Anniversaries, Lipstick, and the Wrong Side of the Road

Howdy!

Rachel and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary just two weeks ago. We went to the 1010 Bistro in Westdale and had the Salmon which was very nice albeit a little on the sweet side (pineapple based sauce). We got each other stuff! I got Rachel a "Roots" T-shirt (there is a Canadian clothing company called Roots - as in grass roots - that Australians love to make fun of), and she got me the Underworld Back To Mine CD which is really cool! She also got "The Court Jester" with Danny Kaye on DVD for the both of us and we watched it and had a great time!

Rachel impersonates the Venus de Milo

We've had a few dramas lately. Rachel left a whole tube of lipstick in her jacket pocket before it went into the wash. We was hwith cold water so that would have been fine, but I didn't detect any problem until the whole load had been through the dryer twice (like 2 hours worth) by which time the whole tube had been pretty much emptied all over our clothes :-( Rachel went to work with the stain remover and did a pretty good job with it for all the important garments! There's still a few specks here and there, including on some of my underwear...

I went to a Magic Pre-release tournament in Oshawa last weekend, which involved getting up at the crack of dawn to drive about 150kms on highways to the site (Oshawa is beyond Toronto from where we are) with 3 other rabid Magic fans along for the ride. Well, I finally did it! I drove on the wrong side of the road! After more than an hour of driving, I took an exit off the highway (remembering that slip lanes are effectively one-way streets) and when I got to the next intersection, I turned left as though I was back in Australia! It was about 8am on Sunday morning so there weren't any cars around - which is probably half the reason I made the error. Anyway, Mike who was riding shotgun is thankfully a very calm thinker in times of crisis, and called out "You are on the wrong side of the road!" It can't have been more than a few seconds before we noticed, but it was long enough to come up to a set of traffic lights and be wondering why there was a guy pointing at me with his headlights on (stopped waiting for the lights to change thank heavens...). Anyway, after taking a moment to asses the situation (median strip so can't just cross over to the correct right-side, intersection zone ahead so can't usefully go forward) I looked to see if it was clear, drove out to the middle of the intersection then reversed around the median strip til I was waiting at a red light on the correct side of the road. Whew! There were about 3 cars waiting at red lights at this stage, and now I'm hoping that nobody took down my plates and reported to police (I haven't heard anything). So that was extremely hair-raising!

When we stopped, one of the guys in the back said to me "That was soo cool!" so at least I gave the guys a thrill they may not have otherwise had! And thank heavens for Mike because I seriously did not realise what I'd done (and why I couldn't see any traffic lights pointing at me even though I was at a traffic light intersection etc).

Hooray!