I sit here and realise how unacceptable it is to have allowed so many days to pass since my last post. I have poor Nicole, pregnant and cankled back in Ottawa wondering if I’m still alive. I’m sorry, Nicole.

The answer is yes, I’m alive. I’ve accumulated four drafts all off to a really good start, the only thing that is wrong with them is me. It’s not for a lack of exciting things to write about but it’s probably more that my life has become so exciting that I’ve been getting busy with excitement.

Okay, major stretch there. Truthfully my excuse is laziness.

I did go to Vegas with Gee which was fun. I remember when I lived in Ottawa, Vegas seemed so out of reach because of the cost of flying from YOW, plus accoms, plus entertainment. But, now it’s just a hop and skip across the border to Bellingham; fly out of there and an hour later, touch down in Veg.  Another nice thing about flying out of B-ham is scoring the Allegiant Air package which sent us to Vegas, accommodated us for four nights, and shuffled us from airport to hotel and back all for $262.00 each.

Vegas made an interesting first impression on me. I kind of likened it to Expo on Viagra and steriods. There is sex partout à Vegas. Among rows upon rows of ads for Naughty Nancy, Erotic Erica, Barely Legal, 18, and Sexy Secretaries, etc, there’ll be the odd one for Thunder From Down Under, Vegas’ Australian version of Chipendales. A little something for the ladies.

Mmmm, not for me.

You walk down Las Vegas Blvd and the sidewalks are lined with these …  ”little clicking soldiers” is probably the best way to describe them. I was so fascinated by their method of soliciting Vegas escorts. It must be a source of regular and stable income that it’s not surprising to see little grandma out there too in her “GIRLS” t-shirt hanging down to her knees clicking the escort cards and handing them to passers by. I just did a bit of research and found many YouTube videos of this interesting enterprise. You can see one here. They seem to actually be called Clickers too. Or Flickers… Snappers. I think part of my fascination with them is the actual technique of clicking the cards. I mean I’m sure handing out the cards is years old however, at one point, someone had to come up with clicking the cards which I like to imagine was borne out of boredom and having things in the hands to play with and flick. Now it’s caught on and every single one of them does it. Some have it down pat, they take a step forward, click/flick/snap the card, hand it out and retract if it’s not received then repeat. Sometimes, the more alert ones will withdraw their arm back if you’re of the female species. I wonder if when they apply for the position they have to demonstrate the technique as part of the overall performance assessment? Or, if there’s a training sesssion. You know, it’s really like a dance in a way. An assembly line, line dance.

We didn’t see any shows because yours truly was on a bit of a justified “but I still have to have fun” budget, so we spent a lot of time wandering the streets, walking through the hotel casinos, shopping, and eating. We did party Saturday night at Pure Nightclub which is within Caesars Palace. We picked it because we saw the words “known for its celebrity patronage” on some flyer – twist our rubber elbows, I tell ya. All I could imagine fantasize was that maybe James Franco will be there and my life can complete itself just like that in a bar inside Caesars Palace at 33 years of age. No such luck though, but, I did find a serendipitous consolation completely by accident.

Pure Nightclub is a nice bar. It’s well kept, has secret rooms, lots of white (pure), congenial alcohol service, and a very impressive janitorial staff who will clean up your drink before it even hits the ground. The one issue I have with the place is unless you’re rolling in high dough in the bottle service you’re standing all night long. Let me explain why this could potentially be a bit of an inconvenience. When you’re a young lady wandering around Vegas you’re smart to wear comfortable shoes by day. But, even given this precautionary measure, taking strides up and down streets and  in and out of hotels are going to make the feets and toesies a little achy come the night hours. But when you’re a young lady wandering around Vegas and you’re preparing to hit a Vegas night club you’re going to be wearing heels, and they’re going to be impractical, and they’re going to defy the physiological structure of the foot and the calf muscle and how they work cohesively in order to keep human upright. Basically take away the heels and you’re in tippy toes for hours with a little stick holding your heels up.

I’ll speak on behalf of the two of us here when I say that by 11PM our arches and heels were screaming bloody murder. I ravenously searched for some kind of surface actually reducing myself to begging the security guards to take turns carrying me for five minutes at a time…

(I’m just kidding, as if I would do that)

(Okay I did it to one of them)

… I did get confirmation that there is in fact nothing to sit on unless you’re in bottle service. Preposterous I say. Anyway, the nice thing about the bottle service areas is that the sofa backs are low enough for even short people like me to be able to just conveniently slide my bum onto it and lo and behold I’m sitting down! Gee and I enjoyed this respite for about two minutes before she was swept onto the dance floor by a beautiful black man who didn’t have a friend. Suddenly I was a loner sitting on the back of a bottle service sofa, facing away from the righteous whose bottle service sofa I was using for my own salvation. I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder after a few minutes and turned to find a security guard advising me that I was not allowed to sit there.

