There is a Gun in My Bed

It is loaded with rubber tipped foam bullets. Today's count is 3 bullets in one load of laundry. These are just a couple glimpse of my current life.

Since I last updated my blog, a lot has changed. At the beginning of April I moved to a different province to start a new job. I put my condo on the market, looked for a new place to live and moved in with my brother and his family.

In May I found a condo near my brother's family. It was under construction, so I was able to select the finishes. Late in June I accepted an offer for my condo and late in August I moved my possesions into storage here.

I love my new job. I work for my brother and his partner as office support and production analyst. The business is in construction. A few months ago there was a major flood in the area, creating a lot if work in the industry. Needless to say, work is busy.

My current status is as such. I am currently still living with my brother, his wife and 3 boys (ages 6 & 3). My new condo should be ready in a couple of months. My computer has not had a reliable connection to the Internet, and I doubt it will until I move out. I take my oldest nephew to his piano lessons and supervise his practicing. I go on dates with my nephews. I have joined the local stitching guild. I don't stitch much (see nephews above). There isn't a day the boys don't make me laugh. I miss my old life, but I know I can have a good one here.

Happy on Monday

Just one little thing can make a Monday morning a much better thing. Today it was this:

Note - it will be released TOMORROW! I think I might treat myself with this and season 4 of Leverage this week.

Da Boyz

My life is full of little boys! Not a little girl in sight.And they all come in sets of three!
First there are my nephews - Stinker, Easy and Curly.
Next is my CSB (Cross stitch buddy - i.e. cousin and best friend) and she comes with three boys - R, L & F. (Need to figure out internet nicknames for them, I could use their family nicknames, but I have a basic philosophy that I want the boys to talk to me when they are teenagers. The real curious can find their mom's blog in my reading list).
Then my BFF and her husband become foster parents a year ago in October and their first placement is a girl! Okay this could work. But the little girl is just with them weeks and then they had two boys - Lion and Tiger. Then in June they get another little boy - Bear.
They are all 6 and younger. My life is full of little boys! And Lego. And vroom vrooms. And choo choos.

6 out of the 9 all on one couch

Cue the Machines!

I'm doing it again, writing blog entries in my head instead of, you know, on my blog. Here's one that has been simmering since Tuesday.

I'm well known in my lack of affection for housewrok. If I have to scrub something I tend to get bored and wander off. I do like the whole putting things away aspect - I can putz away at that for quite sometime. It's just the actual scrubbing of surfaces that I do not enjoy.

On Tuesday I did the kind of housework that I enjoy - 3 loads of laundry and 1 dishwasher run. At the end of the evening I had clean clothes, clean towels, clean dishes and a nice chunk of stitching done. It reminded me of the other machines I would like in order to take over more of the housecleaning responsibilities.

First of all is the Roomba - a vacuuming robot. I don't actually mind vacuuming, but it's possible that this thing could go under my furniture more than once a year which is my current rate.

But the one that has me really excited is the Scooba which WASHES floors.  That is the task that needs to be done way more often than I have a desire to do so. My floors are old and crappy in the bathroom and kitchen and my really poor mopping skills and motivation are not helping them at all.

(The best part of the product description is where it says "all you have to do is sweep" and all I can think is "not if I also have a Roomba.)

So CUE THE MACHINES and let them clean!

Somewhat an Obsession

So I started with Pioneer Woman and the perfect iced coffee and last summer I made my own.

Oh Wow! was it ever good. But now I know why I don't drink coffee - if I added as much sugar and cream/milk to regular coffee as I do to my iced coffee, the results would not be good. So this stays as a special treat.

I turn this

into this

(In the tupperware container is sweetened condensed milk and the glass jar holds simple syrup)

A lovely treat!

(Oh, I will have an occasional cup of coffee, but only if my sister-in-law doctors it - she is a fellow sugar addict.)

New Year's Resolutions

Yes, this year I'm declaring what they are - resolutions, not just intentions. I only have two.

1. Do something about the needlework drawer in my coffee table.

My coffee table is fabulous, I designed it and my dad built it. It's a large chest on wheels and it has four large drawers. The upper right drawer is where I keep my stitching stuff and in the last year I've only added stuff to it and not taken anything out. So my intention is to finish things this year and have that drawer be neat and tidy - not a dumping ground when company comes.

This has been brewing for a while - I've already refused to do the fall workshop last November from my guild or sign up for a correspondence course for this winter/spring with my guild. These two activities took a lot of my stitching time the last 18 months so I'm trying to redirect my focus.

The plan at the moment is to finish three pieces quickly that are really close to being done. Then focus on the piece I'm stitching for my CSB's youngest son - he'll be one in a few days so I'm seriously late with this one. After that I'm hoping to finish the large canvaswork piece that was my guild's workshop piece from November 2010.

I'm sure there will be interruptions along the way, but that's okay as long as something is done about the needlework drawer in my coffee table.

2. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice expecting a different result." What am I doing where I don't like the outcome?

I play a lot of Angry Birds and quite often I find myself doing the same thing over and over again - using the birds the same way and the outcome doesn't change. So I remind myself that I'd repeating myself expecting a different result. What else am I doing the same thing?

So this resolution is about being aware of when I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting and asking myself what I need to change to get a different result. I hope with this one what will happen is that at the end of the year I will be doing things where I'm happy with the result I get.

A bit of a side bar to this one - I sometime get into the thought pattern of when I get all these ducks in a row I can do/have what I want. Once again I want to rethink some of these. Is there another way to accomplish my goal?

There you go - actual resolutions even if they don't meet the SMART objective rule. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) However I think this will work better for me. Let's see.

