Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Archives for September 2009

We had some delicious meals for my birthday celebration

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It was my birthday last Sunday. We didn’t do anything extra special like go out for dinner or have a party, but we did have two really great meals over the weekend in celebration.

On Saturday we went out to get our hair cut. My hair grows really fast and I was past due for a hair cut. It’s so nice now that it’s cut and it’s so nice to not have to struggle with my hair being too long!

After Chris and I got our hair cuts I decided that I wanted to buy a cake for my birthday. We haven’t had a cake, pie or really any dessert other than fruit for over a year so it was time to splurge on something tasty.

While we were in the grocery stores bakery picking out a cake I decided that I want to take a look at the fish section to see if they had any Halibut. Halibut grilled on the barbecue is tasty!

In the end we purchased over a pound of fresh halibut (expensive!), two t-bone steaks (they were on sale!), asparagus, a basket of zucchini and a basket of green peppers (on sale – 3.99 for a basket) and a basket of fresh peaches, garlic bread and a cake for my birthday. The cake was (is, there’s still some left) a banana chocolate chip cake with chocolate truffle between the layers and a chocolate cream cheese dressing. Needless to say it’s a rich cake and we’re only having small slices which is why there’s still some left!

So with all that delicious food my birthday was really a two day celebration. The steak and halibut were more expensive than our usual fair, but they made excellent meals, much nicer than the meals we probably would have gotten if we’d gone out to a nice restaurant on Sunday for my birthday.

I expect we’ll have another celebration in a week or two. Not birthday related though. We’re very friendly with our Greek neighbors and one of my neighbors grandsons is going to get engaged this weekend (i just gave him the name of one of my certified diamonds contacts from my time in the jewelry trade) and I’m sure my neighbors will have some kind of big engagement party soon that we’ll end up invited too. I’ve mentioned before how our neighbors give us food all the time (especially when they’re celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter) and inviting us to their special events … so I’d be willing to wager that we’ll get an invite to their engagement celebration. Mmmm more good food!

So … what do you do for your or your spouses birthday. Do you go all out and celebrate with a party and lots of gifts? Chris and I pretty much have everything we need (except more money!) so we don’t really buy each other gifts. We buy things when we can afford it and when we want it not just for special days or holidays.

I’ll post the recipes for the Grilled Halibut and the grilled T-bone steaks in the next couple of posts in case anyone’s interested in how we made our fantastic tasting food!





We’ve got to fix that darn tri-light that keeps fizzling out

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I have one light in my living room that drives me nuts! It’s an old standing lamp that I got from my parents house when my mother died. I think there’s something wrong with the wiring in the light fixture.

It’s a Tri-light lamp and it seems to burn through bulbs every few months. Once a bulb starts to go it’s tri-light feature stops working. It will usually lose the low light setting first, then the high setting and only the medium will work. The light will also flicker on and off every few minutes too.

I think maybe this weekend (if we have time – see last post!) we’ll have to go and look at light fixtures. Maybe we can find a new fixture to put in the lamp that won’t fizzle lights so quickly. I’d get a whole new light for the living room 1. if we could afford it, and 2 if this one didn’t have sentimental value. I hope that we can fix it.

I don’t know if all tri-lights fizzle out like this when they go, but I figure that our bulbs should last at least five or six months instead of the three months we’re getting for each bulb on average. I don’t have any other tri-lights in the house to compare this one to.

Do you have any lights or appliances in your home that don’t work the way they should? Isn’t it frustrating?

Busy Busy – Every weekend it’s something else!

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The past few weeks have been so busy! Scratch that – the whole summer seems to have been a busy time for my husband and I.

The last two weekends Chris and I went to his cousins to help them dig up their backyard. They have a strange drainage problem … their whole backyard slopes back towards their house! To make matters worse the backyard is filled with clay soil so that made digging really hard!

I also celebrated my birthday last Sunday so that kept us busy too! Hmmm I should write a post about the great meals we had on Saturday on Sunday as part of my celebration.

Now this weekend my husbands brother is here from Chicago. His teenage son is participating in a weekend long hockey tournament. So guess where I’ll be all weekend … sitting in a cold ice arena!

Then … next weekend it’s my brother in law’s birthday and a family friend out of town wants us to come to her house for a dinner party. This means probably staying overnight, but we can’t bring our dog because our friend (the one that had heart surgery last fall) hates dogs! That’s a dilemma because we can’t leave the dog alone for most of the weekend. So we either have to figure out something for our dog, not go … or what usually happens when this friend invites us to one of her parties – just my husband will go.

