R.I.P 2011

Well 2011 has come to an end. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year! I’ve decided to do a month by month re-cap of my 365 days.

January
Early in January my Boyfriend and I crossed the boarder to check out the Detroit Auto Show. I’ve never seen anything so huge before, and me being not entirely a car-freak, I actually thoroughly enjoyed being there for hours  on end. Believe it or not, it was fun! I even sat in a fancy car and got chatted up by an ol’ feller. Unfortunately I tried to just get a solo shot of me “driving”, but it didn’t work out ;)

I guess you can’t really say it was his fault. Since I do like to strike up a conversation with anyone. Hi mister Detroit police officer! In case you’re wondering, we were discussing his cottage in Chatham, Ontario lol.

I went to my second (and much larger) blogger meet-up in downtown Toronto. I was a bit scared going into this one since I’ve only met 3 or 4 bloggers prior and there were going to be so many new, yet familiar faces from reading their sites. I had a great time however, and ended up hanging out with some great blog friends like Morgan, Susan, and found some new blogs like Meghan and Lisa!

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 FebruaryI started filming YouTube videos in November of 2010, and I ended up doing my first make-up swap with my friend Katie from Texas (youtube // twitter), I blogged about it and filmed it!

I tried CrossFit for the first time ever and blogged about it of course. I may even go as far to say as I’m addicted to CrossFit! I’m still going strong 11 months later. Wahoo!


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MarchScott and I took advantage of a Groupon and had a date night in Niagara Falls, the next day I shopped the outlets, lol!

I love surprise visits from my neighbours back home in Newfoundland!

We lunched at Tim Hortons while they were driving through my city.

I’d rather not re-live these hair disaster moments in my life again. But, here we go.I had been growing out my hair for about two years. Au naturale, no dying it whatsoever. I decided to try and go for my bold orange look that I had rocked back in 2005. It didn’t come out so great. Not what I asked for.

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AprilI discovered self-tanner. St. Tropez to the rescue of my pale skin!

I cooked a ham and scalloped potatoes for the first time for Easter. Also, please ignore my way-too-dark complexion. I’ve yet to get the hang of self-tanner at this point. :)

After many trips to the hair salon to fix my orange hair (orange gone wrong!), make it more orange, have it fade out. My hair stylist and I finally … broke up.

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MayScott and I drove to Burlington for my Birthday date night and had a classy dinner! Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday…to me! Happy Birthday happy birthday….happy birthday…TO ME. With a hot pink Nike Free’s purchase :)

I went to another large blogger meet-up. This time it was Angela from OhSheGlows birthday. She had a potluck party for her birthday. (Another) Angela  from EatSpinRunRepeat and I drove down together, to her house. Love this photo. I don’t remember what I’m saying but I’m making Morgan die of laughter here! Read about the meetup here.

Oh, I got lost in Mississauga in May as well. That wasn’t fun.

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June
My bathroom tampon carrying case was stolen. Ew.Eating out on our cute bistro set on our balcony. Clearly not much happened this month :)

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July

I bought an iPad 2 on a really crummy day, then I reviewed it.

I also played one of my last games of soccer, ever. I decided to quit. I don’t think I ever blogged about why I decided to quit. Maybe one day I will. It’s nothing major. I just had enough after getting injured frequently. After playing for over 15 years I just ran out of passion for the sport. My team mates even saw it this summer.

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AugustAugust was incredible. The beginning of August I flew down to San Diego, California and met up with some long-time internet friends for the BlogHer11 conference. It was such a relaxing, incredibly fun time with them. I did a ton of re-caps, so you can read them all here.

A few weeks later, my Boyfriend competed in his 3rd Ironman Canada triathlon in Penticton, British Columbia. His sister lives in BC and came along for our trip, and we volunteered at the Run-Aid station at IMC! We also toured around Skaha Bluffs for a bit too — a very popular climbing spot in Penticton.

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SeptemberA new climbing gym in my area opened its doors to us locals, in August. Our city has been lacking an indoor climbing place since they tore down the older gym back in 2006.

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October

I organized a Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign and launched it at work. Prize donations were insane and we raised over $700 with the 30-something employees I work with.

The staff I work with all dressed up for Halloween. I was Mary Katherine Gallagher, from Saturday Night Live ;)

I also flew home to Newfoundland, for the Canadian Thanksgiving, and made homemade pizzas with my cutie patootie nephews.

