New Orleans By Way Of Boston

I am sitting in the Boston airport right now, we have a connection here on our way down to New Orleans. Kendra, Monica, Maria, and I are taking Teri there for her Bachalorette. (Kendra, Teri, and I are flying down together, the others will meet us at the hotel in the French Quarter.) I am so excited to celebrate my best friend and party all weekend!

Teri and I 

Ottawa

2006

The Last Comment

Sunday Mornin' Coming Down - A post about my Dad each Sunday, named after a song that he loved.

I am running out of 'lasts' from my dad to share. I have already posted about the last email that he sent me and the last texts. I went through the posts that I made on Always Standing  in the Fall to find the last comment he made. As I have always said, I live for the comments and luckily Dad was good about posting them. So, I don't know about the last thing he read on the blog but I am going to guess he was pretty caught up. However, the last post he commented on was just over a month before he died. In mid-October I did a short series called Results Week that detailed times from the summer Triathlon that I had participated in, with Mom, Teri, Kendra, and Jason. The final post detailed my results.

Results Week - ME!

Posted on Always Standing on Saturday October 19, 2013.

The next weekend, on Saturday October 26, (in the morning according to the comment posting data) my dad made the following comment (all spacing and spelling is accurate):

It was great to see you " JUST DO IT " and finish.I would have never finished the swim Dad

I love how supportive he always was. It was great to have him around that day on The Island to help and cheer us on. I reviewed the whole week of posts and I don't even know if I mentioned him, let alone thanked him for being there that morning - it meant a lot to me at the time. Still today, the whole Triathlon experience stays with me as a wonderful memory. I love the above comment that he left. It was months after the event since I was slow to write about it. All his comments were great. His honesty was unfaltering, he was open and kind and sweet and funny. I am so sad that he won't be leaving me any more on Always Standing. I will miss his encouragement, I loved when he read what I wrote.

Teri - The Bride Of Greg

Teri and Greg are getting married next summer. Yesterday, I got to go wedding dress shopping with her, her mom, Monica, and Kendra. I love watching wedding dress shows, such as the many different versions of TLC's Say Yes To The Dress, and being a part of the wedding in this way (I also went dress shopping with Taylor and Steph) is like a live show version! Teri looked beautiful in pretty much everything she tried on and by the end of the day she had two dresses that she couldn't get out of her head. After dinner, we loaded up the photos taken on our various phones and cameras throughout the day and after a fairly quick side-by-side viewing of the two favourites - she picked one. It is stunning, she is going to look breathtaking when she walks down the aisle in July!

Steph is their photographer and has done a session with them already. I think she captures them perfectly! Check out a couple of the shots HERE. They really reflect the way Teri and Greg are together and how happy they make each other. I am very excited about it all!

Short Week - Results Week

To jump start me back to writing more regularly for Always Standing, I am setting up short series of posts with the various results for everyone who did the Triathlon back in August with me. Here we all are after the race:

MultiSport Canada Triathlon Series - Toronto Island 

August 24, 2013

Me, Jason, Mom, Teri, Kendra

Photo by Dad

If you are impatient and want to ruin the surprise you can look us all up on the Sportstats page HERE. However, results will be posted on Always Standing following the above photo from the right this week:
Teri and Kendra: Wednesday
Mom: Thursday
Jason: Friday
Me: Saturday

So Much Fun!

Today's triathlon was so much fun! I love running but I loved this type of race even more. I had a great swim and then things basically got worse from there but it was still a blast. (Endorphin High!) Everyone did very well (and got better times than me) and Dad was there to cheer Mom, Jason, Teri, Kendra, and I on. It was a prefect day to do it and so beautiful to swim, bike, and run at Toronto Island. The results aren't up online yet and I didn't remember to take a picture or write the times down from the paper copy they had at the race. I do remember getting 32nd out of 32 for my age group but was not last over all. I will post times later on.

Scared To Give-It-A-Tri

Originally Jason and I were registered to do the Sprint Triathlon on Sunday. However, training this summer didn't go as well as I had hoped and we decided a few weeks ago to switch to the smaller Saturday version (Give-It-A-Tri) with Teri, Kendra, and my mom. The Sprint triathlon was going to be a 750 metre swim, 20 km bike and 5 km run. The smaller one that we are doing tomorrow will be swimming for 400 metres, biking for 10 km and finish by running 2.5 km. Even with the smaller distances, I am still nervous about it. Mainly the cold water at the moment but also worried about how to do the transitions between events and being embarrassingly slow.

