Paul Henman at henman.ca

Fortunately a meeting got moved so I left work early and headed off to meet up with Kerri, to see yet another place – this one was near York Mills and Vic Park. It was OK – in fact it dethroned the #1 choice of places available on the 1st; however it didn’t trump the one that’s not available until the 15th, so our predicament continued. Read more »

Home. Tired. 44 hours in one meeting! And it was only a 4-day week.

It’s not going to be a restful weekend though: there’s the Beer Festival, Taste Of The Danforth, the Hot & Spicy Food Festival … oh, and finding somewhere to live!

Apart from my race notes and the odd auto-posted bookmark, I’ve not done an update since the Spirit of Toronto two weeks ago, so what’s happened since then?

• I took a day off and tried to make a dent in my never-ending To Do list
• There was the annual badminton competition – Mark & I were knocked out at exactly the same point as last year, so still no medals for us
• Most of Sunday was taken up with moving my stuff from one (work) laptop to another – most of it went well but my Outhouse configuration wasn’t copied over so I’m still trying to get it to behave the way I like I’ll tolerate
• Monday was Victoria Day, which is a stat day in Canada so we borrowed a friend’s car and headed down to Niagara. A friend’s mum & aunt were over from England so we took them to a few wineries (listed below), on to Niagara Falls (photo) and then had dinner at the Pillar and Post in Niagara-on-the-Lake – we finally made it home just after midnight.
  The wineries tour included:
  • Featherstone – an early start (technically before they opened, but Kerri works with them so that wasn’t a problem); the Topaz was a favourite
  • Stoney Ridge – we joined a tour then sampled a couple of wines before checking out the cheese shop
  • Henry of Pelham – lunch was the first order of business and then a few more samples; I recall the purchase of an expensive bottle but I don’t recall which one
  • Crown Bench – we picked up another bottle of the Hot Ice; the Wild Ginger Ice and one more (I think)
• Tuesday was back to work – it may have been a 4-day week but it felt more like 9 days’ effort!
• Thursday night we had dinner with our English visitors and another friend – we took them to The Nose (Gio Rana’s Really, Really Nice Restaurant) and everyone enjoyed it. Hopefully Kerri will post more details, but basically the food, wine, service & company were great.
• Yesterday I nipped downtown to CompuSmart‘s closing down sale and picked up a hard drive enclosure, then went out with Andy in the evening (a pint of Denison’s Weissbier at the Auld Spot then more wheat beer & dinner at Allen’s).
• After watching the race this morning I had a look at my tax assessment – apparently I owe them the (large) amount I calculated but somehow Kerri’s rebate is a lot less than I thought. Hmmm
  Other fun activities today include a huge pile of washing, an equally large pile of dishes, and then some reading for work. Hopefully I’ll get time to make progress with Black (gun porn on the Xbox).

Kerri and I went to a South African wine tasting event held last night by the Toronto wine meetup group at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Funnily enough the wine was provided by DGB and the presenter was an ex-colleague of Kerri’s.

The wines we tasted were:

1. Maverick Chenin Blanc 2005
2. Bellingham Our Founder’s Sauvignon Blanc 2006
3. Bellingham Our Founder’s Shiraz 2004
4. Maverick Syrah 2004
5. St. Augustine 2004 (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot & Shiraz)
6. Spitz Merlot 2002

(My favourites were #2, 3 & 4.)

It’s been a crazy week (moreso than usual) but there were a few things I spotted online that I wanted to comment on / just link to:

• John C. Dvorak says (in an article in PC Magazine) that we should stop using Auto-Reply but clearly he’s wrong. Read more »