Goodbye Nova Scotia...

It's official! The papers have been signed and, tomorrow at 8:00 am, our pack will officially be homeless....

Parting is such sweet sorrow...

Today Ryan and I cleaned the entire house.

It's strange to see the place without our things in it....but, it still looks and feels like home.

It really is a beautiful house.

....even when it's empty, it's still full of love and memories...

Yesterday, the movers loaded everything on the truck.

And, on Tuesday, they packed up our entire house.

Our WoNdErFuL neighbor, Donna, took everything that the movers wouldn't take...like liquids, perishables, and such. We will miss her. She has become family to us, and it is always hardest to leave family.

Goodbye to all the great friends that I have met. Goodbye to all of the beautiful places that I have walked. And goodbye to all the wonderful stores that I have shopped....

I couldn't have imagined a more wonderful place to call home for the past 5 (!) years.

The Journey Begins...

Just when I thought Spring was almost here....

...Mother Nature went and dropped over a foot of snow on us!

But, I shouldn't complain. Our little Polar Bears love the snow, and it's worth all the shoveling and wet feet just to see them bum-scoot around in the snow. They are a riot!

New Lamps!

Our new lamps arrived today. Well, actaully, one was on my doorstep when I got home yesterday evening, and the other arrived this afternoon.

They are absolutely fabulous! I love them.


The shades are made from marbled ivory and dark blue glass. They are really pretty, and I love the design of the shade. It remindes me of a starburst.



...and they cast a beautiful glow. They really cozy up the room.



....now, if I can only keep my two bad little girls from knocking them over....

Home for Sale...

We listed with a realtor this morning, and we should be online (mls.ca) sometime next week.

Ryan and I spent the rest of the day taking a ton of photo's of the house....we probobly took around 150-200 of them! I think I sent 40 or so to the realtor to pick and choose from.

Anyhow....at least that is done! I never thought that it would be as hard as it was to choose a realtor.

...notice that the bathroom is no longer BRIGHT PINK, much to my dissappointment...

Happy New Year!

We rang in 2010 last night in the usual way...sushie and cheesy Kung Fu! This year I got us a bottle of Nova Scotia sparkling wine instead of the usual champagne, and was it ever good! It was so good that I drank the whole bottle! ...as per normal, Ryan took one sip and gave me his glass...disgusted with the taste. He then moved on to virgin ceasers...



Every year we make our own sushie. This year we used smoked salmon and prawns.

Mmmmm.....

We start our meal every year with Sunomo Salad.
(very thin rice noodles in a sugar/vinigar mairinade, garnished with cucumber lemon and prawns...)

We watch our cheesy Kung Fu while we make the sushie...and then we watch the first half of King Kong while we eat. ... we like to leave it there, and imagine that King Kong got to keep his bride and live happily for ever after on his island.

Happy New Year!!!!

May your 2010 be full of beautiful surprises...

I look foward to seeing everybody a bit more this year!

My Paintings...

The semester is almost over. Next Friday (Dec 04th) is the last day of classes. Then Finals on Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday (2!).

I thought that I would post my paintings from my watercolor class that I am taking. Each week we had a different 'theme'.

I will post them from my first painting in class to my final painting.

1-Experimental

This was supposed to be an abstract,

but I really wanted to paint a tree...so I did.

2-- Reproduction

This was a painting that we had to reproduce from our text.

3--Abstract

We used a viewfinder (a small rectangular cutout of paper) and magazines to find an interesting design. Believe it or not, this used to be Maddona's Dress.

4--Floral


5-- Abstract
I don't really like abstracts, but the teacher loves them.
We were given geometric stensils to use for our design.



6--Landscape
Ryan and I were walking the dogs around the golfcourse one night, and I couldn't get over how beautiful it is at night. So, I tried to reproduce it.

7--Final Project

Painting the dogs wasn't even my idea. I had wated to paint a tree full of crows, but my teacher...upon hearing of how badly Ryan wanted me to choose them as my subjects, insisted upon it. I decided that this would be the one gift that I could give to Ryan for Christmas that he would actually be thankful for.

And that's it.

There are more little bits here and there of stuff that we did in class, but those were the "paintings".

Halloween

I got to dress up TWICE this year! Friday was the annual costume Dance for the Kids at my work, so I dressed up as butterfly. I will post a pic as soon as I am able. And on Halloween, the whole family dressed up and went trick-or-treating at the neighbors.

The girls were little pink ladybugs.

I was a Bride and Ryan was a biker...

And, Nevaeh was Captain Hook!

We stocked up on candy, as we do every year. I got three HUGE bags of chocolates, 28 mini-bags of Doritos, lays and cheeses, and 18 bottles of fruit punch.

This year, we got 6 trick-or-treators.

Funny thing is that those 6 trick-or-treators almost cleaned us out! Ryan made sure that they took "lots"....And, we had one group of 3 kids come back for seconds. They offered to take everything, but Ryan told them that his wife would be mighty mad if she didn't have some loot for herself at the end of the night. And, our kindness paid off, because all of our pumpkins were still on our front porch in the morning...and not smashed up along the road like some of our neighbors' jack-o-lanterns.

When will people learn that Halloween is not the time to be stingy?

I hope you had a wonderful Halloween!

Ours was Spooktakular!

Ryan and I spent our entire Halloween weekend cleaning! We had hired a guy to come and clean our carpets, which meant that we had to move EVERYTHING from the upstairs downstairs. And we moved everything--upon doing which, we decided that we were only going to move 1/2 of it back upstairs...which means that we spent the rest of the weekend deciding what we were going to purge and what we were going to keep.

I love cleaning, so this was my kind of weekend.

Above is a picture of our dining room. Our living room is just as bad.

We thought that we would be able to start moving things back up today, but, the guy did a crummy job on our carpets and so Ryan and I went to the store this morning and rented a steam cleaner. After 3 more hours of work, and barely a visible difference, we came to the conclusion that 5 years and 3 dogs are just detrimental to carpeting--especially Berber! And this is as good as it is probably going to look.

...at least we know our carpets are clean.