To Blog or Not to Blog....

I just realized after typing that title that this blog has suddenly become an homage to Shakespeare. So I included a picture of him to make it official. In fact, as of right this moment, I have issued a challenge to myself to try and make all of my post titles Shakespearean quotes. Not one to back down from a challenge by anyone, I of course have no choice but to accept. Therefore, all posts will now begin with quotes from Shakespeare's plays. Only the best for this blog, baby.


Soooooo......now what? I couldn't decide whether or not to write another post tonight. I have nothing of value to say, and didn't want to set any unreasonable precedents like I will write a post every day. Because I won't. I think I should aim for once a week. Two posts in a row like this is a bit of an anomaly, but because it's still new and I love novelty, I couldn't resist checking it out again today and messing around some more with the layout. I'm most proud of the feature at the bottom where I have a video bar made up PURELY OF FRENCH AND SAUNDERS SKETCHES. You're welcome people who appreciate British comedy.

So, I don't know if any of you know this, but I'm probably the coolest person in the whole city of Toronto RIGHT NOW. It's Friday night, and I am wearing an old pair of my sister's volleyball shorts and a tank top, sitting on my Ikea couch drinking caffeine-free diet pepsi, watching Step Up 2 on TV, playing country music on my guitar and blogging. I'm also doing laundry and considering running the dishwasher while trying to figure out how many more days I can survive on one garbage bag and one roll of toilet paper because I'm broke with a capital B. Yup. Coolest person EVER. To celebrate my awesomeness, and also the fact that it is finally FRIDAY, I'll leave you with this song.




You're welcome everyone who likes Fridays, and the one crazy loser (ahem, Kim) who likes country.

What's in a Name?

Welcome to my new (old) blog! Struck by sudden inspiration, and the realization that I spend more hours a week surfing the interwebs than I do sleeping, I figured I might as well put that time to good use honing the skills I developed in Grade 9 typing class. I decided to track down my old site and fire it back up. I like to think of it as "vintage", which is a word that makes pretty much anything that's past its best before date sound cool, but really I'm just too lazy to start another one. After finding the blog site and logging on, the following thought processes took place:

I remembered how my late night TV host boyfriend Craig Ferguson once said that if you are going to say (or write) something, you should ask yourself 3 questions:

1) Does this need to be said?
2) Does this need to be said by me?
3) Does this need to be said by me right now?

When debating whether or not I should start writing this blog, I asked myself those very questions and came up with these answers:

1)Not really.
2)Why not?
3)I'm not doing anything else at the moment.

After some serious reflection on these answers I knew it was a done deal. My future career as a blogger was calling to me. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before I encountered my first obstacle: Coming up with an un-stupid title.

So I'm just going to come right out and say this, before the 3 people who ever read this point it out to me: This blog's original name is totally lame town. (For a moment I toyed with the idea of calling it Lame Town). So I decided my vintage blog needed a new look and a snazzy new name. The look was easy. I selected the "simple" layout from the design section, mainly because that's likely the best word to describe who my readers will be, so that bit was done. But what to do about the name.....

5 years ago I clearly thought that "Some Brilliant Thoughts from a Random Mind" was clever and creative, but at this point in my life my level of sophistication is at an all-time high (as evidenced by my entertaining the notion of calling the blog "Lame Town")and so I decided it needed something cleverer and creativer.
I tried to come up with some titles on my own, but that proved tedious and only made me feel stupid, since all I could come up with was "Lame Town", and that was only because Holly had used the phrase in a Facebook Chat conversation 12 seconds prior. Now not only did I have Blog Title block, but I was a plagiarizer.

I had some other ideas after that. My first one was to steal a ridiculous phrase from a ridiculous celebrity, so that people who google searched said pop culture train wrecks would find themselves suddenly reading my genius commentary on the state of the world, and more specifically, my life. After discarding "It's Britney, B*tch!" and "It Was My Friend's Cocaine" I decided this was not the route to go. By then though, I had stumbled on another idea that would no doubt lead to a popularity explosion of me: Most searched words on Google.

To start this process, I searched "most searched words on Google" on Google. I figured I could tap into the "Stupid People on the Internet" demographic by calling the blog "Facebook" or "Jersey Shore", but then realized that I was still wading in the dangerous waters of Lake Plagiarism and started to reflect on the unfortunate situation of having dumb strangers who can't find Facebook without the use of Google stumbling onto my site. After that, I was pretty much left with "Boobs Sex Porn" which, although there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, wasn't the sort of site I was looking to create.

