Ottawa’s been having a nice stretch of sunshine lately, and with a high pressure front moving through the area, today was no exception. After doing some stuff at home, I headed out to run a couple of errands.

My first stop was the Ottawa Bagel Shop on Wellington, not too far from where I live. Home of some of the best bagels in Ottawa, it also sells all sorts of chocolates, freshly-made cookies and a whole lot of other delicacies. I picked up some Michel Cluizel Grand Lait 45% milk chocolate and a couple of small bars of Green & Black’s Organic white chocolate. I’ve been a big fan of the various chocolates that Green & Black’s make for some time now, but I only recently discovered Michel Cluizel after watching a show on Treasure HD called How The Best Is Done that featured some of the best chocolates in the world. Both makers produce amazing types of chocolate!

Anyways, after buying some cookies to go with the chocolate, I headed off to the Harvest Loaf Bakery, just a couple of doors down from the Ottawa Bagel Shop. There, I picked up a loaf of light pumpernickel bread and a croissant and then continued down Wellington.

Swinging by the Tim Horton’s on Richmond Road near Woodroffe for a quick snack (the croissant just didn’t do the trick), I decided to follow Richmond Road out to its namesake, the village of Richmond.

One of the main reasons to visit Richmond is the Richmond Bakery (their Yellow Pages ad since they don’t appear to have a website). I can recall going there with my parents as a kid. Besides bread, they also have cookies. Lots of cookies. I picked up a dozen sugar jam cookies for a geocaching roadtrip tomorrow and a jam-filled cookie.

From there I decided to check up on a geocache I have near North Gower, Out in the cedars (GCP93C). I placed this cache about four years ago and it’s been well-visited since then. It took about 25 minutes to drive to the cache from Richmond and about 25 seconds to confirm that it was still ok.

Heading east along Roger Stevens Drive, I found myself in Metcalfe, from whence I made my way to South Keys Mall to pick up the bits to make a new geocache out of. After braving the crowds at Wal-Mart, I headed home with my newly-acquired stuff.

All in all a very good day! 🙂

I headed down to the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest at Lebreton Flats Wednesday evening to see KISS in concert.

This was my first KISS concert, which apparently put me in the minority based on the fact that there were tons of people in KISS makeup. I enjoyed it enough and can put a tick next to “Seen KISS in concert”. Rock and Roll All Nite was pretty impressive, with lots of fireworks and confetti cannons. Very cool!

I took a lot of pictures, some of which you can see by clicking on the images below. Sooner or later I’ll get around to putting the rest of them online. They’re now available here.

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I hadn’t been planning on going to Bluesfest, but a call from a friend changed that. I hopped on a bus and made my way to Lebreton Flats where I met up with my friend. We listened to some amazing improvisational electronic music from Holy F*ck for a while before heading off to see Ana Miura.

Watching and listening to Ana, it was clear that she was singing from the heart. Her music was warm and full of rich tones and she even played one song on a ukulele that she’d made herself. Very talented and a likely addition to my iPod in the near future!

Once Ana finished, I made my way to the main stages. Metric was about half-way through their set when I showed up, so I listened to the rest of their set while I munched on some mini-donuts I bought from one of the vendors.

The last act of the night was Ben Harper and Relentless7. He played a mix of guitar and slide guitar while singing a great selection of songs, including  a cover of Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. Wow!

All in all I had a great time at the Ottawa Bluesfest and I’m thinking of going to a few other nights because it sounds like there’s a bunch of great performers lined up.

I took some pictures of the various shows I watched and put them in my gallery. I haven’t gone through them with a fine toothed comb, so you’ve been warned. 🙂

I got together with friends that I’ve known most of my life – one of them since I was kindergarten-aged. We had a BBQ at one of their houses and then headed out to Kanata and took part in the festivities there. As in past years, there was a carnival with rides for the kids, so we spent some time there – I even took one of the munchkins on the ferris wheel at her request, which was a lot of fun for both of us. To say she enjoyed it would be an understatement. There was also a booth that had a pool full of rubber ducks swirling around and a merry go round, both of which presented great photo opportunities.

As it got darker we made our way to a higher vantage point to watch the fireworks. I had my Canon SD850IS with me, so I took a lot of long-exposure pictures. I didn’t have a tripod, so I had to brace the camera or hold it steady.

A couple of people have asked me how to take pictures of fireworks recently, so I thought I’d share some of the tricks I use. And at the end you can see my results. 🙂

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I had a lot of fun this past weekend. Saturday started with a dragonboat practice followed by brunch with some of the other people on the Algonquin College Singapore Slings. Once sated, I did a bunch of errands that saw me drive back and forth across Ottawa from place to place. Tiring of that, I headed out on my bike along the Ottawa River path to the top of the locks and into the Market for gelato at Piccolo Grande on Murray. Happily full of a double-chocolate gelato that had big chunks of white chocolate in it, I headed back towards the Cenotaph to check out the festivities related to the Ottawa Race Weekend.

To say the area was crowded would be a bit like saying the Pacific Ocean has a lot of water in it.

Most of the roads were closed to cars because they were packed with people. People who had just finished a race, people who were getting ready to race, people who were in a race, people who were watching the races and people who were trying to figure out how they could get to where they wanted to be given all the road closures and people.

A friend of mine was doing the 10 km race, so I found a good vantage point near the first turn and waited for the race to start.

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My Tracker had been sounding kind of throaty for a couple of days and when I poked at the tail pipe is swung back and forth. Not good.

So, last weekend I stopped by Active Green + Ross on Bank Street about an hour before they closed to see if they could do something to make it better. One of their technicians put the Tracker on a hoist and took a look. It turns out that the tail pipe was no longer attached to the resonator, and thus the rest of the exhaust system, and was only being held in place by a rubber anti-vibration mount.

He suggested that he could cut the heat shield off the resonator, slip a slightly larger piece of pipe over the resonator and cut the end on an angle, too. This sounded like a reasonable interim solution so I said “go for it”. After ten or fifteen minutes, he had crafted a temporary tail pipe.

When I went to pay for it, the person at the counter said “don’t worry about it”.  “Seriously?” I asked holding out my credit card.  “Yup. If you decide to replace the muffler, hopefully you’ll come back to us.”

Wow! Here’s a company that gets it. For the cost of a couple of feet of pipe, a clamp and fifteen minutes of the technician’s time, they’ve done more to make me want to go back to them than any advertising campaign could.

So, if you need a muffler replaced or other maintenance done on your car you should check out Active Green + Ross.

Ottawa has been having some nice weather the last couple of days, so yesterday I checked over my bike and got it ready for the road. It was nice again this evening so I grabbed my stuff and headed out for the first ride of the season.

I made my way to Dow’s Lake where I picked up the bike path along the Canal. Following it down to the NAC, I headed to Parliament Hill where I did a quick lap past the Library of Parliament before making my way back along the Ottawa River Parkway. Normally, I would have taken the bike path, but there were still sections blocked by snow.

This is one of the earliest first rides I’ve taken. Last year, I wrote about the first ride of 2008 on April 25th. Hopefully, this is good omen of the weather for the next few months.