lifepassedby.com » weather

Spring where are you?

kasper — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:17:35 +0000

Just when I thought the weather was starting to become more spring-like, mother nature decides that winter isn’t over yet and dumps snow down on us. How depressing. I must say that I pretty much shut myself in the house during winter, so with the nice weather I had just managed to get my son out of the house and into the sunshine. We did have a couple of nice days there before it got yucky and cold again. Hopefully this Easter weekend will be nice.
With the change of seasons I get antsy to get my house all cleaned up. It’s such a mess at the moment. I should really be holding a garage sale to get rid of a ton of junk, I’m just so unorganized. As I start to put away my winter stuff I start thinking what the hell did I wear all of last year when the weather was nice. I always feel like I don’t have enough clothes. Me and every other woman out there I’m sure. Mind you in the last couple of years I’ve managed to donate 4 garbage bags worth of clothing to the Salvation Army. I am in desperate need of new pants. Of all the shopping I could do I absolutely HATE shopping for pants. They just never seem to fit properly. I usually go for the petites since I’ve got short stubby legs, but often enough they’re too short or the regulars are just too long. I suppose I could just them hemmed, but I’m just to lazy for that kind of commitment. When I get all frustrated with clothes shopping I can always just buy a bag…have you seen the ones at Lucky-Brand? Oh man are they ever sexy!
So as it works out this year, Easter Monday is my little man’s 2nd birthday! Holy cow, I really can’t figure out where all the time went. I have been madly painting his bedroom to get it all ready for his birthday. Okay, so I started it over the March Break and it was supposed to take like a week, but as per usual with me I decided to do more and more things and therefore it’s taken that much longer to get done. The horrible thing is, the poor little guy has had to bunk with his dad and me since then. Hope it won’t be terrible trying to get him back into his own bed when I finally get his room done. I’ll post some pics of the the before and after in another blog entry. Unfortunately I wasn’t thinking of doing before and afters so the before is after I’d already cleared the room and started patching holes, but hopefully you’ll get the idea.

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Rained out

kasper — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:05:38 +0000

Just got back from a miserable day in Barrie. It was a grey rainy day before we started out and it never really got much better. We went up to belatedly celebrate hubby’s birthday which was June 5th with his family and his sister’s friends. One of the friends brought her 3 daughters along and with our niece who is generally moody they were all miserable by the time we arrived. They had gone up early to make sure we got a shelter, and had been there like 3 hours before we got there. On the way up we stopped to get burgers for everyone as instructed by hubby’s mom. When we arrived she said that she only told him to bring our own food, but he swore that twice she said that we should bring the burgers. That pissed us both off because we wouldn’t have stopped and spent money we didn’t need to otherwise.

We did use the Baby Buzz patch on baby D and between the super smelly patch and hubby and I swatting away the pesky skeeters, I don’t think the baby got any bites at all. Wish I were as lucky. About 10 minutes after I arrived I got a bit bite on my forehead. That I am aware of, I got 3 on my hands (including one right beside the nail on my pinky finger), 1 on my forehead, 3 on my ankle and tons on the backs of my thighs. Talk about itchy!!!

Eventually after we ate the rain stopped so we went on a little walk around the park to view the animals. We saw an albino raccoon, a bear, wolves, foxes and various raptors. It was so sad though, the poor wolves were just running around in circles and obviously had been for some time since the ground under them was all sunken in. I was told that all these animals had been rescue animals, but I wonder if any of them would’ve chosen death over this captivity. Poor animals.

I was hoping to be home by eight since it’s my first day back at work tomorrow, but as usual I couldn’t pry him away from everyone and it was after 21:30 by the time we got home. I’m surprised I’m even writing this – I should be in bed! So I’m off to hopefully get a good night sleep before tomorrow.

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Another rainy day

kasper — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:17:01 +0000

I absolutely LOVE thunderstorms and goodness knows I’ve gotten my fair share lately! Unfortunately it does make for miserable looking days though. The sun is just starting to peek out from behind the clouds now. I’ve got a few errands that I need to get done, so once my Dad gets back from the Flea Market I’ll probably head out. I want to go get baby D those mosquito patches and then I have to go to the bank and cash a cheque I got for web design, then finally I’ll end up and my home away from home – WalMart and get baby D some more food.

