...I didn't already have a full-time job. The photography thing, that is. Wow. I am having a blast with it but it's a lot of work!

In the past two weeks I've had three shoots - two portrait shoots and one event photoshoot which lasted 4 hours on Saturday afternoon. By the end of it, I had a callous on my thumb and nearly 1000 shots to go through. The final cut for the clients was about 400, but let's just say...the editing took care of what was left of Saturday and my entire day on Sunday. I love the process and time flies by while I'm in the middle of it, but when I finally stood up just in time to see the late afternoon light, I realized just how much time it really takes.

Regardless, I was able to turn the photos around and deliver them to my clients today, which they were thrilled about.

I don't really know what my plans are for this business. While I'm very attracted to the idea of doing this full-time, I'm not sure how to get comfortable with the idea of sporadic income. I love my dependable monthly paycheque and to just *not know* what kind of income I would be bringing home? Scary thought. For me, anyways. I am charging a bit for photoshoots now, but still treating this mainly as a portfolio building exercise, so that if I do decide at some point that this is what I want to do, I'll have the experience I need to get it up and running quickly.

Anyhoo...I've made my first investment into this little side business. Besides the gigantic investment of time, which I hadn't really previously given much thought to. My relationship with my Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop are numbered because...I bought an iMac. It was totally an impulse purchase. A few Saturdays ago, K and I wandered into the local Apple retailer and I walked out 15 minutes later with a receipt in my hand. The idea of purchasing a desktop for my photography had been in my head for awhile, but I hadn't thought a lot about what make/model I wanted, other than the fact that I wanted a screen at least 20" wide. I have never had a Mac, and had never seriously considered getting one, but I played around with the iMac model in the store for less than 10 minutes before deciding that it was The One. I know I have a learning curve ahead of me with the whole PC to Mac thing, but I'm up for it. And I'm SO excited to pick it up! It was ordered the day I bought it, so I'm expecting a call in the next day or so to bring home my new baby.

Stay tuned. I will be holding on to my laptop until I've mastered the Mac, for emergency purposes.

In other news, we are gearing up for our trip on Saturday! The countdown is on. At 5:01 p.m. I will officially be in vacation mode. Actually, who am I kidding? Friday is going to be a write-off.

Every once in awhile, I'll get a totally subtle nudge (not) from a certain someone (Heather), on a certain social networking site (Fbook) which casually (not) reminds me that I do, in fact, still even have this blog. Sad, sad, sad. Not the Heather nudge. The need that I have to be reminded of this blog, which I was once so loyal to.

I don't have any of the classic excuses, either. I'm working hard, but I'm home by 7 and spend my evenings doing whatever I want. I don't have kids. Kids seem to be a great excuse for not doing things, but since I don't have any, I can't play this card. I can't even blame my absence on a dog, or a long illness or anything, really.

The real kicker is that so far, 2010 has been one of the most blog-worthy years of my life and most, if not all, of the blog-worthy events have gone unblogged, and some even un-discussed with even my closest of friends. It's not an intentional oversight...it's just that life has gotten in the way, it seems, and on my constantly expanding "to do" list, the blog has moved from "to do" to a "to don't" for no reason at all.

SO.

What HAS been going on on the Rock?

Well, in no particular order...

