Jeffrey Vanneste’s Personal Blog

Rach and I went to Ottawa for the weekend to visit from friends and expose me to my first musical. Friday night we took it pretty easy and just sat in the hot tub. Chris/Tracy made us supper which was much more involved than any of our own. Apparently not everyone cooks at maximum heat all the time. It’s like when you put clothes in the dryer, maximum heat.

Saturday started off with Rach wanting to go check out parliament (pics). I saw my first set of protestors on the way in.

We checked out some big fancy library when we were there. They had all these security/safety measures in place to save all the books. It seemed like a good idea to just digitize all that stuff.

Rach and I had a few fights while we were touring. Something about me being awesome. She went from this:

To this:

Indeed. For the evening we went out for supper and then went over to the musical. The musical we went to was called “Hairspray“.  I can’t say I was that excited over going to it.  It turned out it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  I imagine Rach will want to go to many more so I better like them a little bit.

This next weekend I have a friend (Andrew) coming from Edmonton that will be in town for 4 weeks.  Both Sean and Shawn figure they will venture out here as well before I go back to Saskatoon.  Only 30 days left.

When Rach and I went for pie/cake this is what we ended up buying.

Ya, it’s amazing. You may notice that there is more icing than there is cake. Take notes, this is what makes a good cake. Reducing actual cake leads to increasing taste.

Went to 300 on Saturday (Friday was sold out).  It was pretty good.  Not awesome, but good.  We went to the IMAX which is always a treat.  It’s even better when there are no commercials at the start.  There was a single trailer and then the movie.

After the movie I saw a guy wearing a pirate hat.  He wasn’t dressed up like a pirate.  Just the hat.  People in Montreal wear funny hats but this was pretty sad.  Pirate hats, never in style.

I got my 360 back.  After much complaining and many many phone calls I finally got some compensation for all the trouble.  They are giving me 3 months of xbox live (for the time I lost with no 360), Crackdown (since they shipped the 360 to the wrong address and I had to pay $40 for shipping), and 5200 microsoft points ($80) since all my xbox live arcade titles do not work in offline mode (but they will soon).  I’m no longer bitter.  I hope I don’t have to go through the ordeal again.

Rach made me go for a walk tonight  Rach and I went for a lovely walk tonight.  Deep down she really wanted to go for chocolate.  We went to this pie place that we had went to before.  I recalled from the last time that 1 slice of pie was $6 and maybe 1/6 of the full pie.  A full pie costs $20.  So we just bought a full pie and brought it home.  Best idea ever.

Rach and the GC girls (Genetic Counseling Girls) wanted to go to this big tubing hill when their boyfriends were in town. We went out this weekend for the big event to Glissades des Pays d’en Haut. I can’t say I was terribly excited for this outing. Tubing down a hill requires absolutely no skill. It’s like the activity people who have failed to ski or snowboard do.  I think Devin would say “Tubing is not a skill game.”

Rach told me they had 30 runs. Runs. At a tube hill. It’s not like you can steer the tube. Well, this is what the runs looked like.

There was a chair lift and also a belt to take people with their tubes to the top.  The problem here is they only went half way then you had to climb stairs.  Seriously, why not go all the way?  They had lift tickets which made me laugh. I started to imagine if they would have “tube patrol” instead of ski patrol. They would be the expert tubers in orange suits with the little first aid trays behind them. Sadly, I did not spot any tube patrol.

We paid an extra $4 so we could go on a raft as well. We thought it would be pretty awesome to run and get some extra speed.  Here is us getting ready to run with the raft.

It seemed like it would be awesome. Until these tube-nazi’s told us “This isn’t an Olympic Sport.” What? Really?  After they shared their intellect with us we got in the raft like good little boys and girls.  The rafts actually were the least exciting part. They didn’t go that fast and you just sat there.

Going down the expert runs on the tubes turned out to provide the best speed. I think we tried every combination of with 6 people. A straight line hanging onto each others legs, “The Clump”, 2 by 3, etc. This is “The Clump” at the top.

I took one picture while I was going down the hill. I think it turned out really good.

I think I complained to Rachel quite a bit before going.  I made the deal that if I went tubing this year that we would go skiing next year.  I think tubing at White Tail (which is now called “Blue Mountain”) still tops this (plus bonus points cause it’s in SK).  At least there you get on a huge tube with like 10 people and go flying into hay bales.  As was said today, “As the chance on injury increases so does the fun.”  I think I will retire my tubing career and consider taking up more exciting or skillful activities.