albertacat

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 03:57:40 GMT

Work? Blech.

Rest of life? Mixed. I was sick 4 days this last week - that's going to hurt on the paycheck, especially since I'm supposed to be taking my car into the dealer's in the next 50km for a $200 process that keeps it under warranty - which I need, especially as the "check engine" light has been on for the last week (but taking it in would require being okay without a car, which right now I'm not, dammit). And then yesterday I turned on the windshield wipers without even thinking and of course, one was frozen to the window and broke, but good. Sadly, it was the driver's side.

On the plus side, the stuff I ordered from Sears arrived tonight and I now have a place to make things. In honor of this I'm having herb-rubbed rotisserie chicken, herbed potatoes, and whatever veggies I can scrounge from the freezer. I also got a new hot plate which will hopefully take less than an hour to boil water, which the old one the last renter left behind did.

And, a co-worker I loaned all my Christmas movies to returned them the other day, and there goes the timer, so I'm off to watch A Christmas Story and enjoy the first 'real' food I've cooked for myself in... you know, frighteningly, probably almost a year. Stupid Alberta housing market.

Edit: the chicken turned out kick-ass, and I decided to make some homemade baked fries and those, also, were kick-ass. I LOVE my rotisserie thingy.

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:09:49 GMT

Yeah, team seating starting tomorrow. That sucks. What doesn't suck is the recliner I bought tonight. I went for a couch, came out with a chair. Mainly because I couldn't find a couch I liked in my price range, but there was a recliner for $399 that is going right into my new reading nook with a warmfuzzy blanket.

Anyway, on to the video of the day, this video would make Legolas cry. Get out your "holy SHIT"s now, because you will be saying it over and over and over. Best archery demo EVER.

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 07:10:59 GMT

I refuse to believe it's only one month until Christmas...

I got a metric ton of free furniture today, which thrills me greatly as, like I told the woman who kept wondering if I was sure I wanted the things she had to offer, "all I had until today is 'floor'." There was the portion of floor for laundry, the portion of floor for papers that needed sorting, the portion of floor for books, the portion of floor for DVDs...

Now, thanks to her, I have a couple of chairs, a coffee table, 2 side tables, 3 bookcases, a nightstand, a rolling TV stand, an electric grill and wok, and some mixing bowls. I also stopped at Value Village to pick up something I reserved the other day - a huge desk that, despite almost killing me when I had to maneuver it down the stairs myself, backwards, with it's entire weight on my head, makes the best TV stand ever - it's older, so it's pretty much all real wood, and on one side there's one fitted shelf where I've thrown some crafting stuff and some boxes full of stuff from things I've done in the past that I can't quite bring myself to throw away, and on the right are 4 or 5 sliding drawers which are *just* high enough to fit two rows of DVDs each, meaning I can get the collection off the floor.

What I'm much happier about, though, is to the right, in a little corner of the living room, I've created a reading nook with two bookcases, both side tables, and (until I get some more seating) one of the two chairs. I LOVE that I could fit it in. Love, love, love.

Of course, none of this stuff actually matches so next summer is going to be a frenzy of sanding and stripping and trying to figure out whether to use paint or stain and what color and I do still have that paint techniques book that I picked up like 3 years ago and I do know there are some nice ideas in there...

I still need a couch, which presents difficulties re: a) getting it here and b) getting it down here, and I also need a dining room table of some kind as right now I'm enjoying dinners-for-one off a TV tray or, now that I have one, a coffee table. Must fix that as I really do want to have friends over for dinner sometime during the holidays.

Plus the walls really need some TLC. There's some spare paint in the laundry room and the furnace room and there's even some mud to patch the really nasty parts, so for now I'll stick with the colors already in here and someday, when I'm actually making enough that I'm not getting to payday and thinking "thank god, I really need more food", I'll look at other colors.

Of course, when I do have spare money, I intend to create my very first official "home theater", in which I paint the large end living room wall flat white and get myself a projector and watch Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical (starring David Hasselhoff) as it deserves to be watched. But since my raises are small and not terribly often, that's probably a thousand years in the future.