Winnipeg-oh!

I'm back in Winnipeg for the weekend! Kevin and I started the day stopping by IBM to visit Darin, his old boss/my parents' next door neighbour/our matchmaker. Quite the power combo of titles! Darin's team is made up of 2 other developers - Mike and Curtis, a.k.a. McLovin (see March 20, 2008). Mike and Curtis are also going to weddings this weekend and Curtis is having his own wedding the weekend after. I have a theory on why August beats June for wedding frequency in Winnipeg. If there are 2 things Winnipeggers love, they're good deals and Jeanne's cakes. I suspect the bakery's year-long supply of cookie bases expires in August, causing them to give special deals on wedding cakes, thus driving the popularity of weddings that month. That's one for Freakanomics to explore.

On the drive over, Kevin and I also did a stalking run past my old house on Braemar Ave. Sadly, the year and a half I put in to reshaping the bushes into perfect balls went to waste as the plants appear to be growing untamed now. I had also planted flowers with colours arranged in order of the spectrum. That's right - I have OCD tendencies. Don't tell me you've never separated your Smarties into colour groupings, counted out equal amounts for each group and then eaten them in the order they appear in the rainbow! I still ate the brown ones even though brown isn't in the spectrum, so this proves I'm normal! Any way, the spectrum pattern wasn't evident in the flower beds at all. Sigh. Kevin has forbidden a spectrum garden at the Ottawa house, claiming "random" is a pattern too.

After IBM, Kevin and I went to In Ferno's for lunch with my parents. I of course ordered the duck confit, but for some reason the server thought I meant the duck appetizer, so I got this tiny plate of potstickers. I pointed out the mistake and they managed to whip up the proper meal pretty fast. We got the appetizer for free. Duck appetizer, duck entreé... I tried to get a duck crème brûleé, but no luck.

Post lunch, we went to check out the 99 Pieces of Art on the Wall show at the cre8ery gallery, although 4 had been sold so they were down to 96 by the time we visited. After that, we did a walk around the Forks. We toured the Riverwalk, watched unhelmeted children injure themselves at the skate park (my mom's personal fave) and went through the Johnston Terminal. The new Manitoba display in the Johnston Terminal is pretty cool, although the ballet mannequin on display is clearly too fat to really be a dancer.

In the evening, Kevin and I went to Bellissmo for dinner, with Kevin's former curling buddy, Ian. I was still full of duck but managed to cram in most of a salad. To finish off the evening, we went to Flea Whiskey's for a few games of pool. I won a few games, but only 1 real win - the rest were scratches by the other player. In the end, Ian was declared Pool Champion of the Universe.