Can You Hear Me Now?

So my New Best Friend Rob Szabo just left a few hours ago. Where do I begin?? We had such an awesome time.

Before I left for the Pub on Saturday, I made sure I had a few groceries around so I could at least feed him breakfast in the morning. I figured he drank coffee, and maybe he likes milk in his coffee, and I bought Mini-Wheats cereal (Maple!) because who doesn’t love Mini-Wheats? So even though I never use milk and prefer Vanilla Rice Dream on cereal, I figured I should get a litre of milk justincase. I also bought a loaf of whole grain wheat bread for toast.

Rob? Doesn’t drink coffee. Doesn’t eat wheat, dairy or sugar (allergies)… uses Vanilla Rice Dream on his wheat free organic cereal and his breakfast consists of slices of fresh pineapple, and fresh lemon juice squeezed into hot water.

Well, I sort of had him pegged wrong when I pictured a smoking coffee drinker. Not even close, he’s more the Freaky Health Nut variety hehe!

Actually, it was great – he would make a perfect room mate for me because he eats like I need to! I’m going to start stocking up on pineapple and lemons. But no way in hell will I be going without my coffee anytime soon.

His show was amazing. He played a solo set for over an hour, but it still wasn’t enough for me (he ended with “I Live For The Summer” and it was WICK.ED.). A little later on I told asked him nicely to go back up and play a few more. He obliged, and the few of us left in the Pub really enjoyed it, one couple even danced.

Afterwards, he hung out with me, Michelle, Jay and Katrina and chatted for awhile.

When we left, I directed him to the Humpty’s near my place, because he was starving and the Pub’s kitchen was closed. For the first time at that Humpty’s, I really enjoyed what I ordered. I recommend the Tex-Mex Wrap with Spicy Fries.

We left there at 3:00 a.m. (”you don’t even look the least bit tired” Rob told me; must have been the “Woo Hoo, Rob is Really Here!” Adrenaline) and got to my apartment where I introduced him to my kittens… “oh wow, you weren’t kidding, they ARE cute!!” Well, what did he think I was, just some typical “my kittens are perfect” mother? Ha. Mine ARE.

At the moment I am typing this I can’t see the screen because Pita’s head is following the letters.

Oh, now she has switched to following my fingers on the keyboard. The whole jumping-up-on-the-desk thing is new to her and could be trouble for me.

Anyway, Rob set himself up on the couch and somehow among kittens racing around and playing all night we managed to get some sleep. The next morning was a lazy one, we took our time getting ourselves up and ready. I showed him the Polyjesters DVD, which he thoroughly enjoyed, of course. We finally got our arses out the door for our drive through the mountains around 3:00. First stop, Safeway, so we could buy some pineapple, sesame snaps, trail mix and assorted munchies for the trip. And so Donna could visit Starbuck’s.

We decided we would head out to Kananaskis, as Rob had never been there and it had been years for me (and now that I was there yesterday, I think I was remembering some other place, because that wasn’t my memory). We spent all of 10 minutes there. I honestly thought it was a town, not just a plate of concrete with a little waterfall, surrounded by a hotel and a mini-mall. I did, however, manage to buy myself a gorgeous dark blue zippered hoodie type fleece jacket when Rob left me ALONE IN A MALL for one minute. His fault, totally, he should known better. Not that I have enough of those or anything… but I don’t have THAT colour of blue, and I don’t have one that zippers all the way down.

Presenting… Kananaskis!

Rob and I in Kananaskis

We took off for Canmore instead. Drove around a bit, and decided on the Drake for dinner, where we sat on their patio and stared at mountains in awe.

Awe.

Rob and I on the Drake Inn’s patio

After the good eats, Rob kindly allowed for a stop at a coffee shop so I could get another latte. He was very agreeable to my coffee fetish, didn’t complain one bit.

We got back here around 9:30, after another stop at Safeway so Rob could buy his pineapple, lemon and cereal. We just hung out, played with kitties, and listened to music. Talked and talked and talked. Bedtime was around midnight; Chet Baker is pretty relaxing.

Piles of my CDs after Rob and I were through with them.

This morning was spent just hanging around here until he had to leave around 1:30. More music, talking and playing with kitties. Rob loved Pita and Pepper and at one point I thought he was going to faint when he had both of them curled up near him. It’s kind of hard to take.

Rob experiences Cuteness Overload and almost dies.

After huge hugs and promises of keeping in touch and hanging out again someday, he was off. What an awesome guy he is, a really, truly great person. I enjoyed hanging out with him so much and we really got along. I can’t wait to see him again! He had fun too, it’s nice to be able to take some time to just chill in the mountains and hang out for a day or two after you’ve been busy touring and stuff. A nice break for him, and I didn’t turn out to reveal any be a crazy psycho (we hadn’t met in person before), so I am sure he was relieved about that. Hehe

Okay, now I am off to spend the evening with Ronley Teper. I’ll report back soon!

