On 2015 Resolutions!

Well time again to do another resolution post. Huh, looks like I didn't write about 2014? But 2013 resolutions have indeed been...er.... resolved? What's the proper word? Anyhow, I've adopted a healthier, more positive lifestyle, and found not only one but two pairs of comfortable jeans (jeggings but hey man, it works). Huzzah.

Seems like a good foundation for more advanced goals now...

1. Invest

*Sigh*... I'm good at letting whatever money I have just sit around. So maybe it's time to take them out from under the mattress and do something with it...blaaargh. I'm just so lazy at this though. I seem to have no instinct and memory when it comes to personal finance. It also feels like real work...gneh. Time to stop procrastinating!

2. Watch all Star Wars movies!

This should have been the next step after I'd done that "learn English" resolution dozen years ago but here we are, going back to basics... I figure that it is about time for me to be able to differentiate ewoks and err the other furry thing(s). See? I don't even know why they gave me a passport. I shall come back and cringe at this post a year later.

3. Listen more

This one is damn hard for someone who loves to talk. But now that I am comfortable being an introvert and homebody, I need to also grow up and learn to listen more to the plights of the peasa... I mean, to people. My tune-out rate is too damn high right now. (soooo high, I catch myself being disinterested in my own stories as I speak). I blame it on my "fuck you I'm past 30 and old I don't need new friendship " phase and probably also a little on the mundane shit people say ("Really your kid cried this morning? Fascinating. Tell me again about that time when you almost bought a coffee?"). I mean don't get me wrong, I still recognize that I don't have to make friends if I don't feel like it, but I will pay more attention to my positive influences. I do secretly wish we could meet half way and people starts spewing out interesting shit all the time but it's probably not gonna happen. Look at me, for example, writing about getting jeggings. Uuuugh (ok next year resolution, spew interesting shit all the time, but next year only). So yeah, okay, I'll try to be less distracted.

... on the Annual Best and Worst of 2014!

A little late to the party... but who the heck parties anyways! In no particular order...

BEST!

Moving back downtown, yah!

Oh man how I missed thee, never-ending commute and power outages ... NOT. To be fair, I can't say I hated moving away from the hub. Afterall, life by the lake is how I started running and adopting a healthier lifestyle (Resolution from prior years, check!). But those howling windy nights made me dream about collapsing building and being buried in rubbles. Plus, if that ever happens and I come out alive, there isn't anything in a 2km radius to entertain me while waiting for hot firemen to arrive.

Am I a little worried that my new area is too much of a hipsterville, and will end up being as soul-less as the core? I have to admit, whenever I spot an army of plaid-shirts rounding the corner or tuques peeking out behind macbooks, there is a little stir. But haters of hipsters are also becoming obnoxiously pretentious themselves (read some Yelp reviews on restaurants around Queen West, and have your optometrist thank me for making you do eyeball exercises).

Why can't good things just be, good? I hope the area keeps thriving and being eclectic, because whatever the intentions are behind those weird little shops (pretentiousness, trying too hard, trying too little, etc.) they make up a damn interesting neighbourhood.

Kittay, yah! 

What can I say - she's a sweetheart! I am not a bit disappointed by her lack of typical cat behaviour and sass: no swatting, no climbing up on counters, no scratching of furniture, she even uses toys, boxes and scratch post that are bought for her (Whaa-a-at! I know, right!? Maybe she's a robot cat). Okay well maybe just a tiny little bit of sass, but she is definitely not an ass, in fact she got class - urges people to clean her litter, that lass.

Chris Pratt, yah!

Just sayin'.

Being a homebody but hitting Target Weight, yah!

This was a fairly introspective year. I am making conscious decisions to come to terms with being more of an introvert. This way, when I do actually go out, I am glad to be there and can enjoy myself. To top it off, I've taken steps towards feeling better about myself physically, as opposed to whining about it - big change in attitude and need to keep at it. This might be a good segue (everybody together: segway!) into next year's resolutions, but that's for another post because now we gotta cover....


THE WORST!

Mortgages and running out of money, boo! 

