Home Owners!

That's right, Brad and I are no bona fide home owner! And with a lot of renovations on our plate. Here is a selection of photos from the past four days.
(Can I also point out that it was 40 degrees yesterday?)

Kitchen: yes, that IS harvest gold
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Living Room: The carpet is GOING
~ Bathroom: pre-Brad
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Bathroom: post-Brad
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Bathroom: Today...no fixtures...WHERE DO I PEE?!
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Brad and I feeling gross after a day of sweat, dust, sanding, and painting. EWWWW! (also, I look scarey and goth! EEE)

Who's All Grown Up Now?

Apparently that's me! This week has been incredibly...well...it's been incredible. To start, on Tuesday, I had a meeting with the General Manager who made me News Director (in training for a few months, just to make sure I like the responsibilities and can handle it all). That means I am management! I have staff! I have people! I have to go to department head meetings! It's surreal at this point actually, but I'm really excited. It's strange to think that I've only been in the industry for two years and I'm management now. Not to mention the morning news shift as well, which I love doing.

Wednesday was the official 25th Birthday. It's strange to think that I'm "no longer early-twenties" (thanks Kenny for pointing that out...jerk). It was a great day though. Work was fun, then Ryan and I went for a beer and some spanokopita (or skank-o-topia as he called it) for a couple of hours. Had a great time and heard some fantastic stories. Then I came home and relaxed and watched daytime tv before Brad came home and I opened prezzies. He gave me season three of Animaniacs (ok, maybe not so grown up afterall), and A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore. Mum and Da gave me some moneys (which are already being distributed fairly among vaious merchants of the Swift Current Mall), and a pair of Spongs...which are quite possibly the most comfortable footwear in the world! Mare gave me a book The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, a box of my favorite tea (tazo Passion), and the Hayley Sales CD. She told me she was disappointed when she read my blog and found out I had bought it on iTunes. But I told her it's a great gift because, well, I love the CD, and now I have a full copy of it. Even more ironic though, is that as soon as I had downloaded the tracks, I burnt a CD copy to give her as an additional birthday present! I was going to give it to her because I figured there was no way she would have heard of her, and she bought it for me because she figured there was no way I would have heard of her! Just goes to show we're really on the same plain with each other!

Next, Brad and I went for supper at the Akropol and I had a couple glasses of wine and felt a little tipsy. We came home and I watched the season finale of Canada's Next Top Model. (Rebecca won, as we had all predicted)

Yesterday one of the company's suits was in town, so all of the department heads went for drinks and appy's. It was my first encounter on the management scale and was quite a lot of fun. Getting to be all grown up...one more reason why, but that will come later, with pictures! Yay!

PS...

We have now received 7 wedding invitations this year...and one for next year. Wedding season marches on with a vengeance.

A Day At the Beach

Yesterday was the first day of a slow pitch tournament at Lac Pelletier, which most of my friends were registered in. So Brad and I got up at 6:45 (!) yesterday morning, got dress, loaded up the cooler with 30 bottles of water and drove out to the lake. I promptly laid out my towel, popped in some headphones (currently loving Hayley Sales 'Sunseed' album) while everyone else promptly cracked open the first beers of the day, and started their game. Due to a team dropping out and the reorganization of the schedule, the team (whose name is a little obscene and I won't write it here) only got to play two games yesterday. One at 9am, the second at 7pm. They played really well, despite it being int he igh 20s by 10 oclock, and despite the field being littered with gopher holes (and the occassional ex-gopher). They lost the game, but it was really only because of one silly inning where the other team just kept getting runs in. If it hadn't been for that one, it would have been very very close.
After ball, everyone went back to Nick and Kim's campsite and lounged around. I wanted to tan, but it was just too hot to lay in the sun. After lunch Nick, Vince, Brett, Landon, and Kim decided to go in the canoe. It's not a very good canoe, and Brad and Nick alone make it awfully tippy, but nonetheless they hauled it to the water. The following pictures show how successful they were:

Too many people makes a canoe sink
It's not going to go very far under water
Four people makes it pretty low in the water...
and five makes it go over!
This picture is Vince falling out
Vince getting back in

We were really happy when it clouded over and actually (miraculously) started to rain for a bit. Then it was off to the field again to watch their second game. In the interest of having a fun game, our team agreed to get rid of the "homerun rule" which meant if the ball went over the back while line it was an automatic out. The other team apparently plays competitively though (our guys are in the beer leagues) and they took complete advantage of the abolished rule and knocked every single ball clear out of the field. They also sauntered around the bases and were really quite cocky and downright rude about it. I kept hoping one of the guys in particular would get a ball right to the head and get a minor concussion. It just really killed the fun mood of the night. Obviously our team didn't expect to win, but they also didn't expect to be humiliated by the other teams behaviour. Furthermore, we suspect the bats they were using were illegal. I really just wanted to go and tell them they were being shameful and should adjust their attitudes.

After the game, Brad and I came home so I could go to bed and get a few hours sleep before work this morning.

So, that's my weekend. Let's take a tally, shall we? Days slept in this weekend: 0
Days spent at work: 1
Hours spent outdoors at the lake: 15
Hours spent being irritated with the poor sportsmanship of the other team last night: 5 and counting
Hours spent cheering loudly (and a little obnoxiously) for the team who was playing the poor sportsmen this afternoon: 2.5
Yesterday's high: 32.5 degrees in Swift (pretty sure it was hotter at Pelletier though)
Bottles of water consumed: around 12? More?, I think
Number of headaches from too much sun/heat: 1 (lasted around 4 hours)
Number of shades darker my tan has gotten on my legs: .25
Number of shades darker my tan has gotten everywhere else: 3
Hours spent laughing at Nick, Vince, Landon, and Brett and their ridiculous canoe adventure: oh, thousands!

