July 31st, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
Even with all the other stuff that has been going on in my every day life, I still feel that this has been an amazing summer so far. The weather has been splendid in my opinion – ignoring that two week heat wave in the middle of July, but then again that’s what July is for. The days have been sunny and breezy. The nights, for the most part, have been cool enough that for almost all of June we didn’t even have our a/c on at night. The humidity hasn’t been as horrible as it normally is – as in, we haven’t had it every day of the summer 24/7. There have been days when it’s impossible to breathe with the humidity, but the next day will drop in temperature and be comfortable again.
When it has rained, it has gone all out. Major storm warnings and downpours that make you want to hide. But at the same time, the sky would clear within a couple of hours and you can go out about your day, or it’s only rained at night.
I feel content this morning. Even with my allergies so bad that my eyes have dried out and I can’t see a bloody thing clearly (one regret? Getting this stupid LASIK done in February).
But today I am happy.
This was breakfast:
Yes, that is fried baloney. I needed a meat product. The little white container on the top left holds the creton we bought at the Farmer’s Market yesterday. So much deliciousness!
Even Annie had fruit!
Of course she would have much preferred the baloney and eggs.
My tree is slowly, very slowly, coming back to life.
Although it seems to have decided to come back with it’s autumn colours on.
The leaves aren’t very big yet, nor plentiful and I hope that next summer it’ll pop back to life properly. I don’t think this is so bad for it having died completely for 2 weeks during the heat wave.
Still, I am very happy to see she still has some life in her. I think to celebrate the rebirth of the tree I shall give her a name. I dub thee, Celeste. (Shawn dubs thee, Gretta. He’s wrong though.)
I have been delving back into my childhood for much of this month. Part of that nostalgic trip has been while rereading a series of books I had back in the late 80s.
I am on the final installment of that series now, which will bring my total read books for the month to 17 – only 3 short of last July’s total of 20. Although this month also included To Kill a Mockingbird, which I feel should equal about 5 books worth of reading.
Jinx didn’t want to be left out of my final post for July so he happily posed on the back deck for me.
The back deck is HOT on bare feet so I didn’t let him (or me!) stay out that long.
The last week saw the painting of our deck over many days – if we didn’t have rain! It’s now almost complete and I can move my lone cherry tomato plant back up on to the deck.
We’ve had so much rain in the evenings for the last little while and had been looking forward to a week without rain so we can paint the deck – I forgot to water the poor little plant for 4 days and the bottom is starting to yellow. I have been watering it every night now and hope that we’ll get a little more rain in case I forget. I do have little green tomatoes starting to grow though!
Obviously not everything is back on the deck yet, but my faerie and the plant are back where they belong! I can’t wait for my tomatoes!
Jinx wanted to show off the finished deck but I had to tell him that those railings to his right still needed their second coat! Once that’s done it will be 100% finished! Thanks to my father-in-law for providing the stain. The green even matches the aluminum roofing on our house. Oh, so 70s. (Actually it looks really nice on the deck.)
Now my towels are hanging on the line to dry – sadly there seem to be dark ominous clouds on the horizon. Grr. And I am finishing off this post about my summer so far. I might have some more berries to snack on since we had breakfast around 11:00 am. I have taken the hamburger meat out of the freezer for dinner tonight, that with fresh corn from the farmer’s market. Mmmmm. Dinner seems so far away right now.
And I shall leave you with this final photo of my silly Annabelly who will not play with toys but has no problems falling asleep next to them in weird positions. This happened as I was about to unload all my photos from the camera for my post.
My dogs bring me so much joy. So has this summer. (And of course, so does my husband!)
I hope everyone is having as much fun this summer as I have been – even with the ups and downs.
June 13th, 2010 @ 10:49 am
– Why is it that the crowds in NYC, particularly around Times Square didn’t bother me much but the crowds here in Montreal, especially this weekend for Grand Prix, make me want to punch them all in the face? It took me TWENTY minutes to walk from Peel to Guy on Friday night when it should have taken about 5-7 minutes. Honestly I think the crowds in NYC were much less rude and obnoxious.
– The way my street is right now, whenever someone drives by it makes me feel like I’m back at Marine Village. I sort of like the sound of cars driving on dirt/gravel roads. It’s comforting.
– I should probably check our lotto ticket from Friday since the jackpot was $50 million with 20 extra smaller jackpots at $1 million each.
– I think I am finally getting over the plague and narcolepsy that I caught from my NYC trip. Maybe.
