Month: July 2010

This post is so late! Actually the whole party was so late, we were too busy eating nachos and watching Aladdin on Friday night to make any, plus we still had a bunch of those terrible watermelon ones left from last time. Sym eventually ate all of them so this afternoon I decided to make some simple, mid-week popsicles.

I just used this Sun-Rype Apple Lime juice. When I was a little kid we RARELY got juice boxes, usually just on long car trips. There would always be just ONE apple lime juice box and I’d have to battle my dad for it. It was my favorite and I still love it.

ew, ignore the hair. I DID, haha.
I made them this afternoon and they were done by this evening so Sym and I tried them out and they were delicious! Totally crisp and refreshing and perfect for the hottest day so far this year.

how cute is this kid?

btw these are the LAST EVER pics taken with my old camera, except for the carton of juice which was taken with my new camera.

Taylor got a package this afternoon, and when he opened it, guess what was inside?

A new camera! But wait, Taylor already has a camera, a much fancier one than this. I’M the one with the broken- oh wait.

the last picture ever taken with my SD790 IS
Yes, for the second year in a row Taylor has surprised me with a new camera after I’ve broken mine (the one I have now he bought for me when I jammed the lens on my old one right before we eloped to Hawaii). Not only did he buy me a new camera, but he made sure I wouldn’t buy one for myself by telling an elaborate lie about new models coming out and blah blah blah stuff he knew I’d just be like “OK WHATEVER.” That trickster!

Anyway my broken one isn’t THAT broken- the side panel that the wrist strap attaches to pops out if pull on it (the strap, I mean), but it still takes perfectly decent pictures, so I might be selling it. If anyone needs an emergency camera for a reasonable price, let me know!

So we already know Dougal & Georgie are best friends who like to hang out, but today Georgie showed me that she misses him when he’s not here- by sleeping in his crate.

She could very easily have chosen Kichou’s crate, which is also open AND has delicious forbidden chihuahua food in it, but she chose Dougal’s. So precious!

Speaking of Kichou, I FINALLY managed to get a picture of him and Georgie with no bared teeth and snarling.

Of course, two second later she bit him on the butt. That puppy!

Someday I will get tired of the Dougal-Georgie friendship.

That day is not today.

He’s all eyes & ears and she’s a constant blur. I never thought Douagl would be the calm one; he’s always been a total spazz! I guess he’s finally grown up.

Some pictures from this morning…

this birch tree is so pretty but it hemorrhages seeds all over my stairs that get tracked into my house and make a huge, endless mess

A lap dog in her natural habitat. Please note her own hair stuck in her mouth because she was doing some crazy flails and bites.

You know how regular plastic jars of Nutella are that awkward shape with the weird bulges at the top that make it hard to scrape out every last speck of chocolate hazelnutty goodness? So annoying, right? Well there’s this totally bizarre little bodega near my house that sell the regular chips-pop-cigarettes, but also random foods from around the world, and one of the things they carry is Nutella in these glass cups. These are awesome because:
• it’s way easier to get out every last speck of chocolate hazelnutty goodness
• they only costs $3 so I have less guilt about buying them
• instead of having to wash out and recycle or just throw away the empty plastic jar, this packaging is totally reusable as food storage, a vase or even a drinking glass- the rim is rounded and smoothed and properly finished
So basically for just $3 you get easily-accessible Nutella, PLUS a practical and versatile glass! Not too shabby.

My printer is totally sucking and probably needs to be replaced, BUT I literally just put new ink cartridges in it that I don’t want to waste. I had a whole bunch of free sample packs of 4×6 photo paper so I’ve been printing out tons of ~inspirational~ pictures, to put up on my not-yet-purchased bulletin board. I now have a stack about 3/4 of an inch thick that’s a combination of six or seven family photos combined with a million pics from my tumblr. Since the printer is so bad and the paper is pretty small it doesn’t really matter that the resolution isn’t great.

… aaaaand just in time for me to go back to work.

On the bright side this means instead of being trapped inside with the kids going squirrelly all week we’ll get to spend lots of time outside. And hey, there’s always the weekend!

I spent a lot of timne this weekend catching up on housework I’d been slacking on while on vacation- I had a couple million loads of laundry and dishes to do, floor to vacuum and mop and tons of garbage to go out. We even took out Taylor’s old grey couch and left it in the alley with a sign saying “Free Couch! No Bedbugs! HOW COOL!!” Silly, but it worked, since a day later it’s gone without a trace.

I did do some (lots!) of fun stuff though. On Saturday afternoon we went out front to the West End Farmer’s Market for homous, rainier cherries and fudge.

whole wheat pitas + green leaf lettuce, mini cucumbers, Tomatogems tomatoes + Bean Boy Smoky Tomato Chipotle Homous, mmm, so good!

I also finished cutting out these Fantastic Toys animals & accessories and assembled them.

I got these to practice before starting the Fairy Mushroom Cottage set because this is FIDDLY-ASS work. My advice: use the tiniest embroidery scissors you can find, and score all your fold lines with a metal edged ruler and the back of a knife before folding.

I didn’t have any toothpicks to spread the glue so I used my second-smallest paintbrush and it worked fine.

