Category Archives: Holidays

Irish for the Weekend

Posted on March 18, 2013 | 5 Comments

Happy day after St. Patrick’s Day you little leprechauns!

I did not celebrate yesterday on actual St. Patrick’s Day, but I was lucky enough to celebrate on both Friday and Saturday, so I think that makes up for it.

On Friday my work was hosting a St. Paddy’s social in the late afternoon , so everyone wore their festive green to the office. And I do mean everyone. Every person I saw all day had their green on. Just green everywhere. This was really funny to me because St. Patrick’s Day wasn’t officially until Sunday, so we were all just eager.

And just a quick side note. I googled St. Patty’s vs St. Paddy’s because I never know which one to use, and I found an official website for this…

No St. Patty’s. Don’t do it. Very good to know. I’ll never use it wrong again.

Anyway, after work on Friday pretty much our entire office made our way to a local pub to get our Irish on.

I found a very attractive hat and beard combo, which I sported for a while…

And this is probably the main reason why I love St. Patrick’s Day. I love to see people dressed like fools. And also dress like a fool.

I switched my outfit up a couple times.

At one point about 5o of us were jammed into this tiny pub, all in our green gear. We basically took it over. It was rammed.

I saw a few other customers make their way in, spot our rowdy crowd, and promptly turn around and head back out.

We hung out there until about 7:30 or so, hanging out and drinking beer. It’s really fun hanging out with work people outside of work when everyone sets aside their business pantaloons for a bit.

Moi, Emily, Maria, Melissa

Fun times for sure. And it be noted that I work with a few pretty hilarious characters, so I spent a lot of time laughing.

After the official social ended, about 30 of us turned the night into an unofficial pub crawl down Yonge Street (I know, my work is ridiculous). I made it until about 11 and hit up two other places before I decided to call it quits and subway it home. I still had Saturday to look forward to!

Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day part two with all my pals and their friends and lovers.

Since St. Paddy’s did not officially start until midnight, we did not show up to the pub at 6pm like last year. We hung out at Dawn and Mark’s before making our way over to the bar for around 11.

Evan and the rest of the lads were in attendance also.

Dawn made the most delicious festive cupcakes.

I wanted a vanilla one and it was so big I had a bit of a tricky time eating it… I ended up with my mouth stuffed and cupcake all over my face, so everyone started laughing at me, which made me laugh, which then made me inhale cupcake, so then I started choking. That is always awkward. Choking in front of people is no fun. Your face goes all red and everyone stares at you and asks if you are okay until you are done coughing like a maniac. Good times. Anyway, it was all good, I survived, and that cupcake was really good.

My addition to the food table was green goat cheese and honey dip.

Which made Emily laugh so hard she cried when she saw it. And then everyone said it looked like playdough (which it does). It’s fine, you may snark on the green goat cheese dip all you like, it was still delicious. I really went all out with the platter also.

Eventually it was bar time, so we hit up the same Irish pub as last year (last year was insane), the Waltzing Weasel in Oshawa.

It was not busy at all, since it was not actually St. Patrick’s Day yet (midnight!), and we were the only ones dressed in green. But we have no trouble creating our own party.

We did the green beer thing…

I love the green beer.

We also met up with this lovely lady…

Sherrie had another party to attend, so she couldn’t stay for very long and that was sad. But the rest of us had a good old Irish time.

St. Paddy’s comes but once a year, so you gotta make the most of it!

A very fun night also. I felt the St. Patrick’s Day love!

I hope you guys all had a great weekend and were Irish for at least a day!

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Holidays, Pals, Work Fun

Tagged friends, green beer, patty vs paddy, pub crawl, st. paddy's, St. Patrick's Day

The Donkey and the Phone Number

Posted on February 14, 2013 | 15 Comments

Since it is Valentine’s Day, I wanted to do an illustrated story for you guys to show you how much I love you and appreciate you following along with my antics.

So I started thinking about what I could draw, and what my most memorable Valentine’s Day is. And I don’t really have one. I seriously cannot remember any of my Valentine’s Days, and I think it is because it’s not really a big deal and I just like Valentine’s Day for the chocolate. Also, I thought of this last minute and I don’t really have time to draw anything elaborate.

But I do have a lot of stories. So here is a beautiful love story (or probably crush story would be more accurate).

When I was in Grade 9, I used to go to this bowling alley all the time with my childhood friend Amanda. Her mom and brother played in a league there, and since we lived in the middle of nowhere and had nothing else to do, we would join them on the nights they would play and just hang out, acting cool. This particular bowling alley had a huge arcade, and you could win tickets that you could then cash in for prizes.

