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Monday, March 31, 2014

Things to do for 2014 - March update

Man, where did March go?

1. Complete the first two levels of Rosetta Stone - German

2. Read 25 books - Last year, I read 16 books, four short of my 20 book goal. This year I've upped it to 25 as I don't feel I read nearly as much as I should.

Finished reading:
- The Yard by Alex Grecian
- It by Stephen King. Can I tell you, I wasn't scared while reading the book, but now I'm still a little scared... especially when it comes to bathrooms.
-The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
- Napalm and Silly Putty by George Carlin - While I enjoy Carlin's stand up routines, the book didn't really translate too well, despite my attempts to read it with his voice in my head. I think I'll stick to his stand up instead.

To be read at some point this year:
- Brotherhood of Fear: A Willi Kraus Novel by Paul Grossman
- The Black Country by Alex Grecian
- The Devil's Workshop by Alex Grecian - due out in May

3. Spend less time on the computer in my non-working hours

4. Maintain the blog with regular posts - I've come up with a tentative schedule for postings, but it is still a work in progress.

5. Go through the Digital SLR for Dummies book and improve my photography skills. - I've made it through chapter 1,which is the intro chapter... so really it's kinda like I haven't started looking at the book :/

I really need to get on this one.

6. Continue to photograph Gimli and Merida.

7. Lose 20 lbs. - Last year, I struggled with this and am struggling with it again as the year begins. I was doing well, then I stopped exercising and all the progress I did was lost.

January 31 2014
- down 4 lbs to 144
- lost an inch
- I've been working out my arms and they look a bit better. Not chiseled or anything, but you can see the muscle start to take shape.

February 28 2014
- 144 lbs
- lost another inch/ inch and a half
- I'm starting to see changes - ie I was able to wear a pair of pants through a full dinner and dessert and didn't feel like the button was going to pop off.  This is good news.

March 31 2014
- Am the same as I was at the end of February.
- To say I'm disappointed is an understatement, though my tailbone isn't helping. My arms look great though, so there's that. For April, I'm going to ease back into my stomach exercises and I'm sure once we start running, it will be a big help.

8. Finish painting our house - The painter that completed our downstairs is returning to paint our bedroom and the office.

9. Frame and put up our pictures.

Have gotten the layout for 2 rooms so far. Working on the living room next.

10. Go to The Arboretum at least once a month - weather permitting.

11. Discover local restaurants/bistros etc in my city or in the surrounding areas.

12. Take more pictures of Mike and me.

13.  Enjoy our backyard.

14. Surprise someone.

15. Put in more flowers/shrubs etc in the yard

16. Move off of "Medium" on the drums in Rock Band and to "Hard".

17. Complete the Minas Tirith 3D puzzle

18. Take up running. I'm nowhere close to the point of doing a 5k of straight running, but it's something I want to do. The ultimate goal is to do one of the RunDisney events at the parks.

Well, we are planning on going to the 5k and 10k races in January. We've booked our rooms already - (Yay DVC members!) and our running training will start once the weather improves. I've got it in my mind to start in April, but we'll see. We're also going to do smaller runs closer to home to focus on a timed race.

I will admit, this is not something I'd ever thought I'd be doing! I've been a self-confessed "non-runner" all my life.

19. Put in a smaller garden in the backyard.

20. Organize the spare bedroom so it actually looks like a bedroom and not a place to shove "stuff".

21. Scan in our baby pictures.

22. Start putting together our Disney album.

23. Start cooking more Trinidad type food.

24. Work on the corgis' recall.

25. Travel to a new place.

26. More to come...

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

5 things going on in this house - March

Argh, I've had a headache for most of the day and nothing's helping. I'm going to go hide under the covers soon.

So, what have we been up to this month?

1. It's been deathly cold this winter and that's turned us into hermits. We've done nothing but hide inside, away from the minus double digit temperatures.  This is also why there haven't been many posts - nothing's really going on around here.

2. Gimli has learned how to open his crate from the outside. I have no idea where he learned to do this, we never showed him. His crate has a sliding latch to it and he'll put his nose under the sliding part and slowly ratchet it across until it opens. Then, he'll remove his Mr. Sun toy and play with it... until Merida steals it away and he sits and cries.

