Crystal went on a thrifting mission yesterday, to source off cuts of fabric to make decorations for our new apartment. On the way she found this little beauty, it was only $1.99! It has now been passed on to me as a fix up project. I think I will paint it black to match all of our picture frames, but I’ll decide for sure when I sand it down and clean it up. Consider this the “before” picture, I’ll post her again when she’s all rejuvenated.

Speaking of picture frames, we also have a bunch more that are ready to be painted black too, to fit in with the rest. I can’t wait until all our decorations are up, although it already totally feels like home here, it will be even better when all the picture frames are on the wall instead of the floor.

…I actually planned on starting all of this today but I went out to pick up Avie a new car seat. She is getting so big! I shopped around and managed to find a good one for a decent price, and then I had to head to the Honda dealer to pick up an anchor bolt to hook it up to our car. It’s all set up now though, Avie is going to love facing forward, she loves to see what is going on so it will be exciting for her I’m sure.

So that’s all my news for today, I’m off for a quick rock out on Guitar Hero before Crystal makes me watch Pop Idol. I’ve not really paid much mind to all the Pop Idol shows over recent years, except for a brief stint following Barnsley’s own Sam Nixon. I mean, if I wanted to watch bad Kareoke I’d be down at the KV Billiards, but that being said I really did enjoy watching This Guy! I’ve had the song in my head for the past week now.

Crystal’s parents got me a slow cooker for Christmas, and today I got a chance to use it for the first time, with a simple beef stew recipe from allrecipe.com. I was a bit dubious as to how the vegetables would turn out being in there for so long, I thought they might be a bit sloppy, but it actually turned out really well.

The meat was the best part of it though, really succulent. Now that I have given the cooker a whirl I think I will be more adventurous next time, put my own spin on it and add a few extra vegetables (and I might even put turnip in it Crystal!).

Crystal and I watched the movie Juno a couple of nights ago. I can certainly say it was one of the best movies I have seen in a while. I am not the biggest movie buff, don’t get me wrong, I like to watch movies and all, but I don’t get too into the whole analyzing the meaning of every action and line of dialogue. To me movies are all about sitting relaxing and switching off for a couple of hours and I found Juno the perfect movie for this. It was really entertaining throughout, there were some great characters in it, I couldn’t help rooting for Michael Cera just like his characters in Arrested Development and Superbad, and Ellen Page delivered some great one liners playing the lead.

The movie had a really fitting soundtrack too, thinking about which really makes me want to go play guitar, which I think I will do for a while before Avie wakes up. Overall Juno definitely gets a recommendation from me.

So I did it, I moved all my important website registrations to a single email address and culled all my old ones. I also went through my email and unregistered all the superfluous newsletter subscriptions I had bombarding my email. So I am well on my way to filtering all the digital information that is thrown my way on a daily basis.

The next step is to organize all my social networking and online community accounts. I used to be involved in a couple of online communities, but I don’t really keep up with any of them anymore. I know I have unanswered friend requests and emails all over the place. So it will be good to catch up and just keep on top of things. Then my digital life will be pretty straight.

Next is to organize my real life, our new home office is going to be a big help in that. Actually having somewhere to keep paperwork and carry out projects without taking over the whole house is going to be awesome. Crystal has been getting crafty in here the last few days, she is actually out now picking up fabric to make some cushion covers. I’m quite excited to get a couple of crafty projects going myself too. I’ll be blogging about them soon.

After stumbling on Tony Steward’s blog, whilst trying to find a Wordpress theme, I got into reading his productivity section and have become inspired to streamline and organize my life. Particularly my digital life, which has become overrun with overwhelming wastes of my time. Take my email situation for example, I currently have at least 11 email addresses. Only 3 of which are of any use to me. The rest have either been lost to the relentless grip of spam or are sitting idle waiting for me to ‘reactivate” them. I cling to them because over the years I have registered to different forums and online stores with all these different addresses. But I desperately need to move all my registrations to a couple of addresses and delete the rest.

So that is my mission of the day, to delete my unnecessary online baggage. Or at least it has been my mission of the day, which I have been failing on. But now that I have my mission down on paper, or at least in text form right here, maybe my path to success will be more clear.

No not a link to my homepage, but updates on our new home. Crystal, Avie and I are getting really settled in to our new apartment now. Today Avie spent the day over at Nanny and Papa Wall’s, which gave Crystal and I time to get a few pictures up. It’s hard to get that stuff done with Avie on the loose, what with the glass from picture frames and nails for picture hooks and all that good stuff that she would just love to get her hands on. So it was good today to spend the day getting a start on making the place more homely. We took a load of different picture frames and painted them all black, then put different artworks in them and put them up in clusters. It makes such a difference to the place to finally have some art up on the walls (photos to follow). We have some more frames that we just painted tonight that will be dry tomorrow too, to get even more stuff up. When it is done I will finally send the video to my family that I promised, I haven’t forgot, I am just waiting until all our pictures and decorations are up so that you get the full effect.

The new apartment is working out really well for us. In our old place it was always a struggle for me to keep Avie contained while Crystal did her work, what with our “office” being right in the living room and all. Now that we have a separate office/studio Crystal can lock herself away and do her work while Avie has the run of the rest of the house. That doesn’t stop her from wanting to crawl down the hall to bang on the one door that is always closed though! She always gets super excited when she does get to sneak in to Mommy’s work zone, she is too cute.

The office/studio (still can’t decide on the official title) itself is coming along nicely, we are still getting settled in and finding a place for everything though, but it is starting to take shape. We picked up an adjustable drafting table, with the money my Nannan and Grandad sent us for Christmas. Which Crystal and I have both put to good use today cropping images to put up on the walls. Crystal also uses it a sewing table for the little sewing machine I bought her. We also both got cork pin boards (another part of my getting organized lifestyle) to pin up notes and inspirational ideas. We are thinking of painting a mural on one of the walls in our office too. It will be awesome when it is all organized and finished. I’ll post more on our office/studio later, when I can post photos after I do the video for my family.

I could go on and on about our apartment. Everything about it is leaps and bounds more comfortable that our old place, not that we had a rough time there or anything, it was a nice place. But I definitely don’t miss having to go through the shared laundry room to get to our bathroom or having to shut off the TV and living room lights before we could use the microwave (it would overload the circuit or some shit every time we used it!). We are definitely both excited about our new life here.

What’s this? Paul has a new Blog? But he never updated the old one? Well I’m sure that trend will continue with my all new blog. But at least it may give a glimmer of hope for some updates in the immediate future, while I set up my new site, until the novelty wears off of course.

My new blog is powered by Wordpress, which gives me more control over the look and feel of my blog. I ‘ll probably end up spending more time doing that than actually writing posts, which will be fun for me, not so much for anyone who wants to read up on what I am up to.

As part of my new blogspace right here, I intend to aggregate my social networking profiles. Over the years I’ve done The Facebook , the Myspace, the Humble Voice and so on. A lot of the time I end up ignoring the friend requests and crazy wall invites, not because I don’t care, but after creating a profile and playing with the layout I always tend to loose the gist of what I signed up for. I’m going to try and change all that as part of my getting more organised lifestyle (more about that in a later post) and get back to the social part of those sites. I might even take the time to respond to your dumb ass email spam survey, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

So welcome to my new site.

I Can Haz Wordprez Blogzzz!!!!