it's my birthday!

It's my birthday today. 26 big ones. yee haw. With birthday territory comes the "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to" song, which scrolls through my head all day. I've also already planned out a birthday route which will get me the most amount of free stuff - breakfast at Denny's, free lunch at Mongolie grill, billy miner pie at the keg and maybe a clown ice cream come at Baskin Robins. I love free and I love birthdays. I took today off work to take advantage of all the birthdayness of the day.

Being a twin, our birthday was always a big deal - we got to celebrate twice as hard and long to make up for the sharing of the day. It was fun to celebrate a birthday with someone. Someone who was having just as much fun as you because it was her birthday too.

I'm the first one to spout the phrase "sharing is caring", but it's not necessarily something I live by. I mostly say it because it rhymes and rhyming makes me giggle. I'll share my food, I'll share my clothes, I'll share my unwanted opinions.. all these things I can do without batting an eyelash. The one thing that irks me to share, still, after 26 years, is my birthday. We would get the same presents, sometimes in different colours and most often it would be one cake with two names scrawled on top. Unless you time the opening of presents and blowing of candles exactly, someone will be getting shafted. It took Manda and I a decade or so to perfect it, but we managed to get Shared Birthday Etiquette sorted out.

I think I was 20 years old the first time I celebrated a birthday sans-sister. It was strange. Since then we've missed a couple more; one year I spent my birthday weekend in Vegas. I came home to a surprise party being thrown for Amanda. It was a very strange experience. Nobody has expected me to be home yet, so there weren't any presents for me. The cake had her name solely on it. I wasn't even wearing a party dress. I believe I went home and cried myself to sleep that night. It might have just been post-Vegas blues though.

This weekend I will be spending this birthday in Whistler, which is one of my favorite places. The sister will be absent from this trip due to a death in her husband's family, which makes me sad for them and then super sad for me being without an Amanda for the weekend. Lucky for me, I got a talking toy hamster for my birthday and I think that will replace her nicely. *lol jk.

Because of their abrupt change in plans, we decided to cancel our hotel room, which was a 2 bedroom suite. At this point I still have not re booked a room. I am toying with the idea of using the Suite Secrets feature on whistler.com. Essentially, it's like Hotel Roulette. You can pick how many stars, the type of room and where it is located in Whistler - but you don't get to find out which hotel it is until you've entered your payment information. Could be fun? I've put it off for two days because I was nervous, but now that I'm 26 years old I think I feel ready. Wish me luck...and more importantly, wish me a happy birthday! and then go and wish Amanda one. it's only fair.

blackberryless for 36 hours.

