What good is it having two showers if you can only use one at a time?

Recently somebody implied that I was being a big couch potato because I wrote a few posts about television. Well for the record, yes, a little bit, but only when I’m home.

My last two weeks have been spent mostly either at work or the local rowing club. It’s interesting going to different clubs (this is my third) and comparing them. The one in Vancouver was a well established affair, a social club with a relatively big and fancy club house with employees and everything to boot. Then of course at McGill it was a university club where the focus was on training, coaches putting you through your paces at every turn and not giving any slack.

It’s hard to tell what exactly exists at my current club. The program I’m in is pretty much dominated by kids from the local high school teams. Though I’m told there are senior rowers around, there is certainly nothing regular or organized. I certainly miss the intensity of the university crew. We have had a couple days where we did erging or running and I was thoroughly worn out by the end, but the days we can get on the water—the area is notorious for thick endless fog—are decidedly less intense.

The thing I miss most is having a set crew. You knew as your alarm went off at 5 am that there would be seven other guys down at the water counting on you to be there, not to mention the cox and coach. If one guy didn’t show up, everybody suffered. Train together, win together.

• Shooting fish in a barrel actually is easy.
• Milk is the best treatment for spicy-mouth.
• A bull in a china shop doesn’t do very much damage.
• Elephants really are afraid of mice.

Thanks, Mythbusters.

Also, the roads in Sydney are alive. Or at least, medians on the Harbour Bridge can crawl across the road to different lanes. The video of cars swerving around them as they moved was hilarious. Thanks, Daily Planet.

Overall, a fun evening with the Discovery Channel.

PS: If you google “harbour bridge”, the first hit is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the second is the Saint John Harbour Bridge. Hooray for my town.

I was riding around this small provincial town one last time before flying back to Montreal tomorrow, and I came across this sad, sad sight at Rothesay Elementary School.

Back in my day, teachers would always be telling us kids that we aren’t allowed to play in the woods. Regardless of their warnings, on this side of the playground especially, every day kids would run in to play tag, hide-and-seek, and build forts of questionable structural integrity out of old logs and branches. Every once in a while someone would yell “TEACHER!” and dozens of kids would flee in every direction like cockroaches startled by bright lights.

And of course there was always the favourite of seeing how deep into the woods you or your friends dared to go. This was especially scary on the north side of the playground, since we were quite sure that Chainsaw Billy Bob lived back there.

It’s no wonder kids of today are obese and addicted to their fancy electronic gaming devices — their teachers fenced off the most prime piece of recess real estate around!

I’ve been to far too many bars this week. We’ve hit one almost every day for a while now… There was Studio 54 (nice looking, bad DJ), Club Montreal (bad looking, best DJ in town), O’Leary’s (very east coast pub looking but with jazz fusion on open mike night), the AQ (student party night but dead), O’Leary’s again (even more east coast looking because they sang “Barretts Privateers”), and finally the 3 Mile tonight (worst ever). There’ll be no more of that, though, since I start work on Monday.

While driving home tonight, I was feeling pretty bad, like an ass, and all around bummed out from events prior, and wanted to listen to some depressing classical music. Something in an adagio. (Besides, I could have used the break after all the R&B at The 3 Mile.) So I tune to my trusty CBC Radio 3, only to hear some crazy amateur 80’s synthetic poetry rock crap. The late night host said that everyone there in the studio listened to the album and “really dug it”. Go figure.

The night was saved though by this one perfect moment. I was driving home on the Mackay Highway, along the bit roughly parallel to Rothesay Avenue through all those hills (I want to call them mountains, though, because of the way the highway is carved right through them, creating big rock cliffs on either side). Through the rear view mirror I could see the city lights behind me, almost in an aerial view because of the way that part of the city is built up the side of the river valley. And though the mirror was bright with the orange and yellow spots of city life behind me, the road ahead was absolute darkness save for my own headlights. There were no other cars to be seen and the cliffs blocked out the city that I knew still lay on either side. I was alone. It was very surreal. I wish I could have taken a picture, but for now the image lives only in me. So it goes.