Christopher's Very Good Day

Chris has had some moderate ups and downs lately. UP! He's moving back home to the prairies! DOWN! It's very sad to move away from school and church community. UP! Baby on the way! DOWN! His wife is pretty much useless because she's been so sick!

But lately it's been more UP! than DOWN! for that cheerful husband of mine.

Especially today. Yesterday was pretty hectic: he was determined to have his classroom entirely packed up, and the entire lab inventoried (because he's amazing and wanted to leave everything so that the new science teacher has an easy time taking over everything) by the end of the day. We also needed to finalize all the details about our future home immediately (our potential new landlord hadn't called our references and approved us yet, while my old apartment complex called and said that there were a few suites available at the end of the month, since we'd put ourselves on a waiting list there weeks ago). We were running around all stressed. Chris had to spend a long day at the school, and what if he had to go back for another day? Do we turn down the apartment complex, presuming that we've actually secured the house?

But, by the end of yesterday, everything was done. Chris handed in his keys to the school. I got on the phone and made sure that our house was secured. And, when Chris got home, our next door neighbour asked Chris if he wanted to spend the next morning helping to fix up his boat. Chris loves that boat: it's a wooden houseboat, built in the 1930s. He loves that boat, and he loves our semi-retired next-door neighbour, and Chris is always scheming about ways to get in and help Peter work on the boat. I think at one point he was hoping that, if he helped enough with the boat, he'd get to go out on the water in it when it was seaworthy, but now just the work itself makes him ridiculously happy. Any time Peter asks him if he has a minute to help, Chris's response is along the lines of "Aw, gee Mister, really?"

And so this morning Chris woke up, free from all school responsibilities (he can't really deal with next year until we get to Regina), spent an hour fixing up an old houseboat. And the telescope that he ordered (using gift certificates from the school and as a thank you present from the new science teacher) might arrive today.
And, more officially now that we went over the terms of the lease this morning, we also have a house (minus basement suite) complete with a fire pit and vegetable garden in back, right near the park and the lake (and pretty close to both Chris's school and the university). It's not yet noon, and he's also gone and puttered around the mall, checking out construction progress (his favourite), and getting all squishy about clearance baby items.

Of course, it's not yet noon, but he's already filed today away as "Christopher's Very Good Day."

Our House Hippo Has a New Hideout

For those out there that didn't grow up with Amazing Canadian Commercials, here's a YouTube video that will fill you in.

In unrelated news, my chiropractor and painkillers are helping a lot.  (And apparently I have mild whiplash?  So, that's making my life interesting.)

Christopher is excited like a puppy

Chris is excited because it looks like the rest of Canada outside now.  Also: snow day!

Back from Salt Spring

 

Leaving town and doing something really relaxing for a few days, right before Christmas?  Best idea we've had in ages.  And the resort was just what we needed: we had a cabin all our own, with an ocean view, a wood stove, and a barbecue.  Firewood was free, as were the bikes and the rowboat, but there was purposely no TV and no phone in the cabins (although you could rent a TV).  Perfect.  I got spa treatments, soaked in mineral water, and watched the fire.

Chris had a good birthday.  He got a Lego game from my siblings (Creationary, the Lego version of Pictionary), and he spent most of his birthday building Lego.  (Well, and we went to a restaurant for its Global Curry Night, which made it a red-letter day for Chris.)



On our last night there, Chris decided that it would be really pretty to have a big, roaring fire.  Of course, that made the cabin way too hot for Chris to handle. I think I'll keep him.

To the Silliest 30-Year-Old Possible

My favourite buddy is thirty today, meaning that he can no longer brag that he's in his twenties, while his wife's in her thirties.  He decided that he wanted to go away with me for his birthday, and so I posted this ahead of time. 

Happy birthday, sweetie!  (Even though he probably won't see this until we're home again.)

Chris love bubbles

This has been an unusual week. We've both gotten a lot of work done (I on my old-timey German reading, he on his prep), but we've also kept ourselves busy with hobby-like activities.  I've been blackberry-picking and fruit-preserving, so much so that I'm covered in cuts and bruises and have a freezer full of peaches and blackberries. 

Chris's hobby this week has been a little bit more entertaining for our neighbours:

I'll leave the explanation and videos for Chris at his own blog.

Five

As beautiful as ever

I

It doesn't seem that long ago that we moved to Victoria.  A new friend from my department found out that we had just gotten married two weeks before we moved there, and was amazed because we acted like we'd been married forever.  Recently, another friend from the department found out that we've been married for five years and responded, "I had no idea you guys have been married for so long!" 

II

Two weeks ago, Chris and I camped on our way to North Battleford.  Somehow, we seemed to bring rain everywhere we went, and so five minutes before we arrived at our campsite, it started pouring down rain, which didn't stop until half-way through the night.  Setting up a complicated tent in the pouring rain, with cold temperatures more suited to early winter than July: we kept joking that this was our anniversary trip.  It reminded us a little too much of the camping we did for our first anniversary. 

In the morning we were so amused by our horrific hair that we took a self-portrait (seen above), and I promised Chris I'd post it on my blog. 

