25 before 25 recap

so you may know that this year, on my 24th birthday, I made a list of 25 things I am determined to accomplish before I turn 25.

As we're right at the 6 month point, I thought I'd give you all a recap of where I am on the list.

1. Run a half marathon - Ok so I've done a 10km this summer, and the spartan race, but looks like the half marathon will have to be the last chance one in November...before winter sets in in full.
2. Donate blood again - have donated a couple times to science... but as for to blood services canada, will have to wait another 3 months before it's been long enough since the tattoo.
3. Get a new camera -Done! Got a sweet Fujifilm water proof one, a great choice for taking it with you hiking, swimming, everywhere! Took it out for the first time here.
4. Take an art or photography class - haven't done this one yet.... need to get on it!
5. Go camping -Done! we went the Canada day long weekend, right after I got back from Colorado, and before going to Hawaii...it was muddy!
6. Visit 5 new places - O'ahu and Maui, Hawaii; Sorrento and Amantea, Italy; Aspen, Collorado; Chicago, Illinios
7. Host a breakfast, lunch and dinner  - gotta get on these... Had Kev and a friend over for dinner back in July, made an awesome chicken stir fry.
8. Get a first author paper - Not yet, gotta get that DSS paper out asap.
9. Go trail riding- We thought about doing this in Hawaii, maybe in the fall?
10. Adopt a kitten - How badly do I want a pet....soooo bad, but still can't have one in my apartment.
11. Learn to bake with yeast - Check! even if it is via a bread maker! I've been using it just to do the dough cycle and been making some awesome buns and rolls. One makes an appearance here.
12. Knit and donate 5 sweaters - haven't even started on this one... I do most of my knitting in the winter anyways.
13. Try a fun hair colour - done! dip dyed the ends of my hair (much to my mother's dismay) teal back in June
14. Write my thesis proposal, get it approved - We're getting there on this one, have a solid draft going (14 pages single spaced)
15. Take a dance class...hip hop? - Planning on signing up for one or two in the fall (funds pending)
16. Scramble 5 mountains - ok this guy... clearly had no idea how hard this would be, instead I'm committed to 5 serious hikes, Did one in Colorado to the Lake of America, did one in our lab up to Old Goat Glacier, did 3 in hawaii - Manoa Falls in Honolulu, Iao Valley in Maui, and the Bamboo Forrest hike at the end of the road to Hana in Maui (two of the hawaii ones were easy-ish, so I'd like to add at least one more.
17. Watch a sunrise - got a couple sunsets under my belt... going to have to have the boy take me out for this one.
18. Visit a museum - Surprisingly didn't do any museums in Italy this time.
19. Make a quilt - I have the shirts ready, and the interfacing... need to get going on this.
20. Float the bow - Floated the elbow river on July 22...sooo much fun, such a beautiful day.
21. Make my own bath bombs - coming up soon!
22. Get a tattoo - got my very first tattoo on May 19... on my ribs, it hurt like heck!
23. Read 20 new books - I'm at seven new books... probably re-read 10 old books at least as well.
24. Volunteer with Habitat for Humanity - Signed up to volunteer at a build in Sept. I can't wait!
25. Print more photos - From traveling sooo many places this summer, I certainly have lots of photos to print.

Well there you have it, half way through the year, but not half way done yet. As it stands, this year has already been truly amazing and chuck full of new experiences. The last 6 months have gone by in a flash, can't imagine what the next 6 have in store.

Did you know: There are no rats in Alberta

In the wild that is. Also it's illegal to have a rat as a pet here.

In fact, Alberta is one of the few places in the world to bravely boast "Rat Free".

So naturally when a dead rat was found in a Calgary community last week, the normal response is to put city officials on "high alert" and the community "under surveillance for two weeks."

Check out the report on the Calgary sun website here.

Ratatouille photo found here.

Spartan Race Calgary 2012

Yesterday I woke up bright and early, thru on some pink spandex and black paint, and got ready to sweat in the sun.

The spartan race had come to Calgary, and I, the boy, and countless foolish others, signed ourselves up for 5km of hot misery under a cloudless sky. The course featured flames to leap, walls to climb, bricks to drag, more hills and mud than a person ever needs. Oh and burpees....every time you failed a task you did 25 burpees...I did 50.

Nothing will make you feel prouder tho than being able to carry a sand bag up and down a near vertical hill, low crawling under like 50m of barbed wire (getting your pony tail tangled in barbed wire is less than fun) and high stepping through waist deep mud. So even tho I didn't have the fastest time (the boy was a true gentleman and stuck with my dragging ass the whole race to make sure I didn't keel over and die) and even tho I was woefully under prepared.....and even tho I got a mean case of sun stroke and spent the evening in a shivering huddle....

I still feel incredibly proud to have came, and ran, and overcome everything they threw at me. I can call myself a spartan!

Now to spend the rest of today getting mud off my things and prepping for a committee meeting tomorrow.

What did you overcome this weekend?

Fascinated on Fridays: Furby is Back!

I was just over at Miss Indie's reading her 'Friday's Favourite Things' and gasp.... Furbies are back she says! (Miss Indie's got a great blog, and every single friday I find my way over to something amazing thanks to her lists)

Oh I grew up in the glory days of the Furby, I remember the wild rush and line ups back in 1998 when myself and everyone else I knew wanted one for Christmas. That year my Aunt managed to get one for me from a store in Timmons (it was an all grey one) and we got another (the spotted grey and pink one) from a raffle at a Canadian Tire in the Sault...I remember there being hundreds of people there that night because a shipment of something like 25 of the things came in.

