Insert Sad Music

So I have to start out by correcting a giant mistake that I made about 3 weeks ago. My friend Gill had a baby boy and I need to correct the name of him. It's Mark Phinneus Aiken. Welcome little baby Mark (Phin) to the world. Can't wait to meet you.

So. Ok. How to even begin this? To sum up my past few days in a nutshell... sheer and utter disappointment. I had to kibosh my hugely anticipated trip to Vancouver to see my friends whom I haven't seen in far too long and to see my all time favourite band perform because of scheduling complications. To explain what happened is kind of irrelevant, but it was basically just my complete stupidity that effed up this trip. We were literally heading out the door with our suitcases, ready to go, when I realized what had happened. After a small mental breakdown and fit of feeling sorry for myself, I pulled myself together and tried to deal with the situation. By far the hardest part was emailing Doug (my friend who we were going to stay with in Vancouver), to tell him that we weren't coming. That sucked.

The original plan was to drive to Kelowna the first day, spend the night in a hotel and drive the rest of the way the next morning...but since that second drive was no longer going to take place, like they say, "when life gives you lemons, make a whole bunch of lemonade, build a lemonade stand and use the profits to buy a machine gun and see if life makes the same mistake twice." Oh wait. Is that right??? So we decided to go to Kelowna anyway and just make a mini-trip out of the situation. We had some good meals, did a little shopping and wandered around downtown and the waterfront for a good while. The weather was amazing so that helped out a lot. It turned out to be a decent time.




Today was my third day off and it was positively lovely. Me and Chris went and got Splash around noon and took her to birchbank for a couple hours. Birchbank is the local picnic grounds that get used from time to time for big events. What a lot of people don't know is that if you drive down the road way past the picnic grounds and do some trekking through the bush, there is an amazing private area to go swimming. The river flows into this little inlet and makes a great swimming spot which is much warmer than the brisk Columbia from which it feeds from. So we did some swimming and a lot of stick throwing for Splash.

After that we headed to my parent's house to do some yard work for my mom. It took little time to get really hot and sweaty so we jumped in the river again. Quite a bit colder than earlier but hugely refreshing. Once you get in and your bones start to freeze up, the water becomes much more bearable. When we got back up to the house we got roped into agreeing to babysit Cadance tomorrow while my sister is at work. Should be interesting....