So We Are All Aware

23 Jan

Just so everyone is aware the cat had a very tiring day.

First he had to walk to his food dish from the bedroom where he had been curled up on what I pretend is my bed (since ya know, I paid for it) but in reality is his bed because he is a blanket and space hog.

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Then he had to move from one spot in the apartment to another at various times throughout the day so he could make sure to nap in each of his favourite spots at least once in a 24 hour period. Wouldn’t want his dolphin blanket to think he loved it less than his spot in the back of my closet. 😉

By the end he was so exhausted his only recourse was to collapse on my legs and have one last glorious sleep session…

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…before ya know, curling up in my arms and purring his way back to unconsciousness.

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Poor guy. Don’t know how he manages to survive such hard and stressful days. He’s an inspiration to me!

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Surgery Here I Come

22 Jan

Yesterday I had a consultation at Lasik MD to see if my eyeballs qualified for laser eye surgery.

So yay, they do!

Now begins the journey towards lasers doin their thang to my eyes…or I suppose its more like I am beginning Stage 2 of the journey since I’d like to think all the research I did prior to my consultation counts as part of the journey. What can I say, I need to validate all the time I spent searching and reading and learning since it appears most people don’t really do all that much research…they just kinda assume the peeps at the laser surgery places will tell them everything and they don’t need to take any responsibility for what will be happening to their eyes. What’s with that?

Anywaaaaays…

In preparation for the consultation I had to not wear my contacts for minimum 24 hours prior to my appointment, I had to take sunglasses with me, the box for my current contacts and, hmm, that’s about it. Oh! I had to arrange for a ride home because my eyes would be blurry and light sensitive and I wouldn’t be able to drive.

Lucky for me I have a friend who was willing to drive me. 🙂

They never did bother to look at the box for my current contacts, I’m not sure if that is because they knew they would get that info from my eye doc when they sent in the request for medical records form (had to fill that out when I arrived) or because they forgot, or because they don’t reeeeeally need it. Whatever the reason I don’t think it is that big of a deal.

After filling out some paperwork I went in to a room with a row of 3 eye testing machines. I am not sure what the first machine did but I am fairly certain machines 2 and 3 were being used to partially blind me lol I’m joking! Machines 2 and 3 had my eyes being exposed to super bright lights, one in a striped pattern which made me think of those turning circle things that are used to try to hypnotize people…

hypnotise image

Many pictures were take of my eyes from those machines when they were doing their thing. I think they were taking pics of the back of my eyeballs but I really don’t know. Whatever they were, none of them hurt or felt even slightly invasive, they are nothing worse than what you might have done when at your regular eye doc appointment.

Then I was escorted back to the waiting room but before I could sit a second person came out and called me in to her room of machines. There I did the read-the-letters tests multiple times, learned my left eye is dominant, had more bright lights shone in my eyes, had my eyeballs dilated and was then let loose to the waiting room again. There was a 10-15 minute wait for the eye dilating drops to fully take effect so I sat there with a hot chocolate wishing I could see my phone but unable to because ya know, my eyes couldn’t focus. sigh.

Fun fact! Most everyone has a dominant eye. Most people’s dominant eye matches their dominant hand, so if you are right handed your right eye will be dominant. I am the anomaly. I am right handed but my left eye is dominant. The person checking my eyes who tested that said it could be that I was supposed to be left handed but was raised right handed, what is this, the dark ages? That is so not it! Or I could be partially ambidextrous, which I figure is the closer of the two answers. I do some stuff with my left hand that you’d think I’d do with my right since I’m right handed but it feels more natural to use my left hand, shrug. Sometimes I will purposefully do something with my left hand because I read it is good for our brain health to use both hands for things, so I try to use my left hand for say, putting on face moisturizer because theoretically it will help my brain. Is it true? Who knows! Does it make a difference in my day to do something left handed? Nope. So might as well do it. 🙂

Ok, back to testing!

