November 4th, please mark your calendars :)

I've got to set some time aside to work on the invitations, but I think we may have narrowed down a date for our housewarming.

Wish me luck that I don't have to work that weekend! :)

Yippee! Should be a good time, plus we won't have to turn on the heat that day. ;)

Resurfacing

These past two weeks have been so crammed full of stuff [mostly work] that I feel I've been living under a rock.

A brief synopsis:

- My group at work which is already at full capacity with 13 members, is now operating with only 9, 2 of which are brand new... it's been a fun two weeks. I shouldn't complain too much though, today they took us to The Keg to thank us for all of our hard work. I ordered the Filet Mignon. I figured I deserved it. :)

- Fanyi's wedding is on Friday, which means Kev & I are both taking the afternoon off work to attend, from all indications it looks to be one hell of a party. I still haven't got her a wedding gift as yet, I'm thinking something from Canadian Tire's camping dept, but we'll see.

- Biscuits is doing well, some days he ignores us, others he's craving attention. He's still very messy but I think I've gotten used to it.

- I went on my first serious garage sale expedition on Saturday with Aaron and Kev. And by serious I mean I got there early. I scored a gift wrapping organization kit that I'd been wanting, two very rustic looking candles and a box of magnetic poetry for our fridge. No luck in the plant pots or garden tools dept but there's always next Saturday. :)

- Went on a Home Depot expedition on Sunday, and saved over $60 in the process using the new homeowner coupon I got in the mail. :)

- Dropped by Ruth and Dave's new place on Sunday after hitting Home Depot, they landed a lovely little nest egg and I think they're going to have many lovely moments and memories there. :)

- Went to visit Gran on Sunday after we left Ruth and Dave's place, she'd ask for our help hanging her bathroom curtain and a few ornaments that she wanted for the walls, we hung out for a bit and then brought her over to my folks for dinner, altogether a pleasant evening, as it usually is when I hang out with Gran. :)

- Helped Stefan with the write up for his birthday invitations, as I expected he loved the fact that they were saxaphone shaped - I still can't believe, however, that he turns 13 in a few weeks. *wistful sigh*

- We're having a Thanksgiving service for our new place on Saturday of this week, this only got decided yesterday, thankfully my uncle is a pastor [and is somewhat accomodating] so it looks like I might actually be able to pull it off even with short/late notice.
Ideally I wanted to do it on Thanksgiving weekend itself but with work being the way it is right now, I'm having a hard time trying to plan anything ahead of a few days. We've decided to keep it very intimate with family only attending, the housewarming will be sometime in November [very likely the 4th] and that will be for all of our friends and extended family - the 4th is still tentative, I have to see what my work schedule shapes up to be closer to the date.

- As a continuation from the above point, I've got to start thinking about what to serve for dinner after the TG service. Right now I'm drawing a blank. :)

That's about it from the last week or two. Gonna go check and respond to some emails now, hopefully things will settle down at work soon and I can get back to my usual routine.

A YouTube morning

There's something incredibly sexy about a guy just sitting there strumming his guitar, no band, no other instruments - just him, throw in the lyrics for "your body is a wonderland" and John Mayer and you've definitely got my attention. Kid's got talent, even if he does make funny faces while singing.

John Mayer

YouTube clips that made me smile:

Cover 1
Cover 2

The weekend came and went by with a swoosh!

On Saturday it was pretty much GO, GO, GO - I woke up early, as is almost always the case - and attempted to make as little noise as possible allowing Kev to sleep in. Around 10:00am I decided to give George a call, Liv had mentioned that he would be back from vacation around the first week of September and that would be a good time to contact him about the office chairs. I was in luck, not only did he answer the phone but he said he'd be at the warehouse today up to 12noon and then he'd be gone for another month or so! As soon as I hung up I ran upstairs to shake Kev awake, and an hour later we were on the road heading out to get the chairs.
George, not only had decent office chairs that we got for free, but he also had, believe it or not, matching chairs in a colour that goes well with the carpets we have on our floors currently! [note: This is not necessarily a good thing but it does the trick for now]. I called dad and he came over with the van to help us get them home. Having skipped breakfast we ended up having lunch at my parents, together with Mr. Chan, who Kev and I hadn't seen since December 2001 so that was kinda neat - though we skipped out early as we needed to make a pit stop at both Home Depot and Costco [it's never really a pit stop when one goes to Costco but we came pretty close this time]. Kev then dropped me off at Gran's place to meet up with my parents and headed home to work on the car.

Shopping with Gran and my folks was fun, we got her groceries and then brought her over to Dollarama as she wanted to get a few items there, it took a while but we got it all done - I ended up returning home around 6:00pm, totally pooped. Kev had been washing the car while I was away so he was pretty tired too, and after the non stop GO, GO, GO that we'd had that day we decided to shower and just relax for the rest of the night. Unfortunately, we missed Matt's party in the process, but word on the street is that everyone had a blast regardless, and I sent him an email on his birthday with our apologies.