The prizes were of course nothing spectacular, unless you saved your tickets up for ages and ages, which I never did because I am impatient. But the particular prize that I was after was the guy who worked behind the counter.

I thought he was just ridiculously dreamy and I had been keeping my eye on that prize for months. He looked like James Van der Beek (he didn’t the last time I saw him, puberty hit him hard), and he was my dream. Whenever I was at the bowling alley I would frantically play games so that I would win tickets so I could go to the prize counter and have an excuse to talk to him. I would order coke upon coke and a ridiculous amount of poutines so that I could walk by his counter to the food area and maybe he would notice me.

It did not work. I don’t think he ever said anything to me besides “Hey. What do you want?” as he gestured to all the prize bins.

And I was extremely shy around boys and could barely make eye contact, let alone strike up any sort of interesting conversation.

But one day, after a few months of this, my friends and I were all at the bowling alley for Rock n’ Bowl, and I felt brave. I had my pals as backup (sometimes I am fueled to do crazier things than I normally would if my friends are with me, even now). Clearly James Van Der Beek was not going to take the initiative and ask me for my number, so I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. I decided that I needed a creative way to get his attention.

So I won a bunch of tickets from the games room, strolled on up to his counter, looked him straight in the eye, and presented him with my winnings. And then I pointed to a bin full of plastic farm animals and I said

And then I felt shy and I broke my eye contact and looked away all embarrassed. I prepared myself to run away.

SUCCESS! He wrote down his number for me, and he seemed excited about it.

And this story really goes nowhere because I did not know proper phone etiquette at that time, and called him a little bit too often. Like repeatedly if no one answered the phone. This was before cell phones of course, so it was his home number and one time when he finally did answer he told me that his parents told him to tell me to stop calling so much. I did not have call display yet, so I didn’t understand how he knew it was me, but I was still too embarrassed to call back after that.

And then MSN happened and we somehow reconnected just as I was graduating high school and we went out once and he didn’t look like James Van Der Beek anymore and I realized his personality wasn’t that great anyway.

Sometimes my friends still say to me “Hi. I’ll take that donkey and maybe your phone number,” as a joke. It makes me laugh.

So the point of this story is, if you are without a lover this Valentine’s Day and you have a crush, make the first move! It works! You ask for that donkey and that phone number!

And with that…

Hopefully that will be me today.

→ 15 Comments

Posted in Cartoons, Holidays, Random Musings

Tagged bowling, donkey, james van der beek, valentine's day

New Year’s Eve Adventures

Posted on January 3, 2013 | 11 Comments

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

linds-new-year

I’m a little late, but I have been taking a break from the internets this week. And also kind of taking a break from doing anything productive. It’s been a good time.

Anyway, my New Year’s Eve was pretty awesome. My friend Sherrie just bought a house (all on her own, so proud of her!), so when she told me she wanted to host a New Year’s party this year, I signed right on up for that. House parties are my favourite on New Year’s Eve. I much prefer doing that to going out. I find trying to navigate the bar scene on this night extremely stressful. It’s too busy, too expensive, and it’s impossible to get a cab.

So house party it was. I brought my friend Matt from Journalism (the ugly sweater winner) with me, as he was still here visiting his fam. He also knows Sherrie, as she was in our first year of Journalism with us (how we became friends!), and he was looking for something to do.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

And I also brought my friend Hannah along for the ride.

hannah-linds

Hannah was my former intern at my old job and we became close during that time and made a point to stay in touch after. Our old boss really liked that we became friends, as I’m pretty sure he thought of us both as almost daughters, and we could tell it warmed his heart when we hung out outside of work. So we texted him the above picture of us as a Happy New Year gift.

Anyway, the three of us arrived and we got straight into the drinking games.

kings

That would be Kings. If you are unfamiliar, you use a deck of cards and each card is designated as a different activity. Some are just drink or give out drinks, but some are a bit more elaborate. You have to go around in a circle and choose a card, and if you do not do the activity or you do it improperly, you have to drink. This is A-okay though, as the whole point of the game is to get drunk (and if that is the point, I believe I won).

My favourite are the rule cards, and someone came up with the best rule I’ve ever played with: everyone must speak in a British accent the entire game, and if you don’t, you drink. It was hilarious. I was absolutely dying laughing. And I suck at accents, so I had to drink due to my poor one a few times.

