Gatineau Park, Québec, on Thanksgiving weekend
Playing Trivial Pursuit with my brothers and sisters at home at Christmas
Okay, this is going to be short, but I just realized I hadn't posted in here for a week, and thought I should at least say hello! I got my Season 3 Smallville DVDs today, so I've begun my ritual of watching 2 episodes a day again, for the next week and a half or so, anyway.
Tomorrow I am going to a concert of Songs for a New World, and it turns out Karen and Gill are going too, so we can all go together!
Plans for Russia continue to go well. I am booked at the hostel in Moscow, have finally figured out which train(s) to take between Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I got my tickets for worlds on Friday! I am sitting in the third row!! So you'll all have to watch for me on TV. :-)
My swimming goggles broke on Wednesday, so yesterday Peggy and I went to Walmart to replace them, and to buy a new bathing suit while I was at it, as mine has holes in it since I use it so much. Well, not only was Walmart out of goggles, but we discovered that buying a one-piece bathing suit in a regular size in the winter is not easy. They had tons of plus-size ones, and tons of bikinis, and about three regular one-piece suits. So I bought one of the three, since I really just need it for swimming in my building. And then today I found goggles at the drug store, so hopefully tomorrow I can actually get back in the pool.
Also at the drug store, I picked up some sleeping pills to try to help me actually get a good night's sleep - I'm going to take one shortly, so we'll see how it goes. This past week I have tried sleeping with a mask on, on the floor in my kitchen, and even in my closet! Nothing helps.
Speaking of that, I should probably head to bed pretty soon. I'll try to do a better post soon. In the meantime, you can check out the travel section of my photo album - I've been working on getting those albums up, and should actually have the full Scotland album done within the next week or so - and it only took me 5 months! :-)
Here's a couple of other pictures to tide you over:
Playing Trivial Pursuit with my brothers and sisters at home at Christmas
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!
I am sooooooooooo happy! Jeff Buttle is the new Canadian men's figure skating champion!!! What a fantastic skate! I was so nervous all day about it, because he really didn't skate well in the short program, but then he was smiling before he started, and he gave a little smile right before his first combo, and I knew it was going to be alright. I was jumping up and down at the end. :-) Can you imagine what I'm going to be like in Moscow if he skates like that?? Well, I'm going to be a nervous wreck before the event no matter what, that's for sure. But he is totally on track for a medal this year, and I am so, so, so happy for him.
I am also taking suggestions for something clever to put on a sign for Jeff at World's, so if you can come up with something, please let me know!
Joannie Rochette's skate was also brilliant to win the women's competition. If she skates like that, I truly think she has a chance at medalling too - how amazing would that be??
So I have paid for my tickets to Worlds now, and based on the speed with which other people have been receiving their tickets, should hopefully have them sometime next week. They were, when all is said and done, ridiculously expensive, but I had to reason, how often do I attend the World Figure Skating Championships in Moscow? It should be a wonderful week of skating, and I should have great seats for it, so I'm sure it will be worth it.
Other news? Not much, really. I dropped off my application for my Russian tourist visa, so hopefully that will all go smoothly, and I should be able to pick it up in two weeks. Tomorrow is Susan's birthday, so yesterday a group of us at work went out for lunch, which was fun. There are a few pictures I got back, of that and other things, but I'm feeling too lazy to scan them at the moment, so maybe tomorrow. I was supposed to go out tonight with some friends, but it snowed and snowed all day long, so we decided to cancel. It was much too cold to go skating at lunch for most of last week, but next week should be much better. I've even got a little group from the office together for that, which is fun! Zorana has promised to come along and make a video of my attempted Axel with her digital camera, so that I can see exactly what I'm doing wrong. I passed both the insurance exams that I wrote in December, thank goodness.
Tomorrow I need to do laundry and clean my apartment. It's going to be February in no time at all here - I have a feeling this entire year is just going to fly!
So it's not even 7 a.m., and I'm already totally ready for work. This is because I got up at 5:30 to call Moscow! :-) I called the ticket agency about my Worlds tickets, and they confirmed that, yes, they have my order, but they never sent me an invoice. So now they are going to send the invoice so that I can pay them. Which I had hoped they were going to do by email, but I haven't got it yet, so maybe they are sending it by mail? :-( I don't know. They also gave me the option of just paying in cash when I arrive in Moscow. But that's not until the day Worlds start! Do they really just let people order tickets and assume they're going to show up and pay for them?? Can you imagine if people did that here?? Anyway, it took a while to get someone on the phone who could understand me. But I know that was easy compared to some situations I'm going to face when I get there! :-)
Brenda and I went to see Take Me Out on Monday night, and it was fantastic!! I highly recommend it. The cast was great - Thom Allison continues to impress me, I'm so looking forward to his Wolf/Prince in Into the Woods this summer. I wasn't really prepared for the total nudity involved in the shower scenes, but other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.
