Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Apparently, I've been negligent in keeping my blog posts up to date and there are some readers that rely on it for entertainment over their lunch break. Ooooh, the pressure!! And given how many things have happened last month, maybe it's time to put it online for your amusement.

There's a new president of the NRC and his entire role, best as I can figure, is to eliminate and destroy 100+ years of Canadian scientific accomplishment in the name of progress and competitiveness. Yes, I'm choosing my words carefully, for good reason, but I give the NRC 5 years (coinciding with the end of this president's term) before it's gone and the thousands of technicians and scientists are left unemployed and taking their skills elsewhere (re:out of Canada). Because that'll make Canada more competitive in science. *snort*

Anyways, off my soap box. After losing 10% of IBD's staff in the first round of cuts, I saw the writing on the wall. A position opened up at CancerCare Manitoba and I took the opportunity and decided to leave before I could get cut. In my exit interviews, I was told that it's good I'm leaving because my "unique skill set" (re: whatever it is that you do, besides look after the coffee machine) wouldn't be needed much longer. And for an institute that millions in the hole, me quitting is a heckuva lot cheaper than firing me.

I had 4 days between jobs and, as Brendon well knows, leaving me alone in the house for more than a day guarantees that something is going to be painted. And if there's something that needed painting, it's our bedroom. As Oprah hath bequeathed, so therefore it hath be true, a bedroom should be sanctuary and should only be used for two things. And one of those is sleeping ;-) The bedroom was a horrible yellow colour. It's more yellow than margarine but not really lemon yellow. It's like a faded Post-It note. Sanctuary? Nope, it's like old office supplies! *That* does not inspire that other use of a bedroom (the not sleeping one) if you're remind of being at work. Brendon started by repainting the back wall before we moved in last year. Leaving us with this.

Meh. Well, it left me unsatisfied. Nothing worse than an unsatisfied wife in the bedroom right right?? LOL! Still bland and still "faded Post-it note" yellow, but without the sponged back wall. Worse yet, the yellow wasn't evenly painted, so you could still see the roller marks and dry wall tape in some spots?! With Brendon at work, I got out my ipod, my brushes, and my painter's tape and got started.... :)

Ta DAHHHHH!!

Okay, so it's beige. Again. Like 95% of the rest of the house, it's a combination of beige and brown. Technically, it's Behr "Castle path", and that's in the grey/red category but it's a variation of beige. But it's not yellow!! So that's the bedroom finished. Well, for now... until I insist we replace the carpets, heh heh.

Meanwhile, I still had 2 more days to myself and I was out of paint. To make a long story short, this 3 yards of soil...

became this... (Brendon and I had built the flower beds and 2 boxes ahead of time)



which has grown into this...



60 square feet of boxes is now growing 2 types of tomatoes, green peppers, zucchini, beans, peas, garlic, onions, lettuce, potatoes and carrots. The flower beds are a mix of annuals (sunflowers, zinnias and celosia) and perinneals (digitalis, daisies, echinacea and a few others I can't recall their names but the red ones in the front of the picture).


Oh yeah, and I got a new car. Sexy sexy!!

En suite is finally done!

I've already posted about how much I hated the en suite and how everything in it was white: floors, walls, cabinets, fixtures etc. Here's the pic from the Kijiji ad when we first looked at the house.
So in August, I painted the cabinets. In October, it was the walls.
Last step was the flooring and thanks to my fantastic incredible father-in-law, my ultrafantastic truly amazing husband and 6 hours of a Saturday we'll never get back, here's the final result!!
*BLISS*!!!!
We used Allure tiles from Home Depot. It's a floating floor so there's no adhesive, just two sides that stick together using contact cement. Isn't it beautiful??? *sigh* I'm going to go admire our work again... happy happy!!!

Thoughts from our side of the city

It's been a year since we sold our West End house so I thought, given my 11 months of being in Transcona, that I'd share what my impression is.

1) No one knows where Transcona is.
Tell someone that you live in Transcona and watch their eyes glaze over. And it's not just Winnipeggers who think T-cona is that uncharted part of the map described in latin as "Here there be dragons", our utility companies think the same way. Case in point: MTS called us (at the old house) to tell us that they offer HD and PVR in the West End now. I said "Great, but we're moving to Transcona. Is it there?" Lonnnnnng pause, he comes back "No, we don't offer service outside of the city." What? After moving here and dealing with the mind-boggling ineptitude that is MTS, we discovered that we don't have call display or answering machine on our land line anymore. I call MTS to find out what happened and she said (and I quote) "Different parts of the province have access to different features. If you lived in Winnipeg, you could get call display." I called back the next day (once my jaw had been picked up off the floor) and got everything fixed by someone who knows geography better.

