'Twas the week before Christmas...

God, what an eventful weekend.

We left Saturday at six in the morning, dropping off Tux at a friend's place, hitting Tim's for some go-juice, and then making the run north to Britt. The weather was moderately crappy from MacTier to Pointe Au Baril Station--par for the course on any day from mid-November to sometime in April.
Highway 400 has been extended most of the way to Parry Sound now. There's about six kilometers of two-laned road, still, around the Moon River. North of town, however, 69 is what it's always been, a highway that demands your attention as a driver. It's two-laned, with alternating two or three kilometer long passing lanes northbound and southbound every ten or fifteen klicks.
Why am I telling you all this? Because those three-laned sections, or more precisely the lack of them, cause some pretty scary situations.
Highway 69 is the first glimpse of the north that drivers from southern Ontario see. It's nowhere near as desolate as the roads north of Superior, where towns are hundreds of kilometers apart and gas stations are sparse, but to someone from the urban south, it might as well be. The speed limit is 90 km/hr in most places--justified in most places, too, I'd say--but to many drivers, it's clearly much too slow. When people get caught behind slow-moving traffic and there's no passing lane for an unholy long fifteen minutes, they get antsy.
We saw it twice on the trip north: a guy would roar out from behind us and proceed to pass three cars and a tractor-trailer. The first time we witnessed this rushin' roulette, the gambler managed to veer back in to his lane with a whole second to spare before he would have been creamed by an oncoming southbound SUV. The second time, the passer was even more reckless and lucky, because he had no way of knowing there wasn't anything coming south when he shot out into the southbound lanes to pass the snowplow ON A CURVE. (Less than two klicks from a passing lane! With reduced visibility! On a snow-covered road!)
I don't have official stats, but I'd estimate there's a serious accident somewhere along 69 every other day. As my father has noted on television, it's not the road: it's the drivers on the road.

We made it to Britt and had a wonderful visit, albeit much too short, with my parents, capped off by a delicious turkey dinner (so moist!) I sat down with dad to watch our Leafs get pummelled once again by Ottawa. I'm starting to wonder if we should (a) trade half the team (b) fire Quinn or (c) both of the above.

On Sunday morning, we turned around and made the trip back. Snowsqualls were forecasted, but we managed to dodge most of the mayhem and made it home by ten of noon. The man from Bell arrived to switch us over from digital cable to satellite. A Bell high-speed modem will follow along in the mail some time this week.

I am EXTREMELY impressed with Expressvu so far. It's cheaper than Rogers Digital--always a plus. It has several different 'favourites' lists that allow me to ignore the scores of channels I really don't care about. One of the channels I do care about is a radio feed from CFTR-Toronto...680 News. It's owned by Rogers, but ironically enough only available on Bell.
The best thing about Expressvu is that our four receivers are free, so we get all of the channels on all of our televisions. To do the same with Rogers would cost an ungodly amount of money.
Downsides? A couple of nit-picks. It's hard to decipher all the channels. I've figured out that GLB-T is Global-Toronto, but what's GLB-A? Or CBC-R? What's the difference between Sportsnets 1,2,3, and 4? A detailed channel index would be nice.
The other thing is not Bell's fault at all, just a generalized peeve of mine having to do with 'universal' remotes. They all say they can control your VCR and I've yet to find one that actually could. I've owned several different makes of VCRs and a large number of universal remotes and it doesn't matter what code you punch in, they never seem to work. If any of my readers has ever managed to control their VCR with a universal remote, please write me and include the spell you used.
In the process of hooking up our Expressvu, our Rogers Internet connection was disabled.
Since the Bell modem was due in sometime this week, I shrugged it off. Well, no, actually, I didn't. Being 'netless fills me with a vague sense of dread. Imagine my sense of relief when I discovered this evening that I only needed to plug in one cable to revive my connection.

I got to work this morning to find my store wiped right out. Another record weekend, by far the busiest weekend we've ever seen. The week ahead looks rough. Which is why I'm going to bed...
now.