Money can't buy happiness but running out of it certainly gets stressful... The whole saga of trying to sell a home and/or find a renter and getting financing is a huge pain in the effing crack. This part of being an adult, I have to admit, sucks (the rest of it is not that bad, my mom actually doesn't bother telling me what to do anymore, wheeeeeee no need to slam doors and pout and fantasize about running away but then realize I have no money so I can only pout in my room in the house that my parents own and still crawl out to eat dinner in shaaaaame). I also still harbour deep hatred for that cow of a seller who lowballed the market and made me unable to sell my property... this is a perfect example of how you can't avoid idiots making bad decisions affecting you. I hope she gets fired from her Silicon Valley job and has to crawl back to Toronto and be forced to buy a place at 2946735% premium because Toronto all of a sudden is named best place to live by some independent happiness/economics study!

Not having enough fun time, boo!

Ah this one, this one is related to work. Com'on it was good for the first year to work me hard, I'm new and learning and all, but it's been almost 3 frigging years! You can't make me grow hours in a day...  the monkeys are on my back again because "we need to keep our talents interested" and "who wouldn't want to do new crap!?".. well guess what, ME! No more "learning opportunities" or "new exciting accounting shit". Can you believe this? Someone called a change in accounting exciting... that's worse than trying to sell me extended warranty on a mouse. You know what's exciting? Finishing at 5PM and seeing sun rays muthafucka!

All those sequels and trilogies and long movies, boo!

Honestly, it is "choose two out of three" for movies now: original movie, adequate length, entertaining. I did not even want to go watch Hobbits! Not even one. And this is me! I loved LOTR and middle earth and elves andlslkdfjalsdkjf. But a quite arbitrary personal line was crossed when they drew out a tiny book into a trilogy and forced characters in there and slapped some sap love story to top it all off. Forced love story is a big pet peeve now. Just makes you cringe, doesn't it? NO DON'T KISS HER SHE IS LIKE YOUR MO...aaaaarrrghh fudgesicle! Bloody hell Hollywood get a grip.

I'm moving again!

What a hectic couple of weeks it has been, but the dust is finally going to settle sometime next week on the whole ordeal of moving.

So I am packing and packing away - and I can't wait for the commute time to be cut in half, and to be walking distance to everything again.

Though, I am a little worried about how Purrl is going to adjust to the move, again... she's only recently gotten comfortable in her new home. Speaking of which, here is some cat news!

1. Purrl now recognizes her new name, thanks to the power of bribe (treats, lots of treats) 

2. Coincidentally she has also rounded out a bit, no more the skinny shelter cat she is. Coincidentally.

3. She's way talkative now, her human-servants are not very good at cat-ese, but here are some simple commands her Majesty employs:

- Small "Gnah!" this means "Yo!" and is the greeting word of choice as she is black, afterall. 

- The soft meow is "Hey~ look at me but don't touch me cause I'm just going to walk away the moment you do", plenty of sass she has.

- The really loud couple of "MEOW!". Well, this is her human-equivalent of "Ahhhhh", usually heard after a meal, or in the middle of night, after she poops. I have to say, one must be definitely at ease to be able to announce one's stool accomplishments.

Welp... poop time for me.

on reading a new book (ish, I think I went off topic)

Lately, I've been on a small reading binge.

All these small binges of hobbies (thanks, ADHD brain and a childhood devoid of discipline), somehow still add up to quite a busy schedule. Though I still hate having to answer: "So... what have you been up to?" The fuck if I know - do you mean today? yesterday? last few weeks? What is the appropriate time frame here? How much detail does one go into?

Let's face it, Mr. Coworker by the Watercooler - you can't relate to video games I play or books I read, and I can't relate to wiping up puke off your sick 2-year-old and the latest head lice epidemic in grade schools. Can we spare each other the fake "wow, gee", grab our respective beverages, and move along?

If it's a friend that I haven't spoken to in years, it feels like I have to use broad brushes to paint my life. Maybe I'm more frustrated by my lack of knack at summarizing my life stories here than anything else.  Anyhow, I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

*deep inhale, exhale*

So, back to books.

I just read Gone Girl and loved it - to the point where I don't know if I want to go watch the movie and potentially ruin it. Actually, I can't remember the last good book I read before this one - though I can for sure remember the last crappy one (Divergent. Look at meee, I'm a Katniss wanna-be in yet another world that needs to be saved by a teenager! But the important question is, Dear Diary, does the boy I like, like me back?).