Sunday came and we headed out for Dim-Sum at the-place-formerly-known-as-Furama-House, they're under new management and I'm pretty sure Ken mentioned the new name at some point, I just can't remember it right now. It was a good time as always and Wotjek and Meghan both came out for the first time. We stuffed ourselves silly and then headed over to Ken & Liv's to play poker, as is usually the norm, for the rest of the day. Later in the evening Liv made a fantastic lasagna [from scratch] and after three games of $5 buy-ins each so $30 in total between us, we left with $32.50 - so up about $2.50 overall. Not bad for quite a few hours of fun. :)
Liv's mom was kind enough to bring me two oregano plants from her garden that day as well, for me to transplant, I've now got fresh basil and fresh oregano - and so I feel like quite the cook when I pluck the fresh pieces off the plants. Too cool :)

Monday through to today has been a bit interesting at home, in a nutshell Kev managed to break the shower in our master bath [though if you ask him he'll tell you that the tile was already coming out and he just helped it along] so we've been sharing the guest bathroom, which makes for an interesting morning when we're both getting ready and leaving for work at the same time, right now we're doing the one-person-wakes-15-min-earlier thing but essentially that just means we're both up earlier than we'd like. In the grand scheme of things though, this is trivial compared to the fact that we are going to be redoing our bathroom a lot earlier than we would have liked, so I'll stop complaining about the "little" things. :)

So yeah, bathroom reno, well more specifically, shower reno. Based on what our inspector said, it looks like we'll be taking out the existing tiles, replacing the waterproof dry wall with cement board and checking for any damage to the structural wood before retiling. We should ideally start on this as soon as time permits as while it may very well be a winter project, we'd still need to work outside to prep the materials etc. My biggest worry at this point is dealing with the possible rotting of structural wood, the drywall will be easy to rip out and replace but we need to ensure that we find and remove damaged pieces of wood/plastic etc. Did I mention that we're going to be attempting this by ourselves? Yeah, inspector guy confirmed our thoughts, he said we should be able to pull it off and save ourselves a few thousands in the process so that's the plan.

Looks like we're going to need to buy a Shop Vac, oh and a fire extinguisher, but that's a whole other post all by itself. ;)

Worthy of cute overload

Here are some pics I took of the kids this weekend.

That's Paige in the green shirt, Tanya's little girl and the boy in red is Talon, Meighen's little boy. That's Talon's funny face, just so as you know, he's hilarious.

Regretfully, I didn’t get any pics with Jakob being cute [he was in the basement playing video games], next time though!

*sigh* - they grow up so fast.

As it turns out, I’m stressing out my Hibiscus! :(

Not sure how many of you know this but I think I might be addicted to www.craigslist.com specifically http://toronto.craigslist.org/sss/ [blogger's links aren't working tonight so please ensure you type the spelling of the “craigslist” correctly in the url, because you do NOT want to end up at www.craiglist.com especially if you’re surfing from work ;) ] – anyway, like I was saying I’m addicted to the buy and sell website, so a few weeks back I was surfing and came across a really great deal on a Hibiscus plant, someone was moving and couldn’t take it with them. Now I grew up having this plant in the backyard of our home in Guyana so I thought I’d rescue it and give it a new home here with us, for nostalgia sake at the very least.

Fast forward to today, we’ve now had it for about two weeks, it’s budding and the flowers are gorgeous, but over the past two days we've noticed that some of the leaves were yellowing, so Kev decided to look into it tonight for me.

Turns out that I’ve been stressing out the plant because I’ve been moving it around trying to give it as much sunshine as I can... you’re apparently not supposed to twist them any more than a 1/8 turn per week – and only if necessary!

I feel like such a dope! In Guyana it grew outside and thrived well, and of course no one ever twisted it because it got all the sunshine and warmth it needed to survive.

Ah well, now that I know better I’m done moving it. I hope I didn’t upset it too much, Tanya mentioned to me when she was down that she managed to kill hers in the space of two days!

Wish me luck that all goes well because I tend to get really attached to my plants. :(

If anyone cares, presently has or is planning on buying a hibiscus plant, here’s the link I found: http://hibiscus-sinensis.com/hibiscus/care.html

Let me root, root, root for the home team!

I'd hoped but didn't think it was going to happen, the Toronto BlueJays won last night. :)

After a shaky start where he walked a player or two, Ted Lilly came through for the team as the Blue Jays went on to win the game. No balls came our way but Kev had his glove just in case, all in all not a bad night for a free pair of tickets. :)

Various tidbits from my world

- I'm back at work today, back at the daily grind. Roop is on vacation this week and so Kev drove us in, we got to his building a bit earlier than usual so I decided to skip across the road to check out the P.A.T.H connection from the CBC building to FCP - I'd been meaning to do this before the cold weather hits so that I have a general idea of the route to take. As it turns out, there's currently no P.A.T.H access to FCP as construction of the RBC Centre and the Ritz-Carlton gets underway, which means I am going to be SOL come this winter.

