I’ve been wanting to update for a week or so but procrastination always gets the better of me. But look on the bright side. Those unlucky enough to not have been to our house can see a picture that was taken inside our house! Yes, it’s the one up there! You can see one of my precious plants and one of our IKEA table lamps. Well, part of them anyway. Aren’t you lucky? ;)

The picture above was taken with the camera that ended my photographer’s block. You see, after our trip out West in September last month year, I kind of lost interest in photography. My creative juice just stopped flowing. When we went to Winnipeg in February this year, I thought it would inspire me to take a lot of pictures. Not really. The trip only gave me the right to brag about having been in Winnipeg in winter. And then we got busy with the whole finding and buying a house thing and photography got put in the back seat under a huge pile of printouts of house-for-sale ads.

Fast forward to Monday last week. I was browsing around the Intarweb, looking at pictures people took, and I was thinking how awesome it would be if I had $4,000 lying around to spend on a full-frame DSLR camera and a fast lens. But then I remembered that all 35mm SLR cameras are full-frame and I happen to have one that comes with a fast lens. So I started digging out boxes and boxes of cameras to find the camera I had in mind. When I found it, I loaded a black and white film into it and started shooting. And I fell in love all over again with photography.

The said camera is a Canon AE-1 Program with a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 lens. It was an impulse eBay purchase from January this year. I think I paid less than $50 for it. Bought it, got it in the mail, learned that it worked perfect and forgot all about it. Never touched it again until that fateful Monday. I’ve bought another lens from eBay for it since, a Canon FD 28mm f/2.8 wide angle lens. It just arrived in the mail this morning. I think I’m going to give it a whirl this evening, shooting the landscape outside of town at sunset.

We’re going to a camera show next month and I’m hoping to be able to find more lenses for the camera. I love how cheap Canon FD lenses are nowadays. Cheap and sharp don’t usually go together but in this case, they do, much to my delight. If you want to see some of the pictures from the first roll I shot with the camera, they’re in this Flickr set. There are still more that I haven’t uploaded yet. Will let you know how the second roll — which is in colour — turns out. And I’ll definitely bring the camera up to the cottage over the Thanksgiving weekend next month.

Speaking of photography, I’ll have another picture — a Polaroid — published in a magazine soon. Kind of excited about it, even if it’s not the first time. Will brag about it again later once the issue is out and available for purchase. Heh. I know, I’m shameless.

I know it hasn’t been a month since my last blog post and no one has told me to update yet BUT I just found my dream backyard (!!!) and it looks like this. WANT! Of course, there’d be compromises to be made. I’m sure Troy would want to keep the grass in the backyard because he loves mowing the lawn so much (ha!) so maybe we can have half of the backyard (the left-hand side, please) look like my dream backyard and the other half look like everyone else’s backyard. Maybe?

I know it’s going to take a lot of work, time and money but just like the house, the backyard could always be a work in progress. I’m thinking of waiting until this Fall to start working on it, just because gardening in the Fall sounds less boring than gardening in the Summer. I also read than Fall is a good time for planting shrubs and trees. I love shrubs and trees. I already know what trees I want but I haven’t decided on the shrubbery yet. For trees, I would like: a callery pear, a redbud, a Japanese maple, and a blue spruce. We probably only have enough space for two trees at most but eh, it’s always nice to dream.

Anyway, I’m hungry. Supper is Quiche Lorraine and it is cooking in the oven. I just hope that it’s not going to end up being an epic failure like yesterday’s Linguine Chicken Alfredo. (Update: The Quiche Lorraine dinner was awesome!)

My two major plans for the house interior have been pretty much thwarted. Furnishing the house with Danish Modern furniture? No go. Every time we came across a piece of Danish Modern furniture, Troy would say either it’s too big or plain ugly. Painting the door and window wood trims white? No go again. But I don’t really mind. I’ve come to a realization that all the wood is what gives the house character. Plus, we really hate painting. We found out about it the hard way. Oh, and I really didn’t want to have Troy’s big, ugly, monstrous shelves anywhere in the house, but look what’s standing by the back wall of the dining room. None other than the big, ugly, monstrous shelves! The only one of my plans that actually came together was the plan to have mismatch furniture in the living room because that’s how our living room is. A living room with matching furniture is just too grown-up for my liking.

