It’s been a while! For some reason I’m not as in to painting my nails in the fall/winter as I am in the spring/summer.
I thought of doing some Halloween nails but I wasn’t feeling dark/bright nails; I wanted something subtle, so this dotted combination of taupe/gold/pink was perfect.
Essie in Case Study, Sally Hansen in Gilty Pleasure, Quo by Orly in First Class and Twinkle Twinkle
I received the absolutely gorgeous Essie polish in my Luxe Box from Loose Button.
My dress hasn’t arrived yet but I made the hat for my Halloween costume and I couldn’t be more thrilled with how it turned out.
I’ve been a bad, lazy blogger 🙁 idk why I was in such a funk last week. OH actually I do know, it’s because someone who I thought I was friendly with said personal blogs mine in particular, were embarrassing. For the record I’m not embarrassed that I have a blog, but I was pretty irritated about the unnecessary bitchiness.
… but instead of focusing on that, let’s talk about something else: Family Fun Friday Nights! Every week I try to come up with something Taylor, Sym and I can all do together, and the last two weeks were peculiarly train-themed.
Two weeks ago we had a board game night and played Ticket To Ride, a game that I think is from Taylor’s childhood?
idk, I’d never played it before but he had been practicing on his iPad. That’s didn’t stop me from KICKING EVERYONE’S ASS THOUGH.
Check out my amazing cross-continental railway (I was red)! It was really fun, although I’m not going to say how intense and stressed out I got about the whole thing.
This past weekend I had planned on a simple night at home, but on Friday morning one of my clients gave me a free pass for the Halloween Ghost Train in Stanley Park, so OBVIOUSLY we had to do that!
Before we even got to the train we had a nice creepy little adventure- I had planned out our walking route to get there so we wouldn’t end up wandering through the woods at night, but unfortunately there was some filming going on at the Malkin Bowl so we had to go all the way around. THROUGH THE WOODS AT NIGHT D: Luckily we made it without getting lost or eaten by Sasquatches or anything.
The theme for this year’s train is Circus of Disaster, and if you can think of anything worse than weird clowns in the dark woods at night then WOW you have a sick mind.
Being chased by zombies from the ring toss.
Not pictured: Bird Boy’s nest of mutilated clown parts. I wish I could have gotten better pictures of everything, but it was dark and we were on a moving train. It was just the right amount of creepiness that it was good for kids but still fun for adults, and if you are in the Vancouver area I HIGHLY recommend checking it out before the 31st!
Sym posed for a picture with me on the grounds that I bought her one of those obnoxious, seizure-inducing light-up swords, the brat.
We also went through the haunted maze (twice), visited the colouring tent and had hot chocolate/cider and churros (although Taylor was only able to smell the food & drinks). It was a great start to getting me in the Halloween mood, which is perfect for this week’s Family Fun Friday: my second annual pumpkin carving, Hocus Pocus watching party (see the results of last year’s here)! Sym and I went to Party Packagers’ Halloween Superstore on Saturday and bought a bunch of decorations and carving tools, and I’ve already started stocking up on pumpkins!
Georgie’s getting into the spirit already in her glow-in-the-dark ghost shirt!
Taylor has been on his special diet for just over two weeks now, so I thought I’d post a little update on how it’s going.
So far there has been no improvement in the rash, which sucks because this is the whole reason why we’re doing this thing. It can take up to eight weeks to see results though, so hopefully something happens!
Planning meals around his restrictions and trying out new dishes got rull old, rull fast. There have been a few days when I just said SORRY HUSBAND and made like, cheese tortellini with cheese sauce sprinkled with cheese for Sym and myself.
Then I feel guilty and end up nagging him to make himself something more than just plain brown rice and raw carrots for dinner. Charming. I did manage to finally find wheat-free steel cut oats, and I also attempted two more soups (roasted butternut squash, and vegetable & rice/noodle) but neither was as good as the potato & leek.
