crayon

this weekend rachel and i took a roadtrip to the one of a kind show in toronto. everything we saw there was beautiful and inspiring, and quite expensive. often we would see something very lovely and concluded that we could make that ourselves. the problem is that we don't. but maybe that should be a motivation. one pleasant surprise was that we bumped into rachel greenwood, which is quite remarkable considering the size of that craft fair. had we not been taking a sit-break, we probably wouldn't have crossed pathes.

 

on sunday i went to the fat goose fair in ktown to pick up one thing in particular. so over all, i'm quite surprised to say that we're well on our way with our christmas shopping. and although it's still november, it's starting to feel like christmas, and i'm ok with that.

i've noticed that our house starts to feel small when it's messy. right now it's very messy. i have clothes everywhere and it's hard to see the floor, much less walk around, in our bedroom. i need to do something about this. this week is looking quite full, but i have to make tidying a high priority.

my right ear has been buzzing all day. it's quite annoying.
 
grace...
it's a name for a girl,
it's also a thought that changed the world.

guitar riff

so i got my hair cut.

there are two things i dislike about hair dressers...
1) when they tell me MY (natural) hair is unhealthy because it has split ends, meanwhile their hair is so overly treated it's a small miracle that it doesn't randomly break off.
2) when they straighten my hair. ESPECIALLY when i bring in a picture of what i want my hair to look like and it's NOT straight. they should at least ASK if i want it straightened. instead i have to patiently wait and then wash it again when i get home to style it myself.

i think i need to find a new salon to go to. the ladies at regis are either really out of touch or just incredibly lazy so they style everyone's hair the same way. i want something EDGY, with character, not something 'off the rack'. ugh. thankfully, after washing it AGAIN, i think it's turned out relevantly like i want it. mostly. but next time i'm going elsewhere. plus, i think they raised their prices.

does anyone know of a decent salon for less than thank 35 bux? i'm starting to think my best bet might be asking a novice hair-cutting friend to do it for me. i bet all the really edgy hair cuts i see out there are either VERY expensive or completely free.

i've gotta go. my date is badgering me to get out the door. we're going to see the life of pi in 3D.

bangin' on the bongoes like a chimpanzee.

shaggy

i've decided to get my hair cut. well, cut isn't really the right word. there will be cutting involved, but it's not so much the length as the style. lately i've found that my hair has gotten quite long and the weight of it just pulls it flat. i'd like it to have more volume and body. actually, i'd like it to have more character. i'm excited, but this is a pretty big step because i've never really had a hairstyle before. it's always just been long or growing out to long. i hope i like it. and i hope that it's easy to maintain. i can get away with being quite delinquent with my hair cuts when it's just long, because it just gets longer. with a hairstyle, it will need to keep some form of shape.

this is KIND OF what i have in mind. minus the colour. thoughts?

 

sarah and i had a long chat about hair, hair cuts, and hair styles last evening. i feel very pumped for change of some kind. frig... it's just hair right? it grows back. besides, i think the change would do me good. i think becoming more comfortable with change would do me good. i remember when i first joined facebook that changing my profile pic stressed me out. i don't feel that way anymore. i dunno, maybe that's not great, but having anxiety around change is unproductive and an unnecessary burden.

 

onwards and upwards, i say!

 

i move slow and steady,
but i feel like a waterfall.

moist

i suppose it's murphy's law. but just when i need my window scraper i don't know where to find it.

on tuesday nights, brendan works in napanee and i volunteer at KGH. sometimes he can get a drive with his colleague, but about half the time she's already there so he needs the car. we've worked out a pretty good system. i park in the underground parking lot, and he comes to fetch it there. so far it's worked out great. so after my patient visits, i walk home and usually pick up some dinner for myself because i just need something quick and easy because i'm hungry by 6:30. i quite enjoy these walks home. my solo dinners. i like spending time with b, i never grow tired of him, but i also like spending time by myself. so it's a win-win. i had a nice evening last night visiting. i think it felt particularly rewarding because people actually told me how encouraged they were and how good it was to have engaging conversation. i spent time with a woman who was 106!! that's the oldest patient i've visted so far. she was pretty sweet, and only confused because i'd woken her up from a nap (i'm supposed to wake people because the less they sleep in the day the better they sleep at night.

