Dish #22 - Adventures...

The Dish: Having gotten 5 hours of sleep, I heard the buzz of my cell vibrating at 9:30 in the morning. I grunted and rolled over - as some of you know, I am NOT a morning person - almost chucking the little thing across the room. Seriously? C'mon. On a Sunday morning? Whatever they want, NO. However, against my better instincts and whatever judgement I had at that point, feeling bad for whoever's taking taking the effort to actually call me that early in the morning, I went and tried answering it.

'One missed call. 3 Messages."
Missed Call: Sarah H.
Text #1: From Zak which I am not going to repeat here.
Text #2: "Hey girl u up yet?"
Text #3: "Im going to pic u up at 11 but were going to check out the falls...nigira falls"

Who? When? Where? Was she talking about the NIAGARA FALLS? I'd been there at least 25 times the past 10 years. I refuse. I protest. I demand a change of location...say, the Yorkdale mall? This was when it hit me that I had promised to spend the day with Sarah (post-on-off breakup #1-2-3-4-5...etc with current-ex-current-ex-current beau). I love that girl to death but where does she come up with these ideas? Whatever, it was too late and I might as well just suck it up and go with the flow.

10:15 I realized the time and that I had 45 minutes to sleep, sleep, get my sleep and get ready.

10:32 I crawled out of bed, feeling like crap just got thrown onto me.

11:05 I'm ready.

11:25 Sarah is nowhere to be seen and not replying to any of my texts. As I was thinking how pissed I'd be if I'd gotten out of bed and she didn't come, my door bell rang. I opened the door and there she was, holding a brand new cell phone and smiling. "I busted my old one. I dropped it into water. Then I tried blowdrying it. The text pad worked for a while, the letters all messed up, but then it went into shock and died." Or something along those lines. I couldn't help but laugh and gave her my landline so she could activate her new phone.

12:00ish Finally we get into the car and we drove past dungy towns and boring landscape, aweing and gawking at every ugly little industrial building and bridge we saw. We visited two wineries: Southbrook and Inniskillin; I bought a bottle of ice wine at the latter for Father's Day. Then we finally hit Niagara-On-The-Lake and the Falls. Sarah actually thought there was a lake on a hill at Niagara-On-The-Lake, like a special little lake surrounded by trees. I'd been to the town many times and I have never went and looked at the lake, a lake, any lake for that matter. So it turns out it's just Lake Ontario and not even a nice view of it. The Falls didn't look much different. But for some reason, Sarah and I both thought it looked smaller than from what we remembered. The most interesting thing was the hundreds of seagulls at the bottom of the lake. I recall spotting them usually but not that many of them. It was kind of disturbing. There must be a lot of fish going over the Falls.

17:10ish We came back with all limbs attached and did all that in 5 hours, thanks to Sarah's speeding at 140km/h down busy QEW/401 the whole time. Phew. Gotta live life at full speed right?

Dish #3 - I love Toronto.

The Dish: I really do love living in Toronto. Where else are you going to hear a story about another man who jumped into the infamous Horseshoe Falls? Well I guess that goes for the whole Niagara Escarpement. My point is, although there are many who have entered the great rapids before this man, a true Ontarian will never get sick of hearing a story like this. They called it an "unprotected tumble" on the news but I say it was more like an unfulfilled death wish. Oh yah, by the way, this dude is one of the few who actually survived such an experience. According to onlookers, he kind of just wandered in... Ok so everyone watched as his man climbed over the railings in attempt to kill himself in the most powerful waterfall in North America? Like I said, I love this country.

The Rescue: Here are some pics of the rescue. (All photos are courtesy of CTV.ca)

Pic #1 - Man struggles in cold water after going over the falls but adamantly refusing any aid.

Pic #2 - Rescue helicopter approaches over fallen man
(in attempt to blow him back to the shore).

Pic #3 - Rescue work in progress.

That would be a rescue worker trying to reach the man using a tree branch.

Yes, floatation devices are no longer the rescue tool of choice.

The Verdict: I really hope this man was just chasing after his roll-up-the-rim-to-win Timmies cup and thought it might be in the river or something because oh boy what a pathetic attempt at suicide.