2) Regent Ave traffic is as busy as St James, but without the suicide lanes.
Driving in the area of Regent and Lagmodiere on the weekend is akin to Route 90 or St James. But, someone with a background in traffic flow patterns realized that left turn lights are a good thing and used them A LOT on Regent. Too bad the city can't rehire that company and fix the train wreck that is St James and Route 90. Instead, they're putting in *more* shopping in that end. Can't wait to see the parking lot on Sterling Lyon when Ikea final plunks down here.

3) Transcona is it's own city
Okay, this is the weirdest part of living here. Transcona has it's own downtown, complete with decorative arch! So when I tell someone I'm going "downtown", I have to specify if I mean "Downtown Winnipeg" (ie far away) or "downtown Transcona". I had lunch last week with a group of Transcona residents (transconians? transconites?) who admitted to me that they haven't left Transcona in months. She said "Anything past Nairn is too far away. Besides what do you need to see that you can't get here?" We have 3 chinese restaurants and a thai restaurant withint 1 block of each other. Does that qualify as our "chinatown"?

4) Transcona is a small town.
And just like Pinawa, everyone here knows each other. Or tries to find out if they know each other somehow.
Case in point: The woman and her daughter that deliver the weekly flyers were stuck in their dead car outside our house on a really cold day in December. We invited them inside to warm up while they waited for a tow truck and when they found out that Brendon and his brothers all went to TCI, they spent time trying to figure out if she (as TCI grad in the early 90s) went to school with anyone of Brendon's brothers. When her husband came to get them, turns out he (like most people in Transcona, including my mother-in-law) works at the Freshwater fish processing plant (did you know Winnipeg has a fish processing plant?? I sure didn't...), then we started the whole conversation over again trying to figure out if the husband remembers my mother-in-law. Thank goodness the daughter doesn't work at New Flyer or else we'd have to link her to our friends.

At the same lunch last week, a woman admitted to me that she's lived in Transcona and gone to the same T-cona church for 32 years but is still referred to as "new to the area", but her kids are "neighbours" because they're born/raised here, and yes, came back to raise their families. Yup, it's more like Pinawa than I'd like to admit.

5) Coffee shops.
We don't have one. Seriously. There's neighbourhoods elsewhere in the city that have 2 or 3 on a single corner but the closest Starbucks is Regent and Lag. Depending on how you draw the boundaries, it means Transcona doesn't have a Starbucks. And Timmy's? Only 2. There's a Timmy's inside the Safeway on Kildare (Transcon Proper) but no stand alone Tim's until you go down Regent, past the casino, where you find 2 within a block of each other.

6) Pink flamingos?
I don't know where this notion that T-cona is filled with tropical plastic birds but I've never seen one.

7) Jacked up chromed out trucks with swamp tires and growling engines?
Sadly, yes. We've got that in spades. I'm sure Princess Auto can't keep the "Calvin peeing on the Ford logo" sticker in stock because they're everywhere here! In T-cona's defense, there was a truck down the street in West End that was covered in chrome diamond plate so there are men with Freudian complexes throughout the city.

Holidays!!

Normally, while you're on holidays, in the back of your mind is always the thought "what's going on at the house", especially in this province where November can be either freezing cold and rupturing pipes, or a freak storm creates a random flood that can destroy a basement. We've always had wonderful friends and family coming to our house to look after our Kitty and this time, Brendon's parents will be coming by each day to give Kitty her special pills and her special food (low protein so her kidney failure doesn't progress faster). The pills have to be wrapped in a chewy treat so they don't have to wrestle her to the ground and ram it into her throat; she may be old, skinny, toothless, and clawless but she can be extra nasty to strangers. But this trip, we have added security from our neighbour. Oh yeah, one of the neighbour's house has an extensive camera system that monitors his house 24/7, with a live feed on a password protected website, and is backed up daily onto DVDs. Yup, we live next to Fort para-Knox. He has, the last time I counted on the way to the mail box, 7 cameras that covers 3/4 the radius of his house; 2 are night vision, 1 has a microphone, there's even 1 on the door bell. If anything were to happen to our house, as he told Brendon one day, he's got it on disc. He said that he can't "see into your house or anyting". This is supposed to make us feel welcome to the neighbourhood?! It's creepy creepy creepy. But being thousands of miles away and knowing that he's "covering" our house, is pretty reassuring. Just wonder if insurance can give us a discount for his paranoia?
I wonder if he's reading this...
I wonder if he's reading this as I type it next to the window near one of the night vision cameras....

Second Honeymoon!

