WHEW!!! Glad that bad mood is over with! Talk about a horrible energy drainer that went on for over a week. *wipes brow* My mood lifted when I was venting on the phone to someone last night about my stress over decision making, which in of itself was not unusual since I have been venting most of the week to any of my poor friends (and readers!) who would listen... but for some reason I felt better after ranting to this one person in particular. Maybe his insight and advice was just different, I dunno. And THEN my evening only got better when I hopped on to MSN Messenger and chatted up my bestest buddy Sam, down in North Carolina. He made my night by telling me he's trying to sort out plans for a possible trip up to Toronto in June. YAY!!!!!! I am so excited, you have no idea. I can't wait to see you, baby!!

So yeah, both those things finally dragged me out of my week long wallow in misery and I am feeling worlds better today. I really can't thank you all enough for your support and patience while I whined and bitched. I appreciate it, you guys are the best.

That being said, let me recap the fun and frolic of my weekend! Yes, Friday night from 11pm to 1am my friends and I made complete fools of ourselves out on the ice at a curling club in downtown Toronto. It was really quite comical as a group of six of us stood around and tried to figure out just how you even play the game. I mean sure... we had seen it plenty of times on tv (we're in Canada, afterall) but that doesn't mean we have much of a grasp on how to play it. I think this became abundantly clear as we started off by standing on the ice with a sheet of instructions in our hands that we had printed off the internet; this contained our rules including how calculate the score (which I am still not entirely clear on). Much of our time was spent saying things like "But on tv they do [this]" or "aren't you supposed to do it like [that]?? that's how they do it on tv!!". It felt much like trying to perform surgery based on what I have seen while watching E.R. Eventually we got it figured out and slowly but surely we had ourselves a few games going. It was a ton o' fun and we certainly plan on doing it again. For $10 a person it was a cheap and certainly amusing night of entertainment. If you are interesting in learning more about curling click here (there is a flash animation showing you how it's done under the "how to play section", but don't be fooled...they make it look easier than it really is!) and here. I have posted pictures of me making a fool of myself over on my photoblog, Dreaming In Blue if you'd like to go have a look (for the sake of archiving, look in the March archives of the photoblog).

Saturday night I was out with one of my very favourite friends from highschool, Melra (you have seen her in the comments) and had a fabulous time. We ate, we drank, we talked, we laughed, we bitched. It's good for the soul, and I definitely needed it. Thanks, buddy!

Sunday night was Oscar night....yeeha! A friend of mine decided to invite us all over to her place to partake in an Oscar night ritual of food eating and ballot casting. A few of us went out to the grocery store to round up some grub (we thought we'd do it all sophisticated-like and got things like seafood hors d'oeurves in philo pastry, and spinach & artichoke dip with pumpernickel bread..... but we also got nachos and other junkfood, who are we kidding here??). And then, being the uber-geeks that we are, we all sat down and filled out our ballots using a two tiered system whereby we guessed which movies we thought would likely win and which movies we'd like to see win. Then, being the nerds we are, sat eagerly as each category was announced and checked off on our sheets who the winners were in each category. It made for a strange geek competition to see who had the most guesses right. It was no big surprise that the hostess, who is a film student grad, took first place with 16 correct guesses... I came in second with 12 correct guesses. You can see my ballot here (ooo! and you find out one of my far lesser known nicknames!). Go ahead and laugh, but it made for a wickedly fun night with my friends and took what could otherwise be a boring night of award presentations and watching of beautiful people (hell-O Kate Winslet! ya looked faboo!) and made the evening a total blast.

Did anyone else see the Oscars? Did anyone else find some of the time cutting measures they took this year a bit odd? I mean, I appreciate the efforts to cut down on time (I usually can't stay up until 1am on a Sunday night, so it was nice that they finished around 11:30pm) but didn't it seem mean to march all the nominees up onto the stage and then announce the winner so that s/he could step forward and leave the losers just standing their with their proverbial dicks in their hands?? I felt really bad for those left standing there like losers of a beauty pageant or those who didn't get picked first for the baseball team in public school. It's bad enough you have to pretend like you're happy for the guy who won, but to have to stand up on stage and do it... yikes. And to add insult to injury they only did it for the 'less important' categories like "sound editing", not the big players like "best actor" or "best picture". Coz of course you don't want to embarrass THEM by having them on stage when they find out they didn't win. Oy.... makes me so happy I'm not in that industry. I don't think my delicate ego could take it. Here's "E!"'s review of the night if you are curious.