WTF? Friday

This is too good to be true. This clip is from an actual DVD series put together by a woman who is touting the health benefits of laughing. Being a big fan of laughing (both at myself and at others) I think this theory is lovely. Kerry (the creator) has combined the ‘positive physical and metal benefits of laughter’ with exercise to create her ‘Laugh Away’ exercise series.   Translated, she, and her colleagues laugh like a complete morons while doing exercises.

The clip below is from Laugh your Abs Away and I think it works. I have watched it three times today and think my stomach is flatter already…

Can you plait my hair?

You want me to do what with your hair?

This was one of the newest words I added to my ever expanding vocabulary. Apparently to plait is to braid. It is pronounced platt (rhymes with flat) versus plate like I was assuming. Nothing like a move across the ocean to make you feel like your 17 years of schooling was for not!

Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans…..I noticed that Selfridges in London had Libby’s canned pumpkin on sale yesterday…2 tins for £5 wow they are practically giving them away at $5 USD per can. I googled it and apparently Walgreens has it on sale for .99 cents. If I had only known then I would have shipped a bunch over and set up a stall outside of Selfridges selling it for 2 cans for £4…I could have been rich….maybe next year.

A Canadian caffeine kick in jolly old…

For us it was the Canadian version of the Loch Ness monster or bigfoot…someone once told me that there was a Tim Horton’s in London but in 3 years we hadn’t yet run across it. For those of you unfamiliar, Tim Horton’s is a Canadian coffee shop chain (named after a hockey player) that has become a Canadian institution (see my previous post).

A Tim Horton’s coffee is the drink that hockey moms warm their hands around while sitting for hours in the local ice rink, it’s a pick me up for a long drive or help with a hangover. As with the assumption in the US that there is a Starbucks on every corner, in Canada there is a Tim Horton’s on every corner, in every mall and at every rest stop on the highway. So you can see why we were interested to find such a home comfort in London.

After wandering the general vicinity in London we found it. To be fair it is not its own standalone store its merely a section of a SPAR (British equivalent to a 7-11 or Mac’s). Feeling all nostalgic we went in. We were a bit disappointed to see that the coffee came from a vending machine type thing but were happy to see the traditional cups (oooh the little things).  They also had some donut but they just didn’t look the same plus, they didn’t have the walnut crunch that the hubby likes or the one with sprinkles on it that I like.  So we passed on the donut and went straight for coffee – regardless of the fact that it wasn’t being served to us by a friendly person in a tan blouse and a visor.

The coffee looked okay but sadly they only had milk to put in it vs the 18% cream that is in normal Tim Horton’s coffee. Once we were all poured and sugared we took the first official taste test…and sadly it was pretty bad, although it smelled pretty much the same, my coffee was completely watered down and didn’t have that creamy taste, the cappuccino was a surprise hit so the hubby agreed to trade with me as I was clearly not enjoying my coffee water (aawww).

So, we can confirm that Tim Horton’s coffee can be purchased in London. As unimpressed as I was with their actual coffee, you can still buy the grounds there and make your own Tim Horton’s coffee at home which will save us from having to fill our suitcase with tins of it on our next trip to Canada.

I was hoping however, that while walking around London with a Timmie’s cup, we would attract at least one Canadian on holiday or an ex-pat or two but unfortunately no one was ooot and aboot…shame as we could do with a few more friends here as a bunch of ours have repatriated (love that word!).

An entire year of nonsense

Well yesterday was the blog’s first birthday! I can’t believe i have been rambling on now for a year! Ah who am I kidding, I can believe it cause I have been rambling on about stuff for almost 30 years in real life (did I mention my 30^th birthday is coming up?)

