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I decided a few weeks ago that I was wasting away too much time on the internets and I should try to do something more productive. I happen to work right across the street from a Michaels so it wasn’t hard to get a bunch of craft supplies and get started. Here are my current works in progress.

OK well this one is pretty much done, but I still need to iron and figure out what to do with it. Frame? Cardboard? Decorative pillow? (probably not the last idea).

My sisters-in-law always post lots of cute cross stitches on Instagram and they inspired me to try it. I do remember doing cross stitch at some point when I was like… 7, but I don’t think I even finished the kit that my mom gave me at the time. Cross stitch designs are pretty awesome these days… not so many cats in baskets, haha. Now I have to figure out what design to do next.

Granny stripe afghan. My mom taught me to crochet when I was little, I think I made about 3 squares and then quit. I guess I have more perseverance these days because I haven’t lost interest at all yet. This thing is massive… about 7 feet across!! King size! It’s exciting having it become more blanket-like every day. But each row takes me 30-40 minutes, so I still have a looooooong way to go.

I’ve been stopping at Michaels after every shift at work to buy another ball of yarn with a 40% off coupon. I hope I get some shifts next week because I’ve caught up and need more colours at the moment.

Australia Ticket To Ride. This project started off as just Sharpies on poster board, but then I accidentally drew a super ugmo points thingy on the side and had to paint over it to forever rid the world of its hideousness. Then when we tested it out ~some people~ couldn’t tell the difference between the yellow and green, and the orange and red, so ~apparently~ I have to redo that. And then if I’m redoing the tracks I might as well make the states look better (who makes the land part of a map blue). So basically I have to paint over the whole thing. But the water part looks pretty cool painted, so I’m excited about the whole thing. I just have to stop being so lazy and get my paints out some day.

Until next time… can someone wash my paintbrushes for me?

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Oh my. It’s been a while since I last blogged about regular life stuff. I’ve got TONS of stuff to talk about!! The next bunch of posts might get a little random in here.

Way back in December Lesley came over for another dinner and games night. Rosemarie was still living with us at that point so we got to test out my homemade Ticket To Ride Australia with FOUR PLAYERS. It worked! But Scott and Lesley kept mixing up the yellow and green so apparently I need to do some touch-ups on the board. ;) We still need to make nice tickets as well. I’ll post the whole thing when I’m done (probably in about 8 years at the rate I’m going).


We made stuffed crust pizzas for dinner. Scott made the dough, then we stuffed the crusts with cheese strings and/or hot dogs (!!). If you make these, be sure to pinch the dough tightly shut around your stuffings so they don’t leak out. I had chopped up tons of other toppings so we could each make our own custom pizzas. Plus lots of mozzarella of course.

The pizzas came out deformed, but delicious. DIY stuffed crust works, although I would probably just stick with the cheese strings in the future, the hot dog was wayyyyyyyyyyyy too salty (who woulda guessed).

This was also the night that I learned how to make margaritas at home. My latest favourite drink EVER. On the rocks, with fresh limes. There is an Asian grocery store down the street that often sells $1 bags of slightly old limes, perfect for squeezing! Anyway due to several PITCHERS of margaritas, no other pictures were taken this evening, haha.

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I LOVE DAYS OFF!

Not that I’ve done much with my time. Mostly all I’ve been doing is watching tons of Bob’s Burgers and Suits and making and eating food, haha.

We haven’t done Christmas yet. We’ve made up our own arbitrary holiday and it happens on January 1st. This means we could wait for boxing day sales and get MOAR PRESENTS for less $$. The day is also going to involve the polar bear swim, an egg hunt, a big meal (not sure what yet), stockings…. basically just all the fun parts of other holidays.

Did I ever write about how our TV broke and was deemed unfixable by the repair shop? Well that happened. We went to Costco on Boxing Day morning to replace it. I was expecting it to be a madhouse, but actually it was totally quiet. I have never seen Costco so empty, it was lovely. We ended up getting a cheap 32″ TV. It’s nice being able to watch TV during daylight hours again.

I don’t work again until 2014. I have two and a half weeks solid of training in January but then I’m not on the schedule after that. I’m sure I’ll pick up some shifts here and there but I think I’m not going to be very busy for a while. Perhaps I’ll go back to nights at the data centre? We’ll see we’ll see.