This thought process led to my sudden concern about something else. (I hope you are enjoying the guided tour of my stream of consciousness. If you ever plan to read this again, you'd better get used to it). I began to worry about the fact that, due to the nature of my job (I'm a spy), it might be a bad idea to be plastering my life all over the interwebs for the rest of the world to see. I eventually decided that this was a moot point, mainly since I have no intention of ever posting the name of my workplace, or my last name. These facts combined with my oh-so-unique first name, make it unlikely that anyone who randomly google searches me will find me.

Ultimately, my love of a good competition won out in the end. (That was redundant, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure ultimately means the same thing as in the end, but it's 12:45 in the morning so I don't even care). So, here's where things stand. Because I can't be bothered to come up with a new name for my own blog, my Facebook friends are going to do it for me. The competition will be open until next Friday, as long as I haven't forgotten by then that I even have a blog. So submit away people. I look forward to stealing your creative ideas and pretending they are my own.

The End of the Trip out West

Ok, so I just realized that it's been (AGAIN) almost a month since my last post. I'm really bad at this, apparently. So now, I have to wrack my brain to try and remember the end of my trip. But...here goes.
I arrive in Regina, after flying in on the world's smallest airplane (which by the way, I shared with a cat. Always great for the allergies). Anyway, Robyn picked me up in Regina, and thus began my road tour of the Canadian prairies. First impression of Saskatchewan: It's flat. Just like everyone always said. I've never seen that much sky at one time. It's very cool. Anyway, we make our way to Balcarres, Saskatchewan, population: 500 people. We hang out at her mom's place, get ready, then head out for our pub crawl extraordinaire. I will admit, I was a little skeptical about a pub crawl in a town of 500 people, but we solved that problem rather easily by just going to a different town for each pub. (Yes, we had a sober driver). We hit up three pubs, then call it a night. Good times had by all.
Saturday: trip to Russell, Manitoba. After, of course, stopping in a field of gutted cars on an old farm to procure a rearview mirror for Robyn's car. Yay for car part shopping in Saskatchewan. We head to Russell, party it up, and manage to still leave the next morning at 9 AM, which is pretty good, considering both Robyn's and my combined hours of sleep only equal 4 hours and 50 minutes. I drive.
Then, the border. Three words: Drug Sniffing Dog. We spend 40 minutes inside customs at the border from Manitoba to North Dakota, dressed like the dirtbags we are, while the customs officials literally go through ALL of our bags, take the panelling off inside of the car and open the hood. After escaping without getting thrown in jail, we both decide I will not complain to the customs officials about the drug-sniffing dog hair that is now in the car, since they let the dog in the car. Apparently they have no respect for people who are deathly allergic to dogs. However, my relief at being allowed to get back into the car and leave overrides my desire to complain, and besides, everyone knows you DON'T complain at customs. So I take some allergy pills and we're off. North Dakota was interesting............we saw two cars and a guy on a tractor for the first three hours. Then we stopped in Harvey. It has a gas station. Then we stopped in Fargo, just because I really wanted to, so we had McDonald's in West Fargo. Needless to say, I get pulled over by a state trooper in Fargo. His advice (after pulling us over because I had the shoulder strap of my seatbelt tucked behind me): "Oh...you girls from Saskatchewan?" (yay, Saskatchewan plates) "Um, yes sir". "Oh..well, you have to wear your seatbelts here". NICE. So that was that. In one day, we finally make it to St. Cloud, Minnesota (just one hour short of making it to Minneapolis. Boo). Oh well, anyway, true to form, I'm going to stop this here, and finish this later. Mostly for the suspense factor. Keeps life interesting.

Le Trip out West: Part Deux

OKAY. So, where was I. Oh, right. We get the campfire going, and cram ourselves under Lindsey's giant Ikea umbrella because, although we have beer, warm clothes, and s'mores, we neglected to pack any sort of rain gear, which means all of our warm clothes are getting rather wet. During the ten minute breaks from rain that periodically occur, we manage to cook some Jiffy Pop popcorn on the fire and get ready for bed. At 10, when we finally climb into our tent, it can now officially be considered a DOWNPOUR. After about an hour of Lindsey frantically whispering "WHAT'S THAT?!?" every time she sees a light or hears footsteps (it's a bear with a flashlight of course, Lins. Duh.) I decide to take up watch at the front of the tent, peering out at the campsite through the flap in the tent door. Armed with bear spray, I figure we'll be quite safe. After about five minutes of this, I get bored and go to sleep. Fast forward to:
Monday, 8:00 a.m: When we wake up we discover two things. One: that our sleeping bags and tent are DRENCHED from the rain during the night, and Two: Due to the fact that we were IN our sleeping bags, our only dry clothes are now also drenched, which, by the way, is not going to change because it is STILL raining. So, we did what any city girls in that situation would do: We packed up all the wet camping shit in a big messy pile, threw it in the trunk, got our money for the second night back and went to the Miette hotsprings to soak our aching muscles. This actually worked rather well until Lindsey fell down the stairs on our way back to the car. But, we had Dragostea Din Tei to listen to on the way back, which became our theme song. (Romanian techno is wonderful). It also kept us entertained at our campsite, when we decided to warm up in the car and all climbed in to drink beer and listen to our song, with our campsite neighbours looking rather confused as to why we were sitting in a parked car with the windows fogged up with not English techno music pumping. I think they were just jealous. ANYWAY, I digress.
The rest of the week in Edmonton kicked some ass. We rented some movies, went to some bars, I had ice cream from Marble Slab which is AMAZING. Go there next time you're in Edmonton. I also became addicted to playing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on X-Box, but that's a whole other story. Eventually, it was Friday and time to head off to the airport for the next leg of my trip which I will I get to next time.

