a champagne affair

happy birthday, kris! i threw kris a party last night to honour his turning the big 3-0 and to commemorate his champagne birthday, as he turns 30 years old on the 30th day of december.

we rented the condo's party room for the occasion. i tried to make an ice sculpture from a mold that one of my students gave me as a gift - it is a great idea in theory but ended up looking like the leaning tower of pisa because the water froze at an angle. i tried to fix it to no avail...the leaning tower of ice it was.

the party went into the wee hours of the morning and although we didn't have any complaints from neighbours, i'm sure they heard us. the night was a big success - thanks to everyone who came and to those who helped...

thanks to vanessa, who made an amazing cake! it was so delicious! she also made some mousse with raspberry and champagne in it, also yummy. vanessa, you are wonderful. chris and sebastian brought us snackies and most notably, a big toblerone bar...mmm, toblerone. thanks guys! thanks to albert h. for the 10 bags of potato chips - i definitely won't have to replenish our potato chip stock for a very long time! thanks to my brother who helped out a lot and brought us ice, orange juice and melissa. thanks to melissa for attempting to get to our house using the ttc which is virtually unpossible.

now today, which is kris' actual birthday day, is spent recuperating and cleaning. even the cat is too tired to create mischief. it's a good thing a champagne 30th birthday only happens once in a lifetime!

ode to smell-pie

this is my ode to smell-pie in celebration of the beginning of her 27th year (tee hee, that just makes said pie sound older):

here's to making sure the food on her plate doesn't intermingle.
here's to owning enough pairs of socks that can fill a suitcase.
here's to no longer living in regent park. =P
here's to being a one-woman wrecking crew when inebriated.
here's to having a crazy brother who likes to pretend he's pregnant.
here's to only consuming soups that you can see through.
here's to having 8 cavities at once. (?!)
here's to only using disposable cameras.
here's to eating expired whipped cream (oops, that's me).
here's to a love of shopping (that's definitely both of us).
here's to crying during commercials.
here's to being the tallest person on the subway.
here's to being mistaken for your mother's sister.
here's to catching wine corks in your tube top (and getting it on film).

here's to having a birthday that's 2 days after christmas.
here's to smell-pie! happy birthday, ol'sport!

merry christmas!

our tree:

this is definitely the biggest tree either of us have had...we wanted to take advantage of the taller ceilings in our condo, but forgot that a taller tree = wider tree. we also had a fiasco with the lights, so we ended up dressing and undressing, then re-dressing the tree.

family picture:

this is a far cry from ghetto christmas 2005, where we were living in one dumpy apartment with no furniture, no heating, an apathetic landlord, one fuse for the whole place and a partridge in a pear tree. it was a memorable festivus indeed.

merry christmas!

midge

as i mentioned before, our cat, scout likes to drink the christmas tree water. at first, she only drank out of the secondary reservoir. this secondary reservoir has a tube in it so when the main water compartment is empty, the tube sucks the water from the secondary reservoir into the main one. pretty high-tech stuff for only $19.99! as said in the original post, i covered the secondary reservoir with tin foil so she couldn't drink it anymore.

one day i caught her trying to stick her head in the main reservoir, right beside the trunk of the tree. i yelled at her and she ran away. later on, i noticed that she had a big gop of sap on her right ear and since sap is sticky, her ear was getting matted and gross.

a day or so later, the big gob of sap was gone, as was the fur it was attached to. scout now has a bald spot on her ear.

a photojournalistic account of this story:

before:


please note the consistency of fur on her right ear.


in between:


"no! don't do it!"


after:


"you just had to, didn't you? was it worth it?"

the "after" picture is a little difficult to see, but on her right ear, there is clearly a patch of fur missing. she looks all hard-core and butchy now and looks like she was in a cat fight (tee hee!)...so to punish her, i have started calling her "midge" which seems like a hard-core-er, butchy-er moniker. i don't think she quite understands her punishment so i shall continue it until she gets it, or at least until the fur grows back. it will grow back, right?

