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Dave and I went hiking at Gatineau Park on my birthday. We went up the King Mountain Trail, which boasts “the best view of the entire region”.

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We don’t have ___________________ , but we have a grand piano!

Use any of the following words to fill in the blank:
- cable TV
- a phone line
- any dining room furniture
- a bed
- a dresser
- post-it notes

… and it was totally worth it.

Q: What kind of Grand is it?
The piano is a Kawai GE-30 (this one) and it’s 5′5″.

Q: Where did you buy it?
I looked at a lot of used pianos on kijiji and visited several piano dealers before deciding to buy from Campbell Douglas. In the end it came down to the touching and the sound, and I loved the Kawai the best. My mom also has a Kawai (she has a 5′8″); I grew up playing on her Grand, so this is really no surprise.

Q: How much was it?
It was $14,900 + tax.

Q: That’s a lot of money to spend on a piano!
That’s not a question, and yes it is. It cost more than our car and will last about 100 years longer.

Q: Is it a Baby Grand?
According to the technicians I’ve spoken to, a Baby Grand is just the smallest in the line of Grands, so this one is technically a Toddler. But the website says ‘Baby’ so what do I know.

Q: When will it arrive?
Tuesday, August 25, between noon and 2pm.

Q: Are you excited?
….

Q: Are there special piano movers?
Yes, there’s an entire industry of them! Moving a piano is really complicated.

Q: How will they get it through the door?
According to the Piano Book, a grand piano is moved on its side, straight side down – it will be 5′9″ like this. Plenty of room!

Thoughts after one month of house-owning:

• We have more than one room.
• We have more than one room to clean.
• The cat is still always where you expect her to be.
• The grass sure grows a lot all the time.
• Squirrels are a lot less cute when they are digging up the vegetable garden.
• Security deposits are annoying and expensive (hydro, water).
• There’s room for everything, but not necessarily a place for everything.
• Anything that goes into storage will never see the light of day again. NEVER.
• Having a bbq is totally awesome.

Since we have fresh basil in our garden now, we’re trying to use it up! Nom.

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Today I was at the beach, practising volleyball for the HOPE volleyball thing. We had just finished a 2 hour practice and I was minding my own business, drinking a delicious grape slush-puppie in the car. I whipped out my blackberry to check my email and whatnot while I was sipping on my beverage. I decided to call my dad to let him know I was going to drop by to pick up some stuff from their house. Suddenly while I was on the phone a police officer tapped on my window.

Officer: Sir, could you turn off the car and hang up your phone

Me: Sure (A little confused as to what is going on)

Officer: Sir, we had a report that you doing some crack in here

Me: No (WTF!)

Officer: Please step out of the car sir

Then I spent the next 10 minutes talking to police and having my car searched extensively for cocaine. Hooray!

Apparantly some bystander had seen me drinking out of a straw a jumped to the conclusion that I was doing cocaine in a crowded beach parking lot in the middle of the day. Maybe using my crackberry had me looking like a spaced out junkie.

This recipe is very versatile – next time we’re going to try adding some potatoes and peas. If it looks delicious it’s because it is (was, for about the 2 minutes it lasted).

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It’s sinking in, but slowly.

The cat loves it.

For our wedding last year in June, Dave and I started taking ballroom dancing lessons so we would have something to do other than the hug-and-sway for our First Dance. Since then, we haven’t really stopped and last week went to a ballroom dancing competition held at the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, Ontario.

That’s weird, isn’t it?

We did really well, which is even weirder.

I am an organization junkie. After 2 years of fumbling to perfect my GTD system, I have finally found The time-management system which allows me to feed my weird moleskine addiction at the SAME TIME: Autofocus.

Here are the quickstart instructions from the website:

The system consists of one long list of everything that you have to do, written in a ruled notebook (25-35 lines to a page ideal). As you think of new items, add them to the end of the list. You work through the list one page at a time in the following manner:

1. Read quickly through all the items on the page without taking action on any of them.
2. Go through the page more slowly looking at the items in order until one stands out for you.
3. Work on that item for as long as you feel like doing so.
4. Cross the item off the list, and re-enter it at the end of the list if you haven’t finished it.
5. Continue going round the same page in the same way. Don’t move onto the next page until you complete a pass of the page without any item standing out
6. Move onto the next page and repeat the process.
7. If you go to a page and no item stands out for you on your first pass through it, then all the outstanding items on that page are dismissed without re-entering them. (N.B. This does not apply to the final page, on which you are still writing items). Use a highlighter to mark dismissed items.
8. Once you’ve finished with the final page, re-start at the first page that is still active.

That’s it. I’ve used it for both my personal and work tasks in the past week and it’s amazing how much I’ve gotten done since then. It’s the first system I’ve tried where I actually spend more time DOING tasks than organizing them. You really have to try it to believe it.