RIP Jack Layton

I needed a quiet, stay at home weekend to selfishly faff away, and I got one. Saturday started with some yard work. The neglected lawn was finally cut. The backyard, with all the weeds we can’t put pesticides on, has degraded into a weedy mess. It is an embarrassing ugly blight and yes, I’ll put contraband chemicals on them to kill them – before I have no lawn at all. After hours and hours of bending, pulling, reseeding and numerous weekends wasted, the weeds are no less deterred than when we took ownership of the house. The only language they understand is chemical annihilation. Their days are numbered. I just want to sit on my patio and be able to relax, and not be compelled to get up to pull another weed. Is that asking too much? We will assume control. We will assume control… After the lawn was upgraded from blight to mildly embarrassing I had a massage. As usual, the massage was relaxing and awesome. I can’t stress enough, if you have benefits, get to a RMT!

The early afternoon was spent with a long-time friend who in the area on vacation. Peter is here from the Victoria area of B.C.. We keep track of each other’s busy lives online, but very rarely see each in person, since we live thousands of KM apart, so it was great to see Pete in person! Pete had a busy agenda so we only had a few hours. We caught up on a lot of things and scheduled online gaming in the future. It was great to see him! I hope he upgrades his GPS. *smirk*

After Pete left, I ran the dog on the Humber Valley Heritage trail off Duffy’s Lane. Strangely their website is down – 404 error at the time of this post. Hopefully they will get it working again, as I was trying to find another section of the trail to walk. The dog was shortchanged during the week – so I took her father down the trail (towards Humber Station) than I have been before. The trail turns into a lovely hilly area along the Humber River beyond where I’ve been before… I’ll explore more of this section at some point, it was really picturesque, I’ll bring the camera next time for sure too. Unsettled weather created the perfect excuse to get take-out for dinner… it came down to Thai or Sushi. Thai won. It was delicious as usual. We tried to minimize the cost, we can spend so much getting take out from Bangkok Thai it can be rather disturbing. I picked up some munchies when I was getting the take out, so we could settle in for a movie.

We ended up watching Source Code which has a staggering 91% at RT. It was a very entertaining movie. It starred the very likeable Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan. The movie was a bit of a mind bender. It revolved around a military mission to use some form of time travel to enter someone’s mind during the last 8m of their life. Since the last 8m of their life echoes and the brain stays alive… I’m sure I’m articulating the Sci-fi aspects of this movie wrong… Anyway, Jake is repeated sent into this guy’s body who is on a train that has been bombed and will explode in 8m… His job is to find out who the bomber is in order to stop future attacks from the bomber. As the repeated visits to the past unfold, the present also unfolds a curious story. The viewer isn’t completely sure what is going on with Jake, and what the Military agenda really is. Jake struggles with his inability to save the people on the train. I won’t enter into spoiler-ville… but the story is compelling all the way to the end of the film. The film was well acted, entertaining and actually made the gray cells work. A recommended watch for sure. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bdot was away at the luxurious bathes with her sister and Aunt all day Sunday, so I took advantage of the time nerding out with some games. The gaming menu started with getting Witcher 2 (PC) up and running. It took awhile to get W2 playable. It is maddening how poorly games are tested these days. The rush to get games to market makes some beta looking products hit the shelves. The game crashed repeated after <5m of play, occasionally locking the computer completely. GAH! So… I updated my video drivers, looked for game patches and booted again and again…. Still crashing. So I then started searching specifically for the crash error and gog.com had a suggestion to run the game in Windowed mode with the help of some software. (I'll link to the software later) Lo and behold! Game stability! It turns out W2 is actually a lot of fun. I found it brutally hard and I hate the Quick Time Events… Gah… Stick to the game please… If I can run a guard through with my sword easily why am I forced to fist fight him or hang? The running from the dragon QTE was also brutal… I had to reduce the screen to 640×480 to pass that stage… *eyeroll* Hopefully the QTEs will be few and far between in future chapters. I find them distracting and do not enhance the gameplay. A few early observations : The combat seems simplified – which seems to work well, the story is intriguing once again, I’m not sure what I think of the UI yet… and I’m very happy meditation no longer requires a fire. I’ll have more to say about this as I trek through the game. I’m fairly impressed so far. (One other minor complaint is the inability to map movement keys to the directional keys on the keyboard… really? WTF. *eyeroll*)

Since the humbertrail website was (and is still) down… I took a guess to drive up Humber Station road to find a trail to walk the dog. Heh, I found the start of the Humber Valley Heritage trail at the junction of Humber Station and the Caledon Trailway – which is another trail in the Caledon region. Regrettably I saw the HVHTA sign after walking the Caledon Trailway. The trailway is more of multi use trail for both bikes and hikers. I saw only one cyclist however. The section of the trail I walked was quite nice… once again I regretted not having the camera with me. The dog enjoyed chasing a few rabbits which seemed to be baiting her, sitting out in plain site on the trail. Silly rabbits! The evening was spend doing laundry and chilling in front of the tube. It was a pretty faffable weekend, and that suited me just fine.