Ode to my Fireplace

Due to family persistence I will continue to update, inconsistently, for the time being.

I would like to present a special thank you to my fireplace for the extra service it rendered during a very cold week in November when my furnace decided to commit suicide.

Since being in this house I have continually been surprised by the number of DIY projects where the "handyman" definitely didn't know how to do it themselves... The most recent in these findings was after my furnace quite working and both the upstairs and my suite were plunged into the cool temperatures of around 12-15 degrees...brrrr. I called my trusty furnace repairman, who helped me last year when my thermostat wasn't working properly, to take a look. He found a very jery-rigged system where the spring that opens the furnace has broken and so they had set up a little piece of copper pipe to hold the furnace continually open...this means that basically the furnace is always powered, not just when I tell it to be. So then it overheated part of the control panel and basically killed itself to prevent further overheating of the electrics.
Well $400 later I can now walk into my home after work and not have to go old school lighting a fire to keep myself from freezing! Although I would like to say that my little fireplace managed to boost the temperature quite quickly from around 14 to 20 last night in about an hour. And it was pretty nice to have an excuse to light a fire every evening, and wonderful to sit in front of with a nice cup of tea. The worst part in the whole ordeal was waking up to a cold house and knowing it wasn't going to heat up all day!

Wow, two posts in a week! That leaves me a solid amount of time before I need to feel guilt for not posting...

I Give up.

O.K.

So I'm not usually one to give up on things, actually I don't ever do it really, however, I am giving up the blog... "Inconsistently Updated" has turned into never updated, and it all gets linked and forwarded to my facebook page anyways so why have double? At least that's what I figure. So for anyone who actually checked in here (mom) I'm sorry and you'll just have to turn into a facebook stalker like the rest of the world.

Take Care,
Sarah.

Flu...

Somebody please explain to me how a person can have crazy chills and sweats and still not have a fever!!?

Went into the walk in clinic today and basically got told off for daring to infect the rest of the world...apparently I should have gone to emergency, waited for who knows how long, and infected all the already weakened immune systems there instead.

Turns out I have a flu (NOT swine flu) but it still sucks, and the doctor says I'm contagious for a least a week, so no work all week... If anyone has any brilliant ideas to keep me entertained when I'm not sleeping (which is most of the time) please pass them on!

Results

Dinner was really good. About 15 people in total, still some leftovers, but everyone had more than enough to make them burst, plus pumpkin chiffon pie on top...

Turkey Dinner Number 2

Well I have officially been a "hone-owmer" for a full year (as of Aug.28 actually) and this is now my second turkey dinner to be cooked in this place. I was looking back over the year's worth of renovations and work and was pretty happy with the list that I got done:

1. I deep cleaned a very dirty, dusty, grimy, and overall fairly filthy house that was full of garbage... until it shined!
2. Emptied a yard full of everything from a fooze-ball table to portable car park tents, to scrap wood, to the kitchen sink....with a few trips to the dump/recycle with my handy honda civic.
3. Re-painted: 2 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, a kitchen, and a couple halls
4. Re-finished (scraped, sanded, stained, and varnished) all the wood trim in my bedroom (a VERY dusty procedure)
5. Sewed a set of curtains
6. Had the outside of the house painted
7. Replaced the hot-water heater
8. Framed in, fixed electrical, dry-walled, puttied, puttied and puttied some more, and painted my now beautiful and clean laundry room
9. Plumbed in a functioning laundry room sink
and
10. Somehow managed to figure out a little of what is going on in my yard, realize I have blackberries now, and got my compost bucket up and running.

Among a myriad of smaller projects like pillows and bedspreads.

I've realized that I love owning my own home, it's like having a permanent and never ending project that you can (mostly) choose to work at on your own pace. It feels fulfilling to actually be putting my money towards something, rather than paying someone else's mortgage. The house even managed to hold its own in the downturn of this economy. Fingers are crossed that year two goes by smoothly and the market values start to head back uphill.

