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

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Our mortgage keeps getting lower!

October 30, 2008 by Tricia

When Chris and I first bought our house in 2001 we decided to take out a variable interest rate mortgage. I have to say that it’s worked out well for us!

When we first got our house interest rates were at the lowest that they’d been in years, perhaps decades and we locked in for 6 months at something like 2% below prime and then after that it was guaranteed to be half a percent below prime.

Our luck held, probably due to poor economic times throughout this decade and the prime interest rate has stayed relatively low.

Now with the possible economic recession in the US and our own Canadian economy starting to go down the Bank of Canada has lowered the prime interest rate at least three times in the last few weeks. That of course has resulted in our mortgage company lowering our interest rate as well. We’ve received three letters from our Mortgage company in the last two weeks and with each letter our bi-weekly mortgage payments have dropped.

In all our mortgage payments have dropped about $50 a month. That’s not a huge decrease, but it will help.

Have you been experiencing the same thing? Has your mortgage company notified you that your mortgage payments will decrease slightly in the near future? Our rate drop doesn’t take effect until December and unless I’m way off I think the prime rate might drop again!





Filed Under: Canada, Finance, Home and Lifestyle, Money, Toronto Tagged With: Bank_of_Canada, interest_rate_dropping, mortgage, mortgage_payment, mortgage_rates, Prime_interest, Prime_rate, variable_interest

We’re probably skipping Halloween this year

October 30, 2008 by Tricia

I still haven’t decided if we’ll be celebrating Halloween at our home tomorrow evening. Most years we decorate the front of the house with Halloween figures and some of that fake spider web stuff, but we didn’t do that this year.

Why? Well .. we’ve never had a dog at Halloween and Midnight barks and jumps around like crazy whenever anyone comes to our porch (mailman) or knocks on the door so I can just imagine how she’ll react when little kids all dressed in their cute Halloween costumes start coming to the door in droves.

I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be scared by the kids in costume, she loves kids, but I’ll bet she’d scare them with her barking and jumping. Plus it will be very tiring for us telling her to stop barking for hours on end and holding on to her collar every time we open the door!

So yeah … we’re thinking of just not participating in Halloween this year. If we don’t, I’ll lock our outside screen door so kids can’t come into the enclosed porch and I’ll close our decorative heavy curtains (that I rarely close) so the house will appear dark.

I really enjoy participating in Halloween and or holding Halloween parties, but with Midnight only being a little over a year old and rather hyper I think it will be easier to just skip Halloween this year.

Do you participate in Halloween every year – handing out candy to the kids or have you skipped it on occasion for some reason?

Filed Under: Culture, Entertainment, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Our Puppy, Toronto Tagged With: barking, candies, candy, costumes, curtains, decorate, dog, excited, Halloween, jumping, porch, scaring_kids, skippng_halloween

This neighborhood’s getting noisy!

October 29, 2008 by Tricia

Earlier today I was startled by a really loud sound. I thought that there had been an accident in front of the house, but when I looked outside I couldn’t see anything unusual. It wasn’t until I took the dog outside to do her business that I noticed a huge bulldozer parked on the side street near our house. I guess a material handling company must have dropped it off earlier – probably when I heard the loud noise.

I’ll be that it’s going to be really noisy around here tomorrow when that big machine starts doing whatever it’s here to do. I hope they aren’t going to dig up the sidewalks again. The last two times they’ve done that (in the 7 years we’ve lived here!) it was for upgrades to the water pipe and gas pipe systems.

Yesterday afternoon I heard a really loud noise too. I happened just as I was looking outside, noticing how windy it was and that one of our neighbors garbage cans was on the sidewalk ready to roll out into the road if it got any windier and Boom … there was a loud crash and a rolling thunder type noise in our driveway.

It turned out to have been caused by our neighbors large recycling container falling over in the wind and rolling halfway down the driveway. Man those things can make some noise when they fall over!

The driveway is like a wind tunnel in the winter. I sure hope that that noise isn’t going to be a daily occurrence!

