Tricia's Musings

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



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It’s been a busy holiday season for us!

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I’d like to take a moment to wish all of my regular readers and visitors a belated Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I hope that you’ve been having a great time with friends and family.

We had a great Christmas. In fact, I guess getting ready for the holiday and then having house guests are the main reason why I haven’t written a new post for a while. Sorry!


Our Christmas celebrations started on December 20th! My husbands brother drove down or is it up? from Chicago with his two teenage sons. Chris and I were supposed to go to his parents house (in Brantford (an hour and a half away)) for an early family Christmas dinner, but wouldn’t you know it … our furnace started making a high pitched whining sound late Saturday night!

We quickly called our furnace repair call center services line to see if someone could come right away to fix our furnace. I mean, it was so loud we, at first, had thought our crazy neighbors had a circular saw running outside in the driveway between our houses! So we’d turned off the furnace as 1. it didn’t sound healthy, and 2. who could live with that god awful sound!

Did you know that furnace repair people won’t come out to your house on an emergency basis unless your furnace has totally stopped working? Yeah … so .. we scheduled an appointment and as it turned out I stayed home to await the furnace repairman while Chris went to his parents house for Christmas dinner. Doesn’t it just figure that my mother in law actually cooked a turkey for the first time in years and I missed it?

It also turned out that the furnace repair guy canceled on us and didn’t come until Monday! Luckily the whining sound the furnace was making was only really loud the first time it occurred and our furnace kept on running until it was repaired. (it was a bearing problem).

Chris returned home last Sunday night with his brother and our nephews (and a little care package for me full of turkey dinner, yum). Our house guests stayed for two days. Once they cleared out we started getting ready for Christmas day. My sister and her boyfriend came over to join us for Christmas.

I’m sure many of you went through the same things I did as you got ready for Christmas. By this I mean the house got a major cleaning and so did the good china and silverware that hadn’t been used for a year or so! LOL Then I had to start getting the food ready.

I decided to brine a turkey this year. It was soooooo good! It had a mildly salty taste but oh it was so very very moist! Brined turkey is the best!

I brined our turkey in an extra large ziploc bag placed inside a cooler. The brine mix consisted of Kosher salt, brown sugar, and Rosemary, Thyme and Sage spices. Unfortunately the bag started leaking in the night – luckily I checked on the turkey at 2:30 am in the morning and struggled to get it into another bag and made more brine to soak it in!

I spent most of Christmas day preparing for the big meal. I cooked candied sweet potatoes and carrots, green peas, mashed potatoes with garlic, stuffing with garlic, onion and walnuts, a pumpkin pie and of course the brined turkey. The meal was delicious and we had a great time with my sister and her boyfriend!

If anyone would like my recipe for brined turkey just let me know. I’ll make a post with the recipe if there’s enough interest.

After a busy week of cooking, cleaning and visiting with family Chris and I have spent the weekend recovering! No boxing day shopping for us! I would have loved to gone out and bought some items at great prices (ie a washing machine maybe) but we just can’t afford it right now. BTW boxing day in Canada is like Black Friday for Americans- it’s the day with the best sales!

Now I’m gearing up for more house guests. My brother from Vancouver and his wife are flying in on Tuesday evening for my nieces wedding on the 30th and they’ll be here until the 31st.

We’re looking forward to our last guests of the holiday season, but also, by the time it’s over I’m sure we’re going to be in need of a few days rest as we’ll have been going for two weeks straight with visitors and holiday prep and goings on.

I hope that you had a great holiday! What are your plans for New Years?





My arm is aching!

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Yesterday I somehow managed to get myself stuck with two needles! Ow! No I didn’t do it to myself (remember I’m a nurse) it was a doctor that gave me two shots.

Again – Owwww! Doctors generally don’t give shots as good as nurses do. yes I know I’m biased, but for the most part, IMO, it’s true.

I had an appointment with my pain doctor yesterday afternoon and after we’d discussed how I’d been feeling over the last month and a half or so I asked her if I could possibly get the seasonal flu shot from her.

The doctor went out of the room to get the shot and after she’d injected my left arm with the seasonal flu shot she jabbed a needle into my right arm with the H1N1 vaccine … the shot that I’d specifically told her I didn’t want to get! ARghhhh!

I guess she misheard me?

Anyway, so far so good – no terrible reactions to the shots, well, other than having sore arms. The right arm where I got the H1N1 shot hurts a lot. The doctor pierced a blood vessel when she gave me the shot so it’s bruised, but there’s a very large lump below the bruise. I guess my arm is reacting to the vaccine. I also have a headache – not a really bad one, maybe a medium pain one – bad enough that I know it’s there and bad enough that the Tylenol that I’ve been taking to make it go away isn’t working. I’m also feeling tired and a little bit nauseated.

Hopefully I feel better tomorrow. I decided not to do my shape boxing workout today because my right arm is so sore that it hurts to lift it to shoulder level or higher so I figured jabbing my arms around shape boxing wouldn’t be a good idea.

Anyone else get flu shots this year? And or mistakenly get one you didn’t want?