I know most of Sherrie’s friends pretty well now because of previous activities, so hanging with them was a fun time!

girls

We also played a lot of my other favourite drinking game, flip cup!

flip-cup

My team was awesome, we won about four rounds in a row! Pro-stars. I am VERY proud of my flip cupping skills. I have been working on them since high school. Best game ever.

girls-flipcup
It was a good night food-wise as well, though I didn’t get a picture of the snack table. Sherrie makes the most amazing taco dip of all time (I have sloppily eaten it after getting home from the bar many, many times), and it was sitting directly behind me during Kings and I was just going to town on it. I finally turned around and looked at it and an entire corner of the dip had disappeared. And I was the only one who had been eating it so far. So…that was embarrassing.

It was a really fun night. A successful New Year’s for sure. Sherrie was a great host!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Hannah slept over at my pad, so the next morning the two of us went out for brunch at a really cute pub at the end of my street.

I immediately re-hydrated myself.

drink-spread
Yep, those drinks are all for me.

I was pretty impressed with my omelette also, but I didn’t take a picture of it until I loaded it up with Ketchup and it just looked disgusting so I deleted it.

I hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve with friends, or just your cat and a bottle of wine!

→ 11 Comments

Posted in Holidays, Pals

Tagged flip cup, house party, kings, new year's eve

My Year in Review

Posted on December 31, 2012 | 25 Comments

Since it is New Year’s Eve I feel like I should talk about my year a little bit. This has been, hands down, the most eventful year of my life. So many huge things happened over the past year, and my life is completely different than it was this time last year. The only constants have been my family, friends, and my cat.

I have made a line graph to demonstrate.

2012-year-in-review

So things were definitely all over the place, and at times slightly tumultuous…

To delve into that a bit further, I broke up with my boyfriend of six years, which was a very hard decision, and I went through a couple months of general turmoil after that. Dealing with the breakup while simultaneously selling our house and also searching for an apartment in the city was not my favourite. It required me to put on my serious grown-up pants. And then add that I was basically living out of garbage bags and staying with my parents and various friends during that time, so everything just felt very weird to me. I managed to squeeze in some really fun adventures in those months, but it was still kind of dark times.

And then finally when that was settled, a week after I actually moved and the day I picked up my cheque for the house, I found out I was losing my job. My job that I had for nearly five years, that I identified with on a whole other level above just work. The job that kept me sane during my breakup. It was the one thing in my life that was still the same, and it would be changing. I would lose my office family, and I had grown to love them very much.

And then there was that minor thing with the guy I was dating not existing… Which in the grand scheme of things, really isn’t that big of a deal, but it was still a weird event that left me a bit shaken up.

So those were the not so fun things… But you know what? A lot of great things happened too! I moved on my own to the city! And then I had the best summer of my life: Leah’s super fun bachelorette beach weekend, an amazing trip out west, a fun time in Muskoka with my best friends, camping in Algonquin Park, to name a few things. The video of the piggyback fail went viral. The post I wrote about the guy not existing kind of went viral. And I scored my dream job!

So 2012 was eventful and I cannot lie and say it didn’t have some terrible moments. But it had really awesome moments also. Overall things are pretty good, and I really like where things are going. I feel like everything happened for a reason, and I am where I’m supposed to be right now.

And when I think about it, this is pretty much what my year looked like in 2011:

It was just okay. It pales in comparison to 2012. 2012 was exciting, and 2011 was not. And though 2012 was more dramatic, I will take exciting and eventful over boring and okay any day. 2012 kept me on my toes. This year made me a stronger person. And not to be all cheesy and dramatic, but I think it has set me up to be where I am supposed to be.

And I learned a valuable lesson. Do not fret if things suck. They will get better. Sometimes the bad things must happen to make room for the great things. I know that when I look back on this year, these bad things that seemed like such a huge deal at the time will just be a minor blip on the radar.

So like last year, I am not making any specific New Year’s resolutions. I am just going to carry on being happy and not hungry and see where things go.

Have a great and safe New Year’s Eve!

→ 25 Comments

Posted in Holidays, Random Musings

Tagged 2012, new years

CHRISTMAS!

Posted on December 28, 2012 | 8 Comments

Welp, it’s been four days since Christmas and I have emerged from my food coma and I am ready to talk about it.

I have to just take a minute and say how much I love Christmas on Facebook. I love everyone’s photos of their family and friends all merry in their Santa hats and reindeer antlers and ugly sweaters and general holiday attire. Looking at them just makes me feel happy. So if you are my Facebook friend and you have been posting photos and they are in my news feed, well I am creeping them.

abd-154

I am a creeper just like that cat.

My family always does the Christmas thing on Christmas Eve, so on Monday I headed to my dad and stepmom Mona’s for our fam jam. Also in attendance was my stepbrother Rusty, his girlfriend Leslie, and my stepmom’s mother Velta (who is hilarious and has a really heavy Latvian accent and pretty much everything she says makes me laugh hard).