3. I watched the movie, Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and that's convinced me to start juicing. I'm not doing a total juice fast because I love bacon far too much. So far we've been juicing about once a day. I tried the Mean Green Juice and it's not as bad as I thought it would be. I did have to add in an extra apple and reduce the celery. I juiced an orange yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of juice extracted and the difference in the taste. Especially the orange juice - it was sweet but a different sweet than the orange juice from the bottle. It's a little scary the amount of sugar in the bottled juices.

In terms of feeling different, I don't. I don't think we've been juicing enough to see a difference just yet. We're still working out a schedule - ie juice for lunch or a main part of dinner.

My one pet peeve is that the juicer can be a nuisance to keep clean, especially if you are juicing multiple times a day. I'm sure this will work itself out once we arrive at a good schedule.

4. My exercising has been up and down this month. My arms look great! My stomach not so much. I damaged/bruised/messed up my tailbone and my usual stomach exercises have been causing me pain. It's slowly getting better, but I don't want to over do it. I'm building up my repertoire of different stomach exercises that don't require me to put undue stress on my tailbone.

In related news, Spring is slowly coming and that means we'll be able to start on our running!

5. Merida continues to be a spitfire. She's started doing this "jumping/front feet dance" thing when she's excited. It's kinda like a precursor to the Sparky Kibble dance, but not quite. If she's in a good mood and I start jumping in front her, she'll break into this jumping thing... almost like she wants to jump with me! It's very cute.

It's hard to believe she will be one in a couple weeks. I fully subscribe to the notion that puppies need to stay puppies for at least two years, none of this year old business.

Gimli will be 6 years old this August. Don't even get me started on that!

Friday, March 21, 2014

Flat Corgi Friday - Muppets!

In honor of Muppets Most Wanted, which opened today, I give you Flat Corgis meet the Muppets!



Monday, March 17, 2014

Expiration Date

I've always believed that expiration dates were in place to enable stores to move product than to actually cause food to spoil... within reason of course. I wouldn't drink milk that's a week old, but but sometimes you can extend the expiration date - ie putting things in the freezer.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed there was a roll of Pillsbury Crescents in the fridge with an expiration date of March 14th. I made a mental note to bake it for breakfast one day, but then promptly forgot all about it.

Fast forward to today at lunch time. I opened the fridge and happened to glance up at the little flap in the door of the fridge to find this:


Somehow the canister exploded, spilling the gooey goodness into the fridge onto some decade old candy canes.

Me, being very adventurous and thinking about that Simpson's episode where Lisa stole Homer's pig and it went flying and Homer lamented:

"It's just a little dirty. It's still good, it's still good!"

I decided to try to salvage the rest of the can.  It didn't turn out too well.

So, my friends, apparently the expiration date on the can must be taken very seriously.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Fishy tradition

AMC has been running a Jaws marathon since yesterday.

The first time I saw a movie from the Jaws franchise was Jaws: The Revenge. Don't worry, I won't go into the merits of said movie. I was a small child at the time and was so terrified of the shark that I refused to take a bath for weeks afterward. No sir, only showers for me!

Thanks to that movie I:
- refuse to ever go on a banana boat.
- think of Jaws every time I hear the Christmas Carol, "Noel".
- went through a childhood phase where I would draw pictures of a shark waiting beneath a sinking boat to eat the unsuspecting escaping passengers.
- because I know where the movie was filmed, even though I know the shark was fake, I am still apprehensive when we visit Castaway Cay in the Bahamas.
- this movie sparked my interest in sharks and I'm sure it was the underlying reason for why I wanted to be a marine biologist.
- watch all sorts of shark shows on tv, which I'm sure increases rather than decreases my paranoia factor!

As you would expect, I've seen all the other movies in the Jaws franchise, (read book 1 and 2!), and my favorite remains the first movie. Anytime the first one comes on tv, I have to watch it.

A few years ago, we were fortunate to be able to see the first Jaws on the big screen. It started at 11pm or some horrid hour and we stayed for the entire show. We didn't go to bed til around 4 am, but it was amazing to be able to finally see it in the original format... considering I wasn't yet born when it was first released.


Yeah, I think I'll sit on the sidelines for a little while.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Gimli likes to move it!

I filmed this one a number of years ago and I've been meaning to put it together for the longest time.

