Digital Masquerade

I’ve received a few emails asking where I’ve been and why I have become so quiet in the last little while.  The quick answer is “I’ve been busy” but really that is more or less a cop out statement.  So instead of just saying “I’ve been busy” I’ll tell you a little bit about what I’ve been doing this past month:

London is calling
A few weekends ago we headed down to London to celebrate Gary’s mom’s birthday.  I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned this before, but I seriously lucked out on the whole “in-laws” front.  I absolutely adore Gary’s family and love hanging out with them.  I always feel comfortable and loved when I’m there and if it wasn’t for the two hour drive I’m sure we would see them much more often.

Rollerderby
Gary and I caught the Rollerderby championship game between The Gore-Gore Rollergirls and the Chicks Ahoy!  It was a fabulous match and Ashlea from the Gore-Gore Girls has been bugging me all season to join her team.  Hell, my plus-sized-tall body could easily take out some of these 100lb gals.    I’ve been avoiding it since I don’t really have a lot of spare time and I’m just not up to dedicating three days a week for practices.  After seeing how much fun they had at the game though, I’ve been seriously considering it.  More than likely I’ll just show up to give my support.

Floor Hockey
This is my fourth season playing floor hockey with our work team.  I’m not sure if you remember but when we first started we were completely hopeless.  This season, however, we’ve already clinched first place going into the playoffs.  The first playoff game is tonight and luckily my knee is healed enough that I can play.  A few weeks ago a guy on the team we were playing got a bit upset that the game was incredibly close and decided that hooking my feet with his hockey stick and pushing me was a fabulous idea.

CanUX 2007 in Banff
I also just came back from the CanUX 2007 conference in Banff that went from Nov 24 - Nov 27.  I went with a girl from work and we had a fabulous time.  It started off with a Design Slam on Sunday night that was challenging and a lot of fun.  The speakers on Monday were OK, but on Tuesday they really shined.  We had some great conversations and discovered that UX is huge in Vancouver.  We swapped ideas and got to spend some time in the mountains with a quick drive up to Lake Louise.  I have a bunch of pictures that I need to process but I’ll post the good ones when I’m done.

In between all of these little things, I’ve been working on teaching myself how to use ZenCart to help out Sew Scary, starting to get my feet wet in learning Silverlight for work and also putting Ghoulish Gary  into a CMS so it’s easier for him to update it.

Another thing that’s been holding me back from adding any new content, especially pictures, is that I’m moving my site…again.  I’ll have a shorter domain name and a whole new look.  Something has gone seriously wrong with this current installation causing it to take forever to load anything.  I have a feeling it’s the gallery but rather than troubleshoot it I plan on starting from scratch on my new baby.

I have some vacation time coming up in a couple of weeks that will see Gary and I in Florida for four days, flying back home for a wedding, then Christmas visiting is upon us.  I would say that I’ll try to update but really we both know that will likely not happen

This morning I woke up early so that I would get to work before 10:00 am.  Mind you I can start at 10:00 but we have plans tonight and I wanted to leave at 5:30.  Once I finished my lightening round of getting ready, I left the house without having a single sip of caffeine.  So, when I burst out onto the street from our third floor apartment I stood there for a couple of minutes because I couldn’t believe my eyes.

It was snowing!  White eddies swirling around tires as cars and people forced them to reform their patterns.

Snow!

Falling on my cute black hat and melting on my pink cheeks.

Snow!!

I absolutely adore the first snow of the season.  Sure, it means it’s going go get windy and incredibly cold.  There will soon be piles of slush and boots with pulled seams making my feet damp.

It doesn’t matter because it’s snowing and that means that my vacation is coming up.  My birthday and the New Year are just around the corner.  Non-stressful days spent laughing with friends and family are going to be here soon.  And, let’s not forget the trip to Florida Gary and I are taking this year.

Days spent in the parks of Orlando on rides.  Laughing like the couple of kids we really are at heart.  Consuming as many monsters and magic that we can possibly handle without bursting from glee.

Thank you to all those snowflakes that drifted around this morning for making me a happy woman today.

It’s October and it’s my absolute favourite time of the year. This makes me a very happy girl. Seriously what’s not to love about October. The leaves turn, the sweaters come out, gorgeous coloured scarves and of course…it’s the time of ghouls and monsters.

We’ve been blessed with some pretty amazing warm weather last weekend and we took full advantage of it. We started off by hitting up Canada’s Wonderland’s Halloween Haunt on Friday night. We went with the rest of the Rue Crew and got to have a little meet and greet with the organizers of the event. We went last year and while it was good, they really outdid themselves this year with the Haunted Houses and all out ghoul atmosphere of the park. If you get a chance I’d highly recommend going. The line ups were non-existent, the people were amazingly cool and overall it was a great way to kick off the long weekend.

We’re going again in a couple of weeks for an engagement party so I’ll be taking some more photos but I did take some (ok quite a bit) of photos during our excursion on Friday. So I figured I would share them with you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday night at Rue Morgue’s Cinemacabre they presented Night of the Creeps and had Director Fred Dekker on hand to introduce the film, and participate in a Q&A session, hosted by Michael Felsher, afterwards. A nice surprise was when Steve Marshall, who lives in Toronto, showed up for the screening and was called on stage to surprise Fred.

