Days Go By: first trip into Toronto since 2005 for me

[da]

Somehow I seem to have fallen a few posts behind. Well, I suppose I'll fix things incrementally.

This evening, we hopped into the car at 5pm and drove into Toronto to see melted_snowball's dad, who was on a business trip here. We were going to go to a brew-pub, when we walked right past metalana's suggestion for a Spanish restaurant.
Segovia's the name, according to Dan. Well, they sat us right away, and we proceeded to have a quite pleasent two hour chat and dinner. Steven was in good spirits, and had interesting things to say about his company's work. (It's an engineering firm on Long Island which mades sound-buffering and such.) The restaurant has great visual appeal- they had reproductions of Picasso, Goya, and other Spanish artists covering the walls, and there were super (very bright) colour-combos everywhere. Another section of walls had original murals based on Spanish event posters. Pretty neat. Anyway, the food was... pretty good; not stellar, but it might've been due to the dishes we chose; if we'd gotten one dish that was less olive-oily, that would have suited a bit better. We got six Tapas and a half-litre of sangria. My favourite dish was the Spanish omlette (tortilla)- it was more perfectly formed and browned than ours, though really, it didn't taste any better. We had the nth incarnation of "Are you two twins?" with the waitress. (sigh).

We got flan and chocolate cake for desert, and got ourselves home right around 11.

Oh! And dan's talk-to-strangers ability worked very well on the subway back; we were sitting next to a woman paging though the Toronto International Film Festival catalogue (which is the size of a thick phone book) and she explained to us a bit of how ticket-buying works, what typical people can get to see, and at dan's request, she checked the catalogue to determine that "49 Up" is not playing at TIFF this year. Oh well.

[Edit:

And!... Dan's dad gave me a book: sci-fi by Bester/Zelazny. Forward by Greg Bear! Can't wait to start.

And!! On the drive back, we just got back onto the 401 from the 427 and there at the horizon was a gorgeous not-quite-harvest moon (about 1/3 full, but OH so orange, and just skimming the horizon and the lights of the highway.) I would've killed to have my camera and the opportunity to get a clear photo...]

Comments

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

We had the nth incarnation of "Are you two twins?" with the waitress. (sigh).

You could try different hairstyles :)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Heh. You've not seen us recently. We have different hairstyles.

We'll both be getting different glasses soon, maybe that will help. People notice the superficial.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

We could, it's true. But every time I make my hair spiky, people tell me it looks wrong.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

To forstall the obvious next comment:

You could colour it! ;)

I could colour mine. Blue? Purple?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

If you want to color your hair, that's fine. I don't recommend strawberry blonde.

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was about to say, "how about radically different hairstyles?" Or clothing styles, perhaps? I suppose different glasses is a start. :)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

But we like the way we look.

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I realize that if being mistaken for twins, or at least siblings, was important enough to you two, you would have done something about it by now. As Feynman says, what do you care what other people think?

[kraig.livejournal.com]

Mine's now long enough that I can stick it up all over the place when I get out of the shower, so I amuse the stepdaughter-type by doing so and shrieking like a monkey.

Every time I do that, Linda mutters "gotta cut your hair soon" which may be a hint, but possessing XY chromosomes, I ignore those.

You could try the same thing with your students.

[kraig.livejournal.com]

Shrieking at them like a monkey, I mean, not spiking their hair up.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

It is true that I've submitted my tenure case, so there's really nothing that can happen to me. But still, this might be a bad idea.

[kraig.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest that tenure may affect how well you could get away with doing such a thing, but I wasn't sure how you were doing on that front and didn't want to prod any tender nerves.

So wait a year or whatever and you ought to have tenure (cos you're cool and "they" should keep you around) and *then* do it.

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

When I was at UW, a friend of mine shaved his hair into a mohawk. When one of his professors remarked, "I've always wanted one of those", he replied, "don't you have tenure?"

You're pretty close, so you should get to do this soon. :)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I am vaguely planning for some radical short-term appearance change for that. But I'm also trying not to do anything to trouble my case right now...like dwell overmuch on it.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

You know, I was going to recommend Segovia, but I couldn't remember what it was called. I've never eaten there, but I knew it was around that area.

An interesting story about Segovia:

I downloaded a photo of it years ago to use as a desktop image from macdesktops.com. However, I didn't know what it was *of*. I just liked the photo and thought the colours worked well. This summer, I was walking from Bloor and Spadina to Yonge and Wellesley and was diverted off of Bloor by protests about the infamous Danish comics. This led me through the intervening neighbourhood, and I passed by Segovia. I was like, "That looks familiar," and then I suddenly remembered that I've had that image as one of my random-rotation desktop wallpapers for years and never knew the place was even in Toronto.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh!! Oh!! I was confused when I saw the place becase it looked familiar to me. I told dan I thought I might've seen a picture, or even taken one of it on a prior trip to Toronto.

Only that's wrong- I was thinking of your story of walking past it and it seeming familiar; I think you posted on your LJ, including the mac desktop, and you might have even linked to the picture, because somehow I knew what the place looked like.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Hee! I probably did post about it with a link to the desktop image at the time it happened. :)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Somehow, that reminds me of when I linked last week to my nephew's hamster video.

:-)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

So! Our paths cross once again...