Corgis have the cutest butts and when they walk, they've got the wiggle down pat!



Hope you like the music choice :)


Saturday, March 8, 2014

Saturday Silliness - Mega Derp

We interrupt your scheduled Saturday Smiler to bring you some Saturday Silliness of the mega derp variety.

Captions anyone?


Thursday, March 6, 2014

Throw Back Thursday - Look for the bear necessities

I've never done the #ThrowBackThursday, mainly because I didn't have pictures that would be a throwback. I'm hesitant to start this as a trend because I'm going to run out of pictures eventually, so I may just do this monthly.

However, I was rooting through some pictures and found one of me as a child, at Walt Disney World, sharing a moment with Baloo.


Notes:

- This is 1985 in AdventureLand. Yes, those tiki statues are still there. See picture.
- I would love to know about the scaffolding in the background.
- This was probably before I learned the truth about the Disney characters, which will be the subject of a later post.
- If you tell my mother that her picture is now on the Internet, she will kill me.
- This is one of the only times in my life where I'm wearing pink.
- I wonder where the Adventure Drummer guy is now?

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Things to do for 2014 - February update

February is over and I'm glad to have started some of these.

1. Complete the first two levels of Rosetta Stone - German

2. Read 25 books - Last year, I read 16 books, four short of my 20 book goal. This year I've upped it to 25 as I don't feel I read nearly as much as I should.

Finished reading:
- The Yard by Alex Grecian
- It by Stephen King. Can I tell you, I wasn't scared while reading the book, but now I'm still a little scared... especially when it comes to bathrooms.
-The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

To be read at some point this year:
- Brotherhood of Fear: A Willi Kraus Novel by Paul Grossman
- The Black Country by Alex Grecian
- The Devil's Workshop by Alex Grecian - due out in May

3. Spend less time on the computer in my non-working hours

4. Maintain the blog with regular posts - I've come up with a tentative schedule for postings, but it is still a work in progress.

5. Go through the Digital SLR for Dummies book and improve my photography skills. - I've made it through chapter 1,which is the intro chapter... so really it's kinda like I haven't started looking at the book :/

6. Continue to photograph Gimli and Merida.

7. Lose 20 lbs. - Last year, I struggled with this and am struggling with it again as the year begins. I was doing well, then I stopped exercising and all the progress I did was lost.

January 31 2014
- down 4 lbs to 144
- lost an inch
- I've been working out my arms and they look a bit better. Not chiseled or anything, but you can see the muscle start to take shape.

February 28 2014
- 144 lbs
- lost another inch/ inch and a half
- I'm starting to see changes - ie I was able to wear a pair of pants through a full dinner and dessert and didn't feel like the button was going to pop off.  This is good news.

8. Finish painting our house - We have 3 bedrooms to paint this year. We are toying with the idea of getting the same painter that did our downstairs to come back to do the 3 bedrooms.

9. Frame and put up our pictures.

Have gotten the layout for 2 rooms so far. Working on the living room next.

10. Go to The Arboretum at least once a month - weather permitting.

11. Discover local restaurants/bistros etc in my city or in the surrounding areas.

12. Take more pictures of Mike and me.

13.  Enjoy our backyard.

14. Surprise someone.

15. Put in more flowers/shrubs etc in the yard

16. Move off of "Medium" on the drums in Rock Band and to "Hard".

17. Complete the Minas Tirith 3D puzzle

18. Take up running. I'm nowhere close to the point of doing a 5k of straight running, but it's something I want to do. The ultimate goal is to do one of the RunDisney events at the parks.

Well, we are planning on going to the 5k and 10k races in January. We've booked our rooms already - (Yay DVC members!) and our running training will start once the weather improves. I've got it in my mind to start in April, but we'll see. We're also going to do smaller runs closer to home to focus on a timed race.

I will admit, this is not something I'd ever thought I'd be doing! I've been a self-confessed "non-runner" all my life.

19. Put in a smaller garden in the backyard.

20. Organize the spare bedroom so it actually looks like a bedroom and not a place to shove "stuff".

21. Scan in our baby pictures.

22. Start putting together our Disney album.

23. Start cooking more Trinidad type food.

24. Work on the corgis' recall.

25. Travel to a new place.

26. More to come...