No one has lived here for a very long time… but if you want to have a visit, go to:
That’s home now.
Ending and Beginning
So, it is the start of the new year… and as always, let’s start off by reviewing the “2011 Things I Want to do List”
1. Learn to spin my own yarn. (Nope… BUT my husband did!!! This plan has totally shifted and my husbands new found interest in spinning has made me want to leave this up to him. He is quite good at it, and I reap the benefits of hubby made handspun!)
2. Read all of the Charles De Lint Newford series. (Nope, books were all still in boxes until November. )
3. Do more hiking. We hiked our asses off starting in February!
4. Buy our dream house. We moved into our first home 10th, 2011! Huge, life altering amazing thing.
5. Not let the actions of others control my happiness. I worked pretty hard at this this year and I feel I made a lot of progress.
6. Can serious amounts of food from our own garden/further develop my canning skills. (Nope, but, we did not get our garden space until October so, I think it is understandable.
7. Knit a pair of socks. YES! Socks, done! See them HERE.
8. Get back into Bikram, twice a week minimum/get in shape. (Partial completion. I did a 40-day Bikram challenge and gave it my all last spring. Am I “in shape”? No. )
9. Adopt an animal from NWT SPCA. (inspired by Nicholle <3) (Sadly, no : (
10. Spend as much quality time as possible with my husband. We had an amazing year, and in particular the summer so packed full on one-on-one outdoor activities and we really got to spend a lot of quality time together.
Usually this is the part where I make my list for 2012. This year, I am not making one. I am not making one because it would be 100 things long. I have things I want to do coming out of my ears! This year I am just going to take everything as it comes and try to do as much that I want, as much as I am able.
That being said, this will be my last blog on Everyday Is Waiting for Halloween.
But it’s because my husband and I are starting a blog together, which will hopefully launch March 1, 2011. The blog will have many components, it will have much more informative and purposeful posts then this one does and hopefully people will actually want to read it.
Our new blog is called Building A Frog (I will insert a link when it launches.) Some of the topics we will cover are:
- DIY projects
- First house advice and questions
- Knitting
- Canning
- Gardening
- Home repair
- Money saving ideas
- Upcycling
- Composting
- Landscaping
- Cooking
- Thrifting
- Baking
- Recipes
- Homesteading
- Fishing
- Sustainability
- and our general ramblings and banter.
We hope to have guest posting from a variety of people who have some great information to share as well as some local focus and information. This si a new and exciting venture for us and we hope you will check it out once it it up.
Since I never did get around to doing a post on our new house, I am going to end off the blog with a picture of it.
Our little house on 1.04 acres of all ours.
Thanks to everyone who ever bothered to poke around in these rambling examples of my lifes goings on. It was fun : )
– Christie
Neglected But Not Forgotten
I know I promised a proper recap blog months ago, but honestly I have not had the time. Life has been insane. I know I say that a lot but truly, I am not exaggerating this time. Here is how the Fall went…
School started the first week of September – School was WAY more time consuming then I anticipated. (Because why on earth would I assume that combining a 3 year program into 1 year would be excessive?)
Working – still working 24 hours, 2 – 12 hour overnights, every weekend.
October 4th – we closed on our first house : )
October 10th – My first “day off” since September 6th. We moved into our new house.
October 15, 16, 17 – Rhinebeck weekend and the end of my yarn fast!!!!! We had an AMAZING time and it was a much needed, if short, vacation.
November 27th – My last night of work. I just could not keep up with work and school together anymore. It was driving me into the ground.
November 30th – I met my bestest imaginary twin, Kathleen, for the first time in person, after knowing each other for 5 years. And I got to meet her amazing daughter Lyric.
December 16th – The semester was officially over and I was on Winter Break.
Since the 16th I have been cleaning, shopping, reading, crafting, knitting, visiting, sleeping, unpacking, decorating, baking, cooking, hiking, gaming, and making lots and lots of plans! One of my biggest plans has to do with blogging so look for that update soon.
This was just a quick update, but hopefully it explained my absence.
More to come soon… I promise!!! : P
Unicorn Restyle (& I am, yet again, a terrible blogger.)
I need to write like 5 blogs, about various, very exciting things. And I will, but I can’t right now, so here is a quick post about a very simple restyle of a thrift store find : )
There is an amazing little country thrift store in Hartington, Ontario where everything is $5.00 for a garbage bag full. Today my husband and I managed to fill half a bag, that’s $2.50. I got an adorable and very useful teal canvas raincoat, a purse, some sandals, a book about gnomes for a special little boy and Phill got some old records. I also grabbed this…
Sticker said "Silver Plated, Made in China."
