I'm slowly turning into you

We got a hell of a lot of shit done this weekend around the house. I can't even begin to guess at the amount of money we spent on both functional and decorative fixtures, but our house looks a-may-zing. In celebration of our accomplishments thus far, I've decided to post a series of before and after photos so you can all ooh and aah appropriately. And I expect oohing and aahing and yes that means you.

First up: the front bathroom. Up until yesterday, this room looked approximately akin to the before picture. There was a bar of soap and a towel, and that was all.


Now it's my favourite room in the house. Is that weird?


Next we have the dining room.


There are a couple after shots because I like the other angle better, but the first is taken from the same general area as the before picture. Also, please note that the red papasan chair you see in the after picture is now cushionless, as a certain asshole feline decided it was his personal shitter and pissed all over it right in front of us 30 seconds after I was already supposed to have left for work.



The upstairs hallway, I don't have a good before picture of. But if you look at this one:


and imagine you are actually turned around 180 degrees and staring at a blank wall, that is what was there prior to this:


We hung a picture. And by "we" I mean "I". I hang most of the things in the house. I'm good with a stud finder.

After that of course we have the office, which was a sad looking this:


But now is a fabulous this (there is more to the office, but as of right now I only have pictures in raw format and I don't feel like converting them to something this blog will understand):


Next we have our lovely TV room. This was a vomitious poorly painted yellow and smelled strongly of baby powder.


Now, it's an eyeball popping lime green (love it) and has incredible shelves which I put up all by myself.


Our master bath was the first room we actually pimped out. Before we spent an extravagant amount of money, it looked like this:



And now it's a luxurious this:


I'm not going to bother with kitchen and master bedroom, because we haven't done much with those. Yet.

For the grand finale however, I give you the front of our house when we bought it:


After a full three weeks of hardass labour, we have finished a gorgeous front walkway. There is still some grass and edging clean-up that needs to be done, but other than that it's pretty fucking spectacular. I will post the pictures of the whole process (we documented it well) later, but the pictures in this post are taking long enough already. So, here she is. Be suitably impressed.

Double-you tee eff District 9?

Qu'est-ce que fuck?

I saw this movie. I saw it last Friday. I was excited to see it, I had heard all the hype, it was to be the greatest movie of the summer, [insert more tooting of one's own horn], etc. So, I went.

Let me say here, that since I have seen it, all I have heard about it is that it is fantastic. It is the best thing to come out of Hollywood since the dawn of time, it's better than anything anyone has ever seen, it's a legendary piece de resistance.

It was shit. SHIT.

First of all, the camera? It was strapped to some 8-year old boy on Ritalin, and he was told to vaguely follow this one actor around the whole time while jumping on a trampoline in the middle of an earthquake. I try to avoid things that make me nauseous, and this is one of those things.

As for the story, it was meh. I'm not going to ruin it for anyone who wants to go see it (DON'T), but honestly, it's not so original as everyone seems to be claiming. It's a retelling of a lot of different stories in which a group of people is persecuted and one man tries to save them, while enduring his own personal crisis. Only insert "aliens" for "people", and you have a summary of this film.

I'm not sure why I am so enraged by all the positive ratings this movie is receiving, I only know that I am.

The Boston Cream Pie Incident

Andrew and I both love boston cream doughnuts. It's kind of a weakness. As I am writing this I realize it has been quite a while since I have had a doughnut, and I feel this needs to be remedied soon, so now I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

Anyway, a while back, Andrew was interested in getting a boston cream pie. Since a single serving doughnut is delicious, he decided, a whole pie size boston cream doughnut must be out of this world. Once he found out boston cream pie is really a cake with some custard in it, he turned his puppy dog eyes on me and whimpered at asked me politely to perhaps think about how to make something that would be more like a doughnut or at least not cake?

So I thought about it. I decided that since I don't have a deep fryer, any kind of doughnut-making attempt would probably end up as cake. I played with the whole "pie" concept, but decided it would be taking the name a tad too literally. I don't follow anyone's rules but my own. I settled on a graham cracker crumb base.

