Sublimity…

Yesterday marked yet another new milestone for me, another new ‘home’. I packed up all my things in the morning, and moved out of
119 Hopewell Ave. at noon. I’m now staying with a family friend (Bessa) at
her beautiful house in the Glebe. I’m one block from the Canal, a 5 minute walk from work, one block from the grocery store, and living in a beautiful home in one the finest neighbourhoods of Ottawa (and even Ontario some say). Life is pretty sweet. Bessa took me in after I had trouble finding a rental place for only one month, and she’s actually going to be gone for two weeks, so I’ll actually be her house-sitter – not just a nuisence. After living in ‘student housing’ for the past 4 years, it’s quite a pleasant surprise to move into a real house, I could get used to this life.

496I’d also like to take this opportunity to officially invite you to the opening of my photo exhibit entitled, POLARIS Iglulik. That’s right, I’ve finally gotten around to sorting out the 500 photos I took during my two week trip to Iglulik, and have uploaded 137 for your viewing pleasure. I haven’t had time to add stories/descriptions to them yet, but I hope to do that over the next few days. In the meantime, feel free to browse through them, and hopefully you can get a better sense of what my adventure was like.

The other major event that happened here this weekend (or I should say is still happening, I’m currently listening to the dying echos of the encore cheers) is THE concert. Yes folks, The Rolling Stones are in town, and not only are they playing in Ottawa, but they’re playing at Landsdowne Park, a mere 7 blocks from my new residence. Since a concert for nearly 40,000 people (who paid between $60 and $300 each – they must be nuts!) requires a fair bit of volume, I can actually hear the concert rather well from the dinning room table where I currently sit. I’m not a Stones fan, I don’t even really know their music, but it seems like everyone else in this city does. Jamie (who e-mailed me out of the blue to say he was in Ottawa for a couple of days) and I went down to check it out, and the place was absoutely mobbed. They’ve closed off Bank Street for three blocks on either side of the venue, and there were busses going literally every 10 seconds ferrying people in for the big show. We found a spot on the bridge over the Canal where we could see the stage clearly no more than 100m away – the backside of the stage that is – and watched the spectacle for awhile. The highlights for me were looking at the stage itself from a structural and technical perspective (it’s a huge steel girder structure, 8 stories tall with staircases and catwalks galore, covered in thousands of lights, hundreds of speakers and three ginormous TV screens) and listening to the second opening band, Our Lady Peace, who also happen(ed) to be one of my all-time favorites. They’ve got a new album coming out on Tuesday, and played a bunch of songs from it. To me, they were at their best at the start, no-one will ever beat , but since then have slowly gone down-hill, not to the point I don’t like them anymore, but to the point where I’m not willing to buy the new CD without hearing it first. Based on what I heard this evening (which admittedly was plagued with the horrid acoustics we had behind the stage), I’m not super keen on this new album (it seemed pretty slow and mellow), but we’ll have to wait and see. I’m not giving up on them yet…

Sounds like the concert is done, and so am I (for tonight). Weekends are great, you don’t have to work (and you don’t have to feel guilty about it), but they don’t last forever, and I need to start this coming week well on Monday if I hope to get anything done, so I’m off to bed. Cheerio for now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Life in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.