Paisley Ruth

Born at 12:49AM on Fathers' Day, June 15, 2008, weighing in at 9lbs, 2oz and sporting long eyelashes:

Last.fm

I introduced Tamara to Last.fm this week, and she suggested that I do a blog post explaining it and some of the reasons that we think it's an intriguing service.

What is Last.fm

I'm going to take the easy way out and let Last.fm describe itself:

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you.

You can use Last.fm to listen to music, find out about artists you may like, other people with similar music taste, gigs in your local area, charts and quilts for your personal site, as well as much more.

So what does that mean?

Think of Last.fm as a sort of "Facebook for Music". As a matter of fact, Last.fm actually pre-dates Facebook by a couple of years, so maybe Facebook is the Last.fm of personal relationships. Whatever. The point is that Last.fm adds a social aspect to your music.

Scrobbling? (or: how it works)

I think the Last.fm folks made up this word, so I'd better let them describe it again.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

Once you've signed up and downloaded Last.fm, you can scrobble songs you listen to on your computer or iPod automatically. Start scrobbling yourself, and see what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see.

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

Put it all together for me

So, you download the "audio scrobbler" software from Last.fm and start listening to your music in iTunes as you always do (also supports Windows Media Player and Winamp, but that just begs the question: why aren't you using iTunes?). Last.fm has all this information about what you are listening to, so now what can you do with it?

Here's the summary as I see it:

• Track trends of what you listen to (sounds boring, but to a stats nerd like myself, it's actually fascinating)
• Find friends on Last.fm and see what they're listening to; see your musical compatibility based on commonly played artists (Tamara and I, unsurprisingly, have a high musical compatibility).
• Share your musical trends and tastes. For example, here's my chart for last week:
  

  
  

• Share music. One way to do this is to embed a music player in a web page or blog post:
  Matty Schroeder – Choke
• Discover new music. This is probably the best part about Last.fm. Through the Last.fm software, you can listen to radio stations that are customized for you based on artists that are similar to the ones you already have in your playlist. Also, just viewing your dashboard page will show artists you may be interested in (this just revealed to me that Tyler Burkum has released his first solo album)
• You can join groups. Yay. It's a feature I largely ignore on Facebook, and entirely ignore on Last.fm, so it doesn't fit well into my sales pitch.


• Events and concert listings are associated with artists, so you can easily follow the acts that are coming to your neighbourhood. Can't say that I've really used this feature much yet either, but I can see the utility in it.

If you're not already using Last.fm, give it a try. If you are using Last.fm, add us as friends:
Josh is jdschroeder and Tamara is Tamschro.

A Day in the Garden

The weekend that my parents visited (for graduation, and my birthday), the Saturday we took them to the Japanese Gardens here in town. SO I thought I'd share a few of those pics. We went to the garden in the morning, had a picnic lunch at Henderson Lake, then walked around the lake. Lots of walking that day (well to me at this stage anyway). So these photos are from June 1st, so about 2 weeks ago.

This first picture is a bit blurry, but it shows how large my belly was at the time:



I love this picture, they're totally doing the sasquatch pose:


A couple pictures of my parents enjoying the day:



Me and Dad:


A couple pictures of the garden:



A picture of one of our many rests in the garden:


Oh yeah, and Josh was there too, but I had to steal the camera to capture that:

It was a good, fun day. I enjoyed my parents visit, they don't get to come visit often enough. :)

Extreme Weather

Southern Alberta is always full of ever changing weather, but today has been a doozey!

This morning there was a nice thick layer of fog outside the window, and was just slightly drizzly. But the sun began to shine and burned through it, and it was quite a nice day around noon. By about 2, it started to rain, by 2:30 it began to pour, which turned into hail (which sits about 1 inch thick on the deck, even with all the rain afterwards). It's been pouring since, with continuous snaps of thunder and lightning (usually simultaneously). The streets are just flowing. By 3:00 they had issued a Tornado watch in the area, as there had been funnel clouds spotted nearby. Such an exciting weather day here in southern Alberta. I don't know what weather we missed today... but sure makes for an exciting day.

In other news.... nothing is happening. She's not in a rush to come out. Maybe it's the weather?

Convocation

Well after 7 years, well only about 5 years of actually attending classes, I (Tamara), finally graduated from University. I am now the proud degree owner of a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science, with a Concentration in Geographical Information Science. It took a long time, and many detours, but it is complete!



Convocation was Thursday, May 29th, and my parents, brother, and his girlfriend Anh, all came out for it. We had a good visit, and had a couple days of celebration (also being my 25th birthday on the 30th). I think my parents were hoping for Paisley's arrival that weekend as well.

Here are a few pictures of grad:

My good friend Jen (Geography) and myself- she photographs very well... so lots of photos:




With other good friends Rachelle and Marissa (both Environmental Science)


Just with Rachelle:


On stage - look at the awkwardness. Convocation Regalia is not flattering on a 9 month pregnant woman:





Feeling hot and exhausted.....


Glad it's over.....

Eviction Notice

Dear Paisley,
This is a formal notice of eviction. Although the last nine months have been enjoyable, your contract is up and it is time for you to move out. We will discuss the damage deposit only after you have moved out.
Management
xoxo

(courtesy of my friend Jen)

Time for an update

We've kinda been neglecting the blog for a while now. Really nothing much has been happening in our lives lately. Now that I'm done school, I spend my days around the house, tidying, organizing, and crafting. Josh has been working a fair bit of overtime lately, so he's at the University a lot. So really not much to say on the day to day stuff.