I got called in to room number 3 by person number 3. He did even more eye tests, two of which I found highly interesting. To test the thickness of my cornea he jabbed, ok fine, tapped, my eyeball with two different um…things? Tools! I guess I should say tools lol Before doing this he put numbing drops in my eyes so I didn’t feel it, and I didn’t. It was so strange though, knowing someone was touching my eye with a metal thing-a-ma-jig and not being able to feel it. Oh he also did this thing with, get this, another bright light! lol where I could see the back of my eye in my vision field. Man I love weird stuff like that. Imagine those pictures you have seen of a dessert with cracks in the ground that are thin and spread all over the place, got it? That is what it looked like, just not that colour lol Don’t worry! It is normal! It isn’t because my eye is super dry or anything, it is just that I could see the blood vessels at the back of the eye…seriously, so cool! Why didn’t I become an eye doc? They apparently get to look at interesting things every day.

back of eye

Not my eyeball! 

So yeah, after guy number 3 finished with his tests he took a look at the results he got plus the results from the other tests I went through and it was determined I am a candidate for laser eye surgery.

After all that I damn well better be! lol 😉

He went over the two types of surgery there are, Lasik or PRK. I had already done a huuuuuge amount of research on both types so what he was telling me I already knew, although I did ask for some clarification of things. Then I pulled out my notebook and asked all the questions I had written down because I knew I would forget when in the office.

Poor guy. I don’t think he knew what hit him.

He said he’d never been asked so many questions and made a comment about how for once he wasn’t just repeating all the same things. Looks like I made him earn his paycheque that day! lol

I was asking about the technology, the procedure, the post op care, all of it, and was happy with his answers.

In the end, because I qualified for both types of surgery, it was up to me to pick which one I wanted and even though it has the longer more painful recovery I chose PRK because all the research I did leads me to believe that is the better option.

After my convo with person number 3 I went back to the waiting room, thank god they have such comfy couches lol and eventually got called in by person number 4 who is there to discuss surgery dates and pre-op stuff and payment.

By the end of the approx 2 hours I was there I’d had one delish cookie, one ok cup of hot chocolate and walked out of there with a surgery date and the mixed feelings of excitement and nervousness…all in all a productive day.

Then I spent the rest of the day doing nothing because my eyes hurt, well, more like ached, and they were still dilated so everything seemed very bright…

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These are my eyes! Look at the pupil size, you’d think I was high or something lol

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The 52 Week Savings Challenge

16 Jan

A friend at work told me about the 52 Week Savings Challenge. She wasn’t really making sense so I googled and learned immediately what it is and that some people love it and some people hate it. Of course. *rolls eyes*

Basically it has you putting money aside every week and by the end of the year you will have saved $1378. Pretty crazy huh?

Whatever week of the year it is, that is how much money you put aside. So the first week of the year you put $1 in to savings, the second week of the year you put $2 in to saving, all the way up to the 52nd week of the year where you put $52 in to savings.

From my understanding, the weekly contributions are supposed to help teach you to always put money away, on a regular basis, and by gradually increasing the amount it is supposed to be less painful because it is just a dollar more than the week prior. Kind of like 30 Day Squat challenges where you think no way in hell can you do 85 squats but when you are doing your squats you realize it is only 5 more squats than you did yesterday and if you can do 80 than hell yeah you can do 85.

The challenge intrigued me so I started reading people’s blog posts about it.

