“Mommy! Let’s ride bikes!”

“Miss L… I’m cutting tomatoes right now.”

“Please Mommy? I’ll get my bike. And my helmet. [...]]]> I was in the middle of cutting tomatoes on Monday night for that night’s dinner pizzas. I felt a tap on my leg, which quickly became a full on body hug from the munchkin.

“Mommy! Let’s ride bikes!”

“Miss L… I’m cutting tomatoes right now.”

“Please Mommy? I’ll get my bike. And my helmet. It’s in that room.”

… I keep cutting tomatoes …

“Mommy. I need help. With helmet. Mommy!”

… I thought of saying, “Miss L! I told you I was busy!” and I stopped myself. I was cutting tomatoes. It wasn’t urgent. No one was going to starve that night. Mr. M wasn’t even home yet and obviously Miss L wasn’t screaming of hunger. My priority was just a preference for order of things. There wasn’t really an excuse other than a preference. And, in all honesty, why wouldn’t I want to get outside on a beautiful day and play?

I put down the knife. Walked to the entry room, and helped secure the bunny helmet on that little head of blonde hair.

And we “rode bikes” (aka. Mommy pushing Miss L as she trys her darndest to push those pedals).

Indulgence in wants is a fine line that parents walk each and every day. But I think I’m getting better at fine tuning my inner voice towards enjoying this second childhood as much as I can. Some things need to be answered “not right now” but a lot of them need more “heck yes!” answers.

She’s teaching me as much about life as I’m teaching her. Maybe even more.

May your day be filled with flowers and love and moms!

Happy as clams to be new homeowners! After wading through the first wave of foreclosures in our area (trust me – we saw lots of crazy stuff) and the last of the “newly constructed” homes, we settled on our house, won the bid and moved in.

And while [...]]]> Four years ago… this was us!

Happy as clams to be new homeowners! After wading through the first wave of foreclosures in our area (trust me – we saw lots of crazy stuff) and the last of the “newly constructed” homes, we settled on our house, won the bid and moved in.

And while you want to make your house a home immediately, you soon realize that doing this won’t come as quickly as it did in shared space apartments that you’ve been living in for the past many years. Instead, you end up with rooms with no furniture while you debate and decide what you want and save to get it. Or your rooms change purposes when a new family member arrives.

And I then, over time, you realize that the stuff doesn’t make it into a home. You do. Time does. The undone projects make it as much yours as the perfected ones. The messes have your name all over them probably more than the freshly cleaned mirror does.

And while the fresh vigor of being a new homeowner subsides as the years go on (along with the number of trips made to Lowe’s/HD), the projects and ideas still abound, but your need to accomplish them tomorrow sort of aches away. I know that’s what happened to my home blogging long ago. So I’m thinking I should share some of those “before/after” photos with you… just to share how it does evolve over a long period of time and not just the instant “up-do” that we usually like to share. But that does mean I need to get to cleaning… oh boy, maybe I won’t ever get around to those posts then!

Sometime last month, I started to get really angry every time I saw a DirecTV advertisement, be it in the paper or on TV. You know… the ones that promise you the moon and stars for negative money. I was angry because, as a loyal customer for 4 years, we don’t qualify. [...]]]>

Sometime last month, I started to get really angry every time I saw a DirecTV advertisement, be it in the paper or on TV. You know… the ones that promise you the moon and stars for negative money. I was angry because, as a loyal customer for 4 years, we don’t qualify. If we wanted new boxes so we could have a whole home DVR, it would cost us $600 to upgrade our system. If we wanted a new dish that wouldn’t freeze up our broadcasts, it would cost us $250 plus the hourly house call costs. And a lower monthly payment? Ha! You silly silly loyal customer, you. We’re going to keep raising your costs and giving you less, so that we can offer insane deals to the newbies.

So I launched a devious plan (encouraged by all the lovely folks who seem to do these things daily over on FatWallet and other deal forums), to cancel our service that was in Mr. M’s name and then resubscribe under MY name for all of the goodies and promotions and deals. But then something happened. Mr. M called DirecTV to cancel and, well, he didn’t exactly have the loveliest of conversations with their customer service representatives. And at that point he decided that we should purge our home of anything DirecTV related. And that’s what we’ve done.

