Hey everyone,

OK, so where did I leave you last?

I really don't remember what happened on Friday. Nothing of note, I guess.

This weekend, my parental units decided that they wanted to go to Toronto to visit my relaatives. The trip was pretty much up in the air until like Friday when I got home from work. I wanted to go, but I had some other stuff to do, so the timing would have been better if we could have pushed the trip back a week maybe. Oh well. As an added bonus, my dad gave the approval to go to Ikea, (the furniture store of the Man) for some light shopping.

Saturday morning, we all got up and left for Toronto in the morning. Border crossing was a little odd - We caught the guy maybe 10 to 15 minutes into a shift change, so the border sphincter control was on super tight. We weren't pulled over or anything, but it just took a while for us at the booth. My dad used to travel a ton, and his passport is full of visa stamps - In fact, he's got so many that the passport people had to put in an "appendix" section towards the back of the passport so he could fit more stamps. Anyway, the agent hadn't seen this before, so he had to check it to make sure everything was legit.

So we're driving on the 402 through Canada - I swear, the first 3/4 of this road is the straightest stretch of road that I've ever driven on. So there's nothing to do but haul some major ass all the way through. thanks to a few Canadian drivers, I followed very fast drivers on the 401 and the 402, going much faster than I ever have in the soccer mom mobile. Probably faster than I've ever been in the supaflyride too.

Anyway, so my trip to Ikea (in North York) rates as probably one of the worst trips that I've ever had. The whole place was undergoing major renovations, so the parking situation was totally wacked. There was an enormous line to get into the parking lot, and an enormous line of cars to find parking spots. I was in parking hell for a while. Luckily, we found a place to park, swam throught the sea of people (the store was running some promotions, in addition to the nutty amount of people that are there on the weekends). Pure craziness. I've never seen so many people in one place in my life. The showroom was cool, but the Marketplace was out of control. I felt like I was going to run someone over with my cart. (has anyone ever noticed that all the ikea shopping carts have the same wheel squeak from the wheels on the floor)?

I was very turned off by the whole experience. I think Ikea will (for now on) be a weekday experience. None of this weekend crap.

However, I did end up piking up two of their trademark chairs, and a nifty novelty clock that they had. The chairs that I got are the Poang, which are the ones in the store where there's a machine that mimics that action of someone repeatedly getting up and sitting in a chair - I call it the butt stamping machine. The one at this particular Ikea was quite broken. I guess it was tired too.

Anyway, after that I visited with my cousins, had some good food, watched Two Weeks Notice, and went to bed. I was tired from driving that day and I knew that I'd be driving back as well. I'm surprised I haven't passed out by now.

Anyway, so this morning, I had my prerequisite Bubble Tea drink, did some more visiting, and we came home.

I'm quite tired.

I'm going to bed now :) I'll write more later.

-Kirk