If you love me, you’d nominate me for Best Personal Blog over at the West Coast Social Media Awards. Nominations close Friday April 27th at noon, and it sure would be swell if I got nominated.

Why should I be considered for the Best Personal Blog award?

• I’ve been blogging for over 11 years
• I post a minimum of five times a week, often much more
• My blog is incredibly personal – I’ve taken the lot of you through my many highs (both literal and figurative) and lows (so many lows); always trying to inform, entertain, and occasionally educate (making some people uncomfortable is just a fun bonus)
• I can haz ethics: I’ve never sold anything commercial or accepted money for anything I’ve ever written
• I’m a West Coast girl through and through – my blog may have started in Calgary, but my heart (and since 2004, the rest of me) has always been in Vancouver
• Seriously, I’ve written over 5000 original, unique blog posts – I should get some kind of award for that alone
• Everyone likes to feel appreciated

Nominees will be announced on Monday April 30th. If I manage to get nominated (please please please), I’ll be bugging you to vote for me – but that’s step 2; let’s get through step 1 first. And I promise the bugging will be entertaining, and involve bribery and boobs and candy. You like candy, don’t you? Well, nominate me and you’ll get candy. You can’t lose!

Um, if you do happen to nominate me, you’ll need my phone number for some dumb reason. Email or DM me for it!

Okay, back to work. A post with a good deal less shameful begging shall follow this one (the trade off: additional shameful self-promotion. I’m great! Get on board with it!).

An Ode to Command+Option+M

Two point five days
I searched for you
Wore out my arm
On the slow-ass ribbon-based click through

Why were you so hard to find?

It doesn’t matter from here on in
I’ve got you in my clutches
I’ll never settle for +9b +6a again
Because let’s face it, +3b +3a is so much more attractive and gives you more room to work with on your page – what kind of sadist puts uneven amounts of space around text and images?!

embrace the keyboard shortcut. love the keyboard shortcut.

Words aren’t really necessary, at this point. Two of my best friends got married to one another, and I couldn’t be happier for them – I love Josh and Shan, and I hope their wedding was everything they wanted and more.

From the general policies page on the company wiki:

“Educate them on phone etiquette. In short, we don’t answer the phone.”

so smug.

Hello from shiny new space!

I am many words behind – several thousand need to be dedicated to this past weekend and the wedding – but here is a quick check-in with all the important stuff:

• New office space is gorgeous
• Hello there, MacBook Pro!
• Ice Cube Situation: trays in the freezer; they don’t appear to be used often so I may be on my own
• Diet Coke: will have to be manually provided; there’s a pop machine but it’s only got Coke, Coke Zero, and Other Things that are not Diet Coke
• Bussing downtown again after 5 months is weird
• As will be working in the same building as Ed
• Each bathroom stall is equipped with a sign featuring the following Enemies of Good Taste:
  • Cutesy pee-related poetry
  • Clip art
  • COMIC SANS
• My job is to WRITE :D :D :D :D

Yay!

damnit

If it wasn’t for the fact that I get no cell service, access to Diet Coke is sketchy at best, and it’s kind of expensive .. well, I could pretty much live here.

ferry shenanigans

being creepy all over reilly

only authorized short people allowed

We stopped in Coombs on the way to Ucluelet, then at Cathedral Grove (which is way cooler in November, but still pretty):

so green! suck it, alberta!

ed is one with nature

The wedding is at Black Rock Resort in Ucluelet, and it’s kind of breathtaking here:

just outside the lobby

the view from our balcony

Our room is awesome. The bathroom is the size of most Yaletown condos, and it has both a soaker tub and a standalone rainfall shower thingie. We’ve only been here for 6 hours, but we’ve already had a bath and a shower each (we are dirty folk). There’s a little kitchenette in the room, so we stocked up on a few groceries so we have snacks available – and I don’t know if someone warned them I was coming, but there was a full tray of delightfully frozen ice cubes waiting for me in the tiny freezer. It’s such a simple thing, but I appreciate it SO MUCH – I love ice cubes. Lovely, lovely ice cubes. You make my Diet Coke so delicious!

Tomorrow is visiting (for those with families; we are merely handsome spectators) and setup, then on Saturday .. people get married! I know I have a fancy bridesmaids dress to wear and all, but I’m giving serious thought to just showing up in one of the bathrobes made of kittens from our room – SO COMFY. I don’t think Shan will mind; she’s already talking about marrying the robe instead of Josh (which could get awkward if I show up wearing the groom).

