Could you do this?

Every now and again I stumble upon something that is really cool. Like this guy, Mr. Crayola… amazing, this guy does such spectacular work with the medium of crayon!

So, could you do this?

Or this? (it’s a bit boring the first 30 seconds, it gets better…)

Check out his site.. http://www.themastercrayonartist.biz

Anyways - just for fun the other day, I had a somewhat cooperative cat model and decided to give it a try myself.
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Sorry it’s not brighter and clearer, the light in here isn’t good tonight and the reflection from the flash was rather distracting.

It actually was much easier than I thought it would be and was surprised at how good it turned out. It’s not as great as Mr. Crayola but - heck! It’s definitely something I would like to explore a bit more!

The Dress :D

Okay, I am weak… I’ve caved. Here are some pics… but - to sort of “hide” them a bit, ya gotta click on the “more”, okay? Read more…

Blood Diamonds!

Believe it or not (and I still don’t)… a miracle happened today. While shopping I had to make a quick trip to the little girl’s room (OMG, I can’t believe I actually wrote it that way, I always think people are weird when they say that — however, it just sounds much more diplomatic than saying, While I was at the crapper…)…. Martin stayed out (obviously). I joked, “Hey! You can go into there (pointing to jewelry store) to buy my wedding ring when I’m gone!”

See? He’s thus far been afraid to move forward in that avenue though we’re pretty strong as a couple. But - we had a really great conversation last night and did a bit of bonding in that we are sure we want to spend the rest of our lives together.

So, imagine my surprise when I came out and he’s lookin’ at them! And no blood had to be shed to get him into there! (no blood diamonds for us!) After almost half an hour of looking, we had a good idea of what we liked and didn’t like. I don’t like glam. I like simplicity. He likes big rings and in gold colour because of his skin complexion and the size of his fingers. I like white gold.   We managed to look at two rings we both like… I like them but am not in love with them. But - I wouldn’t mind them. We got some prices and since my very amazing, childhood friend Shelly has been so kind enough to lend me her wedding dress, we shouldn’t feel bad about buying rings that are nice. Both of these rings came up to about $1000 which includes an insurance and a lifetime of resizing… anything that damaged the rings, or wore them through or anything, it would be covered. Not bad, eh? And I don’t think (realistically) spending $1000 on a set of rings is super extravagent. Honestly, these days I don’t think you could get anything much cheaper than that!

We aren’t getting married until August, 2009 so no big rush to get the rings yet!

Now - the wedding dress! I forgot to tell you that Shelly and I got together and she is lending me her dress. I am much bigger than she is but by miracle of miracles, it fit! We have decided to dub the dress, the Sisterhood of the Travelling Wedding Dress because it seemed to fit each of us perfectly despite having a totally different body shape.  I took some pics of it and it actually looks very beautiful. I don’t want to post the pics yet ’cause - I want the day to be truly special and part of that is the pics that we will post of it… if you want to see it, leave a message and I’ll send ‘em to you by email.

It’s so nice to talk to Martin about it and to see him excited and looking forward to it… it makes me feel really good :)

The Lost Generation

This is probably the neatest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Check it out!

Riding the wave!

Well - we’ve got four fishies left. Not sure exactly how we manage to kill ‘em all but - anyways, onto something more positive!

Our fishes love riding this little current we have, near where the filter is. My old fishtanks never did this but for some reason, this one gives a nice little current. And they ride it any time! But - when you add food from the current and the little fishies see the chunks of food go flying, they just go nutso.

Just thought I’d post a small video in lieu of a real entry :)

The view from here!

This past week we had to go to Ottawa and ended up staying at the Novotel (which I can’t say enough how it rocks because it let us bring Uma with us AND it was professionally decorated in a very nice, hip style)… which of course, brings me to the ideas I got there for the bathroom!

