After a short hiatus from Listicling--that's a verb, right?--I'm back! I just couldn't stay away from the lists after doing it weekly for
over a year now. This week The Great Stasha had three options for us to choose from:
or
For me, it was down to a choice between 80s or ten tweets. As we're in the very last hours of 2012, I decided to choose ten of my tweets that sort of summed up the year. Using
All My Tweets, I pored through nearly 2200 tweets from 2012 to find the best ones. Narrowing it down to ten was near impossible--sorry--so I present to you my list of 14:
I spent hours & hours commuting to university by bus last spring, while finishing off a speech sciences certificate. I do actually like taking the bus most of the time. Sitting there reading, tweeting or playing games on my phone sure beats paying attention to traffic, finding a parking space & all the other crap that comes with driving. But seriously, could all the MP3 player users of the world just get better headphones so I don't have to hear your shite music?!?
First bike ride of many this past year!
Unless forced to get up in wee hours of the morning (I consider any hours 'wee' if they're single-digit) for work or something, my schedule slowly shifts to semi-nocturnal.
I finally got back into performing on stilts after a lengthy hiatus due to belly-full-of-baby, etc. Happily, my first few gigs involved roomier dresses. For this gig however, I needed to wear my clown costume: pants. Not long before my screen test, I confirmed that, sadly, my pre-baby bum was slightly smaller than my post-baby bum. Being a metre taller than your average gal brings with it some wardrobe difficulties, I can tell you. Nothing the addition of a bit of fabric in the back seam couldn't fix!
Getting picked to help promote the Vancouver International Children's Festival via social media was awesome. I loved helping
get the word out about Kidsfest & getting to go for free (not to mention some of the preview events & soirees) was really just the cherry on top. If you want to see photos of what fun Kidsfest is in Vancouver, check out my posts on
our first day at Kidsfest &
Kidsfest: Day Two. This event is definitely a highlight of the year for us & I can't wait to go again in 2013!
Thanks to some of you (I assume), I was
nominated as one of the Top 30 Vancouver Mom blogs. Winning a spot in the top 30 came with a lot of perks, like getting to go to
the big soiree for free, not to mention prizes & a fair bit more attention for The Sprog. An unexpected & far better benefit was the camaraderie that developed among the other top 30 bloggers. We've kept in touch via Facebook & had several get-togethers in person. I've learned a lot about blogging from this group of women.
We took Sprout to three of Vancouver's outdoor movies this summer:
The Princess Bride, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, then
Labyrinth. He loved them--well, the first & the last one, anyway. Riding along the Seawall on a mild summer evening, bike valet parking, popcorn, blankets & a movie on a giant inflatable screen--all FREE: what's not to like?
I got a stilting gig as background in a Huggies commercial (this is what I did the aforementioned screen test for). I was part of a circus troupe featuring acrobats on trampolines, stilt walkers, fire breathers, unicyclist, horse riders &
the fabulous East Van institution that is the Carnival Band. Doing extra work for TV or movies generally ends up being a whole lot of "Hurry up & wait!", aka, boooo-rrrringgg. However, hanging out with about two dozen circus performers for two days straight? So much fun! Oh, & if you want to actually see the
Huggies commercial, it's here on YouTube. You can see me in the background for a second or two--look for red pants, black jacket & yellow shirt.
This road trip featured a subcompact car, hours of my father-in-law driving us around, temperatures over 40 celsius & a skin infection requiring two separate prescriptions each for Oli & Sprout. Not one of my favourite trips, I have to admit. I'm hoping that we'll be able to do some slightly more successful travelling with Sprout this coming year.
Over the last summer we spent a few afternoons trying to track down bourbon caramel bacon brownies from our friends' bacon-based food cart,
Pig on the Street. When we found out that they would be participating in a weekly gathering of some of the best food carts in the city at the Waldorf Hotel, we were justifiably stoked. This is also the event where I found (food) love at first sight: pupusas from
Guanaco Truck, a Salvadoran food cart.
In the summer I was whining that a kid-friendly cafe needed to open up in my neighbourhood. I wrote a wish list of sorts here in
An Open Letter to My Dream Cafe. Four months later, Sweetsalt Bakery appeared & fulfilled nearly every item on my list. I'm still waiting for a place that has good beer AND a play area though. :)
I got the opportunity to go behind the scenes for Vancouver's We Day to video blog for Telus & then sat in a reserved box for the big event. It was pretty cool, though not knowing who most of the musical acts were made me feel a bit old. You can check out
my post about We Day if you want to know more. Here's the final cut of the
Telus for We Day video I contributed to.
This is better than TV--we look out the living room window & see all kinds of birds eating, flying, doing bird stuff every day. I've even downloaded an app to help me identify which birds are which. (I know, I'm a nerd)
Once I got a phone upgrade (thanks Telus!) & actually had a relatively recent Android operating system that could run it, I joined the dark side: Instagram. It's been, "Sprout! Freeze! Mama needs to Instagram this!" on a daily basis since then. When we had our Vancouver Inspiration Pass (free admission to over a dozen musems, galleries & other attractions in the city) I became a total Instagram-a-holic.
Click the button over there to the left & head on over to NorthWest Mommy's Listicle Linky if you'd like to read more lists like the one above. You can even join in the fun & link up your own list too!
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