UFC

After my day out at the Health Expo (see pervious post) I went over to my good friends Dakota Bubble and Emperor EJ’s place to watch UFC, Emperor EJ’s friend R came this time. I was super excited to see Jim Miller. 

Jim Miller is a special fighter to me, he’s a red head, which I think are hot, and the first time I went to Boston Pizza for a UFC fight with Emperor EJ and Dakota Bubble he was in the first fight. Saturday night he was fighting Nate Diaz for the chance to fight against the belt older of their weight class. If you couldn’t tell already I only have half knowledge of the UFC, I don’t get into all the back story I just like to watch the fights and so far all I’ve figured out about weight classes is that the heavy weights are like slow moving tanks and the bantam weight class most of the guys there need a burger. 

The fight was actually on Fox, but Dakota and Emperor don’t have cable so we live streamed it. What I liked about live streaming it now is that during the commercials on TV on UFC.com they now have trivia and tweets from the fighters before the fight. The tweets though should only be on there during the first commercial since the same tweets are shown over and over and over again, the trivia is fun though. 

This is also the third fight we’ve watched from the Fox network and I have some helpful hints. First the Statue of Liberty is in New York not New Jersey, which is where the fight was taking place, and I’m a Canadian looking at that and going WTF? I can’t even imagine what people in the states were saying. If the stadium that the fight is in isn’t as big as some of the stadiums that the championship fights are happening don’t do a fly over shot from so far out, zoom in a little so the stadium doesn’t look so tiny. And my number one issue with Fox Sports which is about to drive me bonkers, could someone at the network go out to any office or computer supply store and get the announcers sitting behind a desk some mic stands! Seeing these guys sitting around a desk and holding their own mics just drive me nuts! Either that lose the table and make them stand it would look less pathetic.

Unfortunately Miller didn’t win, it was a good fight though & Nate Diaz was the first person ever to submit Miller and how he did it was both impressive and gross, Miller accidently bit his tongue while he was being submitted.

Fun night with friends all around.

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.