My Dad just finished painting his bedroom, so now instead of the cave-like brown that was originally there it’s a mutt coloured (he used the dregs of about 3 different paint colours) off white. It looks so much better now. Because he’s in the basement he needs it to be as light as possible and now it finally is. His painting just gets me thinking about all the things I still want to do around here (money permitting of course). Besides painting baby D’s room and our master bedroom, I’d really like to change up some of the light fixtures. I really like that the previous owner had all the same fixtures in each bedroom so that there looks like there’s continuity across the rooms. As much as I really want to stay away from changing these ceiling lighting fixtures, I think I may have to put in ceiling fans. The house is very open and it’s hard to get air to circulate properly. I’ll have to see what happens, but I have to find 1 model to use across all 3 rooms for sure. Then there’s the bathroom light fixtures. The original ones I’ve got are those hideous fake gold horizontal vanity strips across the top of the mirror. Once again they are all the same across the 3 bathrooms, but I’d really like to get something from even the 1990s! If and when I actually get around to changing these up I’ll be sure to post a pic.

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On the mend

kasper — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:15:09 +0000

It was a horribly yucky grey, cold, rainy day today. I don’t know where my brain’s been at lately, but my days are all messed up. I was sitting down to breakfast this morning looking out at the nasty weather thinking “at least I don’t have to go outside today…”. Of course today is Friday, so I have to get the recycling to the curb. DOH! Plus I had to get some yard waste out too. When we moved into the house we inherited a huge mess of branches dumped on the other side of the fence. I think we’re probably better off renting a chipper or something to get rid of them instead of following the city rule of only putting out 3 bundles per week. Especially since after all the lugging from the backyard, they weren’t even picked up! grrr

Finally baby D’s conjunctivitis has almost cleared up. The day after his birthday (April 13th) when I took him into the doctor for his yearly check-up I noticed that he was getting a cold. Hubby was really worried because my Mum had been at baby D’s birthday with serious laryngitis which she got while on a trip to Egypt. He was afraid that she’d maybe given him something exotic. We did mention it to the doctor and he thought it was probably just coincidental. After a week of a fairly bad cough, he started to get a goopy eye. I swabbed at it with a warm, wet facecloth and hoped that it would clear itself up since the eye drops I had from the last time had expired. I had finally had enough and made him a quick appointment on Friday the 25th. Unfortunately his usual doctor wasn’t in, so I had to see his colleague. She seems nice enough, but said that she wouldn’t prescribe drops. I ended up getting oral antibiotics, which the pharmacist was surprised to see I was supposed to administer 4 times a day. She thought that was pretty taxing for an infant and I soon began to agree with her. Luckily baby D liked the medication, but I found his eye getting worse instead of better. It was starting to look like he got punched in the face. The skin under his eye was red and raw. By Monday I called the office again and explained that on Sunday when he woke up he couldn’t even open his eye – poor baby! I asked to have the same drops I had had before re-prescribed. I was very happy to hear that I didn’t have to come back in to be seen or get the script as I live about 20-30 minutes from the office. They called in the prescription and I managed to get the drops after my family dinner Monday night. At the dinner my brother callously asked if I had rubbed my son’s eye in raw chicken. So tactful. But his eye did look terrible. So happily now it’s almost gone, which is great since it’s a serious struggle getting the drops into his eyes. I’ve been trying to sneak them in while he’s nursing, but he’s on to me now.

I have finally updated my Flickr account. You won’t see much if you’re not a friend, so if you’re interested in seeing photos with actual people in them then drop me a line and befriend me.

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Dust off the old barbeque

kasper — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:39:11 +0000

Yesterday was the second day that I took advantage of the weather and got baby D out in his portable crib. It was another beautiful day and I was trying to get a little more sun to even out the burn I managed to get on my long hour and a half walk on Monday. I love that my son likes the outdoors so much, but then I suppose he’s just a contented type of kid all around. I was only out for about half an hour when my Dad came out and started doing some more yard work. Late last week we worked in the front yard raking the last of last year’s leaves and trimming up the hedges that needed so much help. Yesterday was all about the backyard and pulling weeds, raking the caterpillarery things that fell off the tree and transplanting a hedge from the front yard. I became obsessed with the mini trees that seemed to be sprouting all over the backyard. In trying to get rid of them I cut and pulled out roots that were about 2 inches around. There is some serious root system running through the entire backyard so I wasn’t going to get it all out by any means. When I went out from my kitchen, on the step down to the deck was a brown paper bag. My Dad had bought some bulbs for me to plant. He got purple gladioli and pink lilies. I can’t wait to plant them, but the problem will be the fact that we have no idea what’s already been planted.