III

Before we got married, I confess that I fairly regularly mocked the whole "On This Day I Marry My Best Friend" variety of wedding invitations.  My response was usually along the lines of "I wasn't aware that I was marrying Ky." We lived fairly separate lives, frequently lived in separate towns, and had such different interests.

But then Chris and I moved 2000km away from all of our friends and family.  Before we moved, we talked to a few different friends who had done the same, who said the same thing: "It was the best thing for our relationship, even if it was hard to live so far from our family."  And we found that to be true for us: Chris has become my best friend.  (A best friend with whom I have far too many inside jokes and sayings, the origins of which we can't always remember.)  I watch football as a result of him, and he grew his sideburns to look like Mr. Darcy's as a result of me.  The general consensus is that we've each gotten stranger and sillier as a result of marriage.   

IV

Upon reflection, most of our in-jokes are the result of the katrillions of hours we've spent in a car together on road trips, not to mentions All Those Years Before We Had Cable TV.  I keep wondering if I'll someday reach the point where I don't find Chris endlessly entertaining.  It hasn't happened yet.

V

We're going to have a funny anniversary today.  We've been helping Chris's mom with yard work, and now we're going to carve a helmet out of a watermelon for tomorrow's football game.  This evening, we're going to a neat restaurant that serves local and seasonal food, so that Chris can eat wild boar.  This promises to be a good day. 

When your husband's a mad scientist

I brought you flowers and chocolate

The weather's finally cleared up around here, and on Sunday I was itching to spend the day outside. Chris and I decided to walk around my university's flower garden, because I figured that its World-Famous Rhododendrons (seriously: we get tour buses) would be in bloom. We brought along the camera, and I was happy with the results:

Okay, I also brought you Christopher's eyebrows for Valentine's Day, but that didn't fit in the title.

I uploaded the whole photo set to Flickr, which you can check out here. Which you might enjoy, if your house is currently buried in snow. Or that might make you decidedly not enjoy a bunch of pictures of flowers.

***

In other (but related) news, I also used Valentine's Day as an excuse for my annual Try Out Some Kind Of New Recipe Or Cooking Technique. Last year was risotto, and this year it was little molten cakes! I took the flourless individual molten chocolate cake recipe from the Joy of Cooking and added the spices from Garrett McCord's Chipotle Flourless Chocolate Cake recipe on Simply Recipes.

And wow: individual molten chipotle chocolate cakes? I highly recommend. I'm going to try other variations on the molten chocolate cake on a regular basis now.

One more picture from Robot Birthday

I decided to let our visitors help decorate Chris's cupcakes, as they stopped by to help him build robots.

The happiest boy in town

At 7:30 this morning (after he finally got me to wake up):

Between this, the pork ribs that are already braising for supper (and corn muffins!), and all those blue cupcakes that will sometime soon have pictures of robots piped onto them, he's the happiest Birthday Boy in the world right now.

Robot Dinosaur Cupcakes

Tomorrow is Christopher's 29th birthday, and his first (non-weekend) day of Christmas vacation. He's pretty giddy about this, and his requests for his birthday sound more like a 8-year-old's birthday than one befitting a man nearly thirty.

"I want dinosaur sprinkles on my cupcakes! No wait, I want a robot birthday cake!"

"I want to spend the whole day building robots out of Lego. I'm going to open my present as soon as I wake up in the morning."

And so. I've just finished baking a dozen cupcakes that have dinosaur sprinkles inside them. I'll ice them in the morning and then try to pipe pictures of boxy robots on the top, so that he can have Robot Dinosaur* cupcakes. And he's declared that he's waking up at 7:00 in the morning, so he can get an early start on his robot-building. (He would wake up at 6am, but he wants me to see him open his present, and so he's waking up a whole hour later as a concession to me.)

And I'm so glad. It sounds like the best Christopher birthday ever. I'm going to enjoy finding little things to make the day even nicer, for the best man I've ever met, who makes me laugh every day and always knows when I need a hug before I even do. Happy birthday, Mr. Christopher.

* They say "Beep beep boop boop ROAR!" And we seriously talk about Robot Dinosaurs constantly. And speculate on "which mammal's milk would be the weirdest to use for making cheese." (My answer: bats. His answer: chimpanzees.)

Presented without context

Chris: "Well, my robot is going to revolutionize my social life."

Crafty News

As Ky has already announced (and I have been talking about on Twitter), Chris has taken up knitting. Ky's now taught him how to cast on and do the basic knitting stitch, and he's starting off by making a Möbius strip scarf. Discover Magazine is to blame for his new knitting mania; he's convinced that he'll be able to make the dissected frog project in no time. (Well, he knew how to crochet when he was a kid, and he's decided that these sorts of handicrafts are exactly right for him these days: just mindless enough, but doing something useful, and combining his spacial awareness and manual dexterity with his love of knots.)

But seriously: isn't he precious?

I was starting to claim that I don't have a crafty bone in my body, but then I went to a Girls' Night with church, and we made Christmas decorations for our doors out of evergreen branches that had fallen during last Tuesday's wind storm. It was the perfect project: instant gratification, lots of floral wire (I love using floral wire), and both free and environmentally sustainable. Everything we used had been scavenged by Barb from our church (fallen branches, pine cones, and also cloth ribbons from off of presents and past decorations).