On a positive note, Josh is now classified as an employee of the University of Lethbridge as of May 1. Prior to that he was contract. So that is great news, as it comes with benefits, as well as a raise. He really enjoys the people he works with, and has become pretty good friends with them (as well as myself with the wives). It's a great group of people. In fact we have them all coming for a BBQ at our house tomorrow. :) We also have plans for S'MORES! On my fancy new firepit (which was an early birthday present):


This weekend, Josh's parents are coming down for a visit, and I believe they're going to do some work for us (in exchange for my cooking skills - which are still lacking, but getting better). They have plans to put up the baseboards that Josh has been putting off, and putting another coat of paint on the banister for us (since it will be nice and I an be outside). I believe we also have plans for a picnic in the park on Sunday. Rumor has it, we're having Swiss Chalet (which just opened here about a month ago). Looking forward to the weekend, and hoping to spend some time getting the garden in shape.

We've nearly got the baby's room together. The crib and change table finally arrived (about 10 weeks we had to wait). But the shipping company dropped the change table, and it is broken, so we're waiting for it to be sent back and a new one to arrive. We have another dresser we can use in the mean time. But in the room we just need to hang the floating shelf, and some decoration to the walls (painted name and such), an hopefully paint the baseboards and window frame (although not a priority). But it's looking good in there.

Well although I have been doing plenty of crafting lately (now that I have a space that I can leave set up), I have been actually doing a bit more organization than anything. Last summer I decided to go "unmounted". This just means that I ditched the wood blocks that stamps come on, and have transfered all my stamps to EZ mount, and use acrylic blocks. Takes up WAY less storage space. I had started the process last summer, but had kinda left it half done. So I've gone back to it, and am getting most of them done now, as well as inventoried by stamp company and theme. Not an easy task when you have as many stamps as I do. But I'm making progress through my stamps, and hopefully will have it all done in a couple weeks, and there will be no stamps floating around and getting lost anymore, they will all be stored neatly in CD cases in an old CD rack of my brother's (shhh he doesn't know I stole it) ;). But I look forward to this massive task being complete, so that I can have everything in one place.

Here's a recent card. I haven't been posting many here lately, as we are working on getting my site set up. Well I shouldn't say we, Josh has the site set up, I just need to get myself in gear and load it up.



One more bit of news, as we grow to a family of three, we will be changing our blog location. Josh has a domain that he's been itching to use, and so we decided that we will use that time as our transition to the new blog. :) SO you'll get the news when it happens here, and we'll also add a link to the new site.

More Wedding Invitiations

Invitation #3




Invitation #4




Invitation #5



Invitation #6

Some sample wedding invitations

I made a bunch of sample wedding invitations a while back now, but have never shared them on here. :) So since life has been a little dry around here lately... I thought I'd share them.

Invitation #1





Invitation #2





Well blogger is having issues... so only 2 invitations for now. :)

They've arrived!

The rest of my cloth diapers arrived today! :) At the early stage, we're trying a couple of each company's diapers that got good reviews. Then we can see which ones work for us and which we want to invest in for the rest of the diapering stages. Although several of them are One Size diapers that can be used from 8 lbs all the way up to 30lbs. So we'll see how it all works out. I've still got to pick up a few more doublers, or make them. Also have to finish making cloth wipes (my project this coming weekend).

Last night we got rain and snow. So this morning when it warmed up again, I heard water running (rather loudly), so I went to investigate. The gutter that goes above our front door was pouring down over the front step (opposite end of the trough as it is supposed to). It wasn't just pouring out... it was waterfalling! There was no way to get in or out of the house! It only lasted about 10 minutes, but it was crazy. Guessing it's something that will have to be attended to this summer. In the winter the same thing happens, then the water freezes on the front step (not so safe).





Since we've put up the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs (we put it up to keep the cats out of the bedroom area of the house while we were working), I've noticed the cats aren't getting as much exercise as usual. Normally they're chasing each other around the house... but this week... they've been laying on their pet bed, and sleeping. But as you can see.... Teemo is definitely more comfortable than he ever used to be.

More Renos

Well we spent our Saturday working around the house. We got the first coat done in the spare bedroom in the morning, and then a second coat in the evening. This room will be used as the baby's room eventually, although right now it has all the furniture for the extra bedroom (which we are waiting for the tennant to move out of before we can do anything with it). So here's couple pictures of the work done:

Here's the room before we started (weird.... it's showing 3 pictures in one.... gotta get Josh on the debugging of that one!):


Here's Josh painting (the first coat):


I also got a chance to work in the garden yesterday. Twenty degree weather in April, not complaining. Hopefully today I'll get some more done in the garden.

I am no officially done classes. :) I'm so happy about that. Have 3 exams to write still, one today (a take home), one this week (just a multiple choice webct based exam) and then one April 24th, which will be brutal (but I'm sitting with 100% in the course, so I am sitting very well going into it). Then I will be a graduate. Only took me 6 years! (or was it 7?)

I've also gotten a chance to do lots of crafting this last month. I'm actually pretty well caught up to my card a day status.... although I usually make 6 -12 at once... not one everyday. Here's just a few of the cards I've made recently:






Josh is headed to Vancouver today, until Wednesday for a conference, so the house will be quite quiet. I'm hoping to get a lot of things done while he is gone, just organization and such. The next two weekends we will also be travelling and getting some visiting in. Then it's May. Time is going very fast!

Guitar customization

You may recall my complaint about the aesthetics of my new guitar. Luckily it was an easy tweak to make the look more pleasing. I pulled off the amber knobs that came on the guitar and replaced them with some chrome ones. Here's the result:

Original amber knobs

New chrome knobs

The new knobs look great, and my repository of chords is gradually growing.