I spent the morning going around Paul and Kelly’s new house (!) in Toronto (!!!). For a limited time (it’s a BIG file) you can click here to download the (14.8MB) picture file.
Right. I doubt my posts are going to get much more frequent in the next little while as it’s that time of year again and I have lots to do. But I’ll try!
Last week I painted the living room and put everything back where it was supposed to be. I’m pretty happy with the whole thing, all in all, but the white colour on the north wall could get pretty boring after a while. I’m thinking of going back to the paint can in May and trying that one again. Still, it’s certainly fine for now.
Olga and her boyfriend Rob came up for the weekend and we had a very good time. We had lunch on Saturday with my parents at the Art Gallery’s Agora restaurant, which was very nice, and after an afternoon of busy shopping in the Eaton Centre we went to dinner in the 360 restaurant at the CN Tower. It certainly hasn’t got any cheaper, but it was quite delicious.
Sunday, Rob and Olga came to church and heard us to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, which went very well. After a lunch in chinatown, the whirlwind weekend wound up, and they shuttled back to the airport. I went off to Roy Thomson Hall to perform my last concert with TMC for a while, and then went to a very nice birthday/Christmas party at Tricia Haldone’s place on Queen East.
This week I seem to have a ton of little details to clean up before my Christmas trip to England next week. Must get back to them now, in fact!
Have a wonderful Christmas and a very Happy New Year!
Ok, the bad news — another two weeks between posts. I’m sorry!! I’ve been busy!! In fact, I’ve been painting! (That’s the good news!)
The dining room looks great — a really nice shade of blue above the bookshelves on the south wall, and the hallway is really really yellow. I think that’s a good thing… At least it’s cheerful and warm for cold winter days. I may get rather sick of it by spring. But now I know how to paint! I feel so empowered.
Starting to get very busy with choirs in the buildup to Christmas. The churches on the hill had an ecumenical service today at CCDP, and although I almost feel asleep during the service it was generally pretty fun. Nice to see and hear some other choirs in one setting. Sort of a ‘sampler set’ of St. Clair-area churches, like those packets of herbal tea with two of each kind of bag.
I’ve also been helping to draft role descriptions for Exultate, principally related to expanding the membership of Exultate-the-corporation to Exultate-the-choir. It’s interesting, believe it or not.
Booked my ticket for England for Christmas…
Oh, and I bought and played through Aliens vs. Predator 2, kinda violent (well, duh) but lots of fun. And scary! Dave got too scared to play! 😉
Well, well, well. I’m baaack!
Some of the things that happened over the last few weeks:
– 3 Carmina Burana concerts (1 Exultate, then 2 Mendelssohn)
– 1 Miraculous ‘how-the-hell-did-we-pull-THAT-off’ Ager concert (Calvin)
– Civ 3
– Continued progress towards fitness
– Lunch with Christine Griffith, who’s doing great and thinking of retiring back to Canada
– Finally got off my butt and bought paint supplies (this morning’s little miracle)
– Civ 3
– Cooked a fabulous four-course meal for Sean, Sara & Kelly
Wait and see how long it takes me to start painting…
Gosh, it’s been forever since my last posting. Doh!
Busy couple of weeks… Well, not really *that* busy. I’ve been staying up too late at night playing computer games, then sleeping in in the morning. As a result, I’ve been getting up too late to get much done. Better turn that trend around before it gets too ingrained…
This Friday is the Exultate concert and I have a bunch of things to do for it, including printing posters, buying wine & beer, and making punch. And brownies. It’s going to be a great concert! Tickets have sold quickly, and I expect we’ll have an excellent house.
In other news, Pete came ’round on Friday and helped me round out my workout routine. He’s almost finished his programming course and has started looking for work. Terrible time to be jobhunting, unfortunately. I hope it works out.
On Saturday I went to an excellent party at Pauline De Jong’s apartment. She’s managed to repaint the whole thing, despite having only lived there for 6 weeks. I haven’t done a thing about repainting my place, and I’ve been here for over a year… Must get up earlier in the morning and do something about that…
I had dinner yesterday with Jackie Chilton and her friend Anthea at Lai Wah Heen in the Metropolitan Hotel. Lai Wah Heen qualifies as the best chinese food I’ve had in a long time, although at $55 per person it’s far from the cheapest! The wontons in the soup were bursting with shrimp, and the peking duck was truly excellent. I’ll have to go back there… when I’m working and can afford it again.
Not much else to report. The new Star Trek show (Enterprise) is mildly entertaining and I’ve been watching it with Dave, but am not going out of my way to see it… I went out yesterday afternoon and bought a couple of cheap but nice dining room/spare living room chairs… The weather’s blah and I think I’ll go to the art gallery this afternoon. C’est tout!
Week two of sweet freedom. Friday and Saturday I was in Guelph for Thanksgiving, and came back into town on Sunday. I made a first attempt at a pot roast for Sunday dinner, which came off pretty well (and has been serving nicely as leftovers this week). Monday I finally crossed StarCraft off my list of unfinished games by successfully completing Brood War. Fabulous game. I also found that the Blizzard web site had some 100+ extra multiplayer boards available for download, so there’s going to be plenty of StarCrafting in my future so long as I can convince Dave to keep trying to beat me.
Also on Monday I watched Starship Troopers, a truly horrible movie in almost every sense: bad acting, silly plot, stupid lines, and a completely excessive amount of gore and violence. Well, I was warned. Now to hope some of those images will leave my head soon…
Yesterday I worked out in the morning, had Kelly over for lunch and talked about the Exultate database, spent the afternoon reading a great web comic strip The Bad Boys of Computer Science and trundled off to choir for the evening. I’m getting some stuff done against my to-do list, but it’s going slowly so far. Next up: rescuing all of my photos from ClubPhoto.com before they start deleting them from their server.
I’ve managed to check a couple of tasks off the to-do list. The latest one was finally getting the wireless LAN working with the other router. So I can write this from the living room, via the internet connection upstairs in the office!
The weather’s been spectacular for the last few days. I was up at Forest Hill at lunch time to join Michael, Diane and Jack in reviewing the facilities at Grace Church-on-the-Hill. The Exultate concert is October 26th, and it’s going to be great! Exultate’s also competing live on the BBC on October 14th in a choral competition. Wish us luck!
I’m FREE!!! It feels wonderful… Not that I’ve been sleeping in, so far. I had a pretty normal weekend, but yesterday I got out for a game of golf with Bruce (fabulous weather, our last batch of summer heat timed perfectly for me), cooked myself a nice dinner, and went off to Mendelssohn. Today I took my time over the paper, went down to work out in the gym, did laundry, watched some TV and went off to St. Thomas’ to help Kelly build a better contact management system for Exultate, and then to rehearsal. Tomorrow, I’m up to Grace Church-on-the-Hill at lunch to do a site visit for our upcoming concert and help plan decorations, etc., and tomorrow evening I’ve got an evening with the people from my project team.
So far, I’m loving life. Must see if I can find a rich woman who’s interested in keeping me as a house-husband… 😉