Last Tournament of the Year

I was just heading out to see the last fastball tournament of the year.  It was the Ontario university women's championship and was being played at Peter Hallman Ballyards in Kitchener.  It had started yesterday and there were the playoff games today.  I was just leaving the house and it started to spit a little rain.  So I came back inside and Barb checked the radar.  It looked like a major storm was going to hit the area in about 20 minutes.  So I decided to try to watch the games on the internet.  When I looked up the games I found out that they had moved the games from the Ballyards to Budd Park.  I was fortunate I didn't go because not only was it going to rain I would have gone to the wrong ball park.  I was watching the championship game and after a couple of innings the storm hit and everyone was running including the camera man with his camera.  They had to stop the game half way through.  I learned later that they were going to finish the game in Hickson a whole other town the following weekend.

Parking Ticket

At the airport, I parked in the pay parking and after Laura's flight got off, I went to the arrivals doors to pay for my parking.  There was a long line at the machine and I was standing at the back of the line I put down my Tim Hortons coffee and was looking through all my pockets for my parking ticket.  I couldn't find it.  Then I started to retrace my steps around the small airport.  I eventually found my ticket under the luggage check in desk.  Then I saw a lady at a machine at the departures door paying her parking and she was the only person in line.  So when she left I went up to the machine with my ticket but the machine wouldn't accept my ticket.  I tried it a number of times and I kept getting an error message.  Then I pushed a button and the lady's ticket came out of the machine.  By this time the lady was long gone.  So I put her ticket on top of the machine and paid for my parking.  Then I walked out the departures door towards my car.  I then realized that I had forgotten my coffee.  So I had to go back to the arrivals door to get my coffee and there was still a line up.  Finally I got everything together and was able to leave the airport.  I stopped the car outside the parking lot and started texting Laura the whole story of the parking fiasco.  She thought the story was very funny but she didn't hear the whole story until she got to Vancouver because she had to turn off her phone when the plane started to take off.

Photo Coping

Laura had about 250 photos from our collection that she wanted to copy.  So on the way to the airport for her flight back to Vancouver, we went to Walmart and she started copying them.  She was at a booth that could only copy one at a time while a stupid lady was at the booth beside her which could copy 20 at a time.  The stupid lady was picking through about 100 pictures of somebody's wedding and all the pictures looked identical but she couldn't decide which ones to print out.  Finally, the lady finished and Laura could start copying photos in batches. Meanwhile, I used one of the other machines and was copying photos one at a time.  Eventually it was getting late and Laura was almost finished.  So I left her and went out to the parking lot to bring the car around and pick her up at the door.  I wanted to use the GPS because I wasn't sure where the airport in Hamilton was from the Walmart in Kitchener but I couldn't get the GPS plug into the slot in the car.  There was something in the slot that was blocking it and I couldn't get the thing out.  I tried and tried until Laura came out of the Walmart and I was worried we would never find the airport without the GPS.  Fortunately, Laura was able to get the thing out of the slot and it was some kind of a fuze from my MP3 player thingy.  So we were good to go and got to the airport just in time for her flight.

Captain Underpants

Laura had never been to see Sarah's apartment.  So we went over to watch the Captain Underpants movie about Professor Poopypants.  It was a very funny movie with great animation.  We were surprised that Ali never came home to see Laura.  Later we found out that he was out being an Uber driver earning a little extra money. It was his first and last time because he said that all the people he drove were drunks.

Kilbride Castle

Laura and I went to a lecture at Kilbride Castle in Baden about 15 minutes away.  It was given by a professor from Laurier University on the ghostly photographs taken by the early Victorians.  First we were able to go on a tour of the castle which was really just an old house but it was a little like Downton Abbey because it had a special area for the servants.  The castle was all decked out for Halloween and all of the tour guides were dressed up in Victorian clothes.  Each guide was in a room to themselves and we walked from room to room.  They all had ghost stories to tell us.  The tour was pretty cool.  The lecture was pretty short but the professor discussed some pretty neat stuff about some famous people.  One of the famous people who believed in ghosts was the former Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.  I told Laura that I had a biography about his strange ideas and later I leant her the book.  Apparently, he had a crystal ball that he would use to talk to his dead mother to find out what to do about the Second World War.  He also had a series of dogs named Pat and would talk to them through the crystal ball after they died.  The lady also talked about this photographer who specialized in taking pictures of ghosts and took a famous picture of Abe Lincoln's wife with the ghost of Abe Lincoln behind her.  A couple of days later I saw an article in The New Yorker which was a review of a biography of that same photographer.  What are the chances????

Yankee Game

Jimmy Parkins is a big New York Yankees fan.  The Yankees unexpectedly made the playoffs and they won the wild card game and then were in the division playoffs and went to the final game of a best of 5 games.  So I decided to drive to Jimmy's house in St Thomas and watch the game with him.  Jimmy was happy to see me and talked all through the game but he kept one eye on the television and if anything exciting was happening, he would suddenly stop talking and lean forward in his chair closer to the television to watch carefully.  Both Jimmy and I were happy that the Yankees won and now they were in the American League Championships.

Second Barbecue

We didn't keep the neighbour's barbecue that we got out of the garbage.  Barb bought another little barbecue like the one we have in Florida.  She ordered it online and it was supposed to be delivered in a few days.  A few days passed and it didn't arrive and Barb was getting desperate for a steak dinner.  So she phoned them and asked them where it was.  They said it was still in the warehouse and they apologized for the delay and said they would send it out quickly.  A couple of days later, when Barb was out playing pickleball it arrived.  When she got home, we had a great time assembling it.  Barb put the legs on backwards.  She says that if there are two ways to do something she will always do it the wrong way.  So we finally had our little barbecue and we really enjoyed it.  We put the neighbour's barbecue back out in the garbage on another late night mission.  Then a couple of days later, a Fedex truck showed up at the house with a package while we were standing outside.  It was a big box and we both said oh no is that another barbecue.  I guess the lady that Barb talked to had decided to send another barbecue to replace the one that was stuck in the warehouse.  We asked the Fedex guy what we should do and he said we could just refuse the package.  So we did and he took it back.  Later Barb thought we should have kept the barbecue.  We could have sold it on Kijji for a hundred bucks.