What's been going on in my life this month and a VSS check-in

Yesterday marked exactly five months since my last birthday. It's staggering how quickly time flies, one month tumbling into the next, life a series of moments and emotions, smiles, highs, lows and memories. I'd hoped to get a new outfit post up this week, but there was no way that was going to happen as the days progressed.

This month has been - and will continue to be - staggeringly busy. The most jam packed, hectic one of 2015, topping even October, and while there will be outfit posts as the weeks progress, again, there was just no way for one to be squeezed in at present. Soon though, including a couple of stellar holiday season dresses that I can't wait to show you guys!

Since getting back from Vancouver last week, I've been crazy busy both vintage Vintage Secret Santa happenings, as well as packing up and shipping out a ton of wonderful Etsy shop orders that have been pouring in recently. I had some requests from blog readers for such to cover payday today, so I've extended the 25% off VSS coupon code there until tomorrow.

If you'd like to purchase anything for your VSS match, yourself, or someone else, you can take 25% off all orders when you use the coupon code VSS25 at checkout until December 12th.
 
Keeping pace with those happenings has been the holiday season itself, which as we all know, usually only gets busier and busier as the 25th draws nearer!

Also, before the end of the month, as a small business owner I need to file my Canadian PST and GST tax reports, which essentially means doing all of my 2015 taxes (in order to generate the precise numbers for each) this month, too. Not exactly what one wants to be dealing with for several days during Christmastime, but it must be done, so no sense in bemoaning it too much.
 
Further on top of those things - and very exciting - Tony and I recently decided that the time had come to get a new (be actually brand new or just slightly use) car. Our current one - which was actually our first car ever - was bought secondhand for a stellar deal back in early 2012 and has served us well for nearly four years now.

However, for a myriad of reasons, it's no longer the best fit for our current lifestyle (a big one being that we need a great deal more room than it provides, including for Annie, our energetic 65+ lbs dog, as well as for when we travel and for when I sell in person at vintage shows) and so this month we've been pouring our a lot of time, thought and energy into researching, test driving, and hunting for our next vehicle.

{The models – and prices! – might change, but the act of buying a car remains much the same as it did back when this photo was taken around the start of the 1950s. Vintage auto dealership image source.}

 
We haven't found "the one" yet, but we're getting closer and are both incredibly excited about this prospect. We've needed a bigger vehicle for ages and knowing that one will soon be ours is giving me some much needed pep to get through these crazy busy weeks!
 
Back, for a moment, to the VSS. For those taking part in this year's Vintage Secret Santa, 100% of the match emails were sent out to all participants by the (PST) morning hours of December 2nd. If you have not yet seen your email in your inbox (it should have been there about 1.5 weeks ago now), please check your spam (a lot of users who signed up with a Hotmail email are having their VSS messages land in their spam filters for some unknown reason - maybe Hotmail isn't in a festive mood this year ), deleted message, and archived message folders going back to November 30th.
 
If you don't see your VSS match email in any of those spots, please contact me by email right away and I get your match info out to you again. There's less than two weeks to go now until Christmas and if you signed up for the VSS, it's very important that you honour your commitment and mail out a gift to your match, who, just like yourself, is no doubt excited for, and expecting to receive, a festive gift as part of this fun online gift swap.
 
Definitely lots going on this month on our for sure, which is great! I've also been giving a lot of thought to the direction of my blog, my wardrobe, my social media accounts, and many other important aspects of my life and work as we head into 2016, so I've got oodles on my (vintage china) plate right now and am seriously excited to see how it will all play out in the coming year.
 
I hope that you're each having a terrific December and that, hopefully, yours is at least a bit less harried than mine!
 
Have an awesome weekend and countdown to Christmas, my dears!!!

We're home!

After a truly - and I mean absolutely truly - fantastic trip to Calgary, Tony and I are home again and slowly starting to get back into the ebb and flow of daily life once more.

Our vacation to our neighbouring province went resplendently. It launched on a drive that was bursting with the most picturesquely clear blue skies and toasty temperatures anyone could ask for; saw us clock more than 2,100 kilometers of driving in total, included my first ever blogger meet-up, oodles of vintage, antique and thrift store shopping; lots of fun sightseeing, and also a fair bit of time to just relax and regroup, something that was wholeheartedly needed in our life at that precise moment in time.

As those of you who follow me on Instagram and/or my personal Facebook page may know, earlier this month my mother-in-law, passed away somewhat unexpected from a stroke. This tragic news left Tony and I understandable deeply shaken and grief stricken. We discussed it at length, and felt that proceeding with our Calgary trip (which was planned for a few days after her passing), as planned, was the best course of action. Thankfully, it was in indeed, as our spirits were lifted tremendously, our minds focused elsewhere, and smiles returned to our faces many a time over the course of our holiday.

Though the veil of sorrow and grief still hangs heavily in our home, we are each other’s strength and comfort, and, much as with returning from our trip, are easing back into our more usual routine.