End of August already?????

Well, it looks like I remembered this blog just in time for my once-a-month blog entry. I'm starting to see a pattern here. Damn, I need to stop doing that, because lots has happened since then, and I can't really remember all of it...or even most of it for that matter. Alright, let's see how my summarizing skills are....
Ok...well, I went to Robbie's wedding which was a lot of fun. It was awesome to see people like Rob and Pete and Kris who I hadn't seen in a long time. Of course, on the way to Toronto we definitely got stuck in the TORNADO weather and spent HOURS in traffic on the 427 and the 7....but it was still a good road trip (well,I had fun. John might have a different story). Between the wedding ceremony and the reception, we discovered that we had a little time to kill. So, after hanging out in the Lee Valley Outlet store with Rocco, John and Liz and complaining profusely the entire time, we did what most people who are classily dressed in wedding ceremony attire do: we went to the Metro Toronto Zoo and rode the Zoomobile. That's right people, go ahead and stare. Can't a girl look nice for a day out at the zoo? ANYWAY, then it was off to Canada's Wonderland to see Cara in the School of Rock Spectacular show, and might I say that girl ROCKED the show. After that, an hour line-up for the bat, and then I went on the X-treme Skyflier...the sort-of bungee jumping ride where they hook you up, hoist you up, and let you go. It was awesome, and, I was proud because I went all by myself! It was fun times, that's for sure. After that came the last week of the summer rec program at work (a little sad) the going away BBQ for John (WAY SAD. Still sad) and then my trip to ALBERTA!!! Yay! So...here is the story of my trip. So far.
Day 1: Friday. 6:15 am. My cousin Heather arrives to drive me to the airport, complete with Aspen, the kitten I am to bring with me to Edmonton for her sister Lindsey. All goes well with check-in, flights are great, and I make it to Kim's apartment in good time.
Friday 11:00 p.m. To celebrate (albeit, slightly late) my birthday, Kim, Lindsey and Kim's friends and I head off to the Armory for a great night of free drinks, dancing in really short skirts (all the girls but me, that is) free shots and free stuff I forgot at the bar.
Saturday: the day of rest. Laundry. Preparation for camping. And a wander through the last night of the Fringe Festival just off Whyte Ave. in Edmonton.
Sunday: 10:00 a.m. Begin frantic packing for Jasper camping trip. Lindsey arrives, car gets haphazardly packed and.....THEY'RE OFF. Complete with '80's mix CD that also happens to include the fat dutch kid song, which, consequently, became the theme song of the trip.
Sunday: NOON. The road trip mobile actually leaves Edmonton. After three and a half hours- THE MOUNTAINS! Despite some clouds and some showers, the scenery is beautiful, the wildlife is plentiful and the weather is warm. We check-in to Wapiti campsite, pitch the tent, have a beer and head into Jasper for dinner, which consists of the greatest pizza ever on the roof of Jasper Pizza with a spectacular view of the mountains. Unfortunately, the skies are darkening, so we head back to camp to get the fire going before the rain starts. And with that, dear, loyal readers, I will leave you.You'll have to check back next time to find out what happens next. MWAH HA HA HA HA!

Oh. Right. I have a blog.

Oops. Kind of forgot about this for awhile. A perfect of example of my usual week-long enthusiasm for something before I get bored and wander off. But I came back! So there. Anyway, it's Monday night, and I am taking some time off from looking up random musical activities to do with the kids at camp for the next four weeks. AH! Highlights thus far: weekly karaoke sessions (including Leah's and my particularily enthusiastic performances of Downtown) spending an entire day dressed as The Paper Bag Princess (Hallowe'en Day, folks) and setting what could quite possibly have been the world record for putting up AND decorating an artificial Christmas tree in July. Oh yeah, and getting paid to eat popcorn and watch Elf. Oh Will Ferrell, what would we laugh at if we didn't have you? Anyway, so that's my life. I'm dogsitting and enjoying the luxury of having a car, unfortunately only until Saturday when I will have to return said dog, said car and the house that they both belong to to their rightful owners. Oh well. It was fun to have a car for a couple weeks. It's official; I can now drive a standard without stalling. Watch, now I'll stall on my way out of the driveway tomorrow morning. Well, I'm off to have a shower and read the newest book I've started since completing the latest Harry Potter. IT'S SAD AT THE END......READERS BEWARE. And no, I will not tell you who kicks the bucket in this one. Later ;)

GRE scores, lawn darts, house painting and driving a stick.

