Weekend Highlights - Riding & Romeo

As inspired by today's lunch:

Some of my favorite smells:

• good body odour
• pre-rain smell
• home-made food that almost ready

Some of my lease favorite smells:

• asparagus pee
• burning hair
• bad body odour

This past weekend was tonnes of fun. Some highlights included a stationary bike race (I'm still right here? How far did you go?), beers at the pub for Alli's 30th (Happy birthday, Alli) and a speech by Romeo Daillaire (if you haven't read Shake Hands with Devil, I would recemmend it. I'd also recommend sandwhiching it with Harry Potter).

I had no idea what to expect from the bike thing, which was a fundraiser for a rider trying to qualify for the Olympics. Teams of 4 took turns riding for four hours today. I thought, "one hour of riding, how hard can it be?". Hard. It's impossible not to go hard when your surrounding my people who look like "real cyclists" riding their little tight butts off. We each did two half-hour segments. It was lots of fun, and my legs were pretty tired at the end. Someone we managed to come second in the women's division. Go Pleasure Junkies. Oh yes, my team was Nat Sweet, Sharon Guthrie and Kelly Matheson. I suppose that's how.

Romeo Dallaire's speech was inspiring. I love hearing live talks like this, especially when I've already read material by the person speaking. There's lots I could say about the night (for example, it was cool to run into the Montieths, and who talks for half and hour before introducing the guy who is going to introduce the guy that everyone came here to see?). One thing stuck out for me though. I would need to spend hours on a blog about the topics that Romeo was talking about. I don't think I need to write down my opinion on any of it. One thing I found kind of interesting was how not tall Lt. Dallaire was. I say 'not tall' because he's not that short either. He was maybe 5'8? I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink that included a section on heightism. Most CEO's are tall (men, of course), and on average, tall people make more money. I found it interesting that without even really thinking about it, I expected Lt. Dallaire to be very tall. He's a strong leader, his presence commands respect....he has a mustache. In my imagination as I read his book, he was at least 6 ft. tall. His presence without question commanded respect, regardless of height. I just thought it was interesting how it drew to my attention my own unintentional assumption.