My printer has some emotional problems so all the blacks have weird lines, but Sym doesn’t seem to mind!

Saturday evening I wanted to go buy this cat condo that’s 40% off at the pet store by my house but SOMEONE was too busy playing Red Dead Redemption to leave the house in a timely fashion so they were closed already. Instead we tried out a different Japanese restaurant than normal (the food was good but the other diners were a pack of dummies. One guy tried to order sweet & sour pork and another guy told his date that soy was just green beans. WHAT?)

Today we slept in, which was AWESOME. Actually, we woke up super early to take the dogs out and then went back to sleep for three hours, which is almost as good as just sleeping in. Later Taylor wanted to go to the comic book store, which turned into going to Urban Outfitters where he got a shirt, Future Shop to look at cameras (mine is breaking, boohoo) and Winners, where I bought a turquoise sheet set for our bed, a canvas basket for the dogs toys (I want to train Georgie to put her toys away when she’s done with them, but right now she’s scared of the basket!) and this cute matryoshka-print blanket for Sym’s room.

She’s been alternating between boiling under her duvet and freezing under this silly pink baby blanket she has so I thought a lightweight, size-appropriate blanket was in order.

So tomorrow it’s back to work for me, and the start of daycamp for Sym. I’m sort of ready to go back but still, I wish vacation could last forever! Georgie agrees.

Unrelated: Taylor took this photo in Kelowna last spring and I recently rediscovered it.

I’d originally planned on painting the library yellow, with grey & white furniture/accents, but now I’m thinking of using this picture for ~inspiration~ and doing it yellow & purple instead. I think it might be epic. EPIC.

Where has this week gone?

Wednesday morning I woke up early to take the puppy out and joy of joys, I had a migraine starting (I get a visual aura first, this weebly-wobbly sparkly thing in my vision. Migraine sufferers know what I’m talking about). I can sometimes head the headache off if I eat and drink, so I had some peanut butter toast and a big glass of water before going back to bed. It didn’t work perfectly but it worked a little, and I was able to not be completely useless for the entire day and actually had a pretty nice time!

Symphony was dropped off by her dad at around nine and she brought her copy of Munschworks 2: The Second Munsch Treasury into my room and read me stories until I felt well enough to get up. Since it was the first day of her summer vacation we were supposed to go to the beach, but my head and the dubious weather precluded that. Instead we mostly stayed close to home, except when we had to run down to Sephora to exchange the Lil Angel perfume I bought her for Love instead (her dad and I had been mistaken about which was her favorite).

Olive Oil Chocolate Chip Cookies from Crepes of Wrath
In the afternoon we baked chocolate chip cookies and watched The Incredibles, and when Taylor woke up he helped me with dinner.

it was steak and potatoes night
If he’d taken Canada Day off this would have been the night he was home, but switching sleep schedules for one day in the middle of the week sucks pretty hard so instead he banked the day off to take an extra long weekend in August (when I’m on vacation again). Since he had to go to work and I was still feeling fairly shitty we just watched a few episodes of The IT Crowd and then I went to bed.

Thursday was the holiday, and since Symphony’s dad was off he had asked to pick her up before lunch. This left me with a whole afternoon off from parenting, and since Taylor was asleep I was off from wifeing as well. I decided to run a simple but long errand- I want to put up mini ropes of bunting in my library windows, sort of like this but teeny:

… but I don’t want to sew a bunch of little fabric triangles so I had the brilliant idea to use double-sided origami paper. I had to go to across town to Yoko Yaya to get it, so I took Georgie with me and she had a huge walk. I think I probably carried her halfway. On the way home I was worried she was getting dehydrated so I stopped at a Starbucks to get some water. It was the first time I’d left her tied up outside by herself- I only did it because I could easily see her from inside. I could also easily hear her because OH MY GOSH she was not happy about being left alone like that and raised a huge fuss! It was pretty funny, actually. When we got home we were both tired from the walk so we napped together on the couch, which is fast becoming one of my favorite puppy-related activities.

On Friday Sym was dropped off looking very patriotic still wearing the Team Canada jersey I’d put on her the day before.

It was actually sunny and hot though, so she quickly changed into a more appropriate outfit and we headed out to meet my friend Morgan.

Sym said she’d only take my picture if I did “bunny ears” on myself, but they were kind of a fail
We had an early lunch at Vera’s Burger Shack and then browsed at Book Warehouse before coming back to my place so Morgan could meet Georgie. After Morgan left for work Sym and I hung out at home until it was time for my hair appointment- I needed my roots touched up something crazy. Between the foils and the processing and the blowdrying, it takes a couple of hours but Sym and Georgie were both really well-behaved. I did have to take Georgie out and grab Sym a snack in the middle of my appointment so if you happened to be in the 1200 block of Granville yesterday evening and saw a crazy woman with hair full of gold foil and a black cape trying to convince a puppy to go number two, well, that was me.

We didn’t get home until almost seven, so instead of cooking a real dinner we just had nachos and watched Aladdin, which Sym was really keen on for some reason. She didn’t get to bed until after ten and I didn’t make it much later- I kept falling asleep on the couch! I guess that one beer was too much for me!