The Davy Experience :)

I didn't get to write too much about Davy's trip to Montreal these last two weeks because I was too busy doing a number of things at the same time. But it was all lots of fun and I still have remnants of his visit here :D (not that he's left yet... in fact he's leaving on Sunday).

Anyway I'll just list everything under this heading because there were so many different but interrelated things that happened.

The Birthday Party

Davy invited everyone to his mother's place up in Cote-des-Neiges (Cote-St-Catherine metro station) to his birthday party on Saturday the 3rd. We were treated to tons and tons of food... *drool*... ranging from the russian salads (including the "Olivier salad"), the caviar, the meat, and the desserts. The guys spent hours upon hours playing chess, of all things to do at a party (Davy's party, of course...) while PJ and I conversed with Ian and Lisa. By the end of the evening we were too pooped to do much else and went home to slumber.

So my mother called me on Tuesday...

"Wanna go to Toronto tomorrow?" she asked more or less nonchalantly.

"What? Tomorrow?"

"Yeah. I'm going tomorrow because I'm kind of bored here."

Well, the conversation didn't really sound like that, but it has the gist. I was puzzled at first because I wanted to go to Quebec to visit her over the long Easter weekend, but since she said she was planning to go until the 18th (*sigh*) I thus had the option to go after class on Wednesday morning, or not at all. :p

I decided not to go, since I had a few tasks to do that necessitated me being in Montreal for at least a few more days... Namely, that Davy had yet to visit me like he said he would, and I had to (start and) complete the invitations for SUMS's End of Year party before the break.

But this means that I have nowhere to go this holiday weekend.... :(

Davy Hath Been Invited

A few weeks before Davy was slotted to come to Montreal, I had invited him over ICQ to come by and make his most tempting mushroom and barley soup. We hadn't set a date, so the matter remained until I got fed up of waiting, and just wrote it down in a card form. I presented it to him for his birthday, so that he wouldn't forget to come over.

He finally came by on Wednesday this week. Davy insisted on obtaining the freshest and as nice ingredients as possible, to make the soup as good as it should be. I suggested we go to Atwater market, since it was probably the best place to pick up all sorts of tasty things. We walked from McGill, passing by the Faubourg, and then reaching Atwater. After a most refreshing market experience, we got home and prepared the soup.

Davy's Mushroom and Barley Soup
Ingredients:
Pearl barley (from Rocky Montana)
Portabello mushrooms (from Faubourg)
Dried (Wild) mushroom mix (from Atwater)
4 Potatoes
Dill
~7 Bayleaves
Salt
~7 Peppercorns
Chili pepper flakes
Sour cream



Stick everything in a big pot with water. Boil for about 40 minutes. When foam develops, remove scum from pot. Serve with a spoon of sour cream in the bowl. Be sure not to eat the bayleaves or the peppercorns.

Now, there's a fundamental problem with this soup... I don't like spicy stuff. But Davy assured me that experimentation would not be too harmful. So he took a good teaspoon (!!!) or so and dumped it in the pot.

Ivo was immediately called to come over, but then he had a problem with his appartment being flooded (!) due to a weird neighbour in the upper levels, so he left for a while and came back anyway. Lil V joined us to eat, and all five of us sat down to a hearty meal...

I'm very intolerant to spicyness, so one pepper flake was enough to start flames on my tongue. Fortunately for me the rice and salad was enough to soothe my flaming mouth, but afterwards I fell asleep with everyone hanging around playing cards. ^_^

We were left with a good amount of soup that still sits on the stove at the moment. It's a good soup... just a tad spicy, eh?

---

Now, I diluted the soup with an extra litre, and have been boiling the thing for a few days already. Jorgh and I just had our second meal of this soup... and it's even hotter than before!

I think the moral of the story is to not put anything spicy like that in a soup again.

The SUMS (!#@$ING) Party

One of my traditions in SUMS was to create the invitations for the end of year party. Except that one year when no one asked me to make the damn thing and they ended up with this fugly looking thing (sorry, whoever made it). So I was naturaly ranting to the exec to let me do the invitations since I couldn't stand them messing up another thing. Of course they agreed, and I had a week before the 13th of April, the day of the event, to make the template (ie. the 6th).

