Category Archives: more.life

Some stuff you just can’t categorize. This is that stuff…

I [heart] Fridays: Fun Finds

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Aussiegall on Flickr

Photo: Aussiegall on Flickr

Here are this week’s inevitable funnies and fascinations:

In light of the recent end of the month of Movember, I did a Flickr search for “Movember Last Day” and enjoyed flipping through the results. Bravo to all who took part.

An entire list of funnies that Amber Naslund collected from her twitter followers.

Internet Commenters PWNED video that I found on Make The Logo Bigger (via College Humor)… what would happen if people commented in business meetings as they do on some blogs? Again, I have a weakness for juvenile humour (and I moderate a number of youth discussions online) so this just makes me laugh my head off.

The race is on – the Chip’s Not Dead Yet Memorial Mile in support of BC Children’s Hospital Foundation (very near and dear to me) is coming June 2009. It’s time to start thinking about what you’ll wear.

Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella? You should follow @officemate on twitter… he’s funny.

I don’t know about you, but I definitely think we need more Laughter Yoga here in Canada, never mind Taiwan. Mind you, I suppose the whole world could use a little more laughter training.

I [heart] Fridays: Fun Finds

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WOW. TGIF.

The lack of time to write has been killing me, but I’ve been helping a friend set up a new website, email marketing tool, youtube profile and such… about 40 hours in the last 3 weeks on top of working full time and being a mom to a 2 year old. BUSY!

But to share some of the things I would have written about had I had the time, I’ve decided to do a weekly entry noting all the funny, strange or interesting things I find online or that people email me, forward on Facebook or whatever. So welcome to the first edition of I [heart] Fridays: Fun Finds.

Here is a cool post showing a 20 year old model photographed as if she were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old using wardrobe, makeup and lighting.

I might never be the same after watching this Zune Paint video on Make The Logo Bigger. Ew. Ew. Ew. Caution… if you watch this in its entirety you’ll feel dirty. And may need medication… or exorcism.

An online store in Japan is selling men’s bras.

I recently started getting followed on twitter by some seemingly odd people who all have 1960s looking profile images and names that just ring slightly familiar. Then I figured it out: the entire cast of Mad Men is on twitter. What a fantastic marketing idea – I can interact with the characters without ever having watched the show. Wonder if I can watch online somewhere…

This is more than fun, but I wanted to note it: Miss 604′s Best of 604: Best of Metro Vancouver Online. I’m sure this is going to bring a wealth of new reading material my way.

Oh yeah, and for the record, best rickroll EVER at the Macy’s Day Parade.

Quote of the week “I’m reaching out to shake your hand and you’re trying to put your tongue in my mouth.” From Chris Brogan’s When Not To Sell Me Something.

And I don’t know what it means, but when I logged in to YouTube the other day, my home page said it suggested the following video for me. I don’t know how to feel about that. Ironically (or, perhaps not so much so), I laughed my head off. I am completely juvenile, I know…

[Video] Enjoy!

Lynn Valley Black Bear Band Winter Concert

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I’ve been asked to shamelessly promote the Lynn Valley Black Bear Band “Winter” (read: Christmas) Concert taking place Monday, December 8th.

The event will be held at the Kay Meek Centre in West Vancouver (attached to West Van High). It starts at 7pm and admission is by donation.

You’ll get at least 90 minutes of entertainment including some festive seasonal (PC) music, some not-so-seasonal music, and quite probably some vocal stylings by yours truly.

lynn-valley-black-bear-band-winter-concert

See you there!

The funniest and saddest moment in US history?

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I got home last night and managed to catch the tag end of Saturday Night Live’s Presidential Bash. I have to say I was glued to the TV like a fat kid to a smartie. While it was incredibly funny, I found it equally sad that the collective leaders of the free world were participating in it.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the election today, but I’d like to go home and glue myself to the TV for the rest of the day to find out (though I’m sure I’ll hear everything there is to hear about the US Election by following #votereport on Twitter). This election has the potential to change the world, I think, moreso than any other in US history.

For anyone who didn’t see it, though, the Sarah Palin rap done by Amy Poehler was absolutely hilarious, but you tell me if laughter is the only thing it conjures up for you…

Almost a Vegetarian

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Yeah, so I’ve been following this Maple Leaf Foods listeriosis outbreak along with the rest of the country. If I wasn’t borderline vegetarian before this, I most certainly am now. I’ve never been a huge fan of meat. I really only eat meat that looks entirely pristine – if it’s processed it doesn’t have any chunks in it; if it’s fresh it is all meat with very little marbled animal-looking stuff. I just get turned off when I think hard about what I’m chewing.

