My Vapid Blog

Over the past few months I have become increasingly aware that my blog is vapid. It has developed (or regressed, perhaps) to a glorified photo album with the occasional quip or witty caption. My blog has become an obligation for friends and family; "I better check to see if the blog has been updated in case she references a photo. Ho-hum". Well, it stops here. Or, I rather hope it does anyway. I have some fairly substantial obstacles in writing a truly captivating blog. Many of the things I find ironic or interesting are off-limits in the realm of blogging.

Here is my list of blogging no-no's:

1. Work. - I work for the Health Region. When I started, I signed a Confidentiality Agreement. This means, if I write, speak, whisper, sing, chant, or otherwise write in code anything learned at work in the context of work will get me fired. Basically immediately. I love my job: the people I work with are great, my work is enjoyable, and it helps to support my shoe and cheesecake habits. I can't afford to lose it by utilizing my blog for the common "venting" that seems natural.

2. Uncharitable thoughts about people I know. - You're wondering who I could possibly have such uncharitable thoughts about, aren't you? Well I can't tell you. It may be someone you know, it may be your best friend, it may be your boss, it may be your coworker, it may be a family member. Hard to say. But Why would I wan you to be annoyed with me because I can't stand ___________? Exactly. Off limits. It's that lesson I learned in kindergarten: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

3. Other uncharitable thoughts. - If I'm annoyed, it sure can't come out here! Chances are the thing I'm annoyed about is something that you love and will therefore result in you ostracizing me. Neither of us want that.

So, with these sorts of limitations, I find I have only a few topics I can discuss:

1. Ollie. SO CUTE!!! Hahahaha, and while I KNOW you all love him, there are only so many times I can post pictures of him snoozing under a blanket, or wearing a cute t-shirt before I become the crazy person who treats her dog like a baby. And believe me, it's a slippery slope.

2. Brad. I'm fairly certain he doesn't read my blog often...and I can chance some embarrassing stories here and there.

3. Hobbies. UBER boring for anyone who is not interested in the same things as me.

4. Random anonymous anecdotes with peoples' names removed to protect me. I.e. "Don't you hate when A PERSON does SOMETHING really annoying?? Me too! It happened to me just THE OTHER DAY at THAT PLACE I WENT TO."

So, while I seem to be experiencing some rather substantial writers block, combined with some serious off-limit topics, I will be striving to write entertaining blog entries, if not for you then for me so I can actually want to blog again.

in the meantime, here is a photo of Peet, our budgie. She is dangling upside down by one foot in her cage, and looks like she's starting to doze off.

A Christmas-y Weekend

It's a tradition in my family to not turn on the Christmas lights until December 1st. So, on December 2nd (whoops! TOTALLY forgot about the 1st) we turned on our house lights which Brad hung while I was in Halifax. In keeping with the theme of the tradition, I don't decorate the house until December. This weekend,. being the first weekend of the month, was the first weekend of Christmas-y tasks, including creating Christmas cards and decorating! Last night I sat down at my scrapbooking table and made 20 Christmas cards to deliver to friends, family and coworkers. I continued on today and have officially made 28, though I still have another 8 to make.

Today was our official decorating day as well! Brad and I did a clean of the living room and I put up our Christmas Tree, front and centre in the bay window so it can shine for all to see!

The next tasks inlude wrapping prezzies, buying stocking stuffers, and doing a lot of Christmas baking (though I think I'll be doing that at my parents' house when we get there!) The past few years I've been late in getting the Christmas spirit, but this year, well, I'm diving right on in!

Sha-Na-Woot!

Mare is officially comng to visit! It's been three years since she's been to Swift Current and will be coming to stay on February 16th! Sha-na-woot!! She will be the official first guest of Chateau Giesliams since we renovated. We decided that the flights would be our Christmas prezzies to each other and what could be a better prezzie from one's best friend than to have her visit for 6 days during which all we will do is scrapbook, shop, watch chick-flicks, and wear comfy pants? Merry Christmas to me!

Halifax 2.0

This year I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go to Halifax for a career fair. The weather was fantastic (especially coming from -12 in Regina when I left) and I'm a big fan of the east coast. I stayed with Maureen to start with though she was unfortuantely (for me) called to work in Nevada to learn how to do some sort of underground geology stuff (that was all I was able to understand from her explanation. Whoosh...over my head!). We had Saturday to spend and went around Point Pleasant and the water front, but her flight left early Sunday morning so I was left with Sunday to myself. What does one do in the Maritimes on a gorgeous Sunday? Why, one drives around looking for the World's Largest roadside attractions, of course!

On the boardwalk in Halifax
~ This is not a "world's largest" but it is a pretty freakin big anchor!
~ A big wave in Halifax at the waterfront
~

The World's Largest Blueberry in Oxford, NS - self proclaimed Blueberry Capital of Canada!
~

World's Largest Lobster in Shediac, NB - the Lobster Capital of Canada
~

A big freakin Rooster in Shediac, NB. It's advertising for fried chicken.
~

The World's Largest Silver Fox in Salisbury, NB - Home of the Silver Fox
~

My last stop was at the World's Largest Axe in Nackawic NB - Home of the World's Largest Axe.
~

Halloween!

Another Halloween came with Brad and I scratching our heads as to what to dress up as. In a last minute trip to WalMart we found our inspiration: plastic skull necklaces. We would be Cannibals! So we gathered some props, shredded some sheets (fyi, it is impossible to find animal print sheets in Swift Current), and painted our faces ferociously. I hot glued a piece of bone to an old nose screw and put it through my nose ring hole for a final touch.