– I would make a terrific Lady of Leisure. I really should check that lotto ticket.
– The lotto ticket is pinned to the cork board in the kitchen. To check it would require getting up off the couch and I am feel rather lazy – er – leisurely right now and therefore need a man-servant to get it for me.
– If we won the jackpot we could totally hire a man-servant to do things. I really should check that ticket.
– I would also hire a chef so that I could eat wonderful, healthy food and it would be all prepared for me and I won’t have to do anything except eat it.
– I don’t like touching food. So it’s handy to have someone around who will make you food so that I don’t have to touch it.
– We went to the dog park last evening and poor Annie didn’t seem to have a great time this time around. She didn’t bound or run, she sort of waddled behind me and kept sitting down to catch her breath. It wasn’t even all that warm. I don’t like that she’s getting so old, so fast.
– My friend Kristi’s dog Xander has had some pretty serious surgery this month, what a welcome back from our NYC trip. They’ve all been having a rough time with his recovery. Annie and Jinx have been very concerned and even went out and made him up a get well care package which will be out in the mail by tomorrow. It should have gone out last weekend but due to my narcoleptic plague I slept the entire weekend away and never got to the post office!
– I would have driven to and from the dog park last night, except for the random crevices in and around my street due to the construction. I have no desire to drive into one of those random deep holes. Especially the one next to our driveway where my FRONT YARD SHOULD BE. So until my street and the next one over (a main street which is now being dug up) are cleaned up and a little less booby trapped I’m find with waiting.
– On the bright side our street is almost completely finished though until we no longer have the temporary water system (through hoses) I doubt it’ll be paved.
– Another bright side (and I’ll end on this) is that my eyes are FINALLY working. The left one goes spazzy once in a while as it gets dry faster than the right (what’s up with that?) but I can SEE people. I can finally SEE! Last week’s LASIK follow-up proved that I was .25 off of 20/20 in each eye and that I still have 3 months of healing left (actually I have 2 months, since it was the end of February, but whatever). So I have hope that at some point I will be able to see like a normal person. I hope. I’d better. If I still have prescription problems at the end of all of this, I will be asking for my money back and NOT going through the procedure again. I do not need another 4 months of not being able to see, thank you very much.
The end.
April 10th, 2010 @ 10:03 am
You’d think saving a creature’s life would get you some good karma points or something. But alas, it didn’t seem to work that way. Shawn was just at the start of the really miserable cold/flu thing that I had the week before so the rest of our Easter weekend didn’t look too promising and then Sunday happened. Sunday I got 3 phone calls in a row from the bank saying that a debit card had been compromised once again. As the first call rambled away in my ear I checked our bank balance. Well, look at that. Some bastard took almost $900 of our money and we’re in over draft again. Lovely. I hung up as the call ended and the bank called back (all the calls are automated). We got a call for almost every transaction the bastard made while taking out our cash.
So, Easter Monday, where I was supposed to hang out and do nothing in jammies all day and Shawn was going to drag himself into work, sick as a dog, we actually headed out to the bank and filed our left report. You know, almost exactly a month after having this happen to us the first time. And with the new card. The bright side is that the bank reimbursed our money right away again, the down side was on Sunday morning we were $60 in overdraft and at midnight we were about to have the mortgage and two insurance payments come out of that account. You can’t call these places on a Sunday and say “um, hi, we were robbed, so we can’t pay you yet” and you especially can’t call anywhere on Easter Sunday. But when we went to the bank machines to change pins and whatnot, I transferred enough to get our account out of OD and it had a whopping $0.87 in it. I didn’t want to transfer the money to cover the payments out of our savings account because what if they took more? So at 5 to midnight Shawn did an online transfer and then checked at 5 after midnight to make sure that it was just the payments that went through and not some nefarious neerdowell.
New rule in our home – never use debit. We’ll take out enough money for the week for each of us. Groceries will be done on credit and I will pay it off right away. No more debit for us.
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The money thing made me anxious, well more so than normal. When I get anxious I tend to focus on other things. So as I was looking for some tax-related paper it prompted me to take all the boxes and piles of bills and important papers and start to organize them at about 5PM on Easter Monday.
The kitchen floor was a large enough space for me to lay out everything in their own piles. Bills, bills, bills, taxes, city stuff, more bills, bank statements. Fun times. Shawn helped me out and then by ten to six it led to the realization that we really, really needed to buy a filing cabinet. We’d been talking about it for YEARS. Mostly we tossed a bunch of papers into a rubbermaid container and it’s not sorted. No, this photo doesn’t even cover the stuff in the containers! Turns out Staples (not called that here) is open until 9PM Monday-Friday. So we thought, ok, cool, we’ll go. But we had a kitchen floor full of delicious paper and Annie was eying it hungrily. What to do?
