A Tour of My Christmas Decorations
Hubby and I have decorated our apartment up for Christmas all nice and spiffy (I’ve gotten over my pre-holiday humdrums), but since we have hardly anyone to invite over to see the decorations I thought I’d put them up here.
Here I am with our Christmas Wreath. it's inside, because nobody but us ever see's our "front" door anyways
Luckily for us, I had accumulated almost an entire tree worth of ornaments before I ever moved out of my parents house, this did mean however, that the huge box of cheap ornaments we bought last year weren’t needed for the tree. I put them to good use anyways, on top of a cabinet.
Nothing but gravity, and lucky placement is holding those up there.
Hubby helped me set up the tree, but I did most of the decorating, although he helped with the tin “tinsel” ornaments.
Our Christmas tree
I’ve included Pictures of a few of our ornaments, so you can really see what it looks like.
I played french horn in elementary school. As a result I own more french horn ornaments than anyone else on the planet.
This is our Precious Moments "Our First Christmas Together" ornament. Obviously it was new last year, not this year.
Hubby's Mom sent us these, we have a whole set of them. Super cute!
This ornament has no particular sentimental value, but Hubby took a darn good picture of it, so I decided to show it off
Not included in the picture tour of our ornaments are several other things. You’ll have to imagine the snowman clock, which chimes a different Christmas carol every hour. On our glass door, we have a lovely, sparkly static-cling christmas wreath from the dollar store (am I classy or what). Also from the dollar store, the perennial favourite felt banners. One is blue, has snowmen and says NOEL. The other is red, has santa and reads “HOHO”. Yep, you read that right, not Ho Ho Ho, just Ho Ho.
Jogging Update
Hubby and I are still jogging. We are advancing very very slowly through the couch to 5k program. We started out advancing at the recommended rate, but every time we moved up a level we ended up feeling miserable. So now we spend two to three times as long at each level as the website suggests, and we’re loving it again.
Last night was the best jog we’ve had in ages. We quit listening to music while jogging a while ago because I found that I was keeping time to the music, even when that wasn’t an appropriate running tempo, and it seemed to be wearing me out too quickly. So last night we were jogging along when we realized that we hadn’t had to stop our conversation when we switched from our three minutes of walking back to five minutes of jogging. Needless to say, I’m very proud of us.
I’ve definitely learned that there’s no one-size-fits-all jogging program. Even though this program is great, it still isn’t perfect for us, and we have more fun by slowing it down. I figure we’re still out moving two or three nights a week, which is a huge improvement from the couch potatoes we used to be.
How Marriage Changed my Eating Habits
I do not consider myself a particularily picky eater. I like a wide variety of foods, however there are a few things that I don’t care for. The major ones are: cheese, coffee and coconut. A little over a year ago, that list would also have included tea and red wine, but then I got married and everything changed.
I was converted first on the issue of tea. I could drink tea before, but I wouldn’t normally chose to. About the only times I ever had a cup of tea were when visiting my Nana and Grandad at the retirement home, because they didn’t really keep anything else on hand to offer, and I didn’t like to refuse they’re hospitality.
Then, the day after our wedding Hubby noticed that there were instructions on the coffee maker for how to make hot chocolate using it. Knowing that I love hot chocolate, Hubby offered to make some for me. Once he got the water going however, he realized that there were no packages of hot chocolate among the tea and coffee packages. Feeling bad that his nice gesture wasn’t working out, I agreed to his offer to make me tea instead (he knew better than to even suggest coffee) and I was amazed to discover that it was really, really good.
At first I thought it was just the awesomeness of having my new husband make tea for me that made it taste good, but I had tea several more times over the course of our Honeymoon, and it stayed enjoyable. In fact, I now start most days with a cup of tea.
The red wine conversion started earlier, but took longer to take full effect, and in fact, I still prefer white wine to red, except when eating red meat. My first good interaction with red wine occured at the wine and cheese shower that a very good friend threw for me right before my wedding. She had paired the wines with the perfect foods (and then left the cheese out of my servings). It was there that I discovered that red wine really does work exceptionally well with roast beef. However, away from these perfect pairings I still didn’t like it much, and chose white wine every option I got.
Then, on our Honeymoon, Hubby and I went on a wine tour (for anyone who’s never been, Prince Edward County, Ontario has an awesome wine industry). Once again I was exposed to really good red wine, and I was in a romantic mood. Between the two factors, I really enjoyed it. In the year and a bit since then, we’ve been gradually drinking up the shower gifts and wine tour purchases. Alot of that was red wine, and I’ve discovered that really, I actually kinda like the stuff.
My Dad is still holding out for marriage to change my feelings toward cheese I believe, but I just don’t see that one happening. However two years ago I wouldn’t have expected to like red wine, so I guess you never know.
Happy Anniversary to Us
Hubby and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary yesterday. I can hardly believe we’ve been married a full year already. It seems like it can’t possibly have been that long.
