Taking a few more days offline as I go in for my surgery first thing in the morning. They’re taking out about a finger-sized piece of muscle from my thigh which I’m told I will hardly miss and will heal from quite quickly so with luck they are telling me the truth and there will be little downtime (Say WHAT?). It’s so hot and noisy in this studio though, enough so to risk my health with adverse effects on healing, that we’re all going to spend the first two nights of recovery at a nice hotel instead. Hopefully that’ll also off-put any stress that Nefarious has from this with the joy of the hotel’s four-storey high corkscrew waterslide. I will do my best to take some photos of the operation.
I got a totally fun totally cheap RC car today… It’s got big flotation tires on it so it can flip over and drive upside down (it seems tough enough to handle the abuse we’ve been gifting it), and better yet, can drive in the water as well. It’s pretty fast, and it drives like a tank, where you can control the left and right sides separately which lets you do things like spin in place. We had a ton of fun with it at the park, as well as at home, and shared our glee with the many kids who gathered to watch our games. Not that their parents were mad about Nefarious smashing into them with the car, but I figured that letting them have a try too would alleviate any anger they were subconsciously considering!
All in all a nice day, especially after a couple very rough days (made worse by the brutal temperatures in our skylight-heavy studio) where I was feeling so terrible I was melodramatically almost wondering if I was even going to wake up the next morning. Nefarious and Cassie and I sat on the roof today under sun-umbrellas reading The Ogress and the Snake, a collection of fairy tales from Somalia (not as good as I’d hoped), and then in the evening before bed read a couple more chapters from Island of the Blue Dolphins, a gift from Caitlin who also enjoyed it as a child. We went to Another Story today, one of Toronto’s best bookstores (especially for kids’ books), and picked up some great additions to our library, including some graphic novels which Nefarious is starting to enjoy reading by herself.
Oh, and I fixed my truck. It’s been making nasty banging and creaking noises when I go over bumps, and I worried that my suspension was having troubles, but thankfully it was nothing more than one of the clamps holding the exhaust in place having broken… A quick wire-job, and now the problem is “solved”.
They’re not terribly exciting but there are more toy pictures after the break.
Nefarious made these videos on the indoor waterslide at the Belleville Ramada Inn of herself, Caitlin, and I… We had so much fun on it. They also have a decent outdoor pool (which is quite nicely heated) and a sauna. I recommend this hotel for the slide alone if you (or the little one you’re travelling with) are into such things… Up a notch, I totally want to go to Great Wolf Lodge some time — everyone I know that’s stayed there with their kids has loved it. This was shot with my Olympus Stylus 1030 SW by the way, a camera which has served me very nicely. Unfortunately we forgot to turn the audio recording on, so the clip doesn’t include Nefarious’s charming narration.
We just got back from a five day road trip through Ontario. We went to Ottawa to visit my brother and Nefarious’s cousins, and then went up to Lake Dore near Algonquin Park and also stopped to see the Bonnechere caves, and then went to Belleville for some back-to-school shopping and then further south to Prince Edward Point which has beautiful flat stones stepping out into Lake Ontario, where we saw a few water snakes and Nefarious caught a number of frogs, and we climbed Macaulay Mountain as well. Lots of swimming and exploring and a ton of driving. That’s the very short version of course, but I wanted to get a last road trip into the summer before Tuesday’s surgery. After that there’s the CNE and school starts again…
I filled up the squirt gun with food colouring for the girls to play with, and they had a great time colouring the wall of our laneway, and were even joined by our neighbour (whose noisy band I have occasionally whined about here) who took a turn spraying. It fades amazingly quickly, so even if it doesn’t rain in the next few days as expected I can’t imagine it being very visible by the middle of next week. Annoyance about noise aside (although I’m happy to say that’s an issue that’s mostly resolved and there’s a decent middle ground in place now), one of the things I love about living in a place like this is the freedom to do harmless yet often-not-tolerated-by-landlord things like this.
Other than that I have been looking at all of the wonderful retro pictures on Cerebral Museum, perhaps my favourite tumblr blog so far (which I found following links from Crappy Taxidermy), and chuckling about the “Gog and Magog” story from Chirac (in which he claims that George Bush asked him for help in 2003 defeating the agents of Satan in the Middle East).
