Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Visit to the Magic Shop
Today I took Vanessa to Browser's Den of Magic, Toronto's main source for magic tricks and supplies. I showed her their Web site just before we left, and they've added some RealPlayer videos of a number of their magic tricks. The one Vanessa enjoyed the most was called "Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere", where two foam rabbits magically appear in your hand after you make one of them disappear.

We ended up there sometime prior to lunchtime, and the two guys there treated Vanessa to a number of magic tricks -- including, fortuitously, the "Rabbits" trick. Vanessa told me afterwards that she was a bit scared of the guys there -- they do real magic, after all -- but you should've seen the big smile on her face when a host of foam bunny rabbit magically appeared in her hand. This is a pretty simple slight-of-hand trick an inexpensive to boot, so I ended up buying a copy. I also picked up a "Dragon deck", and for Vanessa's benefit got her a coin-slide trick, which I was able to wow her with over lunchtime. While she wasn't looking I also bought a giant penny from the shop, and improved the effect of the simple coin slide trick immensely by pulling out a giant version of the coin that just she'd put into the coin slide. ;-) Admittedly, she was a bit on the young side to really get into doing magic herself, but the visit was as much an excuse for me to go and pick up some inexpensive tricks for myself.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Eglinton, making or way gradually from Bathurst over to Yonge. This was all in order to give Erika a "kid break" for the day, as she was working on doing some home improvement stuff with her mother.

As we headed east we ran across the Forest Hill Library. We weren't in any hurry -- just the opposite really -- so we went in and checked out their kid's books section. We spent just over an hour in their and I ended up reading about 10 short books to Vanessa. One of her favourites ended up being "The Very Ugly Duckling" from The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, so I may have to pick that one up sometime.

We peeked into a few other shops on the way back and essentially had fun and killed time, arriving back home late in the afternoon.