• We sold our house. I am no longer a landlord and I no longer have any need to spend a precious vacation day selecting a furnace for a home I don't live in. The house, needing approximately $25K in upgrades like...immediately...was a constant sore spot for us. As of April 30th, we unloaded these issues. We are absolutely over the moon. As lovely as it was to be "in the market", I am thrilled to be back out of it again. Opening my Canadian online banking to see a balance of $0 on the mortgage is, in a word, fantabulous. Later, debt.
• I started my own business. It is going amazingly well and I'm actually having to turn down photoshoots because, well, I have a real job. And a guy who I occasionally like to spend time with. But it's an excuse to build my portfolio quickly and gain experience and who knows...maybe sometime down the line, this could actually be my full-time job. God, I would love that. I'm having a blast with it. I'm booked solid until our vacation in June, and have bookings throughout the rest of June and into July. YES. As for the name...it is not just a shout-out to the lovely Beacon Hill Park, a stone's throw from the home I used to live. It's also the name of the neighborhood in Ottawa where Kurt grew up, AND the name of the neighborhood on the Rock where we ended up when we first moved here. Isn't that weird? It's like it's haunting me. In a good way.
• We're going to Ottawa, in less than two weeks. 10 days of visiting, relaxing and hitting up our favourite spots...I seriously can not wait. I love Ottawa!
• I got another promotion. I don't talk about my real job on this blog for obvious reasons but the short story is...office life is good. My secretary is still pretty much the most hilarious person alive, the best part being that she doesn't mean to be funny at all. She starts every sentence with "Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirlll..." and there is normally a lot of finger-snapping involved when she's making a point. I love her. Last week, she told me that her nickname used to be "Rumpshaker". Awesome.
• Tourist season has officially begun. I'm not really sure why anyone would believe the reports that tourism is down because every time I try to wedge myself into my favorite coffee shop, it is literally swarming with tourists...Americans, mostly, and specifically of the New Jersey variety, with a smattering of le Quebecois mixed in for a bit of variety. It makes for an interesting combination. They seem to be enjoying themselves, which I love to see, but the weather has been less than stellar so far this year, so they probably aren't leaving with the tans they were hoping for. Oh well. That is what spray tans are for.
• I've finally figured out how to get to Victoria this year...thanks to the timely announcement of the wedding of one of my favorite cousins. Nothing is booked, but the plans are in place for August!
• Another favorite cousin - and friend - and I are going to be experiencing the sweltering heat of NYC for a weekend in July, for no reason at all other than we're both turning 3o this year and thought it would be fun to meet up and do something a bit different. And really, there aren't many things that I think are more awesome and different than NYC. Four days of wandering, eating, wandering some more and oh...an outdoor MIA concert...no big deal. Oh, and the hotel we're staying in? Madonna used to live there. Hello...awesome.

So, there has been some stuff going on. There is other stuff too, but it's 11:05 p.m. on a Sunday night and I am exhausted and going to bed.

Night, y'all. That means you, Heather.

Ummmm...where did April go? I logged onto my bank account this morning and realized that I'd been paid, which meant that the 20th of the month had passed. What? When? Must have been while I was at work. It feels like I've been there a lot lately. This time of year is kind of crunch time for us, and I'm feeling the crunch, big time. To the tune of at least 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, for the past month or so. Blech. I'm not complaining, but I'm pretty tired.

In other news, 8 days from now I will no longer be a homeowner. I think I'll do a sentimental flashback post when the big day comes, because I distinctly remember blogging when we bought the house. It wasn't something we'd been planning on, but the opportunity came up to sell the house and we jumped on it. To be perfectly honest...it was a headache and a major stressor for us both. Besides the annual paperwork, worrying about whether the furnace would fail, or how we were going to arrange to have the windows replaced, was getting to us. We're just simply too far away to deal with it without help on that end and even though our tenants are fabulous, it was always still in the back of our minds. Bye bye, house. Bye bye, mortgage!

That's probably our biggest news right now.

Besides work being insane, life is pretty good. The weather is getting fabulous, which is exciting. Happy hours have started up, and it's light out until almost 8:00. We planted a tiny garden on the weekend - just tomatoes, salad greens and some herbs. I haven't had a garden since the tomatoes we planted in pots in our backyard the summer before we moved to the Rock. According to the little information sticks in the seedlings, we will have salad in about 50 days. Awesome.

The next trip off the Rock is in June when we're headed to Ottawa for 10 days or so. We don't have a lot planned. Without the house to deal with, our social calendars are much more open than they would have been, had we been shopping for, say, a furnace. We plan to spend time catching up with friends, sleeping in, and hitting up all of our favorite Ottawa spots. I miss Ottawa a lot. More than Victoria sometimes. It's funny...but there are just a LOT of happy memories for us there, and it's such a great city. Can't wait to get there!

I have a few other exciting things happening right now, but not ready to say too much yet, so stay tuned!

{a view of the Plaza, from Central Park}

I have said it before and I'll say it again: NYC is awesome.