Now, if you are a past SUMS cronie, and you treasure the sweet, sweet (yet disgusting) memories and traditions of the past, you must be informed about the one thing that happened this year that will make you cringe and scream in complete despair, and vowing revenge upon all those heathens responsible for a terrible, despicable injustice upon your legacy.

Ready?

The Annual SUMS Wine and Cheese this year has no wine.

Now, I won't name names since I don't know what happened exactly, but the exec this year has screwed up big time... in fact, this is the biggest ever. The elections were a sham, the exec was a mess, and the one thing they were supposed to uphold to redeem themselves in the eyes of the entire mathematics student body was this one freaking party.

I learned this on the Friday (2nd). Apparently, the person in charge of getting the liquor license for the party did not do so in time, which is 15 days before the event is supposed to occur, and thus they cannot hold a party with liquor being served.

"Why, aren't people lax with the time frame usually?" I asked.

"This year they got a lot stricter..." And then I recalled the fiasco with SSMU's insurance policy expiring at the beginning of December, and the entire student body being left without insurance for their events for about a week. Ahhhhh... crap

"So can't you push the date further to give yourselves more time? (by 2 days)"

"And have it in the exam period?"

No, that wouldn't do.

"So what is going to happen to the Wine and Cheese?"

"We're calling it the 'Fruit and Cheese'..."

Holy mother #@$!ing crap!

The first thought in my mind was just that. Who would go to a freaking "Fruit and Cheese"??? The professors hardly agreed to go to a wine and cheese in the first place, just because our wine was the kinda gross box wine. The only redeeming factor was that the wine was free. But... a fruit???

"Well," I started, "you could call it a Semi-Formal, since we used to have both Wine and Cheese and a Semi-Formal... or a SUMS End of Year party..."

"Those would be interesting," Heather mused. "We'll be having a meeting on Monday to figure out what's going on. In the meantime you don't have to work on the invitations..."

I was pretty ticked off the entire weekend. The invitations were already planned out to have the words "WINE & CHEESE" really, really large on the front of the card. I thought of just giving up, but the most irritating thought in the back of my mind was that I knew I couldn't.

Sometimes I hate my integrity.

---

Finally, on the day that Davy came over to make the soup, after the nap, I spent most of the evening remaking the invitation. While everyone played the big deuce, I slaved away on the ridiculous fruit-covered invitation without any mention of wine on it. Maybe I should have kept the final copy...

I finished at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday.

After giving the thing to the exec later that afternoon, Jordi told me there was a mistake - that it was being held at 5:30 p.m. and not 4.

"But that's what you told me."

"I know."

"When'd you change it?" (frown.)

"..."

"Why'd you change it?" (deeper furrowed frown.)

"To give us more time."

I think if I frowned more it would have fell through the concrete foundation of the lounge.

Davy and the Weird Russian Guy

Later that afternoon, while Jorgh ran off to the statistics seminar, Davy came by again to try pulling together a skating party. Unfortunately, since I didn't want to go without more people going, and it didn't seem that anyone was willing to go in the end, he cancelled the party. Instead, we sat around getting hungrier and hungrier. Ian suggested we go to Café l'étranger, since it was close by and there was the possibility of a banana split that Davy was longing for.

Now, this guy named Vladmir, whom I have never met before, was hanging around kind of aloof. Davy was trying to teach him to play the big deuce, since he played so much the previous night at my place. Vlad didn't seem to be getting the game quickly enough to understand what was going on. One of Ian's friends (Patricia) came by and she recognized Vlad from a kickboxing class a year ago. They started talking, mostly about how scary he was to her since he kicked her ass and laughed like a maniac afterwards, or something like that.

Later, we got fed up of waiting for Jorgh to get out of his seminar ... okay, I got fed up of waiting for Jorgh to get out of his seminar ... and we took off to the cafe. Vlad explained he was trying to practice his french as much as he could because he had an exam in two weeks. So he struggled through french for the rest of the evening.

Ian was driven mad by this guy since he even forced the waitress to speak in french (who was an obvious anglophone, and he was an obvious non francophone who spoke more english). Vlad kept insisting on finding something that was just purement chicken. The poor waitress didn't know exactly what could be suitable for him, so I pointed out the chicken wings. "Est-ce que c'est purement le poulet?" he asked....

Ian then switched places so he didn't have to face him, or even look at him.

["Dave, where did you find this guy?"
"I TA'ed his class in computer science one time..."]

We all agreed later on that he was rather odd indeed.