Terrifying

This is Daniel, I believe he is about 5 months or so now. He has his mother's, Kiyomi's, eyes. However, on a baby they are almost surreal. He looks straight into your soul! It is breathtakingly beautiful. On a side note: What is it about boy babies and the drooling?

Daniel Steals Your Heart

and maybe your soul too...

By Unknown

Photo taken from Facebook

Dad And I Are Late A Lot

I recently read that poor timekeeping can be diagnosed as a medical condition. (Well, it happened once in England but I hope that it will be considered legit and diagnoses becomes more widespread.) It is called "chronic lateness condition." The condition affects the same part of the brain as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and means that the person cannot properly gauge how long things take.

This is actually how I think sometimes:
"You firmly believe that as long as the time you leave is earlier than the time you’re supposed to arrive, it’s all fine. Regardless of how long the journey takes." --- from Buzzfeed

This has actually been said to me:
"Time is not elastic." --- from my mom

This is closer to the truth:
I have no idea how long anything takes to do. I have no concept of travel time and how long it takes to get anywhere. Even with I try to add up estimates of these things - I don't really believe the numbers.

The Full Two Shoot

 

Two: The Cutest Of All The Kittens

Photo by Stephanie Beach Photography

Copyright 2013

Steph finished editing the recent photo shoot that she did with Two, that I mentioned briefly before. You can see all the pictures on the Stephanie Beach Photography Blog, the link to which is always available on the left side of Always Standing. Pets in general are so hard to get good pictures of, cats especially. I am very happy to have these and will probably ask if I can get some printed to put up in Rrunuv Bayit.

Spinning By

The week is spinning by. My mind is foggy. It is Wednesday night but I keep swearing that today must be Friday.

So Much Fun!

Today's triathlon was so much fun! I love running but I loved this type of race even more. I had a great swim and then things basically got worse from there but it was still a blast. (Endorphin High!) Everyone did very well (and got better times than me) and Dad was there to cheer Mom, Jason, Teri, Kendra, and I on. It was a prefect day to do it and so beautiful to swim, bike, and run at Toronto Island. The results aren't up online yet and I didn't remember to take a picture or write the times down from the paper copy they had at the race. I do remember getting 32nd out of 32 for my age group but was not last over all. I will post times later on.

Scared To Give-It-A-Tri

Originally Jason and I were registered to do the Sprint Triathlon on Sunday. However, training this summer didn't go as well as I had hoped and we decided a few weeks ago to switch to the smaller Saturday version (Give-It-A-Tri) with Teri, Kendra, and my mom. The Sprint triathlon was going to be a 750 metre swim, 20 km bike and 5 km run. The smaller one that we are doing tomorrow will be swimming for 400 metres, biking for 10 km and finish by running 2.5 km. Even with the smaller distances, I am still nervous about it. Mainly the cold water at the moment but also worried about how to do the transitions between events and being embarrassingly slow.

30 In Less Than A Year

--------- from Buzzfeed (Thank you to Teri for sending it to me)

30 Signs You’re Almost 30

It’s 11 p.m. and you want to go out NOW???

1. You get carded, and your first instinct is, “AWESOME.”

2. Instead of drunken party photos, your Facebook friends are all about the baby pics.

3. …and marathon times.

4. You get super excited when you go to a concert and there are SEATS.

5. You start a story with “when I was in college” and realize that was 10 years ago.

6. When you watch teen movies/TV shows, you find yourself siding more with the parents than the kids.

7. You’ve gone to a bar and left because it was too loud.

8. You have 10,000 business cards from old jobs that you have no idea what to do with.

9. You’ve become a sunscreen nazi.
… to make up for years of neglect.

10. You find cool celebs who are in their early thirties and think, There’s still hope.

11. You’re getting increasingly scared to check your credit score.

12. You’re seriously thinking about getting a dog. No, having a baby. No, definitely getting a dog.

13. You’d rather pay a little more for a “nice, clean” hotel room than cram into a hostel with 12 of your friends.

14. Everything cool is being marketed to people younger than you now.

15. You’ve definitely lost the enzyme that lets you digest Taco Bell.

16. There’s an increasing number of musical artists you haven’t even heard of.

17. Every night you’re like:
"I don't want to do things. I want to not do things."

18. You’ve experienced the dreaded TWO-DAY hangover.

19. You realize your parents were your age (or younger!) when they had you, and you start cutting them some major slack … and you view them more and more as friends.

20. Running hurts your knees. The elliptical hurts your knees. Everything hurts.

21. Teen slang makes you viscerally angry.

22. You start buying shoes based on “comfort.”

23. An 11-year-old has to show you how to do something on your smartphone.

24. Weekend nights: Instead of having two drinks at four different bars, you have two drinks at one bar then go home.

25. You voluntarily buy the “fiber” cereal.

26. You get really excited about lame stuff, like low interest rates.

27. You wonder, seriously, how you ever pulled an all-nighter.

28. You’ve uttered the phrase, “I’m too old for music festivals.”

29. You’ve graduated from Ikea to West Elm.
…or you at least WANT to.

30. You have been to a party where at least two of your friends brought their babies.

Most Useless Degree

I ran across this great article/rant on Thought Catalog (which as a 'digital magazine owned and operated by an experimental media group based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn' and might be a little too trendy for me to be reading.) I often talk about the uselessness of my TWO degrees in English (proof of this can be seen in the English, Carleton, Ryerson, or Grad School Always Standing tags.) However, I agree with author Tyler Vendetti when she says, "Yes, I’m An English Major. No, I Will Not Be Working At McDonald’s." and in fact I agree with her whole article, my favourite part being:

"I can be a publisher. I can be a journalist. I can be a research assistant. I can be a speechwriter. I can work with magazines. I can be a movie critic. I can review books. I can be a copywriter. I can be a news reporter. I can manage social media. I can be a lobbyist. I can be an editor. I can write for television or radio or movies. I can be a travel writer. I can work in advertising. I can do anything I want to do ... The skills that you develop through writing and reading (such as critical thinking), the skills that come with an English degree, are used in every single day of your entire life." - By Tyler Vendetti, Yes, I'm An English Major. No, I Will Not Be Working At McDonald's., Thought Catalog

I would have made the list of career options longer and more varied, and the list of famous people who were English majors is way too actor heavy, but the article as a whole hits home, hard.

Passed The Threshold

My weight yoyos, more than most people I know. I have had swings of 30 to 40lbs. I don't do crazy crash diets so the changes are always gradual, but it seems that I always slowly return to my largest. However, since I started thinking about my weight in more literal terms, which happened sometime in university, I have never been over 200lbs.  I don't actually care about the number, for women the number is so strange: height, muscle mass, body type, shape, etc. all play such a huge part no one weighs what you think they will and two people can weigh the same amount and look totally different. For me though, I start looking unnaturally large around 180 lbs and the number can get quite high, I remember seeing 198 once and being glad it wasn't over that magic 200. Well, I have been suspecting that the threshold had been passed and sure enough when I dragged my scale out from its place behind the toilet this morning, it confirmed that I am 203 lbs at the moment. My fitness level isn't that high right now but I am not insanely out of shape by any means. For the most part I still feel pretty and sexy but I really need to stop denying my body's need to eat a certain way. I haven't even been eating that badly, just badly for me. Complex carbohydrates (starches like potatoes, rice, and grains) hate me and I need to stop. But I will miss them, oh how I will miss them.

Thanks Gmail

I don't think I will be switching to Gmail anytime soon. I just got a Gmail account to help organize the food for WOTS and the company that I am working with uses it. Well, it has a really annoying feature: I sent out a message to a group but all the replies get funneled into one continuous inbox response. Gmail calls this Conversation View: (sets whether emails of the same topic are grouped together). I fear that I will miss emails because I consider each response its own discussion but they might get trapped in this gathered way of viewing things. For a long time there was no way to turn it off manually and the response given by Goggle when asked was, "Conversation Threading is the heart of Gmail" which is just a terrible reply. Luckily they finally realized that some people didn't really like it so you can now ungroup your messages in the Settings. However, it took a while for me to find out how to turn it off. I am much less scared of missing an email now, but I am also a lot less impressed with Gmail.

Two Is Two

When I got Two in the Fall of 2011, the vet said that she was about 10 weeks old at the time. They need to have a 'birthdate' in their records so I got to pick one - August 15. Today is Two's birthday, and she is two! Steph has done another photo shoot with her and posted the first picture on her blog, it is beautiful! Check it out, HERE.

Me As A Zui

I think you are supposed to make an avatar to play games on this website, but I just made one to look like me for the (slightly narcissistic) fun of it.

Life's In The Way

Both my parents and Heather have reached out to chat and catch up, and I haven't been able to return their calls. I have been so busy lately that I feel like I am falling out of touch with everyone. I have been able to see a bunch of my friends over this past week but the visits feel rushed and I am often late or have to change/cancel plans. I have a contract with CSOL working on some Event Management things that I work on in the early evenings after I am done at the BIA and there seems to be lots of other little chores and life details that are getting in the way. I feel a bit overwhelmed. I miss having free time, I miss talking on the phone with my friends and parents, I miss reading, and I miss posting regularly on Always Standing.

One Year

Jason and I are celebrating our One Year Anniversary today:

Caught In A Kiss

Jason and I

By Stephanie Beach Photography

Happy and in love, I am looking forward to many more years!

Silent And Sad

I have been a little quiet on Always Standing for a few days. This comes from the fact that I had been anticipating making an announcement that I had been chosen to help blog for a large national event being held in Toronto later this month. I applied for one of the ten available positions in early June and eagerly awaited hearing back. I was so confident with my abilities because of my work with the BIA, other communications positions, Always Standing, my education, etc. I totally thought I would be picked without question. Well, when the list came out it turns out that I was not chosen to be part of that ten this year. I hope to try again next year but it did shoot a bit of a blow to my blogging/writing confidence.

Time For Gmail?

I have had my YahooMail account since I was 12. I didn't change it to something 'more mature' or 'more professional' at any of the logical times to do so: applying for university, updating a resume, etc. I have never had any issues and hate the idea of changing something that has been so easy and the same for so long. But over the weekend at The Cottage I had issues getting into my account, which I assumed were related to the terrible internet there. However, now that I am back in Toronto I am locked out of my email account to the point that Customer Care has to help me. Of course, even though Customer Care is free to call, they are so busy that it just tells you to hang up when you phone. I have Tweeted at them and sent in an online form. I hope this gets sorted out soon, I have CSOL related emails in there that I need to access!!

My Heart

"Oh, oh, that we're not broken just bent"

- from Just Give Me A Reason by PINK