This is by far the best (and addicting) video I've seen this week. Suggestively lewd geek humor is the best. I still can't get this song out of my head.

I've finally started The Time Traveler's Wife and while I'm only 100ish pages in so far it's lived up to the praise. I'm really enjoying it. It's been a while since I've read a book that's made me look so forward to the bus ride home so that I can continue reading.

This week I also went and saw District 9 which was also great. The plot wasn't anything like I thought it would be -- much more of a documentary than anything like the suspenseful, thriller sci-fi flicks I'm used to (though with the at times almost dizzying camera shaking from Cloverfield.) I liked the aliens; poor Christopher Johnson's drive and motivation to return home and save his people and his love for his son (adorable!) managed to make him seem so human. It was a very different and fresh kind of alien movie. I both hope and dread for a future sequel.

Someone should come with me to see both The Time Traveler's Wife movie (though I'll probably kick myself for going to see it after I've already immersed myself in the novel), as well as Julie & Julia, because Meryl Streep is just piles of win in anything she has a lead role in. Hilarity and awesomeness can only follow.

We finally sold our old tv! Or at least I hope we actually do. The woman who's buying it is driving in all the way over from Lloydminister so she must want it pretty bad. *Looks at clock* She needs to speed it up though or I'm selling it to the guy next in line. Once that giant monstrosity is finally out of our house we can finally buy living room furniture! *Joy* I'm also in need of some nice fake plants for around the house to bring some much-needed green inside, but not inevitably kill. Anyone know where I can find some nice ones at really cheap prices?

Oh god the poor flowers my Mom gave me out in the front of the house are dead already. Oh god oh god oh god. There must be a special little corner of hell reserved for awful people like me who kill flowers, surrounded forever by hellfire and brimstone and piles of dead pansies and tulips. D: *Crafts pots filled with little paper flowers in hopes that her mother won't notice.*

The very belated moving-in recap.

YAY NEW HOUSE! :B We have officially been living in our new home for one week~ Happy week-aversary, us! I love this place, and it already feels like home. *Snuggles down in her chair all cozy-like*

Right. The big move. To start with, it was surprisingly quick. With our convoy of happy helpers and a giant 14' U-Haul truck, we loaded all the vehicles, carted them to the new house, moved everything in, and were already relaxing and eating pizza out in the backyard in just two and half hours. Much love and thanks to our army of wonderful family and friends who came out and lent a hand. *Hearts you all*

The only hiccup in our otherwise smooth moving day was the discovery that our giant rear-projection 60-something inch television wouldn't fit down the bloody basement stairs. We made sure to measure the width of the staircase and door beforehand, but we completely overlooked the sheer height of the thing. =_=; The low, dropped ceiling in the stairwell was like "HAHAHAHA, EPIC FAIL." So in the end we abandoned the effort and resigned ourselves to the fact that we will have to invest in a new T.V. in a month or two, and until then are using our smaller bedroom television for the basement.

Our new neighbors seem nice, they even brought us homemade cake as we were moving in! :3 They're an older couple, though in fact it seems like a lot of older people live in our area, so it's made for a pretty quiet street so far. Everyone's lawns and gardens are all nicely taken care of and meticulously manicured -- I feel like I'm under pressure to make sure I have lush green lawns and extravagant gardens with lanterns and little garden gnomes. I'm not much of a gardening girl -- I have some nice pots with some flowers out front courtesy of my green-thumbed Mom though, does that count? *Desperately tries to not kill little flowers* *Sweatdrop*

We're more or less unpacked. There's still a couple boxes laying around in some corners and the upstairs living room is scattered with pictures and wall stuff that needs to be hung (as well as has a giant freaking T.V. sitting in it that I badly need to list on kijiji.com so we can get rid of it), but we're mostly done. I'm going to use this weekend to go check out the library that's right near us *excited* and take a gander in at the rec center across the road to see what they offer. I love that we still ended up close to a bus depot -- depending on how much time I have in the morning, I can make the 10 minute leisurely stroll to the transit center or just run out my door and wait at the stop right outside our crescent. My daily commute to work and back is a little longer now, but I don't really mind. (On the topic of the ETS, holy hannah is it hard track down bus passes in Edmonton. I thought all Shoppers Drugmart's sold them, but apparently not; I went to three different places before finally finding a 7/11 where I could buy one.)

