One Year Later

Sam Obeid Photography

This past weekend marks mine and Kevin’s one year wedding anniversary. To say the time has flown by is an understatement! A lot has happened in that time, but I still can’t believe that it’s already been a year. And I thought I’d be sad about not being a newlywed anymore, but I’m not. At all! I actually feel way better about being a regular ol’ married couple now that we have that first year under our belts. I hear the first year is supposed to be the hardest, but we’ve been together for almost 7 years now, lived together for a couple years before getting married, and have pretty much had every trial and tribulation thrown in our direction in that time.

For those that say that marriage is just a piece of paper and doesn’t change anything... I think those people are mostly the ones that have choose to co-habitate before getting hitched. I agree mostly that the day-to-day doesn’t change much, but marriage makes everything feel a lot... heavier. Like, this is FOREVER. It’s a pretty heavy decision to willingly choose to commit the rest of your life with someone! I think way too many people out there reach a certain point where they think they’re “at that age” and just marry the person they’re with, or they get wedding fever because their friends or family are all getting married. Don’t fall for the trap! I was so glad when all the wedding planning was over and Kevin and I could get back to just being us. I actually said as much in our speech at the wedding, which got everyone laughing.

A great piece of advice I heard about relationships is regarding the fact that you have to be happy with yourself before you can be happy with someone else. It went something like this:
Remember, you’re the dessert and your partner should be the cherry on top! Definitely not necessary, but nice to have :)

So anyway, the whole point of this post is that I wanted to share what we did for our anniversary! The weather was AMAZING, so we took a weekend trip up to Niagara-on-the-Lake. If you’ve never been, it’s really quite beautiful up there. We bought some passes for a wine event called the 2014 Discovery Pass Wine & Food Pairings. With each pass ($40+tax), you get 8 food and wine pairings at different wineries (you choose from a list of 20-something wineries) and they had a Designated Drivers pass ($30+tax) where you get a mocktail instead of wine, so I got that pass. It was definitely money well spent! I made a little map that showed where the wineries we wanted to visit were located and the food/wine pairings they were offering. It was very handy to see everything laid out like this while we were driving around so we knew what order to visit them in.

My favourite food was HANDS DOWN the grilled calamari bruschetta with toasted fennel, tomato, marinated olives, and basil at Inniskillin! It was so delicious. Other great food locations were Kacaba Vineyards, Good Earth Food & Wine Co., and Trius.

My least favourite food was easily the thai-style chicken (too soggy!!) at Hinterbrook Estate  and the Jamaican jerk slider (too dry!!) at Greenlane Estate. Also, the drink samples they gave at Greenlane Estate were SO STINGY!!!!! Kevin got about a thimble of Riesling, and I got about 3 thimbles of lemonade. I’m not sure why they were so stingy, especially with my lemonade… it’s freaking lemonade! Oh well.

The Discovery Pass event is still going on next weekend, so here are some iPhone photos I took if you’re interested in seeing what we got

1. Good Earth Food & Wine Co offered a trio: an Italian vegetable caponata with rosemary and Bella Vitano cheese; a Jamaican beef patty with lime and papaya slaw; and a Vietnamese cold roll with tamarind dipping sauce
2. & 3. Kacaba Vineyards offered: BBQ five-spiced pork medallions on arugula, with a navy bean and fennel mix, topped with sweet tomato ginger drizzle. The vegetarian option (which I ate) had all the same, minus the pork, and with the addition of feta cheese and a ciabatta bun.
4. Trius offered: a fresh strawberry cupcake topped with Chantilly cream.
5. Reif Estate offered: fish tacos – blackened tilapia with avocado cream, shredded cabbage, and pico de gallo on a soft corn tortilla.
6. Jackson-Triggs offered: Jerk chicken roti with cilantro, habanero, and cucumber.

Have a great week everyone :) This is our last week before summer officially begins on Saturday!

Condo News: Construction Update

I've been super busy these past few months and haven't had a working computer since March 3rd, but I have no excuse for this long of a blogging break. Just shameful!

Anyhow, I thought I'd give an update to the condo status. I've posting updated photos on Instagram, but it's nice to get a record of it on the ol' bloggo. This is the most recent photo we took of the condo. 

And here's a photo of the view from our unit but from the floor below ours. It looks really dreary here (very English!) but I guess that's what you get when you take a photo in April. C'mon spring!

I just read through my last condo news blog post and got a good chuckle. Apparently people are supposed to be moving into the building about now. Um no. False. #FAIL. My sister is on the third floor, which is actually the second residential level, and she got her official move in date letter in the mail. They gave her a date of July 27, people!! While this annoys me to no end, it's official y'all! There's no going back now. Well legally, I think they can go back or forth 5 days, but other than that it's official y'all! At least for her. Who knows when we're moving. I'm italicizing a lot... I just have to really emphasize certain words here... know what I mean? So while Michelle is second from the bottom, we're second from the top. We got an email saying (unofficially) that we'll be moving August 27 (Michelle's email said July 2). Her move-in date is now 3.5 weeks later than what they told her in the email. Three and a half weeks later than August 27 is....MY BIRTHDAY. Crap. The last one I'll ever have in my 20's, and it falls on a Saturday! Double crap. I guess there are worse things... I can almost guarantee that we will NOT be moving in September at all. It'll probably be Thanksgiving. As long as I don't miss out on turkey, it's all good. There was no turkey this Easter, and let's be real: that is the only thing I care about when it comes to holidays! Gobble gobble. 

