I just got back to Emily's house. I'm totally zonked. I think at this point it’s lethargy; I’m pretty out of shape by my standards. My eating is ok, but even when I go on vacation (usually) I have a semi-constant workout schedule. The last two months (really 3-4) have been ridiculous and it’s really affecting my level of energy.

I heard a great quote on the CBC today from a French doctor talking about obesity levels in France among low-income immigrant groups: “Knowing how to cook won’t prevent you from being overweight, but it will prevent you from being obese."

Got back from the weekend in Niagara Falls. I really had a great, great time. I had low expectations due to perceiving things as being disorganized, but it came together in the end. (You wouldn’t have known the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres if you were not already aware of them.)

It was great hanging out with all of the girls, and I especially liked the time with the bride. I was a little perplexed when she invited me to her wedding. I mean, I figured it was out of a sense of duty because we did work together and teach a lot of PS classes together, but she was always a little bit different in some ways and often (it seemed) scoffed at the way I do things; but she seems to have matured in little ways--not saying she was ever wrong—and I just really felt like she genuinely valued me being there this weekend.

Canada continues to be a very small world because when we saw her fiancé this afternoon, he mentioned that he noticed through fb that I am friends with Gordon, with whom he was in the debating club in HS and whose brother also practices law here in TO.

Friday I was in the city. Spent the night at Birdie’s house; we had a good time getting caught up . She just got back from visiting her sister in the city holding next summer’s Olympic games, as well as a trip to the debt-ladden EU country east of Italy.

(Totally random, but I heard a segment by the economist on Metro Morning last week about how some EU countries may now make a movement to separate from the EU if other nation countries can’t pull it together financially. The reason? The Euro was introduced to make the flow of money in Europe easier, not so that one successful country would have to support another poorly organized country. And at this point with one country seemingly needing to be bailed out, the network seems increasingly less practical.)

Birdies’ house is right next to Dahlia and her bf’s new house (literally, two doors over); Ic alled to leave a message, but I bet they are at her family’s cottage this weekend.

I slept badly Friday, waking up at 1:30am over an issue with the car and then at 4am just because I couldn’t sleep. We left at 6:30am to pick everyone up, with a pit stop in Oakville for coffees and gas. Bizarely, Whole Foods doesn’t open until 8am and I seemed to be the only one in the car concerned with having a real (carb-heavy) breakfast before our wine tour. I tried one of the Starbuck’s breakfast sandwiches: same flavour, but lighter.

We got to Niagara Falls just in time to drop off my car and head to a local parking lot to be pickedup by a bus. Based on the print outs, the wine tour appeared to be from a groupon.

Overall the wine tour was good and pretty much met my expectations overall. It was a smaller bus with a group of strangers and kind of impersonal, but only $50 per person I think. We went to four different wineries: Riverbend, Reif Estates, Caroline Cellars, and Pondview. The first two were a success while the last two were kind of duds...either that or we had lost interest already.

We had 30 minutes and at the first location; it was a garage-sized building with one room for tasting around a counter, and a shop. The girl was young, but helpful; we tried two whites, a rose, and a red that I skipped. Stephanie and I shared a glass that was half the two fingers she was giving out. Still, we each basically touched the wine to our lips and gave up. She drinks even less than me, and I just wasn’t really that interested in wine at 10am.

From there we went to Reif Estates, next to Iniskillin, and had an actual tour. The guide was excellent, a retiree who winters in Barbados and really interesting. I wrote down lots of tidbits that I learned about wine and wine making...like how the term family estate has to do with the percentage of grapes grown on site. Or that there is a sugar scale of 1-10 with 0-3 for table and 3 being a medium dry. In Niagara there are 65 wineries in a 100km radius, second only to Napa Valley. The VQA stands for the Vintner's Quality Association (VQA) and denotes quality, not mediocrity like I had it in my head previously.

