Saskatoon photos

I took this photo last fall when out for a walk on lunch. That is the Robin Hood flour mill at the end of the track there.

Same shot desaturated with Photoshop gradient and a sepia filter added.

Not sure which one I like better.
What do you think?

New stuff!

I have been working full time for the past two weeks and that means lunch comes out of a plastic container every day. Bringing my own lunch also means I frequently eat lunch at my desk, working because I have a very busy job and it gets stressful if I start getting behind....so I tend to work through my lunch and coffee breaks. Bad habit.

I made a promise to myself to stop doing this. And the easiest way to keep this promise is to not bring a lunch. The hunger makes me stop what I am doing, put on my coat and head out and pick something up. And I feel much better after this break.

I have two favorite lunch spots (besides Earls! ) One is Tim's because I can get the lunch soup and bun special for under $5 - wow. The other is a little place with yummy homemade soup and sandwiches that is located on the second floor of Charter House Interiors on first Ave at 24th st downtown. I posted about them on my family room reno post

Last Wednesday I called David at work and said - meet me there for a quick soup and sandwich - and it was quick - like 30 minutes. We both had to be back at the office for 1:00 pm meetings.

Now you have to walk through the store to get to the stairs to the second floor diner and there is always something that catches my eye and usually at a very good price. This speedy lunch date we happened to run into a sale - BOGO half price.

And look what I spotted!!!

Isn't this just funky cool? And it goes with my gecko's and tropical stuff.

David loved it too, soooo they put one in the back of my car to take home on trial. You have to love em at Charter House. Real customer service.

Well I took it home and wouldn't ya know, it was perfect...so

The next day we bought the second one at half price - because they look so much better as a pair.

And that's not all. While we were there, we spotted this cool guy!

It was love at first site and when we both see something and look at each other and say - oh isn't that neat - it would look great on the shelf... well it is a done deal....

and he was on sale for $17 - so I grabbed him too.

He fits in there with the geckos and the tropical chairs. Nothing like a Parana in the family room. You can also put a candle in his mouth - haven't tried that yet but I think it will look pretty neat.

A bit of a conversation piece anyways. haha

I think I will stick with Tim's lunches or home made for a while.

Procrastinator??

No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till tomorrow. It is only when they are behind us and done, that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards, and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasant. Accomplished, they are full of blessing, and there is a smile on their faces as they leave us. Undone, they stand threatening and disturbing our tranquility, and hindering our communion with God. If there be lying before you any bit of work from which you shrink, go straight up to it, and do it at once. The only way to get rid of it is to do it.

-Alexander MacLaren (1826–1910), Scottish preacher

Tranquility? what's that?
Time to just Do It

I KNOW there is a God

“God is not a belief to which you give your assent. God becomes a reality whom you know intimately, meet everyday, one whose strength becomes your strength, whose love, your love. Live this life of the presence of God long enough and when someone asks you, “Do you believe there is a God?”
...you may find yourself answering, “No, I do not believe there is a God.
I know there is a God.”

~Ernest Boyer, Jr.

Facebook anyone?

I posted this a couple of years ago, but since more of you are facebook inaugerated and busy wracking up your list of "friends" I thought you might find this amusing.

Junk Yard

There is a metal scrap junk yard in Saskatoon and a couple of years ago I went there to get some photos...because a big huge pile of metal makes for some cool shots.

If only metal could talk.

two more pages

I spent some time reorganizing the scrapbook supplies this weekend. I discovered some pretty cool product I didn't know I had. At least I had completely forgotten about it. And I now actually have a desk again now that the garbage can is full and the shelves organized, so that helps the work flow!

This process is very therapeutic, so much so that I actually got two pages done when I finished.

One is from 2002 - some very bad pictures but an event I still wanted to archive. I used some of that "get it done in five minutes" paper from bZOO along with some Basic Grey sticker letters I found at the bottom of a pile of stuff that needed to find a home.

The second layout was a more pleasureable experience - scrapping some wonderful photos from this past Christmas. I called it "I'll be home for Christmas", because the house looked so warm and inviting and filled with Christmas spirit and yet three of the kids didn't make it home this year. So "even in their dreams" they were home and I have pictures to show them what they missed. In some small way they were here. My phone bill can attest to that!!

Christmas 2009, Lord willing, will see NINE of us together. And I get to feed them all for several days and several meals. Both fridges will be full of food, and likely a lot of baking and what not stored in the cold garage. The house will be a mess of people, gifts, chocolates, board games, new sweaters, laughter and more food!! And I will love every minute of it.