So, as the story was breaking a week and a half ago I was actually off from work with some kind of infection causing severe cramping and stomach upset, so honestly at that point I was avoiding the news. I didn’t need to hear about it between trips to the can. I tend toward being a hypochondriac anyway, that I figure if I don’t think about it, it’s not a possibility.

That said, I’ve now opened my eyes to the reality and keep watching the list of recalled meat closely for any indication that I or my family have consumed the listed products. I think so far we’re mostly in the clear – we tend to get most of our deli products from Real Canadian Superstore, which uses Ziggy’s brand meats I believe. At the same time, we do occasionally get meats from Safeway (big-man gets Capicollo there; RCSS doesn’t carry it).

Here is a message from the CEO of Maple Leaf Foods:

Now, I heard on the news last night that even cheeses are affected… Yikes! What are we supposed to eat? This is just one more piece of evidence that cereal is a perfectly acceptable dinner food, as I have always suspected.

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Google Rant

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Dear Google,

I’m very frustrated by your assumed understanding of my needs (or my own lack of understanding of your capabilities, anyhow). I’m especially frustrated with the new automatic login to analytics. That would be uber helpful if I didn’t mostly use google for personal reasons. Just because I have analytics and adwords accounts for work doesn’t mean that’s all it’s good for – my google reader, my gmail and my igoogle are all on my personal account, as is that AdSense stuff that served me up canadiancheeserolling.ca… nice AND this very blog.

So I spend a good portion of each day logging out of my natural persona and logging back in as my alter ego: the business woman. I think I’m starting to actually develop some serious mental illness over this point of contention. I can’t keep flip flopping back and forth! I’m already at risk of having the shortest attention span on the planet, but make me do it under two different identities and the fragmenting is almost unbearable.

Please, please find a way for me to have two accounts simultaneously. For the love of all things digital.

Sincerely,
A Dissatisfied Customer

PS – if anyone out there knows how to make Google understand my two separate logins from this one machine, please let me know via comment.

It’s always something with Telus…

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I just hate them. I hate Telus with every fiber of my being. I have hated them since their sales people lied to me to get me to sign up for Telus TV (they told me I’d be able to get all UFC PPV fights, but the truth was they were still in discussions over licensing) and I have hated them since one of their customer service reps told me, “My manager is only here to make sure I get a pay cheque,” when I pointed out their error and requested to speak to someone who actually gave a you-know-what. Apparently, if you do get through their automatic talk-to-a-machine-but-it-can’t-figure-out-what-I’m-saying system to a human being, you can’t get past the power-tripping CSR who was clearly in the right place at a time when there was a labour shortage in the service industry… oh, like now.

Today I decided to bite the bullet and add a data plan to my mobile device. I have the HTC S640 Iris. I don’t mind the PDA, but I still haven’t figured it all out even though I’ve had it over 6 months. I suspect it’s actually harder to use than the Blackberry, but I figured I’d be impulsive… what else is new?

Having added the unlimited everything plan I decided to add the Telus Mobile Email. Sounds logical, right? Get my email to my PDA… it’s unlimited data, so why not? Well… in the process of installing their handy-dandy software and trying to connect my work email to this thing, it ended up clearing all my contacts and my appointments on my Outlook. Nice.

I now have lost every single contact I had in both my phone and my Outlook – that’s all my personal AND business contacts. Not only that, but the lovely Telus Mobile Email says it’s working just fine, but it’s not actually sending any email to my phone. To make things even more annoying, Telus Mobility said there was absolutely nothing they could do to retrieve the lost records; they referred me to HTC Tech Support. Guess what? Yep. HTC Tech Support can’t do anything for me either.

I’m at the mercy of my IT guy. Please let him know what to do. I’m nerdy, but this is really beyond me. I think I’d like a drink…

Cats

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So I have an old-ish cat… she’s about 12. And she’s fat. I’m trying to get her slimmer by switching her over to wet food from free-feeding her dry. She LOOOVES wet food; hasn’t had it since she was a kitten. But with her advancing age, I’m not sure her little teeth are doing so well with the dry, so anyway…

I finally have gotten to a point in my life where my mini-man is sleeping past 6am and now the cat is the one insisting I’m up at 5am. At 5am on the nose she takes, I swear, one claw and slides it up the side of a wall next to my bed. A cat claw on a wall in just the right way actually sounds like nails on a blackboard. Well, okay, it does if you’re dreaming peacefully.

I keep looking around for things I can throw at her. I’m not kidding. She brings out the worst in me – I’m not a fan of starting my days angry, but I’m not doing so well with this new routine. When she hears me yell “shut up!” I suspect she figures, “Right then, she’s up yay! I’ll make some more noise.” And she starts to wail. All this so she can hurry up and inhale her 1/3 tin of cold yuck. EW.