As for that second turkey dinner. I'll let you know tomorrow...

In which the ninja suit is resurfaced and apple pies get baked...

Well folks, September is fully upon us (actually it's almost October!)with the first day of fall and the wind has turned cold again so the ninja suit (aka ice breaker base layer) has made a reappearance, although the bottoms have yet to resurface... but soon.

This week was marked by the baking of about 10 apple pies! It is a pretty cool process to be able to sail to the island, pick the apples, row them back to the boat where they are peeled, cut and coated with sugar and then baked into delicious apple pies (dough from scratch of course!). We had an all girls school on this week and they definitely got into the idea of pie making and we were pretty enthused as well when the last night was marked by a variety of tasty apple pies and turnovers and even a "sack of gold." I like getting my hands into the galley every once in a while and Krystle graciously let me get myself covered in flour to head up the production line, although somehow I managed to escape peeling a single apple...thank you Tom Sawyer.

Three trips left, and looking forward to the change of pace that will come with the finale of this wonderful season.
Back out tomorrow, wish me dry and sunny skies, and fair winds of course!

Back to Victoria

There are a few clues that summer on the boats has come to a close:
1 - The mean outside temperature has lowered to a point that the aft-cabin stove is lit more often than not.
2 - I wore shoes, not Chacos, for an entire day.
3 - I removed all swim suits and board shorts from my bunk as there is little to no chance that I will be going in the water again.
4 - My bunk is looking extra cozy these days and I've been spending a little more time there as of late...
5 - Coffee is being consumed at a higher rate as the year is catching up with me.
6 - My blog is being updated again...

I have not touched this much in the past few months, but maybe with the coming of September and freshness of fall I will be inspired to write again. September with the start of school has always seemed to have a fresh start feeling to it, despite the fact that I have not started anything new in September for about five years now. In fact for the last five years September has symbolized the beginning of the closure of our sailing season. The start of fall sailing is the beginning of a very quick end to what always seems like a year gone by too fast.

Miss Landmine

Miss Landmine Cambodia

I just saw this link and went to check it out. If you are interested read a few of the press articles... it is a crazy story! This juxtaposition to create awareness and controversy certainly piqued my interest. If you have the time to look at the candidates page at the website take a look. There are some beautiful women there and I was happy to see that the age range was between about 18 and 50. The prize is a state of the art golden prosthetic limb. Again. Crazy!

Night to Knight

So I realized I haven't blogged in a long time...oops! Maybe I should change my blog title to "Infrequent Thoughts From A Sailor" The sailing season has been amazing so far, and has been speeding by so fast I can barely believe I only have 7 trips left... The summer has been filled with great trainees and volunteers and tons of adventure and suprise! Here is one of them:


We had quite an adventure going up Knight Inlet. No SALTS vessel had ever been up there before so were breaking new territory. It's a long way up, but all of the rest of the inlets on the coast were are really quite beautiful at the top so we figured it would be well worth the trip. It started out as a hot and sunny day (I hear the rest of the province is in a heat wave as well, although I think we have it pretty good out on the water with a fairly consistent sea breeze to cool us down. We passed a beautiful glacier fed waterfall that was cascading right down into the ocean. (WE swam here on the way back, and it was definitely glacier fed, I can assure you!)

It actually took all of the professional crew to get up there. It was dark during the last couple hours of the run and there was so much debris, logs and general flotsam and jetsam floating around we had to have Sam on top of the main gaff with the "datebuster" (massive flashlight) scanning the water ahead of us, Jacob up forward with another light, Tristan on radar, I was on deck and Skipper was everywhere all at once of course. The radar was picking up everything! and it was like going through a minefield, except we couldn't really tell the size of things so we just had to dodge everything! I AM HAVING A STRESS MOMENT! We got up there and had no idea what it looked like, no-one in SALTS had ever been up there before so we launched the zody and were taking soundings on the bottom with the lead-lined(we couldn't really get a reading on the electronic depth sounder because there was so much fresh water pouring in from the estuary) finally found a place to anchor (a little sketchy) and had crew up every hour just in case we started dragging. Once we were finally anchored though everyone just crashed on deck and we were staring at all the stars. It was so beautiful, absolutely no light pollution you could see everything.

