Festivals Wuz Us

Well, traffic was a super-biatch coming out of work on Friday afternoon. Memorial Drive was bunged up so badly... so unappealing. This was actually probably the first time I had seen Memorial be this bad since moving down into Kensington. So, when I got into the gridlock before Deerfoot, I managed to slide off Memorial, onto the Deerfoot and head up to the natural gridlock of 16th Ave. I finally managed to get through, chat with Crhis on the way... just wasn't the best start to the weekend.

Chris and I decided to head out to Langdon for a few drinks and check out the beer gardens at Langdon Days, but beforehand, we'd go grab a bite to eat at the Yardhouse, since neither of us were really keen on shopping or cooking. So we headed down there and Ashley was there to look after us. She was off to Mexico on Saturday for two weeks, so when we took off, we did a sennding off shot of Tequila before Chris and I took off for Langdon.



Chris and I arrived in Langdon to take a small part in the Langdon Days festivities, but Benny was getting a head start on everyone. Greg had suckered him into double Mai Tais with Brandy instead of Grenadine... just to have an umbrella for every drink and stick each one in his hat. What you can't see is the other 3 umbrellas sticking out of his hat.... too funny.

Jeff was already at his place waiting for us to show up, so we poured Benny out of the bar so he could go home and have a shower and Chris and I went over to Jeff's place for another pre-game beer and then over to the gardens. We sat out front, fending off the mosquitoes and had a laugh... Chris was meeting everyone in Langdon for the first time as well, so it was all new to him as well. I also managed to get my Franz Ferdinand CD back from Jeff... the case had been empty for sometime now and now my CD collection is back to being relatively complete.



The beer gardens at Langdon Days on Friday night was actually somewhat dead. I had never gone to the gardens in my few appearances at Langdon Days, so I wasn't really sure what I was to expect. Despite the lack of people, there were people there who I hadn't seen for a while, since moving into the city and got a couple chats in here or there. The mosquitoes were all hovering around the top of the tent, which I tried to capture in the picture, but even the light coming from the tent wasn't enough for the Twilight function on my camera and you can't make out any of the bugs. Apparently though, Saturday night is the best night at the Beer Gardens... all the ball teams that play in the tournament and a lot of the townsfolk would all be around, but Friday was just the drinkers of the town, almost exclusively. It was alright, but Chris and I didn't hang around for too long for Chris didn't want to crash in Langdon and I wanted to get back in case I wanted to go play ball with Alan up at Shouldice on Saturday.

The word leaving the grounds was that the four-way stop in and out of Langdon was already crawling with RCMP, so just to avoid any complications, which there may have been a small one... maybe... Chris and I took a little detour, a little further East and then looped back onto the highway to head home. No problem. Chris had even fallen asleep on the way home... I do have a picture of it, but I don't think I'll post it. Not today anyways... it'll be for blackmail later.

7:30am came a little too quickly... despite getting home just after midnight. I'm pretty sure I didn't stay up too late afterwards. Oh no, that isn't true. When I got home on Friday night, I had set Jen's phone to call forward mine, to see if I could get Natasha's number from it, but I missed about 3 or 4 calls from the forwarding. So, I spent probably about an hour writing text messages to missed cell phone numbers. I sent 'how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.' Well, Jen's friend Jesse called me straight away... ha ha... I think she's kind of the bitchy type anyways... and it was after 1am... ha ha. Then as it turned out, Natasha was texting me back and forth... I wasn't too sure who it was and I wasn't exactly sleuthy enough to figure out it was her. There were a few messages back and forth... then I just passed out.

And then 7:30am came a little too quickly. I didn't feel ambitious at all laying there in bed. I just couldn't bring myself out of bed to go out and get drunk right away, it just wasn't in me. Actually, getting drunk wasn't in me at all really all day on Saturday. It was sort of a lazy day without beer, but I would be slightly giving that up later, but not to any major extent.

When I finally dragged my ass out of bed, I just sat on the couch, played on the computer and watched a bit of the British Open on TV. I thought I would catch up a little on the hockey news and play with some of the pics that I had taken from the night before. I didn't exactly feel motivated enough to write anything, so I didn't, obviously. I did climb on Amazon.ca and finally bought the CD from Be Your Own Pet and Dirty Pretty Things, which will be shipped from Florida today, hopefully. I still haven't seen the confirmation e-mail yet that they've been sent, but I'm sure its coming.

When I finally came to, I chatted with Chris and he felt like grabbing some Arby's for lunch... so I suggested we head into the core, we could grab lunch at Eaton Centre downtown and then we could just hang out for a while. Lunch and some more CD shopping highlighted the afternoon at the mall... MSTRKRFT's The Looks and Snow Patrol's first album, Final Straw, were both relatively cheap at HMV, despite looking for some Modest Mouse.







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MSTRKRFT, the dance side-project of Death From Above 1979, was a pretty good buy. When we got back to the house, I popped The Looks into the CD player and we sat out front of the house and listened to it. It's a pretty wicked set of beats and dance tunes... wasn't bad chilling music either. I didn't pop in the Snow Patrol CD until later...



