Canada — Page 17 — You are in My World Now

Trying to be money smart

August 11, 2008 by Tricia

I had gotten so use to our Canadian dollar being slightly higher than the US dollar that I didn’t notice when our dollar took a nose dive. I only noticed it the other day when I transferred my paypal earnings to my bank account and for the first time in a long time the Canadian funds were higher than the US funds from which I was changing over.

I guess in some ways this is good for me since I tend to get paid in US dollars, so that means I actually earn a tiny bit more than my US counterparts. However it’s probably not good news for our economy. Maybe I should start looking into investing my money with a futures broker before things get worse?

Now don’t go thinking that I believe we’re headed for really bad times. I don’t think Canada will do that badly over the next few years even if they do take a down turn. Our economy has been very good for most of the last decade, whereas the US economy took a downturn around 911 and kept on going down.

If you have any money to spare have you thought of investing it or putting it into a higher interest account?

My husband and I have accounts at ING as well as at National banks. We keep money in our regular (national bank accounts) just to pay the bills, but any extra goes into the ING accounts because they offer something like 4% interest on any amount of funds in the account, where as standard bank accounts only give you a small percentage of 1% and usually only when you maintain a balance of $1000 or more.

The other thing I like about our ING accounts is that while we do have some Registered saving accounts we also have regular savings accounts that allow us to access our money any time we want so it’s not like our money is tied up for three, six or 12 months or more just to earn that interest.

Whether the Canadian economy takes a dive or not I’m going to keep trying to save as much money as I can. I know it will help in the future!

My little rose garden

August 3, 2008 by Tricia

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I grow roses in my front yard and back yard gardens. My front yard is very tiny … there’s maybe only a 10 by 8 foot plot of grass and I have that bordered with raised flower beds.

These are some of the lovely roses that I grow in my front yard:

This is Iceberg. It’s an easy to grow Floribunda rose.

Another pretty rose that grows against the front of my house is The Fairy. It produces clusters of tiny pink roses almost constantly throughout the summer.

This rose is Yves Piaget. It’s a Romantica rose. I love it’s full double petals and delicate scent.

My Morden Sunrise Explorer Rose is doing very well this year. It always has lovely blooms throughout the growing season, but this year it has twice as many flowers as it usually does. It’s quite happy and as you can see from the photo below it’s also quite pretty.

I have a total of nine roses growing in my small front flower beds along with peonies, daylilies, blue fescue grass, oriental poppy, bee balm, pincushion flowers, hostas, sedum, Russian sage, and many more perennials, plus several kinds of spring bulbs, and annuals such as petunia and impatiens.

You can see a picture of my front yard on my gardening blog – I know the flower beds sound like they must be packed with plants just from the list of the plants I can remember off the top of my head above, but it really doesn’t look too full. Take a look.

Do you garden just in one specific part of your yard (front or back) or do you create flower beds where ever you can make space for them like me)?

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information. GTS participants remember to check in at As the Garden Grows each week so that we’ll know you made a new post!

We’ll be taking a holiday soon!

August 2, 2008 by Tricia

Chris is off work the last two weeks of August so we’re trying to plan a short vacation.

We don’t have a lot of extra cash at this time so mostly our vacation will be a staycation, however we’ve been thinking of taking a short trip to Niagara Falls for a few days … perhaps a weekend trip although it won’t matter exactly when we do it as we’ll have 14 days to chose from. Perhaps I can find a better hotel package deal for a Tuesday or Wednesday night stay rather than a weekend stay?

We haven’t been on a holiday on our own for a long time. For some reason we always end up going to visit relatives – ie trip to Vancouver or joining friends rather than being on our own. Hmmm maybe now that we’ll actually have a vacation just for the two of us perhaps I should try to find some cheap lingerie. By cheap I mean inexpensive … not truly cheap!

More than likely we’ll be bringing our dog with us soI guess we won’t truly be alone, but close enough.

Did you take a vacation this summer? What did you do?

I can’t thank my brother enough for a special gift

July 29, 2008 by Tricia

I don’t think my brother has any idea how happy he made me last week. He gave me a gift that I’d been wishing for, for years without even knowing how much I had wanted it.

So what did he give me? Two free passes to the Canadian Golf Open this past Saturday. Now that wasn’t what I’d been wishing for years. I’m not a fan of golf. It’s interesting I guess, but the best part was after the Open semi-finals on Saturday there was a Tom Cochrane and Red Rider concert. That was what I wanted!

I’ve been a fan of Tom Cochrane and Red Rider since I was a young teenager and I’ve always wanted to see the band in concert.

When my brother got in touch with me about two weeks ago to tell me that he might be able to get my husband and I passes for either the Saturday or Sunday I thought that was very nice of him. I thought my husband would enjoy watching the golf. However when he got the passes and told me that he’d picked the Saturday pass because ther was evening entertainment and told me what the entertainment was I nearly fainted.

So last Saturday we went to the Canadian Golf Open for a little while in the late afternoon (it had rained a good portion of the day and play was delayed by over two hours) then we set up our double folding chair right in front of the grandstand. We had primo seats for the concert!

It was amazing! Tom started out by singing Victory Day, then followed up with Big League, then Sinking like a Sunset. After that he did a song dedicated to his daughter Cody which I believe was called Northern Star, after that they did a slowed down version of Good Times, followed by Human Race, White Hot and Life is a Highway. They came back for an Encore and did Lunatic Fringe and ended with Boy inside the man.

I love each and every song and believe me I was singing along and moving to the music. It was fantastic!

I’ve already thanked my brother profusely and I’ll be thinking of him as he attends a seminar about corporate performance management this week! Ah, he doesn’t mind the work related courses or travel that much … heck, this past Friday he was able to attend the Canadian Golf Open by volunteering to man a booth there for his company.

Going to a concert tomorrow night!

July 25, 2008 by Tricia

Tomorrow Chris and I are going to the Canadian Open golf tournament at Glenn Abbey. My brother managed to get the two of us free passes for the day.

My husband is more into golf than I am. I’m not into it at all, but I still think it will be kind of interesting to go to the tournament as I’ve never been to one before and there will be some big names there. Plus who knows I might even see some celebrities too.

My brother had a choice of day passes to get us. He could either get us day passes for the semi finals on Saturday or the Finals on Sunday. He went with the Saturday passes because from Thursday to Saturday each evening after the rounds are finished there’s supposed to be a free concert. Tomorrow night Tom Cochrane and Red Rider are playing and unbeknownst to my brother that is one of my favorite bands of all time. I’ve never been to a Tom Cochrane concert so I’m super stoked to go.

The only problem with our day and evening away from home is that we have to leave our puppy alone. We can’t bring her with us unfortunately. We do have an idea though … We’re trying to reach one of our friends that lives in this condo hotel in the West end of town to see if he’ll doggy sit for us. He loves Labs and if he’s free it will be the perfect solution to our little problem.

If we can’t get our friend to doggy sit we’ll just go to the tournament in the late afternoon. As I said neither Chris nor I are that into golf. The main reason we want to go is for the concert. Even if we don’t go until the late afternoon I imagine our puppy will be alone for 6 or 7 hours. Since I’m home most of the time she’s never been alone even that long! This could be interesting.