Saturday July 15

Waitress, please bring me an extra stomach!

Saturday I got up and skipped breakfast, heading straight to my meeting. The scones I picked up came in handy for more than just myself at the meeting, as I suspected.

For lunch we went to the always fabulous Economy Shoe Shop, where one of the participant's girlfriend works. As usual, I had the hot artichoke dip, and then I had the day's special, Eggs Florentine, which was delicious except they use raw spinach instead of cooked spinach. Oh, well, I used that as an excuse to ignore the salad.

For supper I used a Delta Hotel gift certificate for $50 off and took two friends to dinner in the Crown Bistrot (don't ask me why they spell it this way, and it's not a bistro either, it's a full service restaurant). I had called ahead and made reservations, which was a good thing since two bus tours were in the hotel and were all eating there that night. Also, I'd asked about a dress code and was told "oh, no, we're very casual".

Perhaps we should have dressed up a bit, since I had to ask for the wine list, but other than that everything was fine. We all had the buffet, which included cream of vegetable soup (the kind one makes from yesterday's leftover vegetables - okay, but they need to make fresh vegetable stock to enliven the flavours), roast pork with demi-glace, steamed PEI mussels (these things follow me around the world, I swear), penne with a chicken-bacon-cream sauce, rice pilaf, your standard boiled vegetables (carros, cauliflower, etc), a flavourless rotini with tomato and herbs, and Atlantic salmon with dill sauce (the salmon wasn't very fresh). Everything else we had was quite delicious (we all skipped the salad bar); we washed it down with Georges DuBoeuf 1998 Beaujolais-Villages, seeing nothing else on the wine list that went with everything.

We had to waddle back up to the dessert bar, where we sampled the apple cheesecake, the berry cheesecake, the pecan pie, the mocha torte, and the strawberry-rhubarb pie, with chocolate sauce, raspberry sauce, and blueberry sauce. We left the dishes of Jell-O alone, though, and enjoyed a cup of tea while we sat there trying to get the energy to stand up.

Eventually we made it back to my room, where my friends gave me a copy of the program from Wilson's memorial service and told me about it (the musician whose song Wilson had requested for the service volunteered to play it himself instead of their using the CD, which was very nice, considering they had never met). One friend left and the other and I went out where we toasted Wilson's memory. I may have toasted it a few too many times, since I don't think I got back to my room until 3 am or so.