Tricia's Musings

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



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I have dumb roses

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My roses and other garden plants must be quite dumb.

It’s getting colder and colder here in Toronto, yet my garden is still very much alive. Smart plants would have shut down and begun to go dormant by now …. but no, not my roses! Some of my other plants seems to be on the dumb side too.

Along with several other roses, my Compte de Chambord is still putting out lovely rose buds. Oh and they smell heavenly! Compte de Chambord has a beautiful old rose perfume scent and as I said, the roses and rose buds are still full of their lovely scent.

Compte De Chambord rose bud
Compte de Chambord rose bud

I took this photo last weekend. It was quite windy so I had to hold the rose stem while taking the picture, but the leaves and other plants near it were blowing in the wind, hence the interesting blurred effect in the background.

Even my Lavender has started to bloom again … I have no idea why. It’s not like I’m out there watering, amending soil or putting my secret sauce (Alfalfa Tea) on my plants. I’m not doing a thing to my garden .. yet it’s thriving.

Here’s a single Lavender bloom …

Lavender bloom
Lavender bloom

And here’s one of my Lavender plants, blooming (a little bit) and looking terribly healthy for this time of year.

Lavender blooming in October?
Healthy blooming Lavender plant - October

Is your garden asleep for the winter or is it still struggling to perform as if it were summer?





A perfect gift for someone recovering from surgery in the hospital?

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Chris was just talking to our friend J. She lives out of town with her husband, but in three weeks she’ll be in Toronto for open heart surgery! She’s had some heart problems for a while and it’s time to get them fixed before her problem gets worse.

When we talked to J’s husband earlier in the week we invited him to stay with us while his wife is in the hospital. He hadn’t even thought of where he might stay or even how much parking would cost if he spent most of the day in the hospital at his wife’s bedside.

We aren’t sure how long our friend will be in the hospital, but we do know she’ll be sedated and intubated for a few days after the surgery so that she can recover from the surgery better, so I expect she’ll be in the hospital for one to two weeks or longer. Can you imagine how much it would cost her husband to stay in a hotel and to park his car at the hospital on and off for two weeks? Or to drive back and forth from where they live (two hours from Toronto)? Yeah, so he’ll save a LOT of money if he stays with us!

Anyway … I know what being in the hospital is like. It’s noisy, it’s boring and if you aren’t feeling well it’s even worse. It’s nice to have friends and relatives drop in, but that can make you even more tired. So I was trying to think of something that we could get our friend so that she could pass the time in the hospital.

I just visited Buy.com to check out their weekly sale page, but I didn’t find anything that might be appropriate for someone recovering from surgery in the hospital. Then I had a great idea. Why not get her a portable DVD player? I was looking at the Philips DCP750 and it looks like it has all the features she’d need.

Now I just have to secretly find out if she has a portable DVD player and if she’d be allowed to use it while she’s in the hospital. I’m pretty sure that once she’s out of Intensive Care she’d probably be allowed to use it. It would certainly be a great way to pass the time and both she and her husband could spend time watching movies on the DVD player.

Does that sound like a good gift for someone spending a couple of weeks in the hospital? Any other ideas?

Our mortgage keeps getting lower!

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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!

We’re probably skipping Halloween this year

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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?

This neighborhood’s getting noisy!

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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.

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