There has been a City of Ottawa crew working on Scott Street between Holland and Parkdale the last couple of days. Yesterday, it looked like they were cleaning the pipes and fussing one of the manholes. Today, they’ve erected a fence around the manhole and been using a crane to pull what looks like a piece of white cloth out of the back of a tractor trailer.

My co-workers and I were speculating about what they’re doing before lunch. Among the things we came up with included cleaning up after an oil spill or something to do with the Freon discharge from the heating plant in Tunney’s Pasture last week.

I headed out at lunch and on the way back to the office I checked out the worksite and got the lowdown on it from the crew.

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I was out and about at lunch with a co-worker last week. We passed by a local chip wagon so we stopped to order lunch.  While waiting for our orders we browsed through a table full of books in front of Collected Works, a book store near Holland and Wellington. In one of the boxes I came across an interesting set of titles that reflected some of the major stages of life, pretty much in chronological order.

The books on dating, marriage and death were in another box.

I drove Brian home to Kanata this evening after our weekly gaming session. While driving along the 417 westbound near Maitland we watched a car in the eastbound lanes go zipping off the road, hit the snow bank and flip over into the ditch. I immediately called 911 who transferred me to the OPP. While reporting the location, we got off at Maitland and got back on heading east. We arrived on scene to find the driver standing near his car along with a couple of Bylaw Enforcement officers who happened to be passing by.

Fortunately, the driver was just a little shaken up and not actually hurt so he must have been wearing his seatbelt. The skid marks were still visible and showed that his trip into the snow bank probably started from the left lane. Talk about a lucky guy!

Once I confirmed to the dispatcher he was uninjured, I set up some road flares to alert on coming drivers. An OPP officer arrived just as I finished lighting the last flare and a tow truck appeared a few seconds later. The OPP officer released us from the scene and we resumed our journey to Kanata and I’m happy to report that was uneventful. I snapped a picture of the upside down car before we left.

On my way home from Kanata, I came across another car in a snow bank on the other side of the median. Fortunately, this one appeared to be just sitting on top of the snow bank. As another car was stopped nearby and there didn’t appear to be anyone looking injured, I called *OPP (*677) to make sure they were aware of it rather than calling 911.

While most people on the 417 were travelling around 80 km/h, there were a few who insisted on driving along at 100 km/h or faster as though the roads were bare and dry rather than partially snow covered and slippery. Hopefully, they arrived safely at their destinations and not upside down in a snow bank.

I went to the Ottawa Wine & Food Show at Lansdowne Park with some friends Friday evening. The last time I went was several years ago when the show was still at the Congress Centre. We bought tickets for the Tasting Alley, which ran for the first two hours of the show. It consisted of about forty different wines that probably averaged about $25/bottle. Unlike the main show, unlimited tasting tickets for these wines were included in the admission price, as was a free coat check. We had some very good wines and a couple of we dumped after one taste.

At the end of the two hours, we made our way into the main show via the VIP entrance, bypassing the line-ups.  That alone was worth the extra cost of the Tasting Alley.

The main show was absolutely packed and I have to admit that I didn’t like this venue as much as when it was at the Congress Centre.  One major flaw with the VIP Entrance is that there wasn’t a coupon booth where we entered, meaning we had to wander around the show for quite some time until we came across one of the booths.  Also, I didn’t think the selection was as good as it was the last time I went to the show.  I didn’t see any booths offering port or madeira, for example.

Still, I had a fun time and we stayed until the show closed at 9pm, at which point we made our way to the Barley Mow for some post-show food.  After sobering up there for a couple of hours (yes, sobering up at a pub — well, some of us), we headed our various ways.

Would I go again?  Probably.  I thought the Tasting Alley was an excellent value for the money and would happily try it again.  One thing thing they could add to it would be to provide little tasting notebooks so you could rate them as you went along.

I was finally able to do some geocaching here in Quebec City.  Since arriving, I’ve scoped out some caches, but wasn’t able to actually find any of them because there were too many people around.  I remedied that by doing some late night geocaching.  One I found was near the fountain in front of the Quebec legislature building (GC154TJ).  Naturally, the geocoin I’ve been carrying around for a while was too big to fit in the container.

The other one I logged was a virtual geocache.  There’s a tree in the Old City that has grown around a cannon ball and to log the cache you have to take your picture with it. (GCHKWJ)

This bumper sticker was stuck to a number of things in the Old City, so I thought I’d take a picture of it for Trashy.

Pictures of it and some other pictures I took since the last update are in my gallery.

I drove down to Quebec City to attend the week-long 16th General Assembly and International Scientific Symposium of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) on Saturday.  Yesterday evening, I wandered around Old Quebec with one of the other people from Ottawa and took some pictures.  It was raining, so everything was shiny and the clouds glowed in the lights giving the buildings a kind of spooky aura.

You can see the pictures in my gallery.

Shortly after 8am this morning, the lower section of the south side stands at Frank Clair Stadium in Lansdowne Park were demolished in a controlled implosion.  I was heading over to my apartment to meet up with the painters, so I stopped off along the way to watch the show.

I parked on Bristol Avenue, near Echo and Riverdale and joined the growing crowd on Echo.  We could hear the three-minute and one-minute warning sirens and then the countdown of the last few seconds.  After zero there was a pause and then a series of booms, kind of like someone taking slapshots at the board in a hockey rink, without any visible effect on the part of the stadium we could see.

After a few more booms the east end kind of folded up and dropped into the growing cloud of dust.

	Very cool! I posted some pictures in my gallery.