Our last episode left us at Valentine’s Day, which was 2 weeks ago .. I am so fired. :p
February 15-21 (Friday-Thursday)
Not much to note, we gamed a lot. Me mostly on Guild Wars with Melar and Luvene and Ken on EQ2. Monday was the newly added Family Day holiday, no Andrea or Chris. So Chris came on Tuesday instead, we had lunch at Duff’s. More gaming and relaxing, catching up on shows like American Idol, Numb3rs and ANTM.
February 22-24 (Friday-Sunday)
Friday was our big “slumber” party at 151, I tagged along with Ken and Chris for their upgrade / moving servers work with Nick and Myles. I had hoped to be able to play Guild Wars on my laptop while I was there but a: Ken didn’t have time to install Boot Camp and b: Chris forgot his laptop anyway so he had to borrow mine. We played a bit of Rock Band before heading downtown and Chris had me giggling over some ad-libbed words to Metallica! We were at the colo from about 10pm to 9am and it was pretty fun. I got to sneak in some Civ IV playing whenever Chris didn’t need my laptop and the pizza we ordered ended up being an EPIC EVENT*
I mostly just tried to stay out of the way and not bug the guys too much. Finally was able to give Myles the souvenirs I picked up for him in Kiev in November and give Nick the hilarious phrase books that Ken picked up for him in Sausalito in January. We also gave Nick the bag of chocolate covered coffee beans we got from Soma and I can’t wait to hear a review on them 
When the boys were finally finished, Ken, Chris and I went to the Golden Griddle for Saturday Brunch. We were all pretty tired though so we didn’t eat much and got the check quickly. The rest of Saturday and Sunday were spent napping and trying to recover sleep habits.
February 25th (Monday)
10 Months of Not-Smoking! I couldn’t get to sleep that night, and Chris was over for working. Right after our lunch at Tandoori Buffet I passed out and completely missed Andrea. She brought us some amazing chocolate croissant type things though. We also ordered my tickets to Virginia for March.
February 26th (Tuesday)
The day started off innocently enough. I was originally going to go pick up Sos and hang out with Erika for the day, but after finding out that Sos hadn’t been able to get to sleep and worrying that the snow would get worse by the end of the night we decided to “Snow Check”. Ken downloaded a game demo for the PSP called PataPon, which is a really cute rhythm game. Then all hell breaks loose.
I started to smell something like chlorine and after writing it off to the amazing pools website I was reading at the time, it kept getting stronger. Ken smelled it too eventually and we heard dozens of sirens heading our way. Ken looked out from the balcony and said that Eglinton was blocked off to traffic along our block and that there was thick smoke from somewhere near the corner. He turned on the news and could find nothing about it, searching online didn’t get us any info either until almost an hour later after the power had shut off and we were running on battery backups. Good ol 680 news.
Ken and I decided we’d be better off finding a place to eat or something because they were saying the power might be off for up to 12 hours. So we loaded up the cats with food, just in case, and trudged down 24 flights of stairs to the 2nd sub basement and since Eglinton was blocked off between Yonge and Mt. Pleasant our back streets were heavily clogged. It was only around 3pm though so once we got away from it a bit the roads were fine. We drove around trying to decide where to go and ended up at the Eaton Center Mall. We hung out there, I got new shoes! I’ve always been partial to Skechers. (Sneakers & Shoes) until around 7pm. Ken had brought his laptop so we opened it up and found some wifi to look up hotels. We’d kept calling our house phone to see if it would ring indicating that our power was back on. Just after we’d picked a nearby hotel, we tried to call the house phone again and it rang. Yay!
Decided to have dinner at Pickle Barrel at Yonge & Eglinton where we could watch the literal army of Toronto Hydro trucks lining the street. That light was still out but there were 2 cops there directing traffic. I think they had all but one elevator shut off so it was a rather long wait and it was packed but we walked into the apartment around 9pm. Checked that the computers and air conditioners hadn’t blown if they tried to restart themselves. All were off, so that was good, then there was an announcement over the intercom system that Toronto Hydro was in the building and demanded that everyone turn off as much power as they could, and not use their stoves, or they would have to shut off all the power to the building. So we left our computers off, turned off and unplugged everything we could think of and took naps. 
February 27-28 (Wednesday & Thursday)
Tried not to do too much, our knees were finally feeling all those stairs. After moving around a bit it was ok, but the initial acts of standing or walking were pretty freaking painful.
February 29th (Friday)
Happy Leap Day! Didn’t do much except watch the snow fall. Caught up with Melar in Guild Wars and finished off some tough quests we both had. We basically had to zerg ourselves and 2 henchmen against a couple dozen Charr who were guarding the ashes of Prince Rurik’s fiancee Althea. Luckily there was a rez shrine right next to the temple. Althea was one of my favorite pre-searing npc’s so I was not very happy about her being burned at the stake.