I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

STORMY EVENING AND THE GLEN.

My sister, Alison, invited us to a one-day-late Father's Day dinner at the Glen Scottish Restaurant on Hazeldean Road in Kanata on Monday evening, which was probably the last opportunity we'd have to all have dinner together before the baby's born at the end of this month or the beginning of July.

We left the house at about 6:45 p.m., which is actually fairly early for us to eat dinner.



Just as we were leaving to get to the restaurant, I spotted one of those rabbits again, though, since he wasn't distracted by noisy children this time around, he spotted me too and kept his distance.



Within a minute or two of pulling out of our driveway, the brief-but-intense thunderstorm passed over Nepean, and, by the time we got to the intersection of Meadowlands and Woodroffe, near the Centrepointe town hall complex, it was pelting down. My father drove onto Northgate and then stopped the car for several minutes, because the rain was coming down faster than the windshield wipers could wipe it away. We even got a little bit of hail. About seven minutes after we pulled over, the rain had mellowed down just enough for us to continue driving.



It was still raining when we were driving west along Baseline, but, by the time we had gotten to Richmond Road and Bell's Corners in western Nepean, the rain had turned to drizzle and the midsummer's evening sunlight was already beginning to break through the clouds, giving me an opportunity to take quite a vivid shot of a rainbow against the backdrop of a smoke grey cloud.

There are a few areas where you can see the grass refracted through the drips of water on the Sonata's windows, which would normally bother me, except, here, it gives the affected area the look of a painting.

This shot would have made a great desktop, except I took it on digital instead of film, and you can easily see some banding in the clouds. If anyone wants it as a desktop background, here's the original 1280 x 960 jpeg file.



Here I am in the backseat of our Hyundai Sonata, wearing my Arsenal Football Club jersey (that's "football" as in "soccer", for those of you in Rio Linda).

I mainly own it because of the Sega Dreamcast logo on the chest (below what's visible in this picture), but it's also quite appropriate apparel for FIFA World Cup season. (The England national team jersey I have would be even more appropriate, but it was in the wash.)

Also, it's fun to say, in a mock British accent, "Hello, I play football for ARSE-nal! I like ARSE-nal! Are you looking at my ARSE-nal jersey?"



The rear end of a City of Ottawa OC Transpo articulated bus, on Richmond Road between Nepean and Kanata, in the wooded "High Deer" area.



And here's our Hyundai Sonata in front of the Glen Scottish Restaurant itself.

I apologize that I felt the need to obscure our license plate number using "mosaic" in Photoshop. Of course, I always leave everyone else's license plate number intact when I post pictures on the Internet, but that's because I like being an ARSE-nal.



Here I am with a few mock Glasgow street signs, with sayings that I think are either Gaellic words or compounds of English words pronounced with a thick Sideshow Willy Scottish brogue. They had the English translations of "YABAMPOTYE", "AWAYANBILEYIRHEID", and "YIRBUMSOOTHIWINDAE" written below the words, but I forgot what they were and they're illegible in this photo.



It sure is hard to try reading the menu whilst snapping a picture of yourself in a darkish room.



Eh, I wasn't feeling adventurous, so I just ate what I had the last time I went to The Glen, lightly-seasoned breaded chicken filets, onion rings, and fries. A whole plate full of fried food, not exactly healthy, but I didn't have dessert so I'm slightly less of a fatass than I would otherwise be today.

It was tasty, with the fries being not too greasy and not too dry, but I'm not a food critic and don't have much else to say about it.



Not too bad a photo of my sister, though I mainly included this picture here to show the overall Scottish pub ambience of the Glen.

After I was finished eating, I wasn't really interested in dessert, so I excused myself in order to take a few photos of whatever I could find outside.



A Mercury Grand Marquis car advertising the Kunstadt Sports store, which is right next door to the Glen. I took this photo mainly for the Flickr "Ads on Wheels" photo pool, but I won't be able to post it until next month since I reached my 20 megabyte monthly limit on my free account with the Champs-Elysees crayon drawing.



An OC Transpo bus on Hazeldean. According to Cats On Mars's KinFreon, it's a Invero from New Flyer.



Finally, my quest to get a picture of a City Of Ottawa Ford Crown Victoria police cruiser has borne some fruit, though it's fuzzy and it was going too fast for me to be able to get a better shot.

They had the eastbound half of Hazeldean blocked off at the Burger King at the corner of Castlefrank for some kind of roadwork. I don't know if they were resurfacing it or something along those lines, but I did get a few pictures of this Mack Street Sweeper/Street cleaner thingie.



By the way... "Castlefrank". That always makes me snicker like a comic book geek (instead of the anime geek that I am) because it's the Punisher's name (Frank Castle) backwards.





I went back in and snapped a few more pictures, but nothing I'll bore you with here.

It was a lovely night, but it was a work night for my sister's boyfriend, so they couldn't stay out too late.



As you can see, they drive a Honda SUV. And it's a recent model too. I guess those annoying Mr. Opportunity commercials with the animated prick actually worked on someone.




The postscript of the evening was, as we were driving back home, whilst on Meadowlands between Woodroffe and Merivale I saw out the rear door window on the other side of the car a glimpse of the door of a car travelling in the opposite direction. A red car door. With a row of either six or eight air intake vents in it, of the sort that I have seen a lot of recently in toy form and in the video game Out Run 2006: Coast to Coast. Crap, it was the first actual Ferrari that I had seen in ages, and I didn't get a good look at it, but I believe that it was none other than the 512TR Testarossa, and I didn't have the camera ready to take a picture, though it was too dark at that point for the camera to get a non-blurry shot of a moving car from a car moving in the opposite direction, so the lack of camera readiness was moot. I wonder if this means that there is a Ferrari owner somewhere in the western Ottawa suburbs, or whether it was just staying in town for Canadian Grand Prix week, since staying in Ottawa and driving early in the morning to Montreal has got to be a lot more cheaper than trying to find a place to stay in Montreal this week.

Or maybe it was none other than Masato Sanjouin a.k.a. Nephrite (Maxfield Stanton/Neflite in the old Sailor Moon dub). Hey, it's not that far-fetched... he could be Canadian. The mineral Nephrite, also known as Actinolite, is primarily mined in... Eastern Ontario! Maybe he's my neighbour!

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:12 PM