Update(s)

My childhood-friend/college-roommate/fellow-understander-of-life-lived-in-Korea, Jessie (two blog shout-outs in one weekend!)  has mentioned a number of times in recent months that my blog is boring and extraordinarily uninformative. (Well!) Although my instinctual reaction has been to deny such nonsense, I suppose she does have a point (I realized in mid-argument that my last real post was written a month and a half ago).  So here I am, rectifying the sad little fact that my blog is half-dead, even though my life has been extraordinarily uneventful of late and I don't have a whole lot to babble on about. Nevertheless, here I go....

The only real update I have is on the job front: I have one! It's of the temporary variety, but it has kept me pretty busy for the past three months and will continue to do so indefinitely. (No, you didn't read that wrong: I'm working temporarily indefinitely.) The job is in insurance (in the claims department, no less) which is an entirely new venture for me and I'm continually confused by the complexity of it (my walks home at the end of the day are usually accompanied by a headache). It's the perfect little job for me right now, but I'm still looking for more permanent work, although probably not as thoroughly as I should be (a little scroll through Monster.com every other evening probably doesn't count as actual "job searching").

Moving on to not-so-informative but much-more-fun news, I'm excited for Christmas! So much so that I dragged Ken to Canadian Tire today to buy a Christmas tree. We were contemplating purchasing a real tree because they smell so nice and they look so... well... real. There were, however, a few obstacles standing in the way of our getting a real tree (namely the prospect of hauling the big ol' thing onto public transit) so we opted for the fake variety. I have to admit I was pretty appalled at the prices of fake trees these days when we finally got to the store. The one we originally wanted was $400! (Seriously? It probably cost the company a buck to make the darn thing.) We opted for the cheapest tree after a whole lot of hemming and hawing (I won't say how much it cost because I'm pretty sure we were ripped off and I would really rather remain unsure) and then we hauled it all the way home on foot--about 15 city blocks--(and by we I mean Ken), then started setting it up pretty much the second we walked in the door. And would you believe we actually documented the whole process in pictures? Who are we?

There we are, attaching the middle part to the bottom part. (Totally posed and oh so interesting.)

I have no idea how the above picture happened but, regardless, couldn't I have cleaned the floor a bit before taking pictures? (We're pigs.)

Now I'm going to tell a little side-story: Ken has always said that the profile of my face reminds him of Whistler's Mother, which I've always found slightly insulting. Even when he had me stand next to her at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris to prove his point, I vehemently disagreed with his opinion and with good reason.

Nothing against Whistler's Mother, of course, but I'm not sure many women my age would take such a comparison as a compliment.... Which is why I died a thousand deaths when I saw this picture of myself taken from tonight's photo-shoot: 

ME

WHISTLER'S MOTHER.

I don't know why the above picture confirmed it for me, but it did. *sigh, sigh, SIGH*

Moving on.... We got these cute little stockings to wrap around the tree and I've decided they're my favorite part about the whole kit and caboodle: 

We don't actually have a lot of decorations on the tree yet, as we only own a few and couldn't be bothered to buy any tonight, so it's looking a tad naked. We do, however, have the sweet little ornament my parents sent to us last year hanging from one of the top branches:

It's cute in and of itself, but it's especially cute because it resembles the wedding cake topper our friends Meaghan and Andrea made for us out of marshmallows right after we got married:

And here's a blurry picture of our finished tree:

Yay for cheap, fake Christmas trees!

Now I'm going to end on a scary little note: We thought we had bed bugs! Ken discovered these icky things on his belly the other night, much to my horror:

Yipes! In case you haven't heard, Toronto seems to be swarming with bed bugs these days... for real. We panicked as soon as he noticed them (naturally) and decided maybe we should fumigate our apartment. True to form, however, apathy eventually replaced our panic and (thankfully) the little boogers decided not to attack again before vacating our apartment of their own accord. (Or maybe the "bites" were actually hives... but that doesn't sound nearly as exciting.) 

Whew! That does it for now.  Hopefully I'll find more things to blog about within the near(er) future but until then, good night!