New Blog Site: UrbanShore.ca

I'm not sure if it's just a God-given trait of all mankind or if it's the artist in me, but I constantly feel the need to create something. I have this overwhelming yearning to create something of value to the people around me; something that will enhance the lives of others.

Whether it's writing, singing or playing music, writing or sharing intimate conversation with people, the drive to create seems to be rooted in this longing to contribute to the betterment of mankind.

I am on the edge of creating something new right now - a new hyper-local website/blog about urban living in the City of North Vancouver - and mostly the mid to lower Lonsdale area. This is my neighbourhood and I think it's the best place to live anywhere. I really just want to find a way that all of us who live here and love it can share ideas about the best places to shop, eat, play... all those places that make this community unique.

And so now, urbanshore.ca is live. Welcome. Sit down and stay a while. Tell me what you think are the best places to enjoy this vibrant place. Share it with me.

Anniversary Weekend

August 14th was our 4th wedding anniversary. We were married on the anniversary of our first date, 5 years earlier, so it's really easy to remember yay! This year big-man surprised me with a lovely overnight away to the most unusual spot: The Silver Reef Casino just outside Bellingham, WA. I actually think it's technically in Ferndale, but that doesn't really matter. You might think that sounds like an odd plan, but for us it was perfect.

It was a simple plan: son at the mother-in-law's, drive down Saturday morning, enjoy some spa treatments, a little gambling, a nice dinner and some more gambling and more spa treatments, and then back on Sunday. It was very well planned and I have to give props to big-man. He's never been good at surprising me with anything. In 9 years he's never managed to actually surprise me on my birthday, Christmas or our anniversary. This, at least, he had planned entirely up until about two weeks prior when he finally broke down and told me the plan haha... yeah, we're still working on the *surprise* element of gift giving.

So here's how it went...

We left our place about 8:00am Saturday. Given we're up daily by 5am, that was no big deal. We had coffees in hand and a few things packed. It was a beautiful morning so we took off without the front panels on the Jeep (we have a hard top 4-door Jeep like this one where the top pieces just above the front seats come off independently from the rest of the hard top) and left them at home (more about that later).

Here's how it looked coming in to Vancouver from the North Shore:



And this was me all excited taking a pic of myself - yep I'm a big dork:



We then proceeded to accidentally follow Granville all the way in to Richmond instead of switching over to Oak to get on to Hwy 99... oops! So we had a nice little tour of Richmond before we finally hit the last stretch to the border. At the border we hit the duty free for big-man's necessities (read: booze & smokes) before we got to join the 90-minute queue of travellers trying to navigate their way to the U-S-of-A.

Anyway, after the 90 minute wait, lots of pee-pee breaks, the odd tweet and some good quality time, we were through the gates and on our way. We stopped for a quick breakfast at Jack In The Box and then arrived at the hotel at about 11am. Perfect timing.



Actually, the timing was good. They had our room ready even though check-in wasn't until 4pm or something. We had an executive suite on the top floor so there was a little extra security - you had to have a key to a 6th floor room to get the elevator to go there. Big-man had even managed to get the hotel staff to pick up a bottle of sparkling wine he knew I'd like and a long stemmed rose and have them leave it, with a card he sneaked in to them, on the bed in our room. Nice touch.





Pardon the bottle of tequila. That was from the duty free. Newest favourite drink is Blue Agave Full Throttle with tequila *mmm*.

So 11:30am Saturday the first item on the agenda was a couples' massage at the spa. It was good. The massage itself was good, anyway. The guy who was working on me started talking about how he divorced his wife for her putting her cold hands on him to warm up. A little inappropriate given it was our anniversary, but whatever. The Silver Reef is certainly not high end, despite what they'd like to think. At least the price isn't high end either lol.

After the massage we shared our bottle of sparkly. That's all I'm saying there...

Around 1:30 we went for some lunch at Panasia. The thing we started to notice about this 'resort' (and I must use the term lightly, it is actually a hotel and casino in the middle of a series of fields on a native reserve...) is that no one knows anything about anything that isn't part of their job. The hostess knew nothing about the beverages offered, nor did she know anything about the voucher thing we got with our room key. All she knew how to do was seat people at the table. The server on the other hand, knew about the beverages and the voucher, but didn't know what came with our food. We ordered a spicy duck dish that was supposed to come with little pancakes to roll it up in and she was very shocked that we would imply there should have been something else. No harm done. The food was okay. Not great; but okay.

After lunch I quickly threw $150 in the toilet. Well, I might as well have done so at the rate I lost it at the casino. At that point I wasn't having much fun, but big-man was enjoying himself, so we stuck around. When he was up a little, he gave me another $100 which I promptly handed over to the 4-card poker dealer. My excuse is that I was training for Las Vegas when I go to Blogworld next month. Meh. Truth is, I was training my self control from that moment on. I draw the line at $250 without winning a single hand.

