A 3 Day Vacation

Have you ever been to a destination wedding close to where you live?  I would highly recommend that you push anyone you know who is getting married to do this!

This past weekend, my friend Jacqui got hitched in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  Niagara is about 2 hours from where we live.  Since Ryan and I didn't get a vacation this year, we decided to take Friday off and make a weekend of it. 

Friday morning was nice and relaxing.  I think I slept until 7:30.  Whoa, I know!  We relaxed, had some coffee and headed down to my old University stomping grounds.  I love going to the St. Catharines/Niagara area because it still feels like home to me.  There is this amazing provincial park down there with a whole bunch of trails, so we went on a big hike.

This waterfalls was part of the hike.  Unfortunately, the water flow was pretty low so it wasn't one of the best that we have seen.

The hotel that we were staying in has a beautiful spa.  We spent all morning there on Saturday in their outdoor hot springs, getting a couples massage and we even ate our lunch down there.  It was very relaxing.

Then it was wedding time!  The wedding was really beautiful and the hotel did a great job.  And Jacqui looked amazing too!  It's so much fun to get everybody together to celebrate a marriage and I think that we all had a fantastic time.

 The one thing I sometimes miss at weddings?  Getting out on the dance floor to catch the bouquet.  I know, I know, what a weird thing to complain about.  So I stood on the sidelines and watched these girls fight for it.

 No wedding is complete without a picture of all of the girls.  It was such a fun weekend and I'm so happy that Jacqui chose this location and included us in the festivities. Congratulations Jacqui!

Note:  I just tried to edit out some of my exclamation marks.  I get pretty excited sometimes.

#introvertproblems

I avoid my local grocery store like the plague. 

Ok, maybe that's a bit extreme, but I do try to avoid it as much as possible and here's why.

I'm from a small town.  I generally go grocery shopping on my way home from work, which is in a different town, or in the city.  I rarely see anyone I know there.  On the other hand, if I go grocery shopping in the town I went to high school in, I see somebody from high school pretty much every single time.  

This may not be an issue for some people.  But for introvert me, it's just a social situation that I would rather avoid.  I just like to get in and get out when I'm grocery shopping with little to no human interaction.  I have been out of high school for 9 years, if I wanted to see somebody from high school, I would make the effort to see them.

So I'm walking through the grocery store last night and I meet up with this guy that I worked with in another life.  We were never friends or anything, more just acquaintances.  So then it leaves me wondering do I say hi?  Do I just keep walking?  What will he do?  Well he said hi, and I was actually surprised.  I guess he isn't one to avoid social situations like me....

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This is the small town problem.  I love my town, I enjoyed high school, but sometimes I just hate running into people I know everywhere.  I don't know whether to say hi, or to stop and talk.  How long can you spend catching up in a grocery store?  Stopping to talk really screws up my 15 minutes in and out plan....

Maybe I'm the minority here, but when you grocery shop, do you want to see people you know?

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Female Fight Club

This weekend we had a bachelorette party for my friend Jacqui who is getting married in two short weeks.  So of course, we did what any good friends would do, we had a female fight club.  We greased up and then surprise, we beat the shit out of her. 

Ok that didn't happen.  That would have been weird.  But the end result for how Jacqui was feeling might have been the same.

On Saturday morning we were all like this:

We contained our excitement and the first stop was breakfast.

The second stop was a winery.  No bachelorette is complete without a wine tasting! (Well that's my opinion.)  There is this one little winery close to Blue Mountain that we went to for my friend Michaela's bachelorette, and we had such a great time that they decided to go back.  

It's one of those wineries where every wine they bring out is delicious (I have been to the opposite where there isn't one wine that you want to purchase).  This made the purchase decision very difficult!  

Then it was off to Blue Mountain for the night.  It actually seemed to me like the weekend was more about eating than drinking.  We had three huge meals on Saturday and I think I'm still kind of full from it!  

I'm really not much of a drinker (shocker! my friends say).  But they always try to get me ridiculously intoxicated anyways.  They failed.  I win.  But I did drink an entire Caeser for the first time.  It wasn't bad, but wine is still my drink of choice.  

Oh and then it was gifts.  What could this be that she's opening? Any guesses?

