Soirée Surprise!

Glosette Girl and I lead fairly planned lives. Often we know what we're going to be doing on a particular day days or even weeks in advance. While not exciting, we find having a schedule helps us keep one step ahead of all the chores and errands we need to do while still keeping some fun time for our family.

For example, we've known for weeks that Margot was going to be spending last Friday at her first ever overnight sleepover camp (run by Sparks at Camp Woolsey). We had planned to drop her off and then head to a nearby pub for a couple of drinks with friends. Unfortunately on Friday morning our friends had to cancel at the last minute. ...And that's when everything changed!

...

7:00 pm.

Normally rush hour in Ottawa is over by 6 pm. However, for some reason last Friday the highways were still clogged at 7:00 pm. This disrupted our planned route to Margot's camp. Frustrated with the bumper-to-bumper traffic I took a chance, took an off ramp and decided to get to the camp by a back route. The road I chose is full of traffic lights and I had little hope of getting Margot to her camp in time. However, by some miracle I caught every green light. Faster and farther I drove. It seemed I could do no wrong! My car had other thoughts.

Unbeknownst to me one of my hubcaps chose this night to fall off my car, fly through the air and hit the car behind me. The driver, startled, tried to warn me that parts of my car were now sitting in the road. So as I flew through traffic and lights he followed me and tried to catch my attention. He finally caught up with me a few kilometres down the road and motioned me to roll down my windows. Confused, I rolled down the window and he explained what had happened.  Later I would learn that, fortunately, his car had no damage. Props to that driver by the way. He didn't freak out - I'm sure a lot of people would have.

Hubcap Down! Hubcap Down!

Anyways, we finally dropped Margot off at her camp and headed home the way we came. And guess what? We saw the hubcap sitting by the side of the road next to the car mechanic who had installed them a few weeks previous! I stopped just long enough to pick it up, demand some kind of compensation from the mechanic (who said he would look into it - yeah right), and then continue on our way.

8:30 pm.

Glosette Girl reminded me that it was Soirée Orange, a fundraising party for parents of Margot's school at the nearby Orange Art Gallery. We had no idea what to expect as this is Margot's first year at the school.

So even thought we hadn't eaten dinner yet, we threw caution to the wind, raced home, changed into something relatively funky and then headed into the night.

The Orange Art Gallery is just under 20 minutes from our house (by walking). So no problem there. We walked up to the doors, paid the cover and were welcomed into an atmosphere of wine drinking, modern art, multiple silent auctions, music, conversation and laughter.

Photo taken in the light of day rather than the decadence of night

Jen and I planned on staying for an hour or so before heading out to dinner at 10:00 pm.
   
11:00 pm

We blew off dinner.

Soirée Orange was fun!  We met lots of other parents, I ran into a friend whose daughter goes to Margot's school, we drank inexpensive wine and beer, bid on the silent auction* and fended off starvation by munching on the hors d'oeuvres.

Our plan was to head into nearby Chinatown for a late night dinner but figured everything seemed closed and we headed home.** I did stop in at a nearby convenience store to grab my salty fix - a bag of Sour Cream and Onion chips! Yum!

12:00 am

Glosette Girl had crashed by this point. I burned the midnight oil munching on my chips with some Mad Max: Fury Road. Go Tom Hardy!

 9:00 am

Groggy wakeup. Laughter at the previous night's events. Eventually we went out for a late breakfast at a diner in the east end of Ottawa and bought a rain barrel from a Scout's fundraiser (bet you didn't see that coming). Happy Earth Day!

Ahh now I know what people without kids do!

And we picked up Margot...safe....

...and sound!

*p.s I won something - paint (not a painting - paint!) Woohoo!

** We learned later on that one Vietnamese place stays open until 5 am! Good to know.

Easter in a Slice of Europe

Happy (belated) Easter!

Glosette Girl and I decided to do something different for Easter this year. To mark the occasion we decided to take a whirlwind trip with Glosette Girl's family (including her parents, and Les Cousins!) to Montreal. The trip was extra special because we took the train. And not just any class - economy class!

It was a fun trip. Amazingly, despite all our traveling over the years, this was the first ever train ride Glosette Girl and I have taken together in Canada.

Montreal! The City of Love! The City of Lights! Wait a minute...

Montreal is an interesting city. It's not obviously attractive (architecturally) but there's a certain vibe, a certain artsy edginess that's cool to experience. Along with Quebec City, Montreal is often described in tourism books as a being a slice of Europe outside of Europe. And everyone knows the Easter bunny comes from Europe.*

Haha whatever. We came...

...we went to the Biodome....

...we hunted for chocolates...

 and we had a big breakfast after a good night's sleep.**

A great mini-break!

p.s. Margot didn't miss the Easter bunny either. She wrote a nice letter to tell him where we were staying while we were gone to make sure he didn't skip our house.

Don't worry, he didn't forget :)

*Actually the Easter bunny was popularized by German settlers in the U.S. Close enough.

**One of Les Cousins! stayed in Margot's bed. It was a late night. Don't tell his parents!

Spring at the Farm

Why is Ottawa the ultimate family-friendly city? Two words: "experimental farm". Ottawa has a farm in the middle of the city.

Let's contrast Ottawa with famous parks at the centre of other great cities:

• New York: Central Park
• London: Hyde Park
• Paris: Luxembourg Garden
• and Ottawa: .with th..the um.... experimental farm.

Hmmm...one of these things is not like the others.

OK OK, maybe that's not a fair comparison! The experimental farm is primarily a research area rather than a tourist attraction. However, because it is so large, not to mention smack dab in the middle of the city, it does have a fair bit of impact on the city's personality.

I like Ottawa's farm - or, more accurately, the agriculture museum at the centre of the farm. But what I think doesn't really matter because Margot adores it.

She likes the animals.

 
And animals.

And more animals!

 
The place knows what its audience likes! (There are regular summer camps here and they sell out in less than one minute - seriously).

Glosette Girl was feeling under the weather this past weekend, so Margot and I had the museum just to ourselves (and a few hundred other families) for some quality daddy-daughter time. It was fun. Damn you Ottawa! You know your wholesome fun :)

The Smell of Popcorn

Growing up, I remember when going to the video store was a special event. My parents would bundle up my brother, my sister and me into our mini van and we would go to the video store where we would rent a couple of VHS tapes.

The video store was a wondrous place for a kid. There were rows upon rows of the latest films and Nintendo video games for rent. The newest ones were displayed in big groups (what is it about seeing twenty copies of the same movie lined up near each other that makes them look so watchable?!)

The store itself smelled like the saltiest most buttery popcorn you could ever imagine. Best of all, when we were very young, the store we visited (Video 99 - this was before the shortlived era of Blockbuster's video store dominance),  gave us free popcorn to munch as we browsed the shelves! I call that magical time when anything was possible the 80s".

Netflix has changed that forever of course. Now it's so easy to just watch movies online....

...or is it?

A strange thing happened on the way to Netflix's global net streaming hegemony. Like vinyl record stores, a few videostore holdouts seemed to have survived the great video store purge of the last few years and one of them happens to be in my 'hood, Audiovideo Centre. That's it's name: "Audiovideo Centre".

We were enticed into the store last week by a free coupon deal and the fact that it is literally just down the street. I hope going to the store becomes a regular family occurrence. The store has a scrappy and quirky look, which is fun on its own, but the main benefit over Netflix is that they have a lot of movies that Canadian Netflix doesn't have. Chalk one win for diversity.

Will they survive? I hope so! Ask me in a couple of years and I will let you know if they made it.