In other news, wedding planning is coming along! Less than 10 weeks to go... I'm going for my potential last dress fitting this week. And we filled out the form for the marriage licence on the weekend. It might sound lame, but I think that was the most excited I've been so far. To me, I was very cool to think about our information going into records. I like looking at all that history stuff, so it makes me think about potential future generations being interested in looking at my records. I've seen a copy of the marriage licence of the relative I was named after - my great great great great grandmother, Emily Jane Green - and it is SUPER COOL. Yes, I'm a geek. But when you have an unusual name, it's cool to see where it came from!

Something else I was super stoked about was the stamp we had made for the wedding. I Instagram-ed a photo of it and have been stamping the shizzzz out of everything ever since lol. I got the stamp from Toronto Stamp and dealt with a very nice helpful man named Jake. They cost about 10% more than the other companies I talked to, but they had a ONE DAY turn around. One day, people!! I made a file in GIMP (basically a freeware version of Photoshop) and sent it off to him. He called me to make some changes so that the stamp would be more legible - I changed the font (to a sans serif) and ampersand (made it more simple) and also increased the resolution. About 10 iterations later, this is what we ended up with! This photo below was just one of my test stamps... we stamped all of the invitation envelopes at the flap, kind of like a seal. 

Sooo a big woohoo to wedding planning and condo building almost being done, right!!?

Five Years

Today is mine and Kevin's 5 year anniversary (happy anniversary!)

Photo: Omar Hassan

We've come a long way in 5 years! A condo, a car, long distance, a few moves, a few jobs, and several vacations.... and soon, a wedding!

Photo: Maricel Salalila

I instagram-ed a photo, and tweeted our official engagement photos, but never announced it on the blog - Kevin proposed Labour Day weekend while we were camping with my family. So now this cutie is gonna be allll mine mwahahahah!!

Photo: Maricel Salalila

I always thought I'd cry when Kevin finally got around to proposing, but I had a really bad habit of always expecting it! Seriously, before every weekend that we had plans, I would tell my friend Gary, "I think this is the weekend..." And when it didn't happen, I would be mildly disappointed. I knew it was coming, I just didn't know when. Kevin likes to do things at his own pace.. Anyhow, when the moment finally came, it was private and sweet, just like I'd hoped it would be. Except I didn't cry! Not only did I not cry, I actually laughed. I think I was just kinda nervous... like nervous laughing? Not sure. In any case, after everything was said and done it was pretty late and everyone was sleeping, so I woke their asses up to share the news!

Photo: Margaret Diotalevi

The next day I went into full planning mode and had a huge chunk of the wedding planning wrapped up by mid-October. The people who know me in real life were not at all surprised by this lol.

I'm not sure how specific to get on the blog, but pretty much all the big things are covered. We're getting married June 2013 at a beautiful heritage house. We've got the venue, caterer, photographer, officiant, florist, dress, MC, and wedding party picked.


Here are some GIFs to sum up the mostly noteworthy proposal reactions:

Me, for a solid week after the proposal

Shannon

Michelle and Deric

Gary

Did you or anyone you know have a funny reaction to a proposal? Also, is everyone down to hear wedding details? Because that's pretty much all I have to write about these days!

What I’ve Been Up To

When I fall off the blogging bandwagon, I fall off HARD! I’ve been really slacking lately because this summer has been craaaazy busy! Kevin and I went to Boston two weeks ago. Had a blast, but I have yet to sort through all of my photos.. One of my best friends, Kerry, got married up north this weekend and I was the MC and a bridesmaid. My uncle also got married this weekend. My aunt, her husband, and 4 of their children came to Canada and were staying with my parents so I took some time off to hang out with them. I hadn’t seen them in 5 years so it was very very nice to catch up!! There have been BBQs, the Science Centre, Niagara Falls, and lots of wine! One of my cousins and her hubby have headed back to England, but some relatives are still here for another week or so. Yay!

Here are two of my favourite pictures from this weekend:
My mom, two of her siblings, all three of their spouses, most of their children, and their significant others standing outside of my parents’ house! These are some of my favourite people :)

This is a photo of the reception area at Kerry’s wedding. The lighting was great so I was really happy to get this shot..one of the few I took that day! I barely had the camera all night because I was doing wedding stuff. Kevin stepped up and got some really great shots. Kerry had some really great wedding decor so I’ll share photos of that soon.