We had a really awesome day. We slept in, and then went for a picnic lunch at a small park near our apartment. I roasted a whole chicken the day before, and then carved it up and refrigerated it over night. I also bought a couple of those “finish baking it yourself” baguettes, so we had nice warm bread. We added in some pate, spicy hummus and roasted garlic (yummy, and so easy to make in the slow cooker while roasting the chicken).
Then for dessert we had blueberries and cherries (yay for yummy local fruit) and also some chocolate covered strawberries. Again, I had made these the day before. We made some Southern style sweet tea, using the recipe from the Joy of Cooking, and then headed out for our yummy, yummy lunch.
The park was surprisingly quiet; we were a bit worried about that as it has a playground but the only child there was one toddler with his parents. We also saw a few people walking dogs.
After our lunch, we took a break from the anniversary celebrations, then headed back out for dinner. I was way overdressed for the little italian restaurant we chose, but there was no way that I wasn’t dressing up for our anniversary dinner.
We had a fantastic dinner. We’ve been to this restaurant a couple of times before, so we know the food there is always good. Our waiter was great too. He was very friendly. Hubby gave the kitchen a bit of a thrill by saying that the pizza he had reminded him of the pizza in Rome. We then enjoyed a very dressed up, somewhat tipsy bus ride home to end the evening.
My Legs Hurt
After our bike ride around the seawall the other day, Hubby and I have been enjoying the idea of getting more physically fit. So we’ve taken up jogging. It hasn’t been too bad so far, but today my legs are rebelling a bit. I’m hoping that they’ll get over it by tomorrow night, when we should be jogging again.
We’ve been using a jogging program that I found online called Couch to 5K. We’ve been doing pretty good so far. It’s hard but not impossible. We’re only at the end of the first week, so starting tomorrow we move things up a level: 90 whole seconds of jogging at a time.
We’ve only encountered two real problems so far. The first is that Hubby’s comfortable jogging pace is alot faster than mine. This isn’t a problem at all when you’re only jogging 1 minute at a go; I just catch up to him on the walking breaks. It does cause some concern when we move up to more jogging at a time though. I think we might check out some of the schools nearby and see if any of them have a track, as then we wouldn’t lose track of one another.
A track would also be good as this is a very hilly city. It’s hard to find a stretch to jog that doesn’t have some significant slope to it around here. This is hard both ways, uphill is obvious, but I found that when jogging downhill I ended up going faster than was really comfortable.
Our other problem is that we don’t have a decent stopwatch to time the segments of running and walking with. We thought about buying a cheap one when at Sears the other day, but it hardly seems worth it as hopefully in 7 weeks we’ll be up to just jogging for 30 minutes. So far we’ve been using Hubby’s GPS, but it’s terrible on batteries, and uses AAA’s. I think I solved this last night with a new podcast for my Ipod.
I just grabbed a bunch of my favourite songs, quick paced ones for jogging and somewhat slower for walking, and cut them to the right length. It’s a bit choppy and awkward to list to, but much better than trying to watch a stopwatch. And really, I tend to skip around between songs and miss the second half of them half the time anyways.
Overall, I’m still looking forward to going jogging tomorrow, so I think this might be working.
Biking the Seawall
Hubby and I went biking today. I haven’t been on a bike in a good 5 or 6 years at least. And I have to say, I’ve forgotten how much fun it was. I think my problem with bikes in the past has been that I absolutely hate biking in traffic. But today we were biking in Stanley Park, so there wasn’t any car traffic to deal with.
I don’t own a bike, although Hubby does. He loves biking, and has been wanting some one to bike with. I said that if he could find a bike I’d go with him, as long as I didn’t have to ride in traffic. Fortunately for us, there are rental places right outside Stanley Park. So for a measly $20, I had a bike for the afternoon. Hubby brought his own from home, which means that we have now also mastered the art of how to use the bike racks on the front of the buses. This is a big step.
So we rode the entire sea wall. I have to say, for a first bike ride in six year, 11K was probably not the smartest distance to chose. It was totally fun, but I hurt now. My shoulders are a bit sore, my legs are aching. And frankly the seat was not that comfortable.
It was really nice to ride beside the ocean. We could smell the water, and for most of the distance the bike path was separated from the car route around the park. We were near the pedestrians, we went by a couple beaches. There were trees and rocks along the other side, as we were down a hill from the road.
Overall, we had a really good day. We got out in the sun for a bit and got some good exercise. Amazingly it only took a little over an hour to actually do the bike ride around the park. That is, except for the time we stopped while Hubby bought me ice cream. That’s right, for going out on a bike with him, I got Mint Chocolate Chip!
Aquarium
Hubby and I went to visit the Aquarium today, and it was really amazing. We ended up buying season passes, because they’re cheaper than two tickets, and we plan to take my parent’s there when they come to town.
There were a bunch of different shows, the only one we watched was the dolphin show, which was pretty impressive. It was only about 15 minutes but there was sure alot of jumping in that time. They have four dolphins at the Aquarium and they put on a great show.
