Because I am surrounded by boxes that are not full yet, you get a meme (From Colleen):

Here are the ground rules for the newbies:

1. After reading my answers, copy and paste the list into your comment.
2. Change my one-word responses with yours (ONE WORD, even if it kills you).
3. Submit your comment.
4. Feel free to post your finished list on your blog, too. (Look at that, a post idea, FREE. You’re welcome.)

Your last meal: pancakeseggsbacon (it’s supposed to be one word - breakfast didn’t feel descriptive enough)
Something on your desk/work area: boxes
Your New Year’s Eve plans: packing
The smallest gift you received this year: nike+ipod
The largest gift you received this year: tripod
Something you wish you hadn’t eaten so much of during the holidays: cookies
On your feet: slippers
Your hair: ponytail
How many other countries you’ve traveled to: three (soon to be five)
One country you dream of visiting: New Zeland
A hobby you’d like to take up/revisit this year: running
A hobby of yours that died (aww, buh-bye) this past year: reading
A publication you subscribe to (print): Cook’s Illustrated
The most embarrassing subscription in your feed reader (if you have one): none
One of your favorite stores to window shop dreamily in: Sephora
One of your favorite online stores to window shop dreamily on: apple.ca
A color you love to wear: green
Your bed pillow: fluffy
The color of your kitchen counter: “dirty”
What you plan to do when you get up from the computer: pack

Netchick’s living vicariously, asking everyone what they got for Christmas. And I’m happy to oblige!

Some new running gear: an iPod Nano, the Nike + iPod pedometer/workout tracker and some new kicks to put it in, since my current runners were looking mighty sad.

And a year’s subscription to Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.

These will either be highly complementary, or cause a great deal of cognitive dissonance in 2008.

Christmas Angel

Originally uploaded by peechie.

Merry Christmas to all of you from all of us at Chez Watercooler.

As promised (and thanks to many of the angels out there on the internets), a list of the charities who are benefitting from a collective of Christmas Cheer this year:

Books for Asia
The BC SPCA
WHAS Crusade for Children
War Child International
Union Gospel Mission
Spare the Cold

Thanks to all of you for speaking up and naming your charities. We donated a total of $225 to your favourite charities (and mine) this Christmas.

I certainly hope that everyone has a wonderful day, whatever you celebrate, and that you’re surrounded with people you love, who love you right back.

Man, when things happen in the “new condo construction” world, they happen fast.

It doesn’t help that despite having to solicit the services of “experts” to make this thing happen (mortgage advisors, lawyers, etc.) they all expect us to tell them what exactly is going on. I suppose that in any other real-estate transaction, “us” would generally be a Realtor, but there isn’t one in this situation, since we’re buying directly from the developer.

Suffice to say, there has been no hand-holding through the process.

So it’s been a stressful couple of days.

We scheduled an inspection of the unit for yesterday morning, and in between scheduling and the actual inspection we were informed that our closing date is going to be January 2nd.

Yesterday ended up being a complete clusterfuck of dealing with the inspection (nothing major is wrong, a couple fixes and some finishing work - should be easypeasy), dealing with the lawyer, booking a moving time and booking movers.

The biggest thing complicating matters right now is the fact that the GST has gone down twice since we initially signed our agreement to purchase.

And nobody ever asked when, exactly, we signed our contract (or apparently even looked at the contract). You’d think they would - it’s a pretty important date, since it determines how much GST we pay out of pocket.

We finally spent a few hours last night looking up the legislation ourselves, and found that we do pay the 7% out of pocket (thankfully we had initially budgeted for that anyhow), and can fill in a short form to send to the CRA to get 1% back to make it equal to 6%. We’ll actually come out ahead on this one, since if you qualify for the New Homebuyer’s GST Rebate (which we don’t, since our home - like most in Vancouver - is well above the $450,000 threshold), they reduce the amount of your Transitional Period GST Rebate.

Another thing about “New Homebuyer” this and “GST Rebate” that: there are a number of programs for New Homebuyers to save GST, Property Transfer tax and to withdraw funds from one’s RRSP without penalty. There are also GST rebate programs for both new homebuyers, and any homebuyers completing a purchase bridging transitional periods around a reduction. Every. Single. Professional, without exception, has confused the programs with each other and told us we qualify for either none or all of them. Which isn’t true.

You’d think that the purchase of new property in Vancouver wouldn’t be such a challenge for those whose job is it to broker the sales of property in Vancouver, since so much of the real estate in the city is brand new construction. Apparently it is.