Big-man made up for my losses at the tables and we got all prettied up and went for dinner at the Steakhouse.



Big-man, having spent many years in the restaurant industry in both the front-of-house and the back-of-house, was excited about table-side food prep. We ate Caesar salad (prepared tableside), he had a pepper steak (prepared tableside) while I had a lobster bisque and, for dessert, we had bananas foster (you guessed it, prepared tableside). Big-man bitched about the wine service (his glass emptied twice without being refilled promptly or, better still, beforehand), but over all he's just a tough cookie to please. I thought it was fine.

After dinner we returned to the casino where our final tally was me down $300 but big-man up $600. I took a photo of him rolling in the cash on the bed (which is pretty funny) but given he was in his underwear by that point, I figured I'd spare him. Some things are better left private. After deciding to quit while we were (collectively, anyway) ahead, we went for a swim and a hot tub before retiring to the room to watch the Olympic coverage on TV.

Sunday morning we got up and had some really bad coffee. Okay, admittedly I'm a coffee snob. We use a French press at home and use 5 heaping scoops of espresso roast for two mugs of coffee, so hotel coffee just can't do it for me. Big-man had decided to have another massage Sunday morning given he'd enjoyed the first one so much. I, on the other hand, decided to drive in to Bellingham to look for some real coffee... a Starbucks perhaps?

It was then that I realised it was raining. Remember that nice weather I'd said we had? Remember how I said we'd gone with the tops off the Jeep? Remember how I said we'd left them at home?! Yeah. Nice. So I'm driving down I5 towards Bellingham in the rain, with my hood on, in search of the happy green circle. I finally spotted one Starbucks just as I was passing it with absolutely no hope of doubling back. I kept going to Bellis Fair... found a McDonald's but that was definitely not what I wanted. So I decided to drive around some more...

I found the strangest thing: right beside Cost-Cutter was Christ The King Church. No joke. A big church in a mall... it was really weird. I'd planned to miss church that morning, being out of town and all, but then I felt compelled to drive right by the front door... 8:30am service. I checked the clock: it was 8:27am. Now I know when God is talking to me. "Don't miss church. You soooooo need a little godly influence don't ya thing?! You already threw away the money I provided for you playing stupid gambling games, don't you think you ought to think about me just a little while you're immersed in all things worldly? Besides, you'll like it." Yes God. I went in.

It was like violins started playing... as I walked though the door the first thing I saw was an espresso bar. Sweet. Then, I met a woman who works in the children's ministry and gets espresso vouchers for doing so. She was happy I'd dropped in and gave me one. Score! Thanks again, God. I finally make my way in to the sanctuary, wondering if people were frowning upon my attire: yoga pants, a hoodie and flip flops (my usual any time I'm not at work), just in time to see the pastor come in... wearning flip flops. FTW!!

After the service I had just enough time to get back to the hotel, get changed and have a swim and a steam before my mani/pedi appointment at the spa - my final pampering of the weekend.

The drive home was quick; just 10 minutes at the border. We were home by just after 3pm sitting by the pool at the mother-in-law's hanging with our mini-man, who we missed dearly.

It's really important for us to take time away from the hectic pace of everyday life. This was a nice break. Thanks babe... I love you. Now if we can just focus on not killing each other before we do it again, that would be fantastic.

Not much of a blogger

Well, it's official: I'm not much of a blogger. It's funny, as much as I think I have great things to say every now and again, I don't actually have time to write them down at the very moment I think them up. I have the attention span of a flea, and thus there are no entries in my blog.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with this blog, to be honest. When I started it, I was just looking to ramble some random thoughts as they arose. I still think that's sort of what goes through my head, but it doesn't much make for good reading. There are so many topics I've thought about really pursuing to make me stand out from the crowd:

- Marketing - so many people do it, and many better than I could
- Online Marketing/New Media - see above
- Parenting - with one 2 1/2 year old I'm hardly an expert
- Christianity - well, it's hard to really share those deep places with the world
- Music - I only know about praise and worship music and artists

I'm also thinking of starting to build more Squidoo lenses. They're my latest obsession and I just earned a whopping $0.07! I know... totally thrilling.

Anyway, I'm currently waiting to hear back from my General Manager to find out if I get approved to go to BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008 in Las Vegas in September. If I do, I'm sure I'll have far more ideas after. Until then, if you find yourself reading this blog, you'll have to make do with my random thoughts in no particular order and with no particular regularity.

Thanks for reading.

Cats

So I have an old-ish cat... she's about 12. And she's fat. I'm trying to get her slimmer by switching her over to wet food from free-feeding her dry. She LOOOVES wet food; hasn't had it since she was a kitten. But with her advancing age, I'm not sure her little teeth are doing so well with the dry, so anyway...