Have you been startled by any loud noises in your neighborhood lately? If you are having wind like we are having (and we had snow flurries yesterday and today too! Sob!) I’ll bet you’ve heard some odd noises.

Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, The Neighborhood, Toronto Tagged With: Bang, blew_over, boom, bulldozer, Crash, digging, falling, loud_noise, Neighborhood, noisy, recycling_container, startled, wind, windy

Some of my favorite summer flowers

October 26, 2008 by Tricia

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I was just saying on my gardening blog that it’s about time we started doing some Autumn gardening tasks, like cutting down the sunflowers in the front boulevard.

Yup … it’s time to put the garden to bed for the winter … actually it’s well past time, we should have started doing some of these Fall tasks at least two weeks ago.

Some of my flowers are still blooming, but most of the plants are beginning to lose their leaves and either die down or are becoming dormant as it gets cooler.

Some of the flowers I’ll miss is my Butterfly Weed:

milkweed Aslepias tuberosa

Such delicate bright colored flowers. This one really attracts Monarch butterflies to my garden.

Another flower that I’ll miss is the Balloon Flower. I’m sure the bumble bees will miss them too:

beeballoonflower2

I have several clumps of Balloon flowers growing in the back and front garden beds in white, pink and blue. I love their balloon like buds and bright cheery flowers.

What flowers will you miss as the winter season approaches?

Filed Under: Gardening, Green Thumb Sunday, Home and Lifestyle, Photography, Recreation, Toronto, Tricia's Garden Tagged With: backyard, balloon_flower, Beebalm, bright, buds, cheery, flower, front_yard, garden_beds, Green_Thumb_Sunday, GTS, Summer, summer_flowers

Doctors creating movies and cellphones dialing on their own

October 23, 2008 by Tricia

Chris was home from work again today. His back is a lot better today, thankfully, so he’ll be returning to work tomorrow. Finally I’ll have some peace around here, even if it’s only for one day.

The hospital has a policy that if you are off work for three days in a row you can’t return unless you have a doctors note, so earlier today Chris made a call to our family doctors office and he managed to get an early morning appointment. As it happens I was supposed to have an appointment next week, just to get a shot of a medication that I have to have every two or three months, so I tagged along and horned in on his appointment so I could get my needle.

If I hadn’t gone to the doctors today with Chris I would have had to take the subway to the office next week and I hate taking the subway these days. It takes me over an hour to get there and well … if you’ve ever been on a subway you know they are crowded, smell and you often encounter some pretty strange people! I should tell you some of my subway stories sometime.

I think that we finally figured out what’s been distracting our doctor the last two times we’ve seen her. I was starting to dread my appointments with her because she’d forget things we talked about the last time I’d seen her and just wasn’t her cheery self. I actually started to think that I might need to get a new family doctor! Well it seems that she’s been busy with a huge project and I’m assuming that was the cause of her distracted behavior! She made a movie!

She wrote and produced a movie that’s going to be called “A Touch of Grey”. I guess they are in post production now, but she talked about how they might submit the film to Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival.

I had no idea that she was interested in film making. Usually when Chris or I visit with her we talk about her family, her sons band, music and things like that, but it sounds like she’s been interested in acting and writing for some time. It will be interesting to see what happens with her movie when it comes out.

Ha … one funny thing happened while I was in the doctors office. I was sitting there with my purse in my lap and I leaned on it. Do you know what happens when you have an unlocked phone in your purse? It starts dialing people! LOL

I didn’t realize that the phone was on, let alone unlocked until I started hearing “Hello … hello” from coming from my purse! That was weird. It just so happens that I was in the crowded waiting room at the time too. Boy did my face turn red.

Have you ever had your cell phone start dialing people on it’s own and possibly create an embarrassing position for you?

Filed Under: Health Fitness and Beauty, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Life with Chris, Toronto Tagged With: cellphone, dialing, doctors_note, embarassing, family_doctor, funny, injection, needle, sore_back, strange_people, subway, talking_purse, unlocked

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