We were downtown last night for a life-drawing session with a twist – the models come in costumes. Dr Sketchy’s Anti-art School arranges for ladies in themed outfits to show up at Mercury Lounge and pose, and local animators and drawing enthusiasts show up to record it all in pencil. They’re generally racier costumes, but [...]

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Natasha and I attended an event in the market last night (which I’ll describe in depth later), but street parking was a huge hassle because the big parking garage was closed, so I drove around detours getting frustrated until I discovered that the parkade on Clarence and Dalhousie had some spots.
Returning to the car 3 [...]

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I took Natasha out for her birthday dinner last night to a place she’d been hearing about, Ottawa’s “New Restaurant of the Year”. Zen Kitchen on Somerset was pretty amazing. It was hands down the best vegan food I’ve ever had (which is not to say they had a lot of competition, but it was [...]

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The May Long Weekend was the official start to our planting season. Natasha and I spent Saturday and Sunday rehabilitating our front flower bed after it was dismantled earlier in the spring by the backhoes digging up our sewer pipe. A few dozen Portulaca Grandiosas (Moss Roses), a stack of pink Petunias and a couple [...]

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Today was my team’s first Dragonboat racing practice! We did pretty well for our first go! I’m super psyched to be participating in such a neat event. The next couple of weeks I’m going to be working to improve my flexibility and rowing muscles so we can power past all the other teams on race [...]

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We had a little brown visitor this morning in our back yard, taking nibbles off our tulip leaves and dandelions (can you believe they’re yellow already? In April?) which probably taste of vinegar from Natasha’s latest experiments in green weed-killing alchemy. The neighborhood stray cat has been on patrol lately, but I haven’t seen him [...]

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On my bike ride in the other day I passed by some fresh chalkmarks on the pavement. I suspect the symbols are part of a game or a map, but I can’t find them in orienteering rulebooks. At first glance I thought they look similar to warchalking marks, but there’s no IDs, and who’s surfing [...]

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Over the Easter long weekend Natasha and I joined some friends headed up to a maple-syrup-producing “Cabane a Sucre” on the other side of Gatineau, called Le Domaine De L’Ange Gardien. It takes about 40 minutes to get out there, driving highway 50 completely skirting around downtown Gatineau and then following pretty clearly-marked signs through [...]

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While watching the final scenes of “Pursuit of Happyness” the building fire alarm went off. In my experience, building alarms are generally false alarms, but I always evacuate nonetheless. Except this time I smelled smoke. So we scurried around to grab our coat, boots, and two big bins full of our important papers and took [...]

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Apparently I’m the last person to read Elizabeth Hay’s “Late Nights on Air”, it’s already a #1 Canadian Bestseller and it picked up the 2007 Giller Prize. For the two of you who haven’t read it yet, I offer this glowing review.
Elizabeth Hay’s depiction of  life at Yellowknife’s remote CBC radio station is lyrical – [...]

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