winnerpeg 2011

you may have noticed that i didn’t post thursday or friday and that my post on saturday seemed a spot space-cadetty. that’s because, as i said before, we went away.

we went to winnipeg, manitoba, canada, a really-hard-to-drive-in city famous for its forks.

plus i ran out of post-it notes and got a new jacket.

{update: barclay got me four new packs of post-it notes}

we went on our trip mostly and mainly because barclay had a thing for work–some sort of convention where he went to learn about bricks. i tagged along to visit my friend crystal and also to do something i am a little bit skerred to mention on my blog because people are going to think i’m stupid, as if those same people don’t already think i’m stupid for simply having a blog: i met somebody that, until friday, i had only ever known online.

{hoh! stranger danger!}

emily-jane.net lives in winnipeg, and we’ve been aware of each others’ online presences for a while now and when i mentioned i was coming to where she was she friendlyily invited me for cheesecake at the cutest little bakery ever. she’s sweet and lovely, and i pretty much spent the whole visit envying her accent. if i had three wishes, my first one would be to have an accent. {my second would be for thick beautiful hair as long as a meter stick, and my third is a secret.}

the rest of the day was spent with crystal, running around osbourne villiage and the exchange district and the forks ducking into vintage shops and haberdasheries and art galleries and trying really hard not to buy everything {which turns out to be pretty easy when everything costs more money than your bank account has ever even seen}. it was magical and wonderful, except for the part where crystal and i wandered into some sort of creepy dungeon that chilled me to the very core of my being. it looked exactly like this:

there comes a point in every adventure where you need to stop following the signs and arrows and just get outta there.

the real fun part of the trip, though, was the drive home. we were driving along, it was 1 in the afternoon, the sun was out, and traffic just…stopped.

for a few hours.

so i said, “i’m going to document this.”

thus: THE DAY THE TRAFFIC STOOD STILL {a documentary}

we listened to our ipod, until the battery died.

when it died, we spent some time despairing until i sprang open the glove box and discovered that we had nothing to despair about, as i so happened to have an emergency music stash.

i also discovered some wire in my purse, which i used to fashion a golden ring for to wear in case we ever made it out alive.

and when i was done, we were still stuck.

so i made another one–

–and two more after that because, frankly, i was on a roll. barclay even made one for my pinky, and it didn’t matter because he is a manly man, the kind who can make jewelry-making look macho.

and then i pretended i was a model, and i took a thousand self-portraits of me modelling my jewelry. here is one:

unfortunately, one of my eyes is noticeably bigger than the other.

aside from all the ringsmithing, we ate a lot of cracked pepper-flavoured spitz and barclay read the three musketeers and we discussed topics. it was nice, being stuck was.

and then, just like that, the traffic started moving again.

and we went home.