Bathroom, floors, dishes, resume, 125 hour project, lemon bars

These are some of the accomplishments of my day. I'm glad that I finally cleaned the bathroom because the toilet begins to really stink after a few days. This house is old and the toilet is old and stained and yeah...after a few days of use it begins to stink. Vaccumed up some laundry detergent that Kuma knocked over while trying to climb on top of the windowsill. "Did you put all of it back in the container?" asks Andrew when we talked today and I told him what happened. I told him twice that I salvaged as much as I could. What can you do when the powder is all over the floor?

I look at this place - this "flat" where I live and think "this is such a bachelor's pad or first place that you would rent with roommates when you are in university or something like that and you are poor and don't have a lot of money and you can only settle for what you can afford". Sigh. I know I should be grateful for a place to live and to have great landlords and all and to be living in a nice neighborhood, and I am - for real, but this place is so "old and things like the lino are falling apart and I seem to always be battling with spiders and spider webs here and I just feel like I am too old to be living in a place like this. Been there and done that, you know what I mean? Andrew says we should stay here until the end of the year because it is the recession (I have heard this word a million times already i think) and we can't really afford to move somewhere else yet and that we don't really need to consider it unless our circumstances change or the house sells and the new owners want us to move out. What he says makes sense......but...I'm still not fond of this flat. It is ugly, ugly, ugly.

Last night I went to our Relief Society anniversary party with my friend Laura. Not Laura Clarke, but Laura Hunter who doesn't live too far from me. She often gives me rides to church because her husband is the executive secretary and always needs to go early for meetings, as does Andrew. Anyways, I was asked to decorate a "January" table so I brought some summery items like flip flops (they call them "jandals" here) and a beach towel and sun glasses, sunscreen, a water bottle, hat and book. Not bad eh? I thought I did a decent job...fairly basic but decent. Well, when I had a look at the other tables my heart sank a little. The other ones were decorated so extravagantly with beautiful tablecloths and statues and all sorts of things. Mine looked puny in comparison. I tried not to let it bother me but at the time I was wishing that I was more creative in that way. We were also asked to bring 2-3 items that represent ourselves and items to decorate a cake with. We started by decorating the cakes according to the month our birthday was in (there was one cake on each table). Believe it or not I was the only January birthday. I was on my own so my friends Lori and Laura (March birthdays) invited me to bring my cake over and we would make a double decker. We made basic white icing and put it on and stuck the cakes together and sprinkled them with chocolate sprinkles. That was our cake. Simple, but nice. Some of the other cakes were quite ornate with purple icing and blue icing and pink icing. (The one with blue icing reminded me of when I was about 10 and I hung out with Sally and Heather Allison and Heather had made a birthday cake with blue icing and left it on the counter and her puppies got into it and there was blue vomit everywhere....sorry for the visual but bright blue icing always reminds me of this)

After the cakes we presented our items that described us and played pass the parcel. I won it - a pen and pencil that say "Princess" on them and a notebook. Then we sung happy birthday to relief society and ate some snacks and stuff and cut a cake. It was fun...a little cheesy in a way with singing happy birthday but it was good to get out and meet some of the other sisters because I never see them because I am in primary. I'm glad that I went. I miss going to relief society.

Well, I don't have much else to write about so I'll stop now. The medical assessment for my work Visa still has not come back. "It can take up to 4 weeks" the immigration officers keep telling me. Great. I guess all I can do it sit and wait. I am anxious to begin working though because finances seem to be a constant source of stress in my household and I feel so guilty because alot of our expenses have had to do with me.