Category: Uncategorized

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!

Today is Symphony’s last day of school. As you can see, she’s thrilled.

Okay actually that’s just the face she makes when I try to take a picture of her. She’s a delight, truly. I just liked her outfit today! She really knows how to mix those colours and patterns.

As usual, I left the end of the year gift buying until the last minute. In fact, I TOTALLY outdid myself. Usually I leave it until the night before the last day of school, this year I left it until the ACTUAL day. OOPS. Lucky I’m not working this week or this shopping trip would have been a huge pain!

I ended up buying her teacher a grow-your-own-organic-heirloom-tomatoes kit (which I forgot to take a picture of) and I got Symphony a bottle of Harajuku Lovers Lil Angel perfume. Along with Studio Ghibli films and vampires these perfumes are so hot with the elementary school set this year.

Before I went out shopping I managed to capture this special moment between Kichou and Georgie. He doesn’t bite her, just snarls and barks and then sulks in the closet. She is not scared of him at all though.

view full size for maximum impact EDIT:

I got up to take out the puppy this morning (no pee incidents last night, yay) and found Sym sleeping on the couch where I had my nap yesterday.

Good thing I didn’t look in her room first or I would have started the day with an omg-my-baby’s-been-kidnapped panic. She’s eight years old but I still check on her at night, to make sure she’s there, to make sure she’s safe, to make sure she’s still breathing. Sometimes she creepily sleeps with her eyes open and I wake her up to make her cut it out.

Even though I’m on vacation my day started early. REALLY early. As in, 3 am when I was woken up by a very contrite puppy who had just wet the bed. MY bed. It was my fault- I usually take her out around 11:30 and she’s good until 6:30, but I fell asleep before ten and I guess she couldn’t hold it. Oh well. I cleaned the mattress and changed the sheets and I was able to get another couple hours in before it was time to get Sym up for her second-last day of school.

After I dropped her off I met up with Taylor and we walked our soggy doggies in the rain. They both got muddy and needed baths when we got home, which they weren’t happy about. Georgie in particular is not a fan of tubtime and whined her puppy face off. One the dogs were all dried off we went out for brunch, then relaxed on the couch and watched the season 4 opener of Burn Notice, which we are like, OBSESSED with right now. We watched the first three seasons in just a couple of weeks!

Once it was over it was well past Taylor’s bedtime, so he went to sleep. I was going to do all kinds of stuff like cleaning the floors and taking out the trash and doing dishes, but that didn’t happen. Instead I read on the couch and eventually fell asleep in a pile of blankets, pillows and dogs. Luckily I remembered to set an alarm to wake up in time to pick up Sym! Now she’s playing on her room and I’m doing all the dishes and cleaning I missed by sleeping all afternoon. So today was kind of a waste, but also kind of awesome.

I also spent some time looking at old photos and found this cute picture of me and Symphony at Vera’s Burger Shack from 2007.

Hahaha I love it. Of course, like every time I look at old pictures now I want to do my hair dark again. It looks so good!!

I cannot get over this cute friendship between Dougal and Georgie! Unfortunately Kichou doesn’t want to be part of my cool dog gang and sulks and hides under the couch all the time. Georgie is a big (tiny) bully though, always picking on him and pulling his hair.

Poor Kichou! Hopefully they can work through their issues and become friends. I can’t be mad at her though; she’s too kissy and fuzzy.

This week’s popsicle party was actually late. On Friday night we ordered pizza and watched Castle in the Sky and I was too tired to get into popsicle making. I figured if we made them Saturday morning they’d be frozen enough by the afternoon for us to try them.

I chose the flavour this time: Watermelon!

We bought watermelon/strawberry juice to help liquid it up.

Symphony helped with the melon balling process.

pre-blend

post-blend

The finished product.

I’m not gonna lie: these popsicles sucked. It might be because the watermelon was past its awesome date- it was a little desiccated in places. We didn’t use those parts but the whole flavour was kind of off. These might be better with a fresher, juicier melon so I might try making them again later this summer.

Half Broke Horses 46/104; The Brief History of the Dead
47/104; Catching Fire 48/104

I loved all of these books! I knew after reading The Glass Castle that I wanted to read Half Broke Horses as well and I definitely wasn’t disappointed. Kevin Brockmeier has been one of my favorite authors since I read his short story collection The View from the Seventh Layer a couple of years ago. Catching Fire is the sequel to The Hunger Games and I’ve been itching to read it for months. It suffers a little from second-book-of-a-trilogy syndrome but it’s still good, and now I’m more excited to read the final book, Mockingjay, than ever.

Georgie stepped in some poop and needed a small bath because she’s going to Sym’s school for Show & Tell today.

While going through my old tumblr posts the other day, one of the awesome things I rediscovered was this picture of pony & unicorn plushes by Fantastic Toys.

Unfortunately there aren’t any unicorns available now, but I was happy to learn that you can buy PDF papercraft playsets! For just $4 I got this adorableness:

So cute! I’m going to go buy some cardstock and as soon as I get my file I have a fun new project to work on with Sym!