Chair heaven

I’m staying at a Hilton in Toronto tonight and tomorrow.  My room has a Herman Miller Mirra chair and I am in love.  Because I can’t figure out a way to smuggle this piece of office genius into our car, I’m putting this out there in the hopes that someone has a spare $700 that they can put to good use.  For the love of everything good in this world, I want this beautiful and ergonomic chair.  Please and thank you.

I have creepers

My eyeballs are killing me lately.  I definitely need to go to the eye doctor or SOMETHING because I can’t stand seeing.  It’s painful.

So what’s new with me?  Well, I decided to delete my “knitting” blog because, who am I kidding?  I can’t even keep up with one blog!  Two is ridiculous!  So I don’t really care if no one is interested in my knitting, I’m writing about it here if I feel like it.

This week, Erik and I travel to Toronto for a work meeting that I have.  I enjoy these trips for the sole purpose of getting to stay at a hotel and seeing my family.  I’m not a fan of the meetings, and last year was made to look like an incompetant fool, even though I had done nothing incorrectly.  So yeah, pretty excited for this year’s meeting!

And another thing – which one of you keeps googling my name and coming to my blog?  Yes, I’m calling you creepers out.  The internet is fancy and sneaky and tells me what search terms bring people here.  Most of the time, it’s neti pot.  But lately?  It’s my name.  So show yourself! Because it’s creepy if you don’t.

She knows me well…

, originally uploaded by Meagan Miller.

It doesn’t matter what she thinks anyway, I still want one.

We are famous, and on the internet

We are famous, and on the internet, originally uploaded by Meagan Miller.

So Google Street View is live in Ottawa. This is my house. From Google Earth! As you can see, we were not home. The windows were not open. And it was not garbage day.

Upon seeing this picture, Erik’s comment was “I really gotta work on the outside of the house.”

Now, I saw the Google car when they were filming for Street View.  I was outside my work (walking to the office) and the car is very obvious (five foot tall camera sticking out of the roof, anyone?) If I look at the shot from exactly where the car was when I saw it, I think I see me.  But there is absolutely no way to tell. I will just imagine it’s me.

I have a feeling all I’m going to be doing all afternoon is looking up things on Google Earth.

Sunlight on the Road

Sunlight on the Road, originally uploaded by Canuck Gooner.

My boyfriend takes good pictures.

Really good pictures.

Weekend in a yurt

Erik and I spent Saturday through Tuesday in a yurt at Silent Lake Provincial Park, a few kilometers south of Bancroft.  It rained quite a bit, and Sunday morning, I basically let it ruin my morning.  Well, that and the fact that we’d bought an $80 lantern that hadn’t worked the previous night, I’d brought the wrong knitting needle for the project that I was working on, and the park has an all-the-time boil water advisory.  Even though we had a barbeque, it’s hard to boil water over one.  Harder still when you can’t have a campfire because it’s raining, so no boiling there.  After about an hour of sitting the kettle on the wood stove in the yurt, we finally had enough hot water to have tea. So yeah, I probably hadn’t slept well either, despite the relative comfort of yurt camping over tent camping, so MAN.  I was in a bad mood.

This was punctuated at the point when I went to close the door (a regular, everyday door) on the yurt, not realizing that my thumb (which, I might add, is already fucked up thanks to a kid I went to daycare with) was in the door on the hinge side.  Needless to say, I heard a crack, felt searing pain, and then freaked out.  Everything seemed to be going wrong and now I’d closed my ugly thumb in the door, only making it more ugly.  So woo!  Starting the weekend o fun off on the COMPLETELY WRONG foot.

But, I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of gal, and things started looking up when I finally had some caffeine in my system and it stopped raining a bit.  We were able to enjoy the incredible beauty of the pretty much deserted Provincial Park.  If you’re ever looking for a FANTASTIC time to camp, end of September-beginning of October is it.  The weather was warm-ish (and really, you’re in a yurt with a wood stove at night, and during the day? Put on a sweater!) and the colours in the Bancroft area were absolutely vibrant.  Crazy beautiful.  I only imagine this weekend coming up will be even more so (we’ve already decided to go back next year at this time).

We explored and photographed and hiked.  We also read and knit (well, I did – it turned out that not having the length of circular needle I needed wasn’t as big of a deal as I’d made it out to be when I was being miserable).  I was obsessed with finding mushrooms, because after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the whole section on fungi, I was pretty excited to see the plethora growing in the forest.

Silent Lake is incredibly silent.  The lake was like glass. The park itself is incredibly dense forest (I’ve certainly never been to a campground area that was so completely treed.)  And there were no other people!  The best part! Until…

The sun goes down.  And your boyfriend admits that he’s scared.  Up until now, you’ve been trying to push every horror movie you’ve ever seen out of your mind so as to enjoy the evening/night.  But Erik was scared too!  At one point, we’re sitting at the fire and Erik’s attention just diverted completely.

Meagan: What’s up?

Erik: Just making sure that wasn’t a murderer.

