homemade slush

I'm sorry to bring this to you on such a cold and dreary day, but I was experimenting with this last week and then things started getting cooler and then I tried to hold out for a warmer day, but that warmer day didn't come, and then I thought, oh heck. I'm Canadian. It's not weird that I'm trying to make frozen things in September and, more importantly, this frozen thing -- this idea -- doesn't work anyway.

It doesn't. Not even with the tiniest glimmer of hope or possibility. The pop freezes, oh yes, it does. You end up with something that looks like slush.

But this, my friends, is not slush. It's some sort of weird combination of slush and ice cube. It's chunky like an ice cube but softer and meltier.

On my first attempt, I couldn't stand the sound that was coming from the rotating blade. You see, the pop tended to freeze on to the bottom and sides of my ice cream maker instead of freezing together like ice cream would. So eventually, there was a nice wall of frozen pop built up around the bowl and the mixing blade was scraping around it. When I lifted the blade out to see what was going on, I realized the frozen pop wall was also on the bottom of the bowl, and because of that, I couldn't get the blade back in right, so the mixer wouldn't mix anymore.

So I thought I'd leave my ice cream maker bowl on the counter for a while, regroup, and try again. This time, I tried to dump the pop in without getting it on the sides and I left it on longer, undisturbed, and suffered through the sounds.

I left it for as long as it takes to empty my (overflowing) dish drainer and organize my storage container cupboard (which was at the point where my containers were starting to tumble out every time I opened the door). But the scraping sound was unbearable. It's about the only time I've thought it would be possible to break my ice cream machine. I have the KitchenAid bowl and there has never been a point where I thought breaking any part of it would be possible. That scraping sound? Oy, I thought the mixing blade was going to snap in half. I stood in front of it, staring, hand-wringing, and decided that no amount of slush would be worth breaking my ice cream maker for, so I finally shut it off.

And this is all I got. I drank down some of the liquid so it would be easier to see the frozen bits, but that's the entire result from two cups of root beer. That's a whole lot less glamourous than I thought this idea would be.

I have these disasters so you don't have to (even though you probably wouldn't want to anyway, and you're probably dreaming of hot chocolate and gingersnaps right now instead of slushies and popsicles like I am).

no wonder they weren't keen on fixing it themselves

So last week, I blurrily woke up and sauntered about with my usual morning ritual. Open the curtains in the office, feed fish, open curtains in dining room...and when I pulled back the dining room curtains, I was surprised to find some strange man in a hoodie with a cigarette coming in my back gate.

My stomach immediately flopped and I stood there in shock. I watched him as he slowly tiptoed across the deck and out to the yard.

I gathered my wits and jogged back into the office to see where he went. By then, he had sauntered across our lawn, over the rock garden, and through the downed fence into motorhome neighbours' yard.

He sidled up the larger motorhome, then walked over to the smaller motorhome (oh yes, there're two of them), opened the door, and climbed inside.

I was in complete shock. As soon as I witnessed this, everything weird with the gate this year suddenly made sense. There have been many times this summer when the gate has been left open. Either the bolt is unlocked and the gate is closed or the gate is actually swinging open freely. I had been chaulking it up to the meter reader, but apparently I was dead wrong.

I'm pretty sure they've been doing this all summer. Right under our noses and just as bold as if they owned our lot themselves. And the one thing I know for certain is that I do not like the idea that they've been using our yard as a pass through.

I can't tell you how weirdly violated that makes me feel. Strangely, I'm not so much as mad as I am sickened. Who does this? Who is so bold as to do this when they probably know fully well that I'm here all the time? I could never. I just couldn't even think of doing it. The only case would be if my life depended on it because then I'd have a pretty damn good excuse if I were caught.

Though by the looks of him, if I had marched out there at that very moment and caught him, he wouldn't have the same reaction as I would have if I were caught. I think it would be more like, f-off or you'll get yours or I'm going to randomly break into your house now just to teach you a lesson. Have a good sleep!

It makes me wonder if there is ever a case where you live somewhere and you actually have nice respectful neighbours. Does this exist? Are there actually neighbours somewhere you'd want to invite over or talk to over the fence or bake cookies for? I'm starting to seriously doubt it.