The awful neighbor saga continues

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The saga with the bad renter neighbors continues! I have a feeling that we’re stuck with them for a few more months, although I’m hoping that they’ll mess up and not pay their rent again this month and end up getting kicked out.

Yeah, I wish!

On Thursday night we had the pleasure of watching them break into their cable box. I guess their cable and or their internet must be cut off. Hey … they were stealing our internet bandwidth in November and that hinted that they’d been cut off. So now they’ve attached a cable wire to the cable box and ran it along the side of the house and directly into the dining room window, like wise, they added another wire and ran that through a basement window.

I’d guess that the house is freezing, but they’ve had most of their windows open to some degree since they moved in in mid September (bet they aren’t going to pay the heating bill either!) so the introduction of cable wires through the windows won’t make them any colder.

I’m just hoping they’ll get caught! I want to tell the cable company myself, but my husband doesn’t want me to. He just wants us to stay away from these terrible people as we don’t know what they’ll do if we tick them off. Yes, they are THAT scary.

They’ve pretty much already ruined our Christmas as we don’t want to leave the house empty as we’re fairly sure they’ll break in, so I might stay home while Chris goes to his parents for Christmas dinner. Nice eh?

The strange thing is that I think they don’t think we notice these odd things they do … like prying open a cable box at night in the freezing cold under the glow of our security light no less. The guy is always lying to us about things … like he says he’s working (nice job since he’s home all the time or at the drug dealer down the street!). Oh and he told us that they were out looking at new homes, that they’re thinking of buying one of those manufactured home yet their young daughter told us they were too poor to even eat salad?

Anyway … as you can see, these people get to me and the home owners are no help. When we called them last week over the parking problem they didn’t want to hear anything we had to say. So we’re just waiting to see how much damage the renters do to the house and how much debt they leave the home owners when they run out on them. Karma sucks – at least it will for them!

Toronto and it’s fickle weather

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Wow, winter hit Toronto with a vengeance last week! We had our first snow storm and temps fell to -20 Celsius (-4 F) or lower with the windchill. The only one in our household who didn’t seem to mind going outside was our Labrador Retriever Midnight. LOL She seems to love the cold … well for a while anyway. She can definitely stay out in it longer than we can.

I was seriously wishing by Thursday that I had a free vacation to one of those spa like jamaica hotels or to some other tropical area.

It did warm up over the weekend. In fact we got some rain yesterday and as a result most of the snow is gone. That’s Toronto for you, freezing one week and tolerably warm the next.

How’s the weather in your area? Did you get snow last week too? Or are you one of my lucky readers who happens to live in a nice area that doesn’t get really cold temps or snow?

Our house is a dust magnet

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Do you ever wonder where dust comes from? Or perhaps a better question is, how can you spend hours cleaning your home only to have dust everywhere a few days later? LOL

Our house seems to accumulate dust – maybe it’s because we have an old furnace? Or maybe because we haven’t finished our renovations so there’s exposed plaster in a few areas?

I don’t know what it is, but it seems no matter how often I clean my house there’s always dust on things within days. Sigh. Oh and we change the filters on our furnace about every two months. I’m sure that helps, but I guess it doesn’t get all the dust. Like I said we have an old furnace, maybe if we had a newer one it would help lower the dust in the house.

Chris had the day off today, so we decide to do a thorough house cleaning. It was snowing outside -our first real snow of the season – so we might as well have done something indoors, right. I changed the bed sheets, and dusted everywhere (even the walls!). Chris followed a bit behind me vacuuming. He even cleaned the three ceiling fans that we have in the house. The arms on the fan even manage to get dust on them when they are running 24 hours a day.

It’s great that my husband is so helpful around the house. He even did the dishes!

We got a flyer today for a local Canadian Pharmacy and they have air purifiers on sale, so I think we might get another one for the house (we already have two). Maybe that will help.

Does your house seem to accumulate dust easily too?

Of course along with the dust we also end up sweeping or vacuuming up a lot of dog hair. Our black Lab always seem to be shedding.

Our dog has two dog beds and we vacuumed them today as well. While I was working on one of them I noticed that there was tons of dog hair stuck on the inside to some of the velcro that holds the donut pillow. Man that was hard to remove! I didn’t get it all – not by a long shot! No wonder her bed was getting smelly!

After seeing how dirty our dogs beds were, my husband decided to take them to the laundromat down the street. They have some really big washing machines and driers. So now the beds are clean (well there’s still some dog hair stuck to the velcro, but they smell much better!).

I also spent some time sewing up some of the holes that our dog had made in her beds by chewing the material. Most of the holes were old ones that she did when she was younger. She’s two now and doesn’t really chew things other than her toys now (thankfully!), so I’m hoping that with the repairs her two beds will last for another year or two.

I love it when the house is clean. I’m not a neat freak, but hey … it is nice when the house is tidy. I’d just like the house to be able to stay clean for a while after putting hours in dusting, vacuuming and cleaning counters, tubs and showers. If the dust and dog hair would go away I’d be really happy!

Time for bed … I love sleeping in a bed that’s just been made up with fresh sheets. Don’t you? …. Good Night!

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