Hola Cuba 2010!

Here are the Cuba pictures (a select few anyways!) . It took over an hour to upload all of them because some of them were taken with my dSLR and the files are mammoth! Enjoy!


Noooooooo....don't leave me behind!

Now THIS is how you enjoy your Rum Punch!

My friend Vicki at our first a la carte dinner. The steakhouse. I couldn't eat anything...damn braces!

Me at the steakhouse. We were really trying to do our best with no hair products and no makeup!

The beach! I'm pretty sure this was one of the +35 days!

This was the main pool...so refreshing. But by the third day there the temerature was matching the ocean so it was like a warm bath!

Lounging by the pool. This is only day 2...look at our tans!

I need to find out what this flower is called. When I was trying to take a picture of it, a resort employee came out to me and said, "careful, look" he shook the branch and 3 wasps came flying out from one flower! So then I just HAD to try and get a picture of one!

Hibiscus? This was in someone's yard in the town of Varadero.

The flowers matched my top!

Classic yellow taxi...a little different from the ones I saw in New York!

So many old cars in Cuba, was happy to find this one by the ocean!

This poor puppy looked so hot and hungry. I woke him up from his nap to get this picture. Probably wasn't a great idea to be crawling around the sidewalk in Varadero...oh well the photo turned out really good!

We stopped at Al Capone's house outside Varadero on the way home. Vicki picked up this coconut drink, it wasn't ripe and made me want to throw up

So instead of the rank coconut juice, we got this bartender to put a Miami Vice inside! Delish

Enjoying a slice of personally made pizza! I love pizza!

This is Hector the pizza chef, he always was happy to see us and made us whatever we wanted. Such a friendly guy!

This is the start of the day where is was a little cloudy and a little windy. We tried every drink on the menu...hilarity and heartbreak followed.

This means trouble Drunk.

Drunk

Drunk, yet surprisingly coordinated

At the Cuban a la carte. This was NOT the lobster I'm used to. Can you tell by the look on my face?

Here we go! Jeep Safari!

Swimming in the freshwater cave, you can see my feet! That's nearly 6 feet down! The water was so clear and refreshing!

Cuban lunch on the ranch, amazing!

Us with our crew Shelley and Cody from Nova Scotia. Cody was a great driver!

Dolphins!

He wasn't the best kisser....

Our favourites, Forbes and Alexis (pronounced al-e-see) resort staff. They were so much fun and taught us dance lessons etc. We had lunch with Forbes and another fellow Ivan and learned so much about Cuba and being young in Cuba. We also taught them a lot about Canada and traveling! We were so sad to be leaving all the awesome people!

About 10 minutes before we said goodbye to our sunglasses in the Caribbean :(

Dancing at the show in the theatre. Literally minutes before we had to get on the bus to leave! We had to get one more dance in!

Basketball will put your eye out!

Something to blog about before the scrapbooking day. I nearly lost an eye last night at basketball!

I was going for a loose ball against a competitor and somehow i'm pretty sure his entire hand went into my right eye socket. I was completely frantic and panicking! It was easily the most painful thing I have ever experienced. (Somehow I keep topping my last painful thing lately!) I thought that I was going to black out. My teammates said I was asking them over and over if, "my eye was in my eye" Haha that's funny. My contact lens was folded into 4 and lodged underneath my eylid waaaaay in the back which I was begging for someone to dig out. After I removed it and my teammates helped me to the washroom to rinse the grime out of my eye and got some ice I started to feel a lot less like I was going to pass out. It must have been the whole disgusting hand in the eye thing. My mates were awesome, making sure I was ok, and staying with me in shifts until the game was over. Which after not leading the whole game since by 2 points in the first half, we tied! They had some good players on their team but we came through in the final minutes. (No credit to me who spent the rest of the game rinsing my eye)

Zac and Evan got me back to Okotoks safely and it was already looking better as I was icing it the whole time. After they left and I was getting ready for bed I noticed my tears were bloody. That was scary so even though I only had one truly functioning eye I went to the ER to have it looked at. You don't want to mess around with your eyes! She did a full exam but was inconclusive on where the blood was coming from which was a bit more scary so this morning I got an urgent appointment with the Rockeyview Opthamologist. He was very good and made sure everything was ok. Because i'm so nearsighted my biggest concern right now is retinal detachment so he gave me some things to watch out for over the next couple of days. Overall I have a bruised eyeball (who'd have known eyeballs bruise) and the muscles are inflammed right now too. Pretty sore. In real life, I don't think that it looks all that shabby. I took a couple of photos of the bloody eyeball....gross I know, but it's my blog and i'll post what I want!



My eye looks lazy....but i'm told that will go away. Thank God for that. I remedied my sorrow by shopping at Winners! Yay shopping! (don't worry i'm going to get my eyebrows waxed next week....I know that they're hideous.)