It’s been a long day with several more to come, so I’m going to do some naked relaxing while I can. I’m going to be on the go basically until next weekend – we leave the island on Sunday, and I start my new job on Monday. I’m excited about everything between now and November – I should probably try to get some sleep.

look at all these fancy times!

Off to watch a couple of yahoos get married! Of all the yahoos I know, they are amongst my favourite!

Will more than likely blog from Ucluelet in between tacos!

That might be a euphemism, but I’ll never tell.

When my wallet gets too heavy (what with all my fabulous wealth), I sort through all the coins and put the big ones in my vacation fund and the pennies in a bear’s head. It’s an old Kraft Peanut Butter jar from a million years ago when they used to come in bear-shaped glass jars that you could use as a piggy bank when it was empty (or otherwise, if you’re into that sort of thing). For as long as I can remember, I’ve put all my pennies in this jar and used it as a door stop. It moved with me from Victoria to Calgary, back to Vancouver, and all around the mainland. It’s been filled and emptied before, but it takes a long time to fill so it hasn’t really done much in a very long time.

With news that the penny is finally going away, (and with the jar being full), I decided it was time to take it to a coin counting machine and start the collection anew. I gathered up all the loose pennies in the house and bagged them up (along with the 34 rolls of wrapped pennies from the last time we thought to do anything with them), and set off to Safeway.

if i had a penny for every penny i put into a jar ..

The bag was heavy as hell, and would have made an excellent weapon. I decided to scoot to Safeway; a decision I almost immediately regretted once it began to rain and I almost fell over from the added weight of the pennies. Still, I made it to the store in one piece and hauled everything over to the CoinStar machine, and started dumping them in.

take it all, you filthy whore

My coin flow is both fast AND furious:

my!

It was kind of like playing the slots in reverse – I was the one causing the machine to make the jackpot noise; not the one winning. It took almost half an hour to get all my coins in and it was terribly noisy – people stared. The machine is almost never used, so everyone was curious as to what I was doing to make so much noise.

Eventually, all my pennies were in (and two dimes, apparently) and it totaled them all up:

CASH VALUE

I took the slip to the customer service counter, and received a (small) wad of cash: out of $36.17 in coins dumped into the machine, I pocketed $31.87 (the machine took $4.30 in fees). Not too bad for a bunch of coins sitting around collecting dust, but I probably won’t do it again – the machine takes a sorting fee of 11.9 cents per dollar which is expensive if you’ve got real money to sort. Pennies are dumb, but if I had a giant bag of loonies or twonies I’d just sort it out myself or take it to the bank. Still, that $31.87 will buy me a lot of Diet Coke. I am easy to please!

I’m kind of getting a kick out of my weekend sewing projects – I don’t know how long I can keep it up (there are only so many fabric bags one person needs), but it’s a fun way to spend a naked Sunday afternoon.

I’m a little grumpy about how this week’s projects turned out, though – for the life of me, I cannot measure myself properly. Once again I ended up with a skirt that would fit many people, but this time I forged ahead anyway because I was too annoyed at the prospect of another failure. I eventually got extremely creative with following the recipe; adding things that were not required and inventing a lining made out of an old dress – but the end result is something I could probably wear in public without getting arrested:

ed does not love me enough to model the skirt without pants on

It’s an extremely lightweight white cotton circle skirt with green polka dots, hemmed with bright pink bias tape and topped with a wide elastic waistband. It turned out pretty good once it was finished, but it’s still too big. I can wear it, but I’ll be the one in the corner hiking her skirt up every two seconds in a somewhat moot attempt to remain decent.

I wanted to add contrasting green/white pockets, but they’d look funny on a circle skirt. I’m kind of in love with the idea of brightly coloured skirts with contrasting hems and pockets, but first I need to find a skirt pattern that I would actually wear but isn’t a circle. I think I may look into the noble square, and see if we can’t come to some sort of agreement.

I did try one other project yesterday, but I failed it spectacularly. Ironically, it’s supposed to be the easiest among all the patterns I have, yet I fucked it up really badly. I seem to be in the “advanced beginner” stage – I’ve made a couple of relatively complicated (for an idiot, like me) things, but the very simple “cut here and sew a straight line” stuff is totally beyond me.

I am a Lady of Leisure for three more days – let’s see how much trouble I can get into.