Different kinds of oaks are used for different kinds of flavours, but mainly the microoxidisation (softening) of wines, especially whites. Vines are usually planted on average about 8 feet apart, 6 feet on a super large or busy vineyard, or 10 feet on a farm where extra care is given. Grapes are planted North-South to allow for a maximum amount of sun; vines don't like extra moisture so pipes are planted underneath to wick extra moisture.

Ice wine is pressed after -8C but not after -14C. There is no colour in grape juice, that comes from contact with the skin that sits in fermentation. (White wine has no skin contact.) For example, in the Champagne region of France, the Pinot Noir grape is used to make champagne, but with no skin contact.

We started out in the garden, then went to room with oak barrels shipped in from Germany, out to the field to look at grapes and vines, then into the processing and aging rooms, before ending with sampling. The Reif Family Estate has been around for 25 years and had the fourth wine making licence to be issued for Ontario. They are located next door to Iniskillin, and also do a lot of ice wines.

We sampled a beautiful, beautiful ice wine after another two wines. The ice wine was awesome and I had 5-6 sips before calling it a day. I got a little mini bar sized bottle as a stocking stuffer for Big, and a bottle of the red the girls sampled because Jabu invited me up to a dinner on Monday night (next week) with a cousin I’ve never really met before. (A lot of these coming out of the word work the last year or so...)

As I said, the next two wineries weren’t as good. Caroline Cellar’s big thing is that they have 50 different wines, and you can pick up to four to sample off a huge menu; Stephanie and I had some beautiful grape juice, also made on-site, but the other girls complained that there was too much to choose from and no direction for very choosing--never mind distinguishing--between very fruity wines.

The last winery, Pondview, is very new and has gorgeous facilities; but the guy leading the tasting hardly seemed like he was qualified to do so, and the other girls claimed the wine tasted downright acidic, i.e. young.

It sounds stupid, but I didn’t realize there were so many wineries in Niagara. (It's got a special farmland designation beuse of the unique soil/rock blend.) So overall the experience was really positive. On the drive back Stephanie asked me what was wrong as I was little grouchy at the end, but I feel asleep on the bus back into town. Honestly, I think it was the alcohol and the lack of sleep.

We went back to the hotel and had a great lunch—-this was another thing that came together that I was doubtful about. Bread, cheese, fruit, veggies, and classic Betty Crocker cupcakes. It was just a fun time with 7 friends sitting on a king bed; we all knew each other with the exception of the MOH, the bride’s friend from high school, who seemed to fit in really well, whether or not she tried.

The MOH and I took naps (we had a “family room” with two conjoined bedrooms and one bath) while Stephanie took a group to the outlets and the bride went for a run (of course). We regrouped later and left around 6pm for a dinner reservation. We did walk all the way across town to the wrong place (typical of the kind of disorganization people complain about lately with regards to Amy...) before cabbing back to the Crown Plaza.

There’s a restaurant, the Rainbow Room, on the 10th floor overlooking the Falls. The food is decent (great by Niagara standards), views are great and the atmosphere was really nice. Niagara Falls is not a very upscale town at the end of the day, so the standards are just different. I had a grouper dish with crab and a Caesar that was very nice, but I definitely felt hungry later.

The bride's two stepsisters joined us for dinner. Talk about the stereotypes of city girls. One had pin straight bleach blond hair, slightly overweight under a kind of fussy-looking floral ruffled dress with a designer purse, diamond ring (on her middle finger), and Tiffany bracelet. The other looked like she wasn’t going to age too well: black eye liner, a denim mini dress with a huge belt, and a tacky seahorse tattoo over her left shoulder. Girls like her are a dime a dozen coming out of Camp Elite or Posh-type places and families, but that's neither here nor there.

After dinner, we walked the Falls to one of the newer, fancier casinos on the better side of town. I feel like I’ve spent my life in a casino after being in Vegas for 2 weeks. It’s a different scene here in Ontario though: you get carded going in, and it was Saturday night and packed to the gills. The ATMs and redemption machineswere out of cash, and the bride couldn’t find a free black jack table, never mind one taking bets for less than $50 a hand.