By the time hubby got home we had pretty much finished for the day so I got him to cook up some hamburgers and we had our first barbeque. Before dinner I took the little guy inside to get him out of his shorts and tee and put on his jammies since it was starting to get cool. I had to be reminded that it is only April still. Sounds funny, but it just seemed like such a summer’s day.

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been working on and off on bringing back all my old posts. It’s a nostalgia thing really. In reformatting the entries for mysql I came across an entry that mentioned my new layout on August 29, 2005. I couldn’t remember what it looked like so I had a look at my past-domains page but I didn’t have a pic for that layout. Now I just can’t have that! So I ended up spending an exorbitant amount of time getting the pic. Thanks to Web Archive an oh so cool site that records static copies of the internet, and Firebug a very neat Firefox plugin, I did manage to get what I needed. My sanity has been protected, but unfortunately my beauty rest suffered for it. I can’t believe I’m up already considering I didn’t get to sleep until around 03:00!

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Real life happened

kasper — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:34:55 +0000

Well once again RL has gotten the best of me. Between the beautiful weather and everything I’ve had going on lately, I just haven’t felt like blogging. In fact, this is the first time in the last 4 days that I’ve even been on the computer! Now that’s some kind of record!

I’ve been spending a lot more time outside lately, mainly because spring has finally made an appearance in Toronto, but also because I’ve been work in the yard. Last year the snow descended before we got the leaves to the curb. We did manage to get them all raked into a pile, but that pile’s been under snow for the last 5 months so I had to get the wet leaves off the lawn before there was no lawn left. Hubby thinks the mark left behind looks like a crop circle. I’ve also been out trying to get some exercise and making sure that baby D gets some fresh air.

Sunday was baby D’s very first birthday so I spent last week getting everything that I needed. Okay, so I didn’t need to get 2 rolls of streamers, a garland, a table centerpiece, party hats etc. but I wanted to so essentially that’s the same thing then. I had my mum and dad, my brother and his wife, my aunt and uncle, my grandmother, my great uncle and my cousin-once-removed (aka my mum’s cousin) over to share the day with us. It was a good time and he thoroughly enjoyed showing off for everyone. And I never got tired of hearing what an amazing child I had, or how lucky I was. He got a bunch of clothes, a couple of Robert Munsch books, stacking rings, a bunnykins birthday plate and the Fisher Price Amazing Animalsâ„¢ Musical Activity Barnyard which he absolutely loved. He also got this pool toy which is a floating car. Uber cute. I can’t wait to take him somewhere where he can use it. It was an enjoyable day, but I find it rather exhausting. From the housecleaning before the party and the running around making sure everyone is fed and watered to the cleanup for what seems like days afterwards, it’s not something I plan on doing terribly often.

This morning I got up at 04:40 and was out of the house with baby D in tow to drive across the city to attend a car clinic put on by my favourite morning show. I got an Alpha Omega 3-in-1 car seat as a baby shower gift before baby D was born, but haven’t used it yet as I was still using my infant carrier. I’ve been whining about getting it installed for the last month or so because baby D’s feet are now hanging over the edge of the infant carrier. So anyway, yesterday I was watching Breakfast Television which I haven’t done for a while, but luckily I tuned in on the right day because they talked about a car seat clinic happening today. Unfortunately it was across town, but I felt it was worth it to make sure my new seat was properly installed. To make a possibly long story short, we (me and baby D) managed to get ourselves on tv 3 times and we won Blue Jay’s tickets. How cool is that? I managed to talk to one of the hosts briefly about his young son and he showed me a picture of him on his Blackberry. I am completely exhausted now, but it was so worth it. I feel really pleased that he’s in a much better car seat and that it has been installed properly.

