Wayne D's Blog

It's time again for me to decide on my emusic.com picks for the month. It wasn't too hard this month. I downloaded the rest of the Norm Macdonald's Ridiculous album that I downloaded the first three tracks from last week, Aimee Mann's Christmas album, One More Drifter in the Snow and Hello Love by The Be Good Tanyas. I've been a big fan of Aimee Mann since I saw her cover James Taylor's song Shed a Little Light on The West wing back in 2002. She came through Toronto soon after that and I bought tickets to her show solely based on that performance. I wasn't disappointed, she played at an acoustic concert in Toronto back in February with Chuck Prophet and I regret that I didn't go but I did hear about it very close to show time.  I went over to youtube to see if there was any Aimme Mann stuff there. I came across a clip from when Aimee appeared on Buffy the Vampire Slayer which was a show I really liked. Aimee and Buffy together, that's a slam dunk, so here it is. Be warned, this clip contains both singing and vampires, viewer discretion is advised. I expect it won't last too long because I'm sure it wasn't posted with permission.

We  (the Argonotes) had originally planned on having our final tailgate party of the year yesterday at the Argonauts final regular season game. We decided the scrub the plan when the November in October weather we have been having recently made it look at if we would be eating our hamburgers in the rain. I decided that I would take down my Coleman stove and brew up some hot chocolate. My plan almost failed when my wife told me she had thrown out our kettle. Off to the dollar store i went, no suitable kettle available. Then it was off to Walmart. I decided to splurge and instead of buying the $7.50 painted kettle I went for the shiny metal kettle which I found more esthetically pleasing than the brushed metal look. I put a small table in the trunk of the car to put the stove on and at the last minute decided to fill our large stainless steel stock pot with water too. A quick aside, don't put a Coleman stove on top of a plastic table. A few weeks ago when we had a hotdog and corn roast/boil fundraiser for the Baden Powell scouting group where I am a leader and managed to have the stove sink an inch or two into the table top in the three hours we had it going, oops.

When we arrived at the parking lot where the Argonotes usually meet the lot was too full for us to park there. Not necessarily a bad thing as they had decided to charge $25 to park in that particular lot. We instead parked next door at Simcoe Place for $10. This meant that instead of opening the trunk, taking out the stuff and setting it up beside the car we had to schlep in all up the stairs and across the street. At least the $15 I saved for parking helped cover the cost of the naphtha fuel which now costs over $11 a can instead of the $8 it used to cost. For some reason parking was very tight and we ended up parking three levels down at the very bottom level of the lot. At least we found a spot near the stairs. It was a good thing that I had two of my sons with me for the game because by the time we had distributed everything among us we were pretty loaded down. The table was left in the trunk of the car. 

There was a convenient spot in the corner of the parking lot that was relatively protected from the gale force winds that were blowing by the metal newspaper boxes that were lined up at this particular corner. We set up the stove on a level spot on the pavement and got things going. I filled the cups and my sons did the stirring. Luckily there was a Toronto Sun box that had a flat top where we could line the filled up cups.  

The hot chocolate seemed to be appreciated, I think I'll do it again for the Eastern Semi-Final next Sunday.