i'm not the sun

Recap on the NYR:

• I have been doing more blogging... but it's mostly been here. A new blog I started to help my grandparents start exercising. I hope that I can get them involved!
• As for exercising, I've been doing Tae Kwon Do, so I think it is fair to say that I am following through on that resolution. I plan on starting swimming again soon (I'm looking at you Wednesday!). I figure that if I exercise more, that maybe I can convince my grandparents to do so as well.
• Travelling: thus far I have been to - Wasaga Beach, Toronto (for Winterlicious), Chicago, and KW. This weekend I am visiting Guelph - admittedly not really an adventure for the purposes of "travelling", I'm still going to count it. Still to come: Boston, Ireland, Boulder, Montreal, NYC, and others?
• Reading: I've been reading the news, does that count? I bought new books... and have been reading a crap load of articles... not the same I know!
• Baking: making dinner with a friend tomorrow. I tried making risotto this year, made a pot roast in the slow cooker, and a few other things.
• Photo-taking: iPhone photos don't count, so I've been failing this one.
• Saving: I paid off $1000 on my line of credit, but that won't last forever. So only a partial pass.
• Spending: I feel like I've spent a little less.
• Sighing: I no longer sigh in my sleep.
• Procrastinating: I'm failing as I type this... working, working, I swear...

starting a new year revolution

more:

• blogging
• baking
• photo-taking
• traveling
• reading
• saving
• exercising (tae kwon do!)

less:

• sighing
• spending
• procrastinating?

exciting times! happy new year!

nothing good happens after 2am

marshall of himym is correct on this one. i shouldn't be allowed to make decisions in the middle of the night. i screwed up. i booked my ticket to nyc on a weekend when i'm already out of town. stupid.

anyways, i saw black swan tonight with a friend. it's a very intense and beautiful movie. there are very few spoken words, but you can feel everything. it's very dark. i highly recommend it.

while out we decided to start a cooking club, and it's my task to think of a witty name. i'm pretty excited about the upcoming semester. i'm exciting about living life. speaking of cooking, i have some brownies to bake!

if you doubt that i'll be there don't despair, don't you dare

i'm a little bit impulsive, and i guess i force the others around me to be a little more spontaneous at times than they might ordinarily be, but for the most part none of them seem to hold this against me (or at least not openly). as a result, i find that i have plans to be in nyc in february. to say that i love new york would be an understatement. but before you categorize me as a sex-in-the-city-fanatic or shopaholic, you should know that i am neither. i have only ever seen the SitC movies, and i spend almost all of my money on travelling, food, jewelry, and music (seriously, i have no discernible talent for putting together outfits, i take "function over fashion" pretty seriously - winter requires a winter coat, and waterproof boots, not stilettos).

in other news: i'm baking matcha shortbread cookies at the moment, one of my friends from school found a new direction in her research and decided to stick it out for the long run (which is great news, i was already mourning her loss 1.5 years in advance, because she is quite fantastic), and i have fallen in love with s. carey's "in the dirt" (in case you hadn't guessed by this post title). anyways, back to cookies!

i feel better and better and worse and then better

i'm finally free of school work, which means that i finally have a bit of spare time, though it has hardly felt that way. i think i have spent the majority of my new free time watching bones and baking. so much baking!

i was looking to the sky

short post because i am still frosting cookies. i love baking, and trying to work out my kitchen problems, but i have to be honest, i'm not very efficient. i would LOVE to know how it took me 5 hours to make 18 cookies. seriously.

in other news, i bought a plane ticket to chicago tonight. i can't really afford to be buying plane tickets right now, but that has never stopped me before. i'm not one to stay in one place for long periods of time, and i was lucky to have been living in a wonderful city within close proximity to one of my favourite cities for a year. now that i'm living in the middle of nowhere (well, really just the middle of nowhere exciting) i really miss the freedom of traveling.

subways in pittsburgh

just a quick post because my ears are ringing, and i need to watch the season finale of merlin. my ears are ringing because i just got home from the dinosaur bones, the reason, and arkells show. but, lets talk about the past few days in order.

