Touch You Last

It’s the morning after the MDS Nordion 10k and I feel pretty decent. Of course, my old man's knee is feeling typically old man-y, and rolling out of bed induced more shrieking than it usually does, but otherwise I feel good. Everything about this race went better than I expected. We ( Isha and yours truly) went in with modest expectation. We were in it for the run itself, and while the closer we got to 60 minutes the better, we weren’t going to kill ourselves in the process. I haven’t run a race in at least three years and this w as the first time that I really saw the crowd. I’m usually inside my head the whole race, but this time I finally saw the huge numbers of people that come out and cheer, and it makes a big difference. We also had our own cheer team, also a first for me. Cathy showed up in a bunch of different spots around the course, snapping pictures and biking around like mad. And Joe and Emma made a couple of fantastic signs, ones that must have req...

Back in University, I played on an intramural inner-tube water polo team. On a difficulty scale, that ranks somewhere between soccer-baseball and frisbee-golf. I was about dead average as far as overall team skill went, but we had some good people on the team. (Brady was one of the star players.) We played an undefeated season, and I’d never been a part of something like that before. I was the unathletic kid, the one picked somewhere around second last when captains drew their teams. So when our water polo team got to the last game of the playoffs, I gave a little speech in the change room, the content of which amounted to I’ve never been on a winning team before. I’ve never even scored a point in anything I played in gym class. You have to win this game for me, or I will forever remain a loser. And then we went out and lost. As of last week, I started playing my first team sport since then, which I guess would be the first time in seven years. I mentioned it before —the All Sorts of S...

Okay, so the house: We’ ve been looking at houses since shortly after Christmas. We wanted, well, pretty much the same things anyone working in a city wants—to be outside the city but not out in the sticks, to feel like a community and not just be part of a faceless burb , to be near public transit, and to get a good house that wouldn ’t take sixty years to pay off. With all this in mind, we decided to look exclusively in Blackburn Hamlet—a small community that is part of Gloucester, just before Orleans. It’s about half an hour away from downtown by bus, it’s a bit like Georgetown— and it’s surrounded by a greenbelt and grandfathered in so it can’t go all obese and nasty with overdevelopment . Our agent came well recommended and she was just amazing throughout. She had a great eye for detail, and she was available any time we needed her. It was a slow process, but mostly because only sixty or so houses come on the market in Blackburn a year. It’s filled with a lot of people who...

Dude, I've got updates galore. It's the first time in a while that I've had a surplus of things to write about, but... I don't have the time to share it all just yet. Do I get off on this teasing? I'd be lying if I said no. Tomorrow. I'll have something up tomorrow. Those of you on Facebook already got the sneak preview (which includes pretty much everyone except Isha ).

I’ve just signed up for Ottawa Race Weekend . It’s only the 10K, so don’t go thinking I’m planning anything crazy like a marathon. Cathy taught me better than that last year . Running by us as we cheered her on near the end of the race, she croaked, "Never do this," and her words have haunted me ever since. I’ll be Isha’s tag-along for this year's 10K. We had a practice run last week, maybe seven kilometers or so, and I didn’t fall down dead so I feel pretty positive the race won’t kill me either. It’s the first one I’ve done in at least three years. My stupid quest to run a 22 minute treadmill 5K is still ongoing. I got stalled for a while but finally made some progress last night. I’m at 25:32. Sadly, I’m too dumb to remember how long I was taking when I first started this. I’d like to say I’ve shaved five minutes off my original time, but I’m pretty sure that would be a damn dirty lie. Lastly, we’ve joined an All-Sorts-Of-Sports league run by the Ottawa Sp...

Joel Plaskett has the physique of a base player—tall and super-lanky. That came as a surprise because I suppose I’ve only seen head shots of him, and even then not too often. But he rocks out all the same. He’s six feet and one hundred and eight pounds of straight up rock. He played the Capital Music Theatre, a storied Ottawa venue that changed locations about a year ago. It was our first time there and probably only our sixth concert since moving to Ottawa. I think I’m more fashion-conscious when heading to a concert than for any other occasion. I’m of a certain age now, honestly just a little too old to fit into the hipster music scene, and I find it hard to strike a balance between trying too hard to look young (hoody, wallet chain, converse all-stars) and just saying fuck it and strapping on a fanny pack. But what’s good about Plaskett is that he’s been around for a while, so there’s actually a few fogies in attendance. Fogies older even than us. Peter Elkas opened up. G...

Tomorrow, about this time, we’ll just be coming back from having seen Joel Plaskett . More on that tomorrow. Here’s a song all y’all should download: Secret March by The Wet Secrets . I first came across it while listening to Radio 3’s Podcast #93 “Sweating to the Indies ,” and then had it further burnt into my brain by successive episodes of the R3-30 . Totally catchy; will totally make you want to run down the street as fast as you can. As if that’s not enough—the band’s name: naughty! The whole album is available to download (btw) in a totally free, especially legal manner. I’ve listened to the whole thing twice, and I’m not quite at the point where I know the tracks by name, but I do know my vote for favourite song title is either I Teabagged Myself , or Grow Your Own Fucking Moustache, Asshole!

Well, bigger break between posts then I’d meant there. Got caught up in drink and talk. Anyhow, onward! Movies I’ve Seen Lately That I Cared Enough About To Form An Opinion On The Way We Were – Hmm. Not feeling manly admitting I’ve seen that one. It was… good, overall. I played the first half hour while ironing, because I wanted to have seen it but not so much to actually see it . It wasn’t until a few days later when I watched the rest of it that I realized Streisand’s character was totally fucking annoying for the first half. She was way better in the second half, but until then Hubbell could seriously not take her out to meet friends cause there’d be five minutes of casual conversation before she’d start hollering, “HOW CAN YOU PEOPLE TALK ABOUT HIGHBALLS WHEN OUR GOVERNMENT WON’T ACCEPT COEXISTENCE AS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO ATOMIC WAR?!?” Better still, after they break up, she calls him up and more or less nags him until they start dating her again. Oh...

Alright, here come a couple of microposts throughout the night. I’ll be drinking (and mixing), so this might get sloppy. My reading habits have been for shit over the past year. I used to read like a fiend back when I was still in Georgetown , which I can largely attribute to two hours a day spent on the goddamn GO Train. Over the past few years though, I’d found that movies had taken the place of books in my life, which I kept myself from overanalyzing at first but later chalked up to my being over reading somehow. I’d even semi-convinced myself that I was never that into it in the first place. But lately I’ve been getting back into it, and now that I am where I am, I can see what my problems were. One, I’d been doing all my reading before bed when it turns out I’m really not a night reader (three pages in and I’m out, or if I struggle through more I never remember it.). Two, work has been stupidly busy (this one is more an excuse for the last four months than the pas...

I promised these photos ages ago but we only just got them developed. Here is the Warp Core Breach, sampled at the Star Trek Experience in Vegas . Quite tasty, very boozy, all in all a good time... except for when you'd occasionally suck up a nice pocket of dry ice through the straw. That part wasn't so good.