I’ve accepted the fact that the house will never, ever look perfect like other people’s houses in home improvement magazines because (1) we’re not rich and (2) we have way too much crap in our possession. As long as the house feels like home to me instead of like someone else’s house, I’m happy. Hell, I’m happy to have a home at all since my old home is no longer. Home to me was the house I grew up with, with my mother in it. After my mother passed away, it just didn’t feel like home anymore. Now I have a new home. Home is this old house full of books, CDs, DVDs, videogames, and board games, and with Troy in it.

It may sound cliché, but home is indeed where the heart is.

Addendum: When I’m feeling homesick, it’s always for the home with my mother in it which always makes my homesickness feel worse than it should be because that home I’m longing for just doesn’t exist anymore. I’m really looking forward to being away and feeling homesick for this house we’re living in. (This might happen next month!)

I wish I could say that those flowers are from our garden, but sadly, they aren’t. We’ve done a lot of weeding on our front and back yards and Troy has mowed the yards a couple of times but that’s about all the work we’ve done to our garden. Partly because the gardening season is already over, but mostly because there are always so many things to do inside the house. We’ve been here almost a month but we still have so many boxes to unpack. It’s just that we moved from a one-bedroom apartment with two big closets and one small one to a three-bedroom house with three small closets, so storage is definitely an issue here. We just don’t know where to put our stuff! You wouldn’t believe the amount of crap we had managed to accumulate while living in such a small space.

Other than that, we love our house. The interior is still pretty much a work in progress but I think we’re doing a good job. The house already feels nice and homey. It is still messy, but like I said, it’s a work in progress. And we still haven’t had a couch. Troy just ordered one online last night but it won’t be here until next month. It’s the exact couch we’ve been planning on buying since before we moved in. It’s a sleeper sofa with some storage space underneath. The storage part is what sold us on it. God knows we need more storage. While we are couchless, we’ve been perusing our ratty old loveseat covered by a new slipcover that doesn’t really fit (do they ever?). But it’ll be out of the house in a month so it doesn’t really matter.

We’re planning on having friends over at our place to entertain the next couple of weekends, which should be fun. We very rarely had people over when we were still apartment-dwellers because we simply had no space to entertain more than two people at a time. Now we have a large deck and a big backyard to entertain friends and family. And a barbecue grill! We just need to make our house less messy and more presentable before the end of the week.

Well, I’ve got to go back to unpacking and such. I will eventually put up some before and after pictures from around the house to feed your curiosity. But please, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t hold your breath!

It’s been years since the last time I got any comment demanding me to update, and I got one today which made me feel all warm and fuzzy, so I just have to update. This one’s for you, Tia! :)

So, we’re taking possession of the house on Monday, which is only four days away. Already we’ve started figuring out ways of getting a mattress into the house without having to rent a U-Haul truck so that we could spend our first of many nights there right after we got the house keys. The current solution is to get one of those cheap IKEA spring mattresses just because they come roll-packed and hopefully easy to take home.

We’re going to have overnight guests the weekend after our big move-in weekend so I spent last night making a list of things to buy to make all three bedrooms sleepable for under $1,000. I think I did a pretty good job because I got Troy’s approval and we’re going to IKEA on Saturday morning to do some bedroom shopping. Yeah, I know. IKEA is not exactly the symbol of premium quality furniture but it’s all we can afford right now.

Last night I came to a realisation that there’s no way I’d be able to pick a paint colour for the living room until we got ourselves a couch. If we had unlimited budget, we could paint the living room any colour we want and then buy any furniture that goes with the wall colour regardless of the price. Since we’re on a tight budget, it’s the other way around. We’ll have to paint around the couch. There isn’t really a very wide selection of couches within our budget. I found one that I really loved that we could actually afford only to be told by the furniture store that the couch wouldn’t be available until August 21. Seriously, if it’s not available yet, why on earth do they have it listed on their website? If they really want to do it, they could at least put the date where it’ll become available. That would’ve saved me a big disappointment. Hopefully by Tuesday we would’ve found ourselves a couch because that’s the day I’m planning to start painting.

Troy packed around 90% of all the books we have on Sunday, which was a big accomplishment because the majority of our possessions comprises of books. We’re going to pack the rest as we go all through next week.

I’m going to miss Waterloo, but I will learn to love Stratford, my next hometown, where the winters are more than just a little snowy.

I miss Winter already.