The next morning waking up was like Christmas, we knew were in the this amazing place, but hadn't seen it in the light yet, so there was this moment that we all savoured in our bunks as we woke up wondering what we would see when we poked our heads up onto the deck. We weren't disapointed, the view was amazing! however it was slightly obscured by the hundreds and thousands of horseflies that were buzzing around the boat. We had planned a bit of sleep in (0930) and a one-sitting breakfast so everyone could eat all together up on deck, but no one ate on deck due to the pesky little buzzers that apparently wanted breakfast too! We launched the zodiac to scout out possibilities for sauna, but Skipper soon radioed back saying that he had a cloud of horseflies buzzing after him and there were so many ashore he has at least 10-14 on his head alone at any one moment! It was all we could do to put on long pants and sleeves and weigh anchor as fast as we could to leave these evil devourers of flesh behind us!

So in the end it was a beautiful inlet, but I don't think we will be revisiting it any time soon!

Wedding Shots

And more photos.

Fav Shots from Lyndsey and Tyson's Wedding

Here are some of my favourites from Lyndsey and Tyson's wedding. It was a beautiful wedding and an amazing backdrop and a harrowing tale of airlines gone wrong getting to and from. To say the least, I left at 0400H, 5 out of 6 flights were delayed or canceled, I over-nighted in an airport...again, we ended up flying to Liberia instead of San Jose, our luggage was lost (only to be returned less than 24 hours before the wedding), the rental cars didn't show up, we took a bus, the resort was beautiful and food and staff amazing, the sun was hot, one of the rental cars (not mine) almost droven themselves off a cliff and they had to climb out the back window to safety (the car was saved in the end), maid of honour forgot the ring in the hotel room, the bride and groom didn't understand everything the lawyer had them to repeat, there were some mosquitos..., we went surfing, and horseback riding, and swimming, and hiking, and had a general blast, we went to a Karaoke bar and one of the staff sang us a love song, everyone made it safely to San Jose, the airline lost my luggage, again! I made it home about 0100H.

Spring Flowers

It's been interesting to find out exactly what I have kicking around my house. Here are some of the flowers that have cropped up in my garden this spring.

Before and After

Before and After shots of my home.



Painting done by Amanda Patterson and Co. of College Pro Painters

Going Old (scratch) Home School!

This week was an interesting one... at least I think interesting is the right word to use when you get 30 home schooled kids between 12 and 19 locked up together on a boat for a week.

It actually was just a lot of fun. Everyone single one of them had a personality, to say the least, and since they hadn't met before it had more resemblance to a summer trip than most school trips do. They were a gullible bunch (I think that all my lies are going to catch up with me one day...) and a group that got excited about everything. There is something special about taking groups from outside the lower mainland to a tide pool or beach and seeing them look at shells and barnacles as if they are special treasures made just for their hunt.

Thanks to my previously mentioned ninja training (and icebreaker base layer) I was dramatically warmer this week, and another promo for Icebreaker here, I actually didn't take it off all week and no it didn't stink! It has however slowly been warming up lately, I even got outside today to do some gardening which was lovely and relaxing. Although I need to figure out which ones are weeds and which ones aren't...

Also my sister came to see me this weekend and helped me clean my house, which was the most amazing gift ever (thanks again!) I am once again enjoying living in a sparklingly home with a back entry that I can walk through!

Sayonara,
Off for another week.

When the Snow Blows and I become a Ninja!

