Cold Power Walking and a New Lunch Date

Well I certainly got my cardio in this morning. Thanks to the design of the downtown corridor, an accident in one key spot caused major backups for all the buses.

I was first aware of a problem when it took us 5 minutes to get up a hill. And then when we reached the stop at the top of the hill, we sat there for 5 minutes, without moving away from the stop. Thankfully, I'm a well prepared Canadian girl and was dressed for the weather. I had my boots, two pairs of pants, a sweater, a hoodie, scarf, mittens and my heavy wool coat on so I was good to brave the elements.

Me and about 6 other people hopped off the bus and started the trek into downtown. Looking down the street, there was a long line of pretty red and white buses and a heavy stream of people heading into the core on foot. While making the trek, I passed my boss' boss en route to the office. We said a hurried hi as we each scurried in a different direction across the street.

Despite the fact that it was -28 with the windchill when I left the house, I was quite toasty by the time I got to the office. There was a quick stop at Starbucks involved, where they gave me the wrong drink but it was still good so I was ok. I wasn't the only one who opted to take the two feet and a heartbeat approach to getting to work today. At least it was sunny.

I must say, I'm really looking forward to the new transit tunnel under downtown being built. I think it will really improve traffic in the core.

I had a fun lunch today. Due to scheduling conflicts and over crowding, I opted to have lunch with a couple of our students rather than my usual group. I know one of the girls pretty well as she's been with us for a few years now. They were quite fun to hang with. It was neat talking about school stuff again and I assisted in the one girl trying to plan a romantic weekend away. LOL. They were a nice break in the day. They gave me advice on boys too :)

Kind of like the conversation I had with our boss' assistant over the difference between the photocopier and the printer and the fact that you cannot send a print job to our photocopier. I'm sure it was a fun conversation for anyone who happened to over hear. Our office isn't equipped with over high tech machines. We're kind of an old school place.

All in all, it was a pretty decent day. I think it's time to go and feed my Merlin addiction.

Good Night!

Sarah

Ice Storm, Christmas, New Year's and Merlin.

So it would appear that I haven't written for a while. I haven't written for 2 months and 26 days in fact. I don't know I haven't written. Just didn't feel like it I guess. I formulated a couple blogs in my head but never had the energy or drive to get them out and onto the screen. I guess I needed a break.

I'll bring you up to speed.

I'm still employed. I'm still single. I'm still broke and I'm still going to Curves. So that would be great, not so good, really shitty and fantastic.

Christmas was lovely. Went home for a week and got to spend time with my family. Thankfully, none of us got sick this year which is good, because I still haven't fully forgiven Typhoid Stephen for giving me the stomach flu last Christmas. It's been over a year and I still can't bring myself to eat cranberries.

The day after my arrival at home, mother nature blessed us with an ice storm. Not quite on the same scale at the one that Ottawa received back in 1998, but it was pretty impressive none the less. We were very lucky and only lost power for a very short period of time. 2 minutes the first time and 10 minutes the 2nd time to be precise. The next door neighbour and the one across the street both lost power after a limb from our tree took down the line (that sound you heard was my mother correcting me and saying that it was the city's tree and not ours. Minor detail. It's on our lawn!). Anyhow, the line was live but it was blocking the road so the nice people at the Hydro company came and cut it, thus knocking out power to both houses.

I got to test out my new "winter tracks" when dad suggested that we go for a walk around the neighbourhood and check out the damage. The damn things worked and I stayed vertical while facing a great fear of mine. I'm terrified of ice. We walked in the middle of the road and everyone froze the second we heard a cracking tree branch as a lot of the tree limbs were still falling. But hey, you've got to do something a little stupid every now and then, right? Besides, it was my dad's idea!

Adding to the excitement of the day came in the early afternoon when a tree around the corner caught fire. Ironically, the house where it happened is owned by a Fire Fighter. The cool part was watching the wreath that was hanging on the tree light up and sizzle as the electrical current ran through the tree. It was like a giant, live science demo.

Christmas Eve took on a fun twist when one of my oldest and dearest friends tagged along with us for dinner in order to avoid having to visit her mother-in-law. However, she made the kids go and see her. I'm not sure if that's cruel or just plain old funny. I think I'm going to side with funny on that one. Kind of like our Christmas dinner. We were only expecting my grandfather to come for dinner. But when he arrived, I broke the bad news to my mom as I saw him helping my grandmother from the car (earlier she said that she was too sick to come). Dinner was interesting as, for the first time in my life, we had Ham for Christmas dinner and not turkey. A fact that my mother bitched about, non-stop, for almost a week straight. The kicker? She's the who bought the god damn ham! In the ham's defence, it was delicious and I loved it more than I like turkey so I wasn't upset about the swap at all. Anyhow, back to grandma. She spent most of dinner just pushing food around her plate and saying that she wasn't hungry. Things really got interesting when she asked for some extra strength Tylenol and then her and my grandpa got into a fight over whether or not she'd taken 2 aspirin before leaving the house. My father really didn't say much. Just kept looking at his plate a lot. And my mom drank more sherry with dinner than I've seen her drink in years. It all amused the hell out of me.

Now before you point out what a horrible daughter I am, rest assured that I'm fully aware that karma will be coming back to bite me in the ass over this. One day, hopefully in the really distant future, I'm going to be the one drinking the sherry and staring at my plate while my mom and dad bicker over drugs. Actually, it won't be sherry. It will be Bailey's.

This is a photo of my grandma from earlier in the day...she's hiding from my camera.

Moving on. I headed back to Ottawa just before New Year's Eve. Mostly because I was out of vacation days and had to go back to work. Also because a very good friend of mine was in town and I got invited to his parents' house for a NYE party. This also meant that I *finally* got to meet his awesome wife and see his wonderful little guy, who had the decency to sleep the entire time. I also got to try lobster for the first time and quite enjoyed it. Sadly the night flew by far too quickly but 2014 was ushered in with good cheer and some great people.

Not too much out of the ordinary has happened since then. I do have a bit of a "dating" conundrum going on at the moment but that can wait for another night as this blog is getting quite long. Seriously!? Why can't people just step up and say what they feel? If you're interested, just ask me out. It's not hard. Especially when I've told you that I want to get some face time with you. Clearly that means I'm interested, right?
Sorry, sorry. Just needed to vent a little.

Work is going well and so is Curves. I was there tonight. And now I'm very sore. Especially my back. Hello new muscle groups. Oh, and I've formed a slight addiction to the BBC tv show Merlin. I've been watching it on Netflix. No worries, I just have 1 last episode in season 4 and then all of season 5 to watch and I'm done.  Then I'll have to find a new series to get hooked on. I am behind on my Sherlock and Downton Abbey watching. It would appear that I'm on a British roll.

Anyhow, I have to go and finish doing up the dishes and then I'm going to relax and watch an episode of Merlin.

Hang in there. I might just very well be back.

Good Night!

Sarah

Happy New Year 2014!!!!