Category: Uncategorized

Way back in the olden days of the internet, I used to have my computer in the bedroom. Since Taylor works nights, he sleeps during the day and all my Photo Booth pictures had the ubiquitous sleeping husband in the background, sometimes also adorned with sleeping dogs.

This picture is so old, look at my dark hair!

Eventually I moved my computer onto an actual desk in the-room-formerly-known-as-the-library-now-known-as-the-living-room, and now it’s in the-room-formerly-known-as-the-living-room-now-known-as-the-office. The background keeps changing, and with the addition of Taylor’s new, wrong colour desk (not to self: PAINT IT) it’s changed again.

The bummer part is I actually kind of like it, but with my yellow desk, the dark brown bookcase and drawers and the white end table my printer lives on there’s already too much going on in here, colour-scheme wise. Anyway. With the addition of his desk, my pictures will now (occasionally) feature something new: WORKING HUSBAND!

You can’t tell, but his lap is actually adorned with the traditional sleeping dog.

Symphony made a little terrarium out of a Ferrero Rocher box (I have a million, thanks Christmas!) and some felt, and today she asked me to help her make some caterpillars for it.

Caterpillar Supplies & Equipment
Scissors, needles and thread. Green pompoms (Sym only wanted to make green ones- it’s our favorite colour), glue and googly eyes from my extensive googly eye collection.

These are easy to do- just thread your pompoms & glue on the eyes!

Sym also drew this little girl on orange felt and cut her out- she said she’s a little sister, and we had to bring her everywhere with us today. On one side she’s awake and on the other she’s asleep!

Sport, 92/104

This is it, the last book I read in 2010. I read a total of 92 books, meaning if I’d just read one more book per month I would have made my goal. So close!

Now I need to decide how I’m going to continue. Originally I was just going to keep adding to my 104 Books list, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe instead I should just start a new book list for 2011? Should I set a new goal or just read for funsies and see how I do? Should I make a rule to read only new books, or do rereads count? I guess I should figure this out! EDIT I decided to do a new list for each year, and made a new Reading Lists page (it’s also linked at the upper right of my blog, just above the header) to keep track of everything.

a full list of all this year’s books can always be found here

Today was Taylor’s last full vacation day (he has to work tomorrow night so he’ll need to get up early in the morning and go to bed in the afternoon) and for some inexplicable reason he decided to spend it at Ikea. Crazy, but who am I to argue 😉

We’d been talking about getting a desk for him, and I’d come up with an Ikea hack using some pieces from a tv stand that I’d disassembled as a desktop. We were just going to get some little shelves and legs to hold it up, but ended up going in a completely different direction! Taylor found an actual desk he liked that was on sale, so we got that in black. It was actually closer to the black-brown colour of the bookcase we already have in the office area and a little drawer unit Taylor picked out today, so I thought it’d match nicely. Except when we got home and opened the box it was the wrong colour!

Oops! So I guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow: painting a desk!
Taylor also bought me a new desk chair, hooray!

What I really went crazy on this trip was toys. I’ve been wanting to replace the crappy, chewed-up plastic toy food I have for the daycare kids, but I didn’t want to get wooden food (too expensive and easily ruin if Georgie gets ahold of it) and Ikea really came through! They had these plush food sets- breakfast, desserts, fruits and veggies– and I wanted them all, but unfortunately had some sort of a brain malfunction and forgot to buy the fruit and veggie sets! Luckily, Symphony’s grandma is going to Ikea on Tuesday so she’s going to pick them up for me.

I also got this little barn:

… that opens up to be a farm!

I also got farm vehicles and extra animals to go with it. I really like this set- I reminds me of a little house with furniture and bears my mom made me for Christmas once when I was a little kid. Of course, I probably could have made this stuff myself, but I then if the kids tried to play with them I’d be like this grumpy bull!

So as I posted (and whiningly tweeted), Mini Christmas didn’t really go as I’d hoped, which really upset me. I made a nice dinner (which I rarely do on Wednesdays) and after we were supposed to open presents, take a family picture in our new pajamas and then watch Elf. What ACTUALLY happened was Sym acted like a whiny, uncooperative brat, and Taylor couldn’t find the piece to attach his camera to the tripod mount and had a rage fit about it. I may or may not have started crying that night in the toothpaste aisle of the drugstore, because they were out of my favorite toothpaste and it was just the LAST STRAW. Anyway. I had big talks with both Taylor and Sym about how their actions made me feel blah blah blah and got everything worked out.

Taylor and I spent Christmas in Kelowna with his moms. I’ll be honest, I really don’t like Kelowna, but I wanted to try my hardest to be positive and cheerful, partially to show Taylor up for his performance at Mini Christmas, but mostly because I wanted to have a nice Christmas myself & not ruin anyone else’s. I think I succeeded? It was easier than last time we were there for Christmas because there was way less snow, and I didn’t have to try to keep Sym entertained or run interference with Dougal. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve, and then spent the rest of our days bumming around. We took Georgie and Kichou for long walks, watched some real gems of movies (four words: JENNIFER LOPEZ ROMANTIC COMEDY) and just pretty much relaxed. It was nice! We also visited with Taylor’s sister Jaime and her boyfriend Shawn on Monday (they’d gone to see Shawn’s family for Christmas).

Taylor’s grandmother came over for dinner on Christmas Day, which was interesting and also awkward- she started feeding our dogs giant chunks of ham and I ended up like, slow-motion lunging across the table yelling “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” like I was taking a bullet for someone, and after that she was very snotty with me- she didn’t even say goodbye to me when she left until I stepped right in her path to say it to her. So that was kind of :/ but oh well. Better than cleaning hammy dog vomit off the carpet!

