Friday was
angrykat's birthday / Robbie Burns Memorial Day, complete with bagpipes and a vegetarian haggis (haggis being one of the few dishes that likely improves in the vegetarian version). I arrived on the street not complete certain of the house number, but the sound bagpipes of bagpipes led me in the right direction. moon_custafer and green_trilobite where there, along with nexstarman and indefatigable42 and others. The birthday girl was letting people draw on her torso with markers. I can't draw and I can never think of anything good right off the top of my head, so I settled for a tic-tac-toe (I tied with myself). Saturday I may or may not have committed a misdemeanor. I went on an outing with the Toronto Urban Explorers, a group which goes to check out places they're really not supposed to be. The undisclosed location turned out to be a long abandoned brickworks outside of Caledon where we may or may not have crawled thru a hole in the fence to gain access. The site consists of several completely bricked up buildings (although with doors ajar) and chimneys rising right out of the ground, marking the location of the underground kilns. The whole thing was a lot of fun, and I'll see about posting some pictures later. Most of the people involved are heavily into photography. My only problem was I was wearing absurdly light socks for walking around in the snow and my feet were completely frozen at the end of the day.
Late that same evening was my friend Daniel's going away party, he's moving to Ottawa. Ran into some Space Community people I haven't seen in a while and got caught up. If you know anyone looking for a career path right now tell them to become geologists, they're being snapped up right now, and even second-year University students can go to Alberta for a summer job and earn $2000 A WEEK.
Quote of the party: "At the beginning of time Satan took a carbon atom and attached three oxygen atoms, and this was the beginning of evil." (Geologists hate carbonates because they get into everything and mess up ore processing.)
And on Sunday I had a very nice brunch with Kyle, who I haven't seen in a while. Mel's Deli on Bloor has a huge, and not at all expensive brunch. The Big breakfast was way too much for me, next time it's the Somewhat Smaller Breakfast. Afterwards we checked the new BMV on Bloor, which is still my new Favourite Place on Earth.
And the Cinema Studies Student Union at U of T is doing free Tuesday night screenings of cult movies I just found out. This week was the great Shogun Assassin, based on the Lone Wolf and Cub manga. This was the English adaptation of the Japanese movie, which is actually the first two movies in the series cut together to maximum the number of decapitations. It's completely over the top (with geysers of blood spraying from people) but played dead serious by all the actors, and is a thing of beauty.