I found a U-Spin and sent Jo a text saying that she’s got her MIL in trouble.

By the way, I don’t think I mentioned it, but Tiffany & Emmanuel moved into their brand new, expensive builder home near Jo & David’s house in a different city and state the other day. It’s got to be hard for Jo; they’re not my “peers” in terms of power relations, but it’s definitely cause for jealousy I’m sure, never mind considering how they’ve got there despite life mistakes (getting pregnant as teenagers), i.e. you could look at the situation and wonder why God rewards bad behaviour, but it is what it is.

I only took issue with Emmanuel’s declaration on fb that "the X family owns a home!” Um, no, the bank now owns a home and you have to pay off in the next 30 (or more likely, 40) years.

We were in the casino for about an hour without much of a plan. I could tell that the bride didn’t want to do anything glam and she was looking to the bridal party to direct the evening’s acitivties to stuff *she* would actually want to do, meanwhile her stepsisters were clearly looking for a good time and wanted to go to *the* hippest night club in town, Dragonfly. I was being an adult and not saying anything or getting involved (not my night), but I really though we’d end up at a club and I’d be sitting in a corner not drinking until 3am.

But, thankfully, the bride spoke up enough at a key moment, saying that she wanted to go to Margaritaville (across the street) and sit on the rooftop patio. The stepsisters decided to make an exit back to Toronto, so we went back to having fun and being more spontaneous, ordering frozen drinks and nachos before leaving after last call around midnight. We stumbled back to the hotel and were in bed by 1am. I posted a status on fb that you definitely know you are on the back side of your 20s when a bachelorette weekend has you in bed by 1am.

Today was low key, but ended up being long. Amy and I were sleeping together (a whole other story that I wonder about in light of Nora) and the other girls had to be wokenup around 9am. By the time 5 girls used one washroom, we had breakfast in the hotel at 10am and then drove down to the Falls. We took some photos and then left around 12:30. We had lunch outside of Niagara in a Swiss Chalet. (I nearly got into an accident with a Mercedes van on the off-ramp. Sigh.) That was perfect and then we were back on the road by 2pm.

Next we stopped at my farm stand and should have been back in Toronto ASAP, but going down Walkers Line I thought we crossed the QEW and there was no on ramp...but no, I just didn’t go far enough. (I simply love how this keeps happening with my driving.) Instead we drove the back roads of Oakville and added another half hour to our travel time.

Got to the city finally aroud 3:30pm. I dropped off the MOH, then we stopped at the bride’s house, saw the fiancée, and he got in the car for propane. We dropped off Birdie, did the propane tank run, during which point I ran a red light after asking him, “is this the turn?” only to be told no, “the next one” and I kept going...through a red light.

We did the propane and I dropped off Amy only to get on the Gardiner and it was totally backed up after a Jay's game let out. I spent another 40 minutes on Lakeshore, before another 40 minuts to finish the drive back out here to 6th Line. I staggered in the house around 7:15pm. I had a run (that killed me), watched some telly, and now am prepping to go to bed as I’m exhausted.

The plan tomorrow is to prepare and can about 80 lbs of tomatoes. Stay tuned.

I now truly understand the deal with city driving, and it’s not fun. I like driving. I also don’t mind driving long distances. But city driving is so much more involved. I was articulating this to the fiancé, but it’s really true: if you’re making a right turn, you have to watch the cars from the opposite side making the same turn, plus aggressive pedestrians and then when you are finally just about ready, and it’s yellow, and you know for sure there’s no red light camera in the intersection, you have to check your blind spot once again for aggressive bikers.

Or streetcars. Great in theory, and a part of Toronto’s heritage (I saw an antique one today taking people directly to the CNE), but the tracks make you feel like you are driving funny, roads are often split with mid-road stations, and at an intersection (again, waiting for a turn) you have to judge if the streetcar is on the same signal and going to stop and pick up people, or on it’s own signal because there’s no stop there.

Before & After