Nothing if not a matyr….

I took a number of days off in the first half of the year coinciding with PD (professional development/inservice) days at school. NPY will do it too, if I tell him I’m not able to, but he also likes to create for himself four-day holidays taking a day off after a long weekend. To be…

Side hustles & passive income & entrepreneurship

I tell you, I know how my mother would react if I told her I wanted to start a business. “You don’t have the education for that. How will you succeed?” Or did I just internalize a lot of stuff. I sure as 1,000% don’t want to own a bricks & mortar business, have employees…

Vancouver’s Hot Chocolate Festival 2023

Yes, it wrapped over three months ago. But this is my blog and I wanted to share the creations I tried here or on Instagram and this is the only place left since it wrapped over three months ago. Between errands with the kids in the car, I noticed we’d be swinging by home and…

Alaska Cruise 2023 Trip re-cap

Let’s see if I can publish this while still mildly feeling mal de desembarquement. It’s still going almost three days after disembarking: at first when walking, overcompensating for anticipating the ground to shift; feeling a push to sway when I’m sitting; and when lying down, feeling my whole body surge or tilt as if still…

All the meals aboard the Alaskan cruise 2023

A long time ago I heard that the Alaskan cruises have the best food. So I had that expectation going on board. We dined within the confines of what was included in our cruise package (no additional dining packages) and … it was good! Dine My Way dinners at Allegro Dining room (Days 2-7). The…

Shopping and packing for the Alaska cruise

I am 1,000% influenced by those Buzzfeed shopping lists featuring primarily Amazon products and with a terrible amount of repetition and clickbait headlines. I know there isn’t much new, but I scroll through it anyhow like a guilty pleasure and every other time, I’m adding another item to my wishlist! As an “homage” to those…

WordPress 6.2

Omgosh WordPress 6.2 so hopelessly broke my site and – silly me – I upgraded the other site as well. Maybe it was a plug-in they shared in common that broke the site. Nope, quick Google search and learned that WP 6.2 itself was a culprit. Between work, kids and filing taxes, an upcoming trip…

March Break 2023

The first year Kiddo was in elementary school, I took one whole week off. I had plenty of vacation to burn after having returning to work from mat leave just two months earlier. Last year and this year, I only took three days off. March Break (or, as they call it around here “Spring Break”)…

Escape from a winter day

When 60 hours of rainfall stop and it’s a non-raining and actually sunny day in Vancouver, it feels like winter is over and it is a strange feeling. I felt a little remiss that we weren’t spending time outside. But things had to be done like return Christmas gifts before the window closed – at…

Year in review: 2022 in books

I did away with the emojis and then I brought them back. I thought I would end up writing just one-liners but over holiday break, I wrote down what I remembered in some big chunks of late nights. I am still locked out of my Catch Star Girl blog so I started an Instagram account…