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!!!!

It just seems like there is never enough time. I have a 101 projects on the go and it seems so hard to get any of them completed. I even started creating to-do-lists galore to get organized and then creating lists and checking of tasks became a project in itself.

Crystal’s maternity will be running out soon and she has been putting plans into place to start selling her artwork and setting up a website dedicated to selling prints for nurseries and kids rooms, similar to the beautiful posters she created for Avie’s room. So my priority right now is looking after Avie throughout the day while Crystal can continue with creating her masterpieces. Spending the day with Avie is always a joy, although she is SOOOO busy now, she gets into everything, all the time. You can’t take your eyes of her for 5 seconds or little fingers are grasping for things they shouldn’t be gripping, her favorite activity right now is climbing to tamper with the rubber bumpers we bought for the coffee table corners, which she removes with ease and a big smile. I really must make an effort to get some video footage of her this week to post on her blog as she really is coming on leaps and bounds, not only in getting around physically but being a little chatterbox too. I’ll add it to my ever growing to-do-list.

umm what was this post about again? It seems like I can’t even focus on writing a blog post without getting distracted. although Avie is always a welcome distraction… Ooops there I go again.

In other news another priority project is planning our wedding, I reallllly need to make some UK phone calls and get official invites sent out, I know it is a lot to ask of people to come all the way over here to be part of our little celebration so I will try and get all the arrangements made so everyone can make their arrangements. I don’t even know where to begin! Crystal found a dress that she loves so she is making moves on her side of things now, I need to get the boys all set up.

So this post wasn’t really about 101 projects in the end, more so random ramblings.

[x] Update Blog

It was my birthday yesterday, and Crystal (with some help from Doug, Bea and Elizabeth) got me a Nintendo Wii. YAY! I was so excited, I had no idea that that is what Crystal had been planning to get me. Avie got me some accessories for it too, what a sweet little baby.

We ended up over at Crystal’s parents house and had some beer and a barbecue, on the new barbecue that I put together that afternoon, I’ve started to really love barbecued food since I’ve been in Canada, makes me wonder why barbecuing is not as popular back home. We played some Wii Sports later in the night too which was so much fun!

Avie didn’t miss out on the fun of opening presents and LOVED the book that auntie Karen sent her, she loved seeing herself in the mirrors, and when that got old, she just chewed on the wrapping paper. So thank you to Karen, Shane, David, Carl and Jodie from Avie!

Thank you to all my family for the gifts sent in the box, the jumper is a perfect fit and I have been wanting a new book to read for a while. You all make me and Crystal feel really guilty as we are always so bad and sending our packages, we will send one soon though, we are working on it already.

Back in April we took a trip to Sydney, on Cape Breton island, Nova Scotia. Where much of Crystal’s family live. We drove down there, a good 7+ hour journey, Avie was, as usual, the perfect little traveller and made little fuss on the long drive. We stayed with Melanie, Crystal’s cousin. Melanie’s youngest, Alex, had not long since turned 1, when we were down and he was running around all over the place. It was fun to see a toddler and imagine what Avie will be like at that age. Avie was mesmerised by him! She was also mesmerised by the hockey that weekend, as we watched the crucial NHL game between the New York Islanders and the New Jersey Devils. The Islanders won, meaning that The Toronto Maple Leafs missed out on a playoff spot! Avie was not impressed after sitting watching 2 whole periods.

It was quite a while ago now that we were down there but one of the things I remember most was the drive through beer store! Yes, that’s right drive through alcohol…

Just drive up…

Pick out your poison…

Then, Pick it up at the window and drive away! Hahaha I thought it was so funny, I’ve never seen anything like that before. Only in Cape Breton eh?

While we were there too we got some photos taken of Avie and her second cousins, Alex and Becca. Here is the pic of Avie looking cute as ever.

It was a good trip, and since then we have been down there again, but more about that in a later post.

End of catch up part 1 (April)

I figured it was high time for a blog post. It’s not like I set out intending to be so slack with the blogging, but the majority of my time on the computer is spent working on the T-Shirt site, or working on my immigration situation. But after a couple of productive days on all that kind of stuff, tonight I decided to have some Blog time. So I opened up Blogger and here I am a good 4 hours later, finally starting to write a post.

So where have I been you ask? Well distraction took it’s merciless grip! I actually, yet again, set off working on redesigning my Website/Blog, you know, the one that I never post to anyway. If I spent half the time writing Blogs that I spend trying to redesign my website I’d have quite the biography right here.

It’s pretty funny to look back at my Blogs and see how many times I’ve stated how I am going to start writing more regularly, what makes it funnier is the fact that I’m going to say it again right here… My plan is to write about what I’ve been up to since March over the next few days, 2 trips to Sydney, 3 weeks in England, my best man speech and of course watching my little girl being way too cute.

So stay tuned for my first update tomorrow!