1st post

Welcome to my blog. This is my first entry! I hope to be a fairly faithful blogger.

Those used to receiving a high volume of e-mails from me may be relieved that they can just come here at their leisure instead now and we can avoid all that e-mail clutter / traffic!

I am feeling a bit under the weather today (slight cold and a case of the Monday blues).

We had a busy weekend. Details...

Friday night: Took the kids to see Journey to the Centre of the Earth in Real 3D at the Scotiabank (formerly Paramount) theatre at John & Richmond Friday night. It was very entertaining family adventure (if you can look past the implausible pseudo-science) and the 3-D effects were quite nifty. The theatre we were in was not packed as most theatregoers seemed to be there for the Dark Knight (which was playing in multiple theatres, including the IMAX theatre). It appears the Dark Knight had a record breaking first weekend at the box office.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/ I plan to see it when the first wave of crowds dies down.

Saturday:

Gary & I spent most of the day (with Ryan and Claire in tow) scouring the Castle-field / Orfus Rd. area for tiles, fixtures and cabinetry for our condo reno. We also made it back to the East Liberty Market Deckla kitchen showroom http://www.dekla.ca/ to meet with Boris who had started on a kitchen design for us featuring Scavolini cabinetry. Boris's layout designs were somewhat surprising to us but it was pricing out within our budget so he is scheduled to come out to our unit later this week to get a better sense of our space. We have an estimate back from one contractor but are waiting for another for comparison purposes. The Scavolini cabinetry takes 4-5 months to arrive from Italy so our planned work schedule (we hope to have major work down when we are away on our Med cruise in late September-early October) may need some tweaking.

In the evening we went to see the movie musical Momma Mia. In addition to Ryan, Claire, Gary & I, Cathy (Gary's sis) and Marie (Gary's mom) also joined us. We had planned to go to the Cineplex Varsity in the Manulife Centre but the 7AM showing was sold out (checked on-line) so we went to see the 6:30 AM showing at the AMC theatre complex in the Toronto Life Centre (Yonge Dundas Square). We probably saved ourselves quite a bit $$$ wise seeing it at the AMC vs The Varsity as adult admission (with a Movie Watcher card) is only $11 there. We all enjoyed the show. It is getting good audience ratings Meryl Streep is amazing as Donna and while Pierce Brosnan's singing and Colin Firth's dancing are sub-par, its still a fun time. The Greek islands scenery is spectacular. We came out humming ABBA tunes. (Actually took the cars and parked in the municipal Green P parking lot underneath the square for the first time... it was reasonable... $6)

Sunday: After attending the 10:30 mass at St Mike's cathedral (Father Bush, the rector, was the homilist and delivered another great sermon), we headed down to the Top Cuts in the block on the South side of King (west of Victoria) for Ryan to get a haircut. It was pelting down rain. Claire & I ordered drinks and waited for Ryan in the Tim Hortons across the street. Following that we headed home, had lunch and did some housekeeping. (We have had to re-organizing storage since on account of our new master bedroom suite (queen bed with tall boys on either side) arriving from Casalife last Thursday.) About 3 PM we left to head over to the Rogers Centre. Gary had received free (CAW) vouchers from his Bombardier co-worker Donna for redemption at the Argos box office for tickets. We wound up with decent seats in section 114 just two rows below the concourse at around the 20 yard line (at the opposite end from the Jumbotron). I had taken the kids to pro basketball (Raptors), hockey (Leafs) and baseball (Jays) before but this was the first time we had been to a CFL Argos game. The Argos were outplayed thru most of the first half but came roaring back in the second half to take the lead with less than a minute reamining in the 4th quarter. The Argos wound up rolling up close to 550 total yards on offense and their QB ran for over 100 years on his own. The one negative... the cost of food at the concessions... I bought 2 chcken finger with fries and 1 chicken wings witrh fries combos and 2 drinks at half-time and only got a twonie back from two 20s! In any case, the kids came away happy! More game details: http://www.argonauts.ca/index.php/article/joseph-hurddles-argos-over-esks I dropped them back to their new Kilgour Estate http://www.kilgourestate.com/ condo home around 8:30 last night.