I don't know if I mentioned either that I did pick up a ticket for Wicked here in Toronto - a group of us from work are going and sitting in the cheap seats. :-) That's the beginning of April, once I'm back from Russia, so I'll be looking forward to that!
And speaking of theatre and Russia, I am trying desperately to find out if anything's playing while I'm there, but am having no luck finding any information online. So I guess I'll have to wait until I get there? My options are pretty limited in Moscow, since Worlds will be taking up almost all my evenings. I could swing a Wednesday matinee or possibly Sunday night, but I was also hoping to see the Bolshoi while I'm there. And St. Petersburg, I don't know if they have any shows there either! Perhaps I should start emailing some of the Russian people who have posted in my theatre site guestbook. :-)
Oh, I just received my invoice for Worlds! Perfect! Let me go look at it... oh my goodness! It's 457 Euro!!!! Yikes! That's about $200 more than I was expecting... why is that? Oh, there's a 77 Euro charge for ordering from Canada. Lovely. Well, at least I actually got Category I tickets. I'd heard they were being reserved for dignitaries and stuff. They should be great. Here's a map of the rink... the Category I tickets are the orange ones. So watch for me on TV! :-) And I'm hoping I can sell my tickets for the mens and ladies qualification rounds, since I really don't need to see the long programs twice, and I'd rather spend that time exploring Moscow. Wow. 457 Euro. That's insane.
My apologies for that stream-of-consciousness paragraph. :-) I better head off to work now, if it's not snowing too much I'll take the scenic route.
I am having so much trouble sleeping lately! I don't know what it is, but I wake up constantly during the night, and am therefore exhausted all day long. Last night I tried these herbal bath salts my mother gave me, and actually managed to sleep for 5 hours straight, which is way better than I have been doing! But it's still not nearly enough. I think Tiger is actually part of the problem, since every time I wake up, I have to move him over so I can get comfortable. It would appear I need either a larger bed or a smaller cat. ;-)
I was especially disappointed to wake up last night, since I was having the most interesting dream, where I was married to a Russian terrorist, and he was going to kill me, but Jack Bristow came and saved me! Mmmmm.... Victor Garber....
This week has been busy with work, as usual. I am actually trying to find a part-time job for after work, but I want something fairly easy - basically, I want a data entry job, where I don't have to think about anything! :-) I actually found one that was perfect, and applied, but I haven't heard anything yet.
Until then, I've been spending some of my spare time at the outdoor rink down the street. I've been having fun with my jumps - the Axel is still not working, but my lutzes are better than they've been in years! I've even landed a couple of pretty nice lutz-loop combos. And on Monday, I was the only one on the ice, so I even got to do some spirals and flying camel spins, and other things I usually don't do on a public rink. It was great!
On a further skating note, I was very shocked and saddened to hear about Angela Nikidinov's mother, who was killed in a car accident at the U.S. championships. Best wishes to her and all her family.
I've booked my hostel in St. Petersburg! It's a little more than I was hoping to spend, but it is a fantastic central location, just off Nevsky Prospekt. Zorana is also prodding me into learning the Cyrillic alphabet, and I've learned exactly four Russian words so far - "yes", "no", "please" and "thank you". Now if I can just master "I don't understand" and "Do you speak English", I should be pretty much set! :-)
This weekend, I am planning on relaxing and not doing much of anything. :-) Hope you all have a good one!
Hard to believe it is already a week into 2005! My time at home went really well, though quickly as usual! There was a lot of driving to visit people, and a lot of visiting, and not a lot of sitting around and relaxing! So I've been pretty lazy since I got home, but today I am going to get motivated and put away all my Christmas stuff around the apartment (the office is done already), and go swimming, and get some work done before I go out with some girls from the office tonight.
I didn't say anything in my last entry about the tsunami, since there isn't really much you can say about such a terrible tragedy. As some of you know already, one of my cousins was in Thailand when it happened, but luckily was still in Bangkok when it actually hit, although she flew to Phuket later that day. She sent some pictures that she took there - not really the kind of vacation she had in mind, I'm sure!
I am starting to get a little more organized for my Russia trip, and definitely pretty excited about it, as I'm sure you can tell from the new layout. I've chosen a hostel in St. Petersburg, and am pretty sure about the one in Moscow. I need to get my visa pretty quickly here, and book my trains. I also still haven't heard ANYTHING about tickets for worlds, which is a little distressing. I've emailed the official committee, but no response yet.
The Alias season premiere finally happened this week, and after such a long wait, I was a little disappointed with it. Hopefully it will build from here, but they seemed to just want to wrap up a bunch of loose ends and start over with something different, but it wasn't achieved in nearly as brilliant a way as when they brought down SD-6.
Okay, the redesign of this site has probably wasted enough of my time for today. Happy New Year everyone!