The major fifth

So. It's a Sunday, we'd been drinking the night before, and we were slowly running out of coffee. It was a bad start. James didn't start his day with root beer like we all thought, but kind of compromised. J made coffee. It was cold out so we forced our way through the wind to Yorkdale where we walked inside to the subway. I handed the woman a $10 and she said 'I take it you want change'. I said, 'yes'. We rode the subway but Rob was out of it. He'd cured the hangover so he should have been proud of himself but he was in a bad way. No breakfast meant he detached himself in case he said something nasty.

We found a Timmy's and relaxed. We could quite see the outdoor ice rink but we could see into a steakhouse. Fun. J (left) complained that he'd asked for a cup of coffee and got one. Only the one he wanted was the white edition and he wanted black. Something about iPod's I wasn't really listening.

None of us knew where we were supposed to be later. The wedding rehearsal was today and we needed to be at 'a church' (not right). Preferably the same one as everybody else. James staggered over the street to see if he could get onto some internet to discover where the thing was. Which he did. Then J though "I only have US dollars and they're worthless in this freezing country' so he went to get them changed. $60 (US) = $63 (CA). He came back and thought he'd been screwed over by an old Indian lady. Turns out, fortunately without the need for immediate confrontation, the US dollar was the thing that had screwed him over.

The rehearsal was a success (it involved me pressing play about 15 times) and everyone was happy. Rob's got some good photos of that.

Mark made a decision to pray before we started, which was a good decision, but as the Holy Spirit established Himself I couldn't help realising something.

We went to 'the grandparents' for beer and pizza. I was going to go to church.... but beer and pizza. There were present givings speeches, and about 1000 people. No...20. The after party was at Mark's place. On the way there we made a decision to get some stuff. The three things we decided on were beer, coffee, and cigarettes. On the way to the (closed) Beer Store the snow (which had been changing the scenery like some kind of crazy Shakespeare play) caused Mark's Oldsmobile to do a couple of donuts in the parking lot. Darn rear-wheel drive.

We played SNES and Ramlin (below-left) kicked everyone's asses. Although she seemed to refer to her Luigi lives as a small army claiming' Mario's taking all my men!' but it was ok when she'd lost the excitement. I was rubbish at it. As was Rob. We were in the team 'I grew up without a games console thank you very much' and that seemed good enough for us. There was dancing and singing and hats.






Oh, yeah. During the rehearsal J got confronted by the church pastor for going off to play video games with one of the staff's kids. There were plenty of replies he could have said like 'That's rich coming from you' (only the priest was Catholic) but decided to go with a good apology, and came in hanging his head saying 'I just wanted to play Gamecube. What's wrong with that?'

The realisation was one of loneliness. The past few days have been quite hectic and that meant little or no time with my Master. It's a basic truth (stolen from Rob Rufus but very relevant to me); if I don't spend time with God everyday I feel lonely.