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

her daily photo – Wild

This photo was taken a year ago yesterday, and had I had this brilliant idea yesterday I would have posted it yesterday.  I’ve not been taking many photos lately, because I’ve been a bit bummed out.  So I decided to try and find some “year ago today” photos that I wanted to share.  This is one of my favourite photos, and I’m not sure what I did when editing it, but I’m hoping it wasn’t very much.  I was taking photos of the snow outside of the building where I work using the streetlights instead of my flash. I just love the colour of blue I found, it’s a mixture of the dark night and the light reflecting off the snow falling.

However, after finding this photo, I kept going through my Flickr stream and realized what was happening a year ago today.

A year ago this week my grandmother passed away, and this photo was one of the last ones I took before I went home to Manitoba to spend the month of December with my family.  The next batch of photos that I took were of the flowers that my family received after my grandmothers passing, and the roses that we left at her grave.  I’ll share some of those later in the week.   All of my grandparents were very special people, and I remember them all every single day.

100 Things About Her

1. She loves lists.
2. She also loves categories and order, some say its because she’s a Virgo.
3. Born in the year of the Rooster, and true to her sign, she sometimes thinks very highly of herself.
4. She likes all of the good things that horoscopes say, and worries that the bad parts are true.
5. She worries too much, but is now worried that she’ll have nothing to worry about because she’s done school.
6. But then she remembers that she can worry about finding a real job.
7. She is irritated by spelling and grammar mistakes, but has a hard time finding them in her own work.
8. She loves playing video games, especially when she can dress her characters up in pretty outfits.
9. She really doesn’t appreciate gore and violence for the sake of gore and violence, whether it be in movies, video games or anywhere else.
10. She likes the fact that this list kind of captures her mood at the moment it’s being written.
11. She knows that once she hits 100 on this list, she’ll want to add more.
12. She likes collecting things, especially things on the internet.
13. She knows that sounds kind of strange right now, but hopes that it’ll be better understood later.
14. She hopes that you’re not too irritated about reading this list in the third person.
15. She misses her laptop, but it’s never been the same since the time she broke it while overseas.
16. She loves travelling, but hasn’t had the money to go very many exciting places.
17. She hates travelling alone, because there is no one to take pictures with her or of her.
18. Her favourite part of London was the tour of Parliament, go figure.
19. She’s also been to the United Nations Headquarters, though it was a long time ago and she doesn’t really remember it that well.
20. She’s in love, and feels a little guilty that this is the first time she’s mentioned the boyfriend.
21. She loves Canadian Beef, and so should you.
22. Unless you’re a vegetarian, in which case you should love Canadian Beef Farmers.
23. She loves sticky notes, especially ones that are multi-coloured.
24. She wants to be a writer, but worries she can’t write very well.
25. She’s a quarter of the way to 100, and she’s just getting started.
26. She has a hard time making mixed CDs because she takes too long to decide what songs should go on them.
27. It’s also because she likes coloured CDs or CDs that look like records, and doesn’t want to ruin them just in case she doesn’t like the CD.
28. She fell in love to a mixed CD.
29. She wonders if people will think it’s strange that she refers to a mixed CD like she would refer to a mixed tape.
30. She doesn’t mind it when people download music, or anything else for that matter.
31. She thinks if things were more affordable, people would be more likely to buy them.
32. She thinks that if people made more money, they’d have more money to buy things.
33. She thinks if corporations thought about people rather than money, they’d make more money because people would make more money to buy things.
34. She’s kind of a crazy lefty, but in a cowboy conservative sort of way.
35. She wishes she were more of a cowgirl.
36. She’s a budding feminist, who learned this past year she’s been a feminist her whole life.
37. When she gets married, she’s going to hyphenate.
38. She’s kind of embarrassed to admit that when she’s lazy, she’ll wear a sheet around the house.
39. She’s not afraid to admit that wearing a sheet can be very comfortable.
40. She’s a bit afraid to admit that she may or may not be wearing a sheet right now.
41. She’s an awfully bad liar.
42. She loves eating, and is coming to understand that she’d rather eat healthy than not.
