June 15

party

So Matt, Tom and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary of being here in Vancouver on Saturday. Yes, I probably celebrated more than Tom or Matt did but that is beside the point. We had a great little party at our house with all the new and old friends we've made here in Vancouver. We drank, stuffed our faces, swore excessively and kept our neighbours awake until 3am. It was a good night.

Aside from that not too much is new and exciting. Here's a quick run down of anything in my life that is remotely interesting, in point form of course:

1. I missed David Sedaris give a reading at the CBC last week. This made me sad but seeing as I was deathly ill with what I am sure was the swine flu, there really wasn't much I could do about it.
2. I rode my scooter around the alley way yesterday. It was SO MUCH FUN! I still have to get the transfer papers filed and buy some insurance before I can ride it around for real.
   
3. I sprained my wrist last week while taking a sick day. Yes, I fell down the basement stairs. My wrist swelled up and had to be wrapped. It's funny because my dad is worried about me riding around on my scooter when really he should be more worried about me walking up and down my own stairs.
4. I'm going to see Au Revoir Simone on Wednesday. They are one of my most favorites, so I am very excited and will most likely spend too much money at the merchandise table.
5. Matt is working in the Okanagan Valley this week. I miss him.

Ok guys! That's it for now.
xoxox

June 6

matt got me a present.

It actually used to belong to our friend Tyler, who is moving to the island. He gave it to Matt because it didn't work. But now it does.

I'm going to buy a black helmet and drive around Vancouver on it. Don't worry Mom, I'll be careful.

Woooooooooooooooo!

June 1

tom is writing you a letter.

1. I'm listening to Tanya Davis. She makes me make happy face. I heart her music. And you should too.
2. I'm about to be a real adult and do my finances. I've been afraid to sit down and do them for a while but I'm much more afraid of ending up like people in the TV show, Til Debt Do Us Part. That show gives me nightmares.
3. My friend Tyler is over and he is playing his viola.
4. I NEED THESE.
   
5. I want to go and see Dog Day and Julie Doiron play on June 14th. (For those who aren't aware, there's an east coast theme here).
6. I'm in homesickness rehab. Starting after June 14th.

xoxox

May 24

lunch break

I swear this blog isn't dead yet; unfortunately, I have other things I have to work on. You know how it is.

In the mean time, follow me on flickr.

Ciao for now.

April 18

too tired for text.

April 4

tom can sometimes be be a reluctant model.

1. The front garden is mostly finished. Nic did most of the work today but I did get to bike home from the garden centre with newly purchased pansies in my bike basket, which pleased me to no end.
   
2. My bike, Lucy, is getting new handlebars this weekend. She's going to be so sexy. I just have to find some awesome handlebar tape, because the fluorescent pink tape she had before will be hard to replace.
3. I cleaned my oven. It doesn't smoke now when you turn it on.
   
4. I got a giant blackberry thorn stuck in my thumb today. I won't lie, for a minute there I feared for my poor thumb's life.
5. Tom and I walked to the lake and shared a pumpkin bran muffin from the bakery. We both agreed it was a delicious muffin.
   

xoxox

March 31

vancouver on my lunch break.

March 29

tom getting a little action

So, I'm super excited about my new camera. I gave her a good test run today when Tom and I went for a walk and she worked beautifully. I took many pictures of dogs sniffing Tom's butt. The photo quality also looks pretty good for a $100 camera. Yea, I'm totally pleased with myself.

But now that I've walked Tom, taken some pictures, did a little work in the garden and posted my photos all over the internet like a little hussy, I need to clean my room. So, off I go.

I promise you can look forward to many pict-o-blogs to come since I'm taking pictures of everything.

xoxox

March 28

admiring the new trooper

It's true, Matt bought a new Trooper. I'll even admit, I miss the old Trooper (or Troopie, as I affectionately called him), so it will be nice to have something on the road again. Summers are hard if you don't have a vehicle to escape in.

You know what's also great? I bought a new camera today! Unfortunately it's bedtime and I have a day full of picture taking ahead of me, so you're just going to have to wait for that pict-o-blog extravaganza.

You'll all live I'm sure.

March 25

Worst blogger ever.

I promise a worthy blog will appear shortly. I've just been busy daydreaming.

xoxox

March 13

Chances are I'm probably writing a short story about you.

March 4

Watch this.

(My dear friend Holly is the woman with the alluring smile).

February 25

Salty chocolate is delicious.

