Happy Easter and Spring Cleaning

Happy Easter! I hope you were treated to chocolate and treats!



This gorgeous photo is most definitely not mine but one I pilfered from the very beautiful blog Full House.

With this first rite of spring, I've been inspired as of late to spring clean around our apartment and started with my closet full of clothes! The following photo was taken by me - as if the quality doesn't automatically scream point-n-shoot - and is evidence of my effort! As always, I could have never completed the task with the support and supervision of my Moose! Note the stink eye he's giving me...hhhmmm...



On this particular Saturday (about 3 weekends ago), I managed to purge 12 pairs of pants, 15 tops, 4 sweaters, 1 pair of shoes, 1 pair of sandals, 1 suit and 1 purse - and of course I still have full closet! It felt good to declutter and to get the closet cleaned and organized. I then went through our outdoor/deck storage and laundry room and tidied and purged them too. Moose did his part and purged some of his toys that he never played with and donated them to the Everett animal shelter. And in the vein of tidying and reorganizing, I've done the same with my blogs-I-love column to the right - I've moved some of the less active blogs or those that have gone silent but are super resourceful to the So Helpful column.

I have a LOT of updating and recapping to do here and hope to get to it this upcoming week! Not only did is this post based on historical events but I've been extremely horrible with not posting photos from a very awesome trip in January that we took with my family and my day extrusion to Vancouver during the Olympics. So fingers crossed, I can get all the photos upload, formatted and posted this week!

Have you heard of Instructables?

It's a really neat DIY website where you can learn how to make almost anything you can think of! I plan on trying this Instructable recipe on the weekend - the 5 minute chocolate cake!

Heellllooooo cake!




There other project I'd like to try is this one - hack a regular pilot pen and replace the ink cartridge with a fancypants Mont Blanc rollerball refill! Instant upgrade for $12!



Happy Instructable-ing!!! :)

PS - Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Statement of the Day

"I’m so relaxed and happy here, at this hour, that I can turn over a Marc Jacobs bag, look at the price, and not immediately vomit. It’s all so perfect. Like the world would be without all the people."

Ahahahaha! :)

This gem comes from an article in The Times (London) - see, they're not totally evil, only during major world sporting events apparently - and is about how lovely department stores can be at 9:30am, the store in this piece is Selfridges on Oxford St, London.

She's ssssoooo awesome!!!

All things old

So this is a bit of a hodge-podge post compiled of a bunch of little things that I have just consumed from my couch in the past hour and bare with me, there is a common link.

Randomness #1

So Who Do You Think You Are?

This was originally a BBC series, which I believe continues to air over the UK, and was adopted a few years ago by the CBC and now (finally) has come to America! What is it? Well, it is a weekly program that traces the family history of celebrities. What's cool is not that these people are celebrities but rather how fascinating genealogy is and how much you really don't know anything about where you come from until you have the opportunity to dig in to the family gene pool and story vault. Tonight was the introductory episode of the U.S. version and Sarah Jessica Parker's mother's maternal line was featured (btw, her mother is adorable). SJP's family did not disappoint, her lineage had quite the story to tell from the California gold rush to the witch trails of Salem! Nerds likes me get a kick out of these kind of shows and I can't wait until I can start my genealogy search! This leads me to the next bit of randomness.

Randomness #2

So 10 years ago I started looking into my dad's parental family as I already knew a few things about them which included the name of the first Rivard to set foot in Canada from France, Nicolas Rivard. I ended up with a fair amount of information and was even able to trace the family back by two generations into France! Fastforward 10 years to this past December and I found the old word doc I had created 10 years earlier (happily not corrupted!) and started to Google the French ancestors and the places they were born and was thrilled with what I found! First, there is a plaque in a French village noting Nicolas and his new world compatriot's baptisms in France. Then with the help of Google maps, I was able to get an idea of where exactly in France my peeps were from! As I was doing all this searching one random night in December I was getting so excited and suggested/told Mike that if we get over to France again, I want to travel all to these villages and see if I can find out even more about these people, like my own Who Do You Think You Are!

Randomness #3

While cruising through PerezHilton.com - you know you all read it too! - I came across this super cool moving picture! It is from 1903 and is the first ever Alice in Wonderland movie! The British Film Institute Archive found the old reel and although it was badly degraded through the wonders of technology have been able to restore it. It can make for a long 9.5 minutes but it is very cool to see what they were able to do with movie making technology 107 years ago!!!!

Check out:





So the common link? All these things are old. That's it, that's all.

Anyways, bon weekend!

PS - Mike received some great news today! He's been named the Administrative Professional of the Year for his wing command! Yay! Congrats babe! xoxoxoxo

O Canada!

So we may not have "Own(ed) the Podium" BUT on the penultimate day of the Vancouver Olympics, we, Canada, do have the most GOLD MEDALS of any country (!!!) and provided Germany doesn't catch up tomorrow, we will have established the record number of gold medals won by a host country in a Winter Olympics! And even if we walk away with 25 or 26 medals total (Dear God/Yahew/Budda/Allah/Vishnu/Krishna, please let us win tomorrow!!!!!!), we still did a fantastic job and we should be immensely proud of our athletes, the cities of Vancouver, Whistler and Richmond and VANOC.

Oh, and Dear International Media - in particular The Times (London) - SUCK IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Especially you, The Times, you've been nothing but miserable, rude, pathetic gits these past two weeks, and well sorry mates but we've now got 13 Golds and the world has said that they've had a great time in Van...so there...I only hope London goes as well because won't you have a lot of egg on your faces then.... :)

PS - To everyone else who isn't The Times, apologies for the aggression but they've really been mega jerks in their coverage and it was both against the spirit of the Olympics and the levelheadedness typically displayed by the paper - basically poor sportmanships and poor taste.

PSS - I DO realize that my ranting against them (nearly) lowers me to their level but you know what? Sometimes bullies need a taste of their own medicine!

The Devil Wore Blue

So in my new job I essentially get paid to read the news all day long….I’m responsible for other stuff too but mainly it’s about reading. Specifically, I get paid to read news and coverage on Cloud Computing – at times tedious and at times extremely interesting. One thing I’ve come to learn is that in the world of IT, social media is one of the fastest ways to find out about software problems, outages and hacks and the fastest of all social media outlets in this regard is Twitter.

I’ve never bought into Twitter, in fact I did and still do fundamentally disagree with it as there really is such a thing as over-sharing and quite frankly, why do people think that other people care that they’re going for lunch now/they’re back from lunch and had a pastrami sandwich/they’re now in a food coma at their desk but are stoked about Friday’s night concert/blah, blah, blah, blah…… And while I disagree with it I do recognize its benefits – it’s a fantastic and free way to promote products/issues/events/across-North-America-road-trips (a la Alex and Luke :)) and in the world of IT it is a valuable resource for finding out about customer issues before they get through to a helpdesk and in the world of PR it allows you to get on top of an issue (hopefully) before it blows up. So this is all to say, I’ve had to sign up for Twitter and now have a bloody account. I only follow people for work – mainly IT gurus and wanna-be gurus and of course, Alex and Luke – who, by the way, accepted our invitation to stay with us if they find themselves in the Seattle area (I hope they do!) and who will be on CityTV in TO!

Anyways, I keep reminding myself that I’m not really on twitter, I’m just obliged to stalk people online for my job. And that’s ok.