Friday night, Katie, Britt and I drank copious amounts of wine and taxied our way down to Gabby's. i get to the door and dig around in my purse to grab my wallet and it is nowhere to be found. I had just paid for the cab so I ran outside and awesomely enough the cab was still parked out front. I open the door and find my wallet tucked down the side of the seat waiting for me. I grabbed it, yelled a thank you and ran back to the bar. Lots of beers and dancing followed. The band was awesomeish, their guitar player was quite the looker. A few hours later kt and Britt tell me they are leaving and obviously i was too busy having too much fun to leave. By this point I've found a long lost friend I haven't seen a while. She shrugs and hands me my jacket and i throw it down in a corner somewhere. Tequila ensues. I'd like to skip the next part of the story and liken my life to the song "Tequila makes her clothes fall off", however that seems a bit graphic, so I'd like to edit the lyrics to tequila makes her phone get lost. or tequila makes her jacket disappear. or tequilas makes her not care that her phone and jacket are missing and her friends have left her alone to make bad decisions all by herself AGAIN! (jk, love them) Anyhow, Saturday afternoon eventually rolls around and my buzzer starts going off. I drag myself out of bed and pick it up with a very wary "hello?". I have never been one to like the dreaded Drop By. It's Katie. I explain over intercom that I've lost my phone. She insists i buzz her up. Of course, i do. She tells me that my mom and her and Amanda have basically sent out a search party for me. Normally we do a Saturday morning speaker phone chat that they were clearly missing pretty hard. I explain that I am fine, just down 1 phone and 1 jacket. I told her i would call her later to sort out our plans. Lol, slash I would walk over to her house because clearly I am techno-less. We BBM my phone and the first message is Delivered and Read. WTF give me back my phone we say. The messages are then not delivered meaning the phone has been turned off. Argh. Manda insists she will find my phone through GPS. Kita and Lan come over. Nik plays the sugarland song that is my ring tone and i get all hopeful that my phone has been found. insert cry face. The girls go out for dinner while i lay on the couch in mucho pain. They bring me back mcdonalds which i promptly return to the toilet. sorry, i forgot to put a disclaimer about gross factor. this morning was very depressing without my beloved BB. I spent all morning thinking about all the messages i could be sending and all the facebook and allrecipes i could be surfing. I put on my Sunday jeans and drove to carol's. Manda meets me over here and makes the call to Fido to tell them my phone has been stolen. After a bit of smooth talking she has convinced them to give me a new phone at the low cost of activation plus 30 bucks. Part of that to be paid with my Fido dollars (free money). We rush over to the mall and they set up my phone and don't charge me a penny and give me a free 2mb memory card on top of that. LML. Manda and I get home from the mall and she gets a text from the person who has my phone. She calls him and is rather rude and tells him he will come grab the phone in cloverdale. I meet him at Tim Hortons (with my dad as backup in my car in case this lunatic is trying to kidnap me- i think i watch too much tv). The guy who shows up is Bryan, who i had been dancing with at the bar. He says that he was hammered and might have taken it as a joke and forgot to give it back. He did mention being a little nervous about manda's threat about GPSing the phone. I manage not even to be mad about the whole thing and tell him to call me sometime as he already has my number. i mean its a perfect Meet Cute. If my dad wasn't in the car I'd probably have went and had a coffee with Brian Phone Thief (as he is now saved as in my contacts list). I went from no phone to two phones in a matter of two hours. God must love me.

My Kitten Kit.

I probably check my mail two or three times a week. On the weeks that I check it three times, at least one of those times the mail box is empty. I am always very excited when there happens to be mail in the box. There are three types of mail i get- 1. stuff from the government 2. junk/flyers/coupons/free stuff I've ordered online 3. actual awesome mail that is meant for me. Yesterday when i opened my mail box it was FULL. I squealed in delight and ran up the stairs.. okay ran up the first flight and walked up the rest. I sat down at the table and started in on my STACK of mail.

Now you'd think this blog would be about #3, awesome mail. It is not. Although, come to think of it this item is kind of #2 and #3. It's awesome and free. THAT makes it a twofer, which instantly brings up its awesomeness rating. It could probably get its own page in the 1000 awesome things book.

I will delay no longer.  The snail mail i received was something I had ordered off the Purina website ages ago and had forgotten all about. "My Kitten Kit" they call it. Please see that it was addressed to Michelle & Watson! Adorable? I think so.

In this kit was a Owner's Manual type thing that covers everything you'd ever need to know about owning a cat. There was one Did You Know blurb i found especially interesting. "Cats are the only mammals that are unable to taste sweetness." I thought it was weird that Watson licked all the icing off my cupcake if she can't taste sweet. It must be the butter in the icing that she likes. or the pink. or maybe the sprinkles. It had lots of helpful information that i could have used weeks, if not months, ago. How to make sure she uses her litter box, how to keep her from scratching the furniture and my entire body, how to get her to sleep at night and not annoy the crap out of me. I skimmed through the book and filed it away if future reference is necessary. There is lots of information about if they get sick and about keeping her a healthy weight and basically stuff i don't care about at this point in time. Oooo! It also came with this cute little charm to go on a collar.

The thing i was most excited about, OBVIOUSLY, was the free coupons. Included in the package: a free bag of kitten chow, a free can of wet food and a free container of kitty litter. Like no joke, best deal ever. Watson didn't care much for the charm, coupons or manual, but she really loved the cellophane that the package was wrapped in. That's all for right meow... uhh i mean now.