Getting ready for holidays

About a month ago, I had a perfect plan for the New Year party which involved going to a huge dance party with DJs, but I quickly gave the whole idea up. Traveling to a town 110 km away, spending the evening with a bunch of unknown people, without food or heating, wasn't exactly the way I pictured my New Year Eve.
What's more, these dresses I found over at  the Cherry Blossom Girl are more appropriate for a formal dinner than for a party in an arena.

            

There's no Christmas spirit without decorations. I usually start decorating my house at 5pm and finish by 11pm.

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I love giving gifts on various occasions. I'm not one of those people who get disappointed or angry if the recipient doesn't return the favor. Sometimes I give others gifts for no reason. The mere joy of giving someone something is a satisfying reward.

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However, I wouldn't mind receiving stationary like this for my massive pile of papers and other trinkets. 

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Housekeeper

Our internet subscription expired at midnight so I figured I could go outside today and do something useful. My plans included cleaning the barn, gathering old plastic sacks thrown around in the other barn, gathering corn knobs, fiddling with my veggie plot, reading and so on. However, my plans were cut short when G informed me that we have to go over to our friends' house to keep an eye on the house while they're off. Well, isn't that fun, I thought. No, it really isn't. You get bored easily unless you bring over your favorite book, do something useful, like cleaning the house, or surf the net, because your friends got their internet subscription, God bless them. 

Suddenly, the house, the temple of cleanliness and order, does not seem so sacred any more. G founds layers of dust on the living room shelves. However, I like keeping the bathroom door open. All those fragrances of beauty products lingering in the air... And the dog waging his tail in the dining room.. The owners would ban me from their home to see the beast in the house.


Got tired of listening to Radio One. While searching for online radio stations I found a search engine called Radio Locator with "over 10,000 radio station web pages and over 2500 audio streams from radio stations in the U.S. and around the world." My first destination was a French radio station playing dance music. I don't understand a word,  but I don't mind. As long as the music is playing. The last two hours flew by. I'm thinking of having some people over. Just to kill time waiting for the homeowners to come home.

Walking down the memory lane

As much I got fed up with FB, I often end up blessing it. Imagine not seeing your school friends for 20 years, or your childhood friends, then somehow managing to find them on a social network and getting in touch with them after all those years. It's amazing! It's great to get informed about your friend getting married (even though the two of you weren't so close) and to see the wedding pics. 

What's even more amazing and great is getting recognized by the daughter of a co-worker whose friend request you accepted just because you have mutual interest and finding out that that's the same girl you played with in a street one summer 13-14 years ago. Summer ends, the kids disappear, the neighbor disappears too, there's only the neighbor's dog left wandering the streets. Then one day, the dog is gone too, mother's aunt is gone, the house mother's aunt lived is gone, and what's left is the street me and my sister spent our childhood in. 

People can change, faces, streets, houses can change too, but the memories live on. Slightly altered but still...

Let the summer begin!

I got a new haircut finally. It's not really what I've expected, but it's better than my previous hairdo. No more uneven middle-lenght hair, and it's much easier for my skin to breathe. My sister is back, my work at school is all done, so my summer holiday can finally begin.
I spent the past four days fixing my internet connection, cleaning my room, cleaning the garden, going to the library... and I finally bought a new tire and a inner tube for my bike. I'll be able to ride it again after almost two months. I've been thinking about a tag sale but I'm not fully ready to get rid of the clothes I don't need. Tag sales are a completely new concept in my country. If you want to sell stuff you no longer need, you either bring to the flea market or put an ad in the papers.

When I arrived at G's house today, I was surprised to see that G cleaned the pantry and the kitchen cabinets. No more dead bugs, rancid oil in pans, and that disgusting piece of lard with grease dripping on my head every time I enter the pantry. We finally fixed the blinds and I even managed to convince him to repaint the walls in the house. Yay!
Now I have to empty the pool to get it ready for my sister's visit tomorrow. Emptying the pool with buckets won't be easy but I don't want to let it flood the lawn.The plants in the garden will appreciate the water more.