Like I said earlier, some people love it, they think it is a great way to save money. Other people had quite the list of reasons to not like it…

  1. in the month of December, when you are already spending a crap tonne of money you have to manage to put aside $202
  2. most people will hit a point in the challenge where the numbers are too big to be putting that kind of money aside every week
  3. you can get the same amount saved by the end of the year if you put aside $26.50 a week, which would be easier to manage budget wise (my mom pointed this one out)
  4. most people will at some point have something unexpected happen that will throw their budget for a bit of a loop making it hard if not impossible to put aside the weekly amount
  5. the challenge says to put the money in a jar or piggy bank so you can watch it grow, it is good motivation to keep going, but this means you don’t earn any interest
  6. some people said you should do it in reverse, make the large payments in the first weeks of the year, so that you get the more painful months over with first

There were other reasons people didn’t like it but those were the ones that stuck with me. They do make a point, but the challenge still intrigued me and I kinda want to give it a try, but heaven forbid I do something exactly how it is laid out lol no no no, I have tweaked it to work better for me, cause why not? 😛

First I printed off one of the many printables you can find online to track the money you put aside. I picked one I liked the look of because then I would find it enjoyable to look at it, rather than finding the paper boring.

52 weeks saving challenge

I found this one at http://www.100directions.com

Then I made the decision that instead of following the order the challenge puts forth, so $1 in week one, $2 dollars in week two and so forth I am going to play it more like bingo. Where, what amount of money I put aside each week is decided based on how my finances are doing that week. So if I’m having a particularly poor week I’ll put in one of the lower amounts, if I am having an ok week I’ll put in one of the higher amounts. This means each month will have a combo of larger deposits and smaller deposits, making it easier for me to manage financially. Oh and I’m not putting it all in a piggy bank. Some goes in a piggy bank (I have an adorable one) and some gets transferred to my savings account. I’ll make the decision based on if I have the cash on hand or not, which means more often than not I will be transferring money to my savings account because I almost never have cash on me, I prefer plastic lol  This will give me the chance to watch the money grow in the piggy bank but also have some of the money earning me interest.

To keep track of where the money went (piggy’s tummy or my TFSA) I am writing a little note at the side of each deposit that I have completed with either P.B. or TFSA, fairly straight forward, shrug.

I don’t know if it will work, it would probably be better if I waited until after April to attempt this because that is when my car payments are finally done and I’ll have more money at my disposal but I’ll try and see how it goes. There is no rule saying I can’t re-start it later in the year if I have to stop at some point and have my money saved up in time for say, summer vacation (of 2017) rather than Christmas of 2016.

Ahhh the joys of making things work for you rather than conforming to the pre-existing template. 😀

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The Unwritten List

15 Jan

I have a random list of things to get done, it ranges from refinishing a table to organizing various things in my apartment, to getting better at dealing with my finances, to learning to knit, to building furniture, to getting my suv looked at…and that is just what I can think of off the top of my head…

Told ya it was random! lol

Every time I complete one of these tasks or errands or whatever you want to call them I immediately think of something else that has to get done so my list, which is very un-safely being stored in my brain, never gets any smaller, if anything it keeps growing.

Its not that I mind having things to do, but sometimes when I’m chilling and watching tv or reading or whatever I’m doing to kill time I think of all these things I need to get done and can’t seem to pick one to work on at that moment in time so I work on none of them. Yet one more reason the list is not getting any smaller lol

One thing I did accomplish was building my new pantry and it is so purdy!

I can’t seem to take a good picture of it so I nabbed the picture from the Canadian Tire website…

pantry

I wish it was more black than brown-black but I got it on a wicked sale, it holds a lot of stuff and hey, a girl can’t afford to be picky, not when she has as little money as I do lol

I had a smaller pantry that I built when I moved in to this place, it was less than half the size of this one and while I thought it would be big enough to compensate for the lack of cupboard space in my kitchen it was not. Maybe if I had some decent counter space it might be ok but I don’t have that either, shrug. My kitchen always looks like a cluttered mess, even when I have just cleaned it and I hate that! Soooooo when I saw this on sale, for a really good sale price, I indulged myself. 🙂

I’m that weird person who actually really likes building furniture. Bought something at Ikea? If you offer to feed me, or hell, give me a glass of wine, I will totally build whatever you bought for you, and have fun doing it! I’m an oddball like that lol This sucker was harder though, which caught me off guard.