Three trips down and hopefully March will hold true to its word and go out like a lamb, it sure came in like a lion! Our first five day trip greeted us with inches of snow on the deck and a frigid northerly wind. I am so thankful for the down jacket that I bought, it feels like I never take it off, even down below it takes a while for things to warm up once the stoves are on.











The water temperature doesn't change more than a degree or two most of the year and we had some swimmers despite the cold weather; I told my watch that if they jumped in the water they didn't have to do the dinner dishes we were responsible for that night...two takers, both girls, so the guys and I did all the dishes that evening. I also ended up making breakfast the next morning, because I guess I was feeling in a wagering kind of mood and told our cook Krystle that if she jumped in she could sleep in and I was make breakfast...we both thought we got the better end of that deal, there is almost no chance of me getting in the water before May at which time I will be in the Pacific off of Costa Rica and it's guaranteed to be much warmer than here.
To help me battle to cold weather I have also decided to start Ninja training.




This will allow me to partition my mind into tropical and arctic sensations and remove cold and ice from my external sensory perception.

My parents have also aided me in this effort by providing me with an Icebreaker thermal base layer training outfit. So far the Icebreakers are working wonders and next week promises to be my warmest yet!!

In which I come back from a very cold adventure and get a new couch and a down jacket.

Well, as usual I have neglected to update this blog, I'm not sure if anyone besides my mother even reads this anymore, but at least for her sake I will put up the pictures of my new couch. It was actually quite an adventure getting inside my house. The deliver drivers after being excited about my largish front door were thoroughly disapointed when I opened the door to reveal a less than spacious entry way into another offset door before arriving in the narrow hallway to my home... They told me that there was no way it would fit, to which I replied, "well there are three other doors, it must be able to fit through one of them, right?!"

In any case after removing my back door as well as the door to my living room, the behemoth of a couch made its way into my lovely home and I am enjoying it as I type.


As far as the very cold adventure goes. I have officially started my sailing season, and I'm going to suggest that March is a tad but chillier than June...The group of grade sevens we had were great though, if not a bit wee. (I'd almost forgotten how small they were; I haven't had any onboard for about two years!) They braved the weather with good spirits though, and thank God for the sunshine or they might not have been so brave. But overall a great start to the season, I did however realize what working in an office over the winter does do my wimp status (it increases it) and I went out and bought a down jacket this weekend. Hopefully this trip will be toasty warm!

p.s. I've started painting my laundry room, and I'll post some before and after pictures once it's done, but for now I have a stacked washer and dryer (thank you Aunty Christine and Uncle Bill) and a jalapeno and dill pickle coloured laundry room in the making!

In Which I Let Google Define My Existence - stolen from MCD

Type the part in capital letters (substituting your name for mine) into Google, and use whatever it comes up with to complete the sentence.

SARAH NEEDS to get her life back and establish herself as the person in charge!

Little SARAH LOOKS LIKE f*&$in Nicole Ritchie in this picture.

What SARAH DOES when she's not doing her homework pictures published by xoseastar.

SARAH HATES you.

All grown up: SARAH GOES to lake placid…again.

SARAH LOVES you (in your dreams).

SARAH EATS cake.

SARAH HAS always been a mover and a shaker.

SARAH WANTS to become the fastest disabled skier outright, regardless of gender.

SARAH IS beautiful inside and out, She's the most beautiful girl, When I'm dancing with Sarah and the stars are out, I am on top of the world.

Signs of a Great Trip

So I completely forgot about this photo contest that I entered. It was a while back and I saw it in Outpost magazine, a magazine that came free with my hosteling international membership. They had a contest called "Signs of a Great Time" I don't think I won, but they published the best/funniest photos on their site and mine made it in. Crazy. Anyways, there are some pretty hilarious ones, so check it out.