And look how Christmas-y my front door is now; can you believe I actually made this thing?

And then when Christmas is over, anything that's not compostable can be collected and used again next year! Completely brilliant.

Also also: they make super-fierce hats. Ky will demonstrate this fact:

********************

In other news, Christopher will be off to the Grey Cup this weekend! This will mark the first time that he gets to see the Roughriders play in the Grey Cup, and he is more than a little excited right now. And he'll get to see his parents and his brother! He's pretty well so excited, he could run all the way to Calgary right now.

Giant-Proofing the House

Meg and Karl are on their way over tomorrow, and we've been preparing ourselves for how much the "wee" Andrew has grown since August. So, you remember roughly how big he was when he visited? (Go and check that link. You need to prepare yourself for the comparison.)

Meg just posted this picture of Andrew in his Halloween costume (so, two months after my picture?):
(I've been hearing rumours that he's already hit three feet tall, while still two and a half months away from his second birthday!)

Chris and I were looking around the house and realising that this kid can now reach almost everything that's breakable or dangerous. We're just going to have to play this thing by ear this weekend. Because Chris predicts that Andrew will now be able to reach the knife block on the counter, while I think that's crazy talk. It's a good thing that Chris is planning on wrestling the wee giant all weekend.*

I can't believe it's been a full week since I last posted. It's been a pretty busy week: I met with my supervisor and he helped me figure out how to streamline the research I've been doing. I've also been putting together a clear chapter-by-chapter overview of the whole dissertation, which helps sort out my thoughts. Also, today I went straight from yoga class to McDonalds, which might be defeating the purpose.

Finally, anyone who hasn't seen Chris's House Hippo Adventures needs to go check that out. I have the sweetest, silliest husband ever.

And now I'm going to sleep. (Can you tell that this started off as a coherent blog post and then went ramble-y and sleepy? I've been awake for a very long time now.)


* Apparently the kid really likes to wrestle now? How has he grown up so much? He's this visual reminder of how long it's been since I finished comps, because remember when he was this big?

I'll get back to work in a minute, but...

Chris made videos of the rollercoaster they made in physics class this week, and while we're still busy editing together all the clips to make a video that he'll post on his blog soon, I just wanted to give you a bit of a preview of part that had me fascinated:

I'll leave the grand finale to Christopher (there's more after the marble drops through the whole in the bench), but this is the part that I keep re-watching.

Here Be Dragons will return

Watch this space, because Chris is going to get back to updating his blog! Tomorrow, our house is going to be covered in a Kinematics experiment that involves 16m of ramps and many marbles. We're also finally getting the new camera, and so those two elements will combine to help re-launch his blog.

Chris had been procrastinating from dealing with his blog, because the template was all messed up and he thought he'd have to spend hours dealing with it. And so I went (with his permission) and gave him a basic (temporary) template, so that he'd just update his blog without worrying about the details. (Bronwyn? Could you possibly think of a clever banner for Chris?)

So, we'll deal with all that tomorrow. Right now, our beloved football team is down by eight points with three minutes left in the game. (Update: and now it's tied with 41 seconds left in the game! Chris is dancing around like crazy.)

A Public Birthday Card for Ky

After Classy Night at the Opera, Chris and I were laying awake too late, talking about our days. The conversation veered toward the subject of my threat to give Ky a wedgie on her birthday, which led to a conversation about how Amanda had sent us "two atomic wedgies" for our wedding presents. It was late, and we found ourselves to be funnier than we actually are, and apparently I had said the words "it's too bad that we come up with these things when we don't have any pens or paper nearby to write these things down."

Apparently Chris got up and wrote down what we were saying, because I woke up the next morning to find this sitting on my kitchen table:



You know, I love that little picture of a stick figure with a wedgie so much that I think I have to give you a close-up:



And so, because 29 is such a grown-up-sounding age,* we're sending Ky wedgies for her birthday. She'd better look out when we see her in church tomorrow. Happy birthday, my dear. Thanks for putting up with us around here.



* And it's that awful year where you have a high likelihood that someone will ask you "And holding?" when you tell them your age, which is why my mother-in-law spent her entire 29th year telling people she was thirty, just so they wouldn't think she was lying about her age.

Goo goo g'joob

Continuing in the tradition of "Maryanne posts silly pictures of Christopher," I present to you a couple of pictures from Chris's school play, where he played the Walrus (of "the Walrus and the Carpenter") in Alice in Wonderland.

Here's Chris dressed as The Walrus, surrounded by the oysters he's about to consume:


And here's the remote control Bread-and-Butterfly that Chris and the younger part of the Robot Club built:
Seriously, that play was just precious.

Chris's family, portrayed in plate form.

Chris just showed me this plate that's been sitting under his plant by his computer. Apparently, he drew on it in elementary school. I think we may have to hang it on the wall, if just for the majesty that is the hollow eyes and the giant shoelaces. (Also: spot the giant bird.)