We went over a few options and decided the best way to deal with it would be to fix the fence. At this point, I didn't really care if it looked good. I just wanted it to stand and block the path. That's all. I was willing to unrole ugly orange snow fence over the hole and secure it on both sides, that's how much I wanted them out -- actually, my first instinct was to buy a roll of gaucho barb wire and an electric fencer, but then I'd be in trouble with the city and they'd be laughing all the way to the bank.

We took ourselves down to the Home Depot and wandered around looking at wood. There's a lot of options when it comes to this stuff.

We knew we definitely needed a post. I knew we probably should get some cement to secure it. Maybe we might need some cross pieces? We got some of those, too.

Technology is a grand thing because we googled how to fix a fence right there in the store with Idle Husband's phone. I wanted to dig a hole with a shovel -- specifically with the extra craptastic one that came with the house (because I'm cheap), but after reading the how-to, IH insisted we get a post hole digger. Luckily, they rent them, so we picked up one of those, too.

can you see that splintered wood to the left? that's what's left of the old post. that also made digging the hole especially hard.

Getting the hole digger was absolutely the smartest thing we did when it came to this project. The hardest part was digging the hole and it had to be roughly two feet deep to matter. So I've been thanking IH for exerting muscles he never knew he had because without his suggestion of getting the digger, we'd probably still be working on that fence and the post would not be as secure as it is now.

While he did that, I removed all the old fence boards from the cross pieces and removed all the nails. This was kind of a tedious task, because you would not believe how many nails previous people had put into this fence. I don't know about you, but when I see a fence post completely rotting at the base, my first instinct isn't to put another cross piece on the top and a hundred more nails into the boards. If the post rots out, well, no amount of nailing is going to save your fence. Just saying.

While the cement was drying and since we only had the digger for 4 hours (or we only wanted to have it that long), we returned it and picked up five new fence boards (that's how many we figured we had to replace), some nails, and some metal brackets to secure the cross pieces to the posts.

we do not know how to cement

When we got back, we waited an hour more just to be sure the cement had firmed up, and then we started making the fence look like a fence.

Along with my "I don't really care what this looks like" attitude, we decided to try to reuse all the old pieces first and use the new ones only if we absolutely had to. As it turned out, we ended up not using any of the new wood we bought. We probably should have used them, but we were attaching things to old crumbling side posts and pretty much every section of our fence is wobbling in some way, anyway, so again. We did not care.

So just in case you're wondering, this entire project cost us less than $35. Can you believe that? The quote I got from that fencing company a while back came in at $1600 and he refused to fix only the problem. He would do it, but that would mean redoing the whole back fence. So we're quite happy with our result. Quite quite happy (we may or may not have done a little happy dance and celebrated with steaks).

after

on a side note, doesn't that tree look amazing?

check out the before

This was seriously easy. A little time consuming and repetitive (I forgot how much I love hammering, you guys!!), and we are totally stiff and sore, but after we completed everything, the fence looks -- really pretty awesome, actually. I'm quite impressed with our first attempt at wood fence building. Now we look over at that corner section the neighbours threw up last year and we're kinda feeling like maybe we should take it down and do it properly. It looks like crap, they bought the wrong brackets, and no wonder the post is already starting to tip! They only used a little gravel to keep it upright!

I'm feeling a lot more energetic about working outside now, too. I didn't realize how exposed I felt until the fence went up. I think that's why I've been avoiding so many outside projects this year. I can't tell you how glad I am to have our yard back. It's going to be nice working outside this fall.

the Calgary Tower

the glass floor is a little nerve wracking

the saddledome. appropriately living up to its name

Ah, finally. The last bit of our vacation. The Calgary Tower. We really wanted to have dinner at their 360 cafe. It rotates as you dine, and I thought it would make for a unique experience. But we got there exactly one hour before it opened for dinner and quite honestly, there's really not much to do up in the tower for an entire hour. I'm just going to go ahead and say it. This is a complete cash grab. If you don't go for the restaurant, other than getting some great city pictures, that's all there is (if you're lucky to have nice clear skies -- I've been there when it's been foggy and that's not cool). So we tried extremely hard to stick it out but we just couldn't, and we thought it would make more sense to at least get back to the car before we added another hour on to our parking ticket price. It was kind of a bummer.

