Hey guys welcome to our new fabulous website! First of all I think we all need to give Brett Braden a big round of applause for putting so much time and effort into making this site look amazing. The colors(colours)   and the whole layout is wonderful and a big thanks to all the  photographers who let us use their beautiful pictures. We feel that the site has really captured all of the things Paul and I strive for. Being able to interact with our friends and fans is very important to us and that you feel like you are getting to know the real us and what better way to get to know us then a blog.

I was starting to write my first blog entry in Paris but my computer decided to have a minor temper tantrum by holding its breath till it gave me the blue screen of death. Needless to say I had to let my computer sit for a evening and restart it in the morning but when I did restarted it in the morning I had to set it back to 2 days before it died and I lost my first saved draft. Boo. That’s ok. It gave me a chance to start fresh.

So last week was the American thanksgiving week, which all of you know we all try and spend with our family and friends. Well being a skater you are always busy traveling and training during this time of year and don’t usually have time to go home. But luckily we just got back from Trophee Bompard last Monday and Carol (our coach for some of you who don’t know the name) was nice enough to give us a couple days off to rest our bodies. So come Tuesday morning I tried to sleep in but as usual being a skater, who skates at 630 every morning and never sleeps in past 8 anymore, I got up and started the day by running around doing a few errands. Once that was done I figured I have all day to do nothing why not go see the new Twilight movie. I know, I know its Twilight but, come on, it was the last one. I had to see how it turned out.

Once the movie was done I had this sudden idea thinking maybe I could go home for Thanksgiving. So I speed back to the house as fast as possible, which I know is not good but I was on a mission to get home and start looking for flights. I called my mom to let her know that I was looking at flights to possibly go home but the more I kept looking the more expensive the flights were, so the chances of me going back to Colorado were slim. So I told her that there was no way of me being able to come home. Being a  figure skater the word NO just doesn’t sit right with us, so I continued looking. I tried one way flights from Buffalo and Toronto and they were still over 400 bucks one way so I gave up for about a hour and then I had a sudden thought, maybe I could drive to Detroit like I did when my sister lived there. So I went and looked at some one way flights from there and sure enough they were much cheaper. So I got all excited and called carol right away. She said that it was totally fine, so I started to book my flight.  But of course right as I went to check out the power goes out. Luckily it was only out for 30 minutes or so but the street we live on is like the Bermuda Triangle, it always seems to go out for no reason. It ended up being a good thing I waited to buy it cause JoAnne ( the mother of the family I live with) found a even cheaper round trip flight for the next morning at 6:50 am out of Detroit to Denver.

Here’s the fun part. I’ve decided to keep it a secret from all my family members that I’m coming home! After saying that, I realized that all of my friends were skating when I arrived and wouldn’t be able to pick me up so I cracked and asked my brother Todd to pick me up from Denver. So once I got that all settled, I now needed to find a place to sleep in Detroit or I could chose to wake up at 3 am to drive to the Detroit airport. Hmmm let me think about that that… umm No I’ll find a place to stay. Luckily I still have some great friends in Detroit and decided to call my good friend Alex Aldridge and see if I could crash on her couch for a couple hours. Being the kind people the Aldridge family are, they told me that it was totally fine for me to be able to sleep at their house. Finally it was time to start my expedition to Colorado!

I hopped in my car around 7:30 and was headed on my 4 hour drive to Detroit. I’m pretty familiar with this drive now so if I have a charged ipod with some good tunes it usually goes by pretty fast. About half way through the trip my sister, Alexe tries to facetime me on my iphone (for those of you who have blackberrys and don’t know what facetime is, it kind of like skype but for iphones ) and of course I have to try and come up with a excuse not to answer it or my cover would be blown, so I just had to settle for ignoring it.

The time went by pretty quick and sure enough I arrived at Alex’s house. She was nice enough to stay awake until I was there to let me in her house. She had a pillow and a blanket all ready for me.  Just as I was about to fall asleep her mom Janet came down to greet me. It’s always so nice seeing her. She and Annemarie (Alex’s partner’s mom) were like my mom’s away from home, so it’s always nice to see them, even if it’s for a quick second.

After about 3 hour hours of sleep it was time for me to roll off the couch and head to the airport. As I’m driving I’m going through all of my things in my head, do I have my passport, yes. Do I have my boarding pass, yes. What airline, Delta check. I’m all good to go but, after I parked my car and got all the way to the security line I realized that I’m on Southwest! So I ran back to my car asked the parking guy if I could get out because I made a mistake and went to the wrong terminal. Or what I should have said was “sir I’m blonde and I just had one of the moments”. HAHA Once again I drove to fast to the other terminal and parked my car and ran straight to security. Sure enough there was no one there, so I walked straight through and was 20 minutes early. Score!

Once you’re on a flight there really isn’t much to do. You could listen to music, sleep, read, or my least favorite stare off into empty space cause you can’t sleep. But since I only had about 3 hours of sleep I didn’t have that hard of a time sleeping. Right as we landed I tried to gather all my things as fast as I could to run off the plane to meet my brother at the passenger pick up. (Not that it would of really made that much of a difference cause I still had an hour drive to go.)

That hour drive took forever! Not that I didn’t enjoy talking to my brother to catch up on things.  I was just so excited to get home. When I finally got home everyone was gone. Then I realized that my little sister, Shelby, just got back from university late last night. And being the loving siblings my brother and I are we decided that it was a brilliant idea to give her friendly wake up call. So we ran up the stairs and jumped on her. You would think that since I haven’t seen her in a couple months that she would be all excited to see me but, no all I get is this dirty look and “What are you doing here”. Since she got in late we let her go back to sleep and I went downstairs to get some breakfast. Here’s the best part. I got downstairs and my mom was pulling into the driveway, so I opened up the fridge to have my back to her as she got into the kitchen. Once she put her bags down I turned around and said, “hello” she just froze! I’ve never seen someone so shocked in my life. Her face went completely white and tears just started flowing down her faces as if she has seen a ghost. Needless to say my whole surprise worked like a gem! My entire day consisted of surprising people. I surprised my twin, Alexe, one of my best friends, Alex, and my old coach Patti. It was such a nice feeling. And I still had to surprise my dad the next day, which was just as good. He just kept saying how did you get here?? I would just smile and say, It was Magic!!

The rest of the week was wonderful. The food was great, I had a lot of good laughs with my friends. Did some henna, climbed some rocks (that’s the fun part about living on a mountain) and of course went to two Colorado College hockey games. I needed to get my hockey fix somewhere since the NHL is still in the lock out.  Now I’m back in Toronto getting back into the rhythm    of things. Early mornings, work outs and the everyday soreness we all love so much

I hope you guys enjoyed my first blog posting. I’ll try and do something every week, Maybe not to this extent but, I’ll try and put up some fun pictures, videos, and maybe even some fashion tips.

I need to work on a clever way to end these blog postings so if you have any ideas or suggestion please feel free to write me. In the words of Porky the Pig…….That’s all folks!!