Author: sox

Last Christmas wasn’t the best one for me — we had just moved, I didn’t feel like my house was my home, there was lots of unpacking to do, and Christmas mostly just got in the way.

This year I’m feeling like this is home, and I’m looking forward to having a good Christmas here. It looks like we’re going to have a busy December with lots of celebrating and visiting, and I’m thankful for that. We’ve got Greg’s office party this weekend, plus we have family visiting. Next weekend is my office party and some gingerbread house making with friends. Then we’re heading to the mainland in the middle of December to catch up with a few friends over there. We’re also hoping to have an open house here nearer to Christmas. We never had a house-warming, so we thought we might do an open house instead. We’ll see if we actually get our butts in gear to pull that off.

My mum will be here for Christmas morning and for a few days before, and we’ll be heading up to Greg’s mom’s Christmas afternoon for a couple of nights. And it looks like we’ll have plans for New Years as well.

And we’ll go to the Esquimalt Light-up, Greg will take the kids to the Truck Light parade, we’ll go see the Navy ships all lit up, we’ll take my Mum to Butchart Gardens and we’ll go see the Christmas trees at the Empress.

Oh, and on December 1st I’ll crack open the new Christmas CD I bought after listening to one of the tracks on the CBC.

Should be fun!

So this post idea was given tongue in cheek, but I’m going to write about it anyway.

Almost 20 years ago, after my first year of university, I needed to find a new place to live. And I couldn’t afford to live by myself so I was looking for a roommate too. My then boyfriend and I did a weekend blitz looking for a place for me. I can’t remember how many places we looked at, but it was a lot. We happened along a place at 10 Mile Point that was pretty appealing. I honestly can’t remember what my exact first impression of my future roommate was, but it must have been good because as the story goes, my boyfriend was busy telling her how I was going to think about it when I walked into the kitchen and said “I’ll take it”.

We only lived together for about two years, but it’s turned into a 20 year relationship that has been a bit of a ride. There have been marriage breakups, miscarriages, babies born, new relationships, family deaths, dogs, cats, dead bunnies, other let’s say “interesting” roommates, a period of time when we were pissed off at each other and didn’t speak, and an even longer period of time when we were so caught up in our own lives that we heard from each other maybe once a year, if that.

Then along came Twitter. Or more accurately, an invitation to follow her on Twitter. I accepted right away, and that has opened the door to the relationship again. I have been able to catch little snippets of her life, and we finally saw each other recently, after not seeing each other for over three years.

So this post isn’t so much about the best roommate ever (although she was), but more about how happy I am that we have reconnected. Sure, it’s mostly been electronically, but that’s a whole lot better than nothing.

Some thoughts regarding this NaBloPoMo endeavour:

If I were growing a moustache I’d have something to blog about.

I have six more posts to do after this one…something exciting better happen in the next six days, preferably every day.

Not sure I’m going to do this again next year.

Maybe I’ll do it on the family blog and then I won’t feel like I’m cheating by posting about my kids every day.

I think a theme would be easier. However, thinking up a theme is NOT easy.

Someone leave me a comment with an idea for a post tomorrow. Better yet, leave six ideas.

At least this post is longer than a tweet.

My sister has a bunch of Aeroplan points and a couple of weeks ago she offered to use some of them to get some tickets for us to fly out to Ottawa with the kids for a visit this winter. We mulled it over a bit. Given Greg’s employment status we weren’t sure we could afford it (we paid the taxes), and we weren’t sure he’d want to take off for a week when he’d (hopefully) just started a new job.

I thought about taking the kids on my own, but that thought lasted all of two seconds. Flying with Elliot is easy, flying with Amy is not. I thought about going out again with just Elliot, but my sister would really like to see both kids. So in the end we’ve decided to go as a family.

A couple of days ago (and this is related), Elliot and I were sitting on his bed reading. He’s always been into books, but he’s stepped it up quite a bit and I figure we’re probably reading about 20 books per day to him now, on the days we’re home all day with him. So we were sitting there reading, side-by-side, and Amy was playing in the room. She would run over to the train table, grab a car, come running back to the bed, grunt and groan until I helped her onto the bed, put the car in the pocket of the sweatshirt I was wearing, get off the bed and repeat the process. Periodically she’d stay up on the bed and try to zip or unzip the pocket. Then she’d ask for help and get mad when I tried to help her. And she’d get mad when I would put my arm down to turn the page, because she couldn’t get to the pocket. Then she’d take all the cars out. And put them back in again. Then sprawl herself on my lap. Then roll over. You get the picture.

Through all this, Elliot didn’t moved a muscle. He’s listened intently to the book, even through all the distractions. And I suddenly realized…THIS is what the plane ride will be like. Thank God I’m not doing it by myself.