February 20

It seems that 2009 is the year of the survey. Here's another I felt ambitious enough to do:

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

x = those you have read.
+ = the ones you LOVE.
* = those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens *
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (complete? no. a lot? yes.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
9 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy * (I mostly just feel like I need to read this)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh*
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame*
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (seriously, what's with every Jane Austen book ever written?)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (this was made into a terrible movie)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (the only John Irving book I haven't read. Screw you bbc list!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins*
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X (obviously, I'm half Islander, it's required).
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X+ (one of my most favorite reads)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (fuck off, Jane!)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X (I can easily say this is my ultimate, number one favorite book. Ever.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X (unfortunately)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie*
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X (if you've never read this, don't. If you feel you MUST read Joyce, read one of his shorts. They're equally as painful - just significantly shorter)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X+ (oh, sylvia. how I adore thee).
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X (several times, I loved this book as a child)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks X+ (awesome book and entirely shocking)
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X+ (also a fave of mine).
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X (why is this here and not included in the Complete Works of Shakespeare)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

34 in total. I'm impressed.

February 14

what?

February 12

This fantastic artist I know from Halifax was on Martha Stewart yesterday. Check out the clip here:

Michelle SaintOnge on Martha Stewart

I love Martha and now I can count one (1) degree of separation between me and her.


Wooo.

February 5

25 things you may not have known about me:

1. I ate Doritos and a bag of mini Rolos for supper yesterday.
2. I think This American Life is the cat's meow.
3. I often spell the word, February, wrong. Although, I'm pretty sure that's a common mistake (really, does it need two R's?).
   
4. I had crushes on two of my high school English teachers and almost all of my English professors.
   
5. Literature gets me hot.
6. I first heard the Cranberries' album, Everybody Else is Doing It, So why Can't We, in the summer of 1993 and it changed my life. I also became obsessed with road movies.
7. My bed has flannel sheets on it. And a feather tic, which is apparently not a frequently used term (the word duvet can suck it).
8. You probably make me nervous.
9. I really liked the movie Sans toit ni loi by Anges Varda.
   
10. The essay, On Running Away by John Keats had a really positive influence on my life. I still like to pull it out when I'm feeling defeated.
    
11. I spend an unnecessary amount of time on this website.
12. I once owned shares in a company called, University Girls Calender, Ltd. I made $250 off those shares and profited from the exploitation of college party girls from all over the Maritimes.
13. I have a revolting obsession with the novel Lolita.
14. I worry that I'm going senile.
15. I think life as a Dryad could be kind of nice.
16. I used to know a girl in high school who thought that bunnies laid eggs.
17. 2002 was a really fun year for me.
18. I tried to go see a movie the other night but failed.
19. When I was nine I killed a frog because I wanted to have a funeral for him. I think I was about seventeen when I finally got over the guilt.
    
20. Finch's Tea & Coffee House is my favorite place to eat in Vancouver.
21. This is taking me a lot longer than it should.
22. My feet stink.
23. I would really love to have coffee with Holly at Steve-O-Reno's tomorrow.
24. I once thought I would become a writer. Only I'd write about disgusting things, like splattered blood and smeared chunks of zombie limbs.
25. I'm done.
    

Febrauary 1

I really want to go to this:
http://peoplesprom.resist.ca/

January 18

Things to do today:

1. Walk Tom and the laundry to the laundromat.
   
2. Clean bedroom
3. Tidy up the house
4. Buy dog food
5. Eat
   
6. Ballet Class
7. Meet up with Nathalie for coffee
   
8. Try and figure out how to bind off my knitting project
9. Start new knitting project
10. Yoga
11. Finish my book

Seriously. Unless I put eating on my to do list it just doesn't happen.

January 13

Busy and unsettled.

January 7

So I don't have lice. Or at least not right now.

I went to dance. It was fun and now my entire body aches. Some body parts more than others.

Work is fun. I'm organizing about a decades worth of neglected files and talking to many seniors. And tomorrow we're having a staff meeting with doughnuts.

I shamelessly want to see this. I can't help it, I love Kate Winslet (minus that time she made Titantic). And it's by Sam Mendes, who is a genius story teller.

Otherwise, I think Hollywood should die.

Bedtime.
xoxox

January 6

Tired. So very, very tired. Yea:

1. So far my new job is amazing. And exhausting. I'm engaged and learning a tonne. Actually, my brain is soaking up so much information each day it throbs with fatigue. I love it.
2. Matt and I celebrated our 6th anniversary today. He took me to Burgoo on Main for supper. We had the stout and cheddar fondue, among other bites of delight (like french onion soup and Burgoo's special brew of beer). It was a nice night. Also - Go us for being awesome.
   
3. I've started a scarf. It took me a couple of tries but I got it going and the stitches are slowly getting neater. One day I'll be knitting beautiful sweaters but until then it's ugly scarves for everyone!
4. Hoping of going to my modern dance class at Habour Dance tomorrow, but I'm kind of letting my social anxiety get the best of me. I'll be really disappointed in myself if I don't go. Why would I be such a chicken?
5. Oh. And, I may or may not have lice.
   

So, on that note, I'm going to go and knit a few more rows. Goodnight.
xoxoxox

January 1

Charity Dawn's New Year's Resolutions:

1. Dance more
2. Read more
3. Write more
4. Knit and sew more
5. Cook and bake more
   

What are your resolutions for 2009?

xoxoxox