Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The last couple of days

A few things of note around town, and with us, that I haven’t gotten around to mentioning due to the boarderline mania I’m experiencing trying to write the book. I’m at 43,000 words, which is a retarded amount to have written in about three weeks, but there you go.

1. We finally got our sealift on Friday. It’s a smaller sealift than in the past two years because we have a smaller sealift room, plus there’s still lots of stuff left over from previous years. I think we might reevaluate our order next year. We like being able to order online using Northmart and we like that they deliver the stuff right to you door. On the other hand, they had our stuff in their warehouse for the better part of three weeks before they delivered it. Plus, we still haven’t got it all yet. Our soft drinks won’t arrive until early October at the earliest.

So yeah, we’ll see about next year. We might switch to someone else. It’d be nice to go to Ottawa and prepare our own sealift, but there’s just no way we have the time.

2. Thanks to a story in News North, at least we now know what’s going on with The Snack. The takeout restaurant used to be located right next door to us until it burned down last winter. They had started construction, but then stopped. Apparently it was going to cost them about 50 per cent more than they had thought to rebuild and they’re now scrambling to find investors.

On the one hand, we’re sorry this is happening to them. It’s shitty they’ve already put so much time and money into rebuilding and are now hitting these snags. On the other hand, we’re both trying to lose weight and The Snack was a powerful temptation to cheat. Especially since they made kickass poutine and had the only half decent club sandwich in town.

3. Speaking of restaurants, we tried out the new one in town on Saturday called The Water’s Edge, which does steak and seafood. I thought about how to sum up the experience, but one of the waitresses who served us summed it up best at the end of the evening.

“I think we might have opened up a bit too early.”

Yup. The menu was pretty limited to begin with and then a third of the items on it were crossed off because they didn’t have it. That included a soup of the day. If you’re a restaurant and you can’t manage to whip up a soup of the day, I think you might have jumped the gun.

Cathy had a New York Striplon on “smashed” potatoes. I had the Tuscan chicken on risotto. Both meals can best be described as bland. I was kind of afraid of this. The people who ran Wizard’s Bistro are now running this place. My take on Wizard’s was always they did half decent lunches, really, really good deserts and perfectly mediocre entrees. Water’s Edge appears to be carrying that over.

I hope I’m wrong, it’s just new restaurant jitters and they have it all worked out in a few weeks. But I think we’ll give it until some time in November before we try it again.

4. On the upside, we did get a nice walrus sculpture, which we both quite like. About $220 in case you’re wondering. I think I'll post up in a few days our complete collection of local art we've acquired, along with some of the Cape Dorset prints we're looking at when they go on sale.

5. The snow continues to creep in around the edges in town. There was another dusting last night and it was still on the car when we woke up this morning. You could still see it in place around town at lunch time. It’s only a matter of time before it covers the ground and stays until next June.

6. Had the car in to get some work done on the brakes and a front wheel that had been making some noise. So that was $900. Only when I tried to leave work the car began to stall and she was even worse this evening. So clearly the guys did something when they had her in the shop. Which means back she goes tomorrow. If there's something wrong that they did and they try to charge me for it, there will be words. But hopefully it won't come to that.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

BTW, if you put "smashed" in quotes because you thought it was a typo on the menu--it isn't. It's one of those foodie terms--smashed potatoes are roughly mashed (so that they still contain chunks of potato) but not finely mashed. Sometimes smashed potatoes will contain potato skin.

tanker belle said...

Photos of the sculpture! Must have. You're going to have such a kick-ass collection by the time you move.

On the oppsite end of the spectrum: it was over 40C here today, high humidity. I stayed in the air conditioned villa, but himself was *working outdoors* in it without the benefit of food or water (Ramadan). A bit of a cock-up with the meals and drinks today because he hadn't planned on partaking of the local fasting.

Anonymous said...

Mad dogs and Englishmen, Mireille....