Baguette Run

Last night was pretty quiet. I watched the latest episode of The Apprentice which was very funny, and a couple of episodes of the Steve Carrell version of The Office, which I really enjoyed. I think that show is often funnier than the Ricky Gervais show. Then I watched a hockey game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Penguins won five to two.

It was a fairly average day at work. There was a baguette run today and I had a panini with roast beef, brie, jalapeno peppers and English mustard. It was really good. The weather is starting to warm up a bit now and the ice is finally starting to thaw.

Totally Freezing

Last night was pretty quiet. I watched an episode of NHL on the Fly, which is like an ice hockey review show, and a couple of episodes of The IT Crowd.

There wasn't any new snow tonight but the temperatures were well below freezing and all the pavements were covered with ice. On my way into work I fell on the ice and coming home I almost fell several times, but I managed not to.

It was a pretty quiet day at work. Most people managed to be in today after all the chaos yesterday and also most people stayed for the full day.

The Naval Treaty

Last night I was watching a pretty good ice hockey game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Los Angeles Kings on TV. Later on I was listening to a radio adaptation of an 1893 Sherlock Holmes story called "The Naval Treaty", in this one an old schoolfriend of Dr. Watson's, now a clerk at the Foreign Office, calls in Holmes when some vitally important documents he was supposed to be looking after go missing. It was a pretty good story, and apparently is often classed as one of the very first spy stories.

It was another quiet day at work. I'm on a training course next week, which is pretty good, because it means that for one thing, it's a change from the regular work and or another thing, I can leave a bit earlier than usual.

I decided to get a steak pie and chips on my way back home, which was nice and not quite as heavy as it was last time I had one.

A Delivery

I watched the rest of Twin Peaks last night and this afternoon. It was really good, but it all ends on a cliffhanger that was never resolved, due to the fact that a planned third season was never made. It would be really great if they did another season of the show or another movie to conclude it, but in a way it kind of works leaving it open.

This morning a Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey tee-shirt which I ordered on Monday arrived, so that was good.

A Filling

Last night I was watching a couple of epsiodes of Twin Peaks, which were really good. They were among the darkest episodes of the series that I've yet seen but they did have some great comedy moments in as well, especially David Lynch appearing as the loud FBI Chief. I saw a really good ice hockey game last night between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Penguins won five to four.

I took the day off work today and went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film, which was based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, takes place in 1954 where two US Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) travel to an institution for the criminally insane on Shutter Island just off the Boston harbour to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an inmate. It was a very good film and very well-made it also followed the book very closely.

After the movie I wandered around for awhile before heading up to the dentist. I had to get a filling put in due to some decay on one of my teeth that had been revealed after my wisdome tooth was extracted last November. I had to get about three or four injections in my mouth to anaesthetise it and the whole thing took about forty five minutes. My mouth is still really numb and I know that it will be painful once the anaesthetics wear off. The dentist said that I would probably need to take pain-killers for the next two days.

Daylight Saving

Last night was pretty quiet. I watched some Twin Peaks and some ice hockey. The clocks all had to be turned back an hour last night for the daylight saving time, so that meant I had to lose an hour's sleep.

This morning I went along with my Dad to the Ocean Terminal shopping centre. First of all we stopped off at Starbucks and had some coffee and a muffin. Then we split up to look around. I got three books in the sales which were: It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock - A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler, Shout!: The True Story of The Beatles by Philip Norman and The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien.

After that we went along to my parent's house. The new issue of Fortean Times magazine ("The Journal of Strange Phenomena") had arrived during the week, so that was pretty interesting. In the afternoon I went out for a walk with my Mum to see if we could find any good branches for Mum to use to make her annual Easter Tree for the house.

I'm off work tomorrow and in the morning I'm planning on going up to see Shutter Island, and in the afternoon I have a dentist appointment to clean up the area around where my wisdom tooth was removed in November. I might need to get a filling with that.

Breakdown

Last night I watched a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on DVD. The first episode, "Into Thin Air", was set in Paris in the early 1900s where a young Englishwoman (played by Alfred Hitchcock's daughter, Pat Hitchcock) arrives on holiday with her elderly mother, who falls ill at their hotel. The doctor sends the young woman to fetch some medicine, however when she returns her mother appears to have vanished without a trace and the hotel staff claim to have no memory of ever seeing either of them before. In the second episode, "Salvage", a young woman nervously awaits the arrival of a violent gangster who has just been released from prison (the gangster is understandably upset because she was responsible for the death of his brother), however what she does not expect is for him to give her thousands of dollars to start her dream business and for him to encourage her boyfriend to marry her. The third episode, "Breakdown", was directed by Hitchcock himself, and starred Joseph Cotten as a wealthy businessman who is severly injured in a car accident, so severly that all the doctors believe that he is actually dead, while he is very much alive but unable to move or communicate in any way. However he has to persuade them that he is alive before they start the post-mortem. Some of them are really good stories, and because they last less than half an hour, they are really good to just put on when there's a bit of free time.

I watched a pretty fun ice hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins on TV after that.

Today was my first day back at work after the holiday. It was a really long day and I was so glad to be out of there. There is a strike on at work scheduled for Wednesday, which at least will break up the week a little bit.

I was really excited to find out that the second season of Twin Peaks has been released on DVD. I really got into David Lynch films in around 1996 and I have really wanted since then to actually watch the whole of that show and never had an opportunity until now. I don't actually think the whole thing has been repeated, at least not that I've been able to see. I can still remember when it was first shown in 1990, and it was such a huge thing at the time.

TV Channels

Last night I was watching a few episodes of Alfred Hitchock Presents on the DVD I got yesterday. The show was an anthology series where each epsiode was a one-off self contained story with no continuing cast or characters. They were all mystery and suspense thrillers and each episode was introduced by Hitchcock, who would also deliver a short speech at the end of each episode. A lot of people think that Hitchcock directed all of the episodes which he didn't. He directed a total of 18 episodes out of the 363 that were made. I also watched the first two episodes of A Perfect Spy, which was a seven part miniseries from 1987, based on a John le Carre novel in which one of Britain's top spies has gone missing, believed defected, and so his people and his enemies are on the hunt to find him, however the spy is trying to search through the secrets of his own past, including his complex relationship with his con-artist father, and trying to find some truth in an entire life built on deception and betrayal. It's a very complex and quite muultilayered work that is as much concerned with the psychology of being a spy as it is a conventional espionage thriller.

While I was away I got quite into watching ice hocky and basketball games and so last night I decided to add the North American sports channels to my TV package so I can watch the games.