Tim Hortons. I kid you not.

on june 6th patrick and i took another stab at saskaspooning. it had been a hard day: my new house, only two weeks old, was proving to have a dampness issue in the basement, one not helped by the sewer back up of the weekend before, or the fact that it was raining here like very wet cats and dogs. we spent the day looking for dehumidifiers which are hard to get in a province that is dry as sick-people toast. and then i was a bit stressed about my upcoming trip to chicago, and he was a bit stressed about his upcoming trip to europe, and so, stressed out as a pair of levis circa 1995, we were not up for anything too fancy.

okay. enough of the bad metaphor/simile. how about i tell this to you like a normal person:

neither patrick nor i was interested in anything too hifalutin that evening. "we might end up at the Ivy!" i said. (the ivy is just as it sounds.) i did not want the ivy. and yet...when we shook the little urbanspoon, and we waited as the database scrolled through over 250 restaurants, i did not expect to be sent to the Tim Hortons at 8th and Cumberland.

So this was our 3rd saskaspooning adventure. first was the Roastery on 8th street. next was the keg on 8th street. now it was tim hortons on 8th street. i hope you are seeing the gravitas of this: we could not escape 8th street.

still, tim hortons (or "timmys", as we regulars fondly call it) on 8th proved to be quite the hotspot. we ended up there at 10pm on a saturday night. patrick had a bowl of chili, a bun, an orange juice, and a donut. i ate a turkey club on whole wheat with a side of chicken soup, a coffee, and a donut. we ate for 14$. take that, Keg Steakhouse!

the tim hortons was PACKED. we almost couldnt get a table. there were tables of teenagers texting one another and laughing and eating donuts. they kept going up for more. there was a weird couple--possibly father daughter? possibly first date? i liked to imagine they were both sitting at an adjoining table and fell in love over their crullers. there was a group of men in long robes and little cloth caps who made me think about tim hortons in toronto, and there was a number of young mums with children, and a lady who might have been homeless, but she might also have been a lady who shops a lot and has little patience with showers. there were also a number of tables with seniors at them, paired off in couples, like they were all on double dates. out the window, alongside my little echo, we saw a lexus and a bmw. they belonged to one of the sets of senior couples. we were amused by their fancy cars until we realised, looking at our 14$ meal out, that if we, too, confined ourselves to dates at timmy's from now on, we might also be driving lexuses well into our golden ages....

it was actually a really good time. you never know what you're going to get. but luckily, all we've gotten so far has been a pretty wicked time.

damn. i just jinxed it. next time's gonna suck.

Adventure #3: Unity, or Lock it, Pop it, Polkadot it

so this post is not about saskaspooning. is that okay? it is, however, about limited choices...and making the best with what you've got. (please note photo is from when i visited the week before hence the reference to the fast and the furious on the sign...)

so patrick's been in unity now for awhile. he's trapped there for work and so we have not been able to saskaspoon. so i went there for the weekend and entertained myself while he worked. this is pretty much how regular couples spend their time but for us this was unusual--we mostly see one another when we are both off work, but here we were, with him working and me at the hotel, writing things and reading a novel and taking my bike out for rides, and then he comes home from work and we spend the evening together. very strange for us but i think sort of like life for the majority of you who live in the same city as your partner.

anyway. we decided we needed something to do on saturday night, and we had two choices, it being unity, a small town in the north west of the province. it has one movie theatre with one screen (attached to a bowling alley, the family's apartment is off the back and the whole family runs it all, very sweet, very much a coming-of-age book in waiting, don't you think?) and this weekend all that was playing was hannah montana: the movie.

it was either see hannah montana or go to the Unity School of Dance recital. we were actually pretty torn -- neither one of us particularly wanted to see miley cyrus' (and her creepy dad's) movie, but we did want to see inside the small town theatre. i think the dance recital might have won out if the idea of seeing inside the movie-theatre-cum-bowling-alley didnt seem so romantic and small townish.

so we went to the movies. the kid at the ticket booth looked shocked to see us, and i told patrick later we should have told him our daughter had died years ago; "she would have been nine...." just to give him a good story. my mum told me later we should have told the kid we were having an adulterous affair and needed a dark place to "neck".

anyway, we paid the 7$ each and got a jumbo tub of popcorn for 3$, plus a lime slush puppy for a dollar. the theatre was filled with small girls and their reluctant brothers. there were not a lot of parents--i got the feeling a lot of kids got dropped off. patrick and i are neither one of us very tall but we were like two huge gullivers in lilliput, i swear.

we had a fine time. the kids around us laughed and laughed and laughed at all the stupid stuff that i didnt think eight year olds actually laughed at, and the lime slush puppy was delicious (thanks for sharing, patrick). i am a bit sad i missed the dance recital. the girls in the dance school were lucky, though; there were so many of them in the dance recital on friday and saturday nights who wanted to see hannah montanathat the theatre owners were going to show a matinee on sunday, just for them ....

ps hannah montana has a dangerous message, by the way. apparently, even though you may want to end the facade and just be yourself, it is okay and in fact preferred if you hide your true inner soul if it pleases your fans.