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THURSDAY:

  • Hiked up Diamond Head crater at the hottest part of the day.
  • Made Rosemarie demonstrate pull ups.
  • Ate shaved ice and got brain freeze.
  • Took a taxi to Kailua because we had too much stuff to take on the city bus.
  • Went swimming at Kailua Beach.
  • Walked around Kailua trying to find something that was open for dinner on Thanksgiving Day.
  • Played board games.

FRIDAY:

  • Took the bus to Honolulu for Black Friday shopping. We got running shoes, a hat, SD card, and jeans and stuff. It wasn’t actually that crazy in the mall. Seemed like we actually missed most of the sales because we were unwilling to go shopping at midnight.
  • Picked up our rental car.
  • Played more board games.

SATURDAY:

  • Drove around the island.
  • Watched the surf competition.
  • Ate raw tuna.
  • Ate garlic shrimp.
  • Ate shaved ice.
  • Got pummelled by waves at Waimea Bay.
  • Stopped at the Pali Highway LOOKOUT!

SUNDAY:

  • It rained all day so we didn’t do much.
  • Played more board games.
  • Drove to Kaneohe for lunch and a movie (Catching Fire).
  • Played even more board games.
  • Watched lots of the food channel.

MONDAY:

TUESDAY:

  • Hiked up Makapu’u Point.
  • Went swimming.
  • Ate fish tacos.
  • Then Scott dropped us and all the bags off at the airport. While he was driving back to Kailua to return the car and busing back to the airport, we made ourselves a games table out of suitcases and played games in the airport.
  • We almost missed dinner because everything was closing.
  • Eventually we flew back to Vancouver.

Super fun trip!! Even though the weather wasn’t awesome I still had a great time. We have to do this again!!

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I haven’t blogged about anything non-food in almost a month!! OOPS!! So now I will attempt to catch up in one giant update post.

We bought a car!! It’s a 2005 Subaru Impreza wagon. It has a fair number of km on it but it’s in very good condition. We are very happy with it so far! PS insurance is so expensive here!!!!! It doesn’t help that I’ve only had my BC license for three years so I don’t get a big discount. :( The car will make getting to early morning hospital shifts (if/when I ever get a job) and Whistler a lot easier though.

Also Brett (Scott’s bro) is coming to visit in less than a week! It sounds like his visit is going to be spent watching as many different types of North American sports as possible. It will be great to see him here, and I know Scott is really looking forward to it.

Our TV is broken. It still has a red light on the front but instead of turning on it just makes clicking noises. Anyone know anything about this or what’s the best way to get it fixed? It’s a Samsung and had a two year warranty but it has been 25 months. GROAN.

I passed my exam (not sure if I already wrote about that already), and graduated. Still no job though.

The graduation was small and somewhat annoying (we had to go four hours early to rehearse standing up and sitting down while being sniped at by a lady we didn’t know) but it was very nice to see our class again. Only one more person has been hired since the end of the summer, bringing the grand total to 3 out of 14. Stuff is definitely happening right now though… lots of internal staff rearrangement… which hopefully opens up a couple more casual jobs for us. Cross your fingers for me please!

I am grateful for being able to go straight back into my old typing job. At least I am working full time, making (some) money and keeping busy. A lot of my classmates are also looking for side jobs and struggling with that a bit so I am relieved it was simple for me to find something. I asked my boss about continuing to work there in conjunction with working at a hospital (theoretically) and he said he needs me for a fixed schedule, which doesn’t really work as I need to basically be on call for the hospital and that is my priority. BUT, he also said I could work in the evenings, so I will most likely do that a few days a week.

We went to my friend Tanie’s house a couple weeks ago to play Ascension (with 80 million expansions). I didn’t do very well but it was still fun. Scott downloaded the game onto his iPad (surprisingly it is free), and since then has played approximately 90,000 games (±500). That probably means that next time I will do REALLY bad.


Lesley came over after graduation for a games marathon. She moved to Cranbrook for a nuc med job so we don’t see her often any more. It was good to hang out, I missed her. We played multiple games each of Settlers, Carcassonne and Wasabi and drank multiple drinks, hehe. Then we had extreme couponing Church’s Chicken (coupons on coupons on coupons) for dinner. Thanks Lesley for treating us!

