I'm saving the rainforest.

Woo.Hoo.

Niagara-on-the-Window-Shopping!

So, one day, my best buddy Elysia and I decided to go window shopping around Niagara-on-the-Lake. You see, we always drive through Niagara-on-the-Lake at night, when everything is closed, but never before have we perused the shops when they were open! Our adventure begins as every adventure should: with bubble tape.


We parked the car, and paid less for 2 hours than I do for 1 hour at Brock for class, and stumbled immediately upon a quaint little book shop. It had a you-don't-belong-here-you-bohemian-clumsy-pothead air about it. I feared touching anything.


They had some amusing shop names. Like....Liquor Store....and The Owl and the Pussycat. Hehee. El pussycato.


We went into The Name Tree, and politely asked the woman inside if we could pose with her armour! She politely allowed us to.


Caution! Art ahead.


Here...is a map. I took an extra photo of the Niagara Parkway. It's my cruise route. I love the parkway. The American side sucks though. We totally got the good side. We rock.


So check it out: there is a store just for Christmas swag. Just Christmas swag! All year 'round! Even in the summertime! Wtf?!


We then happened upon none other than the Beau Chapeau. Their hats weren't all that nice, actually. Some really fucked up New York funeral hats that Niagara-Fallsians could never get away with in a million years.


They had some good advice for the kids though:


Remember, girls: If you forget your hat, you can always flirt with your cigarette.


Okay, let us pause for a moment to observe the extent to which we have made fruit unhealthy. Below, are candy apples. Apples. Dipped in chocolate, and covered in - wait for it - fucking oreo cookies. How the hell are you even supposed to eat that?! You need to break off and consume ten oreo cookies before you even get to the thick chocolate layer surrounding what was once a nice healthy apple. My god, people! Just drink a jug of lard, why don't you.


We moved on from the oreo-cookie-fat-depository window to a store that has a lot of trees in front of it. Those trees had a lot of wind chimes on them. It was a fairly breezy day. The sound was....kinda pretty, actually. I like the sunflower, the bee, and the newt. So cute!! My goodness.


Once we entered wind-chimesville, we found some darling little mice statues. A boy and a girl!! The boy had a bowtie. The girl had a flower in her...hair...fur. You know, to differentiate mouse genders.


Beside the wind chime store, we found The Viking Shop, and the most fantastic umbrella handles ever. The orange umbrella had a little goldfishy floating in the handle! The yellow one had a little rubber ducky! The green one had a frog. Not a fan frog though. There was a blue one with a dolphin, but I'm not a fan of dolphins either. They remind me of a girl that lived down the street when I was a kid who used to go home to eat dinner and somehow get sauce on her forehead for us to look at upon her return. Bloody dolphins...


The restaurant, The Epicurean, gets photo props for their slogan: Purveyors & Servers of Fine Foods. Classy. Very classy.


Around this point I decided time was ripe for some statue humping. So I humped a statue. I'm not sure who it is...but I'm sure he's impressed that I'm humping his likeness. I wouldn't mind people humping my likeness some day.


On a side street, slightly beyond the statue, we found an awesome little store called The Silver Screen. They specialized in old movies, tin signs, and general awesome. I found The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari!! I didn't buy it though. I'm too poor for a $20.00+ dvd that I can just put on my Christmas list. Instead I bought a $4.00 Batman tin within which I might store my illicit materials. We did pose in front of a cute little Betty Boop statue. After that photo op, we noticed the sign that told us DO NOT TOUCH!!! Ah well, c'est la vie.


We cross the street after that. We were running out of time. I had to pick up my boy at work for 4:30 in Thorold. It's a ways away, drive-wise. We happened upon the post office. There's been a lot of controversy regarding it, as it isn't keeping with the towns quaint aesthetic. Fuck you, post office, what with your new bricks and such.


Along to happy! A teensy little store called Cute, the self-proclaimed home of the best darn pant hanger on the planet! We never saw it...we did see ourselves posing all cute in front of Cute though. On my camera. In playback mode. Aaw!


A little further down, a wonderfully bright hammock caught Elysia's eye in Ten Thousand Villages. The hammock was pretty sweet (and pretty expensive), but it was the brown bag sporting the descriptive words of "Brown Bag" on it that caught my eye. What an awesome bag.


At this point, we ended up running back to the car and speeding to Thorold to get there for 4:30pm, but not before making some memories and taking some pictures. Oh, life, how we love thee! This is Sabu, signing off.

Great Gorge Adventures

Today, instead of going to the gym, I decided to go for a hike on the Niagara Glen trails. It's basically rough paths that go down by the Niagara River. My adventures started out with pot, as many adventures do. I packed me a nice bowl. Then I smoked it. Then I figured I should fully document the bowl. So I took a photo of it. Then I got my swag together, threw the Coral's Magic and Medicine album into my walkman, and began my hike.


Step one: an 80 stair descent. There was a sign warning that one of the trails was closed due to falling rocks, and after studying the sign for a bit, I discovered that I couldn't figure out which trail they meant and I'd just have to take my chances. Good thing I wore my impenetrable toque of awesome.