43. She often finds fast food and corner store snacks to be too greasy and actually not very appetizing.
44. She walked into a McDonald’s the other day and didn’t think it smelled very good in there.
45. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that she thinks that Super Size Me is a good movie that everyone should see.
46. She also thinks that should be more movies like Hotel Rwanda.
47. The last movie she saw was Kung Fu Hustle, and really loved the parts when the Axe Gang danced.
48. She loves kung fu movies, at least the ones that are funny.
49. She thinks that any movie with subtitles is worth seeing at least once.
50. Her favourite movie of all time is about a girl and a boy who fall in love, but can’t get together in the beginning because she thinks he’s an ass and can’t get together in the middle because because she thinks he’s dead, but end up getting together in the end.
51. She’s halfway there, and she loves it!
52. She loves dogs, and wants to get one.
53. She really doesn’t think that having a pet in an apartment will be too bad, especially if it’s going to be a small pet who grows up in an apartment and is loved from the first day.
54. She also wants to get some fish, because her father loves them and she loves the glow that the tank gives off in the dark.
55. Her grandmother also had a tank full of guppies, and she loved feeding them when she was young.
56. Her grandmother also had cats.
57. She doesn’t really like cats enough to have one of her own, but in most cases likes other people’s cats.
58. She doesn’t like people or houses that smell of cats.
59. She’s got a super sonic sense of smell.
60. One of her favourite smells is fresh cut grass.
61. Another of her favourite smells is rain.
62. She grew up on a farm.
63. She wishes she had ridden horseback more when she was growing up, but didn’t because she used to be afraid of horses.
64. Now that she’s bigger than the horse, she thinks she’d do better.
65. She wants to have an herb garden on her balcony.
66. She’s excited to be moving to a new apartment within the next month.
67. She’s worried that she won’t have the money to buy the things she’d like for the new place, especially the things that are needed.
68. She wishes she had the money to buy the things that would just be nice to have.
69. She loves coloured pens and markers.
70. She wonders if you realize that when she gets a bit stuck, she looks around her desk for inspiration.
71. She returned the last of her library books over a week ago, and her desk is very empty without them.
72. She loves taking pictures, and wished that she had a better digital camera.
73. She realizes that she needs many other things right now before she needs a new digital camera.
74. Especially since she realizes that the camcorder that she got her boyfriend for his birthday last year takes fine pictures.
75. She never wants to live beyond her means.
76. She wants to start donating money to the Red Cross when she is able.
77. She’ll rip out pages of a notebook and re-write them if she doesn’t like the way that they look.
78. One of the reasons she likes blogs so much is because they do everything very orderly, and she can make them look whatever way she wants, and then change what she wants at a moments notice.
79. She wishes she were better at making webpages.
80. She also wishes that she got to swim more, because she loves it.
81. She just remembered that there is a swimming pool in the basement of her new apartment building, which makes her quite joyous!
82. Singing Christmas carols also makes her quite joyous.
83. She enjoys singing a lot, and wishes she had the self confidence to do it more often.
84. She took voice lessons.
85. She can’t wait to get a bicycle with a basket.
86. She really tried to resist the urge to say she also wants the little streamers that come out of the handlebars.
87. She really likes any kind of popcorn, but prefers the kind that comes out of an air popper at home.
88. She talks to her mom on the phone for hours on end.
89. She loves the Beatles, and can’t pick a favourite song or album.
90. She’s got a wonderful middle name that she got from her great-grandmother.
91. She misses her family dearly.
92. She’s more afraid of her loved ones dying than she is afraid of herself dying.
93. She loves it when her feet get tanned.
94. She’s a clean freak who only cleans when she’s in the mood for it.
95. She loves taking baths, in fact she’s wanting to take one right now, but needs to finish this list.
96. She can’t remember the last book she read for fun.
97. After sitting here for a while, she thinks it was Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry.
98. But she’s not sure whether she read it this past Christmas, or the Christmas before that.
99. She has a pretty good memory.
100. But she wishes it were better, which is why she’s starting to keep a paper journal. Oh, and start this blog of course.