Dear Blog,
Here we are awaiting our flight (somewhat delayed) to London. I’m trying to arrange the music on my phone and computer, but the program isn’t being terribly cooperative. Next time I’ll bring the SD card.
So. Music’s updated on my phone. Next step is to run through my files in iTunes – when I transferred my music from my old laptop (Boomer) to my new netbook (Apollo), iTunes went and duplicated all my songs – and then half of them don’t play at all. So that’ll be for our train ride in Italy (if I can peel my eyes away from my window, that is – Tuscany is gorgeous!)
Enough about that. To resume, I went to London, Ontario, for two days to see my family and to give my mom her mother’s day gift. My train was delayed an hour Wednesday night because a GO train stopped (GO figure!) and broke down in front of us. Plus, I took the milkrun home, making it a four-hour ride instead of the usual two.
To prepare for my physical the next morning (oh yeah, I also went down for that!), I couldn’t eat anything 12 hours prior, so I went straight to bed—after taking some time to look for hotels in Italy. In the morning I drove my folks into London for work, drove back to Ilderton, played a little parallel parking game with a local girl, and went for my physical. I got the n00bie, which was awkward and fun (the whole thing went a little like a talkshow interview than anything else; he was doing his family medicine placement as a third year med student at Western (the local ivory tower)). Except it was more like an episode of Jerry Springer, because I had to take off my shirt. Luckily, it seems the whole gloved-hand-please-remove-your-trousers business is just an urban legend—after all, this was a FAMILY medicine appointment, so the whole thing remained entirely PG, thank you very much.
After the physical I went home, grabbed breakfast, then popped downtown London for my eye exam. This guy was thorough—the med student tested my eyes by waving his index finger around the room; this guy used all sorts of fancy lights, headpieces, and wind tubes to get the results. And the results were good, little change, and I’m going to be the bearer of some pretty swanky glasses once I return from Europe!
The downside of that fashionable excursion to the optometrist was the fact that he put a number of eye drops in my eyes that caused my pupils to dilate uncontrollably. Looking at myself in the mirror I looked like a monster (or rather, like Mr Burns in that alien episode – "I bring you love!"). And driving—well, hindsight is 20/20, but my foresight is too near-sighted to see things as they are—I decided to don my clip-on sunglasses and drive to run a few errands. That was exciting—I was squinting WITH my sunglasses on!! (“I bring you love!”) Anyway, that was fun and exciting and a little dangerous and I was – needless to say – overjoyed when I spent the rest of the afternoon at a Starbucks researching hotels in Rome and Milan.
That night my family grabbed dinner at the Keg – I had the steak and crab – and then drove back to Ilderton where Eric dropped by and we watched Inglorious Basterds (aesthetically pleasing, but little depth sadly).
Friday was spent packing and watching Raiders of the Lost Ark (researching my own role starring in Indiana Jones and the Antique Book Dealer from Persia). After, I met mom for lunch, then spent the afternoon at Starbucks again writing emails and booking for Milan.
Responding to friends’ demands for pictures, I researched a good budget camera on www.cnet.com and found a Canon PowerShot 1200 SD on sale at Best Buy. I jumped into my car and as I was waiting at an intersection I saw none other than my sister’s white Neon (with the unique rust design in the roof). Incidentally, moments before I was considering calling Alana to check if she wanted to meet me at the new frozen yogurt place downtown that she’s been raving about. I figured she’d be busy, so I hadn’t bothered calling her. Now that she was in front of me, however, I took the opportunity to wave my arms spasmodically, call her phone, call her phone several times, indicate with arms flailing that she should check her phone – which she did (this was a very long traffic light, by the way). When she finally picked up her phone the light turned green but I managed to convince her to turn around and join me for a trip to Best Buy and to YoYo’s (Get a delicious scoop of healthy fro-yo at Yoyo’s).
It was delicious, and expensive, and after we parted ways I picked up mom and dad, barbecued, caught the last train from London, and got to my place in Toronto just before midnight.
Before going to bed I made sure to dig out numerous boxes from Jamal’s closet that were left over from my days of service on the CGC – those were heady days in which those boxes saw enormous closet time as well. For those of you unaware of what a CGC is, it’s merely a small committee found in every area where there is a growing number of Baha’is that is appointed by the Baha’is’ elected councils to monitor and facilitate community development activities.
That’s all for now!
Richard
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