Taylor really wanted to make it up to me for ruining my Mini Christmas, so he went ALL OUT for our NYE. Since it was a Friday night, we had Sym, so we didn’t go out or anything. Instead, we made an ENORMOUS feast- Taylor put himself in charge of buying food and he went completely overboard! We had mini cheeseburgers, perogies with pepper and bacon, chicken strips AND popcorn chicken, fries, sweet & sour pork, a huge platter of veggies, salsa con queso & chips, gold & silver cupcakes, two kinds of Cadbury’s mini eggs (popping & regular) and a box of Ferrero Rochers (of which I think Sym ate half). We also had root beer for Sym and wine and champagne for Taylor and I. It was basically enough for to feed a family of 100, but I swear we ate almost everything! It was pretty gross.

After we ate, we played a round of Apples to Apples, which is always fun with Sym. She laughs her face off at everything and is like, an Apples to Apples savant or something- even if she doesn’t understand the word or doesn’t know the people or activities on her cards, she always manages to put down something totally, hilariously apt. She ended up winning, and then Taylor had the brilliant idea of pushing the couch back and playing Dance Central on the Xbox. It was basically the funnest time ever! Once we were all sweaty and gross, we put the furniture back and curled up on the couch to watch our traditional NYE movie, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. I don’t remember why we always watch it, but they’ve done studies, and sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

Because we started watching it so late we were right in the middle at midnight, so we paused and had a little toast. I let Sym try a tiny thimble of champagne and she was not impressed- she didn’t actually even sip it, just dipped her finger in, licked it, and made a horrible face. I guess I don’t have to worry about her turning into a preteen lush! Once the movie was over I put her to bed, and then Taylor and I stayed up drunkenly watching the same Jem & the Holograms episodes I watched by myself the other week. I don’t even know.

So that was my holiday season, sorry about the lack of real posts but vacation is almost over and life will be back to normal, so hopefully I’ll be back to my regular blogging schedule! I hope everyone had a nice holiday season, and so do my dogs 🙂

Since Christmas is over I thought I’d give my blog a quick layout refresh, featuring what I think might just be my worst header ever. If you’re too lazy to go view this post at the actual page, here’s a peek:

CHARMING. You really should check it out though, it’s has the traditional animated rainbow text. I do want to give credit for the unicorn cupcake picture I used in the creation of this monstrosity though.

I first saw it on tumblr with no source, but with some quick internet research I traced it back to Zanda Panda. If someone wants to buy me their unicorn mold I wouldn’t be mad- remember, I DO have a birthday coming up!

You might remember (or not) that way back in the summer I spraypainted my patio furniture and bought a huge rainbow golf umbrella to make into a patio umbrella for my mini-patio. I cut the handle of the umbrella off with my Dremel (which was really nerve-wracking and I’m still surprised I didn’t like, sever my femoral artery or something) but I was never able to figure out a way to turn it into patio umbrella with a stand.

UNTIL NOW.

While we were in Kelowna we visited Taylor’s sister Jaime, and he had mentioned that we needed some speaker stands for the living room now that we’ve rearranged the furniture. As it turned out Jaime has some old speaker stands she’d been given by their mom, but she didn’t need them so she gave them to us.

Unfortunately, they won’t work with our speakers, so Taylor left them outside on the patio. I happened to look at them when we came back from our dog walk and INSPIRATION!

I took the bracket off the top of the stand- the screw was loose so I didn’t even have to dig out my screwdriver. In a burst of cleansing synchronicity the speaker stand is EXACTLY the right size to fit inside the umbrella!

It’s not quite done yet- the umbrella slides down so far onto the stand that it’s hard to work the little thingermer that you depress to raise & lower the umbrella, but I think if add some sort of washer array to make the umbrella sit higher I can make it work.

Still, I think this turned out pretty perfectly amazing! Now I just need it to not be the middle of winter anymore, haha.

special, I-haven’t-been-posting-books-so-there’s-eight edition

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, 84/104; Under the Dome, 85/104; The Cuter Book, 86/104; Zombie Felties, 87/104;

Chronic City, 88/104; Harriet the Spy, 89/104; Cute Pups, 90/104; The Long Secret, 91/104

So as you can see, I’m not going to make it to 104 books by the end of the year, unless I can miraculously read 13 books in the next 36 hours (which seems unlikely). Maybe 104 books is just too many to read in one year? In the last few months I’ve actually felt BURNED OUT from reading, and it didn’t help that a couple of the books I chose (Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, Under the Dome and Chronic City in particular) dragged on interminably and took me much longer to read than they should have. I have read more books this year than last year (87), and I’m going to keep adding to my 104 books page until I’ve reached the goal- hopefully by my birthday!

a full list of all this year’s books can always be found here

When I was in the car on Friday I downloaded a wordpress app for my new phone so I could easily post while I was away and then I just… didn’t. Oops! I don’t really want to do a big Christmas recap right now because I’m tired and greasy feeling (six hours in the car will do that) but here are a few things. These are all Taylor’s pictures- I took my camera with me but never even took it out of my bag, although I did take pictures with my phone, which you’d know if you follow my twitter.

The dogs and I at the traditional stop at the former site of the Coquihalla Highway toll booths.

We ended up doing “Swedish Christmas” and opened all our presents on Christmas Eve. I got so many wonderful gifts, including this beautiful ring from Specimental Design, I love it so much! Thanks, husband!!

I tied these decorative berries & ribbon onto Georgie to make her more festive, but she chewed some of them up and pooped out golden glittery poops all the next day. Story of my life, basically.

Anyway I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas, or if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then a fantastic regular weekend 🙂