Snowflakes and Googols

Kev and I were sitting watching TV the other day as I studied the little snowflakes I'd bought.

Looking at them, all similar in shape, I wondered out loud about the rationale behind the common saying that no two snowflakes are alike. I understand why the presumption is made, but really who has gone around documenting this with certainty? No one.

Anyway, thinking back about our conversation I decided to look it up today on the net and came across this site. Take a look, the site and the reader's comments were quite amusing.

How can they be sure no two snowflakes are alike?

A Christmas-y kind of weekend

The weekend started on Friday evening with a visit from our real estate agents, they came by to check on us and brought with them a housewarming gift, after they left I decided to go grocery shopping, I think it was the most relaxing grocery trip ever, probably because it was done sans Kevin and I didn't feel like I was being constantly rushed to get it done and out of there. ;)

I walked through all the aisles that I wanted to [without sticking to "the list"!], I picked up fruit and managed to actually examine it properly before placing it in the basket - and last but not least I didn't have to hear the famous phrase "I'm hungry" at any point. ;)

Saturday morning came and went pretty quickly, and before we knew it, it was time to head to Ken and Liv's place for the annual Christmas gathering. As in prior years it was a total blast, I got a chance to see all the kids and to witness first hand all their cute and mischievous antics. I probably shouldn't have favourites, but I've got a soft spot for Tara, I love her personality and she's an extremely pleasant child.
I think for most of the evening Daniel wouldn't share any of his toys, even if he wasn't playing with them, if the kids ended up finding one sitting somewhere and started to play with it, he'd promptly snatched it away from them as soon as he noticed - so the parents were a bit relieved when the presents arrived from Santa and the kids each got a new toy. Tara got a mic and seemed happy to finally have something to play with other than the doll her parents brought, that was before Daniel saw her , came over... and with his truck still in his hand tried to take her mic from her - but true to form Tara ever so pleasantly, quickly tucked her mic behind her back with one hand... and with the other hand she took his truck out of his hands and promptly smacked him on the head with it - she then turned on her heels and went to sit and play with her mic. He wasn't hurt, he was just startled. I almost died laughing, especially since she didn't stop smiling through all of it. She's 18 months, he just turned 2. Bet he wasn't expecting that kind of retaliation though, and from a girl none-the-less. :)

On Sunday, I spent the better part of the morning making breakfast, tidying the kitchen and even did a bit of cleanup in the yard, it was definitely a pleasant day to be outdoors. Then in the early afternoon Kev and I worked on the indoor christmas decorations while I waited for my parents to show up [we had a Costco trip planned] and Kev waited on Bruce for help with the outdoors lights. By the time I got back home in the early evening, the guys had finished stringing the outdoor christmas lights and had also managed to put up the chandelier in the dining room... my mom, Stefan and I worked on the tree while Bruce, Kev and my dad finished placing the crystal pieces on the chandelier - it was a nice evening, we even had the fire going while we worked on the decorations, my parents left shortly before 9pm and the guys then went to look at "Family Guy" while I finished off the tree. Poor Bruce, it was well after 9:30pm before he finally got out of there... not to mention he's probably all Christmased-out by this point thanks to me so Bruce if you're reading this, thanks a million. :)

Now I've got just 28 more sleeps, or something like that. :)

Holy Busy!

See? I knew there was a reason we had to have the housewarming on the 4th! I knew that work would wind up being totally insane and that I'd have no other available weekend in November to do it. Looking back, it seems the last day of my blog was the very next day after the HW... and then total silence.

Rest easy, I'm still alive... though just barely.

I think I - [I'd say "we" but Kev was at work for most of the day] - spent most of the 5th cleaning up after the party, having a party on two levels truly meant double the work but my legs needed the work out that the basement stairs provided, plus the fun we had the night before was really worth all the work anyway. :)

The following weekend was spent at work. From around 7:30am to 9pm each night, that included Remembrance Day [a bank holiday]... these incredibly long hours followed me into the new week, which led to a totally exhausting lil' ole me by the time the next Friday rolled around. Somewhere within that whirlwind of a week, I think it was Monday night, I went over to spend some time with Gran - I went straight from work and Kevin met me there - she was pretty happy to see us. Her birthday was the following day - she's now 70 years young. Every day that goes by I am thankful for her presence in my life, she's an awesome granny. Yeah, I know, enough with the mushiness. :)

Thankfully I didn't have to work this past weekend. I managed to sleep in [well by my standards anyway] a bit this weekend... I think I got up around 9am on Saturday and started working on having the house back to a normal state again. You wouldn't believe how much laundry can pile up over the course of two weeks! Kev worked on fixing the vacuum and succeeded, so that meant we can use the piece of crap for a while longer before having to replace it. Between doing laundry and tidying up the place, I managed to pull out the totes with Christmas decor looking for blue and silver decor to loan to my mom. This led to me measuring out and stringing up a few pieces of pine. Turns out that the piece of garland [lighted none the less] that I grabbed for a measley $10 at the garage sale will actually swag the length of the staircase so that put a smile on my face, what a steal that was! The plan is to set up the tree this weekend and finish decorating it, and Stef's coming over to help - I think it might be genetic but our entire family loves this sort of stuff, ever since I was little we'd make an entire day out of it so it'll be nice to work on the tree with Stef in tow.

On Saturday night we went over to Ruth & Dave's place for dinner and a few rounds of pool, based on my complete lack of sleep the previous two weeks I was super tired at an early hour but I still managed to sink a few balls. I made yet another self discovery that night, I think I had underated the extent of my cat allergy - see I had never really spent more than a couple hours or so around cats before so while I would notice my eyes would get red and itchy it tended to clear after an hour or so - however, I didn't get off so lucky on Saturday. I came home with red, itchy eyes, a rash on the left cheek, itchy throat and had a bit of difficulty breathing but alas, it all passed and I've been fine since.

Sunday came and went pretty quickly. I did some grocery shopping, and we even got a bit of our Christmas shopping out of the way, then we made a trip to Home Depot. We'd gotten a few gift cards at our housewarming and decided to pool it together and pick up a bar fridge. I bought a glue gun as well, I'd been meaning to grab one for a while for my crafts but never got around to it, it was $7 so I snapped it up. After the day we'd had I was pretty thankful my parents had invited us over for dinner, we ended up relaxing at their place for the rest of the evening before heading home to crash.

The plan for the rest of this week is to leave work at a normal time, finish up the scrapbook I made for Stef's 13th birthday, ensure I'm home for when the real estate agent drops by on Friday, buy what I need to make the homemade nachos this weekend *and* ensure I have an idea of how to make it work, then it's off to Ken and Liv's for the annual P-Christmas gathering on Saturday.

Sunday is "tree" day with Stef and Kev, Rene is also coming by and so are my folks. So that's my update, aren't you glad I didn't blog before? :)

What a party!

We had our housewarming on Saturday, literally, I think the thermostat showed us sitting at 25 degrees for a while and I eventually cracked a window after it got too warm indoors!

What a party though, I think the last nine of our guests left around 2am after a good hour or two of charades! :D

Thanks to everyone who came out, I had a total blast, thanks for all the laughs.