Interesting month, October, but hard to summarize.

Late last month I took a western-jaunt to Toronto for a few days to visit a friend. It doesn’t seem like that long since I’d been there but we did the math and I think its actually been 6 or 7 years. I’m getting to that point in life where I’m acutely aware at how quickly time goes by. I can see why people start to have breakdowns.

Visiting my friend was the primary goal of the trip but we had a bit of an agenda planned… the first night we threw on our darkest metal-blacks and headed to The Sound Academy to see my current band of the moment, DethKlok! Dethklok is an odd deathmetal band spawned from the Adult Swim show ‘Metalocalypse’. Its a violent, offensive, over the top and entertaining show about the most brutally popular band on earth. The music turns out to be excellent melodic metal and the show was great. Its been a long time since I’ve been to a metal show and, this being my year of concerts, I really enjoyed myself. I even sort of missed my long hair for a minute.

The next day was the launch event of Forza Motorsport 3 at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. A simple 30 (down to <20!) second slalom course was setup and folks brought out their cars to do ride-alongs and even some public drives. I had the chance to drive my friend’s Honda Fit but I’m very rusty when it comes to Slalom and decided I’d rather shoot the event instead. It was fun but a long day overall.

The following Tuesday night it was time for the ears to bleed again, this time to see Metallica at the Air Canada Centre. Another great show but for different reasons. It was really interesting to compare and contrast the smaller club metal show with the giant arena one back to back. Metallica are essentially the ‘U2 of Metal’ at this point. Their music is very polished and they have the spectacle down to a science. The old guys can still rock a show though, even if they’ve reached the point where they drop beach balls on the audience for the finale. Seriously… Metallica is dropping BEACH BALLS on their audience!

While I was away the BAC RallyCross season got started, judging from the brown AMP-clay coloured car-blob in the driveway it looks like it was a fun and muddy day. Daphne did very well coming in with a 4th overall time for the day. Next event is November 22nd and I look forward to shaking the cobwebs off. There just hasn’t been a lot of driving in anger for me this year.

You may have guessed from my last post that I started running (hopefully) regularly a couple of months ago. Its something I’ve been putting off for ages but it was time to start. Prior to September I can pretty much count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever run when it didn’t involve getting to something or away from something. So far it’s been an interesting experience. I haven’t quite reached that plateau where I truly enjoy it but I haven’t minded it nearly as much as I expected. I’ve at least gotten to the point where I crave doing it and miss when I don’t. Having the Nike+ pedometer for my iPod gives me the geeky feedback I need to keep myself motivated too. Of course now that I’ve finally build up momentum the weather turned and the time shifted so its more and more inconvenient to go running, but I’m trying my best to lot lose momentum! You can see the Nike+ widget at the bottom right of this page, if it looks like I’m slacking please send me snarky comments!

Have I mentioned I hate winter? (Possibly with the exception of RallyCross, but I prefer doing that in the dry and warm too!)