I focus on the pleasure, somethin' I can treasure, can you picture that?

Bad Leigh. Bad bad Leigh. Bad bad bad Leigh. 8 days between posts. Sigh.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOOKUM and DAD!

For those of you not in the know, today is my sister Danielle's 24th birthday (or as my mother put it, "Now you're an entire package of candles!" day) and the 14th of May was my father's !@#$)* un-birthday (dates have been encoded for the protection of the parties involved) .

Why is her nickname Bookum? Hint- say it out loud. Twenty sparkle points to the first person that gets it, thirty points if you are under the age of 25 (no cheating if you already know, and I know if you know).

Lets see, what have you missed in 8 days?

CLEANING!

LOOK HOW CLEAN!!

This is the part where you say "Oh my stars Leigh, I marvel at the cleanliness of your not-entirely-humble-and-actually-fairly-impressive abode. Is there some precipitating feature of your week which inspired such shining..., er...shiny-ness?"

Why, yes, in fact. Sarah's grandparents (and naturally Sarah herself) had a visit. =)

We made a very successful meal of shrimp stir fry (with bok choy!From scratch!) and Terry and Brenda very wisely brought wine and chocolate, which is the ultimate ambassadorial gift. When we find alien life out there, all we have to do is bring wine and chocolate to the intergalactic dinner party and the human race will be golden.

The next day we visited the twin towns of Courteney and Comox, each with some lovely features. Firstly, Comox, which basically looks like this;

Which makes me very very comfortable, because basically small shoreline towns here are exactly the same as small shoreline towns in Michigan- the inherent differences being that you don't float as well in Lake Michigan, and that Lake Michigan is...well, a lake, as opposed to an ocean. Regardless of its well deserved but notwithstanding capital L.

Speaking of the ocean-

And then of course, this. 

How many crabs can you spot? Hint: there are a BAJILLION of them and I am terrified and fascinated by them in turns.

So after a few lovely hours at the seaside, where we also spotted a bald eagle (note: if the locals see you getting excited about seeing a bald eagle, or mention in any tones other than those of boredom the existence of an eagle, they know you are not a local) we moseyed into Courteney.

This man; too excited about eagles to be a local. We geeked out together. This is Terry BTW, he and Brenda are wonderful.

I will now show you the two most exciting things about Courteney. One is this restaurant, called "The Mad Chef"

Are we surprised?

where I had bugs in my soup

Haha! Bugs in my soup! See what they did there?

and where Michael picked up a sweater proclaiming that "Animals Taste Good". Which back east would just be funny, but here in the land of the hippy veggie earth muffins is both hilarious and kinda dangerous. Not unlike Ash with his chainsaw hand and lack of medieval tact.

Pop cult-ture reference anyone?

The other most exciting thing was the Mario sighting.

Of course that's really him!

Other highlights of the day included a baby fawn that wandered about downtown Comox eating the flowers out of people's gardens in the middle of the day without a care in the world, and various establishments that had ship appendages.

I said various, I really just mean this one.

When we came home, there were fresh oatmeal cookies waiting for us with cold milk, making Cam the official Hero of the Week. Also, Emma in a box.

"But Leigh!" you say, and quite rightly "That only accounts for...well...maybe three days, if it was some really intense cleaning! Six if you count going to work and them coming home and doing laundry and unpacking and maybe playing an hour or so of Diablo. What else could you possibly have done in the remaining two days?"

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to unveil

(dramatic pause)

PROJECT HOBBIT HOLE

You remember the murder-room? The room in the basement that looked as though it was the primary shooting location for the ickiest scenes in "Last house on the left"? 

NOT ANYMORE. 

Behold! My sewing/yoga/playing-the-wii-because-only-Sarah-and-I-like-the-wii/crafting/escape/lair  room. Which I am painting. This is phase 1

Um...it won't let me rotate the picture, so just tilt your heads to the right. Thats the cutting in. 

And this is the finished product!

See? Can't be a murder room now. The smurfs are inherently non-violent.

It's actually a really lovely shade of teal. The accent colors will be cherry red and a very pale spring yellow. My next order of business is to get a carpet remnant to lay down over the scary (and rather worryingly stained) 70's carpet, and then start setting up furniture and my sewing machine. I have so much work to do!

Whats coming up this week? Well, my 9-5 job on Tues, Weds, Thurs, and then Friday more house-ular organizing and de-cluttering, and then this weekend garage sales to try to fill some the gaps in our furniture needs.

Until next time, more hilarious Emma!

"ooh, wus dis?"

"Ahh! Can see dah nay-boors. Put da clotheses on!"