A Good Friday

Not The Good Friday.

Today was my first earned day off (EDO) of the calendar year and I've had a very good day. It actually started last night. I washed my car and headed grocery shopping. There I parked my car underground so it would dry and not freeze up too badly. After I finished grocery shopping I went to my weekly stitch - in. (It's held in the community room at the grocery store, so it makes sense to do both concurrently.) After thawing out my car thoroughly (3 hours above freezing) the weird clunking sound from the back of my car is gone. Yay! It was also great stitching for the first time in a month.

This morning I got up, showered and started to de-Christmas my house. Boy it takes a long time to take down the decorations on a tree when there are well over 50 ornaments and 4 different types of garlands. I sure glad I leave my lights on year to year and don't use tinsel. I also took the Christmas decorations off the white tree, the mantle and the shelf unit. All that's left is getting the trees actually taken down and put away and packing up the ceramic ornaments. By the way, we have tree decorating parties, we should have tree un-decorating parties since un-decorating is a lot less fun than decoration.

After lunch I headed out running errands. I was 66% successful. I cannot find tree bags in this city. I think I waited a week too long. So it's time to get creative with storing my trees. I also went to my parents for a few minutes before heading home for a nap.

This evening has been great. The curling game was top notch. While watching I worked on the sock I'm knitting. I also made a couple of paper Christmas ornaments. More on these in another post.

So the game plan for tomorrow is a visit to Michaels, breakfast with the gang, spending some time doing stuff at mom & dad's and then working with Photoshop. That will meet my intention to work with Photoshop once a week.

Now a picture and story. The picture is quite simply of my bead garland that goes on my tree every year. I like it a lot - the creamy colour and the fact that there's a lot so it loops around my large tree. The first couple years it was a huge pain to deal with. It would tangle on it's self it you looked at it funny. It took hours to detangle. I think one year it took over 4 hours to get it straightened out and then it had to go on the tree without tangling again. There was a bad chemical smell to them too. Not that your could smell it in the air, but your hands would reek after working with it. Mom came up with the simple solution you see here. We made a bobbin out of some cardboard. Now it goes on and off the tree easily. The chemical smell has also gone away with years of use. I really love it on my tree.

About me updated

So I was reading the post that started this all in 2006 that was all about me and decided a few updates were in order.

1. I'm no longer working for the VP of Manufacturing. I know work as a Project Coordinator in Operations. I still don't know what that means, but I still don't answer the phone or type. It's actually a great job with fabulous co-workers/bosses and I really think that we are on the cusp of greatness.

2. School wise I've completed the courses for the Accounting Certificate through the local technical school. I'm taking time off school right now since I've been doing work full-time and school part-time for the last 6 years. Right now I don't have any intentions of pursuing further study unless my career warrants it.

3. My brother and sister-in-law no longer have a dog, but do have a son. I love being an auntie. There may be a lot of Linc stories (or at least pics when I don't have anything better to go with a post, he's so cute). They are also expecting twins in spring. I'm so excited.

4. Megan has 2 sons and Mel has a husband.

5. I have a digital camera and no excuse not to post pictures.

That should catch you up.

Manifesto

So, now that you know who I am, it's time to discover what this blog is all about. First of all, I make no promises. I hope to post to this regularly, but I'm notorious for starting journals (paper) and dropping them after a couple of days or weeks. I have a lot of essays that drop off in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. Discpline in writing is not my forte.

As to the topics that will be discussed, I make no promises. Somethings that will show up - my friends and family, my hobbies, but mostly the hot topic of my mind. Maybe a link every now and again, possibly some pictures. I have been clipping comics from the newspaper since I was a kid, maybe I'll share some of them with you. Hopefully I'll share some of my works in progress (WIP) for my craft projects, as well as the finished products. I don't have a digital camera, so no guarentees there either.

As to writing style and lengths of articles, well whatever seems appropiate and I have patience for at that moment. I don't promise to always spell check, but I'll try. I tend to like doing asides and will probably be following rabbit trails everywhere. Not to mention parentheses (I love them). While I like writing, I have no desire (or disclipline) at this time to be a professional writer so this is not to perfect my writing style etc.

So far I've told you a lot of what this blog isn't going to be, I think it's time to say what it will be (but no promises - I reserve the right to change this at any time). My goal for this blog is to give me a space to disgorge the contents of my brain. So it could be anything from what's happening in my life, to my thoughts on books, TV, current affairs, to links to what else looks good out there in the world of the internets.

So there you go - what this blog is all about, but no promises.

Introduction

Well after months of contemplating and weeks of writing this entry in my mind, I guess it's time to get it out there. Let's start with the basics of who I am and go from there. My name is Rachel, and I am a 30 something single woman living in a Western Canadian city. I live close to my parents, whom I'm very close too. I have one brother, younger, but at our age it no longer matters who is married, has one dog and lives about 7-8 hours away. Some of my favourite people in my life includes my only grandmother, my best friend Mel, my cousin Megan, and several other friends you'll probably meet as we go along. I work as an admin assistant for a publicly traded company that designs and manufactures electronic equipment. I report to the Vice-President of Manufacturing and my day consists of anything but answering the phones and typing. My preference is to play with large amounts of data in spreadsheets. I go to school as well, working on getting my Accounting designation. The exact route of how I get there is up in the air right now, but I'm still committed to pursuing it. My hobbies include cross stitching, reading, puttering on the computer, watching TV (too much of it for my own good), knitting and other crafts. Given a choice I would rather indulge in my hobbies than do anything else. Well, that's a start. Next up a manifesto of what this blog is. See you all then.