Amberism

Homeward Bound

Tomorrow we're off to the wilds of Alberta for the annual Labour Day Weekend Camping Trip and I'm super excited! hee! Then I'm spending another 2 weeks in Calgary which really is going to mean nothing according to the viewers of the website since I can still update there just as infrequently as I update here.

I'm sure something update worthy will happen soon.

Linux

Linux might be cool and all that for all the geeks out there, but in terms of usability? It freaking sucks big time. You can't even download you're basic program without fucking around and spending freaking HOURS trying to get it working. I don't want to have to download 5 different programs, including a developer's platform just to get ONE small little program downloaded. I don't. Sorry.

It's nice that you're not being attacked by all the freaks of the world hell bent on writing worms and viruses, but I can't DO anything without being willing to dedicate my existance to sitting here. I don't think I'm that willing. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think I want Windows back. gah.

Company's Coming

A friend of mine (Hi!Candi!) recently had house guests for a week and was discussing the things that drive her up the wall about said houseguests and I thought to myself - what an excellent blog topic.

Living on the island means that we've had our share of houseguests because the island is a pretty common vacation destination. Generally speaking, my distinct lack of friends in this part of the world means that I get a little loopy when I know someone is coming to visit because hee! Friends! Real live people to talk to as opposed to the creatures featured to the left of this post.

That said, I have my houseguest pet peeves just like anyone else, but my pet peeves might seem a little, well, odd.

The first thing you need to know about me is that I am, without a doubt, the worst hostess EVER. If we're good friends or family I expect you to come to my house and get comfortable. Put your feet up and skip the formalities. The rule is, I'll get your first two drinks but after that, get your own damn drinks, and while you're up, make me one too. I mean, you're already up. I'll do the same for you.

You're going to have to get over the fear people have of opening someone else's cupboard or fridge at my house. Open the fridge, I don't keep any dangerous creatures in there, unless you count mould because my fridge? Packed to the rafters and I'm sure there's something going mouldy in there on a pretty regular basis. If you're just over for dinner or drinks or something, ok, I can see that you're not going to go through my cupboards, but if you're staying a couple of nights, I'll tell you right from the getgo to make yourself at home and I truly, truly mean it.

If you're staying for a few days, I'll get out the breakfast necessities on Day One, show you where it all was, and on Day Two go ahead and help yourself. I'm not your personal slave, if you want toast, make yourself toast. If you want a glass of orange juice, you know where the juice is, you know where the glasses are. Pour yourself a glass because if you're waiting for me to offer it you'll be waiting for all eternity.

I'm not going to get up early just because you're here. Sorry, I enjoy sleeping. If you're an early riser, go ahead and get out of bed. Have a shower, make yourself a cup of coffee (which means rummaging through my cupboards, I'm ok with it. Honest.) and relax. If I forgot to leave out a towel, I'm sure you can deduce which cupboard the towels are in, don't wait for me to notice you're towel-less (there's a good chance I won't notice). If I forgot to put a towel in the downstairs bath, tell me or go find one. I've had people over and on day 3 I'll go in there and there's no towel or soap, but people have been using that bathroom for 3 days. SAY SOMETHING. God gave you a voice, use it.

If you're cold, let me know. I probably won't turn on the heat because I'm a cheap bitch, but I've got all sorts of warm and fuzzy blankets to accomodate you. Or tell Steve, he'll make sure you're comfortable because he cares an awful lot more than I do.

If you need to do laundry, say the word, I'll tell you where the laundry room is. Chances are I won't even lift my ass off the couch to show you, I'm sure you can find it. It's a small house. Let me know what colors you're doing, I might have some articles to throw in there as well.

If you have a TV show you watch religiously every week, that's cool, unless it interrupts MY TV show I watch every week and then we're going to have to talk. Bribe me, I'm easily bribable.

Basically, if you're here, my house is your house. Stay out of my room, and my office unless I give you explicit permission to use my office (and permission is casual, the comment "internet is available in my office if you want to set up your laptop" is me granting permission).

But here's the thing. You'll notice I DO NOT put my dirty dishes in the sink. I put them in the dishwasher. Like I've already mentioned, I am a shitty hostess and I am not your slave. Put your damn dishes in the dishwasher. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, people. And I clean up immediately after dinner, so you either help or you entertain yourself until my kitchen is tidy. I don't care which you do (really, I don't) just don't expect me to be entertaining you until I'm done my evening anal-retentive tasks. I hate waking up to a dirty kitchen so it must be clean when I go to bed.

