Tricia's Musings

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



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My dog goes nuts over cardboard

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My Labrador Retriever has a cardboard box fetish … ok, well anything cardboard or paper it seems.

It all started a few months ago when I was replacing a box of soda crackers and noticed Midnights interest in the empty box. I let her take it and off she carefully tottered to her doggy bed in the living room with the long box covering most of her muzzle and her eyes. I’m surprised she didn’t bump into any furniture as she took her treasure to her special place.

Now whenever she sees us carrying a box or paper she wants to have it for herself. We don’t let her tear things up very often, but occasionally we’ll give here a cardboard pop case or a cereal box. I guess if our recycling container started to get too full she’d come in handy … we could give here all the paper and cardboard stuff and let her tear it up for us and make it smaller for the recycling container. LOL

She’s actually tearing into a Coca Cola box right now while we’re trying to watch TV. She’s noisy as she tears so we have the TV volume up quite a bit. At least she’s having fun and it will keep her busy for about half an hour.

I don’t have a picture of tonight’s activity, but here’s one I took a few weeks ago of Midnight tearing up a cracker box:

Black Lab chewing box

At least she’s well behaved – she won’t help herself to a box or the mail, she waits until we give her something – thankfully!

Have you ever had a dog that liked to tear up cardboard and paper?





I think we’re in recession recovery mode now here in Toronto

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The news reports have been saying over the last month or two that our housing market here in Toronto was starting to get back to normal … well not totally normal, but close, and now I have true proof that it is indeed getting better. recession

My brother and his wife who live just outside of town decided to buy a Condo around the beginning of May. Their kids are in their 20’s and they don’t need a big house and all the maintenance that goes along with it anymore, so I guess that’s why they decided to move to a Condo.

They put their house up for sale on May 10th and it was sold on the 27th … not bad for a housing market that’s not quite as hot as it was two years ago! Hmmm I wonder if the people that own the house next door (currently inhabited by renters that are slowly driving me nuts) might decide to put that house on the market again soon? That house needs a lot of work though so I’m sure it wouldn’t sell fast without at least some of the work being done.

I was talking with my brother this evening and he was telling me about their new condo. It’s 1,400 square feet so it’s a good size. Two bedrooms, kitchen, sun room, living room/ dining room, balcony and all the amenities that go along with a condo such as party room, swimming pool, sauna and rooftop barbecues I think. Sounds pretty nice.

The building is about twenty years old and my brother says the kitchen is outdated so they are doing to renovate the kitchen shortly after moving in. They redid the kitchen in their current house too so I joked with him that he’s going to be a professional kitchen renovator by the time he’s finished the condo kitchen! They don’t know exactly what kind of kitchen reno they’re going to do just yet – ie tile floors or hardwood, stainless steel appliances or who knows maybe even copper sinks but I’m sure they’ll enjoy figuring it out and of course the finished product. It’s the work in between that might be a pain! LOL

I used to say I’d never live in a condo – especially after living in an apartment for 14 years before we bought our house. But now that I’m so sick with Crohn’s I can see the advantages of not having to trudge upstairs to use the bathroom and not having yard work and home maintenance to do!

How is the housing market in your area? Did it bottom out once the recession hit and is it recovering now like ours here in the General Toronto Area (GTA)?

Perfect weekend for getting things done around the home

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Chris was busy today while I lay like a lump on the couch. Yeah, my Crohn’s is up to no good again.

We have three screen doors on our house, two at the front and one at the back and all of the handles started not working properly earlier this year. The doors just didn’t latch closed when they shut. So Chris spent some time replacing two of the handles and then with my help he rehung the screen door at the back that had been rubbing in one corner at the base – which of course caused it to not close properly.

Now that we’re starting to get nicer weather and want to have the doors open more often to let air in, it’s important that the screen doors close securely. I mean, we live on a busy street and our dog could literally push the doors open if we didn’t make sure they closed properly.

Tomorrow, if it’s not raining and if I’m feeling a bit better I have a few more seeds to plant in the garden and then we might go out shopping at some electronics stores. Our Home Theater stopped working, oh … about two years ago and we’ve tried everything to get it working again, but it just won’t work.

Every time we turn on the Home Theater system we get an “overload” message. We’ve unplugged various addons from the back (DVD player, cd player etc) to see if that helped and it didn’t, we’ve also plugged the machine into a different outlet and that didn’t help either. Then, about two weeks ao, on the advice of a salesperson at an electronics store Chris took the Home Theater apart and checked to see if the heat sink was covered in dust (it wasn’t) and checked for fuses inside the machine. We did find about 5 fuses but none of them looked blown so I guess the system is just plain blown and we’ll have to replace it.

So … maybe tomorrow we’ll go out and see if we can find a new home theater system receiver (without speakers and subwoofer since we have those) that isn’t too expensive and see if that will work. I really miss having the home theater system. I mean, we can’t watch DVD’s easily anymore and I can’t listen to CD’s unless I put them on the computer. I know I’d listen to a lot more music if we could get the home theater system working again.

Anyway, I guess since it looks like it will continue to rain on and off all weekend we’re just going to get things done around the house – mostly inside stuff unless the weather really clears up.

What are you doing this weekend? Are you going out to do something interesting or just doing home maintenance stuff like we are?

I hate it when the power goes out!

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The power was just out here from 3:30 until about 4:30 pm. I hate it when the power goes out. I was in the middle of doing something on the computer – just about to publish a post in fact and boom … out goes the power.

For a while we seemed to have several short power outages each month, but it’s been pretty good over the last year … well except for that transformer that blew up in January that was just across from the hospital that’s just down the street from us. That caused the power to be out for about two hours.

At least we have a gas stove and a barbecue so if the power had been out for a long time we still would have been able to cook. Actually if was out for a few hours we’d probably have to cook as we have a lot of food in the freezer that would be thawing! LOL

While the power was out I was BORED. I couldn’t do any work on the computer or watch TV so I thought I’d go into my backyard and take some photos of the flowers that are currently blooming. Only problem was that my neighbors were in the driveway and their backyard BBQ’ing and talking loudly. I like quite when I’m taking nature photos so I ended up just staying inside with the dog and reading a magazine.

I have the news on now and I’m trying to find out what caused the power to go out, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to talk about it.

Does the power go out in your area every so often? For short periods or hours at a time? What do you do when the power goes out?

Thinking of going back to school?

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In recession times it’s not uncommon for those who’ve been laid off or those who’s jobs might be on shaky ground to think about returning to school. I’m sure there are many people who have recently considered returning to school either to study further in their chosen field or to make a complete career change.

In the early 90’s, during that recession, I did a complete career change and so did my husband (boyfriend at the time). We were both jewelers and the jewelery trade wasn’t doing well, so we took turns going back to school. I became a nurse and my husband became a computer technician.

If you are considering going back to school you might be interested in taking a look at the online Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership course at Lewis University.

There are five concentrations in this course which will equip you with leadership and progressive management techniques, they are organizational management, not- for -profit management, Public administration, training and development, and higher education – student services.

They also offer an online Masters of Science in Information Security. The course is highly dynamic and it provides students with the managerial and technological tools to work with government agencies and businesses in order to safeguard them from threats to their data and computer systems.

I actually like the idea of online courses. They offer flexibility in that it’s often easier to fit an online course of study into your life. Lewis University also offers competitive tuition and has generous financial aid programs.

I know that if I were thinking of making a career change and possibly going back to school I’d probably look into an online course first. Have you ever thought of furthering your career by going back to school?

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