It was certainly a quiet afternoon in front of the house. Just sitting, watching the world go by. I had bought the latest copy of NME available at HMV... so we both got a look at that. It really wasn't too exciting. I played with my camera a little more and we just hung out for a couple hours.



Jen finally got home after 5pm, I think... she had a good time out in Canmore at a condo, instead of a cabin. But apparently, this condo is something else. A $750,000 condo not far from one of the lakes around there... a 4-bedroom place, with all sorts of ammenities and luxuries, so she was pretty tickled pink. She told me all about it... what each room looked like to the colour scheme detail. I guess this is sort of a girl thing.

Jen confirmed Natasha's new phone number to me when she got home... sure enough, it was the same number I was texting all Friday night. Ha ha. So, I gave her a bell and she was on her way to Saskatchewan for the week. I forgot she was heading out that way, but she'll be back Thursday night and wants to hang out on Friday.

Then the taste for Chinese food kicked in... and it was a phone call to Wok Tu Yu. I went and picked up food for Chris and I... a little Salt & Pepper Squid goes a long ways, I tells ya. Especially with a few beers... see, told ya I had a few. Yes, only a few.

Clerks was on tap for the evening movie watching... Chris hadn't seen it yet, so I ran upstairs and grabbed it. There was talk that we may want to see Clerks 2 on Sunday, but he hadn't seen the first one, so that I could do for him. Man, that movie still cracks me up to no end.

"Don't suck any dick on the way to the parking lot. Hey buddy... get back here!"

The evening was capped off with some chatting online. I spoke with Jen in Taipei for a while. She had started up another Blog to collect links from around the net. She wanted some input and some advice... and we got a bit of a chat in. She's really takin' to this Bloggin' thing, much like myself. Check both her sites out... and maybe even give a little input for her second Blog. I was also chattin' with Julie a bit that night... but my router kicked the bucket for the night at around 1am... so that kinda sucked. And that was the night.

Sunday, was again a lazy morning. Jen had left early for a hair appointment and asked if I wanted to go into the core again to look for the Modest Mouse CD for the song we kept hearing at the Yardhouse. I really didn't have much else on the go, so I said yeah... but still lazied around for a good while around the house before getting ready.

She got back, I was showered and ready to go... so we walked through the Salsa Festival, which was happening Sunday afternoon in Kensington. All sorts of tents set-up, much like the Lilac Festival, but with samplings of all sorts of different salsa's from restaurants and individual participants and all the money from the bags of nacho chips went to the Women's Shelters in Calgary. Man, was it ever busy. We just walked through before heading into the core around noon. They were just starting up for the afternoon, but it was really busy.

So we went into the core, she got Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Like Bad News and another reggae disc at HMV, we grabbed a bite to eat and went back to the Yardhouse for a couple beers. While we were sitting there, she got the idea of getting the bar staff a drink from Starbucks... which she did and that paid for our drinks, including Chris' who came a little later. Man, what an idea. I bet her co-workers weren't very happy with her though... she grabbed 4 iced drinks (which are a bitch to make, I hear) when the Starbucks itself was super-busy. I'm pretty sure I would have been pissed off... ha ha. The Queen of Keeping Friends, that girl...



We eventually got a window seat at the bar as well... which the view was fantastic. We hung around there for a couple hours, enjoying a few pints, nothing major. It was really hot out in Calgary on Sunday, upwards of about 31 or 32 degrees... so the bikini tops, tube tops and tank tops were out in force... which made for a great view from the window. Jen, a big fan of boobs ("but she's not gay", in her own words) was doing her best to point them out, for the sake of pointing them out. She was drinking Crown Floats in the afternoon, before she was supposed to work at 5:30pm... she had 3 or 4 and was mighty tipsy, if not slightly wasted by the time her boss called her in to work a bit early... closer to 3:30pm. Ha ha.

Chris and I debated for a while afterwards and decided we should rollerblade down to Eau Claire and go check out a flick. We got home and found that Pirates of the Caribbean started earlier than Clerks 2, so we decided to go see that. But first, we got a good skate in as the people were floating down the river...



... and the clouds rolled in over top of us. Man, I was sure jealous of all those floaters... could be an activity for next weekend. But the clouds really came over quickly, very dark and very ominous. There was thunderstorms in the weather forecast and they did come. So we managed to loop around the Zoo and head back to Eau Claire, pick up our tix and then went into Joey's for a drink and a bite to kill some time. When we got into Joey's, the storm hit... but not for very long around there.

Pirates of the Caribbean was an alright flick... both Chris and I agreed that there wasn't enough Keira Knightley, which was the real selling factor of the movie. When she was on screen, she was particularly hot... so, no real complaints in the end. It was a very entertaining movie... but still kinda glad we only paid $9 to see it at Eau Claire.

We got home around 9:30pm... the paths were clear and dry, so we were able to rollerblade home. Then it was an evening of a little bit of TV, online poker and chatting online. I was chatting with Trisha, a girl I had met online. We were chatting about all sorts and I made mention that we should get together on Thursday and I think we might. She's a big soccer fan and plays quite a bit herself. By all of her pics online, she's a pretty cute girl with seemingly a lot of personality... so I thought why not? We get along alright online... and what's the harm?

And that there is the weekend. Finally... I'm finished.