I Saw Mommy Kissing Zanta Claus

A while back, Jorge mentioned this guy Zanta*, who runs around downtown Toronto in a pair of shorts and a Santa hat, showing off his 6 pack abs and screaming at everyone. Guess who I saw while walking home from the movie yesterday?

Anyway, not really much to report on my trip so far (which is a good thing, as my goal for this trip was to relax and do nothing). The conference was good, my speech at the banquet was well received**, and I got to do some A.R.M. research on both Friday AND Saturday night (scientists are party people!). Interestingly, while I did not experience any A.R.M. on either Saturday or Sunday morning***, I had wicked A.R.M. on Monday! So, either drinking with scientists delays your A.R.M. or drinking at sketchy London, ON bars delays your A.R.M. Or possibly, I've developed a tolerance to A.R.M. and the Monday morning M was the result of this flu I apear to have. It's hard to say, really.

My neice is the cutest thing EVER! Yesterday when my sister and I picked her up from daycare, my sister pointed to me and asked her "Who's this?" and she said "Aunt Beth!" Yay!! She knows my name now! And then, for the rest of the day, she proceeded to call me Kim. Kim notwithstanding, she seems pretty darned smart to me, not that I know a lot of 1.5 year olds to compare her to. Although I've started to wonder if she ever gets sick of all the questions we keep asking her, "What sound does a dog make?" "Where is your nose?" "Is Mommy funny?" "What colour is this?" Like, does she ever think, "MY god, that's like the 20th time you've asked me what sound does a monkey make! Why can't you people ever remember this??!"Other than that, I've pretty much been just hanging out, reading, relaxing, walking around Toronto to check out the city. And running. I've decided that I really am going to do a 10K, so I'm running every other day now. Apparently they've installed hills in the city of Toronto since I was last here - who knew?

*I would link to this on his blog, but that entry doesn't appear to up on his new blog yet... =(

**I managed to work in my cool shoes , Harry Potter and that fact that "I'm a scientist" is a great pick up line.... not bad for a speech that I wrote about an hour before the banquet, and revised while the other speakers were speaking.

***although I had a splitting headache and was doling out my ibuprofen to my fellow conferees, one of whom described his condition as "I feel like I just got kicked in the face!"