Head in the clouds

(because my brain is too mushy to write only one coherent posts, here are the things that have been bouncing around in my brian of late)

• Today was my last day of work before the wedding! Yay vacation!

• Most of the wedding crap is organized, we just have a few details left to get done between now and Saturday.

• I love this time of year. Listening to the songs of the crickets in the fields at the dog park at dusk is fantastic. As night falls pockets of cooler air develop among the cedars along the trail, you can take one step and find it several degrees cooler. If I was allowed to pick the weather year-round, it would without a doubt be August weather.
  

• Holy crap am I geeked about our honeymoon!

• Dave has a special date planned for us tonight. All I know is that I have to dress up and that we're leaving at 6:00. It'll be our last date before we're married and I'm curious as to what he has planned.
  

• We had the best Newfie plumber in the world come to our house last Friday. Not only was he nice, but he helped us save money by suggesting Dave and I do some of the work ourselves and he helped us along. He ended up cutting out the old pipe by the laundry tub so it drains faster than 10 mL per hour (it really was that slow). (please don't get mad by me calling him Newfie - he introduced himself as such and I frankly believe Newfoundlanders are among the nicest people to be found anywhere. Plus? I haven't met any Newfoundlanders who weren't a ton of fun to hang out with)
  

• My sister hosted a bachelorette party for me last Saturday which was awesome. It was the second bacheorette party but she planned it to the hilt by making the tackiest veil she could find and making me wear it and some white plastic leis and candy necklaces. We decided to hit Hamilton's Hess Village, where much drinking took place when I was at school at McMaster. I had some fantastic friends who came from near and far to attend, which I really appreciated. They're the kind of friends where you have to try not to have fun with them around. Some weird random dudes bought us shots, and, in typical me fashion the night I passed out fairly early. Photos? Um let's hope there are none! My sister and I spent the afternoon shopping and relaxing together which was great fun.
  

• Just a couple of blocks from home the low tire pressure light came on in my car, and I didn't think much of it because I was almost home. I went to drive to work Monday and pulling out of the driveway I heard a whap-whap-whap, and sure enough I had a flat tire! Dave's been my to-and-from work chauffeur this week.

• Have I mentioned how excited I am at the prospect of a honeymoon?

• If I knew where the Weather Network was located I'd go down there personally and demand an explanation and/or beg for them to say nicer things about the weather Saturday. Two weeks ago I could check the weather forecast and it would say "sunny" one minute then nothing but rain clouds the next." Up until yesterday the little icon said sunny and the temperature sounded perfect. Now there's a big dark cloud, no sun, and lots of lightning bolts forecast for Saturday with an 80% chance of rain. Jerks. I think you could get just as accurate a prediction about the weather from the crackheads (some of whom are actually quite lovely but sad people) outside coffee time in downtown 'Shwa as the weather network can provide. Why not just admit they have NO IDEA what the weather will be like! I really hope they're wrong; we were going to take pictures on the rocky shore of Lake Ontario.
  

• Today is "clean the house top to bottom day" so that when Dave's brother (who rocks) is house and dog-sitting he doesn't think (realize?) we're complete slobs.
  

• My dress will finally be ready tomorrow morning and Dave's tux will be ready then too.
  

• Dave has a day at the spa planned for me the day before the wedding. I'm getting a salt scrub, full body massage, pedicure, and manicure (I've never had one!) before our rehearsal dinner. Should be fun.
  

I am hoping that post-wedding my posts will begin to suck a whole lot less than they have of late.

Four days to go!

The weekend in point form

I won't pretend our lives are exciting and full of jet-setting weekends, but here's the recap:

• Friday night bachelorette party in the city. The honouree was gorgeous in her "bride to be" tiara. I'm officially afraid of what my girls will be doing to me shortly. My sister's evil laugh doesn't give me any reassurance.
  

• We inherited an electric lawnmower for when the push mower just won't cut it. If only we had a working plug outside!

• Shared a wicked good Thai dinner out in Toronto with friend Saturday we hadn't seen in WAY too long. Remembered why there's no way I could live in Toronto, if only for the road rage I get driving down Yonge to Eglington. Dinner was followed by an evening of drinks (well only a Guinness for me cause I was driving) and much needed catching up at a pub with the best service known to human kind. Poor Ottawa lost. Late in the evening a drunk dude sat down with us (well much to my friend's chagrin, I invited him 'cause I'm all about having random drunk dude stories). He told un-funny jokes but he did make me bust out laughing when he winked at me and stuck his tongue out. Ew. The Firkin pub at Eglington and Yonge has the best service I think I've ever had at a restaurant.
  

• Dave spent Saturday night at a Bachelor party, the drunken debauchery we encountered on the way home reminded me of some younger days when I was "that guy." The blackmail photos are fantastic and the "I love you mans" and toasts to their women were abound. I even got called beautiful. Man I love beer goggles. Poor Dave passed out mid sentence on the way home. :)

• Dog park Saturday I was disappointed the tadpoles hadn't spouted legs yet. Every spring when I was a kid we caught tadpoles (and fed them raw hamburg which, looking back, probably wasn't good for them) and watched them grow legs and turn into frogs. Apparently they still fascinate me cause I had to run to catch up to Dave and the dogs after staring at them in the water.

