A couple days after we got back from our trip, Lindsay got sick. And then a few days later I got sick. And then, just as I was starting to feel better, Bianca got sick. She had some kind of UTI or something. But I’m happy to report that, after a couple of very expensive vet bills, she seems to be fine again. She’s a very good girl.

So yeah, it was quite a week. We were both pretty excited for a change of pace by the time Friday rolled around, and we were glad that months-ago us had booked symphony tickets — even if months-ago me couldn’t predicted that both the Canadiens and Raptors would be playing critical game 6s that night. Anyway.

We decided to have dinner at Canoe first, which was somehow Lindsay’s first time there. Luckily, the weather was perfect, so had miles of clear view from the 54th floor. We ate:

• olive oil poached atlantic salmon w/ horseradish, pickled apple, crispy parsnip
• a half-dozen oysters
  • glasses of Taittinger Brut Réserve Champagne
• I had the duo of pork: roast tenderloin, crispy belly, kohlrabi, baby turnip, cider jus
  • glass of Produttori del Barbaresco, Barbaresco, Piedmont, Italy, 2022
• Lindsay had the wild BC halibut w/ kohlrabi écrasé, cider cream + roasted squid risotto nero
  • glass of Domaine Fabien Coche, Bourgogne Côte-d’Or, Burgundy, France 2023
• screeched tarte au sucre w/ wintergreen chantilly + brown butter milk sauce
  • coffee, tea

We rushed out of there to catch our 7:00 show, and realized only when we got there that the show was for 7:30, not 7:00. That was my bad. I was so fixated on how this conflicted with the Montreal game that I just conflated their start times.

Our tickets were to a multipart program:

• Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 3 w/ soloist Lukáš Vondráček
• The world premiere of Cris Derksen’s short piece ‘STILL HERE’
• Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70

Obviously I know nothing about Rachmaninoff, or this piece, or piano concertos in general, but it certainly seemed a challenging technical piece. My only other observation was that the soloist seemed to be rushing the music. He seemed to rarely look at up conductor Elim Chan during the most challenging runs, during which he seemed to run away from the orchestra. Chan had to do yeoman’s work to hold it all together, from what little I could tell.

Anyway, we left there and got home to a still-happy cat, and I got to see the final few moments of overtime in the Montreal game in which Tampa forced game 7, and RJ Barrett’s insane-sky-high-bounce-and-in 3 at the end of OT to force game 7 in a series no one thought the Raptors could win.

So I guess I know what I’m doing Sunday.