For me, this includes blogging, reading and commenting on other blogs, replying to the hefty backlog of emails and Facebook private messages that arrived while I was away (I didn't bring my computer with me), and - once I've recouped more (on the health front) from our travels – shooting vintage outfit photos (I've got some in the wings from before our trip, as well as new outfit snaps from Calgary, to turn into posts in the meantime).

And speaking of posts about Calgary, somewhere in the range of two to four posts (I want to cover a lot, but at the same time, in my enthusiasm about this fabulous little holiday, not bombard you nonstop about Alberta) about various aspects of our travels will be appearing here in the coming weeks, and will include topics such as some of the wonderful places we visited, where I shopped (and some of the lovely things I bought), plus a post all about that super cool aforementioned vintage blogger meet-up.




I sincerely appreciate, and want to thank you very much, for the great blog comments that you left on the posts that I set to go live while we were on the road, as well as for those on Instagram (such as the one pictured above of Stephen Avenue, a foot traffic only street, in the heart of downtown Calgary), Facebook, and Twitter regarding our travels and my snaps from Alberta (some more of which I plan to continue uploading in the coming days).

It will be a while before I've recovered (health wise) from the trip, and longer still until the initial pain of losing Tony's beautiful mother lessens, but I feel a renewed sense of happiness, creativity, and inspiration from our travels (as well as a new perspective on certain areas of my/our life) which, coupled with autumn's return, will help guide me throughout the coming weeks on the blogging front, and all facets of my life.

Our travels were awesome, and I am grateful with all my might that were were able to take our first holiday in several years this month, but it's also terrific to return home to a town we adore and to start planning for the next chapter of our lives - which, with a bit of luck and a lot of foreplanning, will hopefully include another exciting road trip or two next year.

Time for some much needed weekend R&R

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (a similar sentiment kicked off my last entry), this isn't the post I'd had planned for today. The other has already been written and could have gone live, but somehow it just didn't seem right for this easygoing, sun-drenched mid-July Saturday. The subject matter is a bit serious (it's about USPS's steep rate hikes earlier this year), and though I'm sure it will pop up here sooner or later, again, after such a fun filled, enjoyable week, it just didn't seem like today was well suited to it.

This week has been a hectic one, compounded with the fact the fact that I've not been doing too terrific on the health front this month (I was actually really not feeling well on my birthday, and wasn't able to dress up and/or do an outfit shoot that day as a result - but with the help of a mid-afternoon nap, I was able to get through the day and truly enjoyed every low-key moment of it), which stems at least in part from a very heavy new medication that I started last month.

As such, I've had next to no time to spend online so far this week, and I must apologize if I haven't made it to your own lovely blog in a few days. I suspect next week will be more in keeping with the usual ebb and flow of things, and that I'll be online a bit more.

The basement flood situation that I discussed here is progressing positively. In the wake of having to move everything out of our storage room down there (which was actually the point of entry for the water) because of it, we've decided to rent a small storage unit to house most of what was tucked away in that room (such as seasonal decor, old paper work, luggage, etc) and to transform that room into a home gym for Tony, once the flooring situation has sorted out. 

There's nothing to say we wouldn't have done this had we not been hit with a basement flood, but I'm sure it was a big push in that direction, and I must say, I'm excited to transform that room isn't something that I know my husband is truly going to love having under our roof.

And speaking of adding things to our home, last week (spurred on in no small part by the heat wave that rolled through town around the start of July) we had central air installed in our lovely little condo and are so exceedingly grateful that we won't have to rely on fans and window AC units to get us through another roasty-toasty Okanagan summer.

As I've touched on here and there in posts over the years, as much as I adore this season, the heat can be an extra challenge for my health (I hold up much better in the winter in this respect - and sometimes joke, as a result, that I'm going to up and more to the arctic because of how much better I fare in cold weather!), but with any luck, having central air will help significantly in this respect.

Between the heat (outside), the busyness of this week, and not feeling like a million dollars at the moment, I'm pretty spent as we kick off the weekend, which means its high time for some much needed rest and relaxation.

It's too early in the summer to throw in the (beach) towel entirely - there's easily a couple more solid months of sizzling Okanagan summer ahead of us, so stopping to recharge my batteries as often as possible, so to speak, is a definite must.




{Much like actor Alan Ladd and his wife in this 1950s photo of the couple taken by Bill Anderson, my weekend is slated to be as serene and laid back as possible - completely with plenty of outdoor lounging, reading, and time to unwind. Image source.}


Cold drinks, snuggles with Annie (who, hard as it is to believe, will be six months old next week) and Stella, cozying up with a good book (Claire McCardell's 1950s classic, What Shall I Wear?, to be exact), catching up on some of the week's many emails, and perhaps a Netflix movie or two are the name of the game today and tomorrow.

Whether you've got an itinerary so action packed it would tire Indiana Jones out, are planning to join me for some peaceful relaxation, or find your schedule falls somewhere in between, I truly hope that you each have a splendid weekend, my dears!


*PS*

Thank you again, everybody, not only for your awesomely lovely birthday wishes (all across the web), but for each and every one of your blog comments here this week (it was such a joy to read about some of your own fabulous memories of the 1980s).