For starters, apparently you need two people to build it, which I scoffed at until I had to lift the entire thing from laying flat on the floor to standing in one smooth motion so as not to overly stress any one part and break it. That was…interesting lol 😉

I had a little trouble with the tracks for the drawer, they were not labelled and nowhere in the pathetic excuse of an instruction booklet did it specify which track goes on which piece so I put them on without paying enough attention and the drawer wouldn’t go in. sigh. I was going to just leave it without the drawer in the middle, I kinda liked how it looked, but in the end ended up swapping the two tracks that were inside the drawer space around and boom! Problem solved.

The only thing I didn’t do was attach it to the wall because I am not capable of that lol I don’t own power tools and I am not strong enough to attach the pantry to the wall using my little phillips screw driver sooooo I’ve left it unattached and am just going to have to hope that when we have another earthquake it stays where it is. I mean, it is pretty heavy now that it has so much stuff in it, and I made sure to put heavy stuff on the bottom shelf so maybe it’ll stay put…and if not well I’ll just have to hope I’m not standing in front of it if the big one hits and it falls. Though, if the big one hits I’m pretty sure I’ll have bigger problems than my pantry falling…like potentially being homeless…or sinkholes…or not having anything even slightly related to an emergency kit and thereby dying from lack of preparedness…not that I’ve thought about it or anything lol

The building of the pantry gave me some war wounds, always fun…

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I took the pic a couple of days after I built the pantry so the scratches are not as red as they initially were. People at work thought the cat tried to kill me lol which don’t get me wrong, he does try, just not on that particular night lol 😉

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Good and Bad

4 Jan

Don’t you hate when you get some bad news and then some good news so close together that you can’t figure out which one to think about?

I mean sure you want to think about the good news, cause who wouldn’t rather be thinking about good things but if you are like me you sometimes ruminate on the bad thing that just happened to you and switching to thinking about anything else can be challenging.

Maybe that’s just me though?

The Bad News:

This afternoon I had a follow up eye appointment to see how well I had improved since an incident I experienced right before I went home for Christmas.

Quick-ish recap!

I stopped being able to see properly. Even when wearing my contacts everything was blurry and I was unable to focus. Anything bright hurt to look at and any type of screen became torture for my eyeballs. The eye doc made me wear my glasses, ugh, and put me on eye drops, and told me to come back after my trip for a follow-up.

This afternoon I had my post-trip follow-up and was informed that my eyes have max 6 months left of being able to wear contact lenses before the irritation to my corneas becomes dangerous.

Six months.

wtf?!

So I am supposed to wear my glasses when I can, the doc actually said she medically advises me to wear only my glasses but as a friend she understands that isn’t totally possible right now because of them being so old etc.

She also highly recommends laser surgery. As in, super highly, she wrote me a referral for a consultation to go see if I qualify and to get a cost for the procedure so I know how much money I will have to magically make appear. She estimates for both my eyes I’m looking at about $2900.

Cause yeah, sure, I totally have that kind of money just lying around.

my eye

See those eyes? They are decorative, NOT functional! lol

The Good News:

I’m walking back to my car after that gem piece of news when I check my phone and I have a voicemail from my agent. He had submitted me for a commercial and going off of head shots and previous work they want to book me so I am filming a commercial Jan 12th!

OMG yay! 😀

Normally when I book something I get so excited that basically becomes the only thing I think about, and don’t get me wrong, I am super excited! But I keep going back to thinking about how I only have 6 months left for contact usage for my eyeballs and glasses just aren’t an option for me as a full-time thing which means I am relying heavily on being a good candidate for laser eye surgery but even if I am a good candidate I have no idea how the hell I am supposed to find the money for it, within 6 months.