Nice barricade, huh? It was very creative. It worked. But it was so ridiculous that I had to take a photo before we left. Heh.
Not wanting to spend billions of dollars at Staples (which I totally could if I was able to because I LOVE that store. Mmmm, office supplies. *swoon*), we picked up some no-name brand file hangers and folders, we picked up one pack of no-name brand letter-sized envelopes so I can better keep together the many years of tax papers I have in a box. And we got to of these little plastic boxes called “The Really Useful Box“. According to the paper in the box, if we had four of them we could hold up a Mini Cooper. That IS useful!
So all the stuff on the kitchen floor is now in that box. I was going to make label at work this week but the work week kicked my bottom and wore me out and I had no free time and we had a bunch of stuff going on in the evenings. So next week. And this weekend I plan on tackling the other random papers in the containers. I like organization, I just never have time to do it!
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We also seem to have The Skunk back in our yard. We need to skunk-proof this spring. Before everything starts to grow and bloom and we can’t see the bottom of the fence anymore. Shawn went out to check the yard before letting the dogs out after a walk (I know, redundant, but my dogs are weird) and came back in saying the skunk was at the bottom of the stairs just hanging out. Fun.
But we saw bunnies on our walks this week! I need to start taking my real camera because the iPhone isn’t the best photo-taker in the dark. There’s a block we pass that seems to be bunny-filled. Why can’t we have bunnies? Why do we have to have skunks?
You can click to enlarge the photo, which I lightened considerably so you can even see the little blob that is the bunny. As I said, need to bring my camera with me, iPhone just doesn’t cut it in the dark!
I was able to get fairly close before it started to sneak away. I let Shawn hold both dogs so I could try and get a better photo. Jinx wanted the bunnies. I don’t think Annie even knew why we had stopped.
Then we saw this other one sitting across the street. It was looking a lot like a chocolate Easter Bunny. I thought it was a decoration until it ran away.
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And lastly, Annie hasn’t been doing all that great. She’s having a ton of trouble on our walk (which isn’t that long or far) and she’s not been eating. Although Jinx isn’t eating either and I am not sure if it’s because they are being picky eaters or he’s not eating because Annie isn’t eating (often he’ll start his food after she’s done) or if Annie isn’t well. I don’t know. Her cough is worse and more constant since February, although we had a very early thaw and that might have just increased her allergies. I don’t know. She’s just suddenly OLD. It’s like she turned 12 and got OLD on the same day. Worries me.
March 21st, 2010 @ 5:05 pm
I have had all the blinds pulled this afternoon due to a migraine and it’s just that kind of glare outside that kills me the most. But I was opening the back blinds to let some light in when Jinx noticed this huge crow staring into our living room from the wires outside. Jinx did not approve. I wasn’t about to let him out since I knew he’d just bark at it and frankly, I’m scared of crows. They are evil.
That’s when I noticed there were about 50 billion crows in the back yard and surroundings. Gah! So I let Jinx out to defend our home. Take that, crows!
These ones are SMALL. There are rooster-sized ones hovering around as well. But they must be camera shy because they fly away as soon as I try to snap their photo. Probably afraid I’ll capture their evil souls.
Jinx was quite concerned about the crows in his yard. Not quite as bad as squirrels, but even the squirrels know better than to stick around with the evil crows.
The yard is crow-free, however they are still up on the electric wires and in the trees.
Right before they settled in these trees they all flew up from the yard below (not mine) and it was SO LOUD – and that was just their wings! *shudder*
The one good thing about all these crows? I got this awesome shot of my Winxy Jinx!
(You can click some of these to enlarge – like if you want to see the billions of crows up close)
March 12th, 2010 @ 7:39 pm
A big ol’ hello to my 5 readers! *wave* Ok, so I know I have more than 5 of you out there, I’m just being silly.
It feels like it’s been forever since I have been online in any sort of fun, non-work related way. I have so much to blog about but my stupid eyes are taking forever to heal and I am trying very hard to be a good girl and rest them on the weekends. I have to say that I can see almost everything normally about 90% of the time right now except that using my computer at work all week is frying my eyeballs. Sigh. So last week I put a ban on using Molly the laptop and only logged on 3 times to check email, write the Birthday Belly post and then to transfer money from accounts since I realized I had not yet done that.
