Things what I learned this weekend:
- Walking for two hours in a snowstorm is beautiful, but leaves you with sore thighs.
- People who aren’t living in an apartment with minimal heat are not motivated to fix it.
- Cookie dough dries out in the fridge. Lesson learned: eat it more quickly.
- Toronto is beautiful.
- Trust your family, even when you have doubts. They can surprise you sometimes, and it’s wonderful.
- People drink more coffee when it’s cold. Arrive early if you want a seat.
- I have not gone running in far too long. I have no one but myself to blame for this.
- I need a new messenger bag, one that is not held together by willpower and safety pins. The three bleeding points on my left hand attest to this.
- I need to read the books I own before buying more.
Had an intersting conversation at lunchtime the other day. Went to Big Al’s for burgers with the work crew (great burgers, man) and Jason was talking about his weekend jaunt to Carlos and Murphy’s with Stephen. Apparently Stephen knew one of the guys who worked there, who took them down the basement and showed the a tunnel that ran right under Osborne. It was blocked up, and the health department wouldn’t let them open it, for very good reasons.
Which got us to talking about downtown Winnipeg. Beneath the streets, there’s just a labyrinth of tunnels which have been constructed over the last hundred or hundred and fifty years. In a city like this, you want to stay indoors as much as possible, and at one point everything was connected. There are still underground tunnels that I use every day to get to and from work, but they’re only a tiny, tiny porition of what’s out there, just the reinforced parts that are still in use, and have been made into, basically, a shopping mall.
I always think about those kinds of things being in cities that aren’t here, being in old European or Middle Eastern cities where there are catacombs and all nature of forgotten passages. Abandoned subway tunnels in NYC. Things like that. But there’s a lot right here in my home city, too. Things that are forgotten until someone stumbles across them again. And me with a huge fascination for forgotten things.
Just did a quick yoga workout, about fifteen minutes or so, mostly back stretches, and it did wonders for my tension headache. Not getting rid of it completely, since part of it is allergy-triggered, but enough that I can function again. God bless yoga.