Anybody want to buy one of my kidneys? Or my hair? Or some other part of me? I wouldn’t recommend buying one of my eyeballs since they are pretty much useless. 😉

I know there are financing options so I can spread the payments over 3 years, or maybe she said not have to pay for 3 years, I can’t remember which is it…but I am still paying off my car so no way anybody would say yes to letting me finance the cost of surgery. My car payments will be done end of April so if my eyes can wait until say, end of May, maaaaybe I can swing financing, I don’t really know though, I’m not good at money stuff like this…

I am going to call my insurance company once I’ve had the consult and know how much it will for sure cost to see if they will cover any of the expense but I dunno, of all the people I know who have had laser surgery only one had an insurance policy that actually paid part of the surgery, the other companies said no.

Arg the stress!

Ok, you know what, I just have to focus on the good stuff, the booking of a commercial that doesn’t pay all that much but will be good exposure and good to put on my resume. Maybe it will lead to something that will pay well and then I’ll be able to afford the surgery!

Positive thinking people! Positive. Thinking.

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January Fitness Challenge

3 Jan

You may or may not recall that in December I made up a 20 day fitness challenge, 20 Workouts in 20 Days…

I decided to make a new fitness challenge for January, to help keep us all motivated, well, ok, mostly to try to get me motivated lol I got super lazy over the holidays, and combining super lazy with eating ridiculous amounts of food, lets just say I am not so comfy in my body right now. Ugh.

I decided to make it a bit more do-able of a challenge, since most people I told the December one to thought it wasn’t achievable so instead of another 20 Workouts in 20 Days (which personally I thought was catchy lol) it is…

20 Workouts in 30 Days!

Ok, so not as catchy, but maybe not as scary for people?

Jan Fitness Challenge 2016

The basic rules are the same:

(1) a workout consists of 30 minutes or more of activity

(2) a workout can be any physical activity (ex. 30 mins at the gym, 30 mins cleaning your house, 30 mins packing away Christmas decorations…or whatever else you can think of, as long as it is 30 minutes)

(3) if you miss a day you can make it up another day – so, if you miss your planned 30 minute walk due to life getting in the way you can just add that 30 minutes on to a workout another day. This one isn’t quite as necessary since this time there are 30 days to complete the 20 workouts but towards the end people might be running out of days and I don’t want them to quit because they think they failed.

Thaaaaaat is pretty much it!

I am going to make some sort of cute tracker to put on my fridge to count the workouts, I like to be able to visually track my workouts, I find it helps motivate me on lazy days lol I have also found in the past a good way to keep track is to write on my calendar what exercise I did each day and then highlight it so when I glance at the calendar I can see quite clearly which days I worked out. The more highlighted words the better! It’s sort of like giving yourself a gold star sticker for accomplishing something and weirdly enough it works. Hey! Don’t judge! It’s just how I roll! lol 😉 You do whatever works for you k?

 

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A New Year

2 Jan

We are a little over 24 hours in to 2016…how are things going for you so far? Is it everything you were hoping it would be? 😉

I know it is hard to tell this early in to the New Year but maybe you have an inkling of how things might go…or at least a hope!

It is kind of funny,  I always think of the New Year as a chance to wipe the slate clean, start fresh, ya know? But this year I am still dealing with a bunch of stuff that happened at the tail end of 2015 and it doesn’t feel like a new year has started, that I’m at the beginning of a new chapter in the Book of Me. I feel like I am still cleaning up after 2015.

It kinda sucks…

Not the happiest New Years post is it? sigh

It isn’t that every thing is bad or anything, I’m just in a bit of a down spot I guess. It’ll get better, promise!

I wish I had been able to post the past couple of weeks, due to technical difficulties I wasn’t able to easily get online or write anything so I thought I’d do a catch up post Dec 31st but that didn’t happen…obviously lol

I went home for Christmas, got to hang with the family and friends, got to enjoy the snow and remind my weather wimpy body what true winter weather is like lol I had a great visit! Which is one of the reasons I wish I’d been able to post while away, it is always so much more fun to write about things the same day they happened!

