Mish mash
And now, for the bulleted monthly update list. A lot has been happening in the last month, actually...the last few entries have said "not much is new", but we've been keeping ourselves busy in October.
- We redecorated our master bedroom, which included paint, furniture (from Johnathan's old coworker), a new light fixture, and new horizontal blinds. It's a little...brown. I'm not sure I'm feeling it, to be honest. I think what might help is changing the accent wall to the same colour as the rest of the walls, but even then, I'm not sure. There are just so many brown things in there. It's hard, because our carpet is navy blue, so things like sage green just didn't work. I'm definitely loving the furniture though, I'm excited to have matching stuff! I'm also excited about the horizontal blinds - they're about 2" deep, chocolate brown wood, and they keep out the sun more completely than our old pathetic blinds did. I also did a massive closet dump while we were at it, so now we've got a box of clothing for the Salvation Army - mostly stuff that doesn't fit me right anymore (boo). And of course, we chose to do that the weekend before the weekend my brother's 50th surprise party was going to be held here. Talk about crazy rush cleanup the weekend of the party.
- During said cleanup, we decided to move my old dresser into the basement. It's Ikea, so it's particle board with a slippery-when-wet-with-hand-sweat varnish on it. This means I found it to be heavy, and hard to carry. We got it down one flight, slowly, all the while I said that I didn't feel good about carrying it down into the basement. Johnathan had confidence in me though, so we did it. On the way down the second flight, into the unfinished basement, Johnathan suggested that we rest the the dresser on its side (it's one of the tall, 1x5 dresser types), and I can let it go, and he can guide it down by himself, sliding it down the stairs (he was leading the way, obviously). I agreed, so when he said he had it, I let go. He went down one step, and then the dresser decided it urgently needed to be at the bottom of the stairs, much faster than Johnathan going. While it wasn't as bad as it looked, from my vantage point, I figured I was about to lose my husband due to cracking his head on the concrete floor while being crushed by a dresser. The reality was, while it definitely was pushing him down the stairs, and he was kinda stumbling down the stairs because of it, it was only semi-uncontrolled. But since it looked so much worse from the top of the stairs, after making sure he was okay, I ended up yelling at him, saying "Why didn't you let me wait until we could get someone stronger to help you carry it? Why did we have to do it today?" - my brother was coming over on Thursday to watch Survivor, he could have helped carry it. I apologized later for yelling, he just scared me :P. Before I tell that story to anyone now, I say I tried to push my husband down the stairs :).
- As mentioned above, we had a surprise 50th birthday party for my brother a little over a month ago. We told him we were going to have our immediate family over for dinner on Sunday, because the next day was my nephew's 16th birthday (eesh, 16 already!), and we always have birthday dinners on the Sunday closest to the person's birthday. We also said it had to be at our house (which is not the usual way of it) because Johnathan was flying out to California Sunday night, so we had to have an early dinner and such. In the meantime, my sister sent out an email to extended family inviting them to an "end of summer" party at her house two weeks after Jordan's birthday dinner, which was also much closer to my brother's birthday - this was the distraction party. He bought it! So, when he came to my house expecting a birthday dinner for my nephew (which forgave the balloons hanging in the tree outside), he instead discovered a big party for him! It was the most people we've ever had in our house, by far. Seriously. About 45 people. But everyone seemed to have a good time.
- We attended our fifth and final wedding of the year, which was for a coworker of mine. It was at the Old Mill, and was really quite beautiful. Although honestly, every wedding I went to this year was beautiful, no matter where it was held. I've been to everything this year, from reception hall to mill-turned-art-gallery to backyard, and they were all wonderful. Maybe I'm just a sucker for weddings.
- Oh. I went to the bachelorette party for the wedding above, which was held at Ultra Supper Club in downtown Toronto, which is much more hip than I'm used to. Apparently famous people were going there after the film festival and stuff. I was nervous, like they'd spot the impostor before I even came through the door. Turns out I was dressed fine, no one called me out on my unhipness, and we ended up going to a different club for dancing afterwards anyway.
- The Creative Sewing and Needlework Festival happened a couple of weeks ago, so peemonkey, Christine and I headed out once again for a crafting extravaganza. This time around, we met up with axiom_1's wife Marina, who had never been to a show like this, and was looking for a new hobby. Once we got there, we met up with kelayrel for lunch, and ended up wandering around with her for a while, since one of her classes had been cancelled. Fun! We ended up spending a lot more time at the festival this year than we usually do, and I think that's for a couple of reasons - firstly, we wanted Marina to get a good look at everything, and secondly, Steph was looking at more beading stuff this time around. I like looking at pretty beads and stones, but I have no idea what to do with it. Steph, on the other hand, should actually be called "Magic Jewelrymaker Steph", because she has a great imagination for that stuff. I'm happy to accept the products of her imagination though :).
- I don't think I mentioned it here when it happened, but we paid off my second of three student loans. That's two in the same year, which is very exciting. My last student loan, which has about $6,600 left, should be gone by this time next year, if we keep being as aggressive about it as we are being. My student loan repayment documents told me at the beginning that I would have my loans paid off in 14 years, and if all goes well, we'll be done in half that time. Then the only debt we have left is our mortgage and our car loan. Sweet :).
I think that's about it, I don't remember doing much else :). Work's good, but crazy busy. Non-work life is also good. Overall, things are good. I'm hoping that as we come closer to Christmas, we will have less planned on weekends, so that we can get some shopping done and do a bit of relaxing. I've been feeling really over-busy lately, and I feel like I've been completely neglecting my house and stuff...I just need some downtime, and I hope to get it in the next few weeks! I must go and shoot things now, my nephew is over again this weekend, with his computer, and we're all playing shoot-each-other-in-the-face games together. Ah, bonding.