My Personal Ecological Footprint

It's becoming more and more important to me to try to reduce my ecological footprint. Last year we bought a push mower, we've always recycled all our paper products and now that we have our blue bin, we're down to 1 bag of garbage a week. All our light bulbs in our house are energy efficient. I've even got my eye on a VW TDI Clean Diesel as a potential new car.

All that work to find out that my Personal Ecological Footprint is 8.3 global hectares!! Calgary's average is 9.4 and Canada's average is 7.1. It's nice to see that I'm a bit below the average in Calgary, but I'm not as impressed as I thought that I would be. I thought that we were doing a really, really good job, at least trying to do what we can do. I'm going to have to start eating 100 mile, which is going to be difficult, but I'll try hitting up some of our local markets.

Weekend Wonders

We've finally had a beautiful week, followed by a beautiful weekend. It's like summer is finally here! Started out with the hopes of going on my first cruiser ride of '09 with the gang. Unfortunately, after the fight with the bike rack, when I got to Kristin's,
her bike had a flat. From the sounds of it, not the first. Unfortunately there was more then one hole in the tube, and our ride was called off.

However, we weren't going to let that ruin our beautiful Friday. We decided to just walk around Prince's Island Park, see if we could find anything funny and just take advantage of the warm, sunny evening. We went hoping that we would find some interesting characters, and the park did not disappoint. We found Shakespeare in the Park (doing Romeo and Juliet), so we watched for a bit, and at intermission decided to take a little walk around and see what else we could see. Good thing we did cause we happened upon this scene:

What are these guys doing? And who is the dude in the suit? The judge? What is he judging?What kind of uniforms are they? Amber thinks that they are some sort of trekkies. I'm not convinced. There's something else going on here. Very strange.

Saturday was full of consumerism. Out of the house before 11 and not back until after 6. Shopping, shopping, shopping. We finally bought a few things that we've been talking about getting for a long time. Hit up Costco and even that was dead for a Saturday afternoon. We lucked out and had a very successful shopping day.

Thanks to Christien's mum, we got a lot of our unfinished projects completed around the house. Nursery painted, closet painted, kitchen painted, baseboards painted and nailed up, new closet organizer installed. Feels nice to have those checked off our list.

Now it's back to work for the week. Dale is coming to visit this weekend. Looking forward to seeing Christien's buddy. I haven't seen him since Christmas. Might even get a visit in with Mike, Christina and their new baby Ella. Ah... working for the weekend!!

Question of the Day

Human baby or food baby?

I'm really not sure anymore. Christien thinks that it's just cookies in there. I'm on the fence. This is the first time in years where I haven't been on some sort of diet, or exercise rage. I'm not sure what to do with myself. With my energy coming back, I would really like to take up swimming. My knee is just too messed up to go back to running, so I thought that this would be a nice, easy form of exercise on my joints. Do you think that I can find a pool in the north east to swim at?? I'll broaden my search. Starting back up with yoga in the middle of September, so I'm looking forward to that. I can't say that I've been the poster child for the Pregnancy Diet, but I've only gained 2.5 lbs since the beginning, so that's not too bad. I have quite the appetite lately.

Starting Fresh

After much discussion around starting our blog back up again, I've finally gotten the push I needed to get it going. I will try to be more diligent about writing in this blog. More so then I was before. Christien was more the master behind that one. So here goes...

A little background into what's been going on with the Shorts... We're going to have a baby! Finally!!! I am 14 weeks today, and we are both very thrilled about it. Came as a bit of a surprise to us, as we were awaiting tests results from our doctor, only to find out that we were pregnant. After a gut wrenching 1st trimester (3 ultrasounds and countless doctors appointments), we're happy to report that we've gone from a high risk pregnancy to a normal pregnancy. I can't believe that I don't have another baby pertaining appointment for another 5 weeks. Feels good to be able to start to enjoy this.

The final ultrasound that we had was pretty amazing where we got to see the baby so clearly. It was moving around like crazy and not co-operating at all with the technician. She had to come back 3 times to get the correct measurements for the doctor. At one point she saw the baby's mouth open and then closing over and over again, so we got a couple good stills of mouth open, mouth close. Very cute. It's either a girl who's already gabbing to herself, or a boy who is practicing his jokes like its dad.






Christien's mum has been visiting since the weekend, and she's already managed to paint up the baby's room for us. We won't be finding out what we are having so we've just gone with the good old neutral stand by of yellow, or more precisely Corn Silk on the walls. Starting to makes things a bit more "real".