2nd Week of Running

Last week was a bust, so this will be a sort post. I started off Monday looking forward to the run, unfortunately the weather didnt' agree with me, it was raining. I went out with my mom & aunt anyways and ran for a bit in the rain, but I was cold & wet & all my muscles decided that they didn't want to work properly, so we called it a day after 20 mins. Tuesday was even worst so there was no run, not even a walk. Wednesday I got ready for a walk but ended up being felled by my stomach, which decided it didn't want to work properly. Thursday I had to go out to Centennial College to get some information to help me go to school in September & then Friday I went out shopping & got new running shoes, & yesterday day....well see previous post for that information. Today is family dinner & then tomorrow hopefully I will be out again running. I'm determined to do this & I'm determined to run a marathon & I am a Taurus so I can be pretty damned stubborn when it comes to some things.

Trip to Oshawa

I should begin with a little background, I have lived in, first East York, then North York & then Toronto after the amalgamation, but pretty much in and around Toronto. I worked right downtown, Yonge & Dundas for years & then later up at Yonge & Eglinton, but I haven't to been very many trips outside of the city in Ontario. I've been to Ottawa, which I loved (politics), been to Kingston, Niagara On the Lake, Pickering, Whitby & like pretty much everybody in southern Ontario I've been to Niagara Falls. In Canada I've been to Corner Brook, NFLD, North Sydney, Cape Breton, NS, Wolfville, NS, New Minus, NS Halifax, NS & I lived in Windsor, NS, for a year, I did drive through Montreal so I was technically there. I really pride myself on being Canadian, it's such a deep part of me when I returned from living in FL for 6 months I almost cried at seeing our flag. With that pride I know I want to see more of my country, but not always the typical places that people see, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, I want to see the small towns, the history the diversity. That's the background to my motivation for going out to Oshawa today, the reason is much simpler.
My good friend Dakota Bubble had an interview with a non-profit for a volunteer position, I tagged along with her boyfriend Emperor EJ so he wouldn't be bored out of his skull waiting for her, which we weren't. We took GO transit out of Scarborough Town Centre, we passed through Pickering, Ajax, Durham, & Whitby, we saw a bit of there downtown's as we passed through. I would say the thing I was surprised about as we passed through the town was the porn shops along this route. Maybe whoever came up with the GO route is a connoisseur of porn? Once we arrived in Oshawa & after Dakota Bubble had eaten myself & Emperor EJ set off in search of a Dollarama, yes we are adventures (Emperor EJ was looking for something specific, which we never found). On our walk out to Dollarama (which we found thanks to google maps on Emperor EJ's phone. Yes I'm still impressed with stuff like that) we walked by Oshawa's Memorial Park. I didn't get a photo of that, which I should have, it has a good size band stand with permeate metal bench's in front of it, there is a statue of a solider on the corner honoring the fallen of the town, also on the side of  the bandstand were murals depicting the major wars that Canada has fought in starting from WWI. Along the streets in Oshawa like all towns were fire hydrants, except they don't look like any fire hydrants I've seen before, here's what I mean:

Each fire hydrant was painted differently, there was one that had wild cats on it, one just looked like someones are supplies threw up on it. Something else they have a lot of was murals, there were the one's on the side of the band stand, down a side street we walked by & this one on the side of a building.

Along with the murals, the fire hydrants and just quite small town feel we found some other things there. Yes me & Emperor EJ found a comic book store. Yeah we're geeks & we of course stumbled across the comic book store, I bough Uncanny X-Men First Class & Emperor EJ picked up a Walking Dead lunch box. The one thing I loved about this comic book shop was everything was pretty much on discount, the trade books were $10.00 & the hardcovers were $15.00. If I had a much larger bag with me & a stronger back, I would have stuffed half of their Marvel collection into my bag & gone home with it. I was disappointed I couldn't find Deadpool comics. Also we stumbled across a Donair place. Now for anyone not from the East Coast of Canada & I'm going to say specifically Nova Scotia & New Brunswick since my mom's side is from Newfoundland & I've never heard them mention it before, & I have no idea about PEI, Donair's are spiced beef that you have on a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion & a special kind of sauce. I'm unsure which is more important, the sauce or the meat. My whole time in Nova Scotia I didnt' try one but the guy at the shop gave me a little sample of his meat & sauce & I can understand liking it, the obsession? I'm not sure about that, we'll see. So the shop is called Down East Donairs: A Maritime Tradition, the place has only been open since Dec of last year & the place were he's set up shop even feels a little East Coastish, the building he's in is painted a nice pastel colour & the doors & window farms are all painted white, kinda looks like some of the postcards that come out of Newfoundland. He's on Twitter if anyone wants to follow him, search DownEastDonairs, I'm not 100% if that's it.
When we returned from Oshawa we went to Dakota Bubble & Emperor EJ's place & had Chinese takeout from Mandarin & watched Iron Man 2 & Captain America. It was an awesome way to end a fun day. I would like to take more trips to the towns around Toronto. Stay tuned there may be more posts coming through out the summer & I promise more photo's next time.