Adventure #2: The Keg

because patrick lives out of town, we don't get to saskaspoon as often as we'd like to. but we had an opportunity on the weekend and so we once again drove downtown to steal some wifi.

it's pretty fun beginning a saskaspoon adventure. because we dont know where we'll end up, we always start in the downtown area, in the car, poised to go. downtown has wifi which is our real reason to start there, but once i move into my new house next month which i plan on making wireless, we might just start from my living room. but i like it when we start in the car--it's like we're ready for the race to begin. once we shake the iphone we're OFF! like horses from a starting gate or participants in that grocery store game show (does anyone remember that? people pushed their carts through a pretend grocery store grabbing items for points?)

anyway, after our last meal out with the urban spoon i was a bit anxious, and had not packed a snack. so i was hungry. so imagine my delight when i shook the iphone and found we were being sent to the Keg on Grosvenor.

"talk about extremes," we mused. to go from the sketchy, foodless coffee shop to a fairly pricey steak house was a bit strange. after all, there are many, many restaurants in the urban spoon where we might have ended up. perhaps this was the program's way of making up for my teeny tiny microwaved pies of our last adventure.

anyway, we were driving over there and i read one of the urban spoon reviews. "Really busy during the recession; expect an hour and a half wait on saturdays."

we were confused by this: what makes a 30$/plate restaurant recession-friendly?? and did we really want to wait an hour and a half to eat? well, we had no choice: we had rules to follow.

luckily it would seem most of our fellow recession-sufferers were at home eating gold-plated pizza because we had the restaurant mostly to ourselves.

as we were waiting for our food to arrive, patrick said, "i feel like something's missing..." and he realized it was that anxious feeling one gets when one is trying to sort out a place to eat. patrick observed that saskaspooning certainly takes the stress out of going to restaurants. he and i dont see one another very often, and when we do we are trying to cram it all in to each visit--love and fun and adventure and also just sitting around in our pyjamas. in the past, picking a restaurant would sometimes result in a tense "where do you want to go?" conversation that would escalate into a dizzying back-and-forth that would ultimately find us at EE Burritoes once again. so it was certainly a relief to just show up at a prescribed place and just be together without having to debate about where to go to be together.

and then i got drunk.

here's how that happened: along with my meal (steak, stuffed potato, veggies, spinach salad --patrick had garlic mashed potatoes and prime rib, we shared tempura veggies, which were overdoughy--dont expect the keg to do japanese well, i guess, is the lesson there) i had a glass of wine.

i thought i'd ordered white, but the waiter brought me a sickely sweet glass of rose. "hmm," i said, "this tastes like juice." i started to drink it but wondered, secretly and ashamedly, if my knowledge of wine was that bad. i have never thought myself a sommalier, or anything, but hoped i knew enough to recognize that a sauvignon blanc is not, normally, pink.

anyway, we were halfway through our food when the waiter showed up and offered me my ACTUAL glass of wine. guess hes not a sommalier, either. so he brought me a much nicer white and i got to drink both.

by the end of the meal patrick had eaten all his food but i had half my salad, half my steak, and half my potato and half my veggies left (this was planned). i als had had half my fruitjuice wine (this was not planned). the waiter came along to pack up my leftovers. "i wish once could take home half-drunk glasses of wine," i said plaintively, and didnt that just clinch it, because our waiter then brought me a children's travel cup with a lid with a hole for a straw.

"so you can take your wine with you," he said, charmingly. we left him a pretty lousy tip (15.5%) but i wrote him a lovely, drunkish note of thanks.

adventure #1: the broadway roastery on 8th

the evening before patrick and i set out on our first saskaspooning adventure, i tried to get him to make me a deal.

"how about if we get a coffee shop, or something, we can shake again." we were in his friend jay's house, playing "Towers of Goo" on jay's wii, and i was getting a bit anxious about this plan of patrick's i had just agreed to.

"what's wrong with coffee shops?" patrick asked, watching his Goo tower growing steadily skyward.

