Wining

I attended a wine tasting event at the Grad House on campus last night with a few of the other CGL students. While the event was intended to be at least partially educational, I mainly went for some cheap wine (not that the wine itself was necessarily cheap, but tickets were only ten dollars - a bargain!) And while I did actually learn a few interesting things, it mostly reinforced my notion that "wine tasting" takes itself far too seriously, in my humble opinion.

For the event, we sampled eight different types of wine - four white and four red. Some salad and bread was served with the white wine and some lamb skewers (tasty, tasty lamb skewers) with the red. We also got some port (which was very sweet - I liked it), accompanied with some brie and crackers.

We were provided some papers with the wine list on it along with some space for taking notes, ostensibly for recording our impressions of the wine, though mine consisted mainly of things like "tastes like wine", "yup, still tastes like wine" and "remarkably, this tastes like wine." My palate is rather underdeveloped (I don't drink wine very often). I used the "notes" section for drawing a few sketches which more or less summed up the evening:

Overall, with nine glasses of wine and some food for ten dollars, the event was quite affordable (putting those grad association fees to work) and fairly enjoyable - I'd certainly go to another similar event in the future. It was more than I usually drink in a two hour time span (and wine seems to have a higher alcohol content than most things I drink), so yay for public transit.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Showmanship and Other Ships

Coffee hour in the graphics lab is Friday afternoons. It doesn't actually involve coffee, but there are generally snacks. Today, one of the lab members came in wearing a chinese shirt with a book (it had "Bible" on the cover, but that's inconsequential to the story, really, but it did create an interesting image) which he then proceeded to open (the book, not the shirt) and which then burst into flames (doused upon closing it). It was certainly a flashy entrance. He also tried to do something similar with a wallet, but it didn't want to cooperate.

In non-fire related news, today I was asked by the computer science department to submit an application for the Vanier Canada Graduate scholarship (as a follow-up to my NSERC application which was submitted last week). This is a good thing. The Vanier is rather prestigious (not to mention valuable) and whilst I have no idea what my liklihood of getting one is, I think that this development bodes quite well for my NSERC application, if nothing else.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Attack of the Flaming Chicken

It seems I was so caught up with the imminent end of the long weekend when I last posted that I forgot to mention other things.

Anyway, I was at my brother's place along with some friends for some labour day laziness, which ostensibly was going to include some fancy barbequed chicken. Now, my brother had attempted to make this at some point last year when we were all gathered, but managed to rather set the thing on fire rather spectacularly. This time, the kinks had supposedly been worked out and we had high hopes that it would turn out better. But, somehow, the chicken managed to catch fire... again and was looking very black and charred. My brother just doesn't seem to be having much luck with this recipe.

Oh well, I'm sure we'll get to try it one of these days!

Freak Out,
-TFitC