sometimes i think about things like the phrase "on the lam" and wish i could go on the lam just so i could use the phrase "on the lam" in an actual sentence.

how are things with you, i wonder.
 
it had a son that mowed the lawn.

shot

well... i got audited. as soon as i saw a letter for me from the CRA, i knew something was up. thankfully i was able to locate my 2011 tax return with relative ease. this morning i printed out a few copies of receipts, then sent them off in the mail. part of me is worried that they might get lost in transit. but that's just me being anxious again.

i recently spent some time reading about worry and anxiousness. it pointed out that worry is basically the refusal to accept uncertainity. the site i was reading gave me 4 questions to work through, to really ask myself if uncertainty is really all that bad (i concluded that it isn't). and the funny thing is... even though there's a lot in life that we don't or can't know, the one thing that is certain is that i'm going to be ok. no matter what, i will cling to what is good. i will know peace in hard times. even if my worst fears were realized, i would cope and i'd probably cope surprisingly well. things are never as bad as we imagine them to be. i ended up concluding that there's no sense in me sitting and stewing. being afraid of this or that really won't make one ounce of difference. and even if it helped "prepare" me, which i doubt, i'd still have to experience it for what it is. so i guess that is to say... if my tax receipts go missing, i'd either contact the charities and ask them to issue me new ones, or i'd pay the difference. no big deal and seriously not worth me making my self sick with stress.

i think that's what i'm going to do from now on. when i find myself worrying, i will imagine what my response will be if my negative projections come true, then grab onto the reality that it'll be ok. what-ifs are not worth my time. or yours, for that matter!

 

hold my hand, i'll walk with you, my dear.

suitcase

it feels really good to be on the ball. it's only been a few days, but i've been really proactive lately. i hate the feeling of having something hanging over my head that i need to do. so lately i've been thinking "now... is there anything outstanding that i need to address". so i sent a thank you card to my dad's friend, contacted the newspapers and asked them to stop delivering to our house, made an inquiry into a christmas gift for audrey. it's really great not procrastinating.

sometimes when volunteering at the hospital i get more than i bargained for. that's ok though, i guess. i feel that my years of life-drawing class prepared me for unceremonious exposure to people's body parts.

now that we're at mid-november i find myself counting down to my year-end holidays. maybe it's just the affect of november. a sort of nothing month that feels like a bus tranfer station on your way to something else. and although the end of december will bring with it good things, i don't want to impatiently fast-forward through all the joys of daily life til then.

 

the floor under our feet whispers out,
"come on in, come on in, where it all begins."

renew

well... i installed a new showerhead in the bathroom yesterday. i wasn't sure if it was going to work properly, and i needed brendan's help to tighten the fixture to eliminate a small leak in the connection. but after all that was done, i gave it a try and was delighted by the improved showering experience. the spray is really nice and the angle is pretty ideal. our shower is pretty small, but this new showerhead makes it feel more roomy since the spray doesn't go everywhere. i actually have room to breath and shampoo my hair. i'm very pleased. i hope brendan approves of it too. he liked the old showerhead, so it would suck if he didn't like this one as much in comparison.

i actually took a long weekend. i had a lieu day left over from my time in calgary so i decided to pick a weekend between thanksgiving and my christmas holidays. it was really nice. i did a bunch of running around - i usually hate doing errands, but it's really not that bad when you have enough time and the errands are not cutting into my time doing other things. i love having days off after sundays. and the nice thing was that i felt ready to return to work this morning.

lately i've been really into this icelandic band 'of monsters and men'. ever since i heard them the first time i've considered them a hybrid of stars and edward sharpe & the magnetic zeros. the more i listen, the more i'm amazed how consistently they remind of that combination. i really like them. for me, i think that's a perfect combo. funnily enough, when b and i were in costa rica, we heard one of their songs on the radio. the world is small.