Why it's a dickie sipper of course!  Aka a drink holder shaped as a penis.  Just what every bride needs an not awkward at all to drink out of.  Somebody put some straws in my purse that had little penis' around them and I get home and Ryan says "Is that a penis on that straw?"  Yes, yes it is....

What followed was a bit of drinking, dinner and hanging out at a bar in the Blue Mountain village, all of which I have no record on because it was time for the big camera to go away.  And I wore a dress and heels and I have no photographic evidence, which is upsetting.

And then the next morning we were all like:

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

This weekend was pretty significant for me.  It marked my first ever Blue Jays game experience!  

When one of my friends asked me if I wanted to go to a Jays game with her and a few of my girlfriends, I said yes.  Then I wondered why I had said yes.  I'm not really a sports fan, and I'm definitely not a baseball fan.  I have never even set foot in the Skydome.  But it was a girls outing, and I was due for one of those, so I figured I would go.  Plus it's not like tickets are $80 or anything. (I'm pretty sure they were $20.)  The girls were all pretty shocked that I had never been to a game or been in the Skydome.  (The next morning when I said I had never been to Cora's for breakfast they were shocked again, apparently I don't get out much.)

So on Saturday morning me and two other girls drove down to Toronto.  My cousin lives there, which is pretty convenient.  We went to her condo to get her and then took the most terrifying cab ride of our lives.  We're actually pretty lucky we got to experience the game at all.  When the cab driver told us that due to traffic it would be quicker for us to walk from a certain point, we all pretty much jumped out of the cab.  Yikes.

The game wasn't super exciting for the first little bit.  Until about the 8th inning, there was only one run, luckily it had been made by the Jays.  But I have learned that baseball is fairly social.  Well for me it was.  And that was ok with me.  Then they got 2 home runs, plus another run in the 7th or 8th inning, I don't remember, and it got a bit more exciting.  

Oh and I ate a baseball stadium hot dog.  So I'm pretty sure I have now experienced it all.

But you know what?  I really didn't hate it.  And I would go back again.  I think that I probably actually prefer to be up in the seats that are touching heaven because they are cheap, and I don't like baseball enough to spend $50 on a ticket.  And apparently my chances of being hit in the head with a ball are fairly low up there.

The Morning After the How I Met Your Mother Finale

Spoiler alert - if you haven't actually watched the finale yet, and you want to, you probably shouldn't read this.

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Last night, 9 seasons of build up ended with the season finale of How I Met Your Mother.  The only thing I can compare this to in my lifetime thus far, is the finale of Friends (which I was in France for and missed, so really there is no comparison.)  However this finale was not satisfying for me like Friends was, where I felt everyone ended up where they should be.  This finale was actually only slightly more satisfying than the Lost finale.  

So we had a whole season of build up for Robin and Barney's wedding, a couple that although I enjoyed the fact that she tamed Barney, I never really got.  About 10 minutes into the show, they got divorced.

We had 9 seasons build up for this wonderful life that Ted had with the mother, and at the end of the show, she dies.  WTF?  Ted goes after Robin, the girl who never loved him the way that he loved her.  And from my perspective it makes his whole relationship with the mother seem kind of insignificant.  Did he love Robin the entire time?  Was he fair to the mother?  I just feel like her deserves better.  Ted is a romantic, and Robin is the complete opposite.

They are saying WTF too {via}

In real life, Ted went for Robin 6 years after his wife died.  I think that's fair.  However in the show it was about 5 minutes, and I just didn't think that his wife deserved that, even though his kids seemed thrilled about it.

I think that my main problem with this is that I never really liked Robin.  I used to think that it was Cobie Smulders that I wasn't a fan of, and then I saw her in Safe Haven and loved her and realized that there was just something about Robin that I didn't like.  Probably that she is so different from me.  She didn't want kids, her career always came first and friends and family came second, and that's not me.  So now Ted wants to be with her (again) and what has changed?  Has Robin changed?  Well I guess that's the big unanswered question at the end of the series.  

The best part of the episode however, was when Barney's baby was born and he looked at her and said "You are the love of my life."  9 seasons, and Barney ended up where he should be, finding meaning in his life.  

It's just a show, I know that. But we get so wrapped up in these things.  We let them into our homes every single week and they become real.  I don't know, maybe someday I will get over this ending...