Always read the label...

On Saturday I made the trek out to visit The Boy, and things just happened to work out that his friends decided to head out on the same weekend. I was really excited, since I haven't had many chances to meet them until now. We planned to meet up at Boy's house for some food and drinks, and then head out for a night on the town. It was a long trip, but everyone managed to get there safe, sound, and ready to have a good time.

We ordered in some pizza and everyone grabbed a drink that suited them. Boy had bought something he thought I might like to try: root beer flavoured vodka. We decided the best way to mix up the vodka was to add some ice, a little bit of water, and a little bit of vanilla to make a root beer float martini. It was suprisingly delicious, but seeing as is was basically straight vodka I decided that two were enough and I needed some mix in the next one.

When I was ready for a new drink, I raided the fridge and found an open carton of orange juice. The flavour of the vodka wasn't really strong, so I thought it would be okay. My first sip left me uncertain. It didn't taste bad, just....odd. The Boy tried it and told me to dump it down the sink right away, but one of his friends also tried it and he liked it. After another couple sips I decided it wasn't bad enough to waste and finished the drink without giving it another thought. The next drink I made I used plain vodka though, because although the first drink wasn't terrible it wasn't fantastic either. I walked back into the room, took a sip, and....it still tasted odd. I looked at my drink, confused, and informed the group that it might be the orange juice that was the problem. At this point, The Boy looks up and says, "Wait, which juice did you use? One of them might be expired."

Silence fills the room.

I walk back to the fridge and pick up the carton of juice. Not only was it expired, but it expired four months ago. And not only did it expire four months ago, but there was mold in the spout. Mold that I had completely failed to notice. And because I had failed to notice it, I drank a whole glass of moldy orange juice. Needless to say, the new drink was poured down the drain along with the rest of that carton. And the next drink I made, which used juice that was actually fresh, tasted much better.

Moral of the story: if you're using someone else's juice, it might be a good idea to read the label.

The definition of snail mail

For those who don't know, I am currently in a long distance relationship with a wonderful man who lives on the other side of the country. We're lucky enough to have him out my way for business trips where his expenses are covered, so we share costs when I travel out there. He's working full time and I'm in school which means that quite often it works best for him to pay first and I either mail him a cheque or give one to him the next time I see him. Such was the case last June, when I sent Boyfriend a cheque to repay him for some expense or another. Unfortunately Canada Post happened to be on strike and my envelope promptly disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. Or so we thought.

A couple days a go, Boyfriend and I were on the phone having our (near) nightly good night chat. After catching up on each other's days, he tells me that he got an envelope in the mail today. Figuring it must be something pretty exciting for him to tell me about it, so I ask what was in it. His response? "I don't know, I haven't opened it yet, but it's got your name in the corner."

.......it does? I hadn't sent him anything that I could remember.

After a moment of silence, I realize that maybe my lost cheque finally made it's way to him. He opens it, and sure enough there's my cheque, dated June 1st, 2011. It took them 8 months, but the postman did not lose my mail at all. As much as I would have loved for it to get to him sooner, I admire their dedication. They must have been facing a mountain of unsorted mail when the strike ended, but they sorted it and got that envelope to where it was supposed to be. Besides, I had sent the cheque in a card, so he still got to enjoy that.

Mailmen, I salute you!

A wonderful wedding

Last weekend I went to my first wedding ever. Okay, not quite. I was a flower girl for my Uncle's wedding way back in the day, but the only thing I remember about that day is the purple satin dress I got to wear that my Grandma made for me. So I don't think that really counts.

The ceremony itself was wonderful. Aside from what I would consider to be very typical parts of a wedding ceremony, the couple did one thing that I really liked. They had a sand ceremony where they took turns pouring different colours of sand into a tear drop-shaped glass container. It was symbolic of their two separate lives coming together as one, and the resulting layered effect made a beautiful keepsake. I'll admit to tearing up a few times during the ceremony, there was so much love and happiness in the air it was hard not to get emotional.

The reception was also a success, with delicious food and fantastic dancing music. Plus, of course, the games. They had the bride and groom do the standard "hold up a shoe" game, and also did a game on the dance floor to determine who at the reception had been married the longest (one couple had been married 31 years!). However, one part made me laugh the hardest, and I'm not even sure it was intended to.

