Tricia's Musings

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



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A music filled weekend

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My husband, Chris, and I are having a very music oriented weekend.

It started earlier this evening. The music documentary “It Might Get Loud” with Jimmy Page, Jack Black and The Edge is on the Movie Network this evening and we taping it and watching it at the same time. It’s amazing! We both love all three of these masters of guitar.

I’m also taping Micheal Jackson’s “This is it”. We weren’t huge fans of Michael, but he was extremely talented and I think it will be interesting to see this last documentary of his.

Tomorrow we’ll be going to a Vintage Guitar Festival. I’m sure my husband will be drooling the whole time … even though most of his guitars are vintage pieces as well.

Then in the afternoon/ evening we’ll be going to some of the free or almost free events at the Toronto Jazz Festival.

You see what I mean … Music all weekend of one kind or another. Actually very different kinds of music really, but we enjoy it all.

Last weekend we went to the Beaches Rib Fest and they had live bands playing there too. We bought two full racks of ribs from two different vendors (and ate them from Saturday through to Monday), had a beer in the beer tent and watched a Funk band while we were there. It was fun.

On Sunday my husband is going out of town because his father is having an operation (gallbladder) on Monday so we also need to get some shopping done before he goes. I actually want to get out and take a look at laptops. The one I’m typing this post on it getting old and a little sluggish … so maybe I’ll take a peek and see what’s out there, maybe an Asus or something will fit the bill as a back up laptop.

I’ll bring my camera with me to the Vintage guitar and jazz festivals so expect a post or two with some pictures. Soon.

What are your plans for the weekend? Anything exciting?





Lots to do this weekend

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The weekend is just starting and I’m already tired.

I spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning the house – sweeping, vacuuming, mopping, windexing and so on. The house needed a good cleaning!

The rest of the weekend will be busy as well, but mostly outdoors. We have some gardening to do – mostly tidying the garden as in dead heading our many many roses and putting in some stakes because the roses are flopping over.

This weekend the Beach Rib Fest and Taste of Little Italy is on, and Luminato is still going on as well. We plan to try hitting all three events. Of course there’s also the Much Music awards on Sunday. I doubt we’ll go to that, but it would be kind of interesting to see it. I went a few years ago, but not recently.

Ok time to go watch a movie and put some cream on my eczema. I’m not sure why it’s flaring up but I want it gone.

What are you doing this weekend? Does your city or town have any interesting events going on this weekend?

The new neighbors are busy pounding and painting

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Our new neighbors haven’t moved in yet but they’re sure making a lot of noise!

I guess we first saw them about two weeks ago or so and since that time they’ve been to their new house only four or five times. It seems like they’re cleaning up the interior of the house and doing some painting before they move in.

I still have no idea when they might move in or what the heck they are doing in the virtually empty house that makes so much noise. We keep hearing hammering and pounding noises from the basement. The odd thing is that unless we missed it they haven’t brought in any supplies other than a few items that could easily be carried by hand … so we don’t know what they are up to basement wise … maybe they’re getting ready to make the basement into a spare room or a rec room. Yet .. no drywall or anything else like that has come in. Odd.

They’re here this evening doing something. It seems they found the little storage area that our old neighbor had under the front porch. A friend or relative of theirs was busy pulling everything out of the small storage area and piled it on their front lawn.

He then drove by the house three times with a van – once attempting to back in to the driveway. Finally on his last round he drove into the driveway front first. I was getting a little worried about his driving if he had to drive around so much to aim the van at the driveway. LOL

He’s piling all the stuff that they found in the small storage area into the van. I guess they’re going to throw most of it out, Hmmm maybe I should hall out some of my old fitness equipment and ask him to take it away for me?

We’ve tried to talk to the new neighbors a few times when we’ve seen them. So far they seem to be friendly enough – but not overly friendly. My husband is very friendly and talkative … I wonder if that’s put them off a bit?

The last time we saw them we brought up the idea of sharing the driveway. As in they’d get to use it for a month and then we’d use it the next month and so on. The guy said “you guys don’t drive you car very much do you?” and we said “no .. it parked most of the time”, Then he suggested that we just pull our car up as far as we could into the driveway and that way we both could use the driveway.

Uh … the driveway is only 9 or 10 feet wide. I’m not even sure we could pull our car into the driveway between the two houses without losing at least one side mirror … let alone, how would we get out of the car once it was parked between the houses? And if we could get out of the car the lane way would be totally blocked. It would make it really hard to water the front lawn and garden as we’d have to throw the hose over the car – probably scratching the cars finish.

I guess he thought that since our car isn’t that big and we don’t use it all that much that his idea might work, but I don’t think he thought it through. As I said I if we could get the car in the driveway between the houses I don’t think we’d be able to get out of the car or if we could we’d only be able to open the car door a few inches … I imagine one of the doors would be all scraped after a while.

Oh well, I guess we’ll work something out with them at some point.

Do you share a driveway with your neighbors? If so, how do you work out who gets to use it and when?