and the winnah...

my top three:

places to shop (clothing)
1. french connection (fcuk)
2. club monaco
3. banana republic

places to shop (furniture)
1. urban mode
2. pavilion
3. bombay company

places to shop (other)
1. chapters/indigo
2. shoppers drug mart
3. best buy

things in my closet
1. white coat from fcuk
2. billabong hoodie
3. brown trousers

wishlist clothing items
1. puffy sleeve shirt!
2. black pumps
3. black pashmina

stores that i have never visited in person but really like, thanks to the internet:
1. maxstudio
2. off the wall
3. dELiAs

magazines
1. real simple
2. style at home
3. glow

sports teams
1. edmonton oilers
2. toronto blue jays
3. erin's hockey team =)

people who look like other people, part i

i am the type of person that subconsciously draws parallels wherever possible. for example, when i read the book, the children of men by p.d. james, i was reminded of the davinci code by dan brown...most people can't see the comparison and look at me like i'm crazy whenever i bring it up. but the whole chase aspect, the setting, the characters (main and secondary) and even the religious content (the latter being more subtle), all combined to bring me to this comparison. i digress. so when i meet someone new, they usually remind me of someone. this is part i of my ongoing series, appropriately titled, "people who look like other people".

i present toronto raptor, andrea bargnani, followed by our good friend, sebastian.





now, it's difficult to find a picture that does this resemblance justice, and it's more striking when sebastian isn't wearing a hat, but you can get a good idea...mmm? what do you think?

mind you, i'm sure andrea barganani doesn't condone the sale of tobacco products, but that's a minor detail.

settling in...

i finally added my picture! (see? ----->) it took a while because i couldn't find one that was small enough. we used to have a photo resizer but now that we're using windows vista, our previous resizer apparently won't work.

i still can't figure out how to link to my previous posts...can anyone help?

also, in the archive sidebar, why does it show how many posts per month i write? i don't like that. someone tell me how to make that go away too. please?

thank you and good bye.

pass the damn ham!

welcome to my first post about my cat. her name is scout and like her name suggests, she is very adventurous, not unlike a boy scout. and if she could be personified, she would be the impish scout from to kill a mockingbird. this is how she got her name.

scout has a water dish. it's a very cute water dish, it's light green with white polka dots and a picture of a cat wearing a crown on the inside. as cute as it is, she rarely drinks out of it. at first i wondered if she had some kind of prejudice against her dish, but her food dish bears the same design and she has no problems eating out of it.

instead of using her water dish, when someone gets out of the shower, she makes an immediate beeline for the bathtub. she jumps in and sticks her snout in the spout (ha, rhyme!) then she'll lick the inside of the tap. yuck.

i've caught her drinking out of a bowl that's soaking in the kitchen sink. she would drink out of the toilet if we didn't always put the seat down.

now she has taken to drinking the christmas tree water. i'm told this can be poisonous to cats...so i've covered it with tin foil. death averted. still, why doesn't she drink out of her water dish?! today i found her water dish with her tennis ball in it. maybe i should rename her john mcenroe...it appears she has his temperament!

but she's much cuter than john and is sans headband. do they make headbands for cats, maybe that could be her halloween costume next year! because dressing my cat up as john mcenroe any old time of the year, that would be silly.

damaged goods

the joys of living in a new condo translates to constant repairs and construction. the newest chapter to this ongoing saga includes repairs to the floor of our kitchen - as the building has settled, some tiles have cracked - eight, to be precise. yesterday, the tile guy, lubof, came to fix it. a few of the tiles were half under the fridge, so lubof had to move it onto the laminate flooring just off of the tiles.

