Scarlett rates the new furniture

...and apparently approves.

Both the couch and chair were delivered (late), and barely fit through our narrow front door on Saturday. We love it.

The problem with chocolate brown is you can pair it with almost any colour - a warm bluey green? robin's egg blue? sage green? taupe with red accents? pink? I'm at a loss because the room is so small it's hard to pick a colour scheme, knowing it will probably have to work with the dining room as well.

I can't live with beige walls much longer. I'm convinced that beige is not a colour, it's a way of life, and it's not my way of life.

The sad part of this story is that frankencouch (which, to be clear, is a frankenloveseat) did not fit into our basement, no matter the amount of tugging, shoving and near finger-sever-ing, it just would not fit. It's sitting at the curb, hoping for someone to take it to another home.

Weekend Recap

• Frankencouch's days are officially numbered. Next Saturday the new couch is being delivered, probably some time between when the sun comes up and it goes down. I'm guessing the likelihood that they'll narrow the delivery time down any more than that is slim, but I'm still excited.
  

• With the new couch coming I'd really like to un-beige our living room walls but I'm at a loss for what colour to paint them, and I'm a bit of a "have a complete vision" kid before I get started (at least when it comes to decorating; nothing else, oddly enough). So, we did what broke people do when they wanna re-decorate and spent Friday wandering through Chapters looking for ideas in books. Still haven't made any decisions though. I'm not sure if I'm bold enough to paint the walls a warm bluey greeney colour when the couch is chocolate brown... or go with a more neutral tan colour on the walls with red accents... any suggestions? All I decided is that I want to have Debbie Travis come and re-do our whole freaking house cause it's hard to decorate tiny spaces on a tiny budget. The living room's small and we spend most waking hours in it so it's gotta be calming and not too crazy. I'd like to do some feng shui but I have no idea where to start. If there are any budding designers out there send ideas our way!
  

• Is there anything better for a cold than tom yum soup from a Thai restaurant? There's something about the sweet-salty-hot-sour combination that's perfect for sick people.
  

• After Friday's excitement I almost entirely slept through April Fool's Day, but when I saw the score for the Leafs game on the CBC Saturday night I thought it was a late April Fool's joke. The Leafs, who have stunk (pretty much) the whole season and blew a playoff berth last weekend won 7-0, now that a playoff berth is way out of reach.
  

• Saturday I tortured Dave by bringing him curtain shopping. To TWO places. I think he only went along with it because he was afraid I'd either get too whacky and the curtains would look like something out of an acid trip or I'd pass out in a coughing fit in a fabric aisle, never to be heard from again. What we found were curtains that were either hideous thick floral prints or not anything we (read I) liked so we're (I'm) still looking. It wasn't a total loss, though, I did manage to find a nice camel coloured chenille throw for the new couch that's so soft it makes silk feel like sandpaper. I'm looking forward to curling up on the new chair with a book and the new throw on a rainy day.
  

• We have a wedding photographer! Another thing to check off our wedding list is done (and less than 5 months before the day!)
  

• We went for a walk with the dogs and my parents at a park in Cobourg and the dogs loved the chance to run in a big open space and seemed to have a blast. They panted the whole ride home and we've hardly heard a peep from them the rest of the night.
  

• Finally all my whining that the neighbours have bulbs peeking through the soil and we don't has paid off! I planted a ton of bulbs late last fall and finally I'm starting to see leaves peeking from the soil that I swear weren't there when I (neurotically) checked Thursday. I can't wait to see blooms! The pussy willows in the park are bursting, the birds are back, the days are getting longer and the sun is definitely stronger, I just love spring!
  

Yay gadgets!

Last year when I was articling I barely made enough money to get by. I'm a pro at the "just past its best" section of the grocery store and for months I bought only what I absolutely needed. The only splurges that whole year were a pair of running shoes and a suit I needed for work.

This year, things are better financially - I have a job that pays pretty well and I've actually been able to save for the wedding and stuff. Mortgage payments are cheaper than rent.

I really wanted to take clinics at the running room last year but money and the time to do it both got in the way. I would have had to get downtown and get out of work at a decent hour, both of which would've been hurdles for me.

Now, I have a job with pretty decent hours (and by those I mean pretty amazing hours compared to most lawyers) and am no longer afraid that buying the regular produce (ie not the stuff that's starting to go bad) will wreck my budget. It's a good feeling.

Other than the couch and chair I bought, there really haven't been any big splurges on my part. It's all been things we really needed for the house.

I have to say I've always been a gadget kid, especially when it came to sports. When I was 12 going on 13 my parents got me my first 10 speed bike. Growing up with my dad being big into cycling I wanted to be good at it and wanted to get a little computer that would tell me how far I'd gone, how fast I was going and how long it had taken me (incidentally having a dad who was into cycling also meant seeing lotsa dudes walking around in cycling shorts at our house when I was little which is a whole other story entirely).

I saved up all the loonies I could and paid the $22.99 (all in change, I'm sure the cashier loved me) it cost at Canadian Tire and installed it on my first "real" bike. I biked more than 1000km that summer and to this day remember the exact spot where the sporty little yellow odometer's digits turned to 1000km. I felt like I'd won the Tour de France and raced home to brag to everyone.

I'm more than twice as old as I was then but the gadget vibe is still strong. This week I bought a Garmin Forerunner 301. For the uninitiated this gadget is a heart rate monitor and GPS (oooh!) system that tells you how far you've gone, and what route you take, and your heart rate and speed, download it all to your computer, and about a gagillion other features I have yet to figure out. It has yet to make me breakfast, but I'm guessing that's about the only thing it can't do.

Figuring this sucker out has not been a cake walk. First, getting a satellite signal (wherein I stand outside by the road, holding the little watch part to the sky like a complete moron) was hard, but eventually got one. Then, installing the software on my computer so it'd recognize the unit was an experience that nearly led me throwing the new gadget and my laptop out an upstairs window. Luckily Dave came to the rescue and everything is working as it should.
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Yesterday was the first day I had it all up and running and so I crudely put in some information in it, leashed up the dogs, and took it out. All was going great until I realized that spending my lunch with the gadget to the sky meant I had only eaten a bowl of cereal in the morning, 4 triscuits, some light frulano cheese, an apple, and an orange all day and it was now 5:30pm. This meant that 3k into my run I started to bonk and ended up walking with the dogs the rest of the route.

Hopefully after a glass of milk and a banana this morning I'll be good to go and figure out how the sucker works. If only there weren't wet snowflakes falling I'd be so much more motivated to go!

[UPDATE: I went 6.67km this morning in 46 minutes, burning 496 calories with an average heart rate of 164... can't wait to run in NICE weather!]