As we did in 2008, Kurt and I met up with our good friends EAP and Mugsy for a fabulous time over the Easter long weekend. Only two weeks after our mini-trip to CayMAN, this made us a bit more jet-setting than usual but we've been talking about going back ever since 2008 and the deals from the Rock to NYC are pretty incredible. It is actually cheaper for us both to fly to New York and spend three nights in a 4 star Midtown hotel than it is to buy two return tickets to Ottawa. While going home is always appealing, something about the Chrysler Building was calling my name, so we decided to jump on the deal and spend 4 days enjoying the sights and sounds of the City.

Mission: accomplished. Once again, we had an AMAZING time. Captured in a few of the many shots I took over the weekend:

{New Yorkers, enjoying a sunny Saturday in Central Park}


{blossoming trees, everywhere we looked}

{looking up...waaaaaay up}

{the most amazing sandwich ever, courtesy of the Amish Market (45th & 2nd)}


Yeah...I fell in love again. You could spend months there and never run out of things to do or see. I just can't get enough.

...until you rear-end an imbecile who slammed on their brakes WITHOUT brake lights, end up sprawled all over the road, discover that your scooter has died and, to top it all off, tear ligaments in your foot. THAT is definitely one way to start a Thursday and guess what? It's how I started mine. Now I'm home, with an air cast and a freakin' cane, and I'm hobbling around that way for the next two weeks.

I know the rear-ending thing is on me, though the guy riding next to me also hit her because she stopped so quickly and neither of us were expecting it because there was NOTHING in front of her. No car, no person, no chicken...nothing. She just stopped, in the middle of rush hour, allowed two people to slam into her, and then drove off. It was like bang...bang...bye bye. What? The other guy was OK and helped me up off the road and helped me to get my bike back into an upright position, but I knew something was very wrong with my foot. I managed to get my bike further up the street by a block or so before it died, and then I called my knight in shining helmet (Kurt) to come and help me out.

The end of the story is that I'm home on the couch after 3 hours at the hospital and the very good news is that nothing is broken. The bad news is a) the 2 weeks of air cast, b) taking the air cast to Cayman, and c) my poor little bike, parked downtown, dead as a doornail.

I'm a careful driver, and I was paying full attention to what was going on...I didn't even hit the car very hard, because I had reacted quickly enough to hit my brakes too (and could not conceivably have been going more than 10 km/hr anyways...I just could not have anticipated her stopping like that.

Laaaaaame.

Podcasts. OK, so I'm a bit late on the Podcast scene. Does everyone know how awesome they are?? Because I sure didn't. Sure, the last time I checked out the Podcast section in the iTunes store was approximately 2006, when the offerings were less than stellar, but 4 years have done wonders. Now, when I'm trying to drown out the sounds of my colleagues, or my phone, I just put my ear buds in an let Rick Steves take me on a wild adventure through Armenia, or discover why magnesium is a good supplement to add to my diet. Excellent. So I can work on things that aren't interesting whilst listening to things that are (and yes, nutritional supplements are fascinating to me...no judgment, please). Anyways, the best Podcasts I've found so far are Travel with Rick Steves (I love his books, so it makes sense that I'm into his Podcasts), Sex with Emily, Dishing up Nutrition, Savage Love (as in, the Dan Savage newspaper column), The Moth and Sound of Young America.

The local farmers' market. Again, a bit late to this scene. I've only lived here for over two years, no big deal. There is a fantastic farmers' market on Saturdays not far from where we live, so for the past month I've been dragging Kurt to it bright and early and loading up on fresh, organic vegetables and eggs at a fraction of the cost of their half-rotten, overpriced, supermarket counterparts. It has made a huge difference to our meals and our grocery bill. Not only are we now eating local and organic, which are both so important in my opinion, but we're eating seasonally as well. This is a huge, fantastic step forward for our life on the Rock, since produce has been such a huge downer for me since pretty much the first time I ever set foot in a grocery store.

Getting OFF of the Rock! We're going to Cayman in just over two weeks, which is going to be a.w.e.s.o.m.e. Not only will we be reunited with Ash and Andy, our much-missed pals who left this Rock for that one, but we will also get a chance to hang out with Heather and James, who are going to be there at the same time to celebrate Heather's birthday. I sense some mayhem approaching. There might be stingrays involved. And boats. And rum. And a lot of food. Good times!

