Valentine's Weekend and someone's birthday.....

I'm combining a few things together in one post because I don't want to assume for even a moment that you hang on everything we do over here in Richmond-land. So this will save the pain and condense it for you ;)

First of all - last weekend - LOTS OF FREE FUN! And I mean free. Darrell's work had a conference he had to attend for one of his suppliers. It was a big all-expense paid for shindig so I decided to tag along and benefit from a free hotel in Vancouver. The kids went to the in-laws and we hit the ferry. Ferry and breakfast - paid for by the company. Upon arrival Darrell went straight to the convention at the River Rock Casino Resort (beautiful room; a suite) and I met up with a friend and caught the Skytrain to downtown. Rewind to last year's Olympics; us being skytrain rookies bought our first ever tickets from the guy on the ferry for BC transit for a day. We did not realize, however, that you have to validate your tickets and instead rode the skytrain all day long for free. Upon realizing we were illegal riders, I decided to keep those tickets for a rainy day so last week had a free skytrain ticket!

Fastforward to the Pacific Centre - somehow in 3 hours I saw nothing I wanted to buy so instead decided to treat my friend to Starbucks and call it day. This was paid for by a gift card leftover from Christmas. When I got back to the hotel the cocktail hour started, followed by a gourmet 3 course gala dinner. By the time we went to bed that night we had spent a whole day in Vancouver with shopping and beautiful food and not spent a penny! (We did, however, make up for it at the Vancouver boat show and IKEA the following day....)

Then Monday night - ELTON JOHN! Darrell and I had dinner with our friend Jeni at a Japanese restaurant before meeting Jeni's husband Aaron at the concert. AWESOME! He played for 3 hours solid, never left the stage and sung and played wicked piano for the entire time. Incredible. If you ever get a chance to see him I would highly recommend it.

Lastly, Zachary's teacher had a birthday the previous Friday so he volunteered me to make the birthday cake (surprise....). ALL he could tell me about his teacher was that he was in charge of tech at the school, he once played basketball and he owned a dog. Ok. It's not much to go on and I don't have much time to bang this out but here ya go Zachary.....