In a few weeks, we're going on our second honeymoon! Feel free to start hating us. Hard to believe it's been a year since we were on our first honeymoon in the Dominican! We've been saving up our Air Miles for years and years until we'd have enough for a decent trip. Last year, we were *close* to having enough, so a year later, and many many trips to Rona, the Liquor Mart (yeah, that was a lot of work and arm twisting...) and Safeway for bonus miles, between the two of us we managed to collect about 8500 Air Miles. It is enough that the trip costs us 1/3 the normal price. The trip, for both of us, for a week, all-inclusive, is only costing us $900 instead of $2600. Did I mention that you can feel free to start hating us? Yeah, well, when you're only saddled with a ridiculous mortgage and a cat with kidney failure that requires pills, shots and special expensive food, you may as well blow all your Air Miles and nearly a grand on a trip. You'd be stupid not to!! We just loved the Gran Ventana and the Dominican Republic so much that we talk about going back all the time. I was looking at other all-inclusive resorts in the same area (Jamaica was top of my list, as was Costa Rica) but we just kept coming back to how much we loved the Gran Ventana. So, we're going back.

And yes, I know what you're all thinking so I'll beat you too it. No, this trip is not about making a baby. It's because we want to, can afford to, and will go to a fantastic resort, drink rum, and soak in Dominican sun for a week for $900. Nyah nyah nyah! :-P I know... I'm ridiculously mature for my age. But I get enough flack from my seriously-overly-concerned-about-my-reproductive-status co-workers with their constant opinions about why I'm not pregnant yet, that we need a week off in the 200% humidity, melanoma-inducing sun to get away from their daily advice about what worked for them, or recommendations from their friend of a friend of a niece of a neighbour. I'd like to pretend that I'm exaggerating about their daily comments, but I'm really not. I put on a little weight, they comment that I'm "starting to show" and rub my belly. Oh yes, that actually happened, (hence the new treadmill which I am using regularly). I complain that I'm not feeling well, eyebrows shoot up and a big grin spreads across their face with a "knowing" smile. Since when did sinus headache qualify as a symptom of pregnancy?! *sigh*

(follow-up... Just checked on WestJet Vacations and the trip we're taking is on sale for $750 per person, nearly $530 per person less than we're paying for the same dates. Dammit!!!)

The En Suite

The one room I whined and nagged Brendon the most about changing ever since we moved in, is our en suite. Actually, I whine and nag Brendon in every room, but the one I complain about the most is the en suite. It's white. It's really white. I'm talking "Blinded by the white" white. It's retina-searing, "okay, I'm awake now and seeing spots if you turn on the lights in the middle of the night to go pee" white. White linoleum (except where it's yellow from the previous owner's bath mat), white counters, white sink, white toilet, white vanity, white blinds and the inexplicable green "accent piece" behind the diagonal toilet and the window sill. Yeah, I don't get it either, but it's what was here when we moved in.
So I started my en suite transformation with baby steps and bought a new mirror. Then I bought melamine paint and did the vanity. We'd looked into getting a new vanity but because, for whatever reason, there's no shut-off valves on our plumbing, so we'd have to get someone in to do that first and melamine paint is $40, plumbers are $200. That just seemed like a lot more work than just painting it. Then I bought the new flooring, but that's currently under the bed, awaiting inspiration.

But after much nagging, Brendon finally relented (like he had a choice?) and said we can paint it this weekend so I rushed over to Home Depot before he changed his mind. I tsp'd the walls and we taped off all the baseboards and framing before painting. It's a small bathroom and he was done with the roller work in an hour while I finished the edges and trim. Here's the 75% completed en suite now. *sigh* Bliss.... :-)

AWESOME!!! The wall colour is C-I-L Tomorrow's Taupe with Cocoa Mousse on the cabinets. I prefer Behr paints but it didn't come in this colour, which is supposed to match the faux grout lines on the new flooring which hasn't been installed yet because it's going to be very difficult and we'll probably need some help with it. What you can't see in the photo is the diamond-shaped shower on the left that'll be one of the problems of putting in the new floor with the toilet being the other half of the problem. We can't do much about the shower, but the toilet? Looks like it'll be easier if we just lift it out and put the flooring around it instead of doing ten million cuts.

And in about a month from now, the view from our window will be this...

if Brendon's lucky! We're heading back to the Dominican for a second honeymoon!! We had enough Air Miles that we can go for a week for $900 for both of us. Normally, it's $1200 per person! Can't wait. If you ever get the chance to go to D.R., I highly recommend the Gran Ventana. It's a spectacular resort!!

New Clothes Dryer!!!!

Sooooooo excited!! I've heard that air drying your clothes is better for the environment and for your clothes, so we invested in a new $1400 dryer for the basement. It's even got mp3 capabilities!!

Ha ha ha. We upgraded from our stationary bike to a treadmill. I've wanted one for a while but the floor at the old house was tipsier than I was in my first year at university so we bought a bike instead. With the new house and LEVEL floors in the basement (shocking change!!) we decided to invest.

The upstairs bathroom is a work in progress. I finished the cabinets and we'd do the floors this weekend but I have a performance at the Prairie Theatre Exchange. Will post photos of the new bathroom later, but if you want to see pics of me dancing, go here.