Rider Pride!

Brad, Jeff, Darwin, and I went to my first Saskatchewan Roughriders home game on Sunday.

Darwin: Quite possibly the biggest Rider fan ever. (his helmet is a chip bowl that he won at a bar)

Rider fans are interesting...they like to wear crazy hats and capes...and occassionally a watermelon helmet
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Nowhere else in this country will you find an event sponsored by Pilsner!
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The team and Mosaic Stadium (aka Taylor Field)
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Darwin celebrating after the first touchdown
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The mascot is a gopher! Seriously!

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage...

Saturday was Rob and Bev's wedding. Brad and I were both in the wedding party, which was really nice. I got up at 9 and went to their house to meet up with the bridesmaids and do hair and makeup and get ready together. Bev was amazingly calm and cool! It was very impressive. Everyone had a good time getting dressed and lookes pretty smokin, if I do say so myself!

Tanya, Bev, Amanda, Me, Jen
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The boys looked pretty sharp in their white shirts and matching ties:
Rob, Ray, Brad, Ryan, Glen
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Vince took this picture. He said we were both standing there looking perfect and just when he took the picture, Brad looked down...God only knows what he's looking at!
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The happy couple
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Argh!

It's one of those days aparently. Last night I was late to bed...very late to bed as it were, and so this morning when my alarm went off at 3:21, followed by 3:30, followed by 3:39, I was terribly reluctant to crawl from the warm covers. Not to mention the nausea I was feeling. (Not due to any misbehaving on my part...I'm not actually sure what it was that caused it, possibly lack of sleep?) I spent my whole shower trying to breath deeply and not be sick.
Out of the shower and doing my hair (10 minutes behind schedule) and things went fairly smoothly on that front. It seemed I might actually make it out the door on time, or 5 minutes behind schedule. Not bad for a Monday morning.
It was raining fairly well when I left the apartment this morning and got to my car, when, lo and behold, my car flat out refuses to start. It just wouldn't fire. No idea why, but believe me, I was choked.
I woke up Brad, who couldn't figure out what was causing it either, and he lent me his car to go to work this morning, but it's also not in top condition at the moment.
Got to work today (20 minutes late) and had to rush around getting things done for the 6 oclock casts. At about 5:40, after my casts were recorded and Jon was about to do his, I looked in the newsbooth and noticed the monitor was black and all the lights were blinking. NOT good. So Jonny and I went in and fiddled around and eventually swapped the monitor with the one for our email computer. While pulling the switcheroo though, I managed to knock a mug off the desk, straight onto the floor with a smash.
The ONLY saving grace, and I do mean ONLY, is that on Saturday night we had people over to watch the UFC fights and I made a cheesecake for dessert, so I brought some delicious cheesecake for breakfast. On a day like today, it was definately necessary. And, for the record, anyone who tells me today that cheesecake is not a breakfast food is decidedly not to be trusted.

And the Destruction Continues!

Whoever says the morning shift is boring and nothing ever happens hasn't had a morning like mine. I got up at 3:33 *shudder* and got ready for work, actually leaving a few minutes early for a change. It was still dark when I was driving down 1st Avenue NorthWest on my way to work at 4:30. At the end of the street (which is on a hill, so at the bottom of the hill) there was a really strange cloud. I thought it was terribly foggy this morning, until I got closer and saw the fog was moving very quickly. Then I wondered if it was a really big dust devil that had stirred up tons of gravel and dirt, but as I got closer, the cloud kept moving but didn't seem to end and I realized it was smoke pouring out of a building. Through the smoke I saw the flashing lights of the fire department's brand new Ladder 2 (the truck with the bucket on the end that I got to ride in). The street was closed directly infront of me (and in front of our parking lot), so I detoured around the block and tried to get a better view of which building was on fire.
Once I got to the station, from the back door I had a perfect view of the fire. The building was right across the back alley behind the station and across our parking lot. Almost totally unobstructed.
There were a few people gathered in the parking lot watching the fire, and since it was little early in the morning for spectators to be out, I assumed they either owned the building or something around it.
Being the true blue newsie that I am, I grabbed a minidisc player and went out with a pad and paper to get some info (slightly excited, and a little happy at the prospect of having some breaking news for the morning run). The people gathered turned out to be the owners of the neighbouring business. The one on fire was the warehouse for a furniture store which had just got a new shipment in and was packed to the brim aparently...excellent fuel for a fire. I also learned it had been burning since 11:25 that night! From the size of the flames, I had thought it was very new, not over 5 hours old!
Anyway, it raged on while the firefighters did their best to contain it, which they seem to have been successful. I don't think there was anything more than smoke damage to the neighbouring business (though that's bad enough).
One other bit of interesting information is that the empty lot next to the building once housed an abandoned apartment complex which ALSO burned down three years ago. Interesting. Maybe they need to re-evaluate these structures?
Anyway, at around 6 I went out and took a bunch of pictures:

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This was around 7 when the roof collapsed and the fire flared up again inside
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Things were starting to settle down a little by this time, and the truck switched position.
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I took this one just before leaving work at noon today. The firefighters were still dumping tons of water on the skelaton of a building, and it was still smoking a little, but not a whole lot.