Here, there, and everywhere

My CT scan was the first item on the agenda today. Fortunately, since they were examining the sternum (a bone), they didn't need to do the contrast injection. This is good, because I don't particularly like the contrast injection :) The whole thing was relatively uneventful... until the end, when the technician said "Have you had anything that could cause this?" Hmmmm. That must mean that there's a "this" there. So the bone scan result wasn't just a fluke or an error, and the pain I'm having might not be a sole product of my imagination.

When I got home, we had breakfast and read the paper and flyers. While looking through the Future Shop flyer, Ian noticed that they had the Nintendo DS Lite advertised. He checked online, and they were in stock at our local store. We quickly finished up our breakfast and rushed over there and Ian bought me a DS Lite (that he also uses). We also bought two games - Brain Age and Magnetica. Magnetica is a game similar to Puzz Loop and Zuma, but with more features and stuff. Ian enjoys it very much :)

We drove up go St. Catharines and played our own version of the Amazing Race. We'd booked a hotel/motel yesterday so that we didn't have to fuss with finding a place to stay (or paying too much). How hard can it be to find a motel in downtown St. Catharines and you have the address and a map? Well, it's pretty hard when the place is right downtown and the address you have is for the registration desk, which has almost no signage :) The actual rooms are across the street. The room we have is ok. It's quite large and clean. It has a small fridge and a microwave, which are the main reasons we chose this place. The toilet lists to the right, which is a bit strange at first. It's also not a low-flow toilet, which is something I haven't seen in ages. The room has a slight old cigarette smoke aroma, probably because once upon a time there was no such thing as a non-smoking room and the smoke is in the sofabed, carpets, curtains, and air conditioner.

There are a lot of restaurants here, of a lot of different ethnicities. There are Thai, Mexican, and Indian restaurants all within walking distance. But did we eat at any of those? Nope - we ate at the Mandarin :) It's a Chinese-Canadian all you can eat buffet that we like (yeah, ok, I know it's pretty lame :). There's one opening up in Waterloo in the fall.

When we finished eating, we went down to the dragonboat race area. The best part of the race environment is that there is a permanent course out on the water - we're using the rowing club docks and stuff. The worst part will probably be that there is almost no shade where the tents are set up, and there doesn't seem to be that much space available for the tents. The Silvermasters usually take up quite a bit of space with our two tents and all of our chairs and stuff - we sprawl, as a rule. We didn't bring our team tent, so we couldn't stake out a space. We think that'll be ok, as we'll stake out some space tomorrow before the rest of the team arrives.

Finally, we took a walk through downtown St. Catharines. There are a lot of empty storefronts; I think this area is undergoing revitalization. However, there was a fantastic store with a whole lot of HO scale train stuff called Niagara General Hobbies. They had some great models and track layouts and train maintenace sheds and stuff.