The centre was easy, it was just custard. It was interesting for me, as I have never made custard before. As it turns out, custard is easy. Very easy. Almost too easy... It did use up 4 of my 6 eggs though, and free run eggs are not cheap.


After the custard, all that was left to figure out was the chocolate topping. I got some good dark chocolate bars and melted them in a double boiler, added some cream, and poured that all over. It ended up hardening too much, but that was okay because it tasted delicious.

Next time, I think I will go with an actual pie crust. The graham cracker crumbs were delicious, but not the best match to custard. I'd also add more cream to the chocolate to help it stay a bit creamier and less chocolate bar-esque. Or, maybe I'll just drive up the road to Tim Hortons and buy a dozen.

You're gonna make mistakes, you're young

I'm not quite sure how Andrew and I manage to do everything ass backwards to the way "normal" people do things, but we do. When we decided it might be a good time for us to perhaps start looking for a house to buy, we ended up making an offer the first day we went out. Our agent assured us it wouldn't last long on the market, and she was right. It was rushed, stressful, crazy, and it didn't work out because there were people around who were more hardcore about the house than we were, on the first day it was put up for sale. Those sellers were lucky bastards. I digress.

Friday Andrew found out he has been accepted to RMC for the fall. YAAAAAAYYY!!! He's been offered the chance to complete his Master's degree in 6 months, which is insanely fantastic, if you ask me. We've been waiting since late spring, when he first heard about this option, and everything was finalized mid-August. Finally. So now, we have a bit over 2 weeks to figure out his transportation from Milton to Kingston twice a week. We have been doing some brainstorming already, and we had pretty much 98% settled on buying another car.

Yesterday to celebrate his great achievement, we thought we'd go around Milton to the dealerships and test drive some shit. We went to Honda first, and tried out the Fit.

Source

It was a pretty nice ride, it was surprisingly spacious inside, had a lot of really useful seat configurations for transporting stuff (we transport stuff a lot), and was all around a decent car. We were pretty sure we'd be getting a Fit. The car salesmen did their best to convince us it was in our best interests to buy it RIGHT NOW or at least LATER TODAY rather than coming back because the Fit is an endangered species and it's really hard to get and this deal is only on until Tuesday and Angelo made a reading mistake so we'll give you $500 off but ONLY TODAY so we shook their hands and hightailed it out of there.

But we did really like the car.

Next was Toyota, because I've wanted a Matrix for just about ever. They happened to have a demo 2010 white Matrix with the Touring package and dark interior for sale with only 4000km and I nearly peed my pants I was so excited. A demo was exactly what we were hoping to find, and one with low kilometres that they were willing to sell is a fucking incredible deal. We hemmed and hawed, but I really wanted it and Andrew really wanted it. I took it out for a drive, Andrew drove for a bit, it was a long drive with a huge sales guy in the back seat. This car is similar to the Corolla we have now, except slightly heavier and obviously, a hatchback instead of a sedan. It drives like a dream and has storage space I fantasize about when I should be working. Just like your hot girlfriend, it looks good from the outside, and feels good from the inside. We can add a sunroof and tint the windows and I will be the luckiest bitch in town.

Source

It's a sexy car. We didn't buy it on the spot, because I wanted to go home and think about it. Toyota was much better at not pressuring us to buy buy buy now now now, which was nice. We came home, thought about it, and we're going to go back Monday and get that shit. Providing it hasn't already been sold by then. Oh man, I can't wait for my new car.

At both places, moreso at Honda but still to some degree at Toyota, I felt slightly patronized and more than a little discriminated against because of my age. Both dealers assumed that because we were young, we had no idea what was going on, and that we don't understand financing or discounts or taxes. It was almost funny, because I could step back while they were explaining these things to these kids, and come back with an intelligent question. I've bought a house jackass, a five year financing plan doesn't scare me. Not even a little. I know what I want in a car, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going to be pressured into something because I look like a young girl out on her own without her mommy. /rant.

Hopefully, Monday evening, I will be the proud owner of a quasi-brand-spanking new 2010 Toyota Matrix. I love new toys.