November

I caught walking pneumonia.

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DecemberI entered in the Tour de Bloc boulder competition and didn’t place last!

Staff Christmas party solo this year and asked your opinions on what I should wear. Just because Scott didn’t go with me this year, didn’t mean I was entirely solo. I ended up taking two of my single female colleagues with me! Two dates is better than one. Scott was out of town that weekend and unfortunately couldn’t make it with me. See past Christmas party, including this years outfits here.

Home for Christmas in Newfoundland!! (I’ve obviously yet to blog about that).

Whoowee, that took entirely way too long to write. Hope you enjoyed my 2011 recap! Night all!

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Thanksgiving in Newfoundland

I flew home from October 7-12 last week to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family back home in Newfoundland. The trip was fantastic and I spent the majority of my time with my two youngest nephews who are 3 and 5.  It was also a damp, drizzly windy cold weekend when I went home, and of course the tropical flowers were not wilting/dying in Ontario where the weather was hotter than the hottest day of summer. Half jealous I missed it. I ended up getting to Toronto airport two hours before I needed to be there. There was an incident with the Security, which held up lines for hours and hours. I thought that going there early I’d at least make my flight. But by the time I got there, everything was cleared up and I had 2 hours to kill. So I picked up some supper. It was disgusting. I also did a bit of Christmas shopping at Lush. It was wonderful. Except for the fact they charged me for an extra bath bomb and I didn’t realize it until I was in another province.

I got little sleep on Friday night as I arrived home at about 4am. I couldn’t contain my excitement so I woke up at about 7am so I could drive over to my Brothers house to hang out with my nephews. First, my Mom and I got a few groceries, then headed to the broski’s house where I played with my nephews for hours til lunch time came along. We made mini-pizzas!

Kelan enjoyed it! He’s also sporting the purple Dinosaur shirt I gave him for his birthday a few months back. Score 2 points for Ancy Nancy. Kelan LOVES the color purple and also likes Dinosaurs. Dude. Wicked.Ruairi also loved his pizza. Mister Chatster-McChatty didn’t make a peep at all when he was chomping down.

After lunch I strapped the kids into their car seats and headed out on an adventure to the mall! Ruairi has the best names for his stuffed animals, and ended up naming the Sock Monkey I gave him: Mr Murphy. Except he calls it Mistuh Muh-fee. So cute.

At the mall Kelan spotted this kids cart. I told him to go claim it. It was literally across the hall and he was darting, weaving in and out of “traffic” (people) and hopped right in until I walked over. I almost keeled over in tears laughing at him racing through to claim the fire truck cart.

Isn’t it super cute? It definitely kept them from running away from me at least.

The boys got thirsty so I bought them a cherry slushie. I took the first sip, just to test if it was safe enough for them to drink ;) Of course, it brought back memories… and I wanted to drink it all on them. But I shared.

On actual Thanksgiving Day everyone came over to my parents house and of course I took a monstrosity amount of photos, to show you all. I’m tellin ya, this is going to be one lengthy blog post! ;)

Ruairi was pretending to be asleep. Hey! It’s time to smile, boy.

There we go.

Kelan loves his photo being taken. My little superstar has a hollywood smile! :)

Hanging out with Ancy Nancy on the loveseat. Look at them both cuddled up to me.  Ha! I win.I’m pretty sure they’d do anything I’d ask them to. Speaking of which, I asked if I could put Ruairi’s hair in a pony tail. He agreed. I later asked if I could paint his finger nails. He surprisingly agreed with that too, but unfortunately I didn’t bring any hot pink nail polish with me ;) Little rosey cheeks on him!

The next day I went climbing with a few friends back home.

Oops! Everyone loves a good candid shot.Here we all are, smiling :) Good friends for 10+ years!Going up….coming down!I tested out my friends new (t0 me) harness. Arc’teryx has automatic double-backing harnesses which I do not like at all. But here I am on the wall testing it out, lol.

I’ll spare you the details and just supply you with a handful of the many many photos I took over my weekend trip. Here are some of my favorite photos.

I had a fantastic trip and I’ll be back home for Christmas in less than 10 weeks! I can’t wait to see everyone again :)

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