Sep 29

For our trip back to Canada I picked up a bunch of magazines, a past time in which I rarely indulge. I don’t generally spend money to read celebrity gossip or sensationalist journalism. But it was a guilty pleasure for the trip. The biggest thing that stood out to me was how many trends which I remember are coming back “in”.

The first appalling thing about this is that I am now old enough to remember trends from the first time around. Guess that’s something we all have to accept as we age. But I thought I would at least break 30 before I did so!

The second appalling thing is that I can definitely come down firmly opposed to all of these trends. I can not and will not embrace them. Have I become so out of touch with fashion? Has motherhood rendered me completely style-less? You be the judge…

Clothing Trends Which I Reject:

-Vests: I don’t like vests. Period. I guess under a tux they are ok. And the down-filled kind for cool weather are good. But I DO NOT like this:

-Leggings: Cute on little girls. On adults? Notsomuch. Unless you are a fan of showing off your cellulite.

-Skinny jeans: My take on the skinny jean? There aren’t enough people on the planet who are actually skinny enough to wear said jeans to warrant having them around at all. Only a fraction of those who wear them actually look good in them. My waist is ever so slightly larger than the circumference of both my ankles (*snort!*) and a similar waist to ankle measurement is what is needed to look good in skinny jeans.

-Plaid!!!: All I can say is WTF-ever Fashion World?

Why is plaid coming back? Why? Plaid is not, nor will it ever be, high fashion. I’m sorry. It’s just not. (Except on my friend RC who makes plaid cool.)  And those long, plaid dress shirts with a belt over top and leggings underneath? Gross! Plaid belongs on mens’ casual button up shirts and couches at the cabin. Period.

Ok, ok, ok. I know I’m pretty much the last person on the planet who deserves to be giving fashion advice as I could easily be the next victim on What Not To Wear. But I’m feeling a tad cranky and tired (oh renovations, when will you stop torturing me???) and sometimes a good bitch session clears up the grumps, you know? So there it is. I’m done judging. And it’s not like I would ever tell someone I hate what they’re wearing. It’s more an indication of how long it’s been since I read a fashion magazine and that most of these trends require a body shape that I simply do not possess. All signs point to an annual reading of popular fashion magazines to indulge in mocking style trends see what I’m missing in my wardrobe!

Sep 21

I’ve had a number of requests for pictures of the goings-on in renovation purgatory our new place. So here, for your viewing enjoyment, are a just a few pieces of photographic evidence that I am not making up the conditions in which I’ve been living for the past 3 weeks!

These pics really don’t capture the horror that is wallpaper. But every wall you see here is covered in wallpaper except the one at the end of the hall on the left picture. Up the stairs? Wallpaper. In the kitchen (below)? Wallpaper. In the bedrooms (also below)? WALL-FRICKIN’-PAPER!

Again the picture really doesn’t show how bad the kitchen is, but the wall that the fridge is on basically divides the kitchen in half. It was a ridiculous layout. But we have since remedied that issue.

This is how we fix “layout issues” in my household…

…aaaand like so….

The kitchen with all the cupboards and walls removed…

Kieran has discovered the joy of the shop-vac.

Thankfully no one actually fell through any of the multiple large holes in our floors and ceilings…

…especially when we no longer had a ceiling and the floor was stripped down to the original slats (whenever we swept, all the dust would fall through to the basement and you can imagine how much I loved that!).

Here is what we slept on for the first 2 weeks in the house…

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And here is what it currently looks like in our garage, where all our worldly possessions are currently being stored…

…and where we currently eat our breakfast each morning…

So things are actually better than they appear in the pictures as we have made a lot of progress this weekend. I have moderately high hopes of having a functioning kitchen by the end of this week – minus countertops though, so that will be fun. Regardless, the work continues and I promise I will post pics when things are at least semi-completed!

Sep 19

I hung curtains in my bedroom tonight, yo! No more peep shows for the neighbours! Tonight the ceiling and walls being primed! That is the smell of progress, my friends!

That is all. Carry on!

Sep 15

Maybe you, like me, have heard of children who ride the bus to school. Maybe you, like me, have wondered about how the whole system works. How do kids know when and where to wait for the bus, do they walk to the appointed place alone or with a parent, who gets them on the bus when they leave school, what do you do if the bus doesn’t come…

My best guess would be that the school would contact the bus company who would give you an expected time and place for you to wait for the bus. And then you would go and wait for the bus. However, that bus might not come. In which case you would be standing outside for a long time – in the RAIN – wondering if you are at the wrong place or if you are too early or too late.  And then you would eventually walk home, dragging your devastated 6 year old home and calling a friend to drive her to school because your moving truck is coming today and you need to be there to meet it driving her yourself.

And I bet that after school you might get a phone call from the school principal who is “just checking” to make sure you realize that your offspring is coming home on the bus even though it is the agreed upon start date for bus service. I would also wager a guess that the bus would be approximately 15 minutes late in delivering your deliriously happy daughter into your waiting arms.

Not that it happened to me. I’m just guessing.

Sep 13

I have learned a few things since we began the renovation process several weeks ago and I am here to share my wisdom with you:

  • There is more dust inside the walls and floors of your house than you ever imagined possible. You can’t possibly prepare for it. So don’t even try.
  • There is no excuse for painting anything flesh-coloured (as in Caucasian flesh, other skin colours are much classier choices for paint).
  • Sleeping on air mattresses gets old really quickly. But remembering to pump it up with a little extra air every few days goes a long way. If you are wondering why you are so damn uncomfortable…it could be because your mattress is only at 25% capacity.
  • Renovations make me bitchy cranky.
  • My husband and father-in-law have a bottomless fountain of energy from which to draw. It must be genetic. I don’t know how they do it but they have been working on the house 20 hours a day without stopping for 10 days now. My father-in-law is taking vacation time to come and help us, which is incredibly generous. However – WORST. VACATION. EVER. Sleeping on an air mattress and working til you drop every day is not my idea of a holiday. Just sayin’.

