Happy Canada Day! Canada is now 140 years old.
A very eventful and tiring day. We visited the Mississauga City Hall in the morning. After that we went to the Toronto City Hall and then onwards to Queen’s Park. Later towards the evening we went to the Mel Lastman Square for the fireworks display. Finally, we bought fireworks from the local convenience store and lit them up in the neighbourhood park.
Dooh, Lunato, and I started making plans as soon as Harry mentioned that he was going to visit Canada during June of 2007. We discussed back and forth about what we should do, where we should visit, and most importantly when Dooh and Harry should visit Toronto from Ottawa.
After much deliberation it was decided that they will depart from Ottawa on 13th, Wednesday, around noon and spend 14th, 15th, and then the weekend of 16th and 17th in Toronto. Lunato, excellent at planning vacations, made detailed plans for how to best utilize each day.
Lunato and I hadn’t met Harry since our visit to Jakarta in October of 2004 and Dooh hadn’t met Harry since he left Ottawa back in September of 2003.
Dooh and I applied for 2 days-off from work. Lunato is free from 2PM on weekdays so she decided not to take time off for Thursday or Friday. Shekhar was supposed to join us as well but unfortunately he had a previous engagement for the weekend that he just could not back out of.
In any case, we arranged everything that needed to be arranged, bought everything that needed to be bought, fixed everything that needed to be fixed, confirmed everything that needed to be confirmed, informed Renny of our plans, reminded Harry multiple times about the plan, and then waited patiently for the 13th.
On the morning of the 13th, mere hours before the Greyhound bus was scheduled to depart from Ottawa, Harry called me and informed me that he is not coming because something came up.
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Dooh was furious but being the patient man that he is he held his tongue and quietly made his way to the Bus Terminal.
I used profanity, told Harry to do as he pleased, hung up, and went back to work.
Lunato was shocked as well but she gave him the benefit of the doubt and tried to convince me that some emergency situation must’ve occured and that is why he can’t adhere to the orignal plan. Tsk tsk, she simply hasn’t known Harry as long as Dooh and I have.
Dooh rode the bus alone from Ottawa to Toronto. We met him at the Bus Terminal near Bay and Dundas, argued and whined about Harry’s yet-again-but-to-be-expected casual disregard of pre-made, pre-approved, pre-confirmed, pre-reconfirmed and pre-re-reconfirmed plans. Arrrgh!!
But that’s typical Harry and we love him for what, and who, he is. Besides, as he commented later, “It would be a boring story to tell if everything went smoothly”
Dooh’s birthday was on the 11th of June and Lunato and I had deliberately ignored it and hadn’t called him or wished him a happy birthday. We were going to take him to Demetre and celebrate together with Harry. Demetre’s strawberry-belgian-waffle-ice-cream is delicious and the Demetre staff played the birthday song for Dooh when they brought him his food. I think it was a nice surprise.. he wasn’t expecting it at all.
After Demtre we just went home instead of wandering around downtown Toronto until the wee hours of the morning. While complaining about Harry and narrating past episodes of Harry’s chicanery, infidelity, treachery, betrayal, duplicity, perfidy, and knavery to Lunato (one of my favourite pastime) the lights went out in the whole neighbourhood. After fighting-off the invading mutant zombie horde we finally went to sleep fully expecting Harry to not show up the next day.
Ontario’s Largest Water Fight @ Christie Pitts Park
Saturday, May 26 from 1:00 pm to 1:15 pm
The aim was to attract a flash mob of more then 3500 people (to break the largest waterfight record) but only 100 or so people showed up. Doh. Round 2 is scheduled for July 8th 2007. As apparent from our pictures, we definitely need to get bigger waterguns.
By the way, not all of these images are mine, a lot of them are copied over from facebook’s Waterfight gallery.