One (semi-expected) side effect of eating totally healthy foods all the time: weight loss! He’s also been going to the gym regularly again, and combined with this diet he’s seeing some fast results. I asked him if that meant that he wanted to keep eating this way forever and he said maybe, but that he’d still like to have “Butterfield treat days.”
Recently I’ve really been getting into things from my youth. The week I was involved in this tumblr exchange:
… and ever since I can’t not listen to John Denver. It reminds me of being a little kid; my parents had a bunch of his records and I just remember listening to them at happy times.
this song accurately portrays my feelings about the love of my life:
Another recent rediscovery is my second-favourite teen drama (after Dawson’s Creek, obviously), the original Beverly Hills, 90210.
When 90210 first started airing, I was 13 years old and just SO not into it, but with the July/August summer season at the start of season 2 I got hooked. It was summer and there was nothing else on, and really those two summer seasons (season three had one as well) were genius moves by the producers or the network or whoever thought it up.
The first six seasons are on Netflix and WOW is this show ever amazing. The fashions! The acting! All the times Brenda says “breast!” The really old teenagers! And did I mention the fashions? It’s the early 90s at it’s best, tbh. The only thing that sucks is the entire seasons aren’t actually available- certain episodes are missing. In the first season it’s just the penultimate episode, “Spring Dance,” where Brenda loses her virginity to Dylan and David wins a dance contest. I think it’s pretty big BS that the episode where Brandon loses his virginity to his troubled ex-girlfriend (“The First Time”) IS available but Brenda’s big sexual awakening isn’t.
The first couple episodes of season two (with Brenda’s pregnancy scare) are also missing, as well as several others, including the classic episode “The Next 50 Years,” where Scott Scanlon shoots his face off.
Deep stuff. Hopefully one day I’ll find the missing episodes (and the later seasons) because you know there is no way I’m not watching all ten glorious seasons of this nonsense.
no nail post today; because of Thanksgiving I had the day off and forgot it was Monday, oops
One of my favourite things to do in the autumn is buy a new raincoat. Wait, I mean one of my LEAST favourite. I have to do it every year because I always buy some stupid useless jacket that is supposed to keep me warm and dry and ends up letting me get soaked because it’s not appropriate for rain.
I believe even my bra was wet in this picture. If I had a dollar for every supposedly waterproof coat that acts like a rainsponge hanging in my closet I’d have… significantly less money that I’ve spent on them >:/ It sucks because on rainy days I can’t just hole up in my apartment, I have dogs that need to be walked, daycare kids that need to be taken to preschool, my own kid who needs to be picked up from school, etc etc. I always end up wearing my beloved TNA duffle coat from Aritzia, which is more waterproof than any of my supposed raincoats.
It’s wool though, so it’s way to hot to wear for most of the early fall/late spring (although I HEARTILY recommend it for winter, I’ve had it for years and I love it so much). This year I decided I had really and truly finally had it with these dumb, useless jackets that are totally ineffective against the weather. I did some research and decided to buy a Torrentshell trenchcoat from Patagonia. I mean, TORRENTSHELL? That sounds like it’ll keep the rain out! I ordered it in “lagoon” (a bright blue), and awaited it eagerly.
Of course, as soon as it arrived it stopped raining. For a whole week! DANG IT. There have been a couple small showers this week though, and so far so good! It fits well, there’s a whole bunch of scientific-sounding reasons why it’s waterproof, and it’s pretty cute. I think I’ve got a winner here!
I already have rainboots & pants that I like, and with the addition of this awesome jacket, I’m almost set! I just need some waterproof gloves- I have to have my hands out of my pockets to walk the dog or push the stroller (or both, at the same time) and going anywhere with kids takes eight billion years, so my hands turn into sad waterlogged icy cold chapped red messes all autumn long. I’m thinking these Patagonia R1 Gloves look like they’ll do the trick. Basically I just love Patagonia right now! If anyone wants to buy them for me I’ll take a medium.
As a bonus they also look like something a serial strangler would wear.