Partway through the night the DJ cleared the dance floor and told all the single ladies to come forward for the throwing of the bouquet. I figured I might as well, so I grabbed a few of my new-found friends to come up with me. We chose to hang out around the outskirts of the group, since none of us seemed to really care if we actually did catch it. The bouquet was passed to the bride, she turned around, and.....the DJ started blasting this song:

I was laughing so hard I completely missed the bouquet toss.

As per tradition, this was immediately followed by the groom removing the bride's garter and tossing it to the single men. The bride was set up in a chair, and the groom knelt down in front of her. Suddenly, the DJ asks, "Should we make this easy for him, or should we make this hard for him?" As rousing cries of "HARD" came out of the crowd, the groom was told he could not use his hands. Which may not have been a problem, except the bride was wearing a beautiful ballgown-style dress that must have had at least 7 or 8 layers of fabric for him to find his way through. Once again I was convulsing in fits of laughter on the side as the groom struggled to find his way inside this mountain of fabric, eventually emerging victorious with the garter in his mouth. Someone sitting at my table ended up catching it, which prompted me to ask him a somewhat mischevious question...

"Is it a problem that you're the next guy to get married, but your girlfriend is not the next girl?"

Thankfully he found it funny. My humour has a mean streak sometimes.

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I'm still alive.

Well, my blog has taken the well-beaten path travelled by many of my previous blogs. I start out strong, but life gets busy and suddenly it's been 2 and a half months without a post. I'm not going to just discard this one though, as was my previous method. Hopefully in the new year I can start getting a few more posts out.

Recently I have been hearing some ads for a contest being run at one of the stores in my city. For Christmas, they decided that every day, at every store, someone would win back the money from what they purchased that day. It sounded like a pretty good contest; I mean, who doesn't want to shop for free? But at the end came the disclaimers. "No purchase necessary, see in store for details."

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't "winning your purchases" require buying something in the first place? How can a contest be "no purchase necessary" when you can't win anything without a purchase?

Of course, this isn't the first time that a company has run a contest that raised my eyebrows in this regard. There was once a bag of chips that proclaimed "Win [insert desirable prize]! No purchase necessary, see inside of bag for details". However, that at least had a shred of realism to it. Perhaps you could also visit the website for details, or obtain the information through some other means. In fact, if all you have to do is read someone else's bag of chips to figure out what you're supposed to do, then technically there really is no purchase necessary to win the contest. This store, however, wasn't even trying to pretend to follow the rules.

I thought that contests were required by law to be "no purchase necessary", but it turns out that isn't true in Canada. You can make someone purchase your product in order to gain entries, so long as you ask a skill-testing question. That strikes me as an incredibly odd way to run things, but I'll save that for another day. If this is the case, why even bother with the claim that purchases are not required to win a prize?

I do suppose you could technically enter to win back the $0 that you spent. Perhaps I should go do that now, I could really used the money.

Someone dared me to do it.

I woke up this morning with the sudden realization that I desperately needed a new teddy bear. I know it probably seems strange, but they've advanced so much since I last got one! If I went to the Build-A-Bear shop I could pick what kind of teddy bear, clothing, even give it a beating heart. Though I wasn't so sure on the beating heart thing. It sounds kind of creepy to me.

First things first: I got up and grabbed a cup of coffee. As I drank it, I watched Oscar and Wally, my pet t-rexs playing in the yard. For those of you who don't know, I found them abandoned in a park, fairly freshly hatched and clearly not going to survive unless someone took them home and took care of them. Of course, I forgot how big they get. Handling one is okay, handling two...it's a lot of work. On the bright side I get to pick one each day to ride in to work. A lot less people have been cutting me off since I started riding in on a t-rex.

Today Wally seemed to be in a better temperament, so I chose to take him to the mall. This time though, I made extra sure to bring his feeding bag. You all remember what happened the last time I forgot it. DISASTER. Anyways, I got to the mall, tied up Wally with the other dinosaurs, and almost skipped to Build-A-Bear. I was so excited. I've never actually built one before.

