Curse this hot summer weather! It makes the cats shed like crazy and Sephie has been coughing up so many hairballs that her little kitty voice is quite hoarse. I think she's sick of the hairballs herself and is actually letting me brush her. It's madness!

Theovis and I just got back from our big road-trip vacation on Saturday and it was awesome! We had a really great time and drove approximately 3100km (~2000mi) in the 7 days we were away. We took a million pictures and as usual, I'll post them at a later date. I think I'll do the lazy version and just make photoshop galleries out of them rather than coding it all in, which is why it normally takes me forever to actually get photos posted.

We drove from Vancouver to Merritt, then to Golden, up through Jasper to the Columbia Icefields then back down to Banff. We drove through Calgary to Drumheller (Dinosaur Museum) then back to Calgary before heading down to Fort McLeod and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump and through the Crowsnest pass to Fernie. From Fernie we drove to Osoyoos then through the Fraser Canyon and Fraser Valley then eventually back to Vancouver.

Once we were back home on Sunday, we lazed around for most of the day watching episodes of Firefly on DVD instead of putting our gear away and doing laundry. It was way too hot for doing much else. It was probably at least as hot today but I did get some of that stuff done as well as picking up some groceries, getting a massage treatment to help my aching back and going to ballet class.

I've been trying to get on here for nearly a week to do an update and it just wasn't happening so here's a hodgepodge of what I've been up to. I've just had too much stuff going on plus any free computer time I've had has been sucked up by Theo and I playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic together. By "playing together" I mean that he plays and I make the occasional comment about what path he should take and what kind of new powers he should get when he levels up. Mostly I keep getting mad because he doesn't do the "chuck your lightsabre" attack often enough because it looks really cool. He's all like, "it uses up too many force points that I need for healing," and I'm all like, "hello? It looks cool." We're geeks.

My birthday came and went on May 26. We had an awesome day. It started, well, it started the night before when my brother showed up to surprise me - and it was a huge surprise. I was in the bath and freaked right out when I heard his voice. We got to hang out that night then at breakfast at Sophie's Cosmic Cafe the next morning. He's still in town, I think, but I haven't seen or heard from him since. Typical. He wouldn't even come to the birthday party I had on the weekend because some other "super close" friend that he hasn't seen for 5 years was having a birthday party that same night and he'd already said he'd go. Well, as long as it was something important... *sigh*

Anyway, after breakfast, Theo and I drove to Whistler to do a Ziptrek tour. It was awesome - and terrifying. I started preparing all the images into a page to show all y'all but didn't get too far. I will let you all know when it's up. We had dinner at the Old Spagetti Factory in Whistler before heading home - there's something about ridiculous amounts of adrenalin that makes me crave carbs like nobody's business. I am always surprised at how close Whistler really is. I always think that it's 3 or 3 1/2 hours away but it simply isn't. We made it in under 2 each way and I don't even drive like that much of a maniac.

We hosted a birthday party for Jeff and I here last Saturday which was pretty fun except I woke up Saturday morning with a sore throat and no voice and felt like hell the entire day and night. It meant that I didn't get nearly enough running around done and ended up forgetting to get propane and we ran out during the rainy barbeque. George Whoreman, I mean, Foreman gril to the rescue. Theo baked Jeff and I each a cake, which was very nice. I think people had a good time but everyone cleared out pretty early because they could see what a wreck I was. :( I'm feeling much better now but am still a pretty impressive mucous machine.

To increase the quality of my spare time I keep wanting to watch less TV, especially since most of the shows are on hiatus for the summer, but then I got a bunch of episodes of Clone High from Toren and watched them obsessively until I finished them all. I wish they'd made another season or two becuase it sure was a hoot. Those crazy teenaged clones of historical figures!

Tamara and I popped by an art opening tonight for Chris Woods, who I don't know but is a friend of a friend. The art was really cool but the space was really crowded and I am so very terrible at schmoozing and small talk. Unless I'm in a totally comfortable environment I am such a tool when it comes to trying to have a conversation with people I don't know very well. It's even worse when I think the people are cool and would like to get to know them better. Tamara helped me out by talking more but I become so aware of what a social reject I am in those situations. Grr! I always envy the social butterfly who can flit in and be super-comfortable no matter where they are and who they're with. I would like to be that butterfly but I can't get out of my damn cocoon.