I took a bunch of pictures, though not as many as normal, they are currently uploading to DropBox as I type…I don’t think they will be uploaded in time for this post, seems I took over 100 pics! Eek! But I’ll do a post another day showing you some of what I got up to. 🙂

Mostly my trip consisted of taking advantage of the measly 5% sales tax Alberta has (lucky bastards! lol) and hanging with people. In fact, a happy benefit to my being where there was only 5% sales tax aaaaaand great Christmas sales is that I am writing this post on a brand new oh so lovely laptop! wOOt! Which I’m hoping means I will no longer be having tech problems that keep me from posting. *crossing fingers*

The laptop came loaded with Windows 10, which is going to take me a bit of getting used to lol I’ve spent the last little bit installing Office and anti-virus and logging in to various websites so this laptop can remember my log-in deets for all the various sites I visit. I didn’t get the old laptop backed up and then have it all dumped on this one so I am starting fresh, which is oddly unsettling lol

2016 may not be starting off quite as I envisioned but I’m sure it will be great! Awesome things will happen…some sucky things will happen…but then other even more awesome things will happen to balance the scales and by the end of 2016 I’m sure I will have forgotten how I felt on the first day of this year. 🙂

2016

 

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Vanity, Thy Name Is…

20 Dec

This past Thursday even though I was wearing my contacts I stopped being able to see properly, it was…unpleasant…

I thought the contacts must need replacing, no biggie, so that night I threw them out and put a fresh pair in my contact case so they could marinate in contact solution over night.

Friday I put them on when getting ready for my day and thought they were ok. When I got to work and really started having to focus on things and ya know, read stuff and function in a productive manner I realized I couldn’t see properly. Anything that was on a screen was super blurry and hurt my eyes and trying to read anything on a piece of paper was near impossible. Even when I held the paper close to my eyes the words weren’t any clearer, just all kinds of blurry. I started testing my eyes and noticed I couldn’t see as far in to the distance as I usually could and that in general my vision was getting worse.

Not cool.

I mean, I’m fairly blind, but at least with my contacts I can see. All of a sudden having my contacts on but not being able to see was disconcerting.

Luckily there is an eye doctor in the shopping centre across the street from where I work and they were still open so I called and asked if there was any way to get an emergency appointment the next day. I explained what was going on and the receptionist said I could come in at 12:45pm, the doc would shorten her lunch and fit me in before her already scheduled first appointment after her regular lunch time. Nice huh?

Unfortunately for me I was scheduled to work until 1pm so I said I had to wait until the next day when I could speak to my manager and find out if I could leave early. She said no worries just call the next day to let them know.

My manager rocks, I told her what was happening and asked to leave early, she was all “of course!” and away I went.

The doctor is awesome! I will soooo be keeping her as my regular eye doc. She is my age, hilarious, and friendly / chatty while also being super efficient. She listened to me when I described what was going on, knew immediately what was happening, did an eye exam with my contacts on, then with them off, and badda bing badda boom! Solution to problem found!

It is a sucky solution, sigh, but I guess I shouldn’t be so picky. Something or other in my eyes was swollen, or inflamed, or something like that, and my contacts were irritating that issue which is why my eyes weren’t able to focus properly. Her solution was to prescribe me eye drops and tell me to wear my glasses for the next couple days.

Ugh. Glasses. Me in glasses. In public.

NoooOOOooooo!

I hate how I look in glasses. Plus, I bought my glasses in 2007. 2007! Can you say out of date much? Sigh. I know most people with glasses replace them every year or two but I only wear mine for about an hour at night right before going to bed and an hour (if that!) in the morning when I get up…actually, in the morning it is more like 10 minutes max. So why replace them when nobody sees them and I hardly wear them? I keep them safe in a case so they are in good condition but the lenses are an old prescription and the frame style is out of date.

