Hez and Fae Rewind Moment #3

One fine summer, Fae and I ventured down Virginia to meet up with Ali, another RPG friend of ours we’d know since about the same time we met. Fae’d met her before, but I hadn’t. Fae’s mom drove us down to meet Ali half way. While we were driving, I fell asleep with my head against the window in the back (which I do a lot in cars because I get horrible motion sickness). I was sleeping peacefully when suddenly… the window opened and I was almost thrown from the car. I screamed and sat up, shocked.

Fae looked over at me, startled. Then she looked down at her foot, on the window button. And laughed. She tried to kill me!

We went to Staunton, Virginia to stay with Ali. But she lived in Res, and there wasn’t enough room for three of us. So we stayed on the futon at her friends Stina and Dylan’s apartment. The apartment was on the third floor, there was an elevator. We went back one night to watch a movie. We got into the elevator, pressed the 3 button, went up to the floor. It was one of those old elevators with the grate that you have pull shut before it will move. So we go to open this grate… and it’s stuck.
“Oh right, I forgot that this elevator always gets stuck,” Ali says. Meanwhile I’m holding a tub of Ben and Jerry’s, rapidly melting.

So of course I made a video. A very ADD video.

“This is our elevator stuck… Stuck in an elevator video.” - Hez

“What do you think about being stuck in an elevator?” -Hez
“I think I have to pee.” - Fae
“Me too.” - Hez
“Yeah, me too.” - Ali

We eventually got out of the elevator, rescued by a guy who lived in the building. Then, of course, we didn’t have the key for the apartment. So I had to eat my Ben and Jerry’s with the smallest spoon in the world, that we found in the bottom of Ali’s purse.

Cleveland rocks?

Fae and I decided it would be a nice idea to go to Cleveland, to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the zoo. Cleveland’s less than two hours away from where Fae lives, but I thought it would be nice for us to get a hotel and stay overnight. Especially since it was going to be free (or nearly) with my AirMiles. So we booked the hotel (which of course wasn’t actually free… that’s the way these things work, right?) and headed down yesterday.

We should’ve known things were going to go wrong, because my GPS suddenly stopped working on the way out of Pittsburgh and we ended up driving in circles in downtown Pittsburgh trying to get the stupid thing to “recalculate route.”

When we left Pittsburgh it was yet another gorgeous sunny, warm day. About 26 degrees (Celsius). So of course Fae and I only packed sundresses. We actually both almost packed jeans but changed our mind last minute and didn’t. By the time we go to Cleveland, it was raining and 11 degrees. What the hell? We were very poorly dressed, obviously. We parked and ran into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stepping in puddles with flip flops and covering our heads with our very small sweaters.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was pretty awesome - I hadn’t been there since I was about 8, and I definitely appreciated it a lot more this time. We stayed a few hours, then we decided to check into the hotel and just hang out a bit in the warmth before we went for dinner. This is when I discovered that while I had brought my laptop, as planned, I had forgotten the power cord. It was charged about 70%, but that’s only about 3 hours of usage. We had brought movies to watch in the hotel! Damn.

We watched How I Met Your Mother for a bit, and then headed out for dinner. We were staying pretty far from the city, out by the airport. But we had a GPS, so it’s okay, right? Unless, of course, you’re us. The stupid thing kept losing signal in the middle of Cleveland, leaving us to try to navigate our own way through what apparently was baseball game traffic. They had traffic cops directing things, but I have no idea what they were doing… they were making us go through red lights! Finally, we found a place to park. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe, ordered strawberry daquiris and hoped it would at least be a good dinner.

Apparently the Hard Rock Cafe is a huge rip off… Our drinks were $6.99 each and didn’t even taste like they had alcohol in them. Our sandwiches were about $12.99 and while they were HUGE they weren’t all that great.

Normally, upon visiting a new city, we would walk around and check it out. It was too bloody cold and still raining. So we decided we would try to go see and movie. We asked the waitress and found out there was a theatre in the same plaza, in the basement. We paid and left and took the elevator downstairs… to the sketchiest plaza basement I’ve ever been to. Only to find out that while they were playing about a dozen movies, they were all the movies we didn’t want to see and none of the ones we did want to see (we were thinking Adventureland or Sunshine Cleaning). So that failed too.

In the elevator on the way back up I turned to Fae.
“Why do we always fail?” I asked. We laughed and decided that we would just order payperview back at the hotel and stay warm in bed. We got back to the hotel and decided that the pool looked very enticing, so we got back in the car to go into the weird Cleveland suburb to find a cheap place to buy a bathing suit. The guy at the front desk had given us directions to a Walmart. The last part was “Go down and turn right down Brooksomething, there’s a Walmart at the end of that road.” He said the real name, but neither of us could remember so we decided that it wouldn’t be that hard to find the street that was Brooksomething. We turn and find… Brookhaven, Brookdale, Meadowbrook and Brookshire. All right next to each other. Hmm.