I finally have gotten to a point in my life where my mini-man is sleeping past 6am and now the cat is the one insisting I'm up at 5am. At 5am on the nose she takes, I swear, one claw and slides it up the side of a wall next to my bed. A cat claw on a wall in just the right way actually sounds like nails on a blackboard. Well, okay, it does if you're dreaming peacefully.

I keep looking around for things I can throw at her. I'm not kidding. She brings out the worst in me - I'm not a fan of starting my days angry, but I'm not doing so well with this new routine. When she hears me yell "shut up!" I suspect she figures, "Right then, she's up yay! I'll make some more noise." And she starts to wail. All this so she can hurry up and inhale her 1/3 tin of cold yuck. EW.

Whistler Weekend 2008

So I finally made it out to my friend Mrs. Little's annual Whistler Girls' Weekend... what a fun time! Who knew I'd still enjoy squeezing 17 women into 3 hotel rooms for a weekend of silliness in my 30's? I also finally spent some real time with my new-found half sister - I mean, more than just going for coffee, which was nice. I met her last year after searching for my birth mother and it's been very cool getting to know her; she's a fantastic girl and I really admire her.

Anyway... we got to Whistler about 4pm on Friday the 27th and proceeded to ditch the car with the valet. No need for it when you're staying a stone's throw from everything in the village. We found our rooms, settled in a little and proceeded to socialize around the penis-shaped chip plate as the ladies arrived until our dinner reservation at 7pm. Dinner was awful lol... I mean I didn't really care much, but Mrs. Little herself was mistakenly served a beef burger when she's a vegetarian. EEW... she wasn't at all impressed. The bellini's were good though.

I'm not sure if it's a function of age or something else, but I honestly have no recollection of what took place after dinner on the Friday night *shrug*.

Saturday we got up, got cleaned up, had coffee (no shortage of great coffee shops in Whistler) and went shopping. I spent some good money that I don't have on things I don't need, so all in all a successful shopping outing. After shopping we hit the pool with some refreshments in hand and got friendly with a series of sexy white loungers. The afternoon was made complete with a nap and another shower before attending the pre-bar party...

The pre-bar party began at 6pm with more refreshments, a rousing game of "pass the purple penis", party favours and "how dirty are you" style drinking games... you'd have thought someone was about to be married, but no... this was all just for fun. After the pre-bar party we went to Buffalo Bills for some more refreshments and dancing. The music was awful but we made the most of it...

Those of us no longer used to the bar-star party life left the club at a rediculously early hour and went back to one of the rooms to order pizza and have civilized converstation for the rest of the night. I spent a short but not insignificant amount of time worried about New Young Sister and whether or not she was out on the town alone or if she had a room key, but all was well... she stumbled in at 2am and the photos showed she was well and had a great time...

Sunday morning we all pulled ourselves together and with comfy clothes as the order of the day, made our way to the closest coffee shop to soak up the last of the sun (not to mention caffeine, and ginger ale for those less-fortunate) before piling into our caravan of carpool arrangements to make our way to our final stop - breakfast at White Spot in Squamish.

I arrived home around 1pm on Sunday to hugs and kisses from both Big Man and Little Man. My two greatest loves. Life is good.

Can't wait to do it again next year...

For the love of motorbikes

I have to say, I wonder what percentage of new motorbikes purchased get sold to a second rider vs. those that get totalled. *hmmm*

So yesterday at 4:30, big-man calls me at work from his cell... he's totalled his bike, but he's okay. I'm his first call *BRILLIANT* lol! I leave work immediately and make my way to the Cypress Mountain lookout where he says he's sitting at a picnic table and some nice passers by have given him a bottle of water... um, okay, thanks I suppose.

So I called for an ambulance on my way there - not sure if he did too, actually - by the time I got there we had two ambulances, a fire truck and the fantastic West Vancouver Corporal So-n-So, whose name escapes me - he's the guy who drives up and down that road in a tinted out Charger trying to entice people to race and gives them a ticket as soon as they do...

So anyway, here's what happened: big-man came down the hairpin turn at the Lookout and as he came around to the straight section in front of the parking lot, he hit some gravel that had been brushed into the road by a car that took the shortcut. The gravel took him into the grass where he figured he'd ride it out until he could get back on to the road, but didn't realize there was a cement culvert hiding in the grass.

The front end of his bike shattered on impact, flipped him and the bike over in the air, and tumbled again (I think with him off the bike at this point), coming to a standstill as a broken heap in the grass. He walked away and proceeded to call me.