First off, the room had a very European feel to it and I loved it! But the part I liked the most was the bathroom. They (Novotel) seriously has a nice, sleek modern look with a pretty affordable pricetag with it. I’ve paid almost double before, for half the quality so it’s a big thumbs up for me! I just looked up the design of the hotel and apparantely novotel is going for the “Modern, natural looking” look, so — I definitely think they hit that. I also LOVED the duvet they have — so you don’t have skanky covers there full of germs… they just have the duvet cover which is cleaned and replaced each time. LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT. When I was in Italy my friend Julia had a duvet and I swear I’ve had my best sleeps with a duvet. Next time I go there, I’ll be picking up one…

Anyways - here we go!

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Okay! Above is the entire shot of the bathroom. It has black granite counters, nice wood floors (more on that in a bit) with weird grout things, glass tile and this groovy half-moon shower curtain thing but you can’t see it… but - it doesn’t go straight, it is sort of curved… and, these neat doors which I would LOVE to find them somewhere but - if we can’t, I am sure there is a way we could make them ourselves if we tried hard….

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The doors closed and light behind it makes for a nice soft, glowing effect. I’d just be a bit worried with people pinching their fingers but I think the same kind of door could be made with a single panel door instead of the bi-doors which you see here… gives you enough privacy I think!

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The floors, I really didn’t know what to think about these at first… but then they grew on me and now? I love ‘em! I have never seen a floor like this here in Canada before but I will see if maybe it’s at Ikea? I wouldn’t do this everywhere in the house but - I would definitely consider for a small room like a bathroom either upstairs or our downstairs one when we put it in…

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And finally! The view from the loo! Obviously the designer was thinking of EVERYTHING when they designed the room ’cause you can still see the TV from the toilet, haha… good job Novotel!

Holy hell & the shelf

I think I possibly (semi) survived the most irritating experience in my life and that was putting up shelves that we bought the other day.  It didn’t turn out as nice as I had hoped but the sixty-three thousand holes in my damn hole don’t help things either. I know how to hang a shelf, believe me… but the screws they gave with the little plastic thingys didn’t work and just made huge holes and then the stupid hanging things inside (where the screw hangs on) weren’t equal to one another so - even if I put the screws up and THOSE were equal, when the shelf went up they were then unequal. Do NOT buy those cheap wal-mart shelves, freakin’ things…. 4 shelves for 20 bucks that don’t hang right, are not worth it at all! Ready to see the final product???

The before… (and pardon the mess, that’s my next task for the day)

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The after… (and can you believe it’s even more messier?? hehe)

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The wood is a brown colour that matches the lamp posts and the brown carpet with our green couch. God i hate that couch, if our house ever burns down, I sure hope that it isn’t one of the salvagable items because I’ll set fire to it myself! As soon as I get a real job, you can bet your ass that’s the first thing in the house to be replaced!

I’ll take a quick break and then get started on cleaning… so much for studying, eh? Anything to get out of studying :P

P.S. I hope martin likes the layout of the shelves because, they aren’t effin’ coming down!

Our updates…

Well, Martin and I are doing fine lately… gearing up for spring to come (if it ever decides to!) so we can start work on our yard… and I’ve been fortunate enough to have (tentatively) my contract extended until the end of June which will help pay for the schooling in July and August. I decided to postphone my BA honours until another time and signed off on the papers to complete my BA so I should be graduating in June of this year! I can always upgrade (hehe) to an honours later on but for now I needed to get the BA done so when I leave my aboriginal teacher program, I’ll be granted a Bachelor of Education… if I don’t have the BA, I don’t get the B.Ed.

Fishies? Well, they aren’t doing so great…. Crusty died the other day and another one today. There’s the fab-five left now and hopefully tomorrow I can get the fin-rot stuff so the other ones don’t keel over too (literally, hehe).

So what are our plans for the upcoming summer around the house? We need to finish off a fence between us and the “jones” — our neighbours who go out of their way to ensure they are better than us in every single way. Last year we put up our cute little garden shed and she came up to us and said, “Nice shed. When my husband gets back from Afghanistan we’re going to build an even bigger one.” And, sure enough within a week of him being home, there’s a shed twice as big as ours overshadowing our wee little cute one. Buggers.