Well, Toronto topped off what was already a busy month for me while feeling pretty rough, and threw me over the edge… I have completely overdone it in the past month and am paying for it now big time!! I haven’t had a relapse this bad in years.

I am pretty much sentenced to bed rest for awhile until I can get back on my feet, who knows when that will be, hopefully in a couple weeks. I won’t be online except to check email so I apologize to my MSN buddies, but until I get a laptop I can chat on from my bed (or La-Z-Boy) I won’t be on the computer much!

I had an absolute blast in Toronto though, and will write all about it as soon as I’m able. In the meantime, you can read this entry over in Emma’s blog for a few of the top highlights and see how awesome that girl looks.

So… I guess I’m not quite “back” yet as per my last entry (hahaha Emma’s comment!) but I will be soon. Sometimes I forget I just can’t do things at the pace other people can and I need to slowwww down. So if I won’t take care of myself on my own, then my body will force me to like it is now. Argh.

The worst part about this bed rest sentence is that I can’t go see the Polyjesters this weekend!!

I figured I should do an update before I leave for Toronto and come home with pages and pages to write about!

As per my last entry, I do believe Shawna called me shortly after that. We went for a late lunch at the Cheesecake Cafe and since the night ended with pigging out at Boston Pizza, I can pretty much say that last weekend was NOT a Weight Watchers’ weekend! The following day was her last day here, and our friend Kim came in from Medicine Hat. Originally she was going to come in Friday, but when we discovered the Polyjesters were playing out in their home town of Didsbury, we changed plans at the last minute so that Kim would come out Saturday and we’d all go to the show, about an hour North of Calgary. Jason got Kim and I a cheap room at the Inn for $30 and Shawna took her own rental car because she wasn’t staying the night; she had her hotel in Calgary and her flight left early in the morning. Read the rest of this entry »

I got home last night from the most fabulous weekend in Medicine Hat! My friend Kim lives there and since the Polyjesters were doing a show for the Medicine Hat Folk Club on Friday night, I took that as the perfect opportunity to see them along with Kim and hang out with her for a couple days. When Kim and I were discussing the show and my coming out there a few weeks ago, she told me she’d cook if the guys wanted to come for dinner. Score! It was perfect, because it was also Jason’s birthday on Saturday so I billed it as his pre-birthday dinner, tempted them with talk of homemade lasagna, caesar salad, garlic bread and red wine, and made some birthday brownies. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I have finally decided to finish off my Montreal entry so I can get back to posting about my oh-so-exciting day-to-day existence. I have been deathly ill for the past few days, I don’t know where it came from or how, but I imagine my lack of taking my usual supplements and stress from work overload has something to do with it. Of course now I am several days behind in work because my deathly illness has made it impossible to do more than lift my arm to click the remote, but now that I feel a bit of strength coming back I’d still rather do this than look at numbers. Work will… get done soon.

So, Emma and I crash in our hotel room Friday night after a very long and exciting day, only to wake up around 9:00 so we can get up, shower/dress/eat/pack etc. and be ready to check out of the hotel in time. We ate our wholesome croissant (I think I actually had two that day, gotta get my money’s worth) and juice and I managed to pack all my shopping from the day before into my suitcase. It was about 11:00 and we didn’t have to check out until noon, but we decided to anyway because the Hyatt was just a more exciting place to be than the Econo-Lodge. We now knew we could leave our bags behind that curtain upstairs and that even though the first performer (Luke Doucet) didn’t start until 1:50 p.m., we’d probably see some people. Their lobby was pretty hoppin’.

So we took a cab to the Hyatt, dropped our bags behind the curtain on the 11th floor, and went back down to the lobby. I remember seeing Jeremy Fisher hanging about and approaching him to tell him how much I enjoyed seeing him the night before (which I am quite certain made his day). I think it was around this time, maybe taking the elevator from the front doors to the main lobby, that we were sharing it with a couple members of The Bills (that we had seen on Thursday night). We were telling them how much we enjoyed them and I made a comment about Marc Atkinson being some kind of a God, not realizing he was also on that elevator. Heh. That cracks me up. He smiled and acknowleged my comment as I said “oh, hello” and the bass player noted “that’s a good thing to say right now!”

We sat in the lobby and made ourselves comfortable while we waited for magic to happen. Hee! It wasn’t long before Arlene Bishop and her husband/my old friend Blair Packham arrived; when Blair saw me he said “WHAT are you doing here?!?!” (He had no clue I was going to be there, even though I knew in advance I was coming to see Arlene I figured I’d surprise them). We hugged and chatted a bit. Arlene gave Emma and I a copy of her French Phrase booklet she had created especially for this occasion:

She’s a clever lady, that one!