All unicorns have potential, even tarnished ones : ) So I grabbed my trusty spray paint and 2 coats of black and 1 coat of clear gloss later, our noble beast is so chic he can hardly stand it.
I love the enamel look of how this turned out.
This basically took about 10 minutes, including drying time and cost an estimated .50 cents. I think the clear gloss really gave it that extra boost to make it look like enamel. Now I need to go buy more stud earrings so he can have an abundance of bling!
The Little Things: Promises To Keep
I was so excited when this book came out in trade paper back. (Previously it was only done in a HC limited edition and had to be purchased from the publisher.) And then when I bought it I was so excited to read it! But I waited for awhile because I wanted to savour it. Now I only have about 30 pages left and I am already mourning the loss. I love Charles De Lint and everything he writes but, oh man, do I ever love it when he writes about Jilly Coppercorn. I am already sad and I haven’t even finished it yet. I would read nothing but Jilly books if there were enough of them. I can’t wait to get our house so I can unpack all of my books and reread my De Lint books. I miss them.
So I will finish this today and move on, begrudgingly. (And soon I will update about all the things that have been keeping me too busy to blog, like house hunting (YAY!), camping, visiting with friends and all kinds of other excuses.)
The Little Things: My husband’s container garden
I am not much of a gardener. I like tending them, and eating from them, but I am not so good with the planting and getting things to live part. My husband, on the other hand, is wonderful at it. Due to our current small space, this year he is doing container gardening only. And it already looks so nice. I am in love with the coffee can herbs! What a great upcycling idea.
Herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers and beans.
Mint, thyme, chives, parsley & cilantro
A hiking we will go!
Not much going on right now, just the same ol’ same ol’. We have had some great hiking days and some time at the cottage, but we are really looking forward to next month when the camping craze will begin.
We has a GREAT time hiking at Charleston Lake Provincial Park a few weeks ago and scouted out the yurts and the camp sites… and of course went right home and booked a few nights. We now have 2 camping trips planned for June. YAY!!!!
Anyways, here are a few pictures from our hike:
We have had a very wet Spring. All the lakes are high and there is running water everywhere.
All this rain means lots of beautiful green things are sprouting up.
Phill loves raptors. He was very excited to find this hawk feather on our hike. We also saw 3 Golden Eagles hunting low on some updrafts that day. Very cool.
There are a lot of really amazing geological formations in this park.
The beavers must have gone for a coffee break : )
The Little Things: Summer To-Do List
Trillium, Ontario's provincial flower, are currently blanketing the forest floors. Reason enough, to get out and hike! I took this last week at Lemoine Point Conservation Area. Click to see better detail : )
I am so excited about our growing, Summer to-Do List! Phill and I both love the outdoors, hiking, camping and nature. Now that we are living back in Kingston, we have an ever growing list of things we want to do in and around the area. I grew up here, and there are lots of places I want to re-visit with my husband, as well as lots of things I never did. Sometimes when you are from a place, you see less of it then you mean to. Here is our list as it stands right now:
- Camping, camping, camping!!! (always the top item on our list.)
- Yurt camping at Charleston Lake Provincial Park. (We are going to check the yurts out this week when we are hiking at the park.)
- Spelunking at the Warsaw Caves. (I did this in Grade 8 and have always wanted to go back.)
- Day trip to Sandbanks Provincial Park (beach and swimming on a hot day.)
- Upper Canada Village. (We will be there on June 10th, Phill’s birthday, for the Medieval Festival.)
- Boldt Castle (one of my most favourite places on earth. We took Phill’s parents here
last yeartwo years ago,wow, but we have never been there just the two of us. Romantic picnic day?) - Phill would like to take a kayaking course. (I’d love to do this with him but I have a fear of small boats.)
- Hiking, hiking, hiking (We started our hiking for the year in February, but we are up for plenty more. There are so many great trails in our area.)
- Cycling (I admit it is my fault we don’t do this as much as we could. I am a wimp when it comes the bike riding.)
