Little Elody

On Sunday afternoon I was at my parents' to celebrate my birthday and we ended up visiting my cousins Ryan and Liz, who had a new baby on January 12. Her name is Elody and she's adorable.

This is me with Lianne holding Elody. She was nice and calm and sleepy at this time because she'd just been fed (by me!).

Ryan made us hot chocolate after coming in from the snow with the twins. From left: me, Teia, Camryn, Lianne. The girls are drinking from their travel mugs, which they take to Starbucks, where they have their own card. I am assuming they get hot chocolate and not coffee.

Aw.

Double Aw.

Triple Aw. Liz says the girls are at the point now where they know a picture is coming and try to smile, so they end up with these adorable expressions.

One last photo.

The Elm Hurst Inn: My Birthday and Shannon's Wedding

I'm 24!

Click on the album below to view photos from this past weekend. I recommend watching the slideshow. I may or may not get around to updating this entry with actual text.

Christa's Birthday & Shannon's wedding

Grey's Anatomy rocks

Two proposals on last night's Grey's?! Seriously, this show is currently one of the absolute best on television (this statement is independent of the proposals). It never fails to make me laugh, and it never fails to make me cry. Well, get teary. It's not like I'm bawling my eyes out every episode, though there have been a couple.

So who gets married and who doesn't? Place your bets now.

AAARRRGGGG!

Can somebody please explain to me how technology has improved our lives? Because I'm just not seeing it. Of course, my view is rather clouded by the fight I've been having with my computer over whether or not it will actually copy, play, and then burn "The Life of Birds". The lab across the hall has a couple of burned discs with all the episodes from the series. 10 episodes at just under 50 minutes a piece. I think that watching the entire series will take less time than burning a copy of it.

So far, I have succeeded in getting all of the files onto my hard drive, and they all play back. Yay. What I have not succeeded in doing is getting my computer to recognize the blank DVD. My disc drive is conveniently labelled with "DVD+R DL" RW symbol. I have inserted a DVD+R DL disc. The computer refuses to acknowledge it. It did, once. My burning software was all ready to go, said I had 8.5GB of space. Then I realised I had missed one of the files. So I took out the blank DVD, put in the one I'd borrowed with the episodes on it, copied the missing file, took out the DVD, and then replaced the blank DVD.

And the disc drive made that awful grinding sound that spells doom. I took the disc out and put it back in. Several times. No luck. I rebooted. Nothing. I don't know what went wrong.

If anyone has any idea what's going on, please help me! Kyle, I'm looking at you...

Look out world

"On behalf of the University of Guelph I am pleased to inform you that your application for the Winter 2007 convocation has been approved"

Until this email landed in my inbox a few minutes ago, there was still this vague possibility that something had been horribly confused and they wouldn't let me graduate. It's now a little more real than it was before. Too bad all my friends either graduated last summer or won't be graduating until next summer.

A Christmas tale: part I

'Twas two nights before Christmas and we (my Mom, my sister and myself) had spent the day feverishly preparing for having the family over the next day. It was time to relax and the cat was determined to figure out which presents were hers. Actually, to be more accurate she had simply laid claim to everything under the tree.

Aaron was due to arrive from Shelburne at any minute. It was our first Christmas with Hannah and to be honest, I was surprised that she hadn't yet brought down the tree, or at the very least a few more of the ornaments. The poor thing had been without her favourite toy for a couple of weeks. This being because she had torn it to shreds, but nevermind that. Long story short, she was driving my family nuts with her excess energy. Apparently keeping a close watch on the evil vacuum cleaner wasn't a taxing enough job for her.


"Ooh, I think this one actually has my name on it!"

It was fast approaching happy hour (5:00pm), but we (read: my dad) resisted pouring drinks prior to Aaron's arrival. By 5:30pm, that plan went out the door and drinks were served despite the absenteeism. Not too long after, Aaron finally arrived, with his lateness satisfactorily explained by driving conditions and the bottle of wine he'd just purchased from an incredibly busy pre-Christmas LCBO. We never complain about a bottle of wine showing up at the door.


Lianne: "What are we looking at?"

So we enjoyed a lovely dinner and then settled in the living room to relax and let Hannah open a present. We'd already given it to her, unwrapped, earlier in the day when she was going crazy (oops - Aaron didn't know that!), but we pretended she didn't know what it was. I'd been at PetSmart earlier taking adavantage of a sale on catfood. And trying to replace 'the green thing' (her favourite toy) but they were completely out, in any colour. But I found something similar and crossed my fingers that it would be equally entertaining. It was. And for a while, it succeeding in keeping the cat out from under the tree (except when she used it as cover while stalking her 'prey').

So the evening consisted mostly of watching the cat discover Christmas trees. I felt it was time well spent. There was also some watching of DVDs before we finally tucked ourselves into bed. We had to wake up early enough for Christmas lunch with my dad's side of the family. But more on that in part II.

I Think I've Got It

The new layout editor really is nice to work with once you've repeatedly hit the template with a blunt object to force it into accepting your customizations, while in the meantime your blog looks ridiculous. But I think I figured it out in such a way that it will be easy to undo later and it was relatively simple in the end (just don't ask me to tell you what a "widget tag" is). That said, it won't surprise me if there are still bugs for a while or if things are displaying incorrectly on other people's screens and/or browsers. So if something in the layout seems like it might not be what I intended, please let me know and I'll dive back into the weirdo template code.

Occaisonally, work can be amusing

I'd like to hear the story of how Etheostoma tippecanoe (a fish) got its name.