So yeah, it might have been an even better camping experience if we had have had a group of us.  Less likely that the crazed-killer would get me first.

But really, all was fine.  The only visitor we had Saturday night was a raccoon, and he wasn’t wielding an axe, so it was ok.

Monday we explored some more.  I had a run-in with a deer, and he didn’t mind me too much.  Just continued eating and walking and let me take pictures of him, however difficult it was because the forest was so dark.  Then Erik went swimming, because he’s insane.

Later that day, I noticed the yurt door was open while we were having a campfire – it was still light out, so no fear of finding Jason hiding in there or anything.  I made Erik go close it, saying “you’re the guy who leaves the tent flap open and lets the mosquitoes in all the time, aren’t you?” So he closes it, and we roast some hot dogs or something, and a little while later, we hear a commotion in the yurt. I just look at Erik, so he goes to check out the scene.  He opens the door and says, “There’s a ferret in the yurt.”  I say, “Erik.” Because OF COURSE there’s a ferret in the yurt. You kept leaving the door open.  So then we have to cajole this ferret (which we actually believe was a red fox) out of our yurt.  It, smartly, hid under the bed – like my cat does when we try to cajole her to do anything.

It left, all was good. Some hamburger buns took the heat though, we found that out on Tuesday morning when we tried to have hamburgers.

Again, the evening was full of scary.  Darkness and silence do not a settled-mind make.  Made worse by the wine we’d been drinking, and then worse when we went outside to pee and I fell off the yurt deck (it was DARK) and Erik just laughed.  I skinned my knee. He laughed.

I did not want to leave Tuesday morning (particularly not to come back to WORK, BLECH) but we packed up.  Perhaps the creepiest thing happened that day though:

Our campsite backed on to forest, and past the forest, was a park road that is (I imagine in the summer) fairly busy with car traffic (not so when you’re the only people in the park though, or one couple of VERY few).  So, I’m sitting at the picnic table, facing this road, and a pickup truck drives past. But THEN it backs up slowly and idles right there, in my view. Just sits there. Of course, I can’t really see who is in the truck.  And THEN the person in the passenger seat does this weird slow wave. Just one, and very slow.

And I think, thank goodness we’re leaving today, or I’d be awake all night thinking of that wave. And waiting for those people in the pickup to come back and be all Devil’s Rejects on my ass.

But don’t let that sully your view of our trip!  It was beautiful and fun and if you want to come next year, good! (It means there’s less chance that the crazed-killer will get me first).

If you click that image, it should link you to my flickr slideshow of pictures from the weekend.  Including deer!

The cutest

, originally uploaded by Meagan Miller.

Wearing his birthday scarf! I knit this monster.

Putting it out to the universe

Maybe more on this later, but for now, I’m just putting this out there, to the universe:

I want a job doing something I love.  Preferably photographing.  I want a job that helps me to live comfortably, but most of all, happily.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask, is it?

Ottawa River, death of 365

, originally uploaded by Meagan Miller.

Well, the 365 project didn’t exactly go as planned. Turns out I wasn’t as good at remembering as I should be to even get close. I abandoned that hobby. But here’s a picture anyway. Ottawa River from Westboro beach, sunset, September 15th.

A mishmash of happenings

I’m such a procrastinator.  I have a report to write by the end of next week and I’m slllooooooowwwwlly working on the syntax for the SPSS file (statistics program).  Forget about the actual writing of the report.  That’s what next week is for!  I suck.

So, the goings on in my life.  I’m attempting to increase my (lack) of blogging. (Wait, if I’m increasing my lack of blogging, does that mean I’ll be further lacking?  That’s not my intention.) This weekend Erik and I are hosting some lovely friends from the Brantford area.  They will be here for the weekend to celebrate Erik’s birthday and my extended birthday.  I’m excited to see them, and we have many exciting things planned, most of which involve food.

Monday is Erik’s birthday.  I still want to get him a little something more, as I gave him the monstrous scarf I knitted him on my birthday.  Part of it was because we were celebrating with his parents, and another reason why I gave it to him early was because I couldn’t wait. I think he liked it.  He pretended to anyway.  The real test will be to see how much he wears it in the winter, as it is definitely a winter scarf (double sided – knit in the round – four hundred and seventy eight feet long, I exaggerate a bit.)

Monday is also my first Knitter’s Guild meeting.  That’s right, I joined a guild.  Mostly for the free help and the discounts at stores. I’m not ashamed.  At least it’s not a role-playing guild. Or a Dungeons and Dragons guild.  My guild comes with blue-hairs.

I’ve decided to do a 365 photo project.  I started on my birthday and will continue til I either forget about it, or get bored of it.  Hopefully, that will be at least 365 days from now.  Unfortunately, I lost my card reader somewhere, so I can’t get my pictures off my camera right now.  I might rectify that situation later today at the Radio Shack, er, the Source.

I also need to hook myself up with pair of actual shoes sometime in the near future.  My feet are naked, and getting really cold now that fall seems to be upon us.  I may do that today too.  It seems urgent.

In the meantime, I should get back to syntax.  My life is riveting.