Happy Holidays!

A belated Merry Christmas to everyone! I know I had disappeared in the last month, but perhaps it’s a sign of just how lovely our holiday season has been. I promise lots of updates and pictures in the next little while.

While the Christmas wishes are belated (I can’t even use the different time-zone excuse any longer), I also want to proactively wish everyone a Merry New Year’s, a Food-filled Orthodox Christmas, and a Confusing Old New Year’s.

I love sending out cards, and love receiving them even more. Thanks to everyone who sent us a little note this holiday season – I love you guys! Our haul for this year was very impressive – and special thanks to those who remembered a December baby’s plight and sent birthday wishes, as well!

Given that nothing in the house happens without our cats’ supervision, I thought this was a fitting picture to use for my greeting. After I had painstakingly laid out all the cards, and just as I was pressing the shutter, Shakey wandered in to inspect. At least he’s smart enough not to go and lie down right in the middle of the arrangement!

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Bathrooms!

I’m happy to say that we have a few more things checked off our reno list!

First – our ensuite bathroom is ready to use! The last thing holding us up was Dan’s worry that the grout sealant hadn’t fully worked its magic in a few spots (and my corresponding procrastination on the matter), so I thoroughly applied a new coat yesterday. I’m going to test it out with a shower tomorrow morning, but I’m optimistic!  I picked up a few accessories, as well, so I present to you our new ensuite bath!

The new swivel mirror and built-in shelving.

The new space-saving vanity, toilet paper stand, and hurricane-lamp garbage. And new tile, of course.

The shower with the no-longer-see-through shower doors.

We also got an unexpected start on the main bathroom renos over the weekend. Our home depot light fixture finally arrived, and Dan planned to surprise me on Friday while I was away. Due to shoddy original installation, one thing led to another, and now we have a beautiful new light, as well as some bare new drywall. Of course, once it’s mudded, it will be just begging to be painted, which means I might as well do the whole bathroom in some new and exciting colour. Woot! We’ll probably stop there, although I would love to do something about the generic laminate counter, as well.

Yes, I’m aware only 3 of the 4 lights are on. It’s not a light defect, but a user defect – with the freezing rain today, I couldn’t be bothered to go pick up another lightbulb, and we only had 3 matching-wattage ones left in the house. A nice bonus of this fixture is that there’s maybe a 20-second delay as light starts at about 75% brightness and warms up to full strength. Love it in the mornings!

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Friends

Looks like I need not have worried about the fish – they’re fast friends with BB already!

I often catch her lying up there, next to the aquarium. Sometimes she’s looking at them curiously, others she’s gazing off into the distance – maybe they calm her, as well! What I didn’t manage to catch on camera, by the time I went upstairs to get it, is that sometimes the fish seem to be just as curious about her – when I looked over the first time, all the fish were clustered up against the corner of the tank, around where BB was sitting. Cute!

Shakey is a little bit more indifferent.

I think he’s trying to give me the evil eye, but he’s too sleepy to succeed at it. I’m a little bit worried because today I caught him sitting on top of the aquarium cover. When I was a kid, we had a cat who liked to do exactly that – until one day, the lid folded inwards, taking the cat for a dip in the tank. I don’t think she sat on top of the cover after that – but I sure hope Shakey doesn’t have to learn that lesson the same way!

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Weekend fun

Despite feeling a little bit lazy, we actually got a lot done this weekend.

It started early (on Thursday) with an impromptu trip to the Sens game. The Sharks (with Heatley) were in town, so we took a walk down to Scotiabank Place to see if we could get some cheapo last-minute tickets from scalpers. Score! The Sens lost pretty spectacularly, but it was great entertainment with all the booing and taunts from the fans.

Saturday saw us finally start putting some christmas cards in the mail (or at least in envelopes). A nice thick stack of envelopes is just the visual encouragement I need to complete a repetitive task.

I was also finally able to buy some more fish for the aquarium. Woot! I found a few really neat fish that I plan to buy later on (including completely transparent fish, where you can see the full skeletal structure; and adorable flounder fish, which are quite flat and stick to the walls), and the store had posters up advertising a massive (their words, not mine) boxing week sale. Woot again! Guess where I’ll be bringing my change jar come boxing week?

For the moment, I have

• two red swords (on the left is the guy I bought first, on the right is the new guy)
• two batman platies  (nor in these pictures, were part of the original tank inhabitants)
• two sterbai corys (possibly my most favourite ones for now, the well-camouflaged pair of spotted fish near the bottom right of the picture below)
• three neon tetras (the neon blue guys)

Today was a day of relaxation. I had taken a chance on a purchase through the (relatively) new Groupon site – go check it out if you haven’t seen it yet, they have fantastic daily deals from local businesses – and today was using my facial+body scrub certificate. Fully scrubbed, moisturized and pampered, I headed home, where the beauty treatments continued with an acupuncture treatment from our christmas tree. I’m only half-kidding – this guy’s needles are sharp! Sadly, I remembered about my gardening gloves only after it scratched up my hands as I was putting the lights up.