 

though the truth may vary
this ship will carry
our bodies safe to shore.

peace

I'm lying on the love seat, playing solitaire on my ipod, and listening to U2. I really don't think I could be more content than I am right now. In this thin space. Where everything good is possible and worry has no place.

I used that Oxford comma just for you ;)

Later tonight, shanno and I are going to the casino for our annual trek to give them chump change and drink (caffeine) for free. Wish us luck!

If I had the option for italics, I would quote this... "Let's take a chance, baby, we can't lose."

Sent from my iPod

poppyseed

our little house has a small addition on the front - a small foyer. the foyer was added just before we bought the house and because it was tacked on 70 odd years after the house was built, it doesn't have any heating duct work in it. it does however, have a small built in space heater. that said, us lorimers are too thrifty to actually use the spaceheater. so instead we lived in a somewhat chilly home all last winter. this was a stark contrast to our last home where we could not control the heat and lived in tropical temperatures all year long.

last year during our open house, tim and tracy suggested we install a blanket or curtain over the opening to the foyer to stop the warm house-air from getting sucked into the chilly foyer. that seemed like a good idea, but it wasn't something we got around to doing til yesterday. we now have a wool blanket separating the two spaces, and the difference is quite dramatic. i'm extremely pleased. my next attempt at keeping out the cold will be to buy or make some winter curtains, because whenever i'm beside a window (either in bed or on the couch) i feel a chilly draft. they're not even old windows. i haven't actually heard of 'winter curtains' before, but i'm sure they existed back in the days before central air.

further on the home-improvement/efficiency front, i'm about to head to canadian tire to buy a new showerhead. while brendan loves our shower because it's so tall that he can stand comfortably under it, i find that it's just high-enough that at my height i can't escape the spray when trying to shampoo my hair. but more importantly, we need a showerhead with a hose for filling buckets, cleaning paint trays and the like.

 

that is all.

 

it's all i see these days.

slow

sometimes, and i mean on the very rare occasion i wish that brendan or i had a mobile phone. believe it or not, he just called me on a pay phone from the cat centre. the thought of him being at the cat centre alone is very funny and kind of ironic.

lately i feel like my life has found a good rhythm. not too busy, not too full. i've noticed an increase in my desire for social interaction, which probably means that i'm well rested and well adjusted. it's good. i'm encouraged. we've started having folks for dinner regularly. last friday we had david and sue over, it was really fun and the four of us chatted til 10:00. having guests over always requires a bit of creativity since we don't having a dinning table, but i find the more we do it the more comfortable we get and the easier it becomes.

since life is moving along at a content rate, i find i have less to write about. this is the only downside really. i get a great deal of pleasure out of writing. debriefing. downloading the contents of my head. when i was in highschool, and i'd decided to pursue graphic design as a profession i started doing more painting and the like. art was something i always wanted to do more of. it was something that i wanted as a natural part of my life. but truthfully... was always something i had to push myself to do. how i know that brendan is a true musician and not just a music enthusiast is that he plays for the pure pleasure of it. at any time of day i will find him strumming his guitar in his own little world. sometimes, to my amusement, i'll find him playing a guitar while it still sits in it's wall mount, as though he couldn't wait the extra time to take it down before playing it. music is to brendan what i wanted art to be to me. it's the thing he does by instinct. i love graphic design, very much, but my instinct is writing. it's the thing i can't go without doing for days (if i'm not blogging, i'm writing for work, or writing emails). writing helps ground me, soothe me, connect me. so when i don't have time for an entry, or have nothing of note to say, i'm disappointed. maybe i'll need to do writing exercises - find a topic and just write on it when i don't have anything myself to report on. i just don't feel like myself if i'm not writing.

man, i stand by what i said the other day about this yogurt. it's delicious!

 

through autumn's advancing,
we'll stay young, go dancing.