Two weeks or so after we get back from Cayman, we're off again - this time, to NYC. The main components will be similar to Cayman...a chance to visit with our much-missed friends, EAP and Mugsy, fine dining and general good times. I can't wait. We're staying a bit longer than our first trip in 2008, trying a new hotel (still in Midtown), and I'm mostly just looking forward to exploring, night and day. My camera will definitely be the first thing I pack.

We're also planning a bigger trip for late in the year - likely November. We've got the general idea mapped out but still need to work out a few details, so more to come on that later.

Dreaming up home-based business plans. It's always been my dream to work at home, for myself. After years of having no really good ideas for how to accomplish this, 2010 has presented me with three totally different ideas, all very do-able with a bit of business training and some experience under my belt. One would require about two years of course work, but it's something I'm really passionate about, so I'm thinking I would really enjoy the schooling anyways. Anyways, after the madness that is my work life, it's really nice to think that working for myself at some point is more feasible than I had previously thought.

Happy thoughts, indeed.

Remember when I blogged? Wow. I'm pretty embarassed about this.

Five years ago (!!), I started my first blog. It was kind of the lead-in to this blog, which I started when we moved to the Rocks. Anyways, I was a pretty formidable blogger, back in the day. Sure, I still only had like...6 loyal readers but I was blogging regularly. Sometimes even more than once each day. Imagine. Anyways, I went from being a blogger extraordinaire, to an OK blogger, to a shamefully delinquent blogger. Ouch. How the mighty have fallen. Or, how the moderately adequate have fallen, rather.

So, what is up with you, my 3 remaining readers? Are you still out there?

I'm still here. I'm still on the Rocks, lost at sea.

I spent two and a half glorious weeks in Victoria over Christmas, soaking up all of the comforts of home. It wasn't originally supposed to be such a lengthy trip, but when the time came for me to start packing to come back to the Rock, I decided that I wasn't ready yet, so I somewhat randomly decided to have a tooth pulled. Not a random tooth, mind you, but that devil tooth that started giving me trouble about this time last year, while I was working in CayMAN. To make a long, gory story short, I managed to weasel my way in to see the same specialist who yanked out my wisdom teeth when I was 16. This guy is THE guy to see in Victoria, should you ever require any tooth yanking services. In 20 minutes, my troubles were gone. And now, two months later, my mouth is finally back to normal, after a year of pain. Oh, the lengths I will go to for extra time at home. Sad. But can you blame me?

The highlight of my trip? The family Christmas dinner, hosted at my parent's house. 20 persons of varying levels of Swede gathered in our living room for a feast. No roast beast, but a formidable spread anyways.

I came back to warm, sunny, beautiful weather and, of course, my lovely man. The warm, sunny, beautiful weather gave way to the Rock's "winter" about mid-month, leaving us with miserable torrential rain and gale force winds pretty regularly since then. Can I complain? No. It's not cold. I work indoors. Some rain and wind is not the end of the world. It just means that I haven't had a good hair day in awhile.

My job went from being 8:59 - 5:01 to more of a 7:01 - 6:30 kind of situation. I'm not making excuses, but coming home and blogging was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do. And then I got a secretary aaaand...back to 8:59 - 5:01, for the most part, which is absolutely fine with me. As an added bonus, my secretary has also made it her personal mission to save my soul and to assist me in finding Jesus. We get along great, but if I get annoyed, all I have to do use some mild profanity or casually yell "JESUS CHRIST!" and she gets all quiet as she undoubtedly contemplates just how effed I am, spiritually. I love her.

Obviously, we are very excited about them. They are pretty awesome. GO CANADA!

The Rock has some representation in the Olympics, believe it or not. One guy. We were cheering for him too, but he was disqualified on, like, the first day. Kind of like the idea of a Jamaican hockey team, winter Olympians from the Rock are...challenged. Though, I understand that he is quite the luger. Lugist? Whatever.

By far, the Olympics were trumped for us by the appearance of George last weekend! Our 30 year old tortoise came out of hibernation last weekend for an hour. He ate half of a ham sandwich and then went back into his igloo for a few weeks. I don't think we'll see him regularly until the end of March, but it was nice to see his smiling face for a little bit, anyways.