Anyhoo for those of you interested the blog has had almost 12,000 visits (mom and auntie L you have been busy) in that year and my top posts are

1) Old school catalogue shopping (mainly cause it seems tons of Brits google ‘Argos’ and somehow get to my blog)

2) Waitrose does it again (same as above, apparently Waitrose is a big search term as is milk which this post talks about

3) About (cause they want to know about the genius behind it all hahahah)

Search terms people have found me using include: Argos,Tim Horton’s, milk, hearts??

There have been a few random searches that people have done and found me including my two favourites lately including giant bra,  ‘Is there antibiotics in Swiss chalet chicken? ‘(not sure is there?) and ‘her shirt off’ (??) pretty sure both wouldn’t have found what they were looking for when they arrived here.

In other news it sounds like the British government might look to cut the VAT (our version of sales tax) to encourage us to spend at Christmas (done and done)…as I have mentioned before I love that the tax is hidden in all of our prices so the price on the tag/menu is exactly what you pay. I do wonder how a VAT cut will actually translate to us little consumers as I doubt that every retailer will reprint their menus or fix all the tags on their clothes to reflect this possible 2.5% reduction.

At least in Canada when they reduced the GST to whatever it is now (I keep losing track and always get corrected right away when I quote the old 15% sales tax) it was probably an easy switch as retailers/restaurants just had to update their computers to calculate at a different rate….aaw look at me getting all current events on y’all. Will be back tomorrow with pictures of us having a Tim Horton’s coffee…in London!

PS And for a little shameless self promotion…If you do like my blog vote for it in the Canadian blog awards…its about 3/4 down the page called Adrienne’s blog vote

WTF? Friday

PUHLEESE tell me this is a joke. Only I don’t think it is a joke because it has been featured on some fairly reputable shows including Anderson Cooper, Graham Norton and the Tonight show. They apparently even sold out last year at Christmas….hopefully because they only got one wig made because they didn’t think anyone other than Paris Hilton would be stupid enough to dress their cat up in a wig and think they will like it…

Yeah look at Shaft sitting there, he looks like he loves that wig. And if he wasn’t sedated and stapled to that white furry mat he would scratch your eyes out for putting a blonde mop on his head that clearly won’t stay on his if he moves a millimetre, on yeah and he can’t hear you cause it’s covering his ears…but doesn’t he look so cute? NO he looks like a cat with a mop on his head.

Just because creatures are smaller than us doesn’t mean we should dress them up and humiliate them…oh except if the small creatures are babies cause then it’s funny. The turkey baby is in honour of American Thanksgiving next week and the lobster is just cause it was so damn clever.

How long is a piece of string? How heavy is a stone?

Ages ago I read Bridget Jones’s Diary and I remember the main character quoting her weight in stone. I think i googled it way back then to see if it actually existed but figured this unit of measurement wasn’t really used anymore it was just a clever way for the author to make us think the Brits were a wee bit old school and actually weigh themselves using some unit of measurement invented by the Flintstones.

Come to find out since moving here…it is true! We were talking about people’s weights today at lunch (as we all ate pizza) and out of curiosity, I asked my colleagues what measurement they knew their weight in and every one of them said ’stone’. A few of them knew what their stone weight converted to roughly in pounds or kilos but weren’t entirely sure as stone was their normal unit of measurement for someone’s weight.

WTF is a stone? (and why isn’t it plural?) That’s like measuring your height in string…I am 16 string…how long is the string? How big is the stone? Are they boulders, pebbles, gravel? For the longest time I had absolutely no perception of what it means to be a certain number of stone so when someone said ‘Did you see the show about the guy who was….50 stone’…I pictured both a very large and very small person cause it had to be one of the two.

For those of you who are interested and didn’t know, one stone is equal to 14 pounds (nice round number eh?!) which still doesn’t help me much as my 14 times tables aren’t great so if someone tells me they are 11 stone it still takes me ages to get a proper idea of what that means. At least if I was ever on Jeopardy and they said ‘it equals 14 pounds’ I would know what the question was!

