Toronto — Page 74 — You are in My World Now

Neighbors could make selling home difficult

July 6, 2007 by Tricia

I was just writing about how the cost of real estate in my general area has gone up and up since we moved into our home 6 years ago. I figure that the cost of our home – if we were to try to sell it – would be more than double what we paid for it!

Sounds great, but when you realize that you’d also be paying double for whatever new home you moved to it doesn’t make all that much sense to sell if you are happy with your home.

Still, I might call our real estate broker and see if she’ll appraise our home. It’d be cool to find out what it’s worth right now.

Of course if we did sell our home the new owners would have to put up with the karaoke neighbors! OMG what a terrible thought … can you imagine if we were trying to sell our home and the neighbors started up with their Gawd awful singing and loud music! We’d never be able to sell the house!

Note to self – remember to ask the neighbors to be on their best behavior if you sell the house before they do! Well, if they are still into karaoke at that time.

Birds at the feeder

July 5, 2007 by Tricia

This is a photo of some of the birds that are always in our back yard. We have two big feeders side by side that are quite large and these birds can eat them clean within two days. Or less!

Piggy birds!

Aren’t they pretty though? They don’t look like much from a distance but when you get a close up photo you can see all the different colors in the feathers on their bodies and heads.

I like the bird on the right who’s head is just poking around the corner. He or she seems to be saying – I see you, I know what you are up to!

Cardinals and butterflies

June 25, 2007 by Tricia

I can’t believe it. You know what I saw in my garden yesterday afternoon? A cardinal!

I saw one once before, maybe two years ago, but not since then.

It’s so nice to know that my lovely garden is attracting all kinds of wildlife that we don’t normally see in the middle of such a big city.

Looking out at the garden today I’ve seen at least three different monarch butterflies buzzing around all the flowers. They are so pretty!

Now, I must get some photos of these creatures if I can. Last year I hunted down a butterfly for days that was hanging out around my Rose of Sharon tree. Every time I brought out the camera the butterfly flew away as if it knew I was trying to take it’s photo. I did eventually get a few great shots of it though.

Now to do it again.

Get a Beach Cruiser of your own

June 24, 2007 by Tricia

I would absolutely love to have one of these beach bikes. Don’t you just love the look of them?

The bikes are just simple one speed bikes but their design makes them great for riding – especially on sandy beaches.

I’ve actually been a fan of Beach Cruisers for a while now but I’ve yet to purchase one. However, looking at their 2007 line up of bikes I might just take the plunge and get a new bike.

There are so many different styles it’s mind boggling.

I love the low rider beach bike that is shown on the 2007 bike line up page. It looks so cool! You can get beach cruiser bikes for women, men, stick to the classic beach cruiser line, or show off your appreciation of design and style by getting one of their chopper cruisers.

If you want a bike for racing these bikes probably aren’t for you. They are designed for leisure riding. That’s why I think they’d be perfect for one of my favorite types of biking adventures.

You see, here in Toronto we have a fantastic beach area. There’s a boardwalk and bike bath that runs along Lake Ontario in the West downtown core of the city. It’s a lovely area, and because it’s so crowded you can’t really race along on a bike.

Since these bikes are designed to be ridden on slightly rough terrain like a sandy beach they’d be perfect because there is a large beach area beside Toronto’s board walk too.

The bikes are priced reasonably too. That low rider that I pictured above is only $155 dollars, and the yellow womans beach cruiser that I showed above and linked to is only $95. I’d actually swear that the prices have gone down since I last looked at this website. Even better if they did.

The bikes are shipped 80% assembled so there won’t be much work for you to do once your new bike arrives. They ship using FedEx and they do ship worldwide so no matter where you are you could be a proud owner of a beach cruiser.

Stalker neighbor, power outages and battery clocks!

June 24, 2007 by Tricia

I think I’ve mentioned my neighbor Sofie before on this site. She’s my elderly neighbor that I call my stalker because she’s constantly knocking on my door or following me around the garden or worst of all staring at me from her window as I work on my desktop computer.

Thankfully I have a laptop now so I can hide from her sometimes!

Well … lately we seems to have a lot of small power outages. I’ve actually noticed that this has been happening at about 6 a.m most days. Most of the time the outage is so fast it doesn’t knock out our clocks or anything else, but early this morning I guess it was a fraction of a second long enough to mess with our electric clocks.

When our clocks go out so do the neighbors! Arghhh … Sofie hasn’t banged on our door yet to reset her clocks but she will. I know she will.

One of our electric digital clocks has batteries in it and even if a power outage is a few hours long it will say the correct time when the power comes on. We’ve spoken to our neighbors family about getting her some of these clocks. They aren’t expensive so I have no idea why they haven’t yet.

I’m at the point now where if they don’t buy her a clock today or tomorrow I’m going to go out and buy her two and give them the bill. Gas and time expenses included!

Why do some families not take care of their elderly relatives properly? I’m certain it’s their lack of care causing her to fixate on us .. me .. so much.