Aaaaaaand this would be where my vanity comes in to play lol I don’t want to wear them because I don’t like how I look in glasses and the frames are old. Plus I miss having peripheral vision, and glasses give me headaches, and blah blah blah. Mostly I don’t like them for pure vanity reasons lol 😛

But if I want my eyes to get better I have to wear them so today I not only wore them all day but I was out in public in them, at work! Where people I know saw me! All. Day.

I didn’t like it. It felt so strange having them on my face. When I had to walk through the rain I had to deal with water drops on the lenses, I had to move my head more to see things instead of looking out the corner of my eye or just glancing upwards without moving my head (I am very blind so if I am not looking through the lens I see nothing but blurry random blobs), I had to deal with the headache they cause me, the comments I kept getting, just all of it, I had to deal with all of it. How the hell do people deal with these things on their faces all the time?!

Contacts people! Wear contacts!

I can’t wait for tomorrow to find out if I can go back to wearing my contacts. Man I hope I can go back to my contacts. Well, not myyyy contacts because she wants me to switch brands, but to contacts in general. *crossing fingers*

hate glasses

Random tidbits from the visit:

Apparently I am so blind that if the doc had to test my vision without lenses (even the ones they put in front of you when they go “which is better, one, or two”) she would have to test me by standing in front of me and asking how many fingers she is holding up because the letters on the wall can’t get large enough for me to even realize they are there.

When she was looking at my eyes through some machine I don’t know the name of she blurted out “wow, your eyes are really bad! how have you not had laser surgery yet?!” to which I replied it costs too much and she said costs have gone down and for my eyes, with the latest lasers it would cost under $3000…umm…as if that makes it sound affordable? ha! But now of course I am thinking about it so in January I think I will contact my benefits peeps and see if laser surgery is covered for me. A friend of mine, his coverage paid for most of his laser surgery this past summer so maaaaaaybe mine will be covered, or partially covered…that would be so nice!

Did you know if your eye visit is an emergency visit like mine was you pay nothing? I mean, it is Canada, so you barely pay anything anyways lol but the entire cost of the visit was billed to healthcare, I didn’t have to pay a dime for it. Oh, and my drops are the expensive kind so after benefits paid their part I had to pay $4 and change for them. I love having benefits, *happy sigh*

 

Christmas Brunch

13 Dec

Every year my work holds a huuuuuge Christmas Brunch. We have so many residents now there were three brunch seatings, a 9:30am, 11:30am and 1:30pm.

I look forward to this day all month! I’d say all year but lets be honest, I’m not really thinking about a Christmas brunch in the middle of summer, that’d just be weird lol 😛

We had around 400 people come through the brunch today, which is ridiculous if you know the size of the space and the amount of staff we have. But we are a team of awesome and rocked the brunch like nobodies business.

Ok yeah, I am bragging but whatev, it is a long, busy, hard, day and we not only handled it we did great at it. The people I work with are awesome. 🙂

Pretty much my entire day was spent dealing with brunch related work stuff, not related directly to the food, which is a good thing because oh wow I can be clumsy lol More the organizing and seating and directing of people and tracking everyone so I knew every resident was accounted for and every guest counted so we don’t screw up the charges and answering all the questions and blah blah blah.

Oh, and the hugs. There were countless hugs from residents, and warm wishes exchanged, and love, there was so much love in that building today it was beautiful to watch.

Seeing someone surrounded by their family, watching a resident’s face light up as they see their great-grandchild, listening to family members exchange stories and catching up. People taking an hour and a half out of a random Sunday to turn off their phones and spend time with their loved ones and focus on family, and being connected to each other.

It is something people should do more often and its such a pleasure to be there when it does happen. 🙂

The only part that kinda sucks is that breakfast (for me) was at 7am and I didn’t get to eat again until a bit after 3:30pm. That is a loooooong stretch of time! By the time we ate my stomach had left the feeling hungry stage and was back at not feeling hungry, which was unfortunate. I loaded up my plate, mostly with veggies lol, in the hopes my stomach would wake up once I started eating but it didn’t really so I was left feeling oh-so-full and a tad gross. I hate when that happens. But look, look how good the food looked!