Fight Night & the Worst Time We've Ever Had at Boston Pizza

So I should start off by saying that I'm not trying to diss Boston Pizza & I really do believe in telling people about good service since most people do just bitch and complain on-line & I've worked in customer service for over 10 years so I do give waiters & other service people a pretty wide berth when it comes to serving me, but Saturday night was one just the perfect storm of what can go wrong in a restaurant going wrong.

On Saturday night I went to Boston Pizza with my friends Emperor EJ, Dakota Bubble and P. We were all looking forward to the Jon Jones fight & so it would seem were half the people in Toronto. I ended up getting to the restaurant 1^st around 9:20pm, I had completely forgot about the NHL playoffs, so the place was packed when I got there I had to go on a waiting list. I waited for about 20 mins or so & I had written down some entertaining things that I was going to blog about people waiting, however with what happened that night, the entertaining people in the doorway were almost completely forgotten. I got a booth and just as I did everyone else showed up. We sat down, looked through our menu’s, talked, watched a few prelim fights and then realised it had been almost 15 mins & we hadn’t had one waiter come over and say hi or ask for drinks. We were starting to get antsy then, we piled all out menus in the middle of the table, hoping someone would notice since we couldn’t’ even seem to get a waiter near our table. Luckily the manager who was walking around the restaurant all the time, & we’ve talked with him before & he’s a really good manager from what I can see, noticed us and came over apologized for a waiter not coming by, there had been some mix-up and he would make sure that a waiter came by. We got our waiter, Sean, nice guy really friendly, said if we needed him just to flag him down and all that. We ordered everything right away because we were ready too. Now Boston Pizza has a feature menu on right now that features the all-meat wings. So P & Emperor EJ ordered the Nacho Wings and the Fire Cracker Shrimp & tried to order these bacon wrapped steak, they were told that the restaurant was out of the bacon wrapped steak, which looked sooooo goooood. However we did see the dish twice that night on other people’s plates long after we had asked for it. It was about 10-15 mins before we finally got our drinks, which as the night went on was a short time. Anyways after we got our drinks we watched some of the fights, the 1^st one was Canadian vs. Canadian, which made me wonder where the fights were, Georgia apparently. It was pretty funny to see George St-Pierre (GSP) there as a water boy for 2 of the Canadians, good to see him though, he does look a lot smaller then when he’s in fighting condition, but still superhot. Back to Sean, so when he came back to refill my water & Dakota’s pop, he went to go grab the refills and he seemed to be gone for a while, but when he came back he had a pitcher of water and a pitcher of pop for us, apparently he couldn’t find any glasses, on the other hand it was a brilliant idea since he didn’t’ have to come back to the table very often. After getting the pitcher it was another 20 mins before we got out dinner. Sean wasn’t the one who brought us our food, other waiters did, I however did not get mine. When Sean came back & asked how everything was I could not resist and said ‘I would love to eat’ and pointed to the empty space on the table in front of me. Also we had to ask for forks and knives, luckily everyone else had ordered finger food, and Dakota is on a nacho kick right now. When Sean returned he informed me that somehow my pasta had vanished. Now because of this & the terrible start to the evening the manager had pulled off one of the dishes from our menu and then my pasta, the end result was about $23 off the menu, we split it between us all. But when we got the bill they had forgotten to take off the two dishes.  In the end Jon Jones is still the champion & we’ll probably still go to this Boston Pizza.

1st Week of Running

One of my life goals is to run a marathon, however I am a bit of a big girl, I'm currently hovering around 200lbs. So that I can meet that goal, and also because there is a wedding in the family coming up, I've gone to a dietitian who's helping me with my bad eating habits  and I'm getting weighed, right now, every two weeks, and I've started running. Now since I've never run like this before I'm not just going out & running until I pass out I'm doing it with this great article couch to 5k. My aunt used the same program when she starting running a few years ago, and she's in her 50's, I'm in my early 30's. I started Monday, the 1st few little runs were really hard and I lost my breath easily. Tuesday I hurt everywhere, I really do mean everywhere. I didn't go for a Wednesday, I went out on Wednesday (To see where I went check it out here), so Thursday was my next run day. Thursday it was much easier to run & even right after the run I didn't hurt, Friday I didn't hurt either. Today I ran again, I was with my aunt, who had walking sticks, and my mom, who was walking my brother's dog, who thinks he's still a puppy. Every time I would start to run the dog would try to run after me & because he's kind of big he would almost drag my mom with him. Again it was a little bit easier & because it was cold outside I wore a sweater, which I had to take off for a bit. Now though for some reason my arm hurts, that might not be because of the running though. After the run, I had a shower, had a salad, & then took a nap, I was so tired. From this 1st week of running I'm hopeful for next week. I just have a few notes for myself, 1 ALWAYS remember to stretch, I've really got to get that through my head, I forgot the first day so I'm not surprised that I hurt so much on Tuesday. 2 Make sure there is enough water for the whole run, Monday I ran out & that sucked. 3 Invest in a new sports bra soon. I'm poor right now and I'm using an old sports bra I got a few years ago, I have rather large breasts (DDD) and they bounce around a little more than I would like. 4 Look up runners diets & talk to my dietitian about them. Right now I've added more  vegetables to my diet and I've heard that runners usually have a heavy protean diet, I want to make sure I'm doing it right so that it doesn't bite me in the ass later.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits 3D