- Kev & I are going to a Jays game today after work. While at the dealership yesterday, they offered us free tickets, should be a fun afternoon out, here's hoping the game is somewhat entertaining at the very least - otherwise I suspect I'm going to start heckling just to keep myself entertained. ;)

- Gran's official move to Scarborough is on Thursday, we're are going to swing by after tennis to help her put her bed together, should be fun, I think they're working on her phone so hopefully she'll also have it by then - I'm not too keen on her being there by herself with no telephone access. :)

- Thinking about accepting and heading over to Leah & Matt's place this Saturday to see everyone and then to Ken & Liv's on Sunday for Dim Sum and poker. Those plans are still up in the air though as Kev might have to work this weekend so we haven't really confirmed with anyone one way or another.

- We met a few more of our neighbours, they all seemed like nice folks, older than us and very friendly. The ones directly opposite are moving and had placed a very nice solid pine table on their front lawn [among other stuff], after talking to them we ended up taking it. I think we can make a very nice home-made poker table out of it. I also rescued a plant, two mirrors and some photo boxes from being sent to the dump. They had some other nice stuff but I didn't want to take anything we wouldn't wind up using or have a place for, ideally I want to keep our place relatively clutter free - even if it means a sulky Kevin ;)

- Ruth & Dave got the keys to their place last Thursday so they're currently bouncing off the walls with excitement between that and their pending Caribbean cruise this weekend, pretty stoked for those two, I haven't been over to see the place as yet, but that's only because of the week I had preparing to host and then finally hosting our out of town guests.

That’s about it on my end, and other than me being very tired today, not a whole lot is going on. I had to drag myself out of bed this morning at 6am – my body is still in vacation mode I think. :)

Happy Anniversary!!

Kev & I celebrated our second wedding anniversary yesterday, the 5th [we'd extended our vacation by a day so we could have the day off together] - I think the celebrations officially started on Monday night though as my parents took us out for dinner at the Mongolian Grill to celebrate both our anniversary and their pending acceptance of Canadian citizenship.

Then yesterday, on our anniversary, we spent the morning at the Scarborough Civic Centre attending the citizenship ceremony for my parents and brothers, this also gave both of us a chance to reaffirm our oath of citizenship - which was kind of cool. We grabbed a bite to eat after and then went to test drive a few vehicles that we're considering for purchase next year... we didn't manage to pin it down to any one car but at least we've narrowed our options a bit... we also got a chance to swing by the Scarborough Transfer station to grab new green and recycle bins before heading back home to spend the rest of the evening relaxing, eating ice-cream and watching CSI. We also got a few phone calls from some family members that remembered, some as far as the Turks and Caicos, to top off the night, so that was kinda neat.

Celebrating two years of marriage was a great feeling though, even after two years I still feel like the luckiest girl alive so that's a good sign, right? :)

What a week!

What an incredible week I’ve had.

There was so much going on, first of all it took us an entire week of non-stop "GO" to get our new place looking and feeling like a home before Kev’s family came to visit, but all the hard work paid off.

Stefan came over on Monday and spent a few days helping me unpack and get organized, then Gran came on Tuesday night and even though I tried to have her just relax and enjoy her visit she was scurrying around sewing curtains and helping me get them up, cooking [which truthfully was a god send since Kev and I barely had time to stop and eat - much less cook!], sweeping, giving advice on what to do with some of the stuff I unpacked, she really helped an awful lot and I got to spend some quality time with her as we got the house together – once again I was awed by how much of a wonderful grandmother she is to me.

Meighen, Matt and Talon arrived on Friday night – and as it turns out I am going to be an aunt again!! Yippee!

Tanya, Bryan, Jakob, Paige and Kev’s mom arrived on Saturday around noon, we had originally planned on going to the zoo but we got rained out… so instead we spent the day visiting, going through a box of old photos that Kev had managed to save and getting all caught up on what’s going on with everyone. After dinner, Tanya and her mom helped me scrub the white porcelain kitchen sink that came with the house until it sparkled like new even though Kev & I insisted that we’d probably replace the darn thing.

The kids were adorable as always and they are both growing up so fast, both Talon and Paige are talking now so it was so cute to hear them put together sentences in their baby voices. Paige is as pretty as ever, I think she’s going to be a serious heart breaker when she’s older. :)

Saturday night came and it was a riot - after the kids went to bed on the upper level the adults moved two floors down into the basement and that’s where the party started, we played poker, drank, talked, laughed and got really loud until the wee hours of the morning, I called it a night at 4am but some of the others stayed up until much later, I think Bryan and Matt went to bed at 6am.

On Sunday we made everyone breakfast and they headed out around noon or so. It was great having everyone down but it sure made for an exhausting weekend... I think I’m going back to bed now. :)