Also, while everyone and their dog has said that GST is going down to 5% January 1st, I can’t find anything that says the bill to approve the reduction has gone further than approval by the House of Commons (no approval from the Senate, no Royal Assent) - though if it does happen, everything we’ve found suggests we can fill out yet another form to get another 1% back from the CRA.

But! After some insane crazy-making research and a mostly sleepless night, I think we’re pretty much set.

And speaking of sets, I’ve created one with some of the pictures we took during the inspection. That’s our new kitchen and part of the living area, and you can check the rest of the place out on my flickr stream.

For whatever reason I’m feeling kinda frisky today. And what better way to get it all out (and go back to my regular cold and miserable self) than to purge it from my system with a Meg-inspired Love List:

Remember that bonus I mentioned receiving (along with the aerodynamic socks) after coming back from Trade Show Hell? I have finally decided what to do with it. The KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer. The Cadillac of small appliances. I’m venturing out to the burbs to pick it up tonight! I can already smell the Christmas Baking.

I have finally started exercising again. It’s still too damn cold for running, but I have managed to get up off my arse and actually work out a few times this week. It hurts. Mostly in a good way. But definitely for the best, considering the aforementioned point.

Doing good, with your help! Send me an email naming a charity you’d like me to donate to this holiday season. I’ve already gotten a few emails, but am certainly excited to get more. Even if you’re pretty sure I already have your address - drop me a line anyway with a shoutout for the cause near and dear to you.

Neil’s coming home tomorrow! The worst parts about his absence have been:
a) the fact that I’m currently not getting coffee in the mornings (at least not until I make it to Starbucks, which requires being dressed and presentable), and
b) it’s far too stuffy to sleep in our apartment at night with the windows closed, which means that when I wake up in the mornings, it’s up to me to leap out of bed and attempt to dash to the other end of the apartment to close the windows, turn on the fireplace, turn on the heat in the livingroom, turn on the heat in the bedroom and dive back under the covers for 20 minutes to warm up. All hopefully without tripping over the dog or myself (not an easy feat at 6:00am pre-caffeine!).

Along with my mind (which thankfully has returned) I seemed to have lost my social life after disappearing for a month for work travel. Now that holiday parties are in full-swing and I don’t have to keep turning down invites for being out of town, I can feel that slowly starting to change.

We’re only 3 sleeps away from getting the first glimpse of the inside of our new place! Hopefully will be able to move forward with a closing date shortly after that. We’ve already given notice to our landlord. It’s finally really happening!

Aah. Better. Now I can get back to my curmudgeonly self.

Got any love you need to purge? Drop it in the comments, post on your own blog, and go tell Meg!

For the past 30 minutes, there have been flashes going off pretty much non-stop outside my office windows. From 6 floors up, it could really be a number of things: tourists taking photos, one of the bajillion international students in the area taking photos, welding… who knows.

Then the music started. Christmas carols blaring. So I got off my arse and took a good look out the window at what was going on down there.

I suppose now is a good time to mention that I work across the street from the new Agent Provocateur store (link not particularly safe for work).

There is currently a cube-van with glass walls and a faux office-scene inside it parked out front (after all, this is the core of the business district), containing 3 lingerie models clad in store product and not much else.

I also thought there was a minor earthquake, but it was just all the men in the building dashing downstairs to gawk from a better vantage point. That, and get photocopies.

Yes, I said photocopies. One of the girls is busy sitting on a photocopier, and the other two are handing out copies of her ass (I borrowed one from a co-worker and scanned it, just for you!) to the gawkers.

Sometimes, B2C marketing is way more fun.

I’m flying solo this week as Neil jets off to the exotic plains of Columbus, Ohio.

I suppose it’s only fair he finally gets his own trip - after all, I’ve been to New York and Las Vegas while he’s stayed behind, holding down the fort.

What I think is completely unfair however, is that he’s going to Columbus (home of the Bluejackets and the Buckeyes and not much else) and gets a celebrity sighting out of it, while I went to Vegas (twice!) and NYC and only managed to get hassled by the mob.

Apparently Currie Graham was catching the United flight from YVR to O’Hare at 8am today.

Then again, I’m mostly useless at actually recognizing celebrities while out and about anyhow.

It only hit me about 45 minutes after the fact that I stood next to Mario Cantone in line at Cafe Artigiano on Hornby one day. And Neil was the one who pointed out I was sitting a mere two empty stools away from Peter Gallagher at Tojo’s Omakase Bar last month.

