Beautiful B.C. - A Vacation from my Vacation

Well I have returned after a hiatus of doing jack squat, to tell you more about my jack squat!!! Last Sunday I took off to the beautiful Shuswap lake (houseboating capital of the world). We stayed at the boyfriends boat-access-only cabin. It's a beautiful cabin that barely has electricity and water. A while ago, the group of cabins that his cabin is in rigged up a generator in the creek and they put tubes in the creek to get running water. It's a really nice cabin though that his parents built by themselves (which I am surprised because I watched his dad try and build a door that looked like a fence that had been crashed into).

(This is me enjoying the 1 hour of nice weather I saw the whole week!)

Well his dad is a proponent of the phrase "working holiday". It's fine and dandy to put your son to work for a day each year (considering he usually spends a max of 7 days a year out there) but to put him...and his girlfriend to work for 3 full days out of the 5 they spend there....ummm lame. His dad had us digging holes for vines the first day and we had 2 very labour intensive days of staining his cabin (this is the 2nd time in 28 years it has been done). The cabin is super tall too. You can't even reach the top with one of those huge-ass extendo ladders, so his dad had to rig up some freaky-ass looking scaffolding which he made with spare planks he had kicking around and it was really scary because I do not trust his dad's building skills (see above). But it actually worked out okay which was a good thing considering he sent the boyfriend up there and I thought that he was going to bite it.

Anyways, so we worked our asses off which was okay because the weather was crap. I have only been out to the cabin 5 times and 4 times, the weather has been complete shit. I have the worst luck because it was 35 Celsius the week (even the day) before I got there and then 29 Celsius the day after I left. Oh mother nature, what the F did I do to you. I am sorry that I couldn't wait until the rest stop and a peed behind a tree on the way up, but I was trying to be one with nature.

We spent most of the weekend inside and we played some cards and had a sweet debate. I schooled his entire family at hearts (which they had just taught me the first night). I swear that is the easiest game ever. My game plan was to screw over the boyfriend's dad as much as I could (least I could do after all the work he made us do). I would dump the queen of spades on him like it was going out of style.

Me and the boyfriends father had a debate about health care one night. My position is that even broke people should be able to have a chance to live and be healthy (i.e. have access to all the cancer treatments, MRIs, etc.. that rich people have access). I also said that some people can't get jobs (which gets them the good insurance) through no fault of their own (e.g. if they are an alcoholic because their father was an alcoholic and they are predisposed to be an alcoholic, they can't afford school because their family is poor, they have mental disabilities, etc.). His position was that if you have money, you should be able to spend it how you like. So if you feel like paying a crap load of cash to get that special cancer treatment, you should be able to. It was a frustrating debate in which neither of us budged. Kind of made me want to pull my hair out of my head, but it explains a lot about how the boyfriend fights with me (like father, like son!)

After the lovely cabin experience, me and the boyfriend jetted off to the desert (aka Kamloops) for the annual August long-weekend soccer tourney. I got there before everyone else but
shortly after, my friend from Vancouver arrived. She hadn't seen her boyfriend for 6 months because he had been in China. Her boyfriend is on the boyfriend's soccer team. We walked towards the boyfriend's hotel (which was two blocks away) and we saw the boyfriend and her boyfriends walking down the road. We both turned to them (me to my friend and the boyfriend to her boyfriend) all wide-eyed, expecting an exciting movie-style reunion. But they were being casual, so we clapped them on and my friend (who is like 5 ft 3 and a super-pint-sized-and-cute Japanese girl) finally started running and jumped on him and wrapped her legs around him. We all laughed a little and cried a little. All in all, a beautiful reunion. That night we took it easy and slept because we had a game the next day at 8am.

Well I discovered, during the evening that we had been placed in the competitive division of the tournament because we were supposed to be playing with a really good team (none of whom actually ended showing up). We are a team of older gals (aged 25 + on average) which never practice and drink wayyyy too much beer. We had to play university and major league teams. They are essentially mostly 18 year olds that practice 5 days a week for soccer. Essentially were ready to get schooled. We show up at the field like 10 minutes before the game and the girls we were playing had obviously gone to bed at like 9pm and had been warming up for at least 1 hour. We show up and are like "Don't worry you are going to smoke us because we suck". They didn't believe us. Did we show them though (how to provide us with a really good ass-kicking).

We decided to rename our team "the Snakes" because we were wearing these heinous uniforms that looked like snakeskin (our back up jersey for our team at home). Our cheer was to slither like a snake and hiss like a snake and go SSSSSSSS-NAKES! Yeah I am well aware that we are probably the coolest people that you have ever met, but please try to contain yourselves! We kept making snake references. I started operation "Snake in the Grass" . This is where we lay low and "pretend" like we suck the first half of the game (staying in the grass) and then we pounce on the other team the second half. Oh and pounced we did by conceding another 4 goals!!! We also kept referring to giving them the "snake bite" and that our goalie is like a snake charmers "cobra in the basket". Needless to say we sucked it up all weekend and our best game ended in a 0-4 defeat. I took a stint in goal as goalie and ended up standing in front of the attacking forward (on the goal line) and trying to stare her down and waved my arms to distract her. Not the best tactic but apparently amusing to watch (one of our teammates was on the ground rolling and laughing). But it was the most fun I have had playing soccer since my college girls soccer team got beat by our college guy's hockey team.

