CLEAN ALL THINGS!

a crazy urge to purge stuff has seized me today, and i spent a very enjoyable 5 hours going through dust, dryer sheets, old nuts, bolts, construction left overs, papers, more papers, other papers, cds, packaging, plastic bags, dry wall pieces, nails, other bolts, light switches, outlet plates (x6), and clothes and did:

2 closets cleaned out
1 laundry room cleaned out
1 laundry room organized with new nails and less stuff
7 loads of laundry done (not kidding. maybe 8 if you count last night’s start.)
6 things hooked/hung to ease (i still have 1 gruntdal pole left to hang – not sure where is best to have more hookage area)
2.5 massive bags of recycling/trash tossed
1 box of misc stuff to parents
2 living room corners cleaned out
3 piles of things in bedroom cleaned out
1 olya desk cleaned out and re-set up with computer (yay!)

and about half a pinot noir consumed after that to aid in relaxation.

the best thing is? on wednesday my cleaning lady is coming, and she will tidy up the dust/dirt that my clean up revealed. she’ll also probably leave encouraging comments on the state of the closets, which always helps.

dinner tonight

onion lightly fried till transparent in some vegetable oil on medium, then mushrooms (white and portobello) sauteed with water, onion, and white wine and lots of thyme for about 20 minutes until water and white wine evaporated and mushrooms and everything got dark brown. salt & peppered in the middle.

served as a side to

shrimp (from frozen) cooked in a pat of butter, 4 cloves of garlic, and again some white wine for about 4-6 minutes until shrimp was red.

was DELICIOUS. mushrooms don’t look tasty but without realizing it i went for 2nds and 3rds and ate the entire (Very healthy) (especailly by my low low low standards) dish.

what’s cool is:
1 shrimp were costco frozen – EASY
2 mushrooms were on the old side – eg not good looking for a salad – but still good to eat. great use for them
3 i drizzled the garalic/butter/wine sauce from shrimp over mushrooms before “serving”, to myself, that is.

it was awesome.

4 years do take a toll

holy cow, 4 years do take a toll. this seems like yesterday.

this was the first time tim came to visit me in australia. this was 4 weeks after i left, we missed eachother horribly, and he bought a ticket to see me. don’t ask about the hair.
the shirt is the one my friends in netherlands gave me. its still treasured.

though it didn’t always seem like that at the time, boy. fun times. <3

weird dreams

had a really messed up dream last night, one of those where the details are SO strange that I can’t figure out where they came from?

it was like a maze, that started in my high school. a “game” maze – you entered with a few friends. charles, our consierge led us in and helped make us these rubber band guns. we included myself, tim, our 2 cats, and some other people – friends – i cant identify. as we start going through the maze i see our 2 cats run around, exploring, and then a 3rd black cat appears. i think “Hey they’re gonna have fun” and we keep walking
eventually we get to a twisty turn where we all understand we’ll need to shoot the fake monsters with our rubber bands. the atmosphere is creepy (its dark) but also we know its a game-maze, so no one is freaked out.
i can’t shoot because my hand is stuck near the wall because of the pressure from the people behind me.
our rubber band guns break and the cardboard monsters (like jack in a box) don’t actually harm us – but there’s a voice saying “you are now dead!”. we turn around and take another turn of the maze, when i say “i’m tired of this, this is not fun” and take the first random door.

the door takes me out to a courtyard, with dozens of porches, each one labelled with a decade period. i open one randomly and see something like a puppet show that falls back and reveals hitler which falls back and reveals an alien. someone approaches from behind the thing (this is all me looking into a hallway from the porch) and leads the alien away by the hand saying “this is not for her to see, let’s go”.

i step away and see my two cats, one of whom tail is now shorter. i freak out, pick them up and get flashes of what they went through while they were away (nothing very happy, Bad People did Bad Things to them). i get VERY pissed off and run up to someone standing in the middle of the yard, saying “what the hell is going on, what the fuck is wrong with you sickos” and he/she (can’t remember) goes “you’re not supposed to be here”.

mind you, int he background, i can hear the events of each decade behind the doors. JFK shooting, 20s music, martin luther king, ww2, ww1.

i look around and start looking for my decade, but can’t find anything – everything is in the previous centuries. i end up finding some unmarked door and walking into what seems like an old abandoned hospital. i’m carrying the cats this entire time. i find a vet, and i start demanding answers from her. she seems to be a drunk nazi vet who is very old and very tired. she explains its not “their fault, they thought the cat wasn’t yours”. i get very pissed off and make her hold the cats and go “SEE WHAT THEY DID” and she is terrified and sobers up.

at this point i’m tired, frustrated, scared and angry. i jump out the window and wake up.

the black cat is curled up RIGHT BESIDE ME, leaning into me, and first thing i do is check her tail. it’s all there!

yeah. freaky dreams.

media i’m enjoying and kitchen update

Lady Gaga, of course. All of her. Alejandro especially.


this knock off bag

IKEA’s new textile line

all the kitchens below on the path in our renovation :-)


All inspiration and floor plans are here

Currently I’m pricing contractors, finishes and appliances. The floorplan is basically finalized (last images in the set linked above), cabinets are most likely the shiny white abstract ikea line. Still up for debate:

countertop

appliances

tap

sink

I really love white careera marble but its freaking expensive from what I hear.



this beautiful preppy look

The desire for the material is awful. I want new shoes, I want to update my wardrobe to be more classic (as if I don’t have enough black in my closet), I want that knock off bag.

