Yup, Hello, it is me. It is I? C’est moi! I know it has been a LOOONG time. Do you see that date on the post under this one? January 24th!

That is 227 days; 7 months and 15 days; 32 weeks; 5448 hours; 326,880 minutes; 19,612,800 seconds. Approximately. As I said, a long time.

Quite frankly if I really take a look back I have been very sporadic in my posting for about the last two years. One might go so far as to say completely absent.

Do I want to come back to daily posts? Yes. I just don’t know if there is enough going on in my life to warrant it. I am sure there is enough going on in my head to do so, but really no one wants an all access pass to that insanity. I would like to make an effort though.

In order to try to simplify things and hopefully encourage my posting I’ve merged my two websites. Now whether you type in .com or .ca you’ll come here. At some point I am going to have to spend some serious time reconfiguring the layout, but for now I’m sticking with this one (I think).

On the home front there is finally progress being made on the backyard. I am very happy about this. Though at the same time as with all renovations there is a certain level of inconvenience. In this case re-doing the backyard means all the privacy I had achieved by not maintaining the backyard is gone. It feels very open right now. Last Thursday the excavator came in and over two days and about 4 hours had pulled everything out. When I went out of town on Friday evening there was rubble/scrub/trees/dirt to be removed by dump truck as well as a shed to be moved. I wasn’t there to take photos but fortunately someone was resulting in the very cool pano below that gives a nice view of the progress so far. I had forgotten how big my backyard was until it was just a big open space of dirt. 

Cool eh? Did you zoom in on it? Alright I’ll put the geek away now.

It is a work in progress, but it is good to be getting to it after almost 5 years.

Well I know this wasn’t a very long post but it is getting late and there is work tomorrow. With any luck I’ll be back tomorrow night with tales from the company golf tournament where I will be taking photos from a golf cart.

PS – Thanks for sticking around. I promise I’ll try to do better.

Okay, perhaps you are asking yourself, “why the hell is she showing us pictures of her floor?”, or more importantly “why is she so excited about pictures of her floor?”

The answer to both those questions is the lovely little piece of wood running down the middle of both those photos. They are so beautiful.

It has taken two and a half years to get those nailed down. They have been stained and floating around my house all that time, waiting to cover the gap between my floors.

Finally today their end purpose was achieved and I am SO happy. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but when you consider what it looked like before:

It wasn’t the most attractive thing to look at and it caught dirt like nothing could.

Plus my house is pretty clean at the moment because my nephew in an effort to make some money came over and cleaned (well vacuumed). It will probably stay this way for about a day. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll have managed to pile things on top of all the flat surfaces again.

BUT! I won’t mind because I HAVE TRANSITIONS!

Being on holiday totally throws off my schedule, especially my sleep schedule. I have pretty erratic sleeping patterns as it is, or rather lack of sleep patterns, but throw in a holiday and they try to fall into a rhythm that just doesn’t work in the normal world.

I’ve always been a night owl, an insomniac to a degree, and able to sleep through anything (assuming I fall asleep that is.) It has never been too much of a problem, I have developed the ability to function on very little sleep.

When holiday time comes around though I find myself staying up much later than I should, and sleeping in much later as a result. As if my body knows I don’t have anywhere to be and takes advantage by keeping me up late and sleeping longer. I always know I should be trying to keep my regular schedule, but it is easier said than done. Nights when I can’t get to sleep until past 3AM I know are going to be followed by long days. Sometimes I wish my body would realize that my normal schedule starts at 7AM, as much as I wish it didn’t.

I still have another two days off but I think I am going to have to try to get up early and force myself out of bed. Otherwise going back to work on Monday is going to be very difficult. Which means I’ll have to try and exhaust myself during the day too so that by 10PM I can just throw myself into bed and sleep. I’m not sure how I’ll accomplish this, but I’m sure I’ll find a way. Like say cleaning my entire house from top to bottom and finishing re-arranging it.

Today I accomplished a few things and some things I wanted to check off my list weren’t.

My parents showed up very early (ok it was 9:30 but it was still early for me) to removed some firewood from my backyard that I had no use for. Then my step-dad went and discussed tree problems with my neighbour since more of their tree branches came down in my yard the other night. They are going to look into getting the tree dealt with, hopefully before any more falls apart. I also gave some rhododendrons I had sitting in pots to my other neighbour because she had wanted them for a spot in her garden and I had no use for them. She kept trying to give me money for them, I think finally she got the idea that I just wanted to get rid of them though.

After that I went out to Home Depot in search of a small media stand, so I can down grade from the large armoire I am currently using, but they were not very nice. I also looked at bathroom vanities but didn’t like any of the ones they had and  tried to find programmable thermostats for baseboard heaters with no luck.

Having been totally rebuffed at Home Depot I decided to try Canadian Tire. Their media stand options sucked, but I did find programmable thermostats for baseboards on sale. Of course now I have three sitting on my counter waiting to be installed, hopefully they won’t sit there too long.

After grabbing a late lunch with Indigo Eve I came home I vegged out for a while, then suddenly had the urge to start cleaning things out. I broke down a bunch of boxes I had lying around from various purchases (shoes, electronics, etc). Then I started sorting through boxes that I have been moving from apartment to apartment to house for a few years. I tossed many things but some things I couldn’t. It is hard to rid yourself of sentimental crap, even if you know you should. I did end up with a couple garbage bags full of stuff to take to the garbage dump and I’m sure I’ll throw a few more things in them before I am done.

Slowly I am going to rid my house of all the extraneous junk which will be nice. I really do hate clutter and since I have no closets in which to hide it, it bothers me even more at the moment. Now it is late so I should head to bed and get some sleep then I can get up tomorrow to start the process again.

Had to…turn…the…heat…on.

*sigh*

I kept trying to hold off, thinking “just a little longer”, but alas it was just too darn cold. Actually it isn’t that cold but then the crazy winds of Vancouver Island have decided to rear up and so it feels much colder. Especially when that cold air is blowing around in my crawl space and coming up from my non-insulated floor.

I’m not happy about turning the heat on though so I think I might go to Home Depot and pick up some programmable thermostats, the dial thermostats I have on my baseboards are just horrible. They basically have on or off. I swear they don’t actually test and adjust the temperature in the room. They just pretend to, they are always on, and you can’t tell them to turn off over night when it doesn’t matter if the house is cold or not.

And now I am going to post this because the lights just dimmed and that might be a warning that the power is about to drop. Good thing it is time for bed and I don’t need heat to sleep.