Have a blessed day and get out there and enjoy this balmy weather...it may not last too long.

Incredible weather!!

I made a snowball today. A firm, very compressed, cold and icy snowball. And I threw it at my husband. Because THAT is what you do when the temperature gets above freezing in January in the great white north. When the snow sticks together it is reason to celebrate. I almost made a snowman.

For those of you south of about 45 degrees latitude who get bored looking at Palm trees, this may seem odd, but let me explain.

It has been cold here. Miserably cold. Try to imagine minus 40 F if you can. It freezes your nostril hairs in seconds. It gives a whole new meaning to cool crisp air. It is dangerously cold and it can get, well, rather depressing after the third, fourth, fifth week of it.

When it is THAT cold you spend fifteen minutes layering and bundling just to go out and hope your car, which has been plugged into a warmer all night, starts. You scrap off the ice and while the poor thing tries to thaw and circulate oil, you shovel the driveway of all the snow, piling it into big mounds at the side of the driveway, because where else are you going to put it?.

By now your care should be toasty warm because you just burned about $15 in gas to get it that way!

And you do this every day!! So you can have nice big piles of snow like this.

and this...


Which for a grand total of three months of the year would otherwise look like this...

Most smart Canadians who can afford it, have what we call "command start". You stand at your bedroom window in the buff and yell "Car! START!"
...actually you have to press a button on your ignition key. Voila, the car starts and you head into the shower - much more civil. You may still have to shovel the driveway though. Check the snow gauge.

When it is minus forty however the car may just refuse to start in which case you go back to the old way and may even need your neighbor to come over and attach big long electrical chords from his nice warm car battery that came out of a heated garage to your car battery which is refusing to speak to you because you left it on the driveway all night.

Another wonderful invention which I have in my northern survival kit is the heated seat. You sit down on your car seat and your bum starts to warm up. It is like a built in electric heating pad. Your hands may be frozen, your windshield iced up, your toes icicles, your fan blowing ice particles at you, but your bum is warm. Stop for a hot coffee on the way and things start to look up.

It has been like this more or less since before Christmas and the furnace has been doing overtime and charging accordingly since then.

But this weekend, things changed.

When the temps rise to a balmy 30 F or 1-2 Celsius up north here, you head out there in your bathing suit and shovel a spot on the front lawn for your lawn chair. Okay, not really, but you at least go for an invigorating walk.

And that's what we did early Saturday morning.

This, for those of you who have never experienced a Central Canadian winter, is a snow gauge....
It basically tells you from the kitchen window how long it will take you to shovel the driveway and how late for work you are going to be.

Very cool devise that doubles for a bird bath in the summer.

We do get summer. It is way too short but we do get summer and I for one am ready for it now.

The Diaper Bag arrived!

...and it is beautiful and much larger than I had imagined.


Yes I bought one of those diaper bags I told you about. Boy it can hold a lot of things.


I know... but I am keeping it for some special Mom.













Well, one day I will be a Grandma and
well, just thought these were sooo very nice.



And they are. beautifully sewn by Tina in Manitoba.










They are roomy and filled with pockets on the outside and the inside.


And also very soft...and oh so pretty.













Tina's sewing skills are really superb!
And I just discovered that she knits too!


This is so solid and well made. AND I suspect that once you remove the support in the bottom of the bag, it can be thrown in the washing machine.



I will have to ask Tina about that.






So head on over to Tina at Bits of Scrap and Check out her blog and you can get one too.

You can also check out some of her pictures on her first bag here.


They are $45.00 plus shipping.

Tell her I sent you. ;)

Saving Lives

Steve Karas and Matthew Welling share a special bond.

Matthew Welling, left, received a bone marrow transplant from Steve Karas, right.

They aren't related. In fact, they had never even met until 3-year-old Matthew needed a life-saving bone marrow transplant two years ago.

It turned out that Karas, 51, of Newton, Massachusetts, was a perfect match.

"My heart went a hundred miles an hour, and I couldn't even conceive of what this meant," Karas recalled.

He had signed up for the National Marrow Donor Program registry 17 years ago and had never given it another thought.

The call to donate came out of the blue.

Karas remembered hearing, "It was a little 1-year-old boy with this horrible disease called osteopetrosis, and the only cure was a bone marrow transplant, and would I be willing?"

He said there was no other answer than "of course."

Read the rest of this story here.