Vision of the future

I have always been fascinated with the past, with the way people lived, the fashion. Very often I felt like I would have been much happier living in the 1920s, 1940s or even the 60s. 
What fascinates me now is the way the people saw the future, the year 2000, the 21st century. Literature and illustrations from those times give us a clear vision of what the world would look like in 90, 70, or 50 years. Much of their predictions were right however, some predictions were far-fetched.

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wellmedicated

Individuals predicting the future were definitely wrong about the life on other planets, or even space. It's 2011 and we're still searching for a body in the Solar System being capable of hosting conventional organic life. Besides water, gases and microbes, no extraterrestrials were found on any of the planets observed so far. So the mankind will have to wait another decade or two before it can build colonies in space. OK, there are manned spacecrafts orbiting the Earth, but that's far from the vision of human colonies in space.

Solar heating is quite common in homes and buildings today. However, only a small amount of the entire available solar energy is used. "Commercial solar water heaters began appearing in the United States in the 1890s.These systems saw increasing use until the 1920s but were gradually replaced by cheaper and more reliable heating fuels.As with photovoltaics, solar water heating attracted renewed attention as a result of the oil crises in the 1970s but interest subsided in the 1980s due to falling petroleum prices. Development in the solar water heating sector progressed steadily throughout the 1990s and growth rates have averaged 20% per year since 1999.Although generally underestimated, solar water heating and cooling is by far the most widely deployed solar technology with an estimated capacity of 154 GW as of 2007." (more on wikipedia).

I believe that the news of being able to watch TV on a wristwatch was a real technological breakthrough back in the 1960s but today we can ask ourselves why didn't they think of devices like mobile phones or Tablets earlier. It seems ridiculous to watch a match or your favorite sitcom on your wristwatch.

I guess everybody wanted to have a multi-screen TV set back in the 70s. Imagine watching you favorite shown and having to switch to the other channel to see if the news has started yet. Or a husband watching his show and his wife coming into the room telling him to switch and see if her favorite has started yet. How annoying!

Cockroach nightmare

It started about a week ago. Every morning a roach would patiently sit in the kitchen sink and wait for me to wake up and make coffee. One morning there would be two of them, then three, then one. There were mornings when none would show up, only to show itself later in the day. I knew that the day would come when I would turn the kitchen upside down to hunt those disgusting creatures down. And today was the day. I knew G wouldn't approve of my hunt but I already started the demolition without him, so when he came home, he could do nothing but help me. I found about a dozen of live roaches, and even more that I killed to prevent them from escaping. G was sitting in his chair and laughing telling me he saw a couple of them running along the bedroom wall, just right above my head. I told him he better be joking or I would turn the bedroom upside down too.

It seems like our place is infested by roaches. A mouse or a roach, which is the worst?

Food cravings

While arguing with G two months ago, I told him I hated his clothes and that I thought I was time he bought some new ones. I told him that wearing the same T-shirt for a week made him look pathetic, disorderly and unattractive. While cleaning his wardrobe today, I was amazed to see how much clothes he actually has (twice as much as I have). Of course I knew that, but the fact that he uses only five T-shirts and two pairs of jeans puzzles me. When we first met, I had the feeling that he had the sense for colors and trends, but that was just an illusion.

G told me he couldn't wear those clothes because they had that funny smell of lying in the same place for a very long time, so I just took them out and hung them on the clothesline to air. 17 black and navy T-shirt, my gosh. And that's not all.

I'm happy because I've cleared a large portion of the plot for my future garden. It went rather quickly. Now I'm thinking about bringing my dad's rotary tiller to till the plot because I kinda hate digging up the plot with my hoe. I want a nice, neat and even ground. I have all these ideas how it would look like so I'm anxious to get the clearing done.

Around noon it looked like this:

Around 5 PM it looked like this:

I can't wait for tomorrow to come. I'm going shopping, and I'm going to buy a bucket of ice cream, cookies, a barrel of Pepsi like beverage, bananas, Nutella and a truckload of sour cream crisps.