Needless to say, we didn’t find the Walmart, but we kept going down the street and eventually found another store and bought some bathing suits, which were quite expensive for suits neither of us planned to ever wear again.

We got back to the hotel, went swimming for about 30 minutes, until we suffocated from the heat of the hot tub, and then went back up to our room to order payperview. Fae took a shower, and I tried to figure out the payperview. After about 45 minutes of trying to work it, and then seeing if maybe there was something on real TV to watch, I called the front desk.

“Hi, I can’t seem to get the Payperview to work.”
“Yeah, the company we got Payperview from just recently shut down. So we don’t have Payperview right now.”
“Oh…. Okay then, bye.”

Again, we tried to find something on TV. Largely, we failed. Until we found Whose Line Is It Anyway, and excitedly tried to tune to that channel… only to find out that we didn’t get that channel.

We woke up this morning with plans to go to the Zoo, but they were very quickly dampened by the cold and the rain. We ate our continental breakfast and left Cleveland behind forever, after having failed at everything.

Not so there

Fae appears to have noticed something about me in the past few days that no one else has noticed before… or maybe they were just too nice to comment about it.

Apparently, I have mentally challenged moments. This doesn’t come as a huge shock to me, my dad has long called me the stupidest smart person he knows. This is because I generally live in my head, and I tend to zone out. I also tend to mess up on the small, stupid things in life because I’m too busy thinking about bigger things. Or at least, I like to think that’s my excuse for being stupid.

This isn’t a new revelation, Fae once looked back in the car and saw me just grinning absently out the window. Since in her family people don’t smile, she was shocked.

And then there was the night with the Fanta. Where I just couldn’t get it in my head that the pop machine wasn’t working in the hostel.

Then, the other night we went to the movie store with Fae’s boyfriend and roommate. When I get out the car I suddenly realize that Fae’s looking at me funny.
“What…?”
“Nothing….”

We go inside. I’m walking around, looking at the movies. Suddenly, Fae turns around and starts laughing at me.
“What…?”

Apparently I was actually walking around, twirling my hair with my finger with this blank smile on my face. Fae was hysterical. Apparently I’d had the exact same blank expression when I got out of the car earlier.

We have since come to the conclusion that I have mentally challenged moments. And it makes so much sense. I also sometimes rock back and forth in circles when I’m sitting down, without realizing it.

I swear I’m really a smart person….

Hez and Fae Rewind Moment #2

Also known as why Hez and Fae shouldn’t travel together.

When I was living in Ireland, Fae came to visit for the last week before I went home. We decided to plan a Great European Adventure. We were going to go to London, Paris and then drive around Ireland for a few days to see what I hadn’t been able to see on a bus yet.

First thing, we found out that without a substantial credit card and at the age of 20, we could not rent a car in Ireland. Or anywhere. So that part was shot, but we were still heading to Paris and London!

On Thrusday morning, 5am, I got on the bus to Dublin to meet Fae at the airport. I had already had enough of Dublin by that point, from the week I was there at the beginning and then a trip for the weekend to pick up Kristen, so I was very done with Dublin. So instead of staying at all, we just got on a bus back. And we were going to London via the Shannon airport the next morning at 5am. So of course we spent the night drinking at the pub I was working at, and stumbled home to bed for about three hours sleep. We got on a bus to Shannon. We arrived, walked right up to flight counter. We gave the woman our passports.

I realized that it was taking a little too long for her to find us as passengers.
“Do you have a printout of your ticket information?” she asked. I handed it to her. She looked down at it, and looked back up at us.
“Your flight left yesterday morning at 6am.”

For anyone who’s ever booked through RyanAir, you’ll know that they give you a bunch of dates close to yours so that you can find the cheapest. I thought I was just chosing a cheaper time, when I was actually choosing a different day entirely.

It was just after 5am and we had tickets to see Wicked in London that night. And, again, for those of you who know RyanAir, you’ll know that they are absolutely completely unflexible, and any time you have to book something less than two weeks in advance, it’s ridiculously expensive.

Needless to say, we freaked out. We had to wait until 6am for the ticket counters to open to find ourselves a flight. Finally, 6 came around and 150 euros later we had a new flight to London. Understandably, we were upset for being a whole lot poorer. But we were optimistic.
“Well, when we get to London let’s check all our tickets. It’s fine, we’re going to get there in time and it was just a little glitch.”

So we spent the weekend in London. We were supposed to leave for Paris on Sunday night. Sunday morning we went for a free walking tour of London. At the end of six hours of walking, we were wandering around Westminster Abbey.
“We should go soon so we can get back to the hostel in time to take the tube to Heathrow,” I say.

