her real world

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

Okay, so.

Yeah, I know.

It’s been a long time folks. Let’s just say I’ve been busy. Crazy in love and super happy and loving my job and losing weight and energized and…happy. You can see from above that I am certainly wearing purple and smiling a lot and enjoying the big fish tank at the Toronto Zoo.

I think about blogging every day. My “inspirations” folders (both digital and paper) are filled to the brim with things I want to do and things I want to tell you about. The “photos I haven’t uploaded to Flickr” queue is growing by the second and the “photos I have uploaded to Flickr but haven’t titled, geotagged or made public” queue sits there taunting me every time I look at my laptop. I’m telling myself to be patient and I hope you can be patient along with me.

This week marks one year on this domain and I’m happy as a pig in poop about that. I’ve finally found an internet place where I like to roost, and it has been a long time coming. My first blog post was on livejournal in 2003 and that was the beginning of a long journey of flitting and fluttering about trying to find my way.

Things you can start getting excited about:

• The launch of my new ‘corporate look’, I’m working with a faboo designer (@kevgel)
• A thousand bajillion photos of delicious food that I can’t wait to share
• The story of a journey I’m about to take, working title “Why I’m putting a king sized bed in a bachelor apartment”
• My very nascent thoughts on the social web and how I’m bringing it to work. Yes, you did hear me just say one of the things I don’t talk about on my blog. But we’re going to be refining the rules!
• A new idea I have for sharing photos, not sure if it’s going to work
• Me showing you how artsy and crafty I have been in the last few months
• Many, many photos and stories about Toronto
• A few ploys on getting a bit more interactivity on this here blog

Have I wet your whistle?

Until then, follow me @herrealworld

My head is in a million different places at once

I don’t know how explicitly I’ve said this before, but there are two things I don’t talk about on my blog.

The first is work. You may know that I do policy work for the Government of Canada. If you are resourceful, you can find out more details. If you are not, then just know that I do policy work for the Government of Canada. I don’t talk about it. The end.

The second is my personal life. This would be more difficult if I actually had one at the moment, but I can assure you that if I did I’d most likely cheer about the fact that (cover your ears mother) I was getting to have relations on a regular basis and that’s about it. Chances are I’d blog even less than I already do if this were the case.  Really if you could choose to blog OR have relations and the choice would be to blog, I’m sorry we can no longer be friends.

This doesn’t mean I can’t talk about the effects of either of these on my life. For instance, because of #1 I don’t even have time to shower regularily (kind of kidding) let alone make daily photo posts or even schedule daily photo posts so it at least looks like I have time to blog every day. Not having a #2 makes me cranky as the replacement for not having #2 is chocolate and booze, and really that makes me fat. I digress.

The one downside to having my shit figured out is the fact that I’ve come to the realization that there is so much stuff that I want to do I can’t even get it all organized. My iPhone is helping, but I’m finding there are not enough hours in the day to even daydream about the stuff I want to do, let alone actually doing it. I’m thinking it’s about time that I polish off my old personal logic model and try and map some stuff out, but between planning my personal finances and my retirement plans and my crafting projects and my home decoration fantasies and my cooking adventures and my photography projects and the progress on my morph and the countless other things I can’t remember to list off right now I’m pretty exhausted. My house needs vacuuming and my floors need washing and I have new picture frames from IKEA that I need to get filled and I have baking that I want to do and swimming that I can’t do because of the goddamn bus strike and mother nature are conspiring against my efforts to make it to and from the pool and not turn into a Melsicle.  This paragraph is getting too long.

New paragraph. My cats come to me immediatly if I open any sort of a bag that sounds like a bag of cat treats. For instance you know those dark chocolate covered almonds I love? Yeah, you can get organic ones from Shoppers. I opened that bag maybe once this evening and every time…err…I mean that one time, the cats came running like raging fangirls. I certainly only opened the bag once.

New paragraph.

At the moment I have at the very least three crafting projects in progress. That doesn’t count the million that I have in my head. I’m trying to take photos every day, but I want to take more than that so it’s hard to live up to the unrealistic expectation that I can actually do that. And I want to start drawing at least one webcomic. That’s doable right?

On the morph front, I’m not gaining (in fact I lost over Christmas), but I’m not losing very fast either. It would help if I could get to the pool, because that’s the exercise that I really like to do. I miss the pool. I plan on getting a car. I also need to get out and be more social because I’m two for two the last two times I went out. Grocery store + cute boy = flirting and almost enough courage to ask him for his number. IKEA + cute artist boy = courage enough to ask him for his business card. He didn’t have any printed yet, but he told me about his show. Sadly I did not press further. Happily having my shit together means that this isn’t the end of the world.

Have I updated you enough yet?

I’ve got plans for the blog, but not the time to realize them. Stay tuned for a ramped up design, a section devoted to photography, an attempt to make this place more interactive, and more content. But while I have a huge deadline looming for the thing I don’t talk about #1, don’t expect any of it anytime soon. But know that I love you. All of you. And by you I mean the millions of adoring readers.

Alien snow

We had a huge snowstorm that spanned most of yesterday and the entire time it snowed huge lovely marshmallow snowflakes I lamented the fact that I lived in the city. Even though I knew I could go out there and capture the huge flakes (on my nose and eyelashes) with my camera, I knew that unless I got away from the streetlights somehow, they would all have an orange hue.

Now some of you might like your photos of snow to look like they were taken on a planet where snow is orange, but I wanted big, white, fluffy marshmallow pillows. So I pouted and stayed inside.

This photo was taken during a similar storm not last November but the November before that. The line to get on the bus was so long that I figured I might as well experiment a bit with my camera and get some neat shots as opposed to standing there and being disgruntled with the rest of the public servants. I didn’t have a tripod and my fingers froze off, but after sifting through 100s of pictures that were plagued with the camera shakes, I got a few that I liked. Like this one.

I especially like the perfect blue of the sky, it reminds me of the periwinkle flax flowers I loved growing up on the Prairies. I’ve never been home while the flax is in bloom for a long time, but I really should try and find a field of it to roll around in one of these days. So I can take pictures of course.