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Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

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Trapped in the dark

April 16, 2007 by Tricia

Unbelievable! Our power went out!

I was sitting there in total darkness. Ok, well I was, but I went and found some candles so I guess I was sitting in candle light as I waited for the power to return.

The house was so silent it was eerie. Chris went to bed early because he has to wake up at 5 a.m. to get ready for work. He did wake up when the power first went off though. You see it flickered a few times before failing and this triggered my radio alarm clock and made it blast music for a few seconds. I guess he might have also woken up because his c-pap machine that he must wear each night for his sleep apnea would have stopped working too. No more air forcefully being blasted into his nose. I’m sure he didn’t mind that it was off. LOL

I was in the middle of writing a big article for an advertiser. I had actually spoken with the advertiser via email on and off for a few days and we had decided that my article of his site going up on a Monday might be best because I sometimes have a peak in site traffic on Mondays. Hmmm I hate it when things I promise don’t work out – especially if they are due to circumstances that I have no control over. Luckily the power came back on after an hour and I’m busy working on the post again. I did lose what I had written. That was a drag!

All I wanted to do was finish writing and posting my article and then I was going to go to bed so that I would actually get up at a decent time for a change. Now, I’m sitting here trying to re-write what I had written and hoping that it comes out as good as it did the first time round. So much for actually going to bed early for a change.

The power was on just up the street. The street lights and traffic lights were working in that area, but here it was only darkness. The power failure was just from the corner of my part of the street and eastward. I’m sure the hospital, if was effected had to go on back up generator power. I used to hate when the power would go out at the hospital. All the doors would automatically shut, and the fans that circulated air would stop and it would get so warm.

That’s one nice thing about living so close to a hospital. We are on the same power grid as the hospital so when the power goes out in the area or in the city like the big blackout of 2003, they work to restore power to this area first. Well, I mean any areas with hospitals or areas that offer vital services to the public would be first on the list of course. Luckily the power doesn’t go out here very often.

Naturally I wasn’t able to access the Internet either. Our wireless router was off so our Internet connection was down. I wrote the bulk of this post, and have just now changed the tense from present to past, in my email program while using my laptop. Worried the whole time that my laptop battery wouldn’t last the length of the power failure. If the laptops battery had failed I wouldn’t have gotten anything done.

I’m so happy the power came back on … I just hope it stays on at least until I’m done the article that I promised I’d have already posted by now.





Filed Under: Blogging, Home and Lifestyle, Recreation, The Neighborhood, Toronto, Web and Technology Tagged With: article, busy, candle light, candles, Hospital, house, Internet, laptop, Music, post, power failure, sitting in the dark, write, Writing

Spruce up a wall with a Wallhog

April 15, 2007 by Tricia

Have you guys heard of walhogs yet? Wallhogs are basically posters, vinyl or canvas prints that you place on your wall.

create_wall.jpg Wallhogs can be created from your own digital photos or images to create wall posters, large reusable vinyl wall hangings, and canvas prints in a variety sizes with the largest being up to 7 feet tall. If you don’t have great images of your own to use, you can browse through the wallhog image catalogue to chose a photo or image that suits your needs.

Imagine that? Think of how thrilled your child would be to have a photo or image of one of their favorite things, scenes or people on their wall? If you wanted to, you could probably cover one whole wall or the majority of a wall with one of the vinyl wallhogs. I know if I was still a kid I’d just love that.

When I told my husband about wallhogs we both immediately thought of using one in our soon to be refinished basement. I could take a photo of our garden, perhaps a view from the house looking out at the whole garden and we could put a wallhog on the basement wall that would be closest to our garden. Every time we’d go into the basement and look towards that wall it would be just like looking out into our garden. No more dingy dark basement for us. It would be alive with the feeling that our garden gives us when we are sitting in it.

Businesses could use wallhogs to display life size images of their products, logos or perhaps even corporate events that they are proud to have taken part in.

There are simply so many ways that home owners and businesses could use wallhogs it’ s unbelievable.

wall_poster.jpg

Posters can be created in sizes from 24″ tall and 4 feet wide, or as large as 7 feet by 4.5 feet. Posters have a high gloss finish and just like any of the wallhog products, they are usually created quickly and shipped out within 72 hours of the time that you placed your order.