Random stuff I’ve been wanting to tell the internets:

  • Elementary school in Boston was guarded like the freaking White House. Picking up a child from school was practically a secret service mission, what with no entrance to the school without filling out visitor forms. School here is like a free-for-all. They don’t care how the kids get to their classrooms, so long as they get there. They don’t care who picks them up or where they go after the bell rings! The teacher’s first parent letter indicated her goal for the children this year is independence. I fully endorse this goal but after the red tape, overprotective atmosphere over kindergarten I’m getting whiplash just dealing with it all!
  • Everyone keeps saying Saskatoon has had no mosquitoes until September. Remarkably, when we arrived in town. The mosquitoes waited for me to show up and then moved in to feast. I am undone. Really, just covered in bites!
  • I have never been so aware of the easygoing Canadian attitude before. After being away for a while it has never been so apparent. I like it!
  • All moving companies are, without exception, completely corrupt and out to rob you of every last penny.
  • Things have been rocky with our moving company, or can you tell?
  • They charged us the equivalent of several mortgage payments extra for “packing services” because we ended up putting a lot more on the truck than we originally intended (because we bought our kitchen for the new house in the states and brought it back with us). But the kitchen was all in boxes. It required no extra packing. Loading yes. Packing no. Loading charges did not change. The cost of the weight changed, which is fair. The cost of the packing changed, which is not fair. We will contest this.
  • We were told our belongings would be delivered no later than September 10. They are arriving tomorrow, September 14. Why yes, that is smoke coming out of my ears! Thanks for noticing!
  • It is really refreshing to make such a big move and already know where everything in the city is and how to go about getting settled. Really refreshing! We know where the grocery stores and schools and parks are. We know which events to look forward to. We know which friends we can call and beg to help us with our home renos…. Ahem.
  • My Massachusetts driver’s licence broke the computer system of the local licence provider. I went to switch back to a SK licence and they had it all printed out but realized they hadn’t entered it correctly so they could create a new photo id. So they tore it up and started over. And then they started over again. And then they called the help desk. Five times. And I waited for a full hour (which I know doesn’t seem like much to those of you in big cities, but for Saskatoon if you have to wait five minutes it’s a HUGE FREAKING DEAL). And then they told me to go do what I needed to do and they would call and let me know when I could come back. And then they called and said my Massachusetts licence broke their whole system and it will be a week before they can get the bug fixed so I should come back then. Awesome.
  • A large percent of people here can’t pronounce Massachusetts. You would think that anyone who can pronounce “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan” without any problems would already have the linguistic dexterity necessary to pronounce MASS-AH-CHEW-SETS. Most common mispronounciations: Mass-a-two-shits and Mass-a-two-sits. It amuses me.

Ok, I think we’re done. Hopefully the blog is working and you can all read this. I’ve been experiencing technical difficulties recently so if you’ve been seeing nothing past August 22 and now suddenly see several new posts, it’s not you, it’s me.

Sep 7

Dear Sir/Madam,

The many disturbed minds in the world have not yet devised a form of torture that is painful or humiliating enough to satisfactorily punish you for creating such a fiendishly difficult-to-remove wall covering.  Even when wallpaper removal is going “well” it is still going TERRIBLY BAD and is only marginally better than having two root canals. While giving birth. To triplets. And being run over by a truck.

Those who continue to put up wallpaper are the only beings worthy of more contempt than yourself as they are responsible for the suffering of home-renovators like myself around the world – those of us who wish to make a simple change of paint colour but must first remove miles upon miles of wallpaper!

And don’t tell me that wallpaper is coming back “in” because it’s not. Not into my house, anyway.

Screw you!

Love,
Shannon

Sep 5

When involved in a home renovation as thorough as what we are currently doing (and by we I do mean the hubby), one has to expect all kinds of surprises, both good and bad. Surprises like discovering venting in a wall you had intended to tear down and plumbing that was apparently being held together by dust and when the walls surrounding it were torn down the dust was disturbed and the leaking started. And the fact that what seemed like not too much wallpaper stretches out before you like a task that will continue on into perpetuity.

We the hubby has torn out so many walls and cupboards and flooring that I fear we will soon run out of house altogether. After briefly considering scraping off the stipple from the ceiling to redo it once the various bare patches are fixed, the ceiling was also torn down. No one wants to miss the chance to hit things with sledgehammers around here!

I feel like a pioneer with the flooring stripped down to the bare planks which is all that keeps us from falling through to the basement and which have big enough cracks between the floorboards that we can see right down into the basement. We moved the fridge into the garage and are eating in there while sitting on the concrete step.

Totally roughing it. (Yes, I realize that pioneers didn’t have fridges. Or garages.)

Sep 1

Once again it’s been a long time since the last post. I know you’ll forgive me for not posting from the road.

We have finally reached our destination and today we took possession of our new (to us) house. The renos have already begun and so much is happening my head is spinning. Today was also Avery’s first full day of grade one and I am looking forward to picking her up and hearing all about it.  I wish I had the brainpower to write these mundane updates in a witty and fascinating way, but I just don’t.  Pictures coming soon, if the moving truck shows up with our stuff. Here’s hoping! Cheers!