Ontario Weekend #2

This weekend, I went to visit my grandparents in Ottawa. It had been years since I'd visited them in their home, and since my parents were planning to visit, I thought I'd tag along. I took the Greyhound from NYC to Scranton, where my parents picked me up en route. I hadn't road tripped with my parents in a while:

Mom: "We really look like F.O.B.'s now!" 

K: "Don't say those kinds of things, Mom!"

Mom: "It's true!"

My grandparents no longer drive themselves, so their favorite thing to do during visits is to go out to eat. We really went to town on all-you-can-eat Mongolian hotpot:

Grandma and my cousin David. Grandma would be the last one eating!

My grandparents are in their late 80s, so it's a special treat to spend some relaxed time together. My grandfather won't remember, but I know he's happy when we're there.

See the family resemblance??

The visit was pretty relaxing: we mainly ate ourselves silly, napped, and did a little shopping. My cousin David, whose family I visited in Waterloo last weekend, is living with Grandparents while he's working a short-term job in Ottawa, and it was nice to catch up with him, too! 'Til next time, Canada...

Ontario Weekend #1

It's October – why not spend a lot of time in Canada? This past weekend, I traveled to attend the wedding of two friends from graduate school. The husband is from Saint Catharines, so they got married in a nature preserve near Niagara Falls (Canada side). Too bad Dave had to be at a conference in Chicago this weekend...

My visit kicked off with a stop at the University of Waterloo, to see my old friend Matt. We've been friends since freshman year of college, and we also overlapped at Michigan, where he was a post-doc when I was a grad student. Now he's a math professor! We got tea and caught up, and it sounds like everything is going really well.

I got to spend the night in Waterloo with my uncle John, aunt Virginia, and cousin Stephanie. It had been 8 years since I last visited them at their home, and it was fun to reunite with such objects as the FRIDGE:

We had the same exact one growing up, and it has the most amazing feature: a special drinks compartment, with a tray that flips down, where you can put your glass and pour your drink. Since "getting drinks" was one of my setting-the-table chores, I used this feature very often. I still wish I had a refrigerator like this.

We also ate Auntie Virginia's delicious homemade apple pie:

The next day, it was off to the wedding at Niagara Falls! My friends Evelyn and Mark are both classicists/archaeologists and met in Athens. They are a wonderful couple and perfectly suited for one another.

Post-ceremony joy

I liked their idea for table assignments: each table was associated with a place they've visited during their extensive travels, with a cute picture of them in each location.

Evelyn is a belly dancer on the side, so of course there was a performance by her former troupe...

...in which she also joined in!

Before I left, I stopped by the Falls themselves. That's a lot of water. It was too cold to ride the boat into the mist – while I was there, it began to SNOW.

Overall, it was almost a perfect weekend! But a final note on air travel: I arrived in Toronto on a Brazilian airline I had never heard of before, TAM. It was absurdly cheap, and I felt a little worried about entrusting my safety to this obscure company. However, flying with TAM was instead a throwback to the previous glories of late '90s air travel. I got to check a bag FOR FREE. We boarded according to ROW NUMBER, rather than customer status. They even gave us each THIS MUFFIN:

On the way home, I was flying Air Canada. Air Canada canceled my flight back to New York without explanation, and after rebooking me, refused to comp a hotel room for the evening. <shakes fist> I supposed I could have shelled out for the room, but I had to be back at the airport so early the next morning that I wouldn't have gotten a good night's rest anyway. So I spent the evening in these luxurious accommodations:

Yes, it's a slightly padded bench at the foot of a wifi-related statue, with a strange woman on the other side removing her shoes. Actually, I could've slept fairly well – I changed into pajamas and brushed my teeth, placed my head on my backpack, and had my coat covering me and my purse. It's just that there was construction, seemingly jackhammer-based, going on in the terminal all night. I am seriously disgruntled and will never fly Air Canada again! I urge you all to consider the same action.

homeowners!

Life has been quite chaotic in the past few weeks, as Dave and I have been preparing for the purchase of our first home together! It's a 2-bedroom, 2-bath unit in a co-operative building across the street from where we were renting. We closed last week, moved in over the weekend, and now are sorting through the carnage. The closing was more dramatic than I would have liked: the office was only a 15 minute drive away, but my car wouldn't start when it was time to leave home to get there! Good thing Grace was home and didn't need her car...I hopped on my bike in my skirt-suit, pedaled like mad up to Grace's house, and borrowed her car! When I walked in, everyone looked anxious and/or stony-faced. I was afraid that everyone was annoyed that I was 15 minutes late, but it turns out that the seller hadn't brought the proper, original paperwork, and he wasn't sure if he even had it! The closing was almost off, when the original paperwork arrived via his real estate agent, and we had a deal! Phew.

Celebratory Shake Shack after the closing

The Sandblaster being towed to the mechanic's shop the next day

So now we are in our new home. Our old apartment was brand-new, light and airy, and bigger than we needed. Our new home is older and smaller, and boy do we have a lot of junk! I can't believe how much stuff we just put in closets or left in the garage, and now that we no longer have that kind of storage, it's all sitting in the living room! The good news is that now we have to be disciplined about going through the old stuff and discarding the useless junk.

We had been planning to move in a few days after the closing, giving ourselves time to sort and donate, pack up and organize. But then we were told that we couldn't move in on the day we had planned, because it was a holiday, and instead we moved in two days after closing. We hired two guys to help us with the heavy stuff for a few hours (worth every penny! check out movinghelp.com, which is a Uhaul service), and then spent the next three days moving in the rest of our stuff ourselves. I had thought that I was in pretty decent shape, but it turns out that I was in approximately 5% shape for moving. I can't remember the last time I felt so physically exhausted...it must've been the last time I actually had to exert myself physically...

Nearly everything made it to the new apartment, except our COUCH! It wouldn't fit in the elevator or up the stairs. Here it is, forlorn, returned to our garage after our failed attempts to get it into the new building:

It has found a happy new home, though: Stephen and Grace's basement! So we can go slouch on it and watch TV there. =)

Finally, here are a few pictures of the nearly empty place. I've never really invested in a decorating a place before and customizing it to suit me. It'll be interesting to see how this goes. I'll be documenting our progress as it goes!