Just like posters, vinyl images can be created in very large sizes. They can be made in sizes from 2 to 7 feet in height, by 4.5 feet wide. That’s huge! You could certainly cover all, or a large portion of a wall with one of the vinyl wallhogs. Vinyl images are shipped out within three days of your order and like all of the wallhog products there is no minimum order. You can order just one, or as many as your heart desires.

The vinyl images are reusable too. You can install one on a wall very easily and if for some reason you’d like to take it down you can store it and then reuse it where ever you please.

wall.jpg

As you can see from this image they can remove the background from the photo in order to highlight the focus of the picture. Background removal is free of charge.

The third type of wallhog that you can create is a canvas print. Canvas prints can be create in sizes from 11 x 14 inches up to as much as 24″ by 36″. The inks and canvas material used are of high quality. Canvas images orders have a fast turn around and are often shipped on the same day.

As you can see wallhogs are quite versatile and they are simple to order too. To create a wallhog you just need to decide whether you’d like a poster, vinyl image or canvas print, pick an image from their catalogue or upload your own image, and then follow the easy steps to create a wallhog of the exact size and type that you’d like.

The prices are reasonable too. Going over the site the lowest price I saw was 19.99 for a 2 foot by 4 foot poster, and the highest priced item that I saw was the very large 84″ tall X 52″ vinyl image for $79.99. Don’t you think that’s reasonable for the versatility, size and quality that you’d get when ordering a wallhog?

If you are a photographer or artist you can upload your own images and sell them in the wallhog catalogue. Photographers and artists who sell their images in the wallhog catalogue are also offered a discount price on wallhogs of their own so that they can sell them to their customers through the wallhog reseller program.

I’ve posted some photos on my sites that some people have left comments on stating “that could be a wallhog”. So, I’ve been thinking of placing some of my images in the wallhog catalogue too. Why not? If people like my photos enough to leave comments suggesting that they’d make great wallhogs why not allow them to use them for that purpose and make a little bit of money too?

If you think that wallhogs are a great idea why don’t you go on over to the Wallhog.com website and see what you can create with your images. Browse through their catalogue while you’re there too as there is a wide assortment of images and I’m sure you’d find something that you’d enjoy using.

Wallhogs they have kindly offered to host a contest by supplying a free wallhog to the contest winner. The wallhog would be of the winners choice. If they’d approve my idea I’d love to hold a contest where my readers could submit landscape, cityscape, wildlife and nature photos. I’d hold the contest and allow my site visitors to vote on the images. The best 10 images would then go through a secondary voting process to pick the grand prize winner. If the people at wallhogs approve this contest idea I’ll let you know and we’ll have ourselves some fun.

If you’d be interested in participating in this type of contest please leave a comment so that the people from Wallhogs can see that the contest would be a great idea to host.

Filed Under: Decor, Home and Lifestyle, Photography, Services, Shopping Tagged With: Art, artists, canvas, Contest, create canvas prints, create posters, create prints, Digital, digital images, digital photos, free wallhog, image, photo contest, photograph, photographers, poster, print, sell photos, sell photos on wallhogs, vinyl print, Wallhog, wallhogs, wallhogs.com

Waiting for Spring

April 15, 2007 by Tricia

Join Green Thumb Sunday

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trees at beach

This is a January picture of Toronto’s famous beach boardwalk. The tree’s bare, leafless and waiting for spring. The boardwalk – sunny on a beautiful winter day with a few brave souls daring to come out and explore the beauty of the lake on this cool day.

If anything, that bright winter day was probably nicer than today – a Spring day, is supposed to be. It will be cold and rainy. We might even get some snow.

Much of Europe is unusually warm, and so is western Canada. Why isn’t it warming up here? I want to see my spring flowers bloom.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Filed Under: Canada, Green Thumb Sunday, Photography, Toronto Tagged With: beach, boardwalk, bright day, Canada, cold weather, leafless tree, photo, photos, rain, snow, spring, spring flowers, sunny day, Toronto, winter

The whirrrrrrring sound meant trouble

April 14, 2007 by Tricia

This morning my husband turned on my computer. He often does this if he’s up before me and he hears me moving around upstairs. My usual routine is to get up, get myself a coffee and sit at the desktop computer and check my email as I wake up.

