Lauren | 
July 6th, 2010 | 
Mike was out last night playing baseball (a late game, meaning they didn’t even start until 9:00 and I shouldn’t expect him home until after 11:00 unless his team was schooled or they trounced the other time) and when I got home from a late dinner with friends I decided I should take the dog for a walk, seeing as neither of us had gotten any exercise yesterday due to the oppressive heat. I used to walk Daisy late in the evening all the time, long meandering walks designed to exhaust my body enough so I could sleep, but I haven’t done it in ages for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the problem I have with mosquitoes and the fact that I never really found the twilight walks made any difference to my ability to fall asleep. Read the rest of this entry »
I think I’ve mentioned before that we’re heading to Cape Breton Island in August for a little bit of relaxin’ and whale watchin’ and cottage livin’. I booked our flights a few months ago and got a great deal through a Westjet seat sale. I booked our hotel for our few days in Halifax a few weeks ago and got a great deal through Hotwired. I went to book our car rental a couple of days ago and … discovered it would cost more than both our round trip flights. Read the rest of this entry »
Is there anything better than a 4-day weekend? I wager there is not. With Canada Day occurring on a Thursday this year, we figured it was only prudent to take the Friday off as well, and at the time of writing Mike and I have 3.5 work-free days spreading out before us in such an astounding fashion I feel like little Simba in the Lion King standing at the edge of his kingdom, gaping wordlessly at the glory before him. It’s a weekend! Four whole days! Off in a row! We could do anything! The sky is the limit! The world is our oyster! And so on! Exclamation point! Read the rest of this entry »
We spent the weekend at my parents’ place in Aurora, and as is our habit when we drive there on Friday evenings in the summer, we chose to forgo our usual route (which takes us north on highway 400) and instead took an alternate route (which is slightly longer, but more scenic and less infested with stressed-out cottagers heading up north for the weekend). Our conversation during this trip was light and meandering to say the least, featuring a lengthy discussion on what Mike says his favourite movie is (The Shawshank Redemption) and what his ACTUAL favourite movie is (Zoolander), as well as what I say my favourite book is (Nine Stories) and what my ACTUAL favourite book is (Love Story), with these very scientific rankings based on which movie Mike would choose to watch if he was taking a sick day, and which book I’ve read cover to cover more than 20 times and openly sobbed like a little girl at the end every single time, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »
I am well aware that this is probably interesting to no one but me, but it had such a positive effect on my mood I feel obligated to share it with you all, in case you are having a similar problem with your Raisin Bran.
The situation here is that I love Raisin Bran, and I was buying it with some regularity until I discovered that the number of raisins in the box had dwindled down to nearly nothing. I exclaimed indignantly to Mike that I THOUGHT each box was supposed to have TWO SCOOPS, and he was forced to remind me that “two scoops” is not exactly a standardized unit of measurement, so it was entirely possible each box did in fact contain the advertised two scoops. While technically correct, this did nothing to increase my blood raisin level, which at that point was dangerously low. Read the rest of this entry »
Cat experts tend to recommend that the number of litterboxes a cat-owning family have in the house should be equal to x + 1, where x=the number of cats you have on hand at any given time. We have two cats, and are rule-following, equation-loving, cat-expert-respecting people, so we have three litterboxes. Two of them are located in bathrooms (partially due to the fact that bathrooms are already theoretically kind of icky so we’re less concerned about the far flung tracking of little tiny bits of litter by little tiny feet, but mostly because there just is no good place to store something like a box full of multi-cat formula, odour-fighting, dust-free clumping gravel) and I’m always surprised by the frequency with which I enter a bathroom and already find it occupied by a cat, focused intently on doing the exact thing I was just planning to do. I am even MORE surprised that my natural reaction is not to ignore the cat and stick with the original plan, but rather to apologize to the cat and sheepishly back out of the bathroom.
I forgot to post about this last week, but I am participating in The 365 Project, and last Thursday was my day. The goal of the project is to capture 365 individual perspectives on the 365 days in 2010, and my post (the comments of which feature someone who is inexplicably very upset at the fact that I used that post to spread dirty lies about ostriches) was about how in the general spectrum of awareness of the world around me, I tend to end up at the end where I have to ask Mike when he gets home from work whether something happened in Poland a few weeks ago because I keep seeing references to Poland in places that previously were relatively consistent in their lack of reporting on the aforementioned country. Read the rest of this entry »
I just stumbled across another example of my occasionally wildly inconsistent note taking skills, nestled in amongst several pages of otherwise perfectly coherent notes from an interview I did this afternoon for a newsletter article. Apparently the topic we were discussing, which I won’t go into too many details about here but was nonetheless a rather serious topic that had nothing whatsoever to do with ichthyology, is a “complex issue without a simple fish”.
I’m … not exactly sure what happened there.
So. All of that flossing I’ve been doing? Really makes no difference whatsoever in the misery level of my dental appointments, as I experienced this morning at 8:00. (Incidentally, I may have discovered the worst possible way to begin a day and I now know that the correct response to “How about first thing in the morning?” is to politely and calmly ask the receptionist if she’s lost her mind.) Leah the Singing Hygienist said it made HER feel better that I was flossing, which I suppose counts for something, but it certainly didn’t make ME feel better, so I feel kind of like I’ve been lied to, and I’m tempted to give up on the whole flossing palaver altogether, except that it was kind of nice to skip the whole condescending flossing lecture and just get right into the painful poking this morning, and besides, now it’s a habit and a somewhat virtuous one at that, and it makes me feel kind of smug every time I do it. (See also: taking a multivitamin, wearing SPF 45 when I’m out in the sun for longer than 10 minutes.)
There’s an episode of The Simpsons when Homer says that the best part of the week is on Sunday morning right when church is over, because then it’s the longest possible time until there is church AGAIN, and I kind of feel that way every time I leave the dentist, except also sort of queasy and desperate to get home and wash the dentist stink off under a very long, very hot shower. It’s a little over 5 months until I go back, which I believe is PLENTY of time for someone to find a way to use nanoparticles to make dental cleanings obsolete.
1. I dropped my iPhone on my big toe a week ago, and it hurt enough it actually brought tears to my eyes, and my big toe has been a particularly psychedelic shade of purple ever since. It was the third time I’d dropped it in the same day, so now I’m in the market for a sturdy yet attractive case for it, but I can’t help but wonder why someone would make such an expensive piece of technology so darn SLIPPERY. Read the rest of this entry »