The Piccadilly Polaroid Picture Door
Phew! Holidays over. Waaaaaay more orders than I would have thought humanly possible but I survived. The blog didn’t fare as well, but that’s okay, you still love me. While I am cranking up the gears to begin posting again I thought I’d post a few shots from the Piccadilly Polaroid Picture Door that I scanned in last year so you can take a mental walk down memory lane with me. Not an actual walk, just mental. Unless your brain has sprouted legs like those weird body parts on the Coke Zero commercials (which are funny, but don’t put me in the mood to ingest anything while I am looking at tongues with legs) and then I guess you can do both. But that’s weird, so don’t tell me about it if you do.
This pic is technically from Kipps Lane, not Piccadilly, but since the Polaroid Door was started at Piccadilly all the pics belong to that set. In my mind. Where it doesn’t matter. Why am I explaining? They’re my pictures and I’ll call ‘em what I want. Plus nobody cares.
For some reason I keep writing “The Piccadilly Polaroid Picture Dorr” and then have to correct myself. Figures. Out of all the words in that title, “door” is the one I spell wrong. Surprised it wasn’t “the.”
Watching the Past, in the Future…?
Since Colin and Emily moved to Orie-gone they are enjoying a west coast time zone, and are consequently three hours behind us. We always tease them that we are calling from the future, and how is it there in the past, anyways? Of course the joke gets old, but that doesn’t mean we stop saying it.
Adam and Colin have both just signed into i-Chat on their Macs to watch the end of the world series together (virtually) and talk about the game just as if they were in the same room, like we do for a lot of things since they have moved. But Adam is watching on Fox, Colin on TBS and fox is about 20 seconds behind. The i-Chat has no delay, but this means that Colin’s TV is essentially 20 seconds in the future. So now they’re trying to figure out how Colin is watching 20 seconds into the future, from three hours in the past.
Of course, Adam has had a few Steamwhistles and I am sure Colin is lubricating his World Series Experience in a similar fashion, so it makes the whole thing a lot harder for them to figure out too. They’re both quite befuddled about it now.
We’re Back!!
Well, the trip to BC was amazing. We spent 4 days in Vancouver, Surrey and Whistler, then drove down (in a rented car) to Eugene, Oregon to see Emily and Colin (we miss you guys!) and came back up to White Rock for Sue & Chris’ wonderful wedding on Saturday before flying out of Vancouver again back to Toronto. I’ll be uploading my pictures (as soon as I find the damn cord for the camera) and talking about each day in detail, but for now I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite pictures of Adam’s and links to the rest of the set.
The End of the Dock
A weekend at the cottage is never complete without certain required traditions, and the creation of some new ones. Here are some of my memories from our most recent cottage expedition, to celebrate “Old Man Wallace’s” 30th birthday.
Getting “While you’re upped,” which means getting sent for a beer when you’re not actually up.
Colin and Aiden getting inducted to the “I’ve tipped in a canoe” club, of which I have been a proud member for years.
Ollie trying to eat a caterpillar, a chipmunk and that ugly bug with wings we found in the cabin.
Learning that Aiden does not require sleep. We think he’s a cylon.
Adam taking record 2 Gigabytes worth of pictures in 4 days.
An 8-foot bonfire for no reason on a perfectly warm night.
Sleeping 15 people in a cottage that is supposed to sleep 10.
Adam endlessly poking the fire because he can’t let it alone, and me endlessly bugging Adam about poking the fire because I can’t let it alone.
Watering the flowers in the rain because “it was a directive.” The weather was great, except for the fantastic thunderstorm as we were leaving, and it was a perfect mix of hilarity and clarity, of laughing so hard our cheeks hurt and sitting still for almost a full hour to stare at the perfect sunset. With Colin & Emily’s move to Oregon just around the corner, our cottage days together are numbered. But even when they are over, we’ll still have all these stupid memories to keep us laughing.
A Cacopha……What?