Hmm. After the oh-so-succinct summary of the past two days that I have given in the title of this post, I feel as if I have nothing to actually write. Meh. I'll elaborate. So, yesterday, after a full day of prep work for the first day of the summer rec program (which was today) I went to do some more painting at John's place then had a couple beers and some dinner at Montana's. All in all, a fun-filled day. To top it off, when I got home and checked my mail, I had finally received my GRE subject test scores. YAY!!!! And the people rejoiced. At least, I did. So I opened them. And I saw that they were good. At least, I think they are. I'm sure I'll find out when I try to use them to get into grad school.
Today was DAY 1 of the summer rec program at work: THE BBQ!!!!! Basically, the day consisted of: running the lawn darts event, standing in the rain, getting soaked standing in the POURING rain, getting a brief orientation at the other facility on the campus, helping with a BBQ while standing in the rain, then getting a sunburn running the lawn darts event. Not in the rain. Oh yeah, and I jumped in the bouncy castle. THEN, I went and did some more housepainting at John's until we decided that it was time I learned how to drive a standard. Which, apparently I have some sort of mental block for, because I just CAN'T get it. Oh well. He told me that I was thinking too much; that I was too smart to learn to drive stick. I told him, "I know you're humouring me, but thanks." Oh well, driving lesson #2 tomorrow, so we shall see how that goes. So, that's pretty much it. I'm sitting here now, still covered in paint, about to plan my music activities for the rest of the week ( and by rest of the week I mean tomorrow and Thursday; that's right, get a three day weekend EVERY WEEK ;) I need to figure out from someone how to add links to other people's blogs on my site so that I can add Paul and Kristen and Courtney and Genevieve and anyone else who would like their affiliation with me to be essentially a matter of public record. Anyone?......Anyone?......Bueller.......Sorry. Well, off to plan some activities, watch some CSI showcase style and get some sleep.

Happy Canada Day!

OH CANADA!!!!
And so on and so forth. So far the nation's birthday has been relatively uneventful. I had band rehearsal in Kingsville with some of Eclipse to work on some new stuff, then just watched some Dr. Phil (YES, I'm addicted. Courtney, you feel my pain, right??) Well, I'm finishing this right now at 3 AM. After a fun filled night at Big Dicks, followed by karaoke at Patty O's and then capped off with a drink at Papa Cheney's. So, it was fun. Saw Myles tonight, which was totally random. It was definitely nice to see him again. Anyway, right now Lindsey and I are just finishing our McDonald's and heading to bed, so this is going to be it for my blogging for this evening. Happy Birthday Canada!

Bored on a rainy day....

So, I decided to check out this blog thing that everybody seems to be doing. When I first heard about it I thought: "why would I do that; my life isn't anywhere NEAR that interesting that anyone would want to read about it every day." But.....then I thought: "THEY don't know that." So...before I start telling you all about my promotion to senior editor at VOGUE magazine and my new waterfront villa in Spain.....yeah..right. I do have an apartment in Windsor though, that if I walk four blocks I can see the Detroit River, so it's kind of waterfront property. ANYWAY....Courtney, the Blog Stalker (self-proclaimed, I believe) was the one who told me to check out some of the blogs our friends had, and lo and behold, I discovered this intricate little world of...well, basically reading other people's journals. So of course, I was in. Naturally, spying on other people's lives and wondering why theirs are more interesting than mine is one of my favourite pastimes. So, here it is. My contribution to the world of blogging.

So...today is really boring. I picked up my police clearance and paid my union dues. 170 DOLLARS??!?!?! Damn musician's union. It's really funny; I've probably spent like, $500 plus on all these new 'jobs' I'm starting (the band,the day camp, respite)....I better start seeing some payback pretty damn soon. So yeah. Heading off to watch some Dr. Phil in about ten minutes, followed by some massive apartment cleaning, and then some beers at Charly's with Jennifer and her sister and hopefully Allison. Wow. I'm hoping tomorrow will be Productivity Day, which I have a feeling it won't be seeing as it's also Canada Day. But who really knows.
Later