But what are TV junkies to do when you want to still consume the media but loathe the people that deliver it to you? Well, I can tell you what we did: we cut out the middle man and bought ourselves one of these guys.

Meet Roku 2 XS.

He fits in the palm of my hand, eats up barely any electricity, gives us 1080p HD viewing and so far provides us with pretty much everything we want to consume on TV via HULU Plus and instant NetFlix.

As people who rarely channel surf, and instead eat up most of our time watching our DVR, HuluPlus ($7.99/month) is pretty much way better than any other option for us. You can subscribe to shows, so that they pop in your “queue” when they’re ready to watch. The only disadvantage is that you won’t get them until a day later, but it’s rare that we ever got to them the day of anyhow. It’s also great because you get to watch shows that you may have missed back from Episode 1 of this season. Like Revenge. We (well… Mr. M mostly) watched all 19 episodes in a week’s time to catch up with the season. I have a feeling this will come in handy when summer arrives and we will still have “so much to watch” on TV.

If you’re a baseball or soccer or NBA fan, you can subscribe to watch those games live through the deluxe sports plans. And if they decide not to add NFL Sunday Ticket to Roku in the fall, then we’ll probably just subscribe through PlayStation Network and get it live that way. Same price – and we don’t have to pay for having DirecTV too!

We’ve subscribed to instant NetFlix for awhile now, and it’s handy to have it both upstairs and down (on Playstation/XBox 360) now. And if we decide to hop on the AmazonPlus bandwagon, we’ve got that too! As for network TV… we’ll be researching our antennae options shortly, because this lady seriously can’t go without her Olympics this summer. (any antennae tips are greatly welcome!!!)

So our monthly costs for April’s TV watching: $7.99 for Hulu Plus + $7.99 for instant NetFlix = $15.98.  That’s $100 less than our DirecTV bill from March, so I’m pretty much happy with that for now!

Now… will we stick to our “no cable/satellite” plan for the long haul?  I guess this is all an experiment to find out. And I’m sure the fall football calendar will dictate some of the answers to that question. But for now, this little system works quite well for us and absorbing our TV.

I’m not quite sure I’ll ever be able to go to a conference center again without comparing it to the most beautiful one in the world. Seriously. Vancouver definitely decided to knock their visitors back on their heels with the location of theirs… and I’m not quite sure one ever recovers. Our [...]]]>

I’m not quite sure I’ll ever be able to go to a conference center again without comparing it to the most beautiful one in the world. Seriously. Vancouver definitely decided to knock their visitors back on their heels with the location of theirs… and I’m not quite sure one ever recovers. Our presentation (which was the occasion for my visit) was held in an ocean view room at the Pan Pacific hotel… so I could watch the seaplanes land while chatting it up with colleagues. It was absolutely lovely, and while next year’s trip to San Francisco will be lovely due to the lack of hassle and travel, it just won’t be the same.

As I had mentioned before, since Mr. M and Miss L couldn’t make the trek north, my mom decided to come along and provide me with an exploration buddy. I think she’s still cursing at me for the length of my stride (umm… isn’t this partly her genes to blame?) and my enthusiasm for walking, but altogether we had a great time!

saturday

We arrived on Saturday afternoon, and hit the ground running… or rather just started our touring early after dropping off our bags at the Four Seasons. We hopped on the Vancouver trolley for what we thought was a short 1 hour bus route around the city’s highlights… but it turned out to be an all-inclusive 3 hour tour that stretched a fairly small downtown area into something enormous! But… we got to see most of Stanley Park and the waterfront and pretty much every little part of the city, so without a car, it was a great option!

For dinner, we didn’t venture far from the hotel, and went to dinner at Culinaria. It’s the Art Institute of Vancouver’s student restaurant, and for $28, we got quite the ridiculous 3-course meal. It was the first restaurant that took pity on our hungry California stomachs and gave us 3 desserts. My mom was so impressed she told me to take a photo… so I did.

sunday

On Sunday, the Vancouver Sun Run started outside our hotel’s front entrance. My mom and I have a habit of travelling to random cities during major running events. Like the Chicago Marathon, the Disney World marathon… and now the Sun Run!