So last night I saw a preview of The Pirates! Band of Misfits at the Tiff Bell Lightbox with my cousin and his fiance. It’s by the same people that brought everyone Wallace & Gromet, Chicken Run & the Curse of the Wererabbit. It was really funny and really well done, of course. And the surprise for me was that the director of the movie Peter Lord was there for a Q & A.
 I had won the tickets off of twitter from Vinci Genius. From the Q & A we found out that the movie was inspired by a book called Pirates and Scientists. It supposedly takes place in 1837, as you find out in the 1^st scene. The main character of the movie is Pirate Captain, really that’s his name. The other pirates from his crew have equally cool names like Albino Pirate, the Pirate who likes kittens and the pirate with gout. I don’t want to go through the whole plot cause well that would ruin the movie for everyone, so I’ll talk about look. With the 3D it totally takes you into the sets of this stop animation movie, the details are so vivid even with being fantastically you believe it. Also whenever the Pirates are traveling long distances across the ocean they change to an old style map with little cupids on the edges, sea monsters and also the boat has a little trouble getting over a crease on the map.

The voice actors were great as well with Hugh Grant as the lead as Pirate Captain.  The voice actor I was so excited to hear was David Tennant, if you don’t know I love Doctor Who & my personal battle between who is my Doctor is a whole nother blog, David Tennant was Charles Darwin. Just take that thought in for a moment. And as I’ve always found with David Tennant you can’t really tell it’s him. For me it was probably the fact that he was using something closer to his actual accent that made it a little harder to see the Doctor through the animation. Another historical figure in the film was Queen Victoria, but not like a Queen Victoria I think most people have seen before. I always think of Queen Victoria as strong but a fair Queen, in this movie even right at the beginning you’re a little scared of her or creeped out, one or the other. The plot twists just with Queen Victoria are really interesting & defiantly not where I thought that movie was going at all.

The director had brought along with him Pirate Captain & Polly, his parrot, which was cool to see. After the Q & A he stayed around to answer some more questions and to talk to some fans. Now this is the last week of the kids festival at Tiff & there were a lot of kids there & the director was great with them, listening to each of their questions and answering them in a way that they would understand. We got his autograph & our photo taken with him. I love meeting people who get to do something they love & have some sort of fame but appreciate their fans. It was a great night out for sure. I love Tiff events there are so many things going on there.

Now I just got to figure out where to put the autograph so that it doesn't get ruined.

Under Contstruction

So I was off Blogger for a while & now that I'm back I'm going through my template, the different gadgets I have and trying to figure out what I want the look to be. Because of all this the look of my blog is going to change from day to day & sometimes from hour to hour so don't be too alarmed, or at least not too annoyed.
Thanks!
I promise to stop soon.

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The Green Living Show

Today I went with my mom & aunt to the Green Living Show here in Toronto. It was at the Direct Energy Centre & it was apperenlty where every school in the city had sent their kids today. When we were walking by the parking lot we spotted the busses, I didn't think they would be there, but I should know better. Other than the massive amount of young ones I smacked in the head with my bag today it was a good day. One of my favorite parts was the 'Fresh Food Market'. There were about 10 vendors with mini samples of local and organic foods that they were selling, salads, soups, & some desserts. For $10.00 you got 5 vouchers to use. My aunt got some organic coffee, myself & my mom split our food between us, we had a peanut bean sprot salad, a 'Ontario' salad, which all the differnt things in the salad were from Ontario, also we had an apple crisp with local apples & sweet potato donuts, which were my favorite. Along with the food we paid for we got a lot of samples, greek yogurt, pasta sauce, pesto, organic milk, homemade pop, bread, and more stuff than I can remember. Along with all the food there were a lot of beauty prodcuts avalible and a lot of ways to improve your house to keep your power bills down. It was a little strange to see things like Porche & Lexus right next to the people selling organic fair trade coffee. With the size of this show you can see how popular that the green movement is. The fact that there are little home grown companies right next to the big ones & both are looking for your money and the little compines are usually winning out in this kinds of places shows that there are a lot of things that the larger companies have to fix & with how scarce everyones' money is these days consumers are getting pickier & doing way more research into where they're going to spend the money. All and all a good day, so tired now.