After a bit of banter the movie started and as someone who has never seen the movie before, let me tell you it was fantastic. A huge part of it being so much fun was that the audience was totally into it. I was able to record some of the Q&A and played with Windows Movie Maker today to put together a little clip. It’s about 7 minutes long and I haven’t quite figured out the setting to export a better quality video that isn’t huge but I think you’ll get the gist.

The rest of the pictures can be found here: Night of the Creeps

And for those of you who are curious about the alternate ending that Fred Dekker talks about during his Q&A I was able to find it on YouTube.

Enjoy!

This is the first weekend in a long time that I haven’t worked. I’ve been tempted but I’ve held strong and have reminded myself that I need some downtime. I had big plans this weekend…doing some stuff on Gary’s site, my site, processing photos from the Festival of Fear and I’ve done none of it. Sitting in front of the computer this weekend was not something I wanted to do.

Instead I’ve been watching episodes of Big Love and Neverwhere. I’ve been researching some Guitar Hero bundles because Gary and I have fallen in love with the game but I refuse to spend what the stores are asking for the bundles. I also took Pandora out for some really nice long walks and measured myself for a corset that I should hopefully have in about 6 weeks.

I’ve also been watching my new fish Voodoo. I just realized that I forgot to blog about it when Pan went belly up. He was a good guy but was also pretty sick from the day I got him. Voodoo is a hell of a lot more spunky and I absolutely love watching him swim around. He also has some gorgeous fins. The photo does not really do him justice at all.

Oh damn I just remembered that I’m supposed to be emailing the family with directions to Tonya’s house where we are celebrating my mom’s 60th birthday next weekend. The party should be fun but it’s going to be a lot of work. Tonya is stressed out about it and rightfully so, but I think in the end it’ll be a great day. Now that my sweetie is finally home after the gruelling Halloween double issue I’m going to go and play some Tony Hawk with him and simply enjoy some quiet time together.

I know I’ve been quiet for a while now but that’s a good thing because it means life….is pretty damn awesome.

Gary and I just wrapped up the Festival of Fear (pictures will be coming this weekend I hope), my sister is moving in next door, my Mom is having a milestone birthday and I got a promotion at work.

Top that off with my always present amazing friends, living with the love of my life Gary, and having my sweet puppy Pandora, I could not be a happier girl.

I’m even wrapping up some projects at work so that mens I’ll be able to spend some time working on the various projects I’m supposed to be doing.   I’m about a month behind on my blog reading but I plan on catching up on that fairly soon so be expecting some random comments from me on old posts.

Back in 2005, Gary introduced me to the Bloc Party and their album “Silent Alarm”. I instantly fell in love with the album. It made me want to dance, smile and brought me back to my early University days when Oasis and Blur were big. So, when their second album “A Weekend In The City” came out I was expecting them to continue charming me.

I wasn’t disappointed.

“A Weekend In The City” is a much more sombre album than Silent Alarm and after listening to it a few times, “The Prayer” has managed to worm its way up into my heart.

For those of you who are new to Bloc Party I’m going to share with you two of my favourite songs thrown behind a cut tag for those of you on LiveJournal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, really I do.  Gary and I are both messy people.  We aren’t dirty, just messy.

Various pieces of clothing are scattered throughout the apartment as layers are shed when we reach our hot home.  Paper, purses, receipts and every electronic gadget we own that can be thrown on the table now have a home.  We also have shoes underneath every possible surface.

Considering both of our mom’s are pretty tidy ladies, it amazes me how we clean every Sunday and when the weekend rolls around the place is in shambles again.  I know what we should do, keep things tidy with a 10-15 minute straighten up every night but we’re both just too damn lazy to do it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is going to change this week.  Oh yes it is!  Next weekend is the Festival of Fear and we have guests staying with us from Friday onward.  This means that the cleaning we do this weekend is going to have to last until Friday.

All I can do is ask you to wish us luck or Gary is going to have to deal with a very naggy Nicole.

I’ve finally finished processing and resizing the pictures from Montreal and thought I’d do a little day by day run down of our time there. We walked a lot. We laughed all the time and overall we had an absolutely restful few days in a city we both love. I’ve put the rest of the entry behind a cut since there are quite a few pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have hundreds of photos on my computer just waiting for me to process.  Some are from Montreal, some are from friends getting together and well there are just way too many for me to wrap my head around at the moment.  I’ve made a promise to myself, however, that I’m going to get a large bulk of the ones from Montreal done to send to Dave tonight.  He wants them to highlight his Fantasia post he plans for Rue Morgue’s Blog - The Abattoir.

Instead of processing photos and writing,  I’ve been busy working, reading, and dealing with a sick and swollen Pandora these last few days.  I’m really looking forward to this long weekend.  We’re going to hang the gorgeous curtains that Terra at Sew Scary made for us in the bedroom and I plan on processing and getting a bunch of photos printed for our bedroom.  I won’t be posting pictures of our ultra cool apartment, however until September/October when we’ve taken out the hideous air conditioners.

I also plan on making a nice long picture post talking about how awesome Montreal was and how we can’t wait to go back.  Oh and Kat, you will love Cruella’s.