Update to previous post: Toby is doing much better~ (I'm so glad he's finally back home. Extra thanks to the Glory Hole crew who took such good care of him for those four weeks before we moved.) The vet wasn't completely sure what caused him to get sick -- she didn't think it was a GI problem, and figures more it was just all of the stress in the past month, with the moving from our apartment to the Glory Hole then to our new house; and then having all of the people over at our house the other night so soon after moving him in. He seems fine now though, he's back to his old self, gorging himself on food and being hilariously silly. *Hugs*

He seems to really like his new room~ :3 He been binkying around and crawling all over his new sofa, and I'm going to try to build him a little window seat out of NIC panels this weekend so he can look outside. *Bunny joy*

Recently while I've been waiting at the bus stop to go home this week, among the usual suburban transit passengers I've come to recognize, there's this new woman with a young girl. The kid is probably around thirteen or so, and she must be being picked up each day from a swimming class at the YMCA or something because she smells so strongly of chlorine all of the time. Is it completely weird and creepy that I've come to actually look forward to this smelly haze of swimming pool chemicals that greets me at the end of each day? It's not as if chlorine is a particularly pleasing aroma, but I swear it's like this wonderful breath full of fresh air that breaks up all of the stifling heat and car fumes and grimy smell of downtown. I actually go out of my way to sidle my way closer to the pair of them or take a seat on the next bench over just so I can no doubt look completely stupid as I take giant, noisy inhales. I'm worried that this girl's mother/older sister/whatever is going to notice and think I'm a dirty pedophile or something.

I hate the downtown city area, I really do. Everything is ugly and concrete, way too crowded and noisy; there's not enough trees or grass or sky that you can see in between all of the freaking buildings. It makes me all that much more excited for the fact that in a week's time we're going to have our own green lawn and quiet crescent tucked out of the way. (I sound like an old fart and I don't care. You can take the girl out of suburbia, but you can't take suburbia out of the girl.)

Did I mention that OMG WE'RE DOWN TO A WEEK? *Squee!* I am so excited, but each day has begun dragging by so slowly and it's excruciating. We have a meeting with the lawyers on Friday and we still have like half of the apartment to pack still. D: This weekend Mason and I are getting down to some serious moving business -- watch your head for cardboard boxes and packing tape flying through the air.

Countdown until shiny exciting house possession: 8 (LOOK, WE'RE IN THE SINGLE DIGITS NOW!)

We bitch about how we need rain so badly; then tonight we go out to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the weather a sweaty twenty-eight degrees, and we come out of the theater afterward to the first torrential downpour and thunderstorm of the year. There's no casual strolling through that kind of rain, it's fucking cold. We ran our asses off way across the Cineplex Odeon's gargantuanly oversized parking lot in our shorts and me in my tissue-thin, didn't-bring-a-sweater-because-it-was-effing-hot cami with whipping wind and lightening spearing through the sky all around us like an epic thriller movie chase scene. Only not really. We'd need a Decepticon or two tearing up the asphalt at our heels or something.

Which brings me to Transformers 2. I don't know what kind of cookie crack all you negative-Nancy haters were eating, but you are obviously all crazy because this movie was awesome. Okay, well maybe not awesome in a mind-blowing storytelling or Oscar winning sort of way, but the mindless entertainment factor was a firm A.

I loved that T2 actually focused more on the robots finally and gave them a bit of character; and despite some people's opinions that the whole film was just one non-stop fight sequence, I thought that for a movie that was entirely based on giant transforming robot aliens who shoot things a lot, there was just the right amount of action time to be appropriate. Yes, we are sort of immediately thrust among a slew of entirely new Autobot and Decepticon characters that seem to appear out of no where, but I can understand why they sidestepped it all in favor of some quick introductory narration or else we would have been sitting for the first hour of the movie just watching a round table of "Hi, my name is" by every new Tom, Dick, and hot-pink painted crotch rocket. (Plus, they obviously needed all that extra time to squeeze in a few more much-needed shots of Megan Fox's breasts and her lips and her lounging provocatively across a motor bike. Don't lie -- you'd do her too.) Though to be entirely truthful, I could have done entirely without the pair of Autobot "twins" who frankly were both annoying with their overdone, "teenage white boys trying to be gangsta" shtick. XP

May I also say that Mr. and Mrs. Witwicky were once again hilarious and I love them to pieces, and that you can never, ever have enough of adorable Shia LaBeouf who was funny, geeky, and so cute that I want to bottle him up to store on my pantry shelf~ *Joygasm* I have to admit though, that despite not having any particular like or dislike either way for the character, I was surprised that Starscream didn't have way more screen time than he did. The extra after-credits scene from T1 seemed to be hinting at a set up for him to play a more central role in this sequel, and rightly, since from what I know of him in the original cartoon series he was always trying to take control of the Decepticons at every possible chance in Megatron's absence. Maybe that was the initial idea but was abandoned somewhere down the line in the script writing room? But yes, all in all, worth the price of admission in my book.