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What a glorious day

kasper — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:44:30 +0000

It is an absolutely beautiful spring (I never thought it would come) day so this will be a relatively short post as I’ll be taking the little man out for a bit of sunshine as soon as he wakes up.

As promised my new layout is FINALLY up. I have slaved over every last little detail and am quite proud of how it turned out. The colours make me happy so hopefully (considering the amount of time I worked on it) it will be up for a while. If you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary or not working properly, please let me know. While I was getting my layout ready I fell back into fanlistings. I used to run 70+ of my own a couple of years ago, and while I don’t expect to run any listings I will be joining a ton I’m sure over the next little while.

I am embarrassed to say that until earlier this week I have relied on my maternity pants immensely. It’s funny but when I go from season to season I can’t for the life of me remember what I used to where last year. It just seems like I have no clothes. I did manage to drag out a pair of pre-pregnancy jeans a while back, but with the exception of sweat pants all the pants I wear are maternity pants. So earlier this week I thought, “this is crazy, my son is nearly a year old (where the hell did the time go?!) and I haven’t gotten my butt out of maternity pants?”. I don’t believe it was ever a necessity to stay in the larger size as much as laziness and fear. But I got up the courage and dug to the bottom of my pants drawer and found my forgotten favourite pants. I was worried about putting them on as they were a bit snug before getting pregnant, but I was delighted to find that they fit very nicely and weren’t too tight at all. This of course gave me great confidence, that coupled with the 2 new shirts my Dad had just bought for me, I decided it was time to do a bit of shopping for my new body.

I really don’t shop very often as I’m usually so disappointed in my body that I couldn’t bare the thought of spending money on it. However I can’t very well continue to wear pants with the big stretchy panel on the front given my son’s age, so I spent a couple of days picking up some great pieces. I spent way more than I wanted to, but I suspect that I was splurging given that the last time I shopped for myself was when I was pregnant. I ended up with 3 pairs of heavenly pants that fit just below my navel and are petite so I didn’t have to worry about having them tailored, 2 tank tops, 2 wrap tops and 2 button-up shirts in springy colours. I am very happy with my purchases and can’t wait to have somewhere to wear them.

I hear babbling coming from the other room, so I’m off to enjoy the sunshine!

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Spring is in the air

kasper — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:23:31 +0000

What an absolutely glorious day it was today. I’m so glad I decided to get myself out of the house or I would never have known just how beautiful it was out. I’m not exactly sure of the temperature, but I think it was like 5 or 6°C with the sun shining brightly. Hubby called from the road (as he does numerous times a day) and we discussed how nice it was outside. He said he heard on the radio that we’ve had so much snow this year that the giant snowbergs that have accumulated in mall parking lots won’t even have melted by the end of the summer. Wow, wouldn’t that be sight in July? A big pile of leftover snow.

[flickr]photo:2335668417[/flickr]

So anyway, I had mentioned to hubby that there was an outfit for baby D at Wal-Mart that I was lusting after (yes, you can lust after baby clothes), but that the price was keeping me from buying it. He didn’t think it was too much to pay, so that was the go ahead I needed. Since we are going to London tomorrow for my Mum’s birthday celebration (it should have been last weekend but was postponed due to weather) I thought that would be a great reason to have a new outfit for baby D. Never being one to manage just going to Wal-Mart for the one thing I wanted to buy I ended up also getting him a 2-pack of pjs for when the weather gets a bit warmer and a striped t-shirt and pants.

