Whistler

Dreamed about skiing in Whistler last night.  Familiar dream about trying to get a few more runs in before the vacation ends.

First commercial I saw on TV this morning (sports station) was one for Whistler.  I miss my yearly Whistler trips !

Junos

I recently heard  that my daughter's music teacher was nominated for a Juno award for Reggae Recording of the Year.  He was the instrumentalist for Carl Henry III.  He unfortunately lost the award to Dubmatix ft. Prince Blanco.  I immediately recognized the name Prince Blanco as I met him a few years ago as he was singing with a local reggae band called the Liquidaires with a ultimate [frisbee] friend of mine on bass.    I went to the gig with another ultimate friend and had a great night.  On a related note, I was really pleased to see that a couple of other friends I met playing ultimate, Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen won a Juno for DVD of the year.

Duke

I came home from my ultimate game tonight just in time to see the last 13 seconds of the NCAA Final Four Championship game.  Duke won by a couple of points.  Before bed, I then sit down to ice my ankle and I pick up What the Dog Saw to continue with a chapter I was reading a few days before.  After a few pages I read that one of people Gladwell is talking about went to law school at Duke.

100's and 1000's of strangers

I've been doing a photo project called 100 Strangers for about 9 months now and I'm up to over 40 strangers.  I  met Pam, #43 on Monday night before my ultimate game.  He talked about a lot of different things, including 100 Strangers and she told about her friend, Hilary Leung and his 1000 Stranger project.  Hilary takes photos of people in public spaces, then draws an illustration of that person.  He is exhibiting his work at a gallery starting this week on Queen West in Toronto - see his blog and website for details.  What a cool coincidence.

A wet dog and soccer parents

As I was leaving Sunnybrook dog park today I met up with a couple who were leaving at the same time.  I recognized their dog as he'd been playing with mine for a while in the park.  They asked if I was their son's soccer coach.  Sure enough, I recognized this nice couple who I hadn't seen for quite a years.

As we were getting our dogs to our cars, we talked about our dogs, and they said they had recall problems with their dog (like mine) and it had ran off a while back from this parking lot.  They only got it back after it had found another dog of interest.  I said I got a little worried about Kooper at regular parks (not officially off-leash, fenced parks) and said once he got bored of other dogs and we were in a regular park, it gets very difficult to get him back.

We said our goodbyes and I began the tricky process of taking the leash off Kooper and closing the (station wagon) trunk.  I noticed there was another dog in the parking lot and sure enough it was too big a temptation for Kooper.  He leapt out of the trunk and went to say hello.  As I approached, he ran off down the nature trail toward another dog.  From there he quickly noticed the stream and started exploring the soft ice along the bank of the stream.  I noticed the water was moving quickly and began to really worry.  He was oblivious to my calls and ran further upstream as I approached.  I couldn't get very close as the bank was steep and the ice, I'm guessing, too thin to hold me.  The game continued and sure enough he got too close to the edge and slipped into the stream.  I'm not certain how deep it was, but I was fearing the worst.  He was obviously very surprised when he fell in, but luckily it only took a couple of tries over about 10 seconds and he jumped out and ran up the bank to the trail and met up with another dog.  I grabbed him and walked back to the car.  He didn't seem cold at all and for him it appeared his adventure was just another walk in the park.  I hope he learnt a lesson.

Ultimate food court

I went down to the North end food court at The Eaton Centre today to load up on some wonton noodle soup and bumped into an old friend of mine.  Tom is a lawyer and works in one of the office towers so I've known he works in the 'hood for a long time, but I don't think I've ever seen him close to our offices (I'm in another of The Eaton Centre's 3 office towers) in over 5 years.  I know Tom from ultimate [frisbee], we played on a few teams together and went to the world championships back in 1995.  One small coincidence is that I sent him a quick email the other day wishing him happy birthday.  As I'm walking out of the foodcourt with my take-out soup I bump into another old friend from ultimate - Russell.  I've never seen him out of ultimate gear and here he was dressed like he'd just stepped out of GQ (he was on his way to a meeting).  Turns out that Russell's office is in the same tower as Tom's.

Jack Campbell

I was watching the end of The Family Man the other night.  Nick Cage plays jack Campbell is this wonderful "what's important in life" story.  The next morning I overhear that Jack Campbell had a great game as goalie for the US junior hockey team.

UNICEF

I watched the Champion's League final this afternoon. Barcelona beat Manchester United 2-0. Barcelona have an unusual "sponsor" of UNICEF. I actually did a little googling and was pleased to see that Barcelona actually donate a minimum 1.5M euro per year to UNICEF. A nice story in times of greedy sports teams and players ! Anyway, on the dining room table there's a tax receipt from UNICEF. I didn't know my wife donated any money to UNICEF and today was the first time I saw the paperwork. No biggy, but nice.