So I wander on down the cliffside and begin my descent into the depths of...well, the gorge. And what do I see? A fucking McDonalds cup. I hate litter. I dislike litter when I walk by it on the sidewalk or on campus, but if you're littering in the gorge, you're just as asshole. A big, rude asshole. Don't smear your crap all over nature, buddy. If I can carry a ziplock baggy in my pocket for my cigarette butts, you can chuck your fast food fat trash in the proper receptacle, so conveniently located at the base of the 80 step stair. Moving on, I walked down some rock stairs. Yay, rock stairs!


After walking down some more, I happened upon a wonderful log hovering off the ground in the middle. So I decided that, having learned many skills from Point Break, I'd best try and surf it. Luckily still photos from a camera can't capture severe leg shakage as a result of trying to keep balance. But none of that matters. Because I look cool.


I then followed a rough line of stones marking my path, until I decided paths were for suckers and wandered off. The wandering paid off, and I happened upon a loverly cave. There's a burnt out campfire in front of it, so I think this is where those crazy kids go to do their boozing nowadays. I myself have never drank in the gorge.


Finally, I happened upon the river. It was very wet looking, as water often is. I scouted around for a convenient way to get right down to the water, and conveniently found a dirt slope that was conveniently less vertical than other routes of descent. I did that embarrassing looking baby step walk down, then decided, much like paths, that baby steps are for suckers, and began throwing myself from tree trunk to tree trunk. It was much fun.


After I got to the water, I clambered over the rocks until I got to a good one that rose up above the rest and was nice and flat on the top. I sat, removed my sweater, lit a cigarette, and named it Carrock. A couple wandered below me at one point. The man of the couple helped the woman get over the rocks. The woman of the couple was wearing pants that didn't successfully hide her neon pink thong. Not that I was staring. I just happened to notice whilst videotaping them. *shifty*


When I finished my smoke, I put the butt into my ziplock baggy, like a good little hippie, and climbed back up the slope. Unsurprisingly, it was more difficult than getting down.


I got back onto the path when I got back to the top, figuring I'd have a better change of finding my way out that way then I would had I gone thundering through the brush. I climbed through an awesome cave dealio and found that Nature had installed a skylight. Pretty, though not very rainproof, I'm sure.


After getting through a couple cave-like structures, I got to a fairly straight path through the trees and decided to switch up my cd choice. I figured Zeppelin was the way to go, and because I really wanted to hear Gallows Pole at the time, I opted for Zeppelin III.


Briefly after the music switch, I figured that so long as the ground was sloping in a general upward direction, the previously laid out paths were rendered useless. So once more, I wandered off the path and opted for...well, it turned out to be rather cliff like. I didn't get photo's of that part of the adventure. It's tough to stop and try and take a photo of yourself when you're facing a fall should you let go. When I got to the top of that bit, I found a sunnier, less eerie version of the Paths of the Dead. And I walked them, baby. Oh yes, I did.


Eventually my "path" joined up with a real path, as I figured it would, at some point. As the ground leveled out, I chugged some water, then realized I was still facing 80 stairs.


I caught my breath and took them at quite a leisurely pace. I paused quite a few times to read random key-scratched graffiti left on the rails by other Glen walkers. Only one deserved a photograph, really. I also got a really fantastic shot of one side of the gorge, looking at the direction I came from at the end of the hike. Pretty sweet, eh? EH?! Yeah. Yeah, it is.


I got to the top of the stairs in no time, though my legs still hurt from an aerobics hour class I did yesterday at the gym that somehow turned into an aerobics hour and a half. Some woman interrupted my solitude by asking me what kind of birds she'd been seeing flying around. She was pretty old, and I was tempted to say "vultures," but I opted for the more polite "I don't know," then wandered off and lit my cigarette. Of course, as is the case with life in general, I guess, just when you think it's over, you get a little reprise of random, as was the case with my realizing I had another flight of stairs to climb to get to my car. Ain't life a bitch.


All in all, I had a good time! Got some good photos, heard some great music, hiked and climbed and balanced and hopped and even danced and sang a little. Of course, some of that final cheer vanished during a four hour film class at Brock during which my ass fell asleep not once, but twice, and I overheard some little 18-year-old twat tell her friend how she broke her perfectly good cell phone so her mother would buy her a new one, simply because she was bored of the style.

I bet she left that McDonalds cup in the gorge....

Closed for Winter.

On this fine Spring day, I had an inclination to frequent the local cinematron and take in a moving picture (i.e. I's gonna see one of them there movies). Much to my chagrin, the theater isn't open during the day yet! The theater, you see, hibernates during the day whilst the brumal zephyr of Old Man Winter incarcerates the chartreuse flora and fauna of Mother Earth beneath a funereal stratum of adamantine glaciality and Siberian precipitation, Caucasian in nature (i.e. winter = cold = theater closed).

Sucks, is all.