I am thinking I might write a Canadian version of Bridgette Jones but quote her weight in timbits…

If you are looking for me, I’ll be at the mall

So for a while I have been hearing about this big shopping centre (mall) opening up in London.  It is apparently the largest mall in Europe and was going to have something like 200 stores in it.  Seeing that London isn’t big on malls like North America I took this information with a grain of salt figuring it would be a few stores with a roof over them.  I also took the ‘in London’ bit to mean that it was somewhere on the outskirts of the city at the end of one of the tube lines, as surely this shopping establishment couldn’t be anywhere close to where I bumble around.

 

Anyway, after seeing ads everywhere for the opening I finally gave in and decided to check where this huge masterpiece of a mall would be…to my surprise it was 3 tube stops away from my work. Still being the devil’s advocate that I am, I figured it must be a half hour walk from the tube or something and that all the stores would be crappy….that was until the boss and I happened to pass it our way to a meeting on Friday and I got a glimpse of the massive Waitrose, House of Fraser and 2 story H&M…it was huge, bigger and newer than any other mall I had ever seen.

 

Not surprisingly I got home from work and gently suggested to the hubby that we check out this ‘mall’ thing to see if it is as nice as people say it is. So, Saturday afternoon we hopped on the tube and within 40 minutes (and a less than 2 minute walk from the tube station vs. the 30 min trek I was anticipating) I was in heaven.  This mall is the largest and most spectacular mall I have ever been in…the aisles are long and wide the stores are bright and airy and there are big huge windows everywhere making it nice and light.

‘

There are two proper floors of shopping a bottom and a top (duh) but it seems all the stores on the top floor are two stories high (2 floor topshop eeek!).  We probably only made it through ½ of the mall before the hubby started to fade but I have seen enough to have my internal mall GPS set up and think that I could confidentially do some damage next time I am through there (without hubby). 

 

Two storey topshop

One of my favourite parts was the food court…no plastic chairs to perch on to eat your crappy A&W or Burger King after which you have to try and jam your rubbish in overflowing bins…this place had comfy seats and each restaurant served your food on real plates with nice cutlery (that I pondered stealing)!!  No idea why they would bother but it felt nice and posh.  Also, your choices for food were a lovely Lebanese place where we got chicken wraps and humus but we could have eaten Thai, Mexican, Italian, Indian, a salad bar/wrap place etc etc.

 

Anyway I am already excited to head back there to do some Christmas shopping and can’t wait until one of my Canadian shopping buddies visits (cough Jenn) as I can assure you I will be advising them to head straight from the airport to‘the mall’ to meet me….what’s that hubby?…what did you say? fredit frunch?  couldn’t hear you with your pita’s and hummus in your mouth…shame.

WTF? Friday

I admit I am always the first person putting my coat on when someone in the office (or anywhere for that matter) suggests we go grab greasy fast food.  I do enjoy my McDonalds and other fast food chains and understand that they aren’t my healthiest options.

 

I am however in awe when such food chains introduce new sandwiches that seem to be greasier and fatter than ones they have had in the past.  One of the ones I have been particularly taken with was this one advertised by KFC….its a deep fried chicken patty (mmm) with cheese, bacon and a HASH BROWN…seriously?  I am a fan of hash browns but can’t say I ever thought they might taste better covered in cheese, bacon and a giant chicken nugget. 

 

This past weekend we were out at lunchtime and it started pouring…the only thing within running distance to where we were standing KFC so we popped in and pointed to a few options on the menu…low and behold when the hubby opened his burger box…he realised he had ‘accidentally’ ordered this exact artery clogger.   

 

 

I did keep my eye on him the rest of the afternoon and had my mobile phone on hand should he feel feeling shooting pains down his arm or start clutching his chest…thankfully, he survived.  Wondering what they will come up with next…a deep fried mars bar might fit well in between the tomato and hash brown.

 

 

Just because that food picture was a bit gross I thought I would leave you with the cutest food photo I have seen.