We have our weeks filling up already. I am looking so forward to it. Something else I also love about our list is that we have a strict rain or shine policy about it. For instance we are going to Charleston Lake on Tuesday to hike and check out the yurts, and there is a rainfall warning. Wellies and ponchos it is! (Often we like doing things even better when it rains because there are less people around!) Expect lots of pictures of our summer adventures as the weeks go on : )
Oh, life.
General update of the happenings that make up my life.
First off, I am back to work. This both simplifies and complicates things… but we are not going to get into that.
Secondly, I have decided to go back to school. I want to shift my role in my job into something more training and developement based and I am going to be doing some upgradeing to help that along. I am both excited and nervous about this.
Now that the mundane and genereally uninteresting update is done, now we can talk about fun stuff!!!
I completed my 40-Day Yoga challenge on April 22nd. My final tally was 35/40 days completed. I am really happy with that result. It was hard, but I really stuck to it and as a suprise, Phill bought me another unlimited pass for doing so well on my challenge. (Love that guy!) I am averaging 5 classes per week and am still loving it.
Our hotel rooms for Rhinebeck are booked! I am crazy excited about it already and jsut can’t freaking wait to go to the festival! We already have 2 camping trips set up for June and July and we are hoping to sneek away sometime this month as well.
We had our first mini-vacation of the year last weekend, UFC 129 in Toronto.
We had a great time and it was really cool to be a part of the first ever UFC held in Ontario and be a part of the largest UFC ever to date.
The entire fight card was great. We saw some amazing knockouts. And even though GSP is my favourite, I have to say that the Hominick/Aldo fight was my fight of the ngiht. I have to give it up to Mark Hominick, the guy is a warrior. He didn’t win, but damn did he ever not give up.
Mark's poor, poor face and head.
And as far as the George St. Pierre and Jake Sheilds fight went it was a good fight that ended the way everyone thoguht it would : ) And wow, the fan support for GSP was so amazing. Defening even. I am not very expereinced in how sporting events generally work, I only like MMA and wrestling mainly, but I would say that not much could match the hometown/country pride heard at Rogers Center that night.
We will definetly be attending any UFC that comes to Ontario from now on.
On our way home on Sunday we met up with Matt and Lara and spent the day at the Toronto Zoo, which is one of our favourite places, ever. It was a very rainy day, but we had a great time and the Red Panda even made an appearance for us.
He is usually hiding in the trees whenever we are at the zoo.
We ended the day with some awesome Korean BBQ and then made the drive home. (We were sooo exhausted by the time we got there.)
And in knitting news, I have completed my first ever sock!
It was not as scary as I though and I am hoping to get the second one done soon.
I am going to end this blog off with a picture that makes me very happy. Sneed, Toki and Hoss are all doing great and are such great brothers. I am so very glad that we got the babies. They are bringing us so much joy and entertainment. Sneed even loves them. They are growing like monsters and I am pretty sure that we are going to have the biggest cats anyone has ever seen.
Our sweet boys.
Stash Busting 2011: The Next Level
I have not bought a single skein or ball of yarn since announcing my yarn diet on January 19th. I must say, I am impressed with myself. Its a big deal. Really, it is. And because I have been doing so well, not buying, knitting up my stash I decided to up the stakes. I vow to not buy any yarn until October 15th, 2011. Why October 15th you may ask? RHINEBECK BABY!!!! YEAH!!!! Phill and I are headed five and a half hours south to the Duchess County Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York, October 15th and 16th. Last year it was already too late to go once I figured out how close we were now. But this year, we are there! And it would be impossible (and cruel) for me not to buy yarn at Rhinebeck. So, I figure, if I want it that bad, I can wait until the festival. Go big or go home… or go to Rhinebeck and buy a disgusting amount of yarn and then go home.
And to make this even more interesting, over the summer I am going to try and knit Phill and I each a sweater to wear at the festival.
Speaking of knitting, I have been getting some done. Not as much as usual though becasue my new job and my yoga challenge have been taking up a lot of my time, but soon everything will regulate and knitting will return to normal. Here are a few things I have been working on.
I started my first pair of socks! (WIP)
I have made quite a few tinkle ball cozies. This one being modeled by the lovely Mishka.
I made a cover for my Kobo E-reader.
I made a black hat full of hatred and angst, at the request of a teenaged boy.
I am excited to start some new projects soon and I am already dreaming about the Rhinebeck experience. Come on October! (Also, our 3rd wedding anniversary is on the 12th of October so we will have to throw some romantical stuff in there as well while we are out of twon : )
Everyday Is Waiting For Halloween 