Anyways - we got to get that fence finished so I don’t have to look at the sight of them. And then we need to build a new front porch because ours sucks and is dangerous. Both martin and i took flying leaps on it the same day, a few hours apart and had matching bruises to boot. So, we’re going to work on that and reconfigure it so it’s a bit more “safe”. So I’m looking forward to that! I’ll take some before/afters pics of it when we get around to it!

Another project is that we need to repaint our deck in the back and I’ll be putting a special kind of paint on there to help with slippage. We get a lot of dew here and ice as well as with the pool, it might be a good idea. We also need to finish repairing the deck around the pool from when we had to have the pool replaced last year. Shouldn’t take much work but - we just have to get enough ambition to do it!

Also on the deck in the back, we need to add some reinforcement to the posts by adding two extra screws into each rail. Shouldn’t take too long, especially with the help of the handy-dandy power drill :D

And finally! I’m putting off building our big garden I think as I had really hoped to and will instead build some planter boxes where we’ll plant the vegetables. We have the wood here to do it already so it’s just to take the time to build something. Our veggie garden in the back we wanted to build would be almost 30 feet by 20 feet and it is already there BUT the problem is we are in a very sandy zone… so we’d need to bring in a good dump-truck full of dirt just to be able to grow anything in it. My dad owns a dirt-yard but - he’s still over an hour away and unless he came up a few times with his half-tonne, we’d never get anything growing in it…. and he’s pretty busy so we likely wouldn’t be able to get that done this year anyways. Soooo, planter boxes it is!

We’re supposed to get up to 10 -20 cms of snow (again!) tonight… so much for spring! Fortunately with all of that sand we don’t get flooding much around here! Small graces, that’s for sure….  can’t wait to show you all of the changes that are going to take place over the next few months! With me being out of town again for classes, it’s going to suck again this summer but we’re going to get done what we can when we can!

Cookie Monster, Partie deux!

Uma is our belgian shepherd and she is crazy weird. Last year I made this video of her opening up her own door to the cookie bag which she does only when we say so.

Well… tonight?

Martin says, “Want a cookie? Go get them! You know where it is!”

He then turns his head back to the computer screen. A few seconds later you see this ziplock bag go flying and two big chocolate chip cookies go tossing through the air.

See, a few days ago? He took some cookies to work and didn’t eat them so he brought them home. They were sitting on this stand we have (and it was under some papers too I think!) but she knows to not eat things unless we say so. Oh indeed, she knew where they were and she surely helped herself to them! Of course, we took them away and ate them ourselves but it was really funny. She’s too smart. And, we couldn’t even give her crap for it ’cause well - she didn’t do anything we didn’t say she couldn’t! Ha!

Creepy dog….

So is this where it opens, Ma?

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Today was Martin’s b-day and I decided to get him an aquarium for his present. Actually, two years ago I promised him a terrarium when he got back from overseas but with moving and everything, we never got around to it. See, he had a little gecko friend over there he named George.  So, I went to pick up the aquarium/terrarium and went to the petstore afterwards to see what kind of crawly things we could get. They had only one gecko ($60), one chameleon (er, no thanks, those things weird me out more than a gecko!) and some crabs. Crabs were pretty cheap but - they require a lot of spraying and humid environment so I decided to wait and see what Martin wanted. So today we went to the petstore here and they didn’t have geckos because apparantely the village (not ours, the one we went to go) has a by-law against lizards. They are having it appealed and will have them but - we ended up deciding on fish. Then we had to decide on tropical or gold-fish. We walked out with goldfish :)

It’s a small tank and the 8 little fishies are being named as we speak. So far we have the three gray fishes named Snap, Crackle and Pop.  One also has a coloured mark on the forehead that looks like a mohawk so we are calling them Mohawk. Heh. That leaves four more to be named! Heh. The guy at the petstore said we can bring these ones back in a month or two to get the fancier fish we originally wanted. However, we’re big sucks and will grow to like these ones… like, they already have names, you know? hehe….

Bonne fête Martin!