I remember the brief moment of panic I felt and my next move was a direct result of that panicked feeling. I’m sure had I processed the request for a least 10 seconds longer, the outcome would have been much different. But my body had a different plan for us and before I knew it I had swung myself around and plopped myself right on the couch of the bottle service between a couple of patrons. I looked to one of them and said something like, “Please pretend you know me, my feet are killing me.” He motioned to the guard with a thumbs up and I was safe!  But that still left Gee who eventually arrived at the entrance of the bottle service area. I looked at the same guy who saved my life and asked him if he could vouch for her too. He was a little ruffled this time but gave the security guard the same thumbs up.

Thankfully the bottle service we crashed was full of fun people. More joined eventually and before we knew it, Gee and I might as well have always been part of them. I begin to engage in conversation with my new roomies and naturally we get into the “Where are you from?” dialog when I discovered that not only are some from Ontario but some are also from Kanata, Ontario! My home sweet home. Not many people out this end know of Kanata – we really just say Ottawa, or, “Where the Ottawa Senators play hockey.”

Speaking of Ottawa Senators, my serendipitous consolation occurred when I realised I crashed the bottle service of a couple of Ottawa Senators and their relations and good friends. How fun! They weren’t Senators when I was in Ottawa, in fact one of them was probably even too young to be in the NHL at that time – ha. But anyway, the most exciting part for me was hanging out with people who live, grocery shop, and party in my little Kanata, Ontario! I cared more about discussing landmarks than I did that they were Ottawa Senators. They definitely were fun though and all our drinks forthcoming came out of their Grey Goose bottles so it was nice compensation for not having the opportunity to make out with James Franco in a corner; not to mention the fact that come four o’clock in the morning, we had history like there was no tomorrow.

The rest of the trip was memorable in a different and more vacationing kind of way. I spent $30 on the progressive slots in total and lost it all and marveled at the highfalutin’ and ostentatious hotels and appreciated just how much effort has gone into Las Vegas to make it seem like a world unto its own. I get now why it’s the city that never sleeps. If it weren’t for actually needing to sleep, I could have spent four straight days just wakefully absorbing every hour of my existence there. It’s not entirely out of enjoyment but could also be out of amazement as well. I might hanker to go again in a few years, but don’t understand wanting to go bi-annually but that’s just me. I don’t think I’m the target market Vegas is aiming at.

Hmm, what else have I been up to?

Oh, I’ve been getting up to skiing quite a bit. I’m sad to report that my Mandy Bunny has broken her baby toe and it’s staying straight with pins and therefore she is unable to ski. Lucky I’ve found a new skiing buddy in Andy and kind of like to think I played a part in his transition from snowboarding back into skiing. Made it up to Whistler a couple of times too. Whistler is like my heaven in a mountain. It’s like my security blanket and my revelry all wrapped into one.

On Friday, I whacked my eyebrow/outer corner of my eye-area on the frame of my car really hard. Have you ever done that? It was the most bizarre thing and I don’t even understand how it happened. I remember swinging my purse in first with the intention of having it land on the passenger seat but somehow my head followed, which would have otherwise been okay because I did want my head inside my car eventually but I figure I just didn’t bend my neck enough to clear the frame and into it my eyebrow went. I remember how the sensation went through a split second series of changes in pain. At first my eyebrow felt like it had sustained a thud with a rubber mallet, almost immediately after that it felt like someone had flipped the mallet upside-down and had now hit my eyebrow with the wooden handle. The final sensation was as though someone had taken an ice pick and hammered it into the outer corner of my eye. By this time I was ass-on-seat thankfully because the pain was pretty debilitating. My right eye continued to stream tears until about halfway to work and I kept looking at it in my  rear view mirror waiting for the purply-red, swollen lump to show itself. Which it never did, but the pain is a constant reminder of what happened.

I would also like to note that I should probably child-proof my apartment given the fact that I just slammed my quad into the corner of the side table in my living room. Now this pain is debilitating and I’m sure will also leave a nice, juicy mark. Look at me all bruised and battered and the only weapons were my car and my side table.

So with that, I’m going to post this entry before I do any more damage to myself which may result in me never getting this published.