For christ's sake, pet my dog or talk nice to him once in a while. I mean, seriously, he's annoying but he's cute and he just wants your lovin' people. Don't we all just want a little lovin'? If you give him even the slightest bit of attention, he is WAY more bearable. When you freak out everytime he strolls by, it makes the stay at my house very, very, very long. For everyone, but mostly for Steve and I because when the dog isn't comfortable with you, when you get up to pee at 4 in the morning, he'll freak out and bark at you. No one likes to be jolted out of a peaceful sleep by a barking dog. Least of all me.

I also don't want to hear about how I do things wrong. If I don't do things the way you do things, I assure you that I don't care. You're way is no more right than my way, it's just your way. Go ahead and think I'm an idiot, that's fine, I don't want to hear about it.

To be truthful, I'd rather not cook for you. I just really hate to cook, I'm not that good at it, and it seems to me that when you're cooking your guests are bored and staring at the walls waiting for you to be done. Or if there are several people over, they're all happily drinking a cocktail in the living room or backyard while I'm all by myself cooking in the kitchen. It might be ok if I enjoyed it, but I don't. The only time I don't mind is when everyone sits in the kitchen with me and chats, and Steve is bbq-ing something so the entire meal isn't resting on my shoulders. I'm not kidding, I really, really, really hate to cook. To be honest, I hardly ever cook for people without Steve's help anyway, but if you're here, and I'm alone in the kitchen cooking for you, come talk to me. I think I get this from my stepdad. If he's bbq-ing he gets pissed if no one goes out there and hangs out with him. I really don't blame him, and whenever he's at my house if I'm alone, he'll come into the kitchen to keep my company*.

My worse houseguests are those who are standing around waiting for my permission. I don't know why you're standing there, I don't know what you want, and I'm not your Mommy. Stop looking so awkward and make yourself comfortable. I also hate those people who go home and later bitch that I didn't do this or that for them. I'd accept the griping if I didn't say over and over and over again, I SUCK as a hostess and you're just going to have to get it yourself, or ask. My best houseguests know who they are because chances are, they've made me a drink or a sandwich at some point during their stay ;). heh.

There are two exceptions to this rule. The first is my Grandma because my Grandma treats me like a princess at her house and the rules for entertaining are different. I mean, we go to Grandma's for dinner and we sit down and have a cocktail before dinner from crystal glasses. See? Different rules. My Grandma gets very special treatment at my house from me (although, she might not necessarily think so because I am still scores below her level of entertaining just because I'm not that well versed being the worst hostess ever and all ;) ). For Grandma, I'd light a fire if she's cold and turn up the heat.

And my Grandma lavishes my dog with love. If my Grandma isn't scared of the dog, neither should you be. :)

The other exception is my Mom. Again, at Mom's house I'll wake up and there's coffee in a travel mug made to my specifications ready to go with me to work. And she makes me omlettes on the weekends. Yum! Omlettes! You give me that sort of service, you get a special gold pass at my house. Although, I'm still not nearly as nice to her as she is to me, but she gets to bitch about it if she'd like :).

What are your pet peeves?

*really, I'm hardly ever alone with my family because we all have this, like, kitchen attraction and we're all standing in there getting in the way of the cook anyway. At least, Fearthainn and I are. We don't often help, but we stand there and get in Mom's, or Grandma's way. Maybe its a female thing?

oh! my aching back!

Steve and I started building our deck this weekend.

Holy mother of God. Its backbreaking work, and as per usual, its just the two of us. Seriously, we need friends. Preferably bulky man friends and it would help if they looked good without their shirts on. Ok, that wouldn't help, but it would make moving endless wheelbarrows of dirt and rock that much more enjoyable for me. We can bring their hot, sexy girlfriends over to serve beers or something to ease Steve's pain. I'm cool with that.

To be honest, I'd be cool with anyone coming over and moving a couple of wheelbarrows of dirt.

Initially we were going to put stone down but stone is considerably more expensive and labour intensive than a deck so I compromised and a deck it is. Don't be fooled, building this deck isn't cheap either, but it is cheaper than the stones. The area we're excavating (by hand!) is enormous, I'd say about 300 square feet, so this isn't a small little platform we're talking about!

My only concern is that there might be a really good reason why no one in this part of the world seems to have decks... we're using treated lumber so hopefully it lasts longer than a couple of years.

We were really proud of ourselves and what we had accomplished this weekend, and were sitting out on the small cement patio that we have out there eating ice cream (we earned it!) and we could hear our neighbours daughter say "you should build a brick wall to hide all that". That being our yard. I was pissed right off. First of all, our yard isn't a garbage dump for fuck's sakes, and it certainly isn't necessary to build any brick walls to hide it. And second of all, WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF BUILDING A GOD DAMN DECK. How is that suppose to look pretty? Bitch.

