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.