Thursday night was special! One of Maryl's workmates had extra concert tickets... to... Styx? Styx! I've vaguely heard of them. Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii'm saaaaaaaaaaaaailingggg awaaaaaay, or something like that. So an hour and a half of driving it was! Up up up and up some more, to the concert hall which was INSIDE a casino! A casino, indian of course - they have indians in canada as well; boy those indians get around. They're not just from India! As soon as you walk into the casino you get assaulted by a big circle of giant tvs on the ceiling, all of them shooting lightning with big speaker surround sounds of thunder. "I AM CHIEF *insert indian sounding name*. WELCOME TO OUR CASINO." Then it goes through all the chiefs and they say a little thing about nature and their tribe, all the while scenes of nature blast you. You can sit on giant plastic tree logs too. It's fairly scarily interesting!
But yes... Styx... it was an interesting concert. The main thing was the audience medium was age 47 or so... I hadn't felt this out of place since I went swing dancing in a gigantic ballroom hall filled with 60 year olds when I was 17. Consequently due to aging fun people, the atmosphere was pretty lethargic. Though there were 400+ people in there attempting to scream and clap, it felt like a small room. Every once in a while someone in the first row would throw up some undies or a bra on stage - and let the record show, usually... giant... giant purple bras. Yay? Oh! The best part was hearing Lawrence Gowan play beethoven on his crazy keyboard that spins around in a circle, and then afterwards - "I am the walrus"! He opened it saying that no one should ever cover this song -- unless you do it THIS well! And it was fairly good, admittedly.
Afterwards we dropped 20$ on one go at the roulette table on the number 14, lost it of course, and I said to myself, "Damn it Harry, you know you should ALWAYS BET ON BLACK!"
On the way back, something horrible-sounding and smelling started to come from underneath our car, so I quickly pulled over. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew it was bad. Whenever I hit the accelerator, the car would make extremely loud noises. Checking under the hood was a good sign at least, there wasn't any black smoke pouring out. Nothing under the car revealed anything important - I was hoping for a dying vagrant or some sort of varmint, but alas, nothing. Muffler looked ok, but maybe the connection to it? Isn't it the muffler that's in charge of keeping things quiet and non-smelly? Since we were in the middle of nowhere, at 1 in the morning, we decided to chance it and drive some more to see what would happen. Probably not the smartest move.
But it wasn't too bad - once you get it up to 60kph (ah, metric system), it wasn't TOO noisy. So I drove home for 40 more minutes with a really loud, stinky car.
Friday went to a few places to get it checked out, and yes, it was the connection to the muffler - it just plum decided to break off and die, so all the exhaust was pouring directly under our car instead of going through a nice filter system. $150 to fix - not so bad. Could have been much worse, especially when we did the stupid chance it game.
Saturday we went to the farmer's market and bought the typicals, but this time to spice things up a bit... buffalo meat. Buffalo meat, for serious. The idea was to make some patties out of them and bbq them up. BBQ buffalo meat. And you know what? It tastes remarkably like cow meat. I wonder if we got swindled - but Maryl kept saying she could taste the "gamey"ness. Keep on truckin'. I have officially digested some unnamed part of a buffalo - this time, not the wing.
Sunday was great! We took Holden down to Toronto to see a special children's theatre showing of Pinocchio! We got there with an hour to spare, and by there, I mean relatively NEAR there. It took us forever to actually find the damn place. We drove past it literally 6 times, literally, and still didn't see it - we had to call 411 to make sure we got the right address. Finally we saw it, it was a tiny stupid silly sign hidden betwixt humongous eye-stealing neon signs of other various ill-reputed places of establishment. While trying to find it, Holden was complaining of having to pee, and I asked if he could hold it or if it was an emergency. He said he could hold it, but then a minute later he let me know that it had upgraded into emergency status. He did this by beginning to pee - so the lesson is learned, you really have to listen to a three year old when he says he thinks he may have to expulse his urine in the near future.
Maryl plopped into a store to pick up a change of clothes, and while I waited in the car with a half-naked Holden, he let me know again that he would, in the near future perhaps, need to relieve his bladder. I wasn't sure what to do since we weren't near a bathroom and he was half naked and without shoes, so I did what a man needs to do, got his bottle of apple juice, and explained to him the merits of peeing into a bottle. Surprisingly he didn't complain (the idea normally appalls him, such as, when in the forest, asked to pee in a bush), and out came enough pee to almost fill the bottle again. This is very reminiscent of when I had to do the same into a big bottle of water whilst in a bus and succumbing to mild heat stroke. Thanks again to Meg for pretending that huge bottle of water was actuallywater. Warm water. Anyway.
The play was fantastic for Holden - it was his first. He was the best boy in the whole theatre of 60 other kids. Didn't cry, didn't complain, didn't have to get up and pee (Thank goodness!). He got really scared when the actors went into a big shark and let the audience know that they TOO were in a shark, and that the only way to get out would be to raise your hands and tickle the shark. He was a trooper. His eyes teared up, and he shrunk back into his mother's bosom, raised his hands and did his best to tickle that giant shark he was in. He laughed, he cried, it was a must-see kid's theatre presentation of pinocchio!
Blockbuster only had Pinocchio 3000... about a robot... it had Whoopi Goldberg in it. ...