Product Review Etiquette

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Do you do product reviews on your website or blog? Do you receive products to test and keep? I do the occasional review, more in the past than I do lately.

Most of the time when I do an actual product review it’s an item that I bought myself and I’m just writing about my experiences with the product. One example of this would be the post I wrote just after I bought a Shark Steam Blaster (not that happy with it overall) or my discussions about our new front load washer and dryer (still extremely pleased).

Occasionally I’m contacted by a company and I’m given a product to test and then later write an opinion piece. I haven’t had many of those and I certainly don’t accept all offers for example I probably wouldn’t accept a clinicalliex review . I generally only accept products that I can actually get some use out of and that I will use regularly. In the past I’ve received a Nokia smart phone from a marketing company, bath soaps and skin care products, coffee and a few other food items or coupons for free and discounted food and beverage products, a photograph turned into a canvas, and a special window tint that I used on our very bright south facing kitchen window. There’s probably a few other products but those are the ones that I can remember at this moment.

One reason why I’m writing this post today is 1. that I’d like to do more reviews (a couple a month maybe) and 2. I just received a product that I’m going to review on my gardening blog.

In the past all the products that I’ve received to try out and review have been completely free and the one that I received early today was supposed to be free, however I was extremely surprised when the delivery person told me I had to pay the duty. It was a product shipped from the US to my home in Canada and I guess the company didn’t cover the duty and taxes.

I’m a little miffed, but when I think about it I’m getting a product that costs over $100 for free so it wouldn’t kill me to pay the almost $13 duty and taxes charge. Still, I think the company should have warned me that I’d have to pay these charges. I’ll be contacting the person who arranged the review to tell him about the Duty and taxes I had to pay. It’s possible that he either didn’t know about these extra charges or that it didn’t occur to him that my being in other country might incur these kinds of extra charges.

I’ll chalk it up as a lesson learned. the next time a company contacts me and offers me a product for free I’ll ask if there will be any shipping charges or duty.

Anyway, I’ll be reviewing the item that I just received on my gardening blog sometime next week. It’s a Black and Decker 24 V cordless Trimmer Edger. Definitely something that we’ll get some use out of. Oh, and I’ll be coming up with a giveaway too. The company said that I could give away a trimmer edger to one of my readers, so I guess I’d better start thinking about an interesting challenge for my giveaway. Any ideas?

If you do product reviews have you ever experienced something like this? Say a shipping charge, Duty or taxes?

Do you think it’s fair to have the blogger pay these extra charges or do you think the company sending the product should cover all charges?

Met the new neighbors

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Our brand new neighbors came to visit their new house earlier today. I still have no idea when they’re planning to move in, but they were here for several hours today cleaning up the house.

They pulled out at least two rugs and what looks like some flimsy wall partitions and placed them in the backyard. There’s also a few garbage bags with what looks like broken 2 x 2’s and cheap furniture. Most of that is probably stuff the last bad renters left in the house … probably in the basement because their 14 year old daughter was living down there with her boyfriend (yep).

I guess my husband went outside to meet them sometime in the morning while I was still in bed trying to sleep. He took them in our backyard and feed them some of our fresh strawberries (picked fresh off the plants). I complained a bit about that when he told me because I haven’t even had a strawberry yet. LOL He gives them away to people whenever they visit our yard and I almost never had more than one or two of our own home grown strawberries each year.

Later when I was up we went and knocked on their door to officially welcome them to the neighborhood. My husband had gone out to a local bakery and bought $20 worth of pastries and desserts for them. We also put a few cold soft drinks in a bag in case they were thirsty working in their new hot house.

So I only met the man. I think his wife was out when we arrived at their door. He was dressed in one of those head to toe coveralls that you can buy for painting and he looked hot. He seemed nice enough. My husband who had met and talked with both of them before they were really into their clean up and were still relatively fresh found them to be quite nice.

My husband was actually quite nervous that we’d end up with bad neighbors seeing as the last two renters were so terrible. However we figured someone with the money to buy a house in this neighborhood (no house are cheap in Toronto) would probably be ok.

I don’t envy them all the work they’re going to have to do to fix up the house. When we first bought our house we started doing major renovations. I remember working about 18 hours a day continuously for weeks to get everything down .. talk about a natural fat burner ! I didn’t need to lose any weight at the time we first got our house but with all that work on our renovations I somehow managed to lose about 40 lb in a month .. oh and my Crohn’s was acting up at the time too so that didn’t help. I was skeletal by the time we were ready to move in. LOL

We still don’t know if our new neighbors are going to do a lot of renovations. I think they just want to clean up their new home, maybe paint and then move in. Apparently they gave up their apartment about two months ago and have been living with his parents while they waited to get possession of their new house. I know if I was living with my in-laws I’d want to move fast. LOL

Hopefully the new neighbors turn out to be good people. At least we made an effort to be friendly and welcome them to the neighborhood. Everyone is fairly friendly here on our street and in the general area, it takes some getting used to if you come from an area where you really don’t know your neighbors – like an apartment building, but hopefully they’ll turn out to be nice too.

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