Tricia's Musings

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



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Are you going to the Taste of the Danforth?

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I can’t believe that I almost forgot what weekend was coming up. It’s the Taste of the Danforth this weekend! My local Toronto festival. Yeah!

I love going to this food and music festival. It seems to get bigger every year.

There’s always music, games and rides for the kids. Then there’s several band stand areas where international musicians – mostly Greek, but not all, play. There’s also dancing on or at the band stands, beer and wine tents, bubble machines blowing bubbles in the air, food from all the various restaurants along the “GreekTown” stretch of the Danforth. So that means food wise there’s Greek food, Indian food, Spanish food, some North American food, Asian food and I suppose a few other kinds that I can’t remember right now, but those are the main kinds of foods and all of them will be offered for fairly low prices. Oh and they’ll be tasty!

I’m definitely going Friday evening! Anyone else going to the Taste of the Danforth this year?





Still trying to cut expenses

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I’m still working on cutting expenses. I don’t know how successful I’m being but I’m working on it. These things do take time. Well they can take time unless you have absolutely no money and then you absolutely have to start cutting expenses – right?

The trouble is I think I’ve always been pretty good at cutting corners and cutting expenses so I don’t know how much further I can go other than cutting out the very few luxuries that I allow myself. Luxuries to me are having cable tv and paying for things like the movie channel. If I couldn’t do this I wouldn’t … but since I’ve been home sick on medical leave (for a long time), the days are long and sometimes kind of lonely … TV does make good company as sad as I am to admit that.

Someone had suggested that I use Hulu or Netflix but I’m in Canada and well .. being in Canada I can’t use Hulu and Netflix Canada isn’t really up to par. I was checking it out and a lot of the TV shows it carries don’t have current seasons and the movies look older. So that idea doesn’t work. I wish there was a good Canadian option.

I’ve even been thinking of changing my life insurance company … so I’m going to compare annuity rates and see if I can find a better rate.

Let’s see, other things I’m doing to cut expenses – as usual are making home cooked meals, growing some of my own vegetables and fruits, my husband takes his lunch to work, we don’t drive our car very often, we walk a lot … Any other ideas?

Finding creative ways to save money

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I’m trying to find creative ways to cut our bills yet still pretty much maintain the lifestyle that we’ve grown accustomed to in the last while.

By this I mean not just cooking all our meals at home instead of getting the occasional take out or delivery, but making sure those home cooked meals are high quality meals. Believe me, I’m a good cook I always get lots of compliments when I cook for others.

I also want to see about cutting back on things like our cable bill. We have an HDTV and I’d like to look into antennas for tv’s particularly HDTV’s. I’ve heard they can pull the signal for a lot of free HDTV stations so it might be worth looking into and that would definitely cut the cost of our cable bill if it works.

I’m trying to think of other ways to cut costs – yet not feel the pinch too much. Any ideas?

Time to do some renovations!

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I think we’re going to start working on our living room renovations again this weekend. We were going strong on the reno for about two weeks but in the last week or so we haven’t done any reno work at all. We’ve been busy with other matters.

This weekend we’ll be putting in the baseboards and doing other molding work. Chris wants to rent a nail gun and compressor so that we can get the work done faster so I’m looking up places that we can rent from. So far I’m trying to decide between places like Home Depot and an industrial supply rental company. I guess we’ll just see which store has the equipment we need in the morning and go from there.

Something tells me it’s going to be a busy weekend!

I need a real vacation

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I would love to go on a real holiday. I haven’t been on a true vacation for oh … years! I just realized that yesterday when I was talking to someone about my sister and we were talking about “future plans” and I said something about how my sister and I always talk about taking a vacation together and we never do. I mean – we’ve been talking about going on a cruise or a vacation for about 15 years! I think it’s about time we do!

I’ve been so stressed in the last couple of weeks and just in the last few days my stomach is killing me. Maybe it’s the stress or maybe it’s the Crohn’s rearing it’s ugly head. I don’t know .. either way, if it settles down I was thinking that maybe towards the end of August I might try to get away for a week. I was just looking at a site that lists panama city beach house rentals and I was thinking that if my husband and I and maybe my sister and her boyfriend or maybe another couple went on holiday together renting out a beach house would be a wonderful idea. It would be a holiday that wouldn’t cost all that much, yet we’d be on or near the beach and in a touristy area with lots of things to do. I think it would be perfect.

I just have to talk my husband and sister in to taking some time off to go on a trip. My husband doesn’t really like to travel so maybe he won’t go .. we’ll see .. Hey someone has to take care of the dog anyway!

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