Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Merry Christmas, Love, and Joys of the Season to All!

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Chaos update
Well, it's past the middle of the month and almost nothing is accomplished at the new place. The biggest problem is that I can't work over there during the day because of Ben, and after Steve gets home, we're both too tired. That leaves the weekends, when we've also had to do all of our regular errands - ack! My downstairs neighbour is helping me knock down a wall in the nursery that had about two feet of space behind it that I can use for storage. Of course there were big old heating ducts there and when we took them out, part of the hallway wall came with it - oops! Now we have to fix that as well, and have an electrician in to take down a register. She's also going to add some plugs for us in January some time. If she's going to do that, we have to remove some baseboards to make her job easier, which means that we're going to have some wall issues which will make painting impossible until she finishes. We should be able to start with the kitchen and bathroom though because we're not doing anything in there until we buy the the place. We've had huge piles of snow falling on us recently which makes wandering around with Ben a bit more difficult. On the up side, the snow is beautiful and Christmassy and Ben looks very Maggie Simpsonesque in his snowsuit. I've almost finished the shopping too. We went downtown on Tuesday and got most of it completed. I pushed the stroller and Steve carried Ben around from store to store, which is easy when you live in a city with such a great underground network. Ben, of course, got a lot of attention. Part of being carried around by someone who's 6'4, is that you get a great view. He looked like a figurehead on a ship, all wide-eyed and smiling at everyone. He's really becoming an atrocious flirt!

Monday, December 01, 2003

Let the chaos begin!
We are now renting two places until Feb 1. Yup, the lady moved the last of her stuff from next door and hopefully cleaned up a bit. This means a month of cleaning, painting, sanding, and organizing for the big move sometime in January. Steve's mom arrives for a visit tomorrow, so I should be able to start getting stuff done over there Wednesday. It will be great to paint in a place without furniture! I've almost decided on paint colours, but I have to take the colour chips over and stick them up on the wall and have a look.
Yesterday officially ended something called black powder hunting season. First it's bow season, then two weeks of rifle, then black powder.I can only assume that this means hunting with muskets. I suppose that the deer have more of a chance this way, as you only get one shot, and then you have to reload, but it just seems silly to me. Do you also dress up in period costumes? To me, hunting is fine for food, but I've never appreciated people heading into the woods with their new red hats shooting at anything that moves for sport. My grandmother puts orange coats on the dogs for a month, because you hear all kinds of stories of city folk coming up with their rifles and shooting cows, and horses, and dogs, mistaking them for deer. My dad used to hunt when we lived in Alaska. He and a group of friends would get flown up north into the middle of nowhere for a week and hunt moose and bear. They normally came back with a couple of moose (mooses?) that they would split between them and we would have meat for half a year. When we moved back here, my dad retired his rifles. He didn't think that it was fair to shoot something that couldn't defend itself. My dad's opinion is that if you're hunting a moose or a bear and you miss, that animal has a pretty good chance to kill you (of course, not as good as if it had a rifle with a site and opposable thumbs), but what's a deer going to do? Blink you to death?