A Few Quick Notes 111

-Another rainy St. John’s day today. What is surprising is how much time it has actually been raining this month. Maybe we will break a record.

-In 1998 or 1999, while I was still in high school, my mother and I made a small batch of dogberry wine. If I recall correctly we ended up with about 4 bottles, one of which was given to a friend for Christmas, two of which were consumed at the time, and the remaining bottle of which was left to age. For some reason that I still can’t quite figure out it became imperative that the bottle be opened a few days ago, or we were going to toss it. As someone who develops attachments to such things I was opposed to opening the bottle and preferred that we keep it in the basement forever. Anyway, the bottle was opened and after an initial sniff test it was determined to be acceptable to serve. Amazingly it seems that aging the wine made a huge difference. What had been an almost undrinkable product 8 or 9 years ago was palatable, though not in the realm of ‘good.’ Most noticeable was the very distinct and crisp bitter dogberry taste. In a few days this batch will be but a memory and it will be time to start on the next batch.

-Earlier this week, while skimming through the Globe and Mail online edition, I came across an article about $15 cups of coffee. After several descriptions of the supposedly abundant flavour of this coffee those of a less experienced coffee drinker were also included. While this woman acknowledged that the coffee was flavourful, it seemed odd to her that for the same price she could have had something she valued more, which in her case was lip-gloss. Aside from being baffled at a $15 cup of coffee, I was amazed that someone could manage to pay $15 for lip-gloss and not feel extremely ripped off. In full-blown student mode, not only could I buy lip-gloss, but also I could likely feed myself for 2 or 3 days on that kind of money. I guess some people value on different things.

-Recently, while looking at an undated report on portable classrooms I came across discussions regarding these structures at schools that I had attended. I was particularly taken aback by the photos of sub-par portable classrooms at I.J. These photos were disturbing not only because of the poor quality, but also because I had no recollection of these facilities (I can't even imagine where they might have been). Based on the evidence in the photos it is likely a good thing that they were gone by the time that I arrived, they seemed to be falling apart.

-While we have been doing relatively well at Rose and Thistle trivia the past number of weeks we haven’t been able to convert any of our success into a coveted $50 bar tab. Three weeks ago we had the infamous transcription error, two weeks ago we were out by a point, and last week we managed to foul up the tie-breaker question.

At Bitters this week we weren’t even close. Not only did we manage to do spectacularly poorly on the Tour de France round, we also managed to mess up several additional categories. Though we finished second last, we were only about 8 points away from the leader.