So we headed back. We’re sitting on the tube on our way to King’s Cross and Fae turns to me.
“You know, the flight might have arrived in Paris at 7pm…” she says. I stare at her. It’s almost 4pm, Paris is a one hour time difference and we’re about an hour away from Heathrow. We practically run back to the hostel to check our ticket. Sure enough, our flight leaves at 4:10. I look up at the clock on the front desk.
“Is there anyway we could get to Heathrow in ten minutes?” I ask the girl at the front desk. She looks at me like I’m crazy. The next hour or so would prove her right.

Our problem is now compounded. Not only do we want to go to Paris, but we have to get to Paris to get our flight back to Ireland, so that we can each catch our flights back home at the end of the week. I go downstairs to the computers to see if I can find us a flight last minute. I give Fae the number for the hostel in Paris and tell her to see if she can cancel our deposit on our room there that night.

As I’m scrolling through the fares on RyanAir, I’m getting prices like 300 pounds one way to get to Paris. I panic. At this point I’ve been living off my credit card and my parent’s charity for the last two months, and I definitely don’t have 300 pounds ($600 Canadian at the time!). Fae comes down from using the phone and looks flustered.
“I hate you!” she says. I blink.
“What…?”
“I don’t speak French!!” she says. I burst out laughing. I had completely forgotten that I’d booked the hostel in French, that she would need to speak French to cancel our reservation. Apparently, she managed to do it anyway, in English. Much needed comic relief.

Finally, the only affordable situation that I can come up with is to exchange our flight from Paris to Shannon into a flight from London to Dublin, and pay the difference. Which was still a lot of money. The flight would leave two days later, at 6am.

On the plus side, we got an extra day in London - which meant we got to see some of my favourite things: the British Museum, Abbey Road and Spamalot. We also went out for Chinese food that was very expensive and I didn’t even realize it until I got my credit card bill the next month. $120 dinner? At least it was good!

But we never did get to Paris.

We finally got back to Galway, exhausted and very poor. I decided to pick up a shift at the pub the next night, to get some money to pay my last week of rent. Everyone else thought all of our misadventures were hilarious (which, in retrospect, they really were.) So my roommate texts me and says:
“Callan (the manager) says you can work, but if you’re late he’s going to charge you 150 euro.”

And then we went on to lose Fae’s wallet, complete with her last 200 euro, and our ability to walk in Killarney. But that’s a whole other story.

Of course, the reason Fae and I are best friends is because somehow, after all of this, we ended up having the best week of our lives and laughing our asses off that night at dinner.

Hez and Fae Rewind Moment #1

When Fae and I were walking around Pittsburgh tonight, we were talking about some classic Hez/Fae moments and thought it would be a good idea to share some with you. So I’m going to start with my favourite, because of the sheer hilarity.

So let’s preface this with the fact that, for those of you who don’t know me personally, I have a fairly big boobs. It’s something I’ve come to terms with. They have their own fans, who am I to oppress them? Well, here’s an example of how they saved my life.

It was the summer, and Fae was still living with her parents. We were prone to getting hopped up on sugar and talking all night. We decided it would be a really great idea to climb up on the roof and lay out with some blankets, gaze at the stars and have one of those life changing talks that you have so often when you’re a teenager, and forget how to when you get older.

Let’s get one thing straight - I am terrified of heights. Not so much of being in high places, but of going up ladders or stairs where you can see down. Once I’m up there, I’m fine. It’s just the climb that terrifies me. Anyway, so Fae’s parent’s house is only one story high, and there was already a ladder leaning against it. Fabulous! Fae goes up first. I whimper a little about how I hate ladders, but eventually I get up there too. And we talk. And watch the stars. And it’s all fantastic. Then we get a little tired and a little chilly and decide to call it a night. Fae goes down the ladder. I move to follow.

If there’s anything scarier than going up a ladder, it’s going down. And this is why. I took one step onto the first rung and it promptly broke, sending me flying through the ladder to the ground.

The funny part?

The reason I didn’t hit the ground is because one of the bottom rungs of the ladder caught underneath my chest and it held me there. No joke. I didn’t hit the ground. I was suspended in the air by my boobs alone.

There was a long silence.
“Are you okay…?!” Fae says. Her voice catches at the end. She’s trying not to laugh.
“I… I’m trying to decide whether to laugh or cry right now,” I answer. And then I start to laugh. Hysterically. Without end. I have a huge gash on the top of my thigh from hitting.. something (I still have a little bit of a scar) but I’m sitting there laughing hard enough to wake up her whole family.

“We should have gotten that on video!” says Fae, also hysterical.

The next day, limping slightly, I get to tell everyone I fell through a ladder. Fae’s boyfriend’s response? “Man, you should have gotten that on video!”

And that is how my boobs saved my life.