Thursday:

As previously discussed two friends stopped in for dinner and a movie, which went exceptionally well, other than the fact that i made a large salad that only i could eat. we ate the lasagna (carrot, zucchini, spinach, mozzarella, and ricotta), drank some red wine, and watched amelie. my friend sana had never seen it before, and as she claims to be a lover of romantic comedies i thought that this was a tragedy. the movie was wonderful as always, christie managed to get over her desire to kill my downstairs neighbours, sana fell in love, i missed my garden gnome days, and we discussed people and places we know. i greatly look forward to our next movie night.

Friday:

Woke up early, scarfed a couple of muffins and ran to catch the bus to toronto. em and i went out for a delicious sushi lunch before trekking out to the Ex for the one of a kind show. we spent a good 5ish hours looking and shopping. while there, i ran into an old friend and got caught up. before and after meeting up i managed to snag a number of wonderful pieces, my favourite being a silver giraffe pendant on a silver chain. it's very cute.

all in all friday was an awesome and exhausting day. after the show em and i grabbed dinner at marche (rosti and cheese cake!). though we initially had plans to try to convene with others for drinks post-show, we were too exhausted to do anything other than sit and enjoy dinner.

Saturday:

Had lunch with the family, and then decorated the christmas tree (a tradition i have only ever missed once - thanks to an ill timed set of exams in the early years of undergrad). following that i jumped on yet another bus to head back home to the arkells show. my brother only had good things to say about their shows, so i was pretty excited. when i got to wax, i found out that the opening bands were dinosaur bones (of toronto), and the reason (woah, flashback to a band i loved in highschool). while at the show, i met a nice lady who was in attendance with a short tempered man, and a young kid who looked like my old friend bill (ian's younger brother). i also got to watch the final shootout of the leafs game, while sneakily trying to check out the guy standing next to me (he looked kind of like the college-aged version of dexter/michael c. hall).

anyways, reviews of the bands!

Dinosaur Bones:

I was unsure of what to expect when a group of hipster like guys wandered onto the stage. They played a super short set, and promised that they'd be putting out a new CD sometime next year (i'm guessing sometime soonish, otherwise it seems sort of crazy to be promoting it already). they had a good sound, they reminded me of the reason why i used to like seeing moneen, and some of the reasons i didn't (mostly that their kind of music isn't well suited for some venues, it seems like i was missing a lot of the vocal harmonizing, and guitar mastery due to weird sound meshing).

The Reason:

I thought that they were a bit of an odd choice after hearing dinosaur bones, and reflecting on their old 2003-era sound. i recently added their old CD to my ipod, and i was reflecting the other day about how different their music is from what i normally listen to (they used to be a bit screamo, but i loved them dearly). anyways, the newer stuff by the reason is much more calm, like how alexisonfire became after dallas started taking over the vocals, and more mellow. it was strange. i'm not sure that i'm against it, but i really do wish that they had played more of their old songs (understandably its been like 7 years since they first started playing them, but still!). they played one old song, "subways in pittsburgh", which was fantastic.

The Arkells:

They were seriously fantastic. Just like on the record but better (how rare it is to find a band that is actually better live than recorded!). I think that the highlight of their setlist was when they played "champagne socialist", because dan broke out the harmonica and played it like a master. i mean, the song usually has a harmonica in it, but when he played it live, it was just unbelievably good. their sound was clear, and they had a lot of fun. i had a lot of fun. seriously.

i guess i lied about this being a short post. at least i didn't ramble on more about the girl standing in front of me for the arkells. i could write a whole post about her; she's the rotten, annoying kind of girl that is easy to hate. a few quick words: 1) she started a fight with the woman standing behind me that i had been chatting with, because she saw nothing wrong with her and her tall boyfriend standing right in front of her after she waited there for 3 hours, 2) she then ignored her boyfriend (except to spend lots of time making out with him in the middle of songs, while he tried to listen), only to flirt with his friend (who apologized to me for standing in front of me, and said to ask him to move if he got in the way - nice offer), 3) bumped into people and thought it was rude that they asked her to try to control her movements, and 4) talked through all of the songs, because she clearly was not as interested in the band as she was interested in having both boys attention (i'm surprised that they weren't more annoyed that she kept interrupting their sing-along).

right. anyways, off to watch merlin!

good night, world!