For My Special Lady

What was supposed to be a weekend of juvenile and hair-brained (thank you, thesaurus) business with my older sister, Sis, in Calgary, turned out to be a weekend of death and mourning business with my entire family in Manitoba. On February 5, my Granny of 84 years passed and I was thus summoned home to join in the rite of passage. Don’t let that fool you though…there were definitely a bag of laughs involved – just the way Granny would have wanted it.

It began on Thursday when Jean drove me to the airport along with my precious – a new camera! She lazed in my bed while I packed and off we went.








No getting away from work.

So we went up, up, and away.















Can you tell I got a new camera? I snapped every .3 seconds or so. I’m in love.



Once landed in Calgary, I met up with my sister, met her nice boyfriend Francis. We had dinner at the airport Kelsey’s. Ick. After that, she hopped on the plane with me and we headed further into the bowels of Canada, arriving in Winnipeg close to midnight.




B was happy to see me.


Aw, they both have the Suri Cruise haircut!

Due to Sis claiming MY bedroom, I was relegated to the rec room. You can see my luxury digs here:




Yes, that is a ‘Tom and Huck’ poster (RIP Brad). Yes, my coatrack is the arm of a treadmill. No, those curtains haven’t been replaced since 1977. Neither has the rug.

Friday was the viewing/family night at the funeral home which was rather hard to take. We sang(!?) and chatted about the funny moments of Granny. I took a picture of her in her casket, but I won’t post it here because frankly, I think I deleted it and I can’t really bear to look at it myself. Plus, chances are you don’t know her anyways.





The evening continued on with food and festivities because jamming down junk food “would have been what Grandma wanted”...seriously. Any excuse. We are shameless.














I love food pictures.



The next day was the funeral with my role as a pallbearer. It was a lovely tribute save for the guy who sprung a last-minute slideshow on the crowd and then proceeded to fiddle with it for five minutes before giving up and deciding it wouldn’t work. Thanks for the interruption in continuity buddy.

It was insanely cold with temps hovering around -40C…which I don’t see often. I tried to venture outside to see if anything decent could be captured with my new photographic friend.








(Look familiar?)





We also received gobs of food at our house….mmmmmm.









After a fairly uneventful Sunday, our fam got together once again for some action at the local Chinese restaurant.




As you can see, the décor is also rather classy here…almost as much as our indigenous-themed place last week.


Stay strong Grampy.




”You see, we are good with chopsticks because we live in BC together.” Um……….

Monday arrived and it was time for my to bring my sorry carcass back to BC so I can work a bit and then head on more holidays. Life is rough.





Well, thar she blows. In several hours, I will be heading off to London and hopefully have interesting things to write about on here. Tuesday I am in Paris; I am going to do some segway riding. I’ll be back in Canada after a while, so I’ll see you then…?

RIP Granny Ho-Heart.

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This and That

Well…all I have for you is some randommings. Just been up to this and that, and some of that and this. What about you?

In January, I ate some things. One of those things happened to be a spectacularly prepared meal (thank you Jean) of shabushabu.







Dericious! After we had our fill, we continued our night with several rounds of our favorite hero, that of the guitar variety.

That same weekend, a bunch of us Altona crew plus one non-MB’er headed up to the hills of West Van to the Salmon House for some indigenous-themed décor and chatter.






Aw, I think she’s gonna hate me for putting this one up, but it’s the only shot I got of them that night…


Djds and Shimasu (Chris)

After experiencing some mushroom ravioli, beef tenderloin, salmon (natch), and prawns, we headed back to the Giesbrecht/Stockman mansion for some coffee cake and Germany-home-brewed schnapps. It tasted like whiskey.


Jen and her motor(-boating-son-of-a) slippers.




Rosy cheeks! Tea with schnapps!


That’s the schnapps looking at you. (Enough schnapps schpeak already.) Boo. Lame.


Hi.

The following week, I headed out again to Vancouver to dine out at Aqua Riva with my friend Jean.







Um, that’s it. I told you it was random. I have more to write about my spontaneous trip to Manitoba last weekend, but I’ll save that for another blog upcoming…

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Hyatt's Next Top Models

A few weeks ago, as Jean put it, we went into Vancouver to “…have fun. Go to Konbiniya, look stylish, and pretend to be rich while hanging out in lavish surroundings.” Since we are (or like to pretend to be) rich B’s, we promptly booked a room at the Hyatt Regency and drove in Jean’s 1985 Jetta to our weekend of pomp and prestige.

After a delicious dinner at Kintaro for a steaming hot and very delicious bowl of ramen (along with longing gazes at the cute Japanese boy who cooks noodles there), we headed to the Hyatt, only to drive around the block several times to find the parkade since our weekend of pomp and prestige didn’t include a budget for valet. After checking in, we rode up to the 15th floor of 32 total floors (no 13th, so technically, 31)







The television made a “bloopity beep” noise when turning on and a “bleepity bloop” noise when turning off. Each bed had approximately 20 pillows each, so there was a quite a pile of pillows on the floor when sleeping because I’m poor and only use one.



After darting around the downtown (seriously, running) in search of Kernels popcorn, we decided that an evening swim (or lounge) in the rooftop hottub was in order.









After a luxurious soak and some chatting about traveling to Costa Rica, Scotland and Japan, we packed it in and prepped for our next big outing.


Our view from the 15th floor. No big deal. It would have been even less of a big deal if we were up on 32.


The lobby

Our next stop was the high-end boutique called Konbiniya. (English translation = Japanese convenience store) This store is located on the far end of trendy Robson Street. We perused the wares and I ended up renting a Japanese DVD starring the exquisite male that is Ryuhei Matsuda. We also ate crepes.






The store is so convenient that they have karaoke on the second floor, for that impulse karaoke singer in all of us!




Waiting for crepes behind a gaggle of Korean boys








Our high-end lodgings



Jean had to work the next morning, so we called it a night. She left before I was even out of bed in the morning, so I spent the next few hours lounging about and hit up the stores for a bit more shopping.


Our daytime view






The Green Arrow’s apartment on Smallville. I used to get my hair cut in this building.

When I went down to the lobby to checkout, I noticed a large black man in a suit with an earpiece hangin’ tough near the concierge. I proceeded to the counter and said, “Hi. My friend may have…” and the ladies at the counter snapped “Yes!” and snatched the room key out of my hand. It was a nice snap and sntach, but I was somewhat surprised. I said, “Is that it?” And they said, “Yes!” Okay. It seemed as though they wanted me to leave quickly. They didn’t ask my name, my room number, to pay, nothing. I hadn’t seen either of them at check-in either, so they didn’t know who I was. Several days later in the paper, I saw pictures of Jennifer Aniston coming out of the Hyatt. Hm.

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