All this in spite of the fact that I’m the TV watcher in the relationship, while his nose is usually buried in a book or his laptop on the couch next to me.

So I was probably standing next to Paris Hilton in the towel line at the Mandalay Bay pool and just didn’t notice…

Ring is back. Am happy again. Especially since night before last I had a fantastically vivid dream in which the jeweler had stolen my diamond and replaced it with Cubic Zirconium (he did not, I checked). Our wedding bands are completed and engraved and living safely in the jeweler’s vault.

I wanted to take a picture of them first, but Neil wants to keep them a complete surprise until the moment we put them on. Blame him for the lack of awesome macro test by our new camera.

I will share our engraving though - because I think it’s neat.

Neil’s ring has the number 284 stamped on the inside. Mine has 220. They represent the first occurring pair of friendly numbers.

Pythagoras considered 220 and 284 to be friendly (or amicable). He even wrote: “[A friend] is the other I, such as are 220 and 284″. Aristotle also used the notion of friendly numbers to characterize friendship (in his work “Ethics”). So what makes the numbers 220 and 284 so special? Their property is that each is equal to the sum of the other’s proper divisors. The proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, and 110, and they sum up to 284; the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142, and they sum up to 220.

The pair 220, 284 soon became a symbol of friendship. In the middle ages, 220 and 284 were used by a young man to express his love to his beloved. He would prepare two metal charms with the numbers 220 and 284 engraved on them. These were then put on chains to place around their necks.

We got the idea after reading Fermat’s Enigma, and thought it was way cooler than some random term of endearment, word of affection or each other’s name. And a great way to remind ourselves that above all we feel we’re marrying our very best friend. Our very nerdy very best friend.

The wedding is now in 3 months, 3 weeks and 1 day. Random factoid: that is 2 days shorter than the gestation period of a Pig. So if we found a sow in heat today and worked some pig-love-magic, we could have a piglet right about when we leave for our honeymoon. These are the things you learn when your fiancé grew up on a farm.

Neil also enjoys comparing the pregnancy, birth and childrearing of our human friends to those of various barnyard creatures. The men are usually amused. The women are usually not.

But I digress….

Wedding upcoming! There aren’t really any other fun planning updates. The big things are done, and the little things keep piling up - though I’m still not particularly worried about any of them.

Next up: shoes. I am currently in love with a pair of these (the Pigalle 70 if you look at Evening/Low) in the Fall 07 collection. Clearly someone needs to stop me.

Despite the cheery snowboarding penguins on my new holiday-themed coffee mug, I’m still having trouble fully acknowledging it’s December already.

But December it is - and that means it’s holiday card time!

If you’ve been reading for a year or so, you know the drill - send an email to jen [at] thisdomain [dot] com with your mailing address, and in a couple weeks you should receive some snail-mail greetings from yours truly.

And I’ve decided to do something a little new and different this year: in the spirit of the holidays, I’ve decided to give everyone a gift!

In my world, a gift is something that means something special to the recipient and will make them feel good, thus making the giver feel good, and everyone wins! Since I’m not lucky enough to know you all personally, I’m going to depend on you to tell me what that is.

Specifically, when you send your address. tell me which charity you’d like me to make a contribution to. The only requirement is that your charity of choice is a registered charitable organization (no Human Fund requests!). I’d also love to hear a bit about why the charity is one close to your heart.

One last rule: all requests must come from an actual human who is willing to share his or her name and is willing to receive some mail. I’ll fully admit that this is a somewhat selfish act, and giving to you makes me feel good. Giving on behalf of kitten1234@hotmail.com isn’t nearly as rewarding.

I’ll accept requests up until 11:59pm on December 24th, and I’ll publish the list of the organizations that will benefit from your gifts on Christmas Day. I won’t publish the total donated, but I will note in my card to you how much I donated to your charity of choice. This amount will fluctuate, depending on the total number of requests I get.

Let the giving begin!

Neil and I were planning on taking an impromptu vacation over the Christmas break, partly to try and avoid being home to see if we could postpone closing on our new place until after the GST goes down on January 1st, and partly because we’re sad we won’t be in our new home for Christmas - something we’d really been looking forward to - and wanted some sort of consolation prize.

Then we were told by our Lawyer that there will be a transitional period around the GST change, and while we may have to pay out the 6% tax initially, we can fill out some paperwork to be reimbursed for the additional 1%. Huzzah!