West Coast Email Forward

The following is a minute-by-minute report of the extreme weather concerns in Victoria , British Columbia:

6:22 a.m. Temperature plunges. Word spreads that a Victoria man finds ice on his windshield! Curious neighbors gather to watch him scrape it off with a credit card. One motorist, a former Albertan, claims use of mysterious "defrost" switch on dashboard can aid in process.

9:30 a.m. Hardware stores sell both of their snow shovels. Islanders begin cobbling together implements made from kayak paddles, umbrellas, plywood, cookie sheets and boogie boards.

10 a.m. Golfers switch to orange balls. Beacon Hill Park cricket players, anxious not to repeat the ugly "snow blower incident" of the Blizzard of '96, switch to orange uniforms.

Noon: Word of impending West Coast snowfall tops newscasts across Canada. Saskatoon hospitals report epidemic of sprained wrists related to viewers high-fiving one another.

1:20 p.m. Elementary schools call in grief counselors. Grief counselors refuse to go, citing lack of snow tires.

2:30 p.m. Rush hour begins an hour early as office workers come down with mysterious illness and bolt for home. Usual traffic snarl is compounded by large number of four-wheel-drives abandoned by side of road.

2:50 p.m. Airplanes are grounded and ferries docked. No way to travel between Island and rest of the world. Times Colonist headline: "Mainland cut off from Civilization."

3:22 p.m. Prime Minister Harper announces Canada 's DART rapid-response team can be on the ground within six months." We can't leave Victoria to deal with 225 centimeters of snow on its own," he tells Mayor Lowe. "Um, that's two to five centimeters, not two-two-five," replies the Mayor. The Prime Minister hangs up.

3:33 p.m. Provincial government responds to crisis by installing slot machines in homeless shelters.

4:10 p.m. At behest of Provincial Emergency Program, authorities begin adding Prozac to drinking water.

4:15 p.m. Fears of food shortages lead to alarming scenes of violence and looting. Grocery shoppers riot across the city, except in Oak Bay , where residents hire caterers to do rioting for them.

4:30 p.m. Bracing for the arrival of snow, the city is gripped by an eerie stillness reminiscent of Baghdad on the eve of the invasion. Searchlights comb darkening sky for first sign of precipitation.

4:48 p.m. Panic ripples across the region as words come in that the first flakes of snow have fallen on the Malahat. False alarm! "Flakes" turn out to be nothing more than anthrax spores released by terrorists. An uneasy calm returns to city.

5:40 p.m. Television reporter, Ed Bain, shaking uncontrollably, tells viewers that snow warnings have been extended. This weather pattern could go on for days. Mercury plummets to Calgary-in-August levels. Martial law is declared. Victoria-area politicians announce plans to establish an emergency command centre aboard HMCS Regina once it reaches Oahu .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Victoria Blizzard 2008 - Revenge of the Commuters

Chilled Victoria commuters faced their second day of winter hell today, as an additional ¼ centimeter of the peculiar white stuff fell, bringing the Island to its knees and causing millions of dollars worth of damage to the marijuana crops. Scientists suspect that the substance is some form of frozen water particles and experts from Saskatchewan are being flown in. With temperatures dipping to the almost but not quite near zero mark, Victorians were warned to double insulate their lattes before venturing out.

Victoria police recommended that people stay inside except for emergencies, such as running out of espresso or biscotti to see them through Victoria's most terrible storm to date. The local Canadian Tire reported that they had completely sold out of fur-lined sandals.

Drivers were cautioned to put their convertible tops up, and several have been shocked to learn that their SUV's actually have four wheel drive, although most have no idea how to use it.

Weary commuters faced soggy sushi, and the threat of frozen breast implants. Although Dr. John Blatherwick, of the Coastal Health Authority reassured everyone that most breast implants were perfectly safe to 25 below, down-filled bras are flying off the shelves at Mountain Equipment Co-op.

"The government has to do something," snarled an angry Trevor Warburton. "I didn't pay $540,000 for my one bedroom condo so I could sit around and be treated like someone from Toronto