So this weekend was pretty decent. Unfortunately I didn’t get to hang with my favourite girls (as a result of a nasty case of sickness and exhaustion on both their parts – and a copious amount of hugs goes out to both of them!) but instead I went to a wedding social, which was actually tonnes of fun. I watched the X Factor, lazed in pyjamas, cuddled with the cat – oh, and I MAXED OUT MY OVERDRAFT HALFWAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN MONTREAL. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, today I was informed I was victim of my very first bank fraud crime – my access card number had been stolen along with my PIN, sent somewhere in Montreal, and almost a thousand dollars withdrawn. I was left, this lunchtime, with a sympathetic banker on the line in one hand and a pile of declined debit till receipts in the other, sadly looking at a salad I couldn’t pay for. I, naturally, in true to self fashion, immediately started crying in the middle of the food court (until I remembered my leftover cash from Saturday’s social, took my salad and ran). How awful is that? I went to get a new card, new PIN etc. after work, and was informed it could take a few weeks for the investigation to be completed and “proved” fraudulent before any of the money was returned, so that leaves me in a pretty rubbish position for the next couple of weeks. But I suppose that’s what Visa cards are for, right?

On an entirely separate note however, the good news is that the competition I was in from September – October, which so many of you faithfully spent chunks of your day voting for me MULTIPLE times, has finished Round 1. I think I might have made the finals – I’ll find out for sure in early November, but if I have, I’ll be in the December 14th issue of Wedding Bells magazine all across Canada, and have a one in seven chance of scoring a $5,000 wedding dress and an all-inclusive honeymoon to the Mayan Riviera (yes please). So I just wanted to let out a little SQUEEOMG – and thank everybody for their fierce and faithful support in getting me this far. I’m truly humbled to have had not only my friends but also people I don’t even know voting for me, and I’ll post more when I hear anything at all about the next round…

This week is going by at a crazy pace; I have deadlines, meetings, reports, training and my very own class to teach at the end of it – I’m whizzing through it fuelled by caffeine in the mornings, a glass of wine in the evening and the thought that at the end of this week, I will well and truly have faced my biggest fear in life having been crippled by it for the last few years – and once I get through it, I’ll get to keep going, teaching weekly and getting more and more experience standing in front of people and actually teaching. Yes, I’m definitely terrified. But I’m also excited. And I have a sneaky feeling everything’s going to be just fine… and this weekend will be a very celebratory one indeed.