We also got chewed out by a cop on our way there. It was one of those weird situations where no one knew what he wanted us to do. We were at a light and waiting to go at a safe time and he put his siren on as a warning or something. And so we were like, he must want us to go. Does he want us to get out of his way? And the pedestrians were like, should we walk? Does he want to get around the corner? So we just went because we thought there was an emergency. Then he stopped us and chewed us out for going before the pedestrians (who we waited for as long as we felt we could but they just weren't walking and I think it was because of him and his siren). So after asking us over and over again what our "deal" was (how on earth do you answer that question to anyone let alone a cop?), he decided he had "more pressing matters to attend to" so he didn't give us the $500+ ticket he really seemed to want to give us. Whew.

After the tower, we headed up to Crate and Barrel. It's a lovely store, but more like an upscale IKEA than Anthropologie. They did have some really lovely pieces of furniture and just about any gadget for your kitchen you could ever imagine. (Gadgets like a tomato corer that cost so much, you could never justify the purchase because of how little you'd use it.) And while they had their furniture arranged, they hadn't done anything particularly inspiring with it, so I couldn't even get any ideas from just looking around. I'm still really glad we went, though. Mostly because I got the one thing I wanted to get from that store, and I put to rest all my thoughts about how awesome it was. Because it's not that awesome. Honestly, if we had one here, I wouldn't really care so much about it.

we both liked this sofa -- all right. they had nice stuff, but nothing I'm still thinking and dreaming about.

the Calgary Zoo

The whole point of our little vacation was to get to the Calgary Zoo to see -- what else? Dinosaurs, of course. They have an exhibit called Dinosaurs Alive which is only available until the end of October. So naturally, I've been panting about it since -- gosh. When did I first hear about it? Back in January, maybe? I dunno. It feels like I've been thinking about it forever.

We managed to get to the zoo relatively pain free (driving in Calgary makes me seize up. Like, even the thought of maybe having to go to Calgary -- even when I'm not the driver -- gives me nightmares); and the first thing we did when we got in the gates? Prehistoric Park. Oh yeah.

I like to shake it

They moved, they roared, they just looked a little stupid while doing it, like their hands had no bones in them. It was actually really humorous. Especially the T-Rex. We had to giggle at that one cuz he was so big and overwhelming, and then he started moving his head and shaking his arms. He kinda looked like he was doing the hokey pokey. "Oh! Let me finish this dance and then I'm gonna eat you!" Good times.

There's obviously more to see at the zoo, and see it we did. We were there for most of the day, actually (and we still didn't see everything). Like most zoos, all the animals were asleep or moving too much to get a picture of them or just behind the most hideous fence which kinda made trying to take a pretty picture pretty pointless. And the ones that were awake and close to the fence in good camera view were surrounded by a crowd of moms and kids gawking and pointing so you couldn't get close enough anyway.

Therefore, Prehistoric Park was my absolute favourite part (I'm so glad we did it first before we were tired, sun-stroked, and cranky), and I loved the butterfly garden and the other greenhouse areas. Aside from the butterfly garden, plants generally bore kids so it was relatively nice to hang around in the greenhouses -- and I say relatively because it was so. hot. So hot, my legs were sweating, I kid you not. At the time, I thought my jeans were going to shrink wrap to my body and I'd never be able to remove them again.

zoom kinda disappointed me on this one

who wouldn't want a little elephant chair for their yard? Why aren't they manufacturing these?

these two are great but nothing compared to the blue one that would not stop flapping its wings. Blast!

what is this and can I have one?

here's the best tiger shot I got. Unless you like headless tiger or tiger butt pictures.

zoom success!

Royal Tyrrell tidbits

ahh juicy new fossils

I wish they had chairs in front of this

argh the mammal section is so uninteresting

There were lots of new things to see at the museum this year, but I have to say it -- the highlight of this particular trip was scoring the honeymoon suite at a reduced rate. I mean, come on! The honeymoon suite! We jacuzzed like no one's business!