On one of my breaks from decorating the tree, I had a hankering for something sweet, so I decided to make an apple cake. I used fresh farm eggs I bought from a friend, and as always was amazed at just how yellow the yolks are!

This morning, Dan surprised me with breakfast in bed, but before he passed me my scrambled eggs, he tentatively asked whether the eggs in the fridge were still good, because the yolks were so yellow – this boy’s never seen really fresh eggs! I guess it didn’t help that I got them in a reused carton, so the expiration date was somewhere in July…

Of course, you’ll notice that still missing is an update on my spice shelves. Yeah, uhmm… look, it’s snowing!

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Christmas tree!

Yet again, we headed off to a tree farm on this first weekend of December. Unlike last year, there was no snow on the ground, but the cold and wind more than made up for it in terms of the atmosphere. I don’t have any pictures from the tree farm because I was so cold. We waited around for a while for the tractor-driven cart to take us to this year’s cutting area, which worked out to our disadvantage. First of all, it was maybe a 4-minute walk away, so we froze more waiting for the ride than we would have had we just simply walked. Second, we ended up picking a different type of tree (a blue spruce) than our awesome fraser fir last year – because there wasn’t much choice for the fraser firs in the area where we got dropped off. However, of the drive back, we noticed a whole stand of tagged Fraser firs that we would have walked through had we walked – bah! Don’t get me wrong – the blue spruce is gorgeous and just barely fits in our living room – but as I was decorating it, I already missed the feather-soft needles of the fraser fir. Luckily, I hadn’t packed my gardening gloves away, so those certainly came in handy.

We started out with the tree away from the wall, since it’s a lot easier to wrap lights around it that way. Here is it before we did anything. The gap on the left side is going against the corner in the wall, so we didn’t worry too much about this imbalance in the tree when we picked it.

Dan helped me put the lights into the tree (although I’d like to buy a whole lot more strings for next year), and then took a nap.

I started with the larger individual ornaments, which I’ve been aquiring at 60-80% off post-boxing-day sales over the last few years. I love not being in a rush to get christmas ornaments! Refreshed from his nap, Dan even got up to help me with the last half of ornaments…

Oh wait, no, how could I forget – he kept napping, and by then Shakey had joined him too.

I filled in the gaps with more generic ornaments, and ta-dah! I was too lazy to pull out the tripod to show off both the lights and ornaments, so I’ll have to play with that later in the season. Notice that our tree is so tall this year (there is maybe 3-4″ between the top and ceiling?) that we opted to go without a tree topper. I kind of want to put a bird’s nest or something similar on top, but I think Dan will nix that idea.

By the end, I was feeling a little bit lazy, so I didn’t get much done in the way of trimmings. I got a few things up, and hopefully some trips to Michael’s will inspire me later this week.

I hope your decorating is going well, too!

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Shipping with Home Depot

I’m an occasional fan of Home Depot’s HammerDrop (an online-only, one-day sale), so recently we ordered a bathroom light from them. Often, they have dinky discounts like $20 off a $200 item, but this light we got at nearly 80% off. Score!

While I’m happy with the deals I’ve gotten through them, I’m amazed since very time, a different thing happens on delivery. The first time, they didn’t charge me for the delivery and the item got delivered to my door. The second time, they didn’t charge me for delivery, but when the tracking said it was delivered, the address was actually that of the nearest Home Depot store. When I called them up to ask how/when to pick up my item, the store staff were most confused, transferred me through 3 different people in shipping, and eventually realized that yes, they did have my item, but they had no idea that they could receive items for customers. This final time, they charged me for delivery, and the tracker looked like this:

Notice how it’s, oh, I don’t know, four times as long as the tracking for a normal package? First of all, I was surprised when I saw that it was coming from the States, and was already grumbling by the time it said it was at the brokerage, since I wasn’t planning on paying any duties – I ordered this from the Canadian website of the store, for crying out loud! My guess is that someone filled out the packing information wrong, and so it had to be sent back and redone. I’m still not sure why it had to go to 3 different depots after that, though.

On the day of the delivery, Dan was sleeping in after late-night hockey, and was lucky enough to catch the delivery truck on his way out. He was most surprised that I knew about this, however, when I called him up as soon as he got to work and said “so did you open it? how does it look? !!!!” Husband forgot about the tracking powers of the interwebs.

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