The Latest...

Jessica and I spent the week in Toronto, visiting her family and friends. As always, it was another eat-a-thon. Everywhere we went, there was food, food, and more food. We've both resolved to get back on a proper eating regimen, now that we have no huge events coming up. There's always an event, of course. Mom's birthday is coming up. Mine's a month after that. But those are one-day items, not solid weeks of eating like last week was.

I'm liking Toronto more and more each visit. Driving there is no picnic, but it's certainly better than driving in DC. Living in Toronto would make owning a car less practical, but I think you'd still need a car sometimes. Maybe the idea is to rent one when you need it - I dunno. But the town is full of good restaurants, decent people, and lots of Jessica's friends. The subway is cheap too. In fact, the total cost of the Toronto subway is less than the price that the DC Metro wants to raise rates by. Shows you how piss-poorly the DC Metro is managed. On the other hand, movies are bloody expensive. We paid around $25 for 2 people, at a matinee! That's more than primetime here.

On a side note, as we were walking out of the movie theatre, I saw someone who looked farmiliar. It ended up being Caroline Rhea, host of the Biggest Loser, sans make-up, and in a pink terrycloth leisure outfit. Kind of surreal.

Christmas itself was pretty good. I got all the things I wanted, and so did Jess. I spend a few nights playing Scrabble with Jess's mom and her friend Art, which was fun. Scrabble is starting to grow on me, though I'm not to fond of the "Scrabble Dictionary", which contains countless non-words that do not appear in the normal dictionary. It makes the game a contest of who has better knowledge of the Scrabble Dictionary, which usually isn't me. Jess hates the game passionately, although we did get her to play once, out of boredom. Jess's mom gave us a Scrabble game, so now we have it in the house. We'll see if Jess warms up to it.

We spent the first few nights of our trip at Jess's brother's house. He lives in a small town about an hour outside Toronto. While there, we had Jess drive the Mini around an abandoned street. After a dozen or more stalls, and a few lurches, she just suddenly "got it" and made perfect start after perfect start. Then we drove around the neighborhood, which was strewn with stop signs, turns, red lights, and uphill starts. All pretty much perfect. On the return trip home, she did about 2-1/2 hours of the driving, and that was perfect too, including an uphill start at a red light, while turning left behind a slow-moving tractor trailer, with a mean-looking cop in the other lane. She's now officially a stick-shift driver.

So 2006 is almost over. Tonight is New Year's Eve, and of course we have no plans. We may just stick around the house and avoid all the drunk drivers. We'll see. We got some DVDs for Xmas, so we may just watch them. Hopefully 2007 will be as good for us as 2006 was.