I’m back from a week spent in St. Catharines, Ontario with 2 of my dearest friends and their cute babies. It was a wonderful week. So much visiting, playing with babies, and visiting some sights including Niagara Falls, Port Dalhousie on Lake Ontario and the Funk Family Farm.
Thanks to Derek, Sarah and Lena for being the best hosts! Here are some pictures…
{Port Dalhousie}
{Niagara Falls}
{Funk Family Farm}
{All the ladies at Niagara Falls!}
It was so so wonderful to catch up and pick right up where we left off. It’s not always like that with friends you haven’t seen in awhile, but it’s always like that with these ladies. xo.
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On an unrelated note – JT’s new album is out tomorrow. This is my favourite song on it right now. I told Theo I want to learn the dance moves – they’re just so smooth!
It was my birthday yesterday. 28! The day was wonderful and I felt so loved from the moment I got up to the moment I fell asleep. Many thanks to my wonderful friends and family who sent notes, rang my phone, posted on Facebook or came over to celebrate with a cupcake.
{Custard shake at Clive Burger. Mmm.}
Here’s to another year!
We parked the car far away so that we wouldn’t have to pay for parking. The weather was mild, about 5 degrees at 7pm. We traipsed through the U of C campus in search of the student centre and MacEwan Hall where the Tegan and Sara concert was to happen. It said the doors would open at 7, got there at 7:15 only to be met by the longest line on the planet. You probably don’t know how the U of C is laid out, but this line snaked from Mac Hall in the student centre all the way to the Kinesiology wing. Winding through the food court, down a flight of stairs, around corners and through skinny halls. Every time we took another turn we were met by more line.
“Is this line seriously for the Tegan and Sara concert?” we asked.
“Yep,” came the weary response.
So we joined it at the border of the Kinesiology wing and moved slowly for half an hour. It actually wasn’t so bad.
Once inside we realized this was a standing-only concert. I must admit, those are not my favourites. No chairs anywhere. So we found a spot along a wall and sat down to rest up our legs for the show. The crowd was a strange mix of University students, hipsters, tom boys, girls that looked ready for the club, couples in their 50s and children. Yep, I saw two little girls wearing tiny Tegan and Sara shirts running through the crowd arm in arm. Truly an all ages show.
The twins came on and the night was amazing. The sound quality was perfect – the songs were clear, loud enough (but not too loud), and you could distinctly hear their voices and the lyrics. So many times at bigger shows the music is done a disservice by the acoustics of a large venue or the mixing is bad. Not so for this show – they sounded incredible live.
I appreciated that they also sounded human. Sara messed up the lyrics at the beginning of one song, their voices were not perfect and sometimes they had trouble hitting higher notes. This wasn’t something that bothered me, but rather something that endeared them to me. Tegan and Sara have immense talent, but they’re also human. I love that they showed that. They’re also hilarious and told silly stories between songs and bantered back and forth like only twin sisters who also work together and are with each other constantly can do.
They played a great mix of songs – hits from previous albums, every track off their new album, a Prince cover and a medley of old old songs. When they sang a bit of Monday, Monday, Monday I was immediately transported back about 10 years to when I first loved that song. Strange how music makes you remember. When they busted out Closer, their hit single right now, I handed Theo my bag and let loose – dancing with the three girls in front of me who hadn’t quit since the start. Like at any good show, they welcomed me into the fold and we just danced. It was so fun.
We left with aching feet and aching backs, but not too much ringing in our ears. It was everything I’d hoped it would be.
{Fernie on Theo’s Birthday}
{An addition to the collection}
{More serious than I intended}
Lately I have been…
*Going for coffee in the evenings
*Getting back into the gym routine
*Counting down the days until March
*Practicing my dance moves for the Tegan and Sara show tomorrow evening
*Dreaming about an upcoming trip to Ontario where I will visit Niagara Falls, catch up with old friends and plant some kisses on some cute babies.
*Wishing for spring
Happy Wednesday to you.
This week has been strange. T was home sick on Monday and Tuesday, which got me off my game a bit. Now I’m struggling to catch up on a bunch of work and all day yesterday I thought it was Monday but then bam! today is Thursday oh, and wait, it’s Valentine’s Day? Forgot about that. Tomorrow we’re going to Fernie to spend Theo’s birthday long weekend with some family on the slopes. It’ll be a great time, but I have done nothing to get ready for it.
Hm.
Happy Valentine’s Day/Thursday to you!
You guys, I don’t mean to brag but it’s been +7 every day this week. Sunny and glorious. On Wednesday I took a trip out to Canmore with my Mom and sister on a wedding planning mission (Sheila is getting married there in June). We scoped out the ceremony and reception site, ate a delicious lunch at the Rocky Mountain Flatbread Co., went to the florist to pick out flowers, snooped around the hotel, booked rooms for rehearsal dinner and gift opening, went to a bakery to look at cakes and, of course, marvelled at this sight:
Does it get any better? Not sure it does. I can’t wait for June 29th!!
Yesterday I got to help out in Theo’s classroom. We built steamrollers out of egg cartons, donuts and thin bread sticks. Wheels and axles! Also, if you ever need a boost of self-confidence just go to a grade 4 classroom. I had all of the little girls flocking to me saying, “You are so pretty!” “I like your sweater!” “Your hair is so nice!” – wow. It was great fun, but afterward I had about an hour to kill before Theo could leave for the day so I hopped on over to a coffee shop and killed time in the best way possible:
Gatsby! Coffee! A match made in heaven. I love The Great Gatsby. I said to Theo last night that if I had a time machine I would for sure go to New York in the 1920s for a day. It’d be a rip roaring time (of course, I’d need to transport myself directly into one of Jay Gatsby’s parties, that’d be the best).
They’ve made this book into a new movie, but I’ll have to wait until Christmas to see it. Until then, feast your eyes on the trailer:
Oh and happy Friday!!
As many of you know, I’m the Alberta Editor over at The Spectator Tribune. What that means is that I am in charge of all the Alberta content you see on the site. I oversee the Alberta writers, make sure we have content and publish it to the site daily. I also still try to write articles myself (though I haven’t in a while – I need to get on that!), and I help the head editor, Toban, with managing the homepage of the site and editing anything he throws my way. It’s awesome. I love this job and I love The Spectator Tribune. It really is a site like no other – dedicated to getting news out about the prairies, an area of the country that is sometimes forgotten about in mainstream media.
Over at The Spectator Tribune we’ve just launched an Indiegogo campaign to generate some funding. As of right now, the site isn’t bringing in much revenue. It’s been online since October, our readership is nicely growing and we’ve got ad campaigns that are slowly generating money, but so far none of our writers have been paid to write the excellent content you see on the site. In an effort to push The Spectator Tribune into a place where it is self-sustaining and profitable, we’ve started this Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to pay our hard working writers now.
Here’s the link: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-spectator-tribune
There are some great rewards for donating to the cause, especially if you have a business or something you’d like to promote. If you feel like this is something you’d like to support, that’d be lovely. If not, that’s OK too! Our hope is that this project can stay online and continue building momentum until it gets to a place where it sustains itself.
Thanks for reading this shameless plug. Happy Thursday to you all!