Slowly adjusting to the braces...

I'm starting to get used to this situation known as "having adult braces". I snapped a quick photo before I met my friend Lisa for brunch on monday to show the progress. (I'll try and stay away from taking the wide open mouth pictures that really show the progress! They usually look kinda gross haaha)

(realizing how tired I look, yikes!)

I'm starting to have a bit more confidence with them, but it's slow that's for sure.

Just so I don't leave Meridy out of the blog today, I took a cute pic of her on monday too when she was having a nap on the guestbed (which apparently she now owns):

I think that Meridy thinks she's a model. I know for sure she must think that i'm the paparazzi. Always taking photos of her!

I'm counting the days until Vicki and I leave for Cuba. I'm trying to jam pack the next 10 days so that they go by quickly. I have basketball in Calgary tonight and i was able to snag a spot at the all day scrapbook crop on Saturday. Brandi and Darrel will be at the YYC en route home from a Kelowna boarding trip so i'll try and meet with them there!

I'll be sure to post after the all day crop! (If not before!)

How OLD are you!?

It would appear that i'm having a bit of an identity crisis. I've now had braces for 2 weeks, and I find myself identifying with teenagers the world over. It does make me feel a little bit younger than I am for sure. But, I do have hobbies that may be typically linked to people of older age...

I haven't scrapbooked in months (been busy!) so these pages aren't up to par. But, I still like them. It's hard to scrapbook something that you have so many pictures of. So here is the first little bit of scrapbooking Europe 2009:This would be the mess that is my kitchen table....yikes.

I don't have a scanner big enough to scan in these pages as each one is 12X12 so I had to take a picture of them with my camera. They didn't turn out very well even if I turned off the flash, but you get the idea.

Ok, as for the braces update! Things are moving along nicely. I've become a little bit more adventerous with my food choices. The top wire is almost straight already! It will take a bit longer to see big changes on the bottom but i'm happy to be patient. It will be so worth it!

Gold Rush

Sidney Crosby has it made. This guy has accomplished so much in his life that I think his celebrity will rival that of Wayne Gretzky! I obviously don't have much for new that would trump the Olympics and Canada winning gold in both men's and women's hockey...but, I wanted to post anyway.

So it's been over a week with my braces and i'm already able to eat most things. Last night I cooked a pretty intricate meal of pork roast with honey balsamic glaze, and glazed roasted root vegetables (parsnips,turnips,carrots,leeks) but unfortunately there was no way i'd be able to chew the pork chop. It too much resembles steak, which since it's my goal to eat steak...it was no easy task! Luckily because I skimped on supper portion I had enough room for frozen yogurt. My saviour. :)

In more exciting news; yesterday Vicki and I booked our trip to Cuba! We leave March 20 to Varadero. We are staying at the Iberostar Laguna Azul:

It seems like a really nice resort. Right now mom and dad are there. They texted me when they arrived to say that it was awesome and to book it. Gina and Tyler will be there at a similiar time so we'll have to see if we can meet up in Cuba!

I'm sad that the weekend is basically over already. I feel like i've hardly had any time off and it was actually a 4 day weekend for me! I'll have to make the most of this weekend upcoming.

Witty Title

So I met my good friend Julia in the city tonight for supper. When I told her that I was going to post that in my blog she came up with a really good title for it. But since an hour ago...i've forgotten it. So we'll just have to imagine that I remembered it and everything will be fine!



I was so happy to see Julia. It has been far too long since we last spent time together. Important to note that Julia has been wearing braces for some time now, although I do think that they did come off for a brief period. She's getting her braces off in the next couple weeks so I wanted to make sure we got a photo of us both with braces at the same time!

I must note that even though it's only been a week I can tell that my teeth are moving so much already! Also we both have such great brunette hair. This photo was taken just outside Julia and Chris' new home in Signal Hill Calgary. It was a bit of a stakeout we were also taking pictures of her house in the dark and i'm pretty sure violating a few laws while doing so!

So here I am. One week after braces and thinking it's not so bad. I'm into the solid type foods now at least one meal a day. Chewing gets tiring and trying to keep the food under control and not in my braces can be tiring, but still manageable.

My goal is to eat a steak. And I will attempt that goal as much as it takes for me to achieve it!

P.S. Heard that the Canadian Men's hockey team won tonight...great news!

The Reveal

I'm hungry.

That's all I can think about. I tried to eat something for lunch today. No dice. I've kind of started to dislike that I can't eat solid anything! I made an apple crisp..which I can't eat. I'm making supper which I hope I can eat...but i'm not making any promises. On the other hand, I did have a surprisingly good sleep last night :) Can't complain about that!

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better 'eating' day. But this is teaching me a great amount of self control. I have lots of tasty treats in the house right now that I can't have...unless I swallow them whole!