My routine was severely altered this morning!

Chris turned my computer on and said “Oh oh …” and you know anything that starts with Oh oh is not going to be good. “your computers making a sound that I just know you’re not going to like” he said. I called downstairs “What do you mean? I can’t hear it from here. What is it doing?”

He didn’t really say, he just kept telling me that I wasn’t going to be happy with the noise. Then he said I think it’s the fan.

As I came down the stairs I could hear the noise. It was a high pitched whirrrrrring noise. He was right. I didn’t like that sound at all.

Chris took the side panel off the computer and figured that it was the fan on the power supply that was making the noise.

Ok, that’s not too bad. We’ll take the computer to Best Buy or Future Shop and get a new power supply for it. We had to replace a power supply for our old computer a few years ago after a power failure zapped it. It had been easy to find the right replacement and the computer was only down for a few hours. No problem.

Chris went off with the computer and I got on the laptop to check my email.

Chris came back a couple of hours later. Much later than I thought he’d be. It turns out that the power supply in our 2003 HP Media center computer is a very special one, much smaller than most and only made by one company that supplies HP directly. Arghhh.

We got on the laptop and started to see if we could find HP parts dealers in the Toronto area, or if the HP parts store carried the power supply that we needed. HP telephone support is only open Monday to Friday so we couldn’t talk with anyone and I couldn’t find the model number on their power supply parts page. None of the computer supply stores we called could get the part either.

What a drag! Chris also told me that one of the people he talked with at Best Buy or Future shop had said the power supply would cost about $140 bucks. Much more expensive than the last power supply that we had to buy for our old old computer. I started to think, gee we could get a whole new computer for about $500 at the most. What should we do?

We decided to check for the part on eBay and we got lucky and found it. So now I’ve made my first ever eBay purchase ($36 with shipping!) and I hope that the part we got really is the correct one. It’s got the right part number but the photo’s looked a little different than what our own power supply looks like. I guess we’ll see in about a week when it arrives.

So I guess I’ll be using only my laptop for the next week or so. It’s unfortunately that all my saved emails are on my desktop, and all the info about money I’ve been making and so on. I guess we could plug in the faulty computer and move some of that info to this computer. The desktop still works but we’re pretty sure that that sound means failure is imminent. Plus, if the fan isn’t working properly the computer could over heat and get damaged. That would be much worse than not having access to some of my stored info for a few days, so I think we’ll just leave it turned off for now.

Filed Under: Shopping, Supplies, Web and Technology Tagged With: broken, Canada, Chris, company, computer, computer fan, email, husband, laptop, media, Money, moving, shipping, special, support, Toronto, work

Great gift ideas at Dennisis Gifts Shop

April 14, 2007 by Tricia

34185.jpg

If you enjoy shopping, or browsing sites with lovely items that you might treat yourself with or that would make fantastic gifts for someone you love then you should stop in and visit Dennisis Gifts Shop. The site has very nice products at reasonable prices.

You’ll find everything at Dennisis Gifts Shop from inspirational items, aromatherapy products, bath and body accessories, kitchen accessories, collectible statues, plates and figurines, and home and garden decor. If you are purchasing an item as a present for someone they also have gift cards.

The site is very user friendly with attractive and popular items listed in the top left menu, and just below this you’ll find the stores directory which lists the items that are sold at the gift shop by category. Each category page lists items with short descriptions, a small picture and it’s price. Click on the image to see a larger photo of the item that you’re interested in, and an in depth description of the product. You can easily order the product from it’s description page.

While you’re visiting the site don’t forget to take a look at their top selling products.

Right now they have a special. If you purchase any two items you’ll get 20% off your order. Just type in the promo code 103 when you reach the checkout and you’ll get your discount.

If you enjoy Dennisis Gifts Shop you might be interested in purchasing a copy of their biannual catalogs too.

Filed Under: Decor, Fashion, Gifts, Shopping Tagged With: Aromatherapy products, Bath and Body accessories, Collectible Statues. Home and Garden Decor, Dennisis Gifts Shop, Figurines, Gift Cards, Gift ideas, Gifts, Inspirational Items, Kitchen accessories, Plates, spa

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