Occasionally in life, there comes a time when your heart is filled with extreme sadness. It’s not the kind of experience that I would wish on anyone, and certainly not one that I relish having to go through myself. But, it does happen, and sometimes there is nothing you can do except hang in there and hope that, eventually, laughter will once again return to your life.

Thankfully, that day, for me, seems to have come (hence, my return to this small-yet-fabulous corner of the Interweb!), with a little help from the good people at Sam’s Club…

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Just a reminder to all ice cream lovers across North America…

TODAY IS MIRACLE TREAT DAY!

If you stop by any participating Dairy Queen today and pick yourself up a delicious DQ Blizzard, the proceeds will be donated to your local Children’s Miracle Network hospital.

Not an ice cream fan? No worries! You can also make a donation directly to the Children’s Miracle Network, and make a huge difference in the lives of children in your community.

Ice cream for a good cause… What could be better than that?!

A few things that I learned during the recent long weekend (from which I am still recovering):

- Just because you don’t burn the first two days of a long weekend doesn’t mean it’s safe to skip the SPF 50 on Day Three. I laugh in the face of many things… But melanoma isn’t one of them…

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I’ve come to an important conclusion: I either need to swear off Jen Lancaster novels, or stop being so nice to total strangers.

Kicking my Lancaster habit is unlikely to happen any time soon, as all three of her novels are on my Summer Reading list. It’s just toting them around in public that seems to get me into trouble… and by “trouble” I mean “hopelessly awkward situations with random men I’ve never met before.”

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So, I’m flicking through TV channels today, taking one of my (somewhat infamous) procrastination breaks, when I’m confronted with an image of bumper cars riding around in an Always Dri Weave.

Seriously. Bumper cars. Dri Weave. I couldn’t make this up even if I tried…

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Fact #4689542 about me: I loathe public washrooms.

When I was in high school, I refused to use the school washrooms. I knew that they were cleaned daily, but it didn’t matter. After witnessing countless numbers of female students standing on the toilet seats to adjust their kilts in the giant bathroom mirror, I decided that they’d never be clean enough. (This often meant “holding it in” for seven or eight hours a day while I was in class… How my bladder survived, I may never know.) Fast forward to the present. In our shiny new office here in the west end of Toronto, amidst rooms with lavish leather chairs, multiple kitchens, and pristine boardrooms, there is one major problem: We only have one Ladies’ Room.

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Summer around our house can only mean one thing: baseball season.

While baseball is definitely not my favourite hot-weather sport (give me soccer or volleyball any day, thank you), it is a huge part of B-rad’s life. As such, our summer schedules often revolve around umpiring and evening games, and we occasionally eat dinner quite late. Tonight was one of those nights…

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That’s a line I hear a lot. Usually it’s the response I get right after people ask me how I’m putting my six years of post-secondary education to good use, and I tell them that I’m an intern. “Well,” they say, looking extra-sympathetic, “everyone has to start somewhere.”

For me, this “somewhere” isn’t just the fourth floor of a freezing cold office in the west end of the city. It’s a place where life as I’ve come to know (and love) it, is undergoing some major changes. Great changes. Exciting changes. Scare-the-crap-right-out-of-you changes.

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