We played another game that day too and lost horribly but ended up going out that night. We ordered pizza after a long-deserved nap (I mean we played so hard that day!) and then got all beautied up to go to the bar. We got to the bar super-early (at about 9pm) and walked in. We were the only girls in the whole bar when we got there and there were about 50 guys. They all turned towards us, tongues hanging out, when we walked in. Gotta love that. It was a fun night. We danced our tushes off and got even drunker. The boyfriend and a couple of his friends decided not to play soccer that day (because the team they came up with had 20 players already). Instead they played a game of golf and ended up having another person join them as their fourth. This guy turned out to be the owner of the bar we went to. So the boyfriend and his friends all stayed at the hotel drinking until 11pm and sauntered up to the front of the line for the bar (past the 100 people standing in line) and said hey we are blah blah and blah and we played golf with the owner. The bouncer had been told about them and they got to come straight in. The best part is that my old soccer team was standing in line (I left the team because they are a bunch of back-stabbing bitches) and they walked in right past them.

A couple of little gems of stories from the night were when our goalie decided to pretend to be a waitress at the bar because she found a tray. Needless to say she got "hired" and then "fired" in the period of 3 minutes when she went up to a table of people we didn't know and asked them if they would like a shot (she had 3 empty shot glasses and two beer glasses on her tray). She then proceeded to fall over and flip the tray face down on their table with a HUGE SMASH and then she ran off. Also me and my soccer teammates have been joking about how we were going to hook one of the gals from the team up with a guy off of the boyfriends team and that they were going to make out. We have been teasing her about it for 2 months. Needless to say....mission accomplished. They had a little kiss-and-tell-which-spreaded-to-the-whole-two-teams at the end of the night. I've never been more proud of her. Lastly, there is a girl on my team that is 6ft and she had this guy off of the other team that was about 5ft6. He was intrigued with her height because when he stood up straight, he was straight at her boob level. I have never seen so many motorboats in one night! Ahh good times. No one parties like soccer girls!

The next morning we played our last soccer game which we agreed to forfeit if the other team would lend us some players. We were all so hung-over that we were yelling at each other "could you get that" when the attacker beat our defense. We also fell all over the place and sweat out alot of booze. We spent the rest of the day being lazy and watched a soccer game. When we were sitting in the beer gardens after the game, there was a streaker. He was money. He ran out during half time of another game. Ran off with the ball (that was sitting at half) and tried to score a goal (which he missed by a mile). He then got down on the ground (remember he is naked all this time) and threw his arms in the air screaming "NOOOOO!!!!" He then casually sauntered back to the beer gardens and put on his shorts and continued to drink.

That night we went for dinner at this place that was really good. It was called "the Players' club Chophouse" and his owned partly by our hometown hero, Jerome Iginla of the Calgary Flames. If you are ever through Kamloops, I highly recommend it! Then we played sociables at the hotel room before going to the soccer dance. When we got there we went and bought some drink tickets and discovered that when you bought your drink, you had to mix it yourself. They had a table with a bunch of bottles of pop on it that you could put in your little glass of hard alcohol that you got when you handed over your ticket. I swear if someone put Rohipnol in one of those pop bottles, they would have gotten a lot of people F-ed up.

A couple of fun stories from that night is when our goalie found a beer bong which had some letters on it. The only letters I could find was an R, an S, a P and another R. So me, being the nerdy accountant I am, spelt RRSP with the letters. RRSP, for those of you from the states, stands for Registered Retirement Savings Plan (like a 401K). I then put them on my arm as a tattoo (see picture below) and made up a RRSP cheer song:

R-R-S-P
What does that mean to me?
Life Savings!
Ya! Ya!
Life Savings!
Wooooo!

(Me with my sweet RRSP tattoo).

Also the boyfriend had a dance off with his friends and got bootied out of the circle by his best friend; Me and my friend tried to climb on the top of some scaffolding to dance like party girls but got chased down by the bouncer (who we made a stealth getaway from); I got my ass grabbed by more guys then a care to count; etc.

We then found a bus out front and chartered it to go to our hotel. We thought that we were all cool convincing the bus driver to give us a ride, but we then found out that the bus was kept to drive drunk people back from the party to their hotels rather than everyone having to take cabs. I made up some good songs for each of the people on the bus (like we used to do back on the school bus in elementary) and then fell on my ass when the bus stopped and I was trying to take a picture. We hung out at the guy's hotel room for a bit and then went back to sleep off the last night. The next day we drove home.

All-in-all, it was another fun soccer tourney. But it is unfortunately the last soccer tourney of the summer. So you guys will have to wait another year to hear of more fun stories. I am trying to convince the girls to go to a tourney in Edmonton during indoor soccer where we can hit some of my old stomping grounds from my university days (I talk like they were a long time ago rather than last year). Other than that my summer has been uneventful. I will try and do something interesting in the next little while that would be worth talking about!