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Lazy, lazy, lazy

kasper — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:53:59 +0000

I’m such a slack. I have no idea where my weekend went. I guess between watching movies and working on my new layout all the time just got sucked away. I really want to get this new layout finished up, but it seems that I keep changing my mind about how it should look. Maybe by next weekend I’ll have it looking spiffy enough to put up.
I started doing the Weekend Snapshot and was really looking forward to making myself take some photos so that I’d be able to post along with everyone, but I’ll refer back to the first statement of this entry. That’s right, I’m a slack. We were supposed to go to London to my Aunt’s house for my Mum’s “surprise” birthday. The “surprise” part is a joke because my Gran told my Mum to ask us (my brother & I) if we could come down to her party. Seeing as she already knows about it, it’s not exactly a surprise. I talked to her Friday and she said that she had been practicing looking surprised. I was really looking forward to seeing everyone and showing off how big baby D’s getting, but it got postponed due to weather. We got a dumping of like 25-30cm! As I suspected it was sunny on Sunday and melted the snow pretty fast. That figures. So we’ll be heading south next weekend instead. Since I don’t get out and do stuff much, find myself being inflexible when plans change. So with the family doing nothing interesting over the weekend, I once again have no photo to show for it. We may actually make it out of the house today and drag baby D through the snow on his sled, so if we do I’ll be sure to get some photos up. FYI I don’t post baby D photos publicly (or mine either for that matter), so if you’re interested in seeing them let me know here and befriend me in Flickr.
I did manage to get some things straightened out about my maternity leave. So, I’ve been in to work and done the paper work, here’s how it’s going to play out. I am taking an Infant Care leave after my maternity runs out. This will be unpaid, but I don’t have to return to work. I will return to work on June 30th for 2 weeks until our summer starts while hubby takes 2 weeks holidays to stay home with baby D. When I go back to work my unpaid vacation time (20 days) will be processed and paid out to me which will hopefully help get us through the summer since I can’t claim EI. Then I will be back full time for the new school year in mid-August. The other hitch of this scenario is that my Dad (Mr. Financial) thought I was insane to even consider such a stupid idea when we discussed it a couple of weeks ago. To go without money when we’re stretched as it is would be suicide. It’s true, it will be extremely hard on us but I feel that it’s what’s best for baby D. So on Thursday night we all went out for dinner and while I searched for a good way to break the final news to my Dad, he said ‘so March Break is coming up, I guess you’ll have to go back to work soon’. “Actually no.” ‘Oh, so you are staying off until August?” ‘Yup, got it all cleared through work.’ And that was the end of it. No arguing, no yelling, no ‘you can’t possibly afford to stay home’. It was sweet. So one less thing for me to worry about. Yay! Now I’ll just have to think of something else…

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Stuck in the snow

kasper — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:42:38 +0000

We’ve gotten quite a lot of snow over the last little while. And last night it snowed non-stop till early this morning. Hubby left for work this morning at 04:30 and ended up getting stuck in the street just outside our house and had to wait for the snow plow to come around and dig him out. He ended up getting in at 07:30! That makes for a crazy long morning. I went to my church parenting group this morning and was worried about the trip, but it went without a hitch. I was a little nervous when some yahoo came out of a coffee drive-thru and ended up driving sideways in front of me. Why can’t people drive according to the weather conditions?! When I got to the church the driveway hadn’t been plowed so when I turned into the parking space I felt the car sink in. I thought that I would have problems getting out afterward, but didn’t dwell on it. Luckily a plow was going through the back lot so we all had to move our cars from the side to the back once he was done. I say luckily because I was definitely stuck and needed to be pushed out and if we hadn’t have moved the cars then, I could easily have been the last car in the parking lot after the group was over.

After I got home since baby D had fallen asleep in the car I left him there and decided to do a little shoveling. This would be the first time I’ve shoveled since hubby tells me that he’d rather have me inside with baby D then to leave him unattended. I forgot how much shoveling snow sucks! Wow!

I saw something that made me happy and sad all at the same time. My little guy crawled last night. It was so amazing to see him really doing it, but it just reminded me that he’s getting older and less and less of a baby. He’s been sitting on his haunches lunging forward and backward for a while now, but usually when he goes to move forward he just slides flat out on his tummy. He’s also managed to go from crawling position to sitting twice. I’m sure mostly by fluke but it won’t be long and he’ll have me out of breath chasing after him.

Just before he crawled though he was being all creepy again. He was sitting staring at the ceiling (no lights or anything to look at) and then starting “singing” and waving his arms frantically. This went on for about 5 minutes or so. I’m really trying to convince myself that it’s just baby behaviour, but … Well my Great-Aunt died on Saturday. I don’t think she’d come and visit me, but maybe she did. Hubby’s dad died going on 3 years ago now and I swear he was in our apartment. I remember looking at myself in the bathroom mirror with the door open – meaning that I could see all the way down the hall right into our living room and kitchen. I swear I saw something move behind me that definitely wasn’t hubby. And at odd times I’d feel like someone was there and the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Okay I gotta stop thinking of this stuff, I’m starting to spook myself!

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