A couple Saturdays ago (the same day the neighbors boarded up the fence actually) I got my hair done. My ends/highlights were looking brassy, my roots were long and the difference between the to was really obvious. Instead of spending all my money and time getting my roots highlighted, I decided to have a light ash brown toner put on my ends to deepen/de-brassify the highlights I already had, which would help them to blend in with my roots. It took way less time, cost way less money, and the difference is amazing!
… and by amazing I mean subtle. Okay, I KNOW it looks exactly the same but irl I swear it is different. Just not so different that anyone would notice.
Sailor Moon, Vol. 1, Naoko Takeuchi; Kathleen, Please Come Home, Scott’Dell; Forever, Maggie Stiefvater
Sailor Moon, Vol. 1 was good. After reading the first Codename: Sailor V I was more used to the right-to-left reading, and it was interesting to see how different it is from the anime. Symphony and I are both looking forward to reading the rest of the series!
I read Kathleen, Please Come Home a bunch of times when I was a kid; in fact, to me the cover should look like the original 1978 cover:
For some reason the other night I started thinking about it, and decided I should find & reread it (easy enough, since it’s available for Kindle). It was a lot more depressing than I remembered it; spoiler alert but almost everyone dies, and at the end when Kathleen finally DOES “come home” there is no home to come home to anymore.
Forever is the final book in a trilogy about teenage werewolf romance. I read the first two, so I read the third one. That’s pretty much all I have to say about it.
a full list of all this year’s books can always be found here, and as always, book links are usually to Amazon, and clicking on them might earn me a nickel.
The worst part about living in a basement apartment (besides hearing EV RUH THING my upstairs neighbors are doing and fighting a losing battle against wolf spiders and centipedes) is the darkness. My apartment is UNDERGROUND. The sun is ABOVE GROUND. Do the math.
Luckily this place does have quite a few windows, some rather large, compared to other basement apartments I’ve lived in. The children’s living room, in particular, has a decently-sized window that lets in a lot of light.
There would probably be even more light coming in, except right outside that window is the fence of the old pink house next door.
That house has actually sold now, and the new owners have been working non-stop to make it habitable- in spite of the million dollar+ asking price, it was apparently a dank, disgusting hellhole that needed to be completely gutted. They’ve torn out the carpets, the walls, the ceilings, the electrical wiring, EVERYTHING, and they’ve also cut down/back a lot of the overgrown plants in their yard. When they first pruned all the trees and bushes, I was amazed! There was so much more light getting into my apartment! I was no longer suffering from the year-round version of SAD that afflicts people who dwell in darkness! Hallelujah!
Two Saturday afternoons ago I was in the backyard talking to my upstairs neighbor about it, about how much brighter my apartment was and how happy I was that the new neighbors had taken care of the garden. Then I went inside and saw this:
They boarded up all the gaps in the fence. It’s 800% darker in here now.
Like, I KNOW it’s their fence and they can do what they want with it and have a right to have privacy in the their backyard that they paid an undoubtedly absurd amount of money for, but it still seems like kind of a dick move. And I think they knew it too, because instead of starting at one end and working their way across, they boarded up the gaps to the left of my window, then the gaps to the right of my window, and then when they had nothing else left to board up they did the gaps right in front of my window.
I should ask them to buy me a SAD light 🙁
Instead of having a bunch of birthday parties throughout each month, Symphony’s class has one big party on the last Friday of each month. Apparently the kids who don’t bring in something to share have to clean up afterwards (which doesn’t seem exactly fair; what about kids whose parents work too much or maybe don’t have enough money?) so she asked if I would make some little donuts for her to bring. I made her a deal: I’d make the donuts if she decorated them.
She originally asked me to make the cinnamon-sugar donuts but I didn’t have enough time to be fussing around with measuring out lots of ingredients so instead I used boxed brownie mix (which works great for baked donuts, btw). Sym chose chocolate glaze and chocolate sprinkles, and although I’d never made chocolate glaze before it worked out really well- I just sifted together lots of icing sugar, a little cocoa powder and a couple tablespoons of milk and voila!