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Okay so not the best picture, I am not skilled at plating my food so it looks pretty but hey, it tasted good and really, that is all that matters…to me anyways!

There is some smoked salmon with capers and cream cheese, turkey with gravy, roasted potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, golden beets (which are a fave of mine), red beets, zucchini and prawns. There were other food items, like eggs benedict, salmon with some sort of sauce, roast beef, mashed potatoes with corn, various salads, various types of bread and buns…there might have been more stuff but that is all I can remember right now, I think I am in a bit of a food coma lol

There was also a dessert buffet which I didn’t think to take a picture of until it had been almost picked clean, this is the only image I have of it…

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There were various pies, cheesecakes, tarts, bread pudding with rum sauce, cream puffs, fruitcake, cookies, fresh fruit, creme brule, mince tarts, cheese…I’m missing some stuff but it is a lot to remember!

From 10am until the end of the last seating we had a piano player sharing her talents which is always nice and of course Santa Claus appeared for each seating, no child can be left behind! lol I was too busy to remember to take pictures of either of those so you’ll just have to trust me that Santa and the piano player were top notch. 🙂

The only other thing I took a picture of was the ice sculpture but I waited too long and the poor guy was fairly melted, as you can tell by the size of his head…

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So yeah, that was my Sunday. Basically working my butt off, then enjoying food with my co-workers, then going home to digest and sleeeeeeeep! 🙂

Hope your Sunday was just as awesome!

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The Sweater Experience

12 Dec

For Christmas I am flying back home, which I am very excited about! However I am not flying home alone. Nope. Not this year. This year I am bringing this lovely fella with me. 🙂

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That is Striker reminding me he is more important than the book I was reading by laying down on top of it lol

The thing is, I am from Alberta and it is coooooold in Alberta! They get real winter as opposed to the rainy not all that cold weather I get here. The poor little guy does not appreciate the drop in temperature he feels when we step out of the airport at night. He flew home with me once before and he was so quiet during our travels people didn’t even realize I had a cat with me…until we stepped out of the airport to get a cab and then he became quite vocal!

This year I thought I would make things easier on him and I bought him a sweater. Yes, yes I have become that person who bought an animal clothes. I know I should be ashamed but oh man, the experience of getting him dressed in the sweater was so amusing (to me, not him) that the sweater was worth every penny just for the laughs I had.

He was cuddling on my lap, innocent as to what was about to happen to him. I grabbed the sweater, leaned in as if for a hug and boom! got that sucker over his head and around his neck all in one easy move. Well, sort of easy move, there maaaay have been a tad bit of wiggling and dodging but I was faster lol

Turns out I made a slight sizing error and bought the sweater in too small of a size, which is unfortunate because it is a striped pattern and the combo of stripes, and tightness of fabric, makes him look a tad, umm…husky? rotund? thick around the middle? any and all of those apply…which kind of makes the whole thing funnier 😛

The poor guy, he did that thing cats do oh-so-well where, as soon as the sweater was on, he did a full on, dramatic, body collapse. Just poof! One second he is ok, the next he is collapsed on my lap, unable to function because horror or horrors, he has a sweater on!

I found the cat’s kryptonite.

I tried getting him to stand but as soon as I removed my hands he magically became unable to bear weight on his paws and collapsed again.

Unfortunately for him he was on my lap when I put the sweater on him so every time he collapsed he collapsed on to me, meaning he couldn’t get away from the evil person who was inflicting this torture on him. He did however refuse to look at me…

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I eventually got him to turn his head a bit…this was the nicest of all the looks he gave me…

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As you can see the tag is still on the sweater so I will be returning it for a larger size. Striker probably wishes I would burn it and send it back to the hell it came from but sadly (for him) that won’t be happening.

 

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