We're gonna go camping next month! I'm sooo excited! We're going to drive up to Golden (to see Theovis' dad and stepmom), hit Banff (BAMF!) and meander our way back to Vancouver. Since Theovis doesn't drive and I can only do about a max of 4 hours a day, we'll camp whenever I get too tired to continue and hopefully see a bunch of cool stuff. I think it has been about 8 years since we last went camping so it's gonna be pretty cool. Yay!

Mum and I took down this poor, diseased, ant & aphid riddled tree in our front yard on Monday. I had just been planning to trim off a bunch of dead branches but we soon realized that there wasn't much on the tree that wasn't dead. So we sawed off the big branches until we had only the long trunk of the tree left and I Paul Bunyan'd that sucker down. Taking a tree down with an axe is more work than I thought. It went easier once I realized I'd been swinging left-handed for quite a while and switched to right - vastly improved my aim. We'd thought of renting a chain saw to take care of it but the axe thing just seemed quicker. We chopped up the larger wood into pieces which we will let dry then burn in the fireplace this winter. Once we know we've killed off the root structure we'll haul the stump etc. off and replace it with a new, (hopefully) healthy tree.

Acupuncture is not the answer to my menstrual woes. Alas and alack! I don't know what to try next...

I can't believe it has been nearly a month since my last update. It seems that every time I sat down at the computer, I needed to be doing something else and had no time for writing. Alas...

I've actually been doing some webdesign again for a friend who is holding a women's conference this summer. You can check out the site at www.everywomanintheworld.com. It's been so long since I started a site from scratch so it was a pretty fun thing to do again. And really frustrating at times.

I refinished our kitchen cabinets over a (long) weekend with a lot of help from Mum. We sanded, scrubbed and painted our little hearts out. Plus I got to rent a kick-ass mitre saw rented from Revy, uh, Rona (I hate it when stores change their names) which I didn't end up using as much as I'd expected to because I realized my initial plan for the project was insanely ambitious and would have taken us forever. Since what we did seemed to take forever anyway, I'm so glad I backed off with the plans. Those photos will be posted shortly - and here they are.

We had a great visit with Theo's brother Murray, his wife Laura and our 2 nieces Emily (3) and Julia (4 months). They stayed with us for about 5 days and we had a bunch of fun showing them (or directing them) around Vancouver. We went to the Maplewood farms with the kids one day where they got to pet goats and bunnies, see a cow get milked and all sorts of other farm fun. Several friends and all their kids joined us too so there was lots of excitement over the animals. I was pretty excited about the goats and bunnies myself.

We'd been having the dishwasher floods again despite all the various plumbing repairs we'd had done under the sink and we finally worked out that it was coming from where the sink sprayer joined up with the pipes from the fixture. It is only around a year old but I was pretty much ready to just go buy a new fixture to get the problem solved. Thankfully, Murray is exceptionally handy and gave us a whole bunch of good advice about various house renovations, including the sink, and he came up with a $0.68 solution involving a hose clamp that completely solved our problem. I've been running the dishwasher flood free since then. Woo hoo! He also reinforced our deck railings with approx $3.00 worth of lag screws rather than us replacing the whole wobbly railing this summer. Plus he gave us good advice for creating a cement water barrier to prevent any more rain water running down the path and under our foundation. PLUS, (hard to believe there's more) they arrived with a beautiful compound mitre saw as our housewarming gift! It is so awesome! I literally jumped up and down with joy. Now I can easily do the baseboards and will probably add chair rails and crown moldings all over the place. It is sooooo good!


I've been loving the summer-ish weather despite a couple mild sunburns because I didn't realize the sun was that stong already. I've heard it has been snowing in Calgary and a couple other places around the country as we're toasting ourselves on the West coast. Is it cruel to laugh? How 'bout a mild chuckle under my breath? Okay, I'll play nice. *snerk* Okay, that was the last one.