Unfortunately, when I got there it was just being closed. Apparently a winged monkey had escaped from the zoo and had decided to make the store her home. Can't blame her, with all the cuddly things just laying around in there. But until the zoo could send someone to pick her up, the store had to be closed for everyone's safety. Those monkeys can be vicious when they feel threatened. I walked around the mall for about 30 minutes, and when I saw the store still wasn't open I decided to head home. I didn't want to leave Wally unattended for too long, he can be a bit of a mischief-maker!

So I didn't get my teddy bear today. Perhaps I'll try again tomorrow. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I hear some screaming outside. I need to go check if the boys are getting into trouble again.


If any of you are a little confused, I was challenged to make a blog post that included a teddy bear, two t-rexs, and a winged monkey. This is the result. Hope you enjoyed it!

DO NOT WANT

I went to bed last night feeling just fine. I woke up today with a cold. Or, at least, what I assume is a cold. My head is stuffy, my nose still manages to run like a faucet, and my throat is rebelling against me. It was early, the sun wasn't up yet, and I had a day full of work and school ahead of me. If I was less broke I may have called in sick, but my bank account urged me to get up and be a responsible adult.

All the way to work I was praying that it would be an easy day. I work with developmentally disabled adults and while there a lot of days, bad days are usually REALLY bad. At first it was looking good. My client that I work with was in a good mood, all laughs and smiles and funny jokes. Our ride to the program was pleasant, with lots of awesome music on the radio. Everything was going great. Then, when we got to the program, my client informed me that her bag was wet so her juice must be leaking. No worries, that's easy enough to deal with. We get inside and I ask to see her bag. I look through it to make sure everything's okay. It wasn't juice that was leaking. There, hidden in the bottom of the bag, was a rotten, liquefied apple.

DO. NOT. WANT.

Normally I do okay with stuff like this. But for whatever reason today I couldn't handle it. I gagged. I will admit to seriously considering just leaving it for the next person to find. Instead, I did the responsible thing and composed myself and helped the client take care of it.

Not a great start to a friday.

More productivity equals less brain power

The brain is definitely a muscle. Okay, not literally, but at least figuratively. The more you exercise your brain, the more useful it becomes. Like a muscle. Also, if you stop using your brain, it atrophies and then takes work to get it back to where it used to be. Like a muscle. And finally, if you overuse your brain, it starts to get tired and act funny. Like a muscle. At least, that's what happens in my case.

Today was my day for catching up on school work. I did some editing on a group lab report. I completed a quiz for my astronomy class. I rewrote four-and-a-half lecture's worth of notes on how to condition your muscles. It was all very productive, and it felt good to finally get caught up on all of my studying. But today was also my day off, which meant I spent the morning sleeping in and my early afternoon catching up on the internet, followed by the required procrastination time. I didn't get started on my school work until 5pm. Not so good.

At first I was powering through it, but as the hours passed my hand-brain coordination was slowly waning. The words I was writing out took a bit more effort to process, and I kept adding random g's in places they don't belong (seriously, where did I find a g in "creatine kinase"?). Just as I was deciding that maybe it was time to call it a night, my boyfriend sent me a text letting me know that it was "tim" to make some tea, and he was just going to put his clothes in the laundry and call me in a "non". A SIGN! I giggled at his autocorrect fails, and sent him a quick text asking why Tim was making him tea and how long a non was before packing up my school work. As I happily put my books and pens away, a thought slowly dawned on me. When he said it was time to make tea, he also said something about studying. Why would he be studying? He doesn't go to school. My brain struggled to process what had happened. Eventually, I went back to the text message and confirmed that niggling thought. He hadn't sent that text. I had.

I had a good laugh at myself and went to clear up the confusion. The hand-brain coordination continued to remain at an all time low as I talked about "tra" instead of "tea" and typed symbols instead of letters. When my boyfriend called a few minutes later, he listened quietly as I stumbled over my words trying to tell him what happened (the mouth-brain coordination also becomes compromised). At the end of my story, his only response was "you should probably take a break from studying for a while."

We are now at 2 hours since I stopped studying and brain function is almost back to normal. Only the occasional errant letter or two. Lesson of the night: 4 hours of straight school work is probably a few hours too many.