• Saw a beautiful black swallowtail butterfly at the park too after the dog nearly stepped on and ate it. Yeah they're even clumsier than I am.
  

• We bought two rose bushes but the debate rages on as to where we should plant them. (doncha wish your life was as exciting as ours?)
  

• We now have a weeding tool, but have yet to use it on the dandelions on our lawn. There are only a few, so it's not that bad but any removal I suspect will be futile because our odd neighbour who is NEVER home (we've seen three times since moving here) has a lawn that's mostly yellow with a few patches of green, so it's safe to say we'll never win this battle. I'm just glad she hasn't sprayed any pesticides. I still say dandelions are pretty but some suburbs conformity has come over me and I feel the need to take them out.
  

• We looked at wedding bands. Think I've got mine picked out and Dave's narrowed his choices down to about five. We were delightfully surprised to find some that didn't look like they were mass produced.
  

• I seem to have remarkable wallpaper karma because it's coming off amazingly easy. Even better than that, the walls underneath (old lathe and plaster) hasn't been too bad a surprise. We were expecting the worst knowing that lots of people use wallpaper to hide really bad flaws in walls. Ours definitely have flaws, but the wallpaper isn't hiding anything too bad so far. Plus, it's coming off remarkably well with just vinegar and water.
  

It's been a head-smashingly fun week in the 'shwa

Has it ever been a loooonnnnnng week. I have no idea how I'll survive until Friday. Oh well. I'm supposed to be at a bachelorette party which should be lots of fun and games. That's of course if I'm still standing!

Anyway, moving on, I've done lots of learning this week. I've learned my parents have decided to do some work to their already gorgeous home. I've also learned that my mum probably should have become a highly paid accountant for some big nameless corporation because her tax-refund-getting skills are impeccable and I'm now expecting a fairly fat cheque from the man. These two forces have combined to make it virtually irresistible NOT to do some work on the house.

We moved in at the end of last summer and, beyond a few tiny things, we haven't done much work to the place. I have a long list of things I want to do to this place. It's an older house which definitely has lots of quirks, both good quirks and bad.

I'm hoping to slowly start to rid the house of the non cute quirks. The beige in the living room is making me a little cabin feverish. The original kitchen (or an early successor to it) in our 1940s house is getting more and more annoying especially when you view all the glorious cabinet options and choices there are out there. The original hard wood floors are still gorgeous but badly in need of re-finishing. Most of all the wallpaper in the front hall and upstairs hall is making me nutso.

In a bid to rid the place of its quirks, I think I've found a pretty good score. A neighbour down the street works re-finishing floors for a living (SCORE!) and has given us a wicked price to re-do them. So, that will happen once we get the walls un-beiged, and the ceilings touched up with plaster and painted, the floors are next.

But, in the meantime, the wallpaper in the halls is the bee doing the most stinging in my bonnet. Actually I have a bonnet full of bees right now, but I'm directing it all at the wallpaper.

I'm sure at some point this wallpaper was pretty to some person. I can't think of either a time when that would have been, or a person who would have found it pretty but I'm sure it was, just as I am sure that it is not pretty to me.

I'm curious as to what I'll find behind the wallpaper. The walls are lathe and plaster and we already know of one spot that will need work (we call it the rollercoaster wall because it dips up and down), but the rest is a mystery. My fingers are crossed that it isn't too bad and the wallpaper removal itself isn't as dreadful as I'm imagining it will be.

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Finally, should you randomly happen to be a caterer who happens to stumble onto my blog, I have some completely unsolicited advice for you. Aren't you lucky!

If, as a caterer, you're being asked to price catering an event such as a wedding, and one of the MAIN parties identifies herself as a vegetarian right from the beginning, it would probably not be a great idea to note how big a "pain in the ass" some vegetarians are at catered events at length. You would probably also be best not to tell said vegetarian about how she should realize that most of the people attending the event will eat meat so she really should focus on ordering food that will please them (meaning all meat, all the time) instead of the "few vegetarians." This type of comment will make said vegetarians consider hiring one of your competitors instead.

Just moments before the steam started to come out from my ears and my head started spinning rapidly in counter-clockwise fashion, I told her that as a vegetarian I had more often ran into caterers who were a pain in the ass that treat vegetarian guests who were paying a great deal for their services as the pains in the ass. I'm also not a fan of cocktail receptions where all the hors d'oeuvres are meat. Moreover I didn't want my veggie friends to end up with a dish of the standard cold penne primavera, or, as I served one time, a vegetarian dinner that consisted of two potatoes (one still covered in sauce from the chicken that had until moments before occupied the plate) and veggies. I don't want my own freaking wedding to be like that!

Beyond that, when we said pork was out as an entree option because we have friends who are devout muslims who can't eat pork she implied that was completely unreasonable and said that "some people are so unreasonable as to not want to be in the same room." Uh yeah! And they're our friends, so we're happy to accommodate that. You should be too! Frig!

So now, after the fun this week has been so far, my sweetie has prepared a hot water bottle for my aching back (no, I'm not 90 years old and yes I use water bottles regularly) and I'm off to bed. You may have guessed I didn't get much sleep last night, which has made the tone of this post somewhat cranky. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow fresh and ready to tackle the wallpaper sans cranky pants tomorrow night after work.