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The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
– G.K. Chesterton
So, I took a little hiatus from this feature, though I’m not really sure why. In any event, it’s back, so let’s get to it.
1. Macaroni and cheese
2. Getting some Christmas shopping done early.
3. An honest day’s work
That’s what I’m happy about this week – what about you?
True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body: nourishment and refreshment.
– William Penn
In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations. It is cold, half- French, and difficult to stir.
— Stuart Keate
So when I said last time that I hoped it wouldn’t take me two weeks to blog the next leg of our vacation, what I really meant was, “See you in 6 weeks!” Sorry.
Anyway, we left Buffalo Thursday morning – another beautiful day – and headed north. We crossed the border with no problem and checked into our hotel, which was connected to the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays would play that night. We immediately set out on foot for the Hockey Hall of Fame; David’s been wanting to go there for a long time. Of course, I made him pose for pictures:
But I got in on it too!
There was so much to see, but the crown jewel is the Stanley Cup, which we got our picture taken with:
Then we wandered our way around town a bit before heading back toward our hotel and the CN Tower. This is what it looks like from the ground:
Wow, right? Well, we decided to go to the top. David, who is afraid of heights, was a good sport on the way up, even though the elevator has glass peephole in the floor:
But that was nothing compared to the glass floor at the top, which freaked even me out:
There were a ton of kids up there, and none of them were scared; they were lying all over the glass floor, face down, or running back and forth all over it. I could barely look down, but I forced myself to walk across the glass part once.
Then we took in the view, which was amazing.
I took a panoramic “stitch” shot with my camera, but I don’t actually know how to stitch them together to show you (that’s part of #78 on my list – learn three features of my digital camera; haven’t gotten around to it yet!) so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
We headed back to the hotel for a few minutes to rest before heading downstairs, out the door, and around the corner to the baseball stadium to see the hometown Toronto Blue Jays take on the Evil Empire, aka the New York Yankees.
With apologies to Karen, who is a Red Sox fan, here are some photos of some famous Yankees:
Jeter
Rodriguez
Damon
Posada
Our seats were about 4 rows up from the field. At one point, A-Rod chased a pop up into foul territory and ran smack into a Canadian police woman. What’s awesome about that? Well, in one of those pictures, you can sort of see me and David! Here, I’ll show you:
Great, right? We’re famous! Anyway, the game was just ok, really, and the Yankees trounced the Jays, but I was psyched to complete my goal of seeing three games in three different stadiums.
All in all, I really enjoyed our trip. We definitely did not have enough time to do everything we wanted to do, so we are planning a return trip at some point. You can check out the rest of my Toronto pictures on Flickr, if you like!
“I speak two languages: body and English.”
–Mae West
Dear Person Who Found My Blog by Searching “белые тигры”:
Gesundheit.
Love,
Mel
ETA: “белые тигры” apparently means “white tiger,” judging by the images that come when I copy and paste that phrase into Google. I love the internet.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear. Fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
– H.L. Mencken
So I’ve been thinking about this post lately. Not the boy – David’s got that part covered – but the end. This: “I learned, eventually, that you have to listen to everything, you can’t just pick and choose the parts that fit the story you’re telling in your head.”
And I was thinking about the story I tell in my head all the time – we all do it, we all tell a story about the life we imagine we live, about why we do things, and what we hope for. It’s the story we tell to get through the day, because the truth is so often less than we would like it to be.
My story’s about a girl who’s kind, and smart, and funny, and generous. Who’s successful, by most people’s standards, both personally and professionally. Whose life is more or less charmed in a number of important ways.
My truth, though, so often seems to fall short of that. I am often unkind, and particularly judgmental, at least in my thoughts. I regularly feel like everyone else is smarter than I am, particularly at work, and that I am a heartbeat away from people realizing I’m a fraud. I haven’t updated my weight loss photo album on Facebook in more than a year, because the truth is, I’ve gained 35 pounds in 15 months and I am terribly ashamed of that, and yet I cannot get it together to take control of my eating. My so-called charmed life has been scarred by some particularly shitty things, especially early on, and I lack the courage to truly face at least one of them. I live most of my life with some level of fear of not being good enough while setting such unbelievably high expectations of myself that it’s no wonder I fall short. I live with the man I want to marry and who I know loves me unconditionally, and yet I spend an inordinate of time and energy fighting the feeling that, sooner or later, he’s going to realize that I’m not quite what he thought. I drop out of communication with my friends and my grandma for extended periods of time because I just don’t have the energy or the attention span even to send an email, and by the time I do, so much has happened that I can’t bear having to recap it all, so I give up. That’s my truth.
Is it any wonder that the story I’m telling in my head is decidedly more upbeat? It has to be; otherwise, I’d never get out of bed.
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