Image comes from Angelfire's Furbsite.

This was way better than neopets... this was a real life fuzzy toy (about as solid as a brick under the fuzz) that you could feed, tickle, pet and love.... and they were definitely vocal about wanting all that attention. Getting the stupid things to sleep through the night may have been worse than actual babies....at least until you finally resorted to pulling the batteries out.

What became of my precious Furbies... well as all fads do pass, I eventually got bored of the little guy. I know that the grey one sat in the toy bin at my Nana's for years, along with a Tickle-Me-Elmo that probably needed to be exorcised (as the voice got really strange the older that got). The last time I saw this furby he was looking worse for wear, with the fabric covering his ears pulled off and the rest of his fur looking pretty scragly... I think he may have even been missing an eye lid. (the next set of cousins in my family are a pair of brothers and I think they play too hard with Furby)

So that brings me to today, and the Walmart Website's announcement that Hasbro has brought Furby back!

I have to say.. .these solid colour guys, with their digital eyes and plastic ears just don't seem as cute to me. But who knows, maybe my littlest cousin Caitlin will be begging for one for Christmas this year just like I did way back when.

Wordless Wednesday : The Cloud Gate

From my recent trip to Chicago, we saw the Cloud Gate at noon on a Sunday with a beautiful blue sky full of clouds and a tonne of tourists.

How to Add Social Networking Icons to My Blog

Ok, I know I use a plain old simple blogger template for my blog, but that's because 1) it's clean and I like it. and 2) I can't justify spending money for someone to do a blog design for me right now and 3)I just don't want to learn myself to do things like serious HTML myself.

But seriously.... the Twitter, Pinterest, RSS and whatever buttons that come standard from their sites just sort of make my eyes hurt....so finally I did something about it.

This post here gave me the tips I needed to start.

And here's what I went and did about it.

• First I searched around for some free icon sets.

 

Icon Archive has tonnes of sets that you can browse through, and links back to the designer's site where you can download them. I ultimately however picked my set, found while googling for a free pink set (ooh yeah girly girl here) from WebStuffShare.com. They look like this:

• Next up opened the files (they usually come as a zip) and thru them all into powerpoint so I could pick what ones I wanted and play with arangement... Well this set, I soon realized didn't come with a pinterest icon....so I was back to searching (a less than matched set would be less than ideal).

• Once I knew which ones I wanted and in what order, I uploaded them all to photobucket... since this would generate HTML code. This new set came from position : relative.

  

• Then I had to add the HTML Gadget to your blogger template, and copy the HTML code in for each image, use the code <br/> to break them up into two rows (or more). When I copied in the code from photobucket, the code is automatically set up to link back to photobucket. All I had to do was to change the url here to where I wanted to link to. Easy as pie!

This image shows what all that looks like. I just replaced the photobucket url within the quotations with the url of  I wanted to link to. I also got rid of the bit 'target="_blank" all that seems to do is take your browser to a blank page on its was to your new link.

• Once I did these few simple steps, I was good to go. As it was the size icons I chose were a bit to wide to go 5 across. I could have go back and repeated the process with smaller icons that had come with the set. As it was, I just made my side bar a tiny bit wider to fit 5 of these in a row. 

 

 

 

Don't all those pretty icons look nice up there. If you have any questions about how I put my social networking icons on my blog,  don't hesitate to ask either in the comments, or by clicking the brand new email icon!

3 Awesome Easy Nail Tutorials

So if you're anything like me, you like to have your nails painted, you're crappy at painting one hand versus the other and you want your nails to look classy (and not like they belong on a 13 year old girl). Here's 3 great, easy looks that change things up from the normal one colour routine (or my go to, one colour plus a stripe!).


1. Neon Rainbow/Ombre Nails...this video comes to us from Nikkie Tutorials and this exciting paint job looks easy enough to pull off that your right hand might even look as good as your left when your done. This technique can also be easily adapted to do a two colour ombre effect.




2. Louboutin Nails...video comes via NailsFreakBlog... and I've never considered painting the underside of my nails before, but just like that classic pop of red under shoes I'll never afford (tears) this look is in my opinion both classy and vampy.




3. Crackle Nails....this is one I've been doing all summer long, especially when travelling (I find if you chip your polish with crackled nails, it's not as noticeable) Anyways there's a 1000 odd videos on youtube for this, but all you do is throw on a bright undercoat (I like neons best) and then go over it with a quick layer of the crackle polish (mine's from Sally Hanson) and you do have to be quick, as it starts to crackle right away, then top coat and you're done.

Black/Blue/Pink

Anyways, these are three great, simple ways to do your nails, that don't require extensive technique with tiny brushes and stuff. And you can do all three looks in relatively little time!

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Now I seriously need to get back to my research proposal.....any second now.

~~~~Update! I tried technique number one last night, here's the results:

Isn't that just about the least attractive picture of fingers ever?

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also Elycia and Kaylah just posted a hilarious how to video on nail stickers, you should promptly check it out!

Living better with Leslie and Janet: Nail Stickers