We also took a look at the Beluga exhibit. We didn’t join the massive line to get at the underground viewing room to see the baby beluga, but we did see it from above. It’s actually really cute. The gift shop was pretty cute too, there were tons of “It’s a girl” beluga items for sale, including pink stuffed whales.
We also had a blast with the sea otters, they were so adorable. There was one that seemed to have an itchy foot/flipper. It spent several minutes floating around scratching away, occasionally turning a somersault in the water. Then they were fed. The food was some sort of shrimp or fish, embedded in large chunks of ice. I can now honestly say that I’ve seen a sea otter banging a piece of ice against rock, breaking it apart. One of the two otters had gathered up all the large chunks of ice and was floating around with them all balanced on its stomach. The other otter grabbed all the bits that got away. I think it actually ate more in the time we were watching.
There were just the highlights. There were tons of tanks full of small fish and urchins. Many of the underwater creatures were really, really weird. And some were really beautiful, like the strawberry anemone. Amazingly, I didn’t chicken out completely from the reef shark exhibit. I didn’t get very close to the glass, and I mostly focussed on the sea turtle that was in there with them. But I didn’t run away.
Finally we visited the frog exhibit. There were at least a couple dozen types of frogs there, many of them endangered. It seems that there’s some type of plague that’s wiping out frogs, and this exhibit was designed to raise awareness. Given how much I love frogs, I really enjoyed this exhibit. Although there were a few frogs that I couldn’t find in their aquariums.
Overall, an awesome way to spend an afternoon, and I’ll definitely go back
Hubby’s Coming Home
Hubby is coming home tomorrow. I’m very excited. I really miss him when he isn’t here, and he’s been gone for fully two weeks. Which in my opinion is way too long. It makes it even worse that he had only been home a couple weeks after his last multi-week stint away.
Aside from missing him, I’m also very excited that Hubby is coming home because I do not do well living alone, even temporarily. After about a day of relishing having the house to myself, I start to get jumpy. For the last week and a half, I’ve had the tv running every waking moment so that I don’t have to hear the sounds of the house settling, or the landlords moving around upstairs, as that makes me jumpy.
Even then, I have to be careful what I watch, because Hubby isn’t here to deal with it when I watch something mildly scary. Seriously, I’m the kind of girl has to have Hubby to get me a drink in the middle of watching Jurassic Park because there’s no way I’m getting off the couch. And that the reason I’m not getting off the couch is that as long as I don’t move I know for a fact that there are no raptors behind me. Lucky for me, he thinks this is cute and endearing, not annoying. However it does make watching anything even mildly scary a really bad idea when I’m home alone.
So in anticipation of Hubby’s returning, I have become a house cleaning machine. The entire Scrapbook-tornado mess that was our living room has been sorted into neat piles and is tucked under the couch. Two loads of laundry have gone through the machine. and all the stuff I’ve been putting off throwing out from the fridge is gone.
I have also discovered a wonderful thing known as a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Seriously, they aren’t kidding when they named it magic. We had a stain on the grout in the kitchen where we’d spilled some juice and not gotten to it in time. Now it’s barely noticeable. Overall, I am very happy with my house now. It’s ready. So hurry up and get home Hubby! I want a hug.
How I Defeated the Closet
We have a huge closet in our apartment. It’s a great place to store stuff, but it has one problem: no shelves and very little internal structure. When Hubby left town almost two weeks ago, he left out a suitcase that belongs in this closet (I told him this was ok, and that I would put it away) I’ve been walking around this suitcase since then, and today I decided to take on the closet and try to get it put away. This turned into an all day struggle from which I came out victorious.
Well, after a little struggling, it became obvious that in order for the suitcase to go in, everything else had to come out. The only exception was the part of the closet sectioned off for support by the stairs. That part is full of bubble wrap and styrofoam from our move here. That part got left alone. I tried to pull some out, but it’s scary.
Turns out, we had ALOT of cardboard in there. I promoted one box up to secondary laundry basket, but the rest I broke down for recycling. Including the huge one that served as a dining room table for two weeks until our table got here. That box had duct tape all over it which just made taking it apart even harder.
After finally becoming mistress of all things cardboard (without even cutting myself) I had to tackle the stuff that I couldn’t just throw out. I found all our winter scarves and stuff. And I found Hubby’s Linux cap, which has been missing for a while. I found my mini-vacuum, which for some reason was in the box for Hubby’s biking stuff, and I found the biking stuff which was pretty much everywhere but in the box.
For a long time I couldn’t figure out why stuff still wasn’t fitting. Then I remembered like magic: the suitcases must be put together like Russian nesting dolls. So out they all came again, the duffels got folded, and back into the closet they went. And now, it’s all pretty and clean and organized. I have bruises from dropping boxes on myself, but I definitely won.
Hubby be warned. When you get home, if those suitcases you took with you get just thrown in the closet rather than nested properly, I may have to kill you.