Not to mention the Gone Girl movie is 149 minutes long. I thought we live in a world of instant gratification now? Songs, for example, have been shorter and shorter. They are all mostly less than 4 minutes long nowadays, and pretty succinct. I mean,  "Turn down for what!?!" no one is going to wonder what the message is. If you don't got buns, hun, then my anaconda don't want none. See? Someone in the music industry's been reading about effective communication.

Those novel-based movies man, they need to chiiiill out.

...on unexpected search results

Decided to search up a random teacher.

Was reminiscing about some weird traumatic episode of when I first started school in Québec.

Was during Welcome Class where every fresh-off-the-boat kid was sent to learn French before going into regular class. It was also my first Show and Tell ever and lo and behold, I decided to bring my diary.

Somehow young doremish had it in her head that diaries are super-duper-top-secrets and guard-it-with-your-life-private. Probably pretty hare-brained to bring it, but fuck it, we were told to bring something that was near and dear, and that diary was as prized to me as possessions go. 'Twas pretty in an old fashioned way - not pink, nor fuzzy - it had a lock, and scented pages. My aunt gave it to me as a good-bye gift from Taiwan.

At the end of the preso, the teacher who, so far I had been quite fond of, asked me to open it and show it to people.

I mean, thinking back, my biggest secrets in there were probably along the lines of "today, a booger flew out of my nose by accident and it was icky". But on principle and probably on principle only, doremishette mustered all her courage and said No. To. A. Teacher (!).

But he kept insisting. And I just stubbornly kept refusing. It went on a few times and he got red-faced angry. Nope nope nope nope. Still nope.

He got up, and ended up wringing it off my hand despite my teary protests, and flashed a few pages to the stunned faces of my classmates*. At that point I was flat out wailing from embarrassment (of showing my diary? or losing an arm-wrestling match to an angry 30-year-old? of my frustration with not being able to articulate that I felt it was important to respect my privacy even though I was a kid, which was what I was thinking, but couldn't say? I still can't quite place it).

I have since then hated that teacher.

Anyhow. I found his name on Google and he passed away this year at 53. Cancer. 

Huh.


*"today... booger..."

on nuts...hah no not those geebus

I recent had an encounter with a bowl of mixed nuts. While picking through it I figured everyone has a nuts hierarchy (if you don't well, get thinking, it's one of those important questions you regret not taking care of earlier when you're on the death bed), so I would like to share mine.

1. Cashews - makes it to the top, eeeasy. Little commas of delights. Fish them out of the bowl and chomp on. Crunchy, fragrant, oh so good. 
2. Pine nuts - mmmmm pine nuts if only you were cheaper
3. Pecan and walnuts - makes pies. Pie is superior form of dessert.
4. Almonds
5. All Other Inferior Nuts
6. And at the bottom of the nuts totem... the Brazilian nut. It's like that fat obnoxious kid that tries too hard.  Says nasty stuff to look cool and hovers around. Empirical data indicates they tend to float to the top when you shake a box of mixed nuts. Go away Brazilian nut, you are super bland and blah.

P.S. I apologize for the lack of nut-related jokes. 

...on cat ownership

I figured might as well reboot this blog when I got something new to talk about. Maybe updates will last more than a month, we'll see. It probably won't be just about the cat.

This reminds me of a story with my first boyfriend in high school. I guess I used to talk about my dog a damn lot. We were hanging out with him and his friend and the two of them talked the entire time about McDonald's where they both worked at. At some point, tired of being left out I said, hey can we talk about something other than McDonald's? To which he snickered and said "Like what? Your dog?" And laughed with his friend. If it had happened today they would probably have high-fived and called each other bro. Ugh. Hate teenagers.

That being said this is my blog so if cat does funny shit, cat gets words.

Purrl is a lady cat that was in a corner box on top right at an adopt-a-thon. She is black and senior so that's two strikes against her in the odds of being adopted. I am not sure if the shelter named her but "Alana" is a stupid name. Why not Mildred or Geraldine, too? stupid humans.

In the span of her first week around, she managed to poop outside the litter box, hide so well for so long I thought she had ran off, eat peace lily leaves that are toxic to her and become sick. If these episodes taught me anything, is that I'm a worried pet-parent. Vet is commending me so much for bringing her in that I suspect not very many people usually do...

But look at her! So damn adorable. Get better soon Purrlie