A Vancouver Birthday

April 23, 1986. Yes, I turned 23..on the 23rd. I think that means something but I'm not sure. Hopefully it means this is going to be the best year of my life!! It sure started out that way....I woke up that morning earlier than usual, 10 am, haha. Because obviously it was my big day and everyone gets up early on their big day, even if they're not doing anything! Well I woke up to Kelly, acting very strange, telling me to go back to bed. That NEVER happens, so I knew something was up. She also locked me out of the computer so that was a sure sign that she was scheming. Once I got her permission to use the computer again, I realized she made me an awesome birthday video filled with random birthday wishes form random people! haha It was fabulous! And surprising! And a perfect way to kick off my day.

After I blew out the candles on my birthday Tim Horton's donuts, and made a wish to meet the cast of Twilight, Kel and I headed out for a walk in Central Park. B-E-A-UTIFUL! I foresee me taking lots of naps and having multiple picnics there this summer! Or possibly picking up a couple games of horseshoes...Anyways, the real reason we went there is because we found out the set of New Moon was being filmed there. And the park is right next door to us so we went to creep it out. And we found it!!! No cast in sight unfortunately, but we saw a green screen set up and some posts and such. Pretty cool none the less. Kel and I are confident though that we'll see the cast downtown Van somewhere, and we'll spend the night laughing and drinking, and become great friends! :D

After our park stroll we got haircuts! A new look for a new city! Sure! It was well needed,...shaggy was taking over and I was feeling sluggish. A good clean up fixed that right up! And a new style. I now have bangs....strange at first cuz I felt like I was in grade 3 again singing in the school play, and then I looked identical to my mother. A weird feeling I must say. But it all worked out. We were ready for a night out!

First stop - Steamworks Brewery...let's just say that was the starting point. Good food, good beer, good 'tradition' shots of SoCo. The Horvath-Staudt tradition that probably put us past the point of clarity,..it was just nonesense from then on. Pretty sure the one waiter had a crush on Katie. With her hand all the way to the bottom of her beer glass to pull out the lemon, he walks by and asks, "Do you want another lemon or are you happy fishing that one out?" And then he brought her another lemon. He was super sweet. We also thought we saw Al Borlin (Richard Karn) from Home Improvement sitting at a table near us. BUT we were disappointed when he got up and looked nothing like him at all.

Of course that wasn't enough so we wandered around and happened to stuble upon Ceili's (Kay-lee's), an Irish pub with dualing pianos! DULEING PIANOS PEOPLE!!! It's the same chain that Greg told us about in Calgary. Talk about a blast! Those guys rocked! They were very entertaining and they sang happy birthday to me!! Yay! Looking forward to another Thursday downtown soon. We also made friends with some cools peeps who (I think it was more of a warning) told us they were in the 'film industry'. I'm not sure if that was supposed to scare me or not, but it didn't. They were awesome. Yes, Mase who resembled the lead singer of The Darkness (big curly long afro hair) with a mix of the Beatles with a jacket similar to that of the Sgt. Pepper Band attire. And Chad who was sweet and liked to be dipped while dancing with a woman,....he
quizzed us on the song 'Piano Man', wondering how we knew all the words.

So, to all you Billy Joel fans:

It's 9 o'clock on a ...
What's the old man making love to ...
What is Davy still in ...

In the midst of all our fun we failed to keep track of time and ended up running 6 blocks...Katie in closed toed shoes, me in my Jesus sandals...to catch the train back to Burnaby. It would have been a $30 cab ride home...running seemed appropriate! The next day we realized we really only needed to run 2 if we had paid attention to where the stops actually were...lol. Oops! So I guess we need to learn the train system a little better. But there will be lots of time to do that now! There will be lots more adventures, more random people and definitely a lot more fun timez ahead!