Pretty Good Weekend

The weather certainly could have been nicer (it's warm enough for this time of year but very overcast and Sat. was drizzly), but otherwise it was a pretty good weekend.

Sat. I did get back to the gym.  I've barely been able to go once a week (and swimming once a week), whereas weeks I can make it three or even four times to the gym and swimming I just feel so much more virtuous.  I really should have made it over on Thurs., but I was just a bit sick of getting wet, and I guess I feel that because I am biking more than I normally would (in Feb.!), I don't need to really push it.

Then my wife and I went to the AGO to see the Keith Haring exhibit on Saturday.  This is only on for two more weekend (past this past weekend), and I didn't want to go when it was going to be super crowded.  I think I've taken it in enough times, having gone in four times or so.

A friend had told me there was a small exhibit on Rembrandt and his circle, so we asked about that.  It was down on the main floor.

Rembrandt (Attributed), A Scholar by Candlelight, ca. 1628

My wife headed back home, but I had quite a bit left to do on Sat.  First, I went over to MEC.  I had to replace the front light on my bike.  It had been stolen on Friday!  This makes the 2nd time in recent memory I've had the bike light stolen when parked on the street (plus a bungy cord stolen from the garage at work!).  Toronto the Good, my ass!  (Overall, Friday was ok, except for the theft.  I saw Drive-Away Dolls, then headed over to the Rex to see the Botos Brothers for a while.)

Since I was close to 401 Richmond, I ran through there, literally taking less than 10 minutes to pop into a few galleries.  Then I caught the Spadina replacement bus.  I had exactly one minute left in the two-hour free transfer window!  I was a bit worried that because we were on the bus and not the streetcar I would be forced to enter the station through the fare gates (and pay a full fare), which is how things work at Bathurst.  However, Spadina does have connected bus bays, which I guess makes sense for people taking the bus north.  I had just never come through the station that way before.

I got over to the Paradise Theatre with about 15 minutes to spare.  I was there to see Kurosawa's High and Low.  I enjoyed this quite a bit, though I was much more interested in the second half of the film, which is a police procedural where the police are out running around the city.

Then I went for dinner at an Ethiopean place nearby.  This is becoming a bit of a tradition, though normally I eat first, then catch an evening film at the Paradise.  This time I was at a matinee, so ate afterwards.

Typically, I would go home after that, but I was catching a concert at 8 at Roy Thompson Hall!  So I dropped in at Robarts and got about 45 minutes of work in, before it was time to head down to the concert.

The concert was interesting.  It was the combined forces of two orchestras (NAC and OSQ) and then the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir came in for the last movement of Jacques Hétu's Fifth Symphony.  In general, I thought Hétu's Fifth Symphony was pretty interesting, though I didn't care for the last movement much at all.

Sunday I got a bit of work done, then the grocery shopping.  I made dinner for Monday (or what I thought I would be eating on Monday until I realized I have a concert to go to!) in the slow cooker.  I also just had enough time to go over to Matty Eckler and get my swimming session in, so that definitely made me feel accomplished.  Then I ran back over to Robarts to wrap up some additional work.

I finally wrapped up Drabble's The Ice Age this weekend.  I also finished Steinbeck's East of Eden.  I don't think this is a great book (structurally too repetitive and also people just drop out of the main story when they aren't useful for the plot), but it had some memorable characters, particularly the servant Lee, who was completely written out of the movie apparently!  This is probably the longest book I've read in quite some time.  The longest book (not book series) prior to this was probably rereading Crime and Punishment and then Mann's The Magic Mountain before that.

I would have liked to gotten through a bit more actual work this weekend, so I don't have so much to do on Monday, but on the whole it was a pretty good weekend.