My camera seems to have died. Rest in peace, d70. I have no money to get a new one given how I want a new kitchen. Let’s just hope I won’t need to take any photos in the next month. (HAH).

I learned how to make some REALLY kick ass cocktails recently. @shazow and @limedaring were kind enough to let me experiment on them sunday night; then the experiments continued after the lovely dinner at colbourne lane (which apparently is probably like the fanciest restaurant in the city? who knew. SIMONA my darling coworker knew. here is simona.

simona - glance

she took us there as a treat, silly lady. though it was still much appreciated.), when simona came by for continuation of the party. i managed to whip up 4 different cocktails from what seemed absolutely no ingridients on hand.

one milky. (zeus’s… magic juice, let’s say, though our name is a bit more dirty)

one chocolaty (no name)

one lemony (elephaunt lips)

one sweet (a modified sweet lips or something like that)

i’m missing grenadine among other necessary ingridients

tonight i made banana bread and it again succeeded. if you ever want to try making it, this recipe can do no wrong. even with week old bananas. for serious. and it takes like 5 minutes all together of effort for a week of breakfasts. amazing.

proque te vas

february is coming

its a bit hard to believe that 1/12th of the year is already has went by. the stress situation is getting a bit better; in part because of lessened workload and in part because i’ve learned to handle it better. i still have ways to go in terms of managing to not let it get to me and to juggle all the responsibility without it eating into my after-5 time, but at least i have my priorities set.

its a bit trippy to think that 1/12 of the year has already passed. its such a large chunk of the year, and it seems like yesterday that time came back with the big white box from apple, or the policeman threatened to arrest my dad at nathan phillips square for public intoxication during the new years celebration.

this month has been particularly good because we made some correct steps to a better life. we have had some good conversations regarding what both of us want in the next 5 years; a cleaning lady will start coming in weekly; and a carpenter is coming in tomorrow to look at the kitchen for a possible reno. the 3 things have very little to do with eachother other than we’re becoming more adult-like in our thoughts, and behavior.

today we went to dave and busters for a friend’s birthday. the lady in question is a friend of a friend, though she has helped us out magnificently with the wedding.  it was shocking how young people there felt to me. this was probably the first day i felt Old/Adult. there is something very refreshing and terrifying about being able to spend $10 on tickets without any worry; there is something very wrong when 80% of the crowd is younger than you. WEIRD. and i’m only 26.

i still think of myself as being 25 years old. not 26. though i do actively remember my age.

the condo is coming along nicely. other than the hypothetical kitchen reno we’re pretty stabilized. OH YES! ALMOST FORGOT:

mom gave me some awesome birthday presents. she refinished (well, finished from our light start together) the fiberglass Eames Herman Miller chair that was made march 14, 1956. I know because I’m looking at the manufacturing label RIGHT NOW. its framed by my table. she stripped and sanded down the chair and repainted it, and replaced it with the legs that I got forever ago to replace the broken old ones. this chair came from my previous position with the Mining Company. I’m madly in love with the fact that I have a 50+ year old chair. HOW AMAZING IS THAT.

but to boot, she refinished the twin to the original wooden chair from the same corporate location; i now posses 2 matching vintage teak chairs. I love them to pieces. It’s probably a bit sick. BUT OH MAN.

I got myself some tulips on Wednesday and they still look great, even though they ran out of water last night when we slept over at Karmun’s; amazingly enough the refreshed vase this afternoon rescued them. they actually finished the exciting water bone dry.

I started buying musin on iTunes. I can’t stop listening to I’m your Man – Down With Webster – a Canadian band! And I bought it on iTunes. There’s something superbly pleasant about buying music so cheaply and easily. And legally.

Flat Rock Pinot Noir 2007 is awesome.

January 2010

I feel like I’m starting to feel very tired from the stress. thank goodness I have:
a supportive husband
an amazingly patient and helpful girlfirend
ridiculously easy going friends who forgive my disappearances
smarter than I coworkers
and a good manager

but I still want to start leaving work at 5, not 6-7:30 which is what goes so far.

random:
black seal rum is delicious
want to try rye whiskey and single malt
got a tetanus shot – ouch!