Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Favours


I just found the cutest wedding favours: customizable mints!

I'd put Christopher & Paige with the wedding date, but I'd also have 2 little tags tied to each one with the guest's name on one sheet and on the second have a message that reads "For your next water cooler meet" on one side and "We were mint to be" on the other side.
Don't you just want to carry these cute little packages around?
Plus, at these prices ($1 for the packaged or boxed mints, and $1.60 for the metal tin), I won't even be left with a bad taste in my mouth!

I want to go to Chinatown

Not Somerset Street, Mikasa! Or some other equally China plate-filled store in which I can roam free.

I'm a little Miss Type A; but I'm a lot of a nester. I dream of finding Prince Charming (check!), owning my own home (check!), settling down, and raising a family. I feel like I'm going to be complete once I have checkmarks at the end of each of those listed desires.

Maybe it's because I have divorced parents: I need to have in my own adult life what I couldn't have in my childhood -- a home psychologists and journalists don't label as "Broken".

Now that we own, I admit to feeling more settled. Not settled down, just calmer. Like things are finally happening for me.

And now that I have a house, I admit to wanting to fill it. Not all the way up, just enough. Like with things my friends will want for themselves.

With things like China. Why wait for a wedding? I don't want to hold off for two years waiting to create my gift registry; I want to start getting the things people expect to be on my registry!

A girl has got to eat, so why not eat off pretty plates? My favourite right now is the Mikasa Cheers collection with four patterns: polka dot, striped, swirl, and diamond. Each service includes an 11-inch dinner plate, an 8¼-inch salad plate, a 9-inch soup bowl, and a 12-ounce mug (which is great, because I'm not a fan of tea cups in matching sets with plates). But I wouldn't do one version of the Cheers, like just the polka dots, I'd mix the four versions! I'd get four of each set for 16 total and mix and match at my dinner parties -- or try a different style every night at dinner... Plus, I just found out these are all microwave-safe... a plus for a leftovers queen like me!

Here are the sets mixed up:


And here are the sets individually:

Striped (really it should be called "ringed")

Diamond -- similar to the polka dots, but little squares

Swirls -- so modern!

and Polka dots, my all-time favourite.

Monday, October 26, 2009

It's been a while...

Sorry, folks, I know it's been an eternity since my last post, but life's been busy. How busy? you might ask. House-buying busy!

You are looking at the proud owner of a 12-year-old home in Central Park (Ottawa, not NYC). It only took a bidding war, dealing with out-of-country sellers, and a mortgage fiasco (what do you mean I have $35,000 in credit lines?) to get to the "sign here, please" moment.

And though it hasn't been downhill since, it hasn't been easy. Our carpet was supposed to be installed last week; it's still not here. We need to be out of our apartment in 3 days but we don't have a second floor to move furniture to because it's all exposed nails and plywood right now. We ran out of paint before finishing the second coat with only a single 20sqft wall beneath the stairs left. We ripped the carpet out ourselves, but cracked a couple stairs and ripped a piece right out of another; we subsequently through that little piece out and had to go through the nail-and-staple-filled trash to find it.


But our parents have been A-MA-ZING and we have never felt more blessed. They have graciously handed over cheques, painted our walls, ripped carpet, patched holes, packed our apartmet, moved boxes, and laughed off laneway fender-benders. Shout-outs to select friends and family who actually came over to wash walls the day we got keys or cleaned and painted the following day. We couldn't have done this without you -- at least not in this year.

This was the biggest shopping high of my life. Remember how you felt when you plopped down your student Visa for your first designer bag? This felt like that but a thousand times more exciting. And nauseating. Especially when I saw my bank account drop $20k -- a far cry from the then-heart-pounding $240 for my first Dooney and Bourke!

The strangest thing about all this is that I've started dressing up for work. I got a promotion aa week after buying the house, so maybe that plays into it; but I think it's more that I feel grown-up. I feel like this is it; it's time to act my age. My mother always said, "Dress for the job you want, not the job you already have." Suddenly that feels like an idea I need to hold on to: the next promotion! After all, a raise sure would make this house-owning thing easier on my personal spending budget ;)