We have things going on into early October! I think by the time all of our planned activities are over I’m going to need a holiday! Maybe I should look into one of those Myrtle beach vacation rentals that I keep hearing about. Sounds good to me!

How busy are you these days? Did you have a busy summer like I did? Are things settling down now, or are you just as busy with parties, family obligations and other things as you were all summer?

The cat and the soap bubbles

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Ninja kitty does it again! I love this shot of a cat jumping up to puncture a huge soap bubble!

Wow!

The photographer took the picture at just the right moment as you can still see the shape of the bubble but it’s also clearly disintegrating. Actually the fading punctured bubble kind of looks like a face doesn’t it? That’s another thing that I found cool about this photograph.

Well my Redneck neighbors are finally gone!

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The nightmare is over …

Ahh … a sigh of relief! My redneck nuisance neighbors are finally completely gone – only three days after their rental lease ended!

These are the neighbors that moved into the house next door in January. I call them rednecks because they were loud, didn’t take care of the house or property (you should see the weeds in the backyard, some are five feet tall!) and well … they seemed to collect tires and cars!

As they slowly moved out of the house next door (moving began the second weekend of August) I counted a total of 16 tires being moved from their backyard and maybe the basement! Who the heck needs 16 tires?

They were the worst movers too. They borrowed a truck from a friend (looked like a UPS truck but it was painted silver) for a few of their moves but they didn’t know how to pack the truck. It seemed like they were just carrying things out one at a time and hadn’t packed anything at all!

I thought that they were finally out of the house on Saturday, but on Monday the guy showed up with his son and they started hauling stuff out of the basement! However, they didn’t take much of it away. Instead they put a big HD flat screen TV on the front porch as well as two single mattresses and some other stuff and left it there until today! They’re lucky that nobody stole it off the porch!

I think that someone was casing the house last night though … there was a guy standing outside my house last night for about 15 minutes and he kept looking at my neighbors porch. He was also trying to call someone … I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to contact someone with a truck so that they could steal that TV!

Oh and on Monday when the guy and his son were hauling stuff out of the basement window they piled most of it in the driveway. It was garbage bags full of clothes, a tacky set of cupboards, a very used dresser and a bunch of other stuff. Our driveway looked worse than it did during the 6 week long garbage strike (at least it smelled a bit better!).

If I needed any proof that they were ignorant low class people I got it on Tuesday when the home owners son and wife came to take a look at the house and clean it up! They let me come in and they showed me how their renters had painted the walls (tacky colors and stripes on the doors???) and how the paint was peeling and bubbling everywhere because they must have used latex paint over oil paint!

The carpets were ruined as well! They got a puppy in January shortly after they moved in and from the looks of it the dog did his business on the carpet – several times. There were stains all over the carpet in the living room, dining room and hall way.

I know they kept the dog in the kitchen most of the time, but the dog ruined that room too. The home owners had put in nice laminated wood flooring in the kitchen before they rented the house and now the floors are scratched and bubbling up in places. Not something that usually happens to laminate so that dog must have been peeing all over the place and they must not have even tried to clean it up! Can you imagine cooking meals in a kitchen that had uncleaned dog pee in it? Yuck!

The rednecks also broke two chandeliers and a window. The chandeliers were ones that my old neighbor (Stalker – Sofie) who’s about 88 years old now, made when she was much younger and worked in a lighting factory. So they’re old chandeliers and had sentimental value as the woman had made them herself! They also managed to crack the porcelain tile in the bathroom. How, I don’t know!

All in all I think that it cost the homeowners more to rent to these low class people than it should have! They tore out the carpeting today and are having it replaced. I think they’ll also have to replace the kitchen floor, fix that cracked porcelain, repair at least one window pane and repaint most of the house! Oh yeah, and clear out all the weeds in the backyard!

There were some new people looking at the house the other day and they might move in as early as September 15th. They haven’t signed the lease yet though, so I don’t know if they’ll be my new neighbors or not. In a way I’m half hoping that they don’t move in because they were recommended my the former renters! Ah! They’re friends! If they do move in I hope that they don’t turn out to be anything like the people that just moved out as that was a nightmare for Chris and I (yes we fought over the things that our neighbors were doing because they frustrated us so much!) and an even worse nightmare for the home owners!

I’ve I’ve learned anything from this it’s that renting out a house is kind of scary! You never know what tenants you’ll get! (or in our case neighbors!)

Have you ever had nightmare neighbors or rented a house or room to someone that just destroyed the property?

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