Weekend Update

The weekend started off with us biking downtown to see Star Trek. What an awesome flick. Kate is more of a Next Generation fan so she didn't really know all the characters very well but she liked is as much as I. Bridging the generation gap I guess, should I say that about my girlfriend? Anyway great flick, if you're on the fence about seeing it, go see it.

From the movie we went to the Montreal Beer Festival. I used to go to the Toronto Beer Fest all the time. In the first few years is was slow and we tried a number of different beers. We had VIP passes, it was my favorite weekend of the year. As the years went by the festival became more and more popular. At first that was great, there were more beer tents, live music, more food items. Then the punks found out about a festival for beer. In the early days we would try strange new brews and learn about the process used to brew that particular brand. Long into the early afternoon we would learn about Kegs and the history of beer. Any attempt to do that now amongst the jostling of position in the beer line, and the guy pouring the beers frantically trying to accommodate all the people in line without being ripped off by the punks looking to scam a beer, is futile. Plus who cares, many of the beer tents are the same crappy beer you can get anywhere. It literally went from what you may expect a wine tasting affair to be, to a kegger. I don't mind keggers, but it's a beer of a different colour than the beer festival. So in short, punks ruined my favorite day of the year, and it's not just because I'm not a punk anymore, which is arguable. Kids today, I tell you, youth is wasted on the youth. The Montreal Beer Festival is much more civilized, not sure if that's due to the punks being too preoccupied with spray painting everything or if it's too new, but whatever the case the festival was fun. We tried all sorts of strange beers I've never heard of, including a red stout that was great and a couple new blondes, both Kate and I love blondes.

The beer situation in Montreal is far superior than Toronto. The beer is not only cheaper but far better. I'm not saying put the best beer from each province against each other and Quebec will win, I rather think not. What I am saying is that for 20 bucks you can get a lot of a really good beer in Quebec (a 15 pack of Trembly is 16 bucks), in Ontario for 20 bucks you can get a 6 pack of a good beer or a 12 of something that is probably horrible, I'm looking at you Blue, Canadian, Coors Light, etc.... I'm almost exclusively a microbrew guy now, nuts to Molson and Labatt, they're like the Walmart of beer.

So we were going to go up to a friend of Kate's farm this weekend, but he had family obligations. So instead we went back to the organic farm. After a long bike ride out, we spend the first half of the day weeding a sweet garlic patch. Tough work, I scratch my arms up a little but it weren't too bad. Then we learned how to hoe with various hoes in a broccoli patch. We also hunted for some little slug like things that curl up around the base of the plant and eat the leaves at night. I killed one, Kate didn't find any, so I won that battle. Kate stole my Swedish hoe which was wonderful and gave me some stupid stirrup hoe that was much harder to manipulate, if you want to buy a hoe, get a Swedish one. After a grueling bike ride back home we, well I can't remember what we did Saturday night off hand, I didn't study any French that's for sure, need to get on that.

What was supposed to be a relaxing Sunday turned into another long bike ride to a pretty cool market north of us. Lots of plants and vegetables, we carried back as much as we could but we'll need to go back. My legs are very sore and tired today and we have a softball game, the first one we actually will get to play in. If my legs hold me back it's Kate's fault for making me exercise.

I've got another test on Tuesday, so I may miss the final Stanley Cup game but that's not too big a deal, hopefully it will go 7, which will be on Friday. That will be fun.

So that's the update on the Crap I Did last weekend.