One More Window

On Saturday Brad, his Dad, and Nick spent a good portion of the day installing our new bay window! It looked like a ton of work and they did a marvelous job!

New Windows!

Brad and Ben worked their arses off Friday and yesterday to get our new upstairs windows installed. It was a very exciting day for us to see the huge difference it made to have new windows. It feels like a new house! I tried to take pictures along the way, but to be honest, they were so speedy, they'd have an old window out before I had a chance to take a picture of it, so I'll post some older photos of the rooms so you can see the difference.

Spare Bedroom: This was where they started on Friday:

(very) Old

New

~
On Saturday they started with the Master Bedroom:

(very) Old

New

~
The Kitchen:

Old (notice the truly hideous awning)

New(goodbye awning!!!)

~
Bathroom:
Old

New

~
Living Room:

Old (it's too bad you can't actually see the draft that came from this window)

New

Living room from outside:
Old

New

~
When they started removing the old window in the spare room, Brad realized it would probably make a mess, so he covered my scrapbooks with a towel to protect them! What a good man!
~
Ollie wasn't quite sure what was going on, but, ever adaptable, found a patch of sunlight to lay down in.

~
Ollie. Completely confused by the hole.

~
We're still waiting on the front bay window; it wasn't quite done when they went to pick up the others on Friday. When it's done, Brad and Ben will install that one, along with the basement windows. Yay! I have to say, it's already making a huge difference. I don't feel a breeze coming off of any of the new windows! I'm not quite as afraid of winter this year.

Practically Famous!!

When I started looking for a wedding dress in 08 after we got engaged (ok fine, after Mare got engaged and I started helping her with the search and looking a little extra for my own pleasure) I found that I really loved the designs of Maggie Sottero. I spent a lot of time on her sites looking at the different lines available. One thing I loved about the site is that they would post the stories of bride who had bought their gowns. When Mum and I found my dress, a Sottero Midgely, I decided I would submit a picture to the site to see if I would be posted. It took a long time before I actually got around to sending a photo but I checked yesterday evening and they had posted the photo I sent and my story! I'm a Midgely Bride! Hee hee! Clearly I took a screen shot (they are always updating the page and putting new brides up, so I won't be featured forever), but here is the link to the page.

ebooks: not written, but CREATED?

I spent the morning driving a rental car which was thankfully endowed with satellite radio. With this glorious tool I tuned into BBC Radio 1 and the Chris Moyles show who had Stephen Fry on as a guest. Having grown up with many a Blackadder reference/quote thrown around the kitchen table, and being one of the few people I know who knew Hugh Laurie was actually British prior to seeing him on an awards show with his accent coming through, I was excited to hear the interview. It proved to be truly entertaining as Fry is an incredibly intelligent and eloquent person who is inherently silly (the perfect combination for radio, really). Moyles talked about Fry's new book, The Fry Chronicles which has apparently just been released and covers his life from 1987 (when he met Laurie) on.
When I got home this evening I was very interested in seeing if I could track down a copy of this memoir and went to the kobo site to find it isnt available there. I skipped over to chapters to see if it has even been released in north America yet, and it doesn't appear to have been. As a last ditch effort, I tried the BC public library catalogue of ebooks. I selected the search function and entered "Stephen Fry", then clicked the drop down menu to choose author... But it wasn't an option. I could choose ISBN (the numbering system for all books), Title, or Creator. Maybe it's just that I'm over-tired right now, but using the term "creator" seems, well, a bit grandiose, doesn't it? And really, if it's a memoir, aren't we now treading into existentialist territory? Fry has written about his life...is he the creator of his own life, or did someone/something else do the creating for him? If so, doesn't that make all authors who are dubbed "creators" by the BC library system just plagiarizers? Yeah, that's right, I went there. Chew on that for a while...

Anniversary Photos

For our first anniversary, we asked Rob, once again, to take some photos of us (I thought it would be a fun bookend to the engagement and wedding shoots). They were in our mailbox this afternoon when I came home from work! Here are a couple (ok, a few) of my favorites!

Harvest

(Farmer) Brad was out in the garden this morning digging up the spoils of his work in the garden. Last year was the first year we had a garden and we learned a few things from it. 1) leave some room for things to grow. 2) don't plant too many potatoes or you'll be trying to pawn them off on other people who also planted potatoes. 3) plan carrots into soil that allows them to grown deeper so you don't just have little fat squat carrots. ~
4) only plant or two tomato plants because they seem to like the location of our garden and grow to a daunting and unmanageable size. ~
And 5) you better like cucumbers because you're going to get an assload of them.

~
I'd say we learned our lessons and this year had pretty good results.

Living in a Scrapbooker's Paradise

With the completion of the spare room downstairs, I was able to overtake the previous spare room and turn it fully into a scrapbooking room (ok, computer room too, but in all fairness, I do use the computer for scrapbooking sometimes). This is my new room! It's fine, you can be jealous. ;)

Project Spare Room: Success!

Today Brad finished up our spare room downstairs and we moved the bed and other furniture down into it! We now have a functioning, dedicated spare room for our guests! It's come a long way...(in case you don't remember what it looked like, here is the blog entry from January when we started the demolition).

Here is our finished product:

(please note, the bottom right framed picture is a piece of the wall paper we ripped down...you can't just throw that stuff away! Tribute must be paid!)