Our progress on Saturday. On Sunday I had actually cleared away half of the gravel and dirt from in front of the cememt patio and Steve had placed more support beams on the side square portion to the left of the cement patio. I'm going to slowly work at moving more gravel and dirt from the front of the patio this week.

And the roses, because they're pretty. You can also see the majority of my backyard in the background just to prove that the backyard isn't that awful as to require hiding.

46 is a nice number.

Happy Birthday Uncle Ricky! You were only 16 when I was born? Crazy!

I just spent a day and a morning eradicating a virus from my work computer. I'm bitter and cranky about it. The virus was being activated remotely because of a hole in Windows so I needed to get a security patch downloaded and installed. Easy as pie, right? WRONG. While I'm attempting to get the security patch my fucking computer is in a reboot loop being activated remotely. It was rip your hair out frustrating. I finally get it all patched up and check gmail for the first time in a day and a half and there's a warning telling me about the virus. That wasn’t helpful.

Thankfully my home computer is on Linux, not Windows. I swear to god my next machine is going to be a Mac.

Counting up the days I've been unproductive due to viruses in the last 4 years it's been about 7 days and 3 of those days involved a huge hit on our company and my computer was in a queue to get fixed. If it had only been me affected it would probably have only been about half a day. Still, 7 days is less than I would have thought, but my virus frustrations have been both at work and at home so maybe that's why I thought it was more lost time at work.

Anyway, back to enjoying my summer and not updating :).

eh, bad month to fly?

Is it just me, or has this been a bad month for passenger planes around the world? Particularly for France.

If you search plane crashes (and I don't recommend that you do if you EVER want to fly again) it appears that its a lot more common than you'd think, but generally we're talking small planes and not passenger planes and its the trouble the passenger planes are having lately that is a little unusual. To me, at least.

First, there's that skidding off the runway in Toronto.

Then a plane went down in Greece this past Sunday.

And now another crash in Venezuela this morning.

Doesn't make one eager to fly anytime soon, that's for sure.

Summer Lovin' Had Me A Blast

It's been a busy week of beer drinking. Beer drinking does NOTHING for your figure, but hey, it's fun.

This weekend a friend is coming over to hang out and soak up some sun and basically just laze around (at least, that's MY plan). We're thinking we'll take the boat out for a spin tomorrow afternoon, have a picnic and make it a summery fun weekend. Next weekend I think we're planning to either go camping or kayaking. The weekend after that? Labour Day! Hee! Labour Day camping! I can't wait! And, in this part of the world, you can camp all September, so we've got more plans in the works to head out in September. I'm thinking we'd better strap on our backpacks one weekend too, because it's just WRONG that we haven't been backpacking in the entire year we've lived here. Talk about lazy. That's unacceptable.

I'm rambling. It's summer. I'm outside. You should be too :).

I'm FREE. F.R.E.E. Like a bird!

I am done. Done, done, done. D.O.N.E. both my summer school projects. It feels fabulous. Now I have 4 weeks until school starts again. I like it. I like it a lot!

The second project was a little, uh, crap. But whatever. I'm done!

Steve and I were about a day off from buying a sail boat and the dude's wife put a hold on all his assets. They're in the middle of a divorce and I suspect, under the circumstance, it's not a very nice divorce. Kinda sucks for us because I was sort of excited about owning a sail boat.

My brain is shot, so that is all.

No one wants to play the blog game with me. Shucks.

It is written

someone special did me :)

1. Reply with your name and I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I'll tell you my first memory of you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal. You MUST. It is written.

The last leg

I'm into the last 6 weeks until my time at my current company will come to an end and I've come to a realizations.

I have A LOT of personal crap on this computer. About 6 years worth, actually. How the hell am I going to archive and move all that stuff without it eating away a great deal of time when that time would be much better spent outside since it's so damn beautiful here?!

Especially the pictures. My lord, I've got pictures in every nook and cranny of this computer and if you think they're organized, than you think highly of me and I love you for it, but they're not. They're really, really not.

Any anal-retentives out there want to come over and clean my computer? Pretty please?

My Boys. So Cute.

And a rare moment indeed where my dog is sitting still in the presence of water. Miraculous, really.

Quadra Island

Camping was good fun, and Quadra Island is beautiful! Besides the raining bit, that was annoying, but it was a beautiful spot, and we had good friends and good food and good drinks so what's a little rain?!

The ferry to get us off the island had some sort of crack in the deck so we were delayed about an hour and a half, but managed to survive the hassle.

And now I must drown in the project writing and researching I should have done weeks ago. Let this be a lesson - procrastinating never works in your favour. Never. And its so beautiful out now. meh.