Registration Complete

I just finished registering for my first Triathlon! It was surprisingly expensive and none of it is connected to charity, but having run a few events in my life, I understand the cost to create a race like this. At the end of August I will be completing in a Sprint Triathlon on the Toronto Islands. I will need to swim for 750 metres, bike for 20 km and finish by running 5km. Trust me, I have already started to train for this! Before I could register I have to get a race license from Triathlon Ontario, which was a strange requirement. So far, Jason has registered to join me, and Teri, my mom, and Kendra have registered to do the Give-It-A-Tri, a smaller version done on the same weekend.

Dying The Hardest

Last night I went to play movie trivia. I recently because a member of The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and part of that is access to a monthly trivia night. I brought Teri, Kristen, and K to be part of my team and we tried our hand at an evening of Action Movie themed trivia - we sucked. In fact, we got last place. The best part was that the lowest score gets a prize so we each got a free beer. The name of our group was also fitting - Dying The Hardest

Have Car - Will Drive - Episode Three

The one with the carpool...
I went to Winterlicious this week with some of Teri's friends who live in Toronto. It is a two week event where Toronto restaurants offer a set menu and everyone goes out to eat at these fancy places for a little cheaper than they normally would be. I have always wanted to do it, Teri talks about it every year and I'm always very jealous. Anyway, I went with her friends and the food was incredible. But, connected to the car, the following conversation transpired:
M: Yeah, so I'm going to Ottawa this weekend.
Me: Oh my god, I'M going to Ottawa this weekend!
M: We should go together!!
Me: Yes, we totally should carpool!!!
K: Umm, except neither of you have cars...
I explained that while I don't normally, I did in fact have a car for the month. Over the week I have arranged the details with M and we are leaving together for Ottawa this evening. It is going to be great to see all the Ottawa people and so nice to have company and someone to share gas costs with on the drive.

Webers

Webers is a Canadian institution. It is a hamburger stand on Highway 11 which leads into the largest cottaging area in Ontario. It is on the way to Teri's cottage, which I visited at the end of this summer. We stopped there both on the way up and the way back. The burgers are really good!! When I was younger we had a family friend that had a cottage up in this area and we would stop at Webers then too. I don't know how I comprehended how special it was when I was so little, but I know I was always sad that the route up to my grandparents northern house didn't pass Webers. Maybe it was because my parents would tell me about how unique it was and how they had stopped there when they themselves were younger. It opened in July of 1963, so really has been a pivotal stop for the areas cottage commuters for over 40 years. Most northern cottagers know it, love it, and eat there regularly. So regularly in fact that on the way back from her cottage Ter didn't even get food there, she went to the nearby Subway. Because of the barrier in the center of the highway installed in the 1980's, Webers bought a bridge. They got a section from the paths that lead to the CN Tower and installed it so that travellers going in the opposite direction could park and walk safely over the highway to eat. (The picture is of me, K, Ter, and C after our cottage trip heading over the bridge to Webers for lunch on our way home.) It is the first and only privately owned bridge built over a public highway in Ontario. Besides the great food and cool bridge, the area around the hamburger stand is really interesting. It is a large park and they have a collection of CN Railway cars. On the business side, they are amazingly efficient. People come out to take your order when you are standing in line and give you a card with it written down on. They then bring you a bill and have the change ready for you. By the time you are in the little cooking area, they put together your order really fast. I hope Webers is still going strong years from now so that I can continue to visit it and maybe bring my kids someday.

Mouse Crisis, Part Seven

I haven't had to deal with mice in a long time. Die Höhle is pretty good and we haven't seen a mouse yet, many large and creepy basement bugs mind you. I am terrible with mice, it is totally an irrational fear, I know they can't hurt me but I just can't handle them. I spent a few days a Teri's cottage and they are having a bit of a mouse issue. Ter and her friends regaled me with stories of a previous guest supposedly waking up with mice on her in the middle of the night. I think the person was either lying or dreaming, but it still freaked me out. No drama the first night, though Ter said that she didn't sleep well because she could hear mice all night in her room. The second night, Ter's friend K and I heard one in ours. We freaked out and woke everyone up. Sure enough it ran out of the room a short time later, I watched it go from my perch standing on a couch. There was this sonic mouse repeller thing that we plugged in, in hopes of keeping K and my room free of mice for the rest of the stay and there were no further issues. But the damage had already been done, I was too scared to sleep well.