"well, what if we get the broadway roastery, or something? there is no food there. there is only coffee." i should know--the roastery is by my apartment, and i go there a lot, because the only other alternative is starbucks and i do like to support the locals, even though i am about to malign them ..... because as much as i enjoy fair trade coffee, at the roastery it comes with wifi internet, and lots and lots of hippies and grungy hipsters; dogs chained up outside, kids in the parking lot playing hackey sack and plotting revolutions while dealing drugs. there is certainly a vibe at the roastery, that's for sure. but it wasn't necessarily the sort of vibe i was looking for. plus, i get hungry. patrick has this ability to go hours without eating but i need sustenance on a regular basis, otherwise i get cranky. "tim horton's or caffee sola would be okay. because they have food. but the roastery has no food."

"they have food," said patrick, referring, i think, to the stickysweet "jamaica bars"--butter and coconut pressed into puck form and featured prominently at the counter, alongside dead flies.

"that's not food." my tummy grumbled in anticipation of tomorrow's hunger. "so can we skip a coffee shop if we get one?"

"no. you agreed to the rules. we go where we're sent. otherwise, what's the point?" patrick's Goo tower stretched ever higher.

i looked plaintively at jay, who shrugged. "you did agree."

i sighed and resigned myself to follow the rules. besides, there were over 200 restaurants for us to end up at. how possible would it be we'd end up at the roastery?

so you know how this is going to play out. we woke up and drove downtown to steal wifi, poised in the car, on the edge of our seats, and patrick gave his iphone a shake, and then began to laugh and laugh and laugh.

"what? what is it?" i grabbed the iphone and was horrified to see "The Broadway Roastery" as our suggestion. "how? did you rig this?"

"no. i did not. you did, you fatalist."

i had a moment of wanting to refuse to go. to get all pouty and put my foot down but then i remembered jay's you-agreed-didn't-you? shrug and so i reluctantly accepted my fate.

luckily, as we were driving towards the hippie-hotspot at the top of broadway avenue, at that spot known as 5 Corners, we realized we had been assigned The Broadway Roastery on 8th street. "well, i've never been to that one!" i said, and felt a bit relieved. this would be an adventure, after all.

8th street is a pretty lame street. it's a big prairie strip, the furthest you can get from hippiehaven as possible. all the same, i was still surprised when we walked into the Roastery on 8th and found stay-at-home mums, clean floors, and nary a dead fly, fruit or otherwise. the people on wifi were clean and did not appear to be uploading screenplays or downloading propaganda. and everyone looked well-fed. which meant, maybe, i'd get fed.

we went up to the counter (clean, wide, the whole place designed to look like a cabana or something) and i asked the young fresh faced hipster-in-training if there was any food to be had.

"well," she said, "we have cinnamon buns and pieces of cake". (no jamaica cake, i am happy to report). my heart sank. and my tummy rumbled. i knew i should have packed a snack.

"you dont have any food-food?"

"oh, we have mini pies. meat pies and veggie pies." she pointed at a tray of teenytiny little pies.

"i will have one of each, please!" she looked a bit surprised at that, but handed me two little plates with a little pie on each. (at this point i will mention that her belt was really too tight. we knew she was trying a "look" but she was failing a bit. but i have no doubt she'll eventually get transfered over to the "real" Roastery at 5 Corners and she'll learn the follies of her stripmall ways.)

as she handed me the pies she said, "you can heat them up at the microwave over by the cream and sugar. i'd give them each about a minute."

and so patrick waited while i heated up my pies, and then he took the plastic wrap off his cinnamon bun and we heated that up, as well. the bun. not the saran.

the rest of our visit was pleasant. the pies were delicious, (although, it must be said, could have used a bit longer in the microwave), but patrick said the cinnamon bun was "not the best." perhaps it, too, could have stood a bit more heating. i sipped my sugar-free london fog, patrick his double americano with ice, and we discussed the pros and cons of the Roastery on 8th St.

There is a children's play area. this did not look very fun, as it consisted of no children, mostly crayons, and a weird mural of a boy kneeling on a donkey. (see above). my theory is that the artist misjudged his perspective, lending the boy his weird donkey-dancing appearance.

The music was an interesting assortment--Rod Stewart, KT Tunstal, and that "walking in memphis" song i once memorized on an air canada flight to new zealand, back in the day when you only got the one overhead movie and the in flight "radio" had "stations" featuring hot tunes of the day. the station i favoured also showcased such classics as "Buffalo Stance" and "Cigarette Dangles".

and the people watching was fun, too. there was certainly a dearth of hipsters and revolutionaries, but a healthy collection of suburban wannabes.

all in all, we had a nice time. i had to eat again later, of course, but that's the name of the game. you never know what you're going to get.

except, i guess i kind of did know. i predicted the Roastery, didn't i? well, next time i'll be hoping we dont get someplace awesome.