Get ready for mayhem Mayhem MAYHEM!!

So, last week instead of going to see American Football we instead saw, in the same stadium, Monster Jam. A three hour event of monster trucks, quad biking, monster trucks and demolition derby.

A silly afternoon spent with very loud engines and lots of expensive looking monster trucks smashing themselves up to the delight of the crowds. Seems everyone was only there to see the crashes, I know I was. They flip. They roll. They land on their roofs. They break. They smash. They have to get towed off the arena by a digger. Still it was entertaining.

Lets play some FOOTBALL!!!!

So on Saturday last week we went to our first (American) football game over here. It was an American College Football game being held at the Rogers Centre for some reason or another. Anyway we'd never been to one, and since it's only about 150m from out front door it seemed rude not to. So we went.

Rutgers University was playing Ball State University (personally I didn't know the US had a Ball State, I'm pretty sure it's not one of the 50 I've learned about, I'll look it up and get back to you.) Due to the joys of random ticket allocated we were just off the centre line on the Ball State side, so I guess we were cheering for Ball State then. Note to self, don't sit on one teams side and cheer for the other, it just gets messy.

The universities certainly put on a large show. Each side has their own marching band and several sets of cheerleaders (spares I suppose in case they break one) plus their mascots running around the field (or at least freshman students dressed up as mascots in some kind of weird hazing initiation.) Probably about 200 people officially involved on each side due to that, plus all the fans that followed them up to the Great White North from the Land of the Free.


Anyway it was a fun enough game to watch, even though Ball State didn't know what to do with the ball most of the time. Either their quarterback forgot he should really get rid of the ball before five burly armoured mean people jump on him, or the receivers he was throwing to were scared of trying to catch it. Whichever happened Ball State lost 52-30.


It was a good day out anyway. We'd never been to a major sporting event before so it was a new experience every way.

Ice, Snow and Mount Sinai

So on Wednesday of last week I went for a walk to the west of downtown, towards the Exhibition area by the lake. It had snowed the day or two before, it was icy and cold. Bit windy as well. As you can see in the photo below, the temperature board reads as cold.

A fun walk, even if when I took my gloves off to change lenses on the camera it felt like a wind chill of -25 degrees C (which it was.) Still it was a good walk. Stretch the old legs, explore somewhere I've never been. I decided to go for the walk as I had an interview in the area the next day and wanted to find where the place I was going beforehand, just to ensure I knew how long it would take to get there.

I came across this Inukshuk as well. Inukshuk are markers left by the Inuit and other first people in the western and arctic regions of Canada to act as navigational markers and meeting places. Apparently it is very hard to orientate yourself when all you can see is ice and snow, or rolling plains. Obviously this Inukshuk isn't authentic and has just been made to look nice in a park, but there are still hundreds or thousands of real ones around Canada.

And what about the Mount Sinai section of the title you ask? Mount Sinai is the name of the closest hospital emergency room to us (we think.) It is where we had the joy of spending Friday night last week. Nothing terribly serious though. While at Ikea earlier in the day and loading a friends car I managed to somehow (I don't know how, I don't recall doing it) taking the top right off one of my knuckles. Anyway four and a half hours of pressure and ice later when it won't stop bleeding we decide it would be best to go to the emergency room (as told to by a nurse on a telehphone helpline.) So the ER on a Friday night, the usual assortment of people there under police escort, security guards with other people, and lots of genuinely sick people (which just made me hide my pathetic wound under my coat.) Still for a Friday night I was reasonably impressed that such a non-threatening injury got me seen in three hours, even if they did give me a tetanus shot as well. Aw well, such is life.