A Dutch friend I met on Fraser Island in Australia came to visit Canada and stayed with us for one night. I already mentioned this in my daily dinners post but her and her bf rented a car and drove from Vancouver to Alaska to Whitehorse to Banff and back to Vancouver. Such a cool trip, I would love to do that some day!! They saw lots of cool animals and beautiful landscapes. We went out for sushi dinner. Femke’s first time eating sushi and we took her to the Eatery?! Banana sushi was the hit of the evening. If she ever has regular sushi she’s going to think it’s so boring.

We went to the UBC apple festival for the fourth year in a row. It’s a tradition! We went with Gillian and Bryan again (this could have also gone under the Friends category!!) and enjoyed the much less damp weather from last year. I was worried my face would get all itchy from eating so many apples but surprisingly it didn’t. Scott and I bought a bag of apples each but mine haven’t been very good. I do enjoy a soft apple but my Fiesta apples are all bruised and marked and a little gross inside. Disappointing considering how much they cost. We also bought a sampler pack of three types of balsamic reductions, and a piece of apple pie (for Scott).

Vancouver has had CRAZY fog for the past few weeks. Our lovely view of the mountains turns in to total greyness for 20 hours of the day. It looks kinda cool sometimes, but is also very very damp. This blog post has a whole bunch of really cool Vancouver fog photos.

The skeleton season is starting and I am SO IKSIDID!!! I’m going up to Whistler today to watch the Canadian selection races (where they decide which level of competition circuit each athlete will get to do this season–the first step for them to qualify for the Olympics). I’m excited because all levels of skeleton people will be there and I already follow A LOT of them on Twitter… and now I’ll get to see them all in real life! Some other countries have started doing their selection races too and it’s really interesting (to me) to see how they all progressed over very intense pre-Olympic summer training. I could ramble on much longer about this but I don’t think anyone else is as big of a skeleton nerd as me, haha.

As for myself, I will be going up in a couple weeks for my first skeleton school of the season. I am excited, and scared. Can’t wait to fly down that track though, and I’m super super curious to see how much my weight lifting and core work has paid off.

I have been doing a lot of different fitness stuff lately! Last week I did two weights sessions and two cardio sessions (I never want to do cardio, so this was an accomplishment), and this week I did one weights, one cardio, and two bikram yoga sessions.

My 10 class yoga groupon is about to expire so I finally went to redeem it. I suck at it so far, but that is to be expected as I have never done yoga at all before. Today was a bit easier than Thursday and I imagine my next class will be even better. PS holy moly, sweat was pouring off me like an actual rain shower. DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP. I like how nice and loose and relaxed I feel after the class.

We’ve been really busy lately, and my awkward 10am-6pm work shift has made it pretty hard to squeeze in exercise, but I am getting better at finding time. It astounds me how much my attitude has changed in the last 6 months, and that I actually want to make exercising a priority. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME??!!

Since my last book post on October 3rd, I finished (via audiobook):

  • Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, her first book, a thriller like her others
  • How to Approach and Flirt With Women by Carlos Xuma, because why not, an insight into what dudes think about
  • Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, a historical novel about two cousins, and comics
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, the world’s longest book, which I found pretty tedious
  • Looking for Alaska by John Green, a YA novel to revive me after Infinite Jest. Short and sweet.

And I started Paper Towns, also by John Green. He really loves the manic pixie dream girl type, doesn’t he. :/

That list looks extremely short to me for nearly a whole month, but Infinite Jest took TWO STRAIGHT WEEKS of 7.5 hour shifts to finish. Man that is a long book!! I didn’t even really like it that much, but by the time I realized it was boring I was already about 1/4 of the way through and then I just wanted to finish it for the sake of finishing it. There were some interesting parts, I liked the story lines of the half way house people, and the kids at tennis school, but a lot of the rest was zzzzz.

DID YOU KNOW, that if you don’t have a Costco membership you can just get someone to buy you a giftcard (with your money), and then you just show that at the front entrance and they let you in! And then if you buy more than your giftcard you can just pay the rest in cash. Loophole!! We did this and got veggie burgers and base layer and jalapeno poppers and soap and all sorts of other junk. But they didn’t have any samples at all and I was sad.

OK I’m out!