I was telling Blair how I didn’t know this conference was happening when I first booked my flight, and how it just seems that when I plan a trip somewhere, my favourite musicians end up having a show there. Arlene quipped “will you travel somewhere warm?” Ha ha I mentioned how excited I was to see Danny Michel the night before. “Danny was here?” Blair asked (they’re good friends and play together a lot). I explained how we were dead tired and didn’t stay after he finished his last song, and that I really wanted to meet him and talk to him but we were just too tired to stay. “Oh, he’s disappointing”, Arlene said. “He’s great on stage; but off… and she shook her head shamefully and disapprovingly . Ha ha ha ha ha now I know I really want to meet him!

The four of us headed up to the Beaver Suite to see if there was any action there yet. There wasn’t. The doors were still closed and no sound coming from behind them. Along came Ben Sures, another artist from the conference and friend of Blair and Arlene’s. We all chatted a bit and Blair, seeing my glasses, asked me if I had one of those cloth wipey thingys to clean glasses. I reached in my purse and pulled out my yellow cloth, all neatly folded in its plastic compartment and handed it to him. Blair was impressed by the clean state of my cloth, and when Ben commented Blair said “yes, Donna is my official cloth glasses cleaner handler, I bring her on tour with me… Read the rest of this entry »

Friday morning we got up earlier than we would have liked to, because the FREE Continental Breakfast included in the cost of the hotel was from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. and I don’t think wandering out to the lobby in flannels is acceptable. We showered and dressed and I got a head start on my coffee from the little pot in the room, and prepared to stuff ourselves (well, I did, because I thought I knew what a Continental Breakfast consisted of) with a variety of muffins, danishes, fruit, etc. When we got to the breakfast area at about 9:45 the only thing we saw was a coffee pot and apple/orange juice dispenser, and a counter with crumbs and little peanut butter and jam packets. I went to the front desk to advise them there was no breakfast left, and she shockingly said “no croissants??” and scurried off. She came back and re-filled the croissant tray. THE CROISSANT TRAY. That was the extent of our Continental Breakfast: croissants. No choices, no fruit. Welcome to Econo-Lodge!!

So we ate a croissant and juice before heading out for our big day at the downtown Eaton Centre. I knew I wanted to go “somewhere” on St. Catherines, and I checked in advance to see if there was a major mall there that would allow me to borrow a wheelchair for the day. No problem, and we could leave the mall with it to wander around if we wanted to (but we never did, it was cold out and Eaton Centre is big enough!) So I left my walker at the customer service desk and traded it in for a wheelchair and Emma pushed me all over that place. I spent a fair bit of money that day, lots of shower gels on sale and body butters to be had. I bought a cute square glass thingy that has a sun sort of floating inside, and you put it on a base that lights up and changes colours, and it is very cool. We went into Old Navy where they always have grrrrreat sales (but I rarely get to one in Calgary) and I bought a few pairs of flannel pajama bottoms for $3.97 and Emma bought THREE hoodies that were about $6 each. Woo hoo!

Emma thought it was strange that I wanted to take pictures of the phone booths, but I thought they were cool.

The mall

Emma took this cool one

Me in my new pink sweater

We went to the food court to have lunch, and I came very close to hitting Edo Japan because that’s just what I do, but I decided I should try something different, some vendor we don’t have in Calgary. There was a Thai place, which I thought to be very cool, and they had a curry dish, and I love me some curry, and really, how often do I get curry?? So I ate the hot curry chicken dish which fulfilled my curry consumption needs, for a couple weeks anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday morning when I woke up (Feb. 24th, we are back in Montreal now), Lynn was already back from an early morning class and brought fresh Montreal bagels with her for breakfast! So we had yummy bagels before getting dressed to head over to Fairview Mall in Pointe Claire… Emma was getting new clothes! We didn’t have a lot of time because Lynn had to be back at work that afternoon, so we just hit a couple stores. Emma found a few great things to buy and I got myself a pink sweater that was on sale, too good to pass up! On the way home we went through Tim Horton’s Drive Thru ’cause we were really short on time. Back home Emma and I ate while Lynn whizzed around getting ready to leave for work again.

Emma and I got ready for our big night out and she packed a bag (and I re-packed whatever I had messed up in less than 24 hours), and we called a cab to be at Emma’s sister-in-law’s work by 4:45. Trish was kind enough to offer us a ride to the hotel downtown, saving me at least a $50 cab fare. She was very sweet and friendly, and amazingly everything fit in her car, too. Seeing my walker, she asked me if I had ever been to the hotel we were staying at, and when I said no, she warned me that it was on a very steep road. St. Dominique slopes at an approximately 180° angle (give or take). Crazy! I treaded very carefully from the road to the door every time… if it had been icy on the sidewalk, I would have been a goner! Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, February 23rd I boarded a plane early in the morning, heading for Montreal to meet my favourite 15 year old and good friend Emma live and in person for the first time, and hang out with her for a few days. We had all sorts of fun plans that included a couple nights in a hotel downtown while we took in some live music. At the time neither of us were aware of what a completely overwhelmingly amazing few days that would turn out to be!! Read the rest of this entry »