 

 

 

 

You’re not going anywhere…

On some of our recent trips I have noticed more and more in-plane advertising. I think its a great idea as I have self diagnosed myself with ADD and the worst place for me to be is stuck in a tin airplane for hours on end with nothing to do. I tend to search the seat pocket and read everything inside (including instructions on the sick bag) so when there is advertising like below on the Air Malta flight or Ryan Air you better believe I will read it.

Air Malta seatback advertisement (it was actually printed on the little tissue you rest your head on)

Ryan air overhead compartment advertising

Ryan air advertising

My thoughts are that when they have you stuck in your seat they should be advertising things that you can purchase either right there ON the plane?  Great way to recoup those rising fuel costs!  They seem to instead have messages about buying real estate in Malta…which is really only applicable to those travelling to Malta (at least the Ryanair’s ads are applicable to all passengers as obviously you are familiar with their service and will probably be marginally more interested in the ads).

The one campaign that bugged me most was on my last Air Canada flight back to London . On this flight we were lucky enough to get one of the few planes they have upgraded and put in TV’s into the seats which meant we had had on demand TV (as opposed to the way to Toronto where we had this). The issue was that once you chose a TV show or movie, there were 5 minutes of commercials you had to watch before the feature started…and you couldn’t fast forward through (which to be fair as my background is in marketing so may as well capitalise on your captive market, they certainly aren’t going anywhere).

My problem with these ads were that they were all the same no matter which programme you watched and that first one was for my favourite steak restaurant in Canada called The Keg. I was stuck on crap airplane, after being served crap food and every time I tried to watch a show I was shown a 30 second commercial with a freshly grilled filet steak that is only available in CANADA which was a) somewhere that I wouldn’t be returning to for at least 6 months and b) WASN’T available on the plane and I was starving! I probably would have dished out good money had the air host/hostess come by with a tray of steak from The Keg.

Anyway my long winded point is that in air advertising is a great idea. In theory it could help to regulate flight prices by bringing in advertising revenue but I also think that airlines should carefully target their advertising audiences, go to companies that have products you can buy instantly on that plane…either from the food cart or duty free.  Bored people spend money (or is that just me?). Also try and advertise products/services that you can actually purchase in the country you are travelling to versus the one they just left….those are just my thoughts.

If you stuck with my blah blah this long I thank you with this great video from Mad TV (US sketch show) that is absolutely hilarious…now if only the belts could be sponsored by someone.

 

My biological clock is barking

So I think most women my age see a baby and start getting broody…I on the other hand see a dog and get broody. It shouldn’t surprise you then that this weekend I dragged the hubby to a dog show thing at Earls Court. It wasn’t a dog show like the ones you go and watch dogs perform but it was more of a show for you to meet and interact with over 200 breeds of dogs. They let you pet them, take pictures and ask questions about the breed. My initial (fairly North American) reaction was what if a kid gets bitten, or the dogs fight…then someone will sue and the whole thing will be shut down…thankfully the Brits don’t seem to worry so much about that stuff and let great shows like this go on (plus they don’t have rabies over here so that’s one less thing to worry about)!

The thing I loved best was that you could literally pet and play with every dog there!! It was like petting zoo of dogs…we stopped at the Bichon Frise exhibit as that is the type of dog the hubby had grown up with then we headed to the Border Terrier booth where I melted…look at this guy, don’t you just love him – that’s the kind of dog we eventually want to get.

We also hit the basset hound exhibit (in honour of my doggie growing up Maggie) and stopped at all of the other 197 booths which included a hairless dog (eeew) the most massive St Bernard and a great dane that I stood eye level with. For those of you doggie lovers I have included some pictures below (not sure why the border terrier is duplicate but he’s cute enough to look at twic…for those of you cat lovers…sorry, can’t help you.

It was such a fun day out (it doesn’t take much to entertain me) and the best bit was at the end I got a bag of cotton candy! Dogs and cotton candy make me one happy girl.