Ottawa road trip: days 2 &3

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with friends whom I hadn't seen in a long time. First I had lunch with Lisa, whom I met while working for OTI in summer 2002. It was an unusually busy weekend for her so she was only able to squeeze me in between an Arabic class and a concert rehearsal. Nevertheless, it was good to see her again after over 2 years. She told me all about this exciting project she's been running with high-school volunteeers since early summer. They are creating Flash presentations that exploit memory strengthening techniques to let people remember facts about a given topic with very little effort. She also mentioned that her sister recently got a spot on the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which is incredibly kewl news for a musician.

After Lisa left for her rehearsal I met up with Andy (Bernat), with whom I worked at KL Group way back in summer 2000, and his girlfriend. We spent a couple of hours chatting over hot beverages before they had to leave. Then I went out for dinner with Drew, Shannon, Ange, Lex and Sarah. We got to our favourite Vietnamese restaurant (Cam Kong) an hour before it was going to close for the night so we had to eat quickly. Somehow I managed to pull this off. Upon returning to Drew and Shannon's place we watched Mystic River before going to bed.

The next morning Ange and I hopped into her car, rescued Lex (from his girlfriend) and Sarah O'Leary (from her family), before heading back for Waterloo. During the return trip I read large swathes of Sarah's Psych 101 textbook.

Ottawa road trip: day 1

Ange, Lex, Sarah (O'Leary) and I left Spuc shortly before 2pm hoping to beat the TO rush hour traffic. We did :-) I also had the pleasure of a sneak preview into Sarah's novel for NaNoWriMo.

After an uneventful ride through the entire GTA, we made a pit stop at Harvey's near The Big Apple. Having been convinced by both Sarah and Lex that I would be famished before we reached Ottawa, I decided to purchase a small chicken salad to eat in the car later. Interestingly, they never asked me to sign the reciept when I used Visa to pay for my food.

After we'd hit the road again, Lex remarked that he didn't recall having actually paid for his meal. At first I attempted to chalk that up to his swiss-cheese memory but he was quite adamant about not having taken his wallet out. It was only after we dropped Sarah off at her home and I decided to eat my salad that we figured out what had happened. I discovered that my salad had no chicken in it and was increduluous at having paid over $5 for a salad with no meat. Suddenly everything clicked as we realized that they had charged me for both salads!

Drew gave me the tour of their new place since I'd never sen it before. They have organized everything quite well as usual, although the kitchen is slightly more cramped and the water pressure not as amazing as when I lived with them in the summer of 2002. Apparently Shannon is looking to hand off her guinea pig to a new owner so, if anybody is interested in acquiring one, let me know and i will get you in touch with her.

Once Sarah (Pell) showed up, we had sushi for dinner. We were being quite loud so it was good that they had relegated us to the lone booth at the restaurant. After we escaped from there, we bought bubble-tea and headed back to Drew and Shannon's apartment for the night. Ange eventually dropped Lex and Sarah off at Sarah's place and we all retired to bed.