at the Riv Bistro in Midland, a very nice greek restaurant, and then Anne and I set off back to Toronto. It probably wasn't very wise, as we got caught in a major snowstorm. The roads were terrible, and we were crawling down the 400 at, maximum, 60 km/h. We weren't alone on the roads. As well as the other travellers, we passed several spin-outs, but with a small, low-traction car I wasn't about to play good Samaritan and get stuck. We made it back in about 4 hours instead of the two it took us to get up, but we made it down safely.

Today marks the first day for the Usual Suspects dinners restarting. It's been a good 6 weeks since our last dinner. It'll be great to see the gang.

Tuesday last week was the Shrove Tuesday party at Calvin. The smell of pancakes wafted down the road to Yonge Street and gave me a great appetite. But the best part of the evening was the entertainment: we had a series of choir members & others in the congregation perform a wonderful mix of comic solos, instrument numbers, and more serious Art pieces. I was part of a barbershop quintet backing up Karen in a piece from "the Music Man", which went way better in performance than in rehearsal. (Whew!)

Anne and I are both recovering from colds, and with another cold wintery day today we're both looking forward to spring. I've had a number of invites to go down to New York and visit people -- thanks, everyone! -- and we're going to plan a trip as soon as it warms up a bit!
posted by Tom at 5:33 PM | link | (0) comments