Tonight Greg and I are having dinner with two other couples, at one of the couple’s new house, sans kids. It’s been planned for over a month, and I’m really looking forward to it. Greg and I get plenty of time to ourselves in the evenings because we thankfully have two good sleepers, but we don’t go out a lot without the kids, so this is a real treat. Uninterrupted adult conversation with good friends, coupled with wine and food. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

Elliot and I just had our first official movie night. Greg was supposed to join us as well, but he had a last minute trip to the mainland.

After bath we got into our pajamas, made popcorn and settled in. We watched Bob the Builder – Born to be Wild. It was good, but I look forward to graduating to some Pixar movies. They are too long still for Elliot, and he scares VERY easily, so we’ll wait a while yet.

We plan to make this a fairly regular thing in our household.

I gotta write this letter, and I gotta do a blog post. So here you go. And yes, I will actually be mailing this letter. Although not sure it’ll go out exactly as is…just wanted to get a rough draft done.

To The People Responsible For Making Customers Happy At Yakima:

My husband and I bought a Yakima SkyBox in June of 2006. We paid over $700 for it, which was a lot more than we would have paid if we went to a warehouse store and bought one of their no-name brands, but we were willing to pay for a quality product. In addition, the lifetime warranty was very important to us.

We have only used the SkyBox about ten times over the past three years, as we don’t often need the extra storage. When we went to use it this past summer, my husband noticed a crack in the underside of it as he was putting it on our car. Upon further investigation, we found that the crack ran down the entire belly of the pod. Which obviously affects the integrity of the pod and it’s ability to keep things dry.

Knowing the pod has a lifetime warranty, we took it to the dealer we bought it from, an authorized Yakima dealer, and they contacted their Yakima distributor. They were told that the crack was not a defect, but that the pod must have been dropped. They refused to honour the warranty.

We have not dropped this pod. We have not dropped anything on it, and it has not fallen down. We are very disappointed with Yakima’s reaction, and unless this situation is rectified, we will not be buying Yakima products in the future. We have already had the need to purchase a bike rack, and given the customer service we’ve received so far from Yakima, we decided to get a Thule instead.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
The Customers Who Are Not Happy

When it came time for Amy to go to daycare and Elliot to switch daycares, there were two that I was hoping would have openings at the right time. Both were recommended to me by friends. One of them was at the top of my list for two reasons: location (close to my office) and they provided food (less work for us). We didn’t get into that one.

Turns out neither have been an issue. In fact, it’s been the opposite. Their daycare is less than 10 minutes from my office, and it’s on a beautiful piece of land, as opposed to next to a parking garage downtown. And I actually like making their lunches. I like having control over what they eat. And now that I’ve been doing it for a few months, I don’t really have to think about it anymore.

Not to mention that both kids are pretty darn happy there. I’m very thankful.

Yoga night tonight. My regular instructor wasn’t there and the instructor subbing for her was just okay. She talked a lot, and it was…different. Which I suppose shouldn’t be surprising since they are different people. But she lost me when she told us we should melt our shoulders like warm icing going down our backs.

However, it did get me to thinking of the other “service providers” in my life, and how few changes I’ve made. I’ve had the same hairdresser for almost twenty years. Same dentist for about the same time. And I’d still have the same dental hygienist, but she left the office so I got a new one. I’ve received about 150 massages over the past eight years and all but one of them have been from the same RMT. I had the same doctor for ten years and only switched because I got pregnant.

Is this normal? I suppose it probably is. Why switch when you’re happy with the service you are receiving?

Greg and I menu plan. We started before we had kids, to prevent the conversations we’d have in the car on the way home from work, tired and hungry:

Greg: What’s for dinner tonight?
Me: I dunno, why is it up to me?

(To be fair, he often worded it differently, like “Any thoughts on dinner?”. But no matter how it was asked, it always got me riled up.)

For the longest time we just did it a week at a time. But last year I changed it to a two-week plan. Partly because I was sick of doing it every week and partly because we started ordering some of our food from spud and that required me to be a bit more organized.

So now, every second Monday or Tuesday night, we put together a two week menu plan. And we’re darn good at sticking to it. We do change the days up depending on what we forget to take out of the freezer, but for the most part we don’t change the meals. And it’s actually mostly me who does the planning. This is because I’m terrible at multi-tasking, and if Greg is doing it with me, he often suggests an idea while I’m in the middle of writing down ingredients for another meal. And then I lose my train of thought and end up forgetting to write some key ingredient down.

Our eventual plan is to get a bunch of the recipes we use often digitized so we can quickly search for ideas instead of flipping through recipe books for every meal. (I am very much a follow-the-recipe kind of cook.) That is still on our to-do list, though.

There are a couple of other advantages to doing the plan, aside from keeping our marriage intact. One is we do way fewer trips to the grocery store. And the other is we eat better. Before when we’d just go to the grocery store to grab something for dinner, it often was something unhealthy.

Some people have told me they couldn’t do a plan because they wouldn’t know what they felt like eating on a particular night. There is the odd time that I’ve felt that, but generally the meals on the plan are ones we really enjoy eating, and it hasn’t come up very often.

I have no suitable closing comment for this post so I’m just going to end it right there.