I'm Australian! I got official confirmation and a lovely certificate officially giving me Australian citizenship. I think it's a nice combo with my Canadian (No sassy comments about how you always knew I was bi, Jeff). So if I get sick of this beautiful, clean, safe country with nationalized healthcare, I can just move to a different one - one with all that PLUS deadly snakes and spiders. Huzzah!

Theovis and I did rip apart the office last weekend and what a job it was. We're still in process of putting it back together but it looks great. The hardwood isn't in the best shape in this room but the new desk arrangement and bookshelves make it look like a much larger room. A decrease in the stacks of various crap will also help. We got rid of our old bookshelves by putting them out in the lane and they all disappeared. I don't know if other cities do this but it is an awesome way to get rid of stuff in Vancouver.

I'm heading up to Whistler this weekend for the Every Woman in the World conference. It should be a bunch of fun. Anyhoo, I'd better head out so I actually get some work done before the goofing off begins.

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Hola, ustedes!  Theovis and I have been taking a Spanish class at Langara.  It's pretty fun, and we've been learning a lot but it is making my brain hurt sometimes.  Last night's class filled my head to overflowing and I found myself staring at her blankly when she asked me a question because although I knew how to answer her, I couldn't make it come out of my mouth.  I think she realized that I was just having an off moment and she stopped asking me too many questions after that.  I find myself translating from English to Spanish and vice versa often with French thrown in the middle.  I think knowing French is helping me overall but when I don't know how to say something in Spanish I catch myself throwing in French words.

I spent last weekend down in Bellingham (well, Deming, which is outside Bellingham), WA visiting my friends Karen and Larry.  It was a great weekend relaxing in the sun down by the river or in the hot tub under the stars.  Karen and I drank too many frozen Cosmo slushies and had a grand time giving tipsy advice to her 14-year old stepson about the kind of gal he should marry.  Larry and Ian made Larry's signature bbq'd salmon, which made me a very happy woman.

I spent much of Monday attempting to organize our home office, which has been the chaos room since we moved in.  It has too much clutter and completely inefficient furniture for what is required.  Unfortunately, every time I got started on one part of the project, I couldn't complete it until another part was taken care of.  But this weekend we are going to take our desk apart and change it around to more efficiently fit the space, plus we're going to get rid of a speaker cabinet that we have been hauling around from apartment to apartment to apartment to apartment to house for 10 years, with it being used exactly zero times.  Huzzah!  Of course, with the way my brain works I start thinking, "since we're ripping the room apart anyway, it's probably a good time to rip up the carpet to expose the hardwood floor."  Theovis went pale when I mentioned it but I might just do it while he's Heroclixing on Sat.

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On a mission to catch up on the summer movies, we saw SpiderMan 2 on Wednesday night and Harry Potter 3 last night. Both were very well done. The guys I was with raved about Spiderman, and I really liked it, but I found the women screaming incessantly a little hard to take. It seems Sam Raimi was giving nods to his original Evil Dead movies but there's a limit to the amount of screaming women I enjoy in any one movie. I do love the Bruce Campbell sightings, though.

Harry Potter was a more interesting film than the last few have been because the director (Alfonso Cuarón) wasn't nearly as slavish to the books as the previous one (Chris Columbus) was. He did leave out a lot of the back story but there's only so much one can cram into any one movie, and I think he did a good job telling an interesting story in it's own right. I really enjoyed the director's previous film Y tu mamá también, but considering how racy that one was, he seemed like a strange choice for Harry Potter. I really liked what he did with it, though. Definitely better than the last 2 though staunch book lovers might be miffed by all he edited out.

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I've continued my streak of efficiency this week thanks to the magic of endorphin-induced energy. And the really big news of the week is: I paid off my student loan! It took 8 years at a snail's pace but I realized recently that I had more money in my savings account than I owed on my loan so I popped over to the bank and paid it all off. Huzzah! It is a big relief to not have that debt hanging over my shoulder anymore. Since I got rid of all my consumer credit card debt a few years ago, all I need to worry about is 18 year's worth of mortgage payments. Sigh.

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