Champions "Social Night"

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I’m not much of a socialite. I’m a little more socially-awkward, nerdy girl with a strange combination of Type A personality and shyness… it’s hard to explain. It often gets mistaken for UBER-snobby, but really I just don’t feel comfortable making conversation with people I don’t know very well unless it’s for business and we have something specific to talk about.

So Thursday night at kickboxing I was reminded of the planned “Champions Social Night” by a few equally unsure individuals who asked if I was going, presumably to know if there would at least be someone there they didn’t feel horrified to try to have a conversation with.

I’ve been training at Champions for something like 8 years now. I’ve basically lost count. The truth is, though, that although I’ve known the people I train with for that time, I’ve not truely gotten to really *know* any of them. Those I did get close with don’t train anymore. To make matters worse, in the last 3 years I’ve taken a collective year and a half off, so friendships have formed and tight-knit clicks abound.

A few people asked me if I would go (the self-critical me figures it was likely out of politeness only) and so I reluctantly agreed to step in and check it out. I arrived WAY too early; I thought it was to start at 7:30 or 8pm… yeah, checking the details would have been a good way to go, but that’s just not my style these days. So I arrived at 8:30 thinking I’d be there late enough to at least be inconspicuous as I enter. Not so. I was the first person there other than Champions staff… nice. That doesn’t make a wall-flower type cringe at all…

Thank GOD for small miracles, one of the gals at the club I’ve been closer to in the last few years showed up relatively soon after I did, so we had a lovely chat. I came to find out she’s got a regular role on Stargate Atlantis, so I now have to watch it even though I don’t like science fiction shows, but it’s just really cool seeing someone you know on TV. Anyway, I digress…

I ended up having a super fun time, more to drink than I’d like to admit, and didn’t get home until 2am even though Mini-Man gets me up well before 6am on a daily basis. Other than being a little tired today (okay, well… a lot tired) I felt pretty good. Not like cardio-class Saturday good, but able-to-drag-myself-and-my-toddler-through-Superstore-for-our-weekly-grocery-shopping-trip good. So at least that was something.

I cringe at the thought of some of the photos that were taken. Something about drinks and dancing makes you feel likely more attractive than you really are. I don’t really want the reality check, thank you very much.

Whistler Weekend 2008

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So I finally made it out to my friend Mrs. Little’s annual Whistler Girls’ Weekend… what a fun time! Who knew I’d still enjoy squeezing 17 women into 3 hotel rooms for a weekend of silliness in my 30′s? I also finally spent some real time with my new-found half sister – I mean, more than just going for coffee, which was nice. I met her last year after searching for my birth mother and it’s been very cool getting to know her; she’s a fantastic girl and I really admire her.
Anyway… we got to Whistler about 4pm on Friday the 27th and proceeded to ditch the car with the valet. No need for it when you’re staying a stone’s throw from everything in the village. We found our rooms, settled in a little and proceeded to socialize around the penis-shaped chip plate as the ladies arrived until our dinner reservation at 7pm. Dinner was awful lol… I mean I didn’t really care much, but Mrs. Little herself was mistakenly served a beef burger when she’s a vegetarian. EEW… she wasn’t at all impressed. The bellini’s were good though.

I’m not sure if it’s a function of age or something else, but I honestly have no recollection of what took place after dinner on the Friday night *shrug*.
Saturday we got up, got cleaned up, had coffee (no shortage of great coffee shops in Whistler) and went shopping. I spent some good money that I don’t have on things I don’t need, so all in all a successful shopping outing. After shopping we hit the pool with some refreshments in hand and got friendly with a series of sexy white loungers. The afternoon was made complete with a nap and another shower before attending the pre-bar party…

The pre-bar party began at 6pm with more refreshments, a rousing game of “pass the purple penis”, party favours and “how dirty are you” style drinking games… you’d have thought someone was about to be married, but no… this was all just for fun. After the pre-bar party we went to Buffalo Bills for some more refreshments and dancing. The music was awful but we made the most of it…
Those of us no longer used to the bar-star party life left the club at a rediculously early hour and went back to one of the rooms to order pizza and have civilized converstation for the rest of the night. I spent a short but not insignificant amount of time worried about New Young Sister and whether or not she was out on the town alone or if she had a room key, but all was well… she stumbled in at 2am and the photos showed she was well and had a great time…

Sunday morning we all pulled ourselves together and with comfy clothes as the order of the day, made our way to the closest coffee shop to soak up the last of the sun (not to mention caffeine, and ginger ale for those less-fortunate) before piling into our caravan of carpool arrangements to make our way to our final stop – breakfast at White Spot in Squamish.
I arrived home around 1pm on Sunday to hugs and kisses from both Big Man and Little Man. My two greatest loves. Life is good.
Can’t wait to do it again next year…