Luckily this 50,000+ person event didn’t start until 9am, so we weren’t woken up by the music and crowds, and look… the streets were nice and empty!

We walked to breakfast at The Templeton… then headed down to the water to take a ferry over to Granville Island.

Granville Island is essentially a former industrial area that has been turned into little haven for artistans in the city. They have a central market, with all sorts of wonderful food vendors as well.

Before lunch, we went and sampled some artisan sake (for the sole purpose of grabbing a bottle to take home to Mr. M), then walked over to Go Fish! for some freshly caught halibut fish and chips!

We caught a ride back to the hotel on the Trolley from Granville Island and ended our day wandering over to Robson Street to check out the shopping. I can sadly report that we didn’t leave Canada with any Lululemon or Roots clothing… I’m not sure I realized how Beverly Blvd. in Beverly Hills had all of the Canadian goods I needed before now.

Dinner was remarkable only in that we couldn’t find any sort of casual place that was open after 8pm… so we ended up at one of the Cactus Club Cafes watching the Canucks game… and still not being able to get food. I’m sort of thinking we should have opted for the $18 mac and cheese on the room service menu instead… but we got to watch a playoff hockey game among Canadians, so that was well worth it, despite the loss.

monday

My presentation was at mid-day on Monday, so we ate a late breakfast at YEW (um… I’m going to try my best to perfect their croissant french toast ASAP!), suited up and went to the waterfront for my presentation.

[insert lovely structured poster session by yours truly and 7 others that went splendidly!]

When I got back, I switched into my casual clothes and convinced my mom to venture out to Queen Elizabeth park. While I told her it had panoramic views of the city, we both didn’t realize that it’d be quite an uphill walk from the skytrain station.

We took a brief stop inside the Bloedel Conservatory to pretend we had detoured our day with a stop in the tropics, and met some lovely little birdy friends.

We originally had plans to walk over to the nearby VanDusen botanical garden as well, but we decided that the day was getting by us too quickly, and headed back to the hotel to pack up and go to dinner.

We opted for one more night of seafood with dinner at Coast: I had thai mussels and mom had snapper fish & chips. This would notably be the location of the second night of 3 gratis desserts… which again warranted photographic evidence.

[sidenote: at this point I’m thinking my mom should be thanking me for all of those logged walking miles at this point, because just looking back on these dessert plates is making me gain weight…]

tuesday

Before our afternoon departure, we decided to pack in one more tourist jaunt before we left. We grabbed some coffee and pastries and walked over to Stanley Park and visited the Vancouver Aquarium.

Seeing the Beluga whales and the pacific white-sided dolphins was definitely a treat… and we even got to see 2 sloths!!! (don’t ask why they’re at an aquarium, but just revel in the fact that they’re there in the first place)

We hiked back to our hotel, stopped on the way to pick up some unpronounceable BC wine to take home (Nk’Mip Cellars Qwam Qwmt Chardonnay), grabbed our bags and a sandwich from the La Brasserie street cart, and hopped back on the Canada Line to the airport.  

And just like that… we were no longer hanging out in Canada anymore, but on our way back to California.

I’ve got to say, I was impressed all around with Vancouver though. And I really want to go back again, probably in the summer to enjoy the outdoors a bit more. My paternal grandparents were both Canadian (British born but moved to BC as kids), and I’d really love to get a chance to see Vancouver Island and where he grew up… and share it with Mr. M and Miss L on another trip.

But for now… it’s back to work and reality… and not eating 3 desserts every night with dinner… sigh.

And then I remembered that I had somehow managed to wear all of these prints/colors in one outfit back in the day.

When I saw the prints from the Diane von Furstenberg collection for GAP Kids, I thought they looked familiar in some way.

And then I remembered that I had somehow managed to wear all of these prints/colors in one outfit back in the day.

And yes… that is a two piece ensemble.