Our weekend tale starts with good intentions. In Friday's post, I talked about gearing up for a long ten-mile run on Saturday. Ellie and I behaved ourselves Friday night, ate well, and did everything right in preparation to run at 7:00 a.m. I even woke up early to take the dog out! Alas, when I did wake up the weather was so bad that Audrey refused to walk out the door. We were pounded by thunder and lightning all Saturday morning, delaying our run until after the day's planned festivities . . .

They had like 5 of these things rolling around!

Saturday was my lovely wife's birthday! To celebrate, we headed out to see her dad and go to the Western New York Gas and Steam Engine showing. It was full of insane feats of farming engineering from about the 1950s all the way back to the 1910s and maybe even before! Some of the equipment just made you scratch your head and ask how they came up with the design—and, more importantly, how they didn't lose every limb (though from what I gather they did lose quite a few fingers at least). It was a blast, and it was fun to hang out, though the ground was a bit muddy!

For Ellie's birthday, I got her a pair of tickets to see Jason Mraz with Christina Perri up in Toronto on Sunday the 9th. We got a hotel room for Saturday night so we could spend a bunch of time in Toronto. After our soggy start and our delayed run, we decided it would be best to just get up to Toronto and run there. By the time we did get up there, though, it was already after 9:00 p.m., and we hadn't eaten much, so naturally our running got pushed off to the following morning. That was fine, we figured; we could get up early and hit the fitness center, which had really good treadmills, and we'd log a couple hours on those.

. . . We hadn't planned for the massive convention(s?) of school-aged children. About three miles into our treadmill run, the kids at the convention must have gotten a morning break because the fitness room suddenly became engulfed. Exercise balls started flying around, kids started flying off the backs of the treadmills around us, screams came from everywhere, and it was just a generally not-safe situation. Couple that with some lasting effects of baked brie we had had the night before and the run was cut short after only four miles. So much for sticking to the schedule.

Now, I want to make it clear that I'm fine with kids using fitness facilities. I'm not one of those stuck-up people who gets pissed off when a little kid is around or anything like that. I just don't really care for a ton of unsupervised kids screwing around on expensive machines where they could get seriously injured when other people (a.k.a. old people like Ellie and me) are actually trying to work out. It just kind of ruins the mojo.

Our walking route in Toronto, nearly 5 miles (probably over after factoring in shopping!)

We did end up swimming a bit and doing laps, which was great. But it wasn't the ten miles we were hoping for (and honestly in need of). Then again, we did end up walking around Toronto for about five miles, so in a way it might have been a good thing we didn't exhaust our legs doing the full run. I guess there is that silver lining?

Finally, the main event arrived. The actual concert was awesome. Jason Mraz is pretty amazing live and has a lot of fun putting on shows. And Christina Perri sounded great live, too! (It's refreshing when artists are as good on record as they are in concert.) It was nice to be in the fresh air, sipping on ten-dollar Heineken, and just relaxing to the beats. Overall it was a pretty good event and a great weekend!