After 5 hours at LGH, the doctors couldn't find a thing wrong with him... he's sore, but alive and unscathed. He has a scratch on his forehead and some abraision on his thigh, but was wearing full leg armour, butt/thigh armour, reinforced leather jacket and a great helmet.

I believe God is not finished with him yet on this earth...

Waiting for Nothing

Do you ever have an overwhelming sense that you should be doing something? Like maybe something's about to happen or you're on the verge of something exciting? I'm not sure what it is, but it drives me crazy. I am completely unable to sit and do nothing. My brain hurts from all the info floating around in there, yet I can't seem to sit down, relax and slow it all down. I think about work; I think about mini-man; I think about my future; I wonder if I should get a new job; I look for new jobs; I browse Facebook; I have something to eat; I read a page in a book; I check my email; I check the listings channel on the TV; I check my work email; I look at my google analytics account... for WORK! How sad is that?! I can't stop...

When I do nothing I feel like I'm wasting my life, but when I'm busy I feel like I'm missing my life. Am I crazy? ... Really. Is this what it's like to be rubber-room, straight jacket crazy? Am I ruining my kid with my neuroses? I'm busy all the time, but when I'm not busy I find something to do that means absolutely nothing yet takes up loads of time. I'm supposed to call my sister tonight, but haven't done it yet, I'm getting tired (it's only 8:15?!) and I'm thinking of just curling up in bed with a book knowing full well I'll read a paragraph and nod off.

I feel like I've finally (after only 2 years lol) figured out how to be a mom, but now I have to figure out how to be me again. Where am I? Who am I?

Well, as a random share, here's a picture from where I work. My band played on the mountain on Saturday... it definitely doesn't suck to be me, despite the whining...

Family Time

... About that whole "seeking balance" thing... today is a great day! My wonderful mother-in-law came over this morning (with my sister-in-law... must give credit where credit is due) for breakfast and to hang out with my amazing mini-man while my big-man and I went to church together... on his crazy-fast GSXR-750 crotch rocket :D fun! I think ours is the only church that really should have bike parking. It's starting to amass a following of leather-clad rocketeers who serve the Lord lol!

But again I digress... fun times. I haven't been on his bike in quite a while. I've become a bit of a nervous nelly since becoming a mom over 2 years ago, but I guess that's a God-given instinct: protecting your life. The mini-man thought it was very cool that mommy was getting on the back of daddy's motorcycle. I think he wanted to come too, but there's no way. He's not riding until he's at least 42.

So this afternoon we're headed out to enjoy the sunshine by the pool, sipping cool beverages with friends while caked in SPF 50 and enjoying inflatable things filled with water and bits of grass and such... you probably know how it is. I will do my best to relax while running around trying to make sure the mini-man doesn't fall in the in-ground pool, but instead sticks to the inflated variety. I should wear a hat.

The Power of Prayer

A couple of months ago I found a very cool website. It's simple, but impactful. A great place to go to see your life isn't as bad as you think it might be. A place to find inspiration. A place to find people all seeking the same thing: Dear-God.net.

Sometimes it's only when we open up and share our struggles with others that we realise everyone has the same types of struggles. I'll admit to being one of the first to submit to the belief that everyone around me seems to have it all together while I'm the only one madly juggling 26 different pieces of fruit in varying shapes and sizes. I suspect the reality is that all those people who seem to have perfect picket-fenced lives have something in their life that makes them as human as the rest of us.

Anyway... here's another random thought brought on by my pastor's sermon this morning (he'd die if he thought this came from him lol): I'm thinking of getting all of John 3 tatooed on my arm as a half sleeve. How's that for a profession of faith? I dunno. I wonder if there's a better chapter. I don't suppose my arm is big enough for an entire book... okay, well maybe Galatians or something...

Seeking Balance... for real.

So here I am, at work... working diligently at setting up Facebook ads and a company twitter. I think it's my ADD... no, really. I think if I had come into the world 15 or 20 years later than I did, I would have been medicated for it. I was browsing Google's latest widgets, looking for anything I should be considering for business, and I decided to set up a new gmail account. Then I figured, while I'm at it, I should delete my hotmail account... so really I needed to transfer my contacts over. No problem... a quick export, a quick import and it's done. But then I had to email a bunch of people who still use my hotmail to contact me. Archaic I know... I'm on Facebook every day for heaven's sake! And then I realized my hotmail is my login for a bunch of things... so I had to go and change my email address in those things, like Blogger and Twitter. So then I thought oh I should add my blog URL to my twitter - after all, it asked for a URL in my profile that I was updating. Then I noticed I hadn't blogged, and my blog name was related to my hotmail account... so I had to delete it and start all over again. Okay I digress...

I think I spend too much time online. So I thought I'd strike a balance in my life by starting a blog. Yeah... that makes sense. I'd better get back to work...