Tomorrow lays before me with another looming day filled with packing. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff you never realized you've actually accumulated over the years until you start packing it up in boxes and piling all together in an obscene, ever-growing mountain in the corner of your apartment. I'm glad we have an army of cohorts helping us move, or we'd be driving boxes back and forth for the next month.

Countdown until shiny exciting house possession: 12

Or at least a scale 3D model of it, courtesy of a wonderful shareware program called Sweet Home 3D that I found. It's really easy to use and OMGSOMUCHFUN. X3 I spent entirely too much time gleefully measuring out walls and sizing and rearranging furniture, though I really doubt that comes as a shock to anyone who knows me well at all.

Originally I was going install this fancy little Java applet that comes with the program that lets you view the virtual tour and spin around in the 3D model from your own website, but for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work so we're stuck with screenshots, ladies and gents.


Full model, two different angles, complete with lawn and driveway~! The program doesn't let you make multiple floors and stack them so I had to settle for just sitting the lower basement level beside the upstairs one.


The first floor. 1) Front entry way (stairs to basement are directly across from front door); 2) bunny room with small sofa and television (sofa and TV mostly for me, though maybe I can get Toby hooked on What Not to Wear); 3) spare room, probably will store golf clubs, laundry drying rack, and miscellaneous random what-not; 4) master bathroom; 5) master bedroom; 6) living room, mostly for display though I will play piano in there; 7) kitchen and dining room; 8) backyard deck; 9) enormous backyard complete with firepit! 10) double oversized garage.


The second floor. 1) Stairs; 2) main living room with sofas and television (lots of empty room still in this area, not sure what we're going to do with it yet); 3) furnace and freezer room; 4) second bathroom; 5) office; 6) storage room.

Getting everything insured is currently under way. We're going to try to set it for Shaw to go in the day before we move to transfer all of our cable/interwebs/phone lines over, and I'm still trying to track down an affordable cleaning service to come in to give the place a good scrub from top to bottom. While all that's going on, we're beginning to go through our current place to purge and clean.

Ugh, still more than month to go. D: It seems like such a long time, and yet I still have so much to do and it seems very stressful and busy. I think I've had more headaches in the past two weeks than I did all of last month. Can it just be squealy happy moving day now, please?

Countdown until shiny exciting house possession: 33

I'm not going to lie, I spent most of the evening stressing that the new house that we've grown so in love with was going to fall through when this afternoon during the house inspection, the nice man found something called vermiculite in our soon-to-be attic that could be ASBESTOS. SCARY, HEALTH-THREATENING, STUPIDLY-EXPENSIVE-TO-FIX ASBESTOS.

D:

Immediately after the inspection, we ran a sample of the stuff over to a lab tech to have it tested. There was a horrible, preemptive fake out when later in the evening we finally got the results back -- which were good -- but turned out to not be ours. We were accidentally sent someone else's results, so we had a brief five-minute celebratory dance only to have the horrible truth come crashing down on us and plunging us into another hour of nervous, anxious dread. Thankfully when the actual results did come back, it was also nothing but good news! X3

The rest of the inspection went really well. (Okay... well there was some tense moments where we thought that we'd accidentally lost the seller's cat when we left the front door open... *Sweatdrop*) There's a few areas in and around the house we'll need to patch up like drainage and a support beam outside for the roof awning, but they're all things we can do ourselves and won't cost that much. And that, ladies and gentlemen, along with our confirmed financing (finally... oh god what a stressful last two days) means our two closing conditions have been met and we are officially getting the house! La la la la laaa~

Gaah! I completely forgot to take any more pictures of the house while I was there today though! *Angst* I was too busy measuring rooms and worrying about deadly asbestos. Now I must start making to-scale grid diagrams of each room and laying out tiny paper furniture~ :B

Countdown until shiny exciting house possession: 42