Sadly my Nana couldn’t make it. She is doing well, but big outings like this are sometimes a bit too much for her. It is okay though, my Dad and I went to see her on Saturday for a little Christmas celebration beforehand.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

She is always so happy! She just kills me with her cuteness.

Anyway, my parents pets were all festive for the occasion…

tweedy

Tweedy is sporting the lion haircut like a rock star.

mojo

I can never get a picture of Mojo (the dog) actually looking at the camera because all he cares about is food (maybe he reminds you of someone…) so he is always just looking at where the food is. It’s all he is after, all the time. Perhaps I should dangle bacon in front of my face next time. That will probably get his attention.

It needs to be said that there are few things in life I love more than a beautifully set Christmas dinner table.

set-table

But I can think of one thing, and that is the CHRISTMAS DINNER!

christmas-dinner

Ahh I wait all year for this. Deliciousness from left: stuffing, mashed potatoes (obviously with a gravy volcano, because that is the proper way to do mashed potatoes), veggies, squash, cabbage roll (a tradition!), ham, and turkey. Yes, yes and yes.

My family always does the present thing after dinner, and then dessert after presents. So I have time to digest for a bit before tackling this:

dessert

That cake was so amazingly delicious. It was a strawberry cake, and typically I do not like fruity cake (vanilla with buttercream icing all the way), but that cake was seriously good. I may have to rethink my future cake choices.

And of course there were presents!

tree

I got a pretty good haul this year. Probably my favourite was a little trinket I can attach to my purse that is actually a sneaky alarm when pulled. My dad and Mona worry about me walking around at night in the city (not that I just wander around aimlessly at night, but you know). So just in case someone tries to attack me, instead of punching them in the face I can just pull on my handy little siren. It was a very thoughtful gift.

I also got these sweet straw glasses from Mona:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

And you better BELIEVE those are coming to Jamaica with me and I will be using them (note: the scarf was a gift, and the headband was a bow from one of the presents, I didn’t show up to Christmas wearing that thing…but I liked it).

My Dad and I got our customary photo in front of the tree…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

And overall it was just a great Christmas with the fam.

Christmas day I headed over to my friend Sherrie’s to watch Christmas movies in our pajamas while drinking wine. It was PERFECT, and we decided that this may need to be a new tradition.

She made me the best margarita also. And margaritas + Love Actually = Love.

love-actually

Amazing. And we had tacos for Christmas dinner. No complaints about that.

On Boxing Day my very oldest friend Emily invited me to her parents for dinner with her sister Sara, stepbrother Dave, and boyfriend Corey. I LOVE their family dinners (they also had me for Easter dinner this year), so I headed to our hometown of Blackstock, which is so small that I can’t even google the population (and I didn’t even live in Blackstock growing up, I lived outside of Blackstock). It’s the boonies, that is what you need to know.

Em’s mom made us all vesper martinis, which apparently are also known as the James Bond martinis.

emily-lindsey

Very fancy. And VERY strong. I’m pretty sure they just wanted to get me drunk…

Before dinner we all hung out and enjoyed appetizers…

appys

And then it was time for Christmas dinner round 2! We started with parsnip soup that Emilio’s mom made.

parsnip-soup

I was skeptical about the idea of parsnip soup, I cannot lie, but it was so good! I couldn’t get enough of it. And then more of the usual Christmas dinner fare…

dinner-1

Again, so good. I wish I could eat Christmas dinner every day. Thank you so much Emily and fam for having me!

The dessert spread was pretty impressive also…

desserts

Those peanut butter marshmallow squares remind me of kindergarten! My mom used to make them for me when we had snack days. Of course this wouldn’t be allowed now, silly peanut allergies… Also, Emily is cakepop maker extraordinaire, and her sister Sara MADE those chocolate peanut butter cups herself. I was dying. So delicious.

And then we all watched this:

xmas-vacay-2

What is this?! I had NO idea there was a sequel to Christmas Vacation, or I would have been all over watching that a lot earlier. Anyway, it was horrible. Don’t watch it. I’ll tell you what happens. Nothing. Nothing that you ever need to see.

We all agreed that it was probably the worst movie we had ever seen. But it was pretty fun to make fun of it at least.

It was decided that I was going to sleep over, as we had a snowstorm and the roads were bad, and I had also had some drinks. I hadn’t planned on this, so I had no pajamas. But Emily’s mom came to the rescue with a beautiful satin teddy bear nightgown.

jim-jams