Like all great ideas from the depths of Colin’s consciousness, this one was born of many, many, many glasses of beer and a conversation that was way too serious for the current blood alcohol saturation level. Back in October of last year a pact was entered into by Colin and Adam to embark on a great baseball quest (searching for….?) this season, and the first stage took place just over a week ago. Inexpertly titled “A Cacophony of Epiphanies,” the rules, as outlined by a fading Adam and Colin on that fateful October night, are outlined at the end of this post. And near incomprehensible.
The quest was officially started with a trip to The SkyDome on Retro Jersey night. 12 of our closest friends, a few questionable baby-blue retro jersey purchases, a two-day Rock Band marathon (with some actual guitar playing thrown in for fun) and a mini-keg for the 6 of us left at the end of the adventure sure made this crazy idea seem kinda logical as we all had a great weekend. More pictures can be seen here, and here (the second set is Adam’s).
The Official Rules are listed after the jump, for anyone interested.
Take Me Out to the Ballgame…
A fun Sunday. Adam, Colin, Emily and I went to the Sky-dome (I refuse to call it the Roger’s Center) for the first time in a long time. We got to see the Jays Sweep the Red Sox (but I secretly kind of like the Red Sox) and watch Frank Thomas pull off a pretty nice Grand Slam Home-run.
We thought going to the Sunday game would be better since Friday was Colin’s Athletic Therapy Banquet and there may have been some hang-overs on Saturday. But then we proceeded to have a jam session on Saturday night which led to wine and 4 cases of beer, so Sunday was a bit rough anyway, as Emily demonstrates on the train home. More pictures here.
Scaredy-Cat
Chantelle: “Why is everything cuter when it’s sleeping?”
Colin: “Because then it can’t hurt you.”
Piccadilly Porch
I had a dream about Piccadilly porch the other night. I don’t know what triggered it, but it put me into a melancholy mood, heavy with reminiscence that lasted long after waking. I kept thinking about the profound (drunken) discussions about the world that porch hosted, and the jam sessions that turned into debates that turned back into jam sessions and finally into almost complete incoherency by the time morning came.We believed we were so profound, so enlightened, so in tune. Maybe we were, maybe we were full of shit. Didn’t matter, I guess.
Officially, there were 5 of us that lived in that house at the end of Piccadilly, dangerously close to Molly Blooms and as close to EOA as you could get while still being west of Adelaide. Brian and June, Matty, Colin and me. Cooper lived on the couch randomly throughout the year and Keith took the other couch during hockey playoffs since he didn’t have a TV. It was never uncommon to come out of your room and find people you had never met sleeping on one of the 5 couches, but we liked it that way.
It may have been a house of inside jokes and stupid pranks, parties, childishness and general mayhem (I distinctly remember the quote “Can someone get the door? This is illegal!”along with other such proclamations of our collective lack of common sense), but a lot of serious connections were made there too. I met my husband while I lived at Piccadilly and, almost in the same week, Colin met his wife. Brian and June are now engaged to be married, and last I heard Matty and his beautiful girlfriend at the time, Jenn, are still going strong, in Australia, no less. I learned what it really meant to have Colin as a best friend, and he still is, to this day. It would seem contrary to think that at a time in our lives when we seemed to take very little seriously, our serious life was happening all on it’s own. Maybe it’s not contrary; maybe it says something about how seriously we should all really be prepared to take ourselves, anyways.
Cheers to the things about Piccadilly that we’ll never forget: Debu and Chuki, Molly’s on Mondays, Kegs & Eggs (and raw clams), The quote wall, watching the annual Michigan/Michigan State shindig on the TV we pulled out the window on the porch, waking up with a parking barrier slanted across the kitchen, Pearl Jam or Bust, Campasaurus and Quest and never having peanut butter in the house, the beer bottle alarm system on the window with no lock, Jam sessions and Matty’s itty-bitty guitar, ringing the porch with bottles of JD, Trying to wash the cat, and, of course, many, many spontaneous mind-blowing porch session where we discussed the world, the beer, the weather, the government’s foreign policy, Einstein’s theory of relativity and was that a G-chord or a C-chord in Wheat Kings?
I give you full permission to assume
Colin just wrote me that after I asked him if I could link something of his, and that I thought it was alright, but didn’t want to assume. For some reason the phrase struck me as a pretty nice explanation of what best friends are to each other. Feel free to assume in kind, brother.