Hey Sis-

Just heard about my sister's new blog. Man, she just keeps getting cooler! It's mainly about her experiences as one of only three women in her sheet metal union. Pretty interesting read.

Speaking of Big Sis, she and her daughter (aka my niece) came to visit last November to see us (of course) and also check out the Pow Wow at the Toronto Aboriginal festival.


Not only was the pow wow a very interesting cultural event, but even better was having the opportunity to really get re-acquainted with my sister. Although we have kept in touch over the years, we really haven't been close since we were teenagers and both left home on our individual life adventures. We seem to finally be getting to know each other again and I hope it continues.

Also, my niece and GB's niece had a chance to meet again. They hadn't seen each other since our wedding three years ago when they were both junior bride's maids and were fast friends.

So here's to old friends, grass dances, Greek food and powerful women! See you in June, sis!

Dishes

Something that has bothered me the last few times we've had dinner parties is not having enough dishes to serve our guests with. Twice we've run out of plates and had to improvise. I decided after Christmas that I wanted to start looking for a replacement set from our current dishes, that come from GB's single life, and, although nice, are not quite as sophisticated as I would like. I've been looking for something that's nice enough for dinner parties but durable enough to use everyday, oh, and not ridiculously expensive. I've had a lot of fun these past few weeks surfing many dinnerware web sites.

I was finally able to drag GB out to William Ashley, who are having an amazing sale right now (with a warning of course that his patience would be limited - I think he'd rather have a root canal than go shopping - I, on the other hand could spend hours in that store just browsing!).

During our 1.5 hour endeavor (which far surpassed GB's new measure of shopping patience - the time it took for our coffees that we had to leave at the door to get cold), we managed to talk our selves into considering a ridiculously expensive set of formal dinnerware on top of the casual set we also planned to purchase. Luckily, we had the sensibility to "take some time to think about it", and when walking out the door we passed a quite nice set that was, I kid you not - one eighth the price! Granted, it wasn't quite as nice as the other set, but to GB's point, we'd like to have dishes that we would feel sick if someone accidentally broke one.

So, we were able to bring our casual set, Pfaltzgraff Sphere in green, home with us today, while our formal set (Mikasa Cameo Platinum) is on order. After unpacking, washing, and rearranging the cupboards (what fun!), taking a good look at our dishes, I'm tempted to say, they are actually good enough for entertaining, and maybe we should forgo the formal set altogether. I'll need to think on it, but we do have a few weeks. It just seems silly to have an extra set of dishes that you bring out only once or twice a year. We'll see...

The Honeymoon is Officially Over

No, not CB and I, but rather Apple and I.

In early 2006, work kindly furnished me with a high end Macbook Pro laptop. Our relationship was rosy from the beginning. Ah, we were young and optimistic. No wrong could be done. But I knew. I knew in the back of my mind that all things end.

The fan has been, oh, what's the word?... 'grinding'. 'Can't hear someone in the room speak' grinding. It has so far taken 32 days, 2 visits (leaving the laptop both times), 1 system planar (wtf!?) for Apple to NOT YET fix it.

I like OS X, I like the hardware (when it works), but man these folks are difficult to deal with. They make Dell look responsive. Add to this the fact that the new system planar is flaky and I'm seriously reconsidering advocating Macs.

On a related note, I read the other day in the National Post that, according to a recent study, the reason for nostalgia is that your brain gets a happy on when it remembers something. Anything. Our consciousness interprets this by associating the positive feeling with the memory itself, not the act of recall and presto: nostalgia. Hence I fully expect the love affair to begin again as soon as I get a new fan.