And that’s where the story starts, my friends.
Well, that’s not quite where it starts, but it’s where I am starting.
So I was on this self-imposed computer vacation over the weekend, right? And so I went off with Shawn to his Dungeons & Dragons game (and had a fun time just watching, because to play? It looks terrifyingly daunting! Too much MATH!) and whilst there some random 800-number phoned and I missed it but then got a text-message of the voicemail (did I mention I also got an iPhone recently? Like, last week. And I LOVE IT!) and it said that my bank card had been compromised and please change the pin if you have one of those new secure chip cards, blah, blah, blah. It was Shawn’s card and we went and changed the pin like good little law abiding people. And that was that. The odd thing is that on the Friday I had thought, I’d best transfer the money I needed to while the banks were still open since payments were due on a Monday and I have run into that “your card is cancelled” thing over a weekend before and it sucked. Premonition maybe? Can’t I have a decent Charmed One power? Like the blowing up or moving things with my mind?
Anyway…
So I forget about transferring the money until I am on my way to bed Sunday night at 10PM. I was going up to bed with my book, all relaxed to read 2 pages before I fell asleep. Remembering I needed to get that money from one account to the other I took Molly up to bed with me and logged into my bank… only to notice that the account in question was $300 IN OVERDRAFT. Um.. guh? I checked the transactions and ran downstairs in a t-shirt only, holding my laptop and called down to Shawn in the basement asking if when he “tested” the card with the new pin if he happened to take out $482 dollars. He took out $20. So our money was gone.
Before we got the call from the bank of course. But we never checked. GAH!
I was so upset that I couldn’t even dial the stupid number to the bank and Shawn eventually did it and spoke with someone. We had to go to the bank branch of the account that was empties and file a report, etc. Since it was out joint account we both went. We both got to work stupidly late on Monday but the bank did give us our money back saying even though we had to be told it was temporary due to the investigation it was pretty obvious it was fraud. I told the adorable bank teller that I could assure her the heart attack I had at 10PM the night before was completely legit. heh
Fast forward to Wednesday morning as we’re getting dressed to go to work and my cell rings again – turns out it’s the bank calling because MY card was compromised and I needed to change the pin!! What the hell?!?! So we drove to the bank on the way to work, I changed my pin, but we couldn’t wait until 10AM for it to open so I stopped at the bank downtown on the way to my hair appointment and got a new card. THIS time our money was safe and we CHECKED when I changed my pin.
Stupid week. The bank, or the dumbass thieves out there who clone cards, owe us 2 days of parking money since both of these trips robbed Shawn of his free parking spaces.
Meanwhile my eyes are up and down, but for the most part I am feeling almost normal again vision-wise. Yesterday they even made their own moisture! I was so proud of them!
And other things… last Sunday (before the theft discovery) we went out to dinner for my father’s birthday – which was this past Monday and then we all went back to my parents’ place for cake. A pound cake that my mum made that was delicious and weighed at least 1o pounds. But the best part?
My mother actually LIT the happy birthday candles!!!
The candles that I swear we have had for at least 10 years that she got at the dollar store and NEVER EVER get lit. It was such an event I had to document it.
Also of note, the glasses my niece gave me some new glasses to help my eyes heal since she was very concerned about my eye surgery.
How about that! They match my hair and my star tattoos. She’s very thoughtful my 3 1/2 year old niece is. I think it’s a good look for me.
And since I had a birthday post for both of my dogs with photos it seems only fair that I honour my father as well. As the Bible says Honour thy father and all that stuff. So here’s to you, Daddy!
I love you, old man! 
And lastly, this evening I looked out my front window and it looked like the sky was on fire. I couldn’t capture it decently with my camera, but it was breath-taking. Yet again, sky phase this year.
And that’s it for now, I think. I squished a whole bunch of stuff in this one post. Sorry about that! I have my 2-week follow-up at the Lasik clinic tomorrow and will see if my eyes are healing normally or if anything is wrong. Have to say I’m slightly nervous, but I was told due to my having dry eyes to begin with it could take longer than most. And to be honest, I am not a very fast healer in general.
I shall try to be computer-free as much as I can this long weekend (we took Friday and Monday off this week for vacation for Shawn and to celebrate his birthday!) I don’t know how well I’ll do, but at least I can read BOOKS now so I’m going through those pretty fast.
Toodles, lovelies!
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i'm darkness and light and bubbles and faerie wings. i love purple and faeries and music and i'm pretty sure that WordPress hates me.
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