he replaced the cracked tiles and did an excellent job workmanship-wise. however, kris got home to find the refrigerator unplugged. this is clearly a problem because the items in our refrigerator are in there for a reason. anyway, lubof left a note saying he would return the next day to put the fridge back. so when he returned this morning with amber (the customer service person for the condo company), i pointed out that the fridge was left unplugged. he deduced that he would have moved the fridge at 5:00, and if my husband returned home at 8:00, then that's only three hours. i, however, see a loophold in lubof's theory. i know he would have had to move the fridge earlier than 5:00 because when i left at noon, there were still cracked tiles under the fridge. he would have had to move the fridge to remove the tiles before he could replace them. that means the fridge potentially could have been unplugged for 6 hours or more. i should be a CSI! except for my lack of expertise in forensics and science in general...meh, minor details.

then when he went to move the fridge back to its spot, he chipped and pulled off the transition between the tile and the laminate flooring. amber tried to be helpful by telling us that transition was already loose. i told her it may have been loose, but was it sticking straight in the air and chipped before? she then offered to reimburse us. then i remembered we had some extra transitions when we put the laminate in. i gave them the new piece, lubof took the damaged ones and he went to cut new pieces. he returned, but the transitions for whatever reason were not the same colour! argh!

amber also told us to tell her if there was "damage" to our food and she will try to reimburse us for that too. how can you tell if your food is damaged? you eat it and if you get sick then you know it's "damaged"?

i'm told that food in a fridge can stay good for 6 hours if the door is kept closed, but should we take that chance? i'm not a big fan of food poisoning and i'm pretty sure kris isn't either. this is why we got married, we have so much in common!

the invincibility cloak

we purchased snow tires for my car this weekend. good timing too - it snowed a bit today and the roads were slick. it took me almost an hour to get home because there was an accident that was blocking most of the highway. traffic was moving at a crawl for about 20 minutes. that was the first of two accidents that i witnessed firsthand and 680 news informed me that there were many more throughout the city.

as i was patiently waiting for traffic to move, i wished that i had used the bathroom before leaving work. i hate when that happens. to make matters worse, once i was close to home, i decided to get gas. i suppose i could have waited until tomorrow, but gas is always cheaper at night and i always forget in the morning. before tonight, i never realized how much the sound of gas pumping into your car can make you want to pee. i considered using the gas station's bathroom, but i wasn't that desperate. ew.

back to my original thought: snow tires are wonderful! they really do help you get a grip on slippery roads, although i was probably driving more prudently because i didn't want the tires to give me a false sense of security - a bogus invincibility cloak, if you will.

after a long commute, i returned home safe and sound, full bladder and all.

i noticed that in last night's episode of grey's anatomy, meredith has wavy hair again. we haven't seen wavy hair since season 2, when she was all dishevelled, broken and just plain dark and twisty because of derek. i wondered if the writers/producers did that on purpose; made her hair look disorderly in s2 so as to reflect how she's feeling on the inside. in all of s3, her hair has been flat-ironed, straight and shiny. as an advocate of flat irons, i attributed this to her caring again about her appearance since she's now happily in wuv with dr. mcdreamy (sigh). i guess i'm assuming that only people who care about their appearance flat iron their hair...

maybe i'm reading too much into this. especially because if my theory holds water, then why was her hair wavy last night? her and derek are fine. maybe because her family life is falling apart. who knows.

speaking of which, the new writer's blog is up - this one is a good one. i've found the last few have been subpar and not really shedding any light on anything for me. and i was getting tired of reading, "wow, i'm scared, i'm a new writer and this is my first blog and you people scare me"...so what if we scare you? just write, dammit! this blog was a good one so read it if you're a grey's fan!

another side note: one of my students forgot to give me her present at the end of last year (june)...they were cleaning their house, found my misplaced gift and gave it to me on wednesday. christmas break is 3 weeks away and they could have just waited to give it to me at christmas and save some money, BUT they didn't! how nice! it was a $50 gift card to chapters! which means i can almost buy s2 of grey's! yay! although i have to decide if i should go with s2 of grey's or s1 of veronica mars...decisions decisions. i will have to wait until after christmas to buy it anyway because i usually get more chapters gift cards from other students for christmas. three cheers for not having to spend my own money!