So we re-thought the vacation thing. I’ve been away a lot lately, and Neil is going off to Ohio next week, so another set of flights wasn’t really appealing. That, and with the upcoming moving, new furniture and wedding costs, we could afford a small getaway, but really couldn’t afford to chase the sun.

But dammit, we still wanted our consolation prize!

So we trundled off figuring we’d start looking at new digital cameras, since we were planning on buying one for the honeymoon anyway, and thought it would be nice to have something that wasn’t 2 megapixels and 4 years old to take holiday photos with.

We walked into Lens & Shutter, intending to look at the latest in point & shoot technology. But for the kind of pictures we want to take (travel landscapes, low-light and night-sky shots) we admitted to ourselves what we knew all along - a pocket camera was going to be completely inadequate.

So we started looking at larger cameras - and by that point, in terms of price, one might as well start exploring the world of entry-level digital SLR’s. So we did. And walked out of the store with the Pentax K10D.

Neither of us has followed the world of digital SLR’s particularly carefully, so we weren’t even aware there were entry-level options other than the Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D80. But Pentax, despite coming a bit late to the digital SLR game, has put out a camera that competes on price with the lower-end Canon and Nikon lines, but competes on features with the much more expensive Canon EOS 30D and Nikon D200. It’s a pretty incredible value for money.

The three pictures in this post represent the 3 best (read: only passable) pictures of the 200 or so we’ve taken so far (wine by Neil, dogs by me).

Next step: picking up a book on digital SLR photography to figure out what all the features mean (seriously, I don’t even know what an F-Stop actually is) and taking a short course on digital SLR photography. Any recommendations?

It seemed like a good idea earlier this week to book the nurse’s appointment for 8:00am on Saturday, since we’re usually up ridiculously early most days anyhow, and rarely sleep past 7:00am on weekends. Hey, did you know that when you buy life insurance, they send someone over to take your blood pressure and make you pee in a cup? Anyhow, this whole process also requires fasting for 3 hours beforehand, and I figured the less time I was without snacks or coffee, the better - so 8:00am it was. And then we’d be free to get on with our day without waiting around for our appointment.

And then this past week happened, with having to navigate managing work’s presence at a local event, go on an off-site course and do all the regular work stuff quite literally all at the same time. A couple 12-hour days later, and suddenly 8:00am Saturday seems like a very bad time to have some random stranger with rubber gloves and a clipboard show up at my door.

So the alarm went off at 7:00, and I snoozed it until 7:36, at which point I figured that despite his status as a health-care professional, I should probably put on pants for the impending visitor, and stumbled into the bathroom for my morning pee. Oops.

Mid-stream it hit me - I’m going to be required to pee again in about 20 minutes - without the aid of coffee.

We went through the questionnaire, we went through the height/weight/blood-pressure checks. I went through a couple glasses of water. Neil went through his questionnaire. He went through his height/weight/blood-pressure checks. I went through another couple glasses of water. Neil peed in his cup. I went through another couple glasses of water. The only thing I had to offer were complaints about my now painfully distended belly full of liquid, and not a drop of pee.

The nurse waited around for another 15 minutes - I still couldn’t pee.

And not for lack of trying! Oh how I tried! I tried relaxing, I tried willing myself to pee, I tried running my hands under very cold then very hot then very cold water, I tried applying pressure to my general bladder area. Not a damn drop.

So the nurse agreed to break the rules since we appear to be generally upstanding citizens, and not the type who’d have a stash of someone else’s pee in the bathroom, or otherwise try to cheat the test. He left me with the jar, instructions not to have anything but water until after I’d peed, and to please record the temperature of the pee (there’s a stick-on thermometer on the outside of the cup) and he’d come by and pick it up in-between some other appointments nearby later on.

Finally, FINALLY about 20 minutes (and another glass of water for good measure) later, I peed! Neil cheered, we High 5′d and did a happy dance (ok, I drew the line at the dance - I haven’t needed celebration for going pee-pee in the potty since I was 2 or 3) and I dutifully recorded the temperature of my sample. And the nurse came back, gave me a receipt for my contribution, and in about 3 weeks our next of kin can throw us under a bus for a tidy sum.

But now, of course, I can’t actually leave and get on with my day, because with all the water I drank earlier, I can’t stop peeing. Seriously. Every 10-minutes or so I need to go again. And I suppose it didn’t help that I finally had coffee as well.

And I was going to try and think of something pithy to close this with, but I need to pee again.