The Karpiuks » site news

Where are we?

lesley — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:49:01 +0000

Oh ya, over here making lots and lots of geeky soap…

Happy New Year!

lesley — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:47:39 +0000

Happy New Year to you and yours from the Karpiuk family!

To kick off 2010, we’ve given our blog a major facelift, as you’ve probably noticed. Not only do we have a new layout, but we’ve got a whole new domain as well. The old gallery system has been replaced by a slick Flickr account integration; you can see the most recent uploads in a photostream off to the right there, and clicking the “gallery” link above will take you to all of our photos (most recent sets at the top) and photo collections. Everything from the old Look At Us Go gallery has been moved over and old links on Look At Us Go will now redirect here to thekarpiuks.com. (While we feel like we’ve caught them all, if you find any faulty links just let us know!) Our email addresses have also changed accordingly. You can email us both by using us [at] thekarpiuks.com or individually with our name [at] thekarpiuks.com. With all of the immigration dust nearly settled, family is hopefully on the horizon; a fresh start with our family blog in a fresh new year seemed to be the way to go!

Speaking of immigration, we took a quick road trip to Toronto earlier this week for Lucas’ medical appointment. All went well and he flies back in to pick up the results for his final interview appointment in Montreal on January 5 to get his green card. We’re really excited about the final piece falling into place so that we can move on. While in Toronto we enjoyed good sushi and good company and were sure to get our fill of Tim Hortons and other Canadian goodies that we’ve been missing. Special thanks to Ronald and family for their amazing hospitality!

2009 went out with a bang. We treated my parents to dinner and their first live hockey game: the Indiana Ice vs. the Chicago Steel at Conseco Fieldhouse. It was a great time and afterwards we went back to their place and played Wii Fit until the ball dropped. Pictures can be found in a set on our gallery page. Lucas was of course my first kiss of the new year, with Oliver and Winston a close second and third ;) I sure am lucky to have such a great family. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us in 2010.

May 2010 bring you a fresh start, new excitement, and good health! Cheers.

Somehow, it’s Christmas

lesley — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:00:31 +0000

Wow, somehow it’s almost Christmas. (yay!) Wow, I’m almost 30. (boo!) and a lot has happened since our last post in June. (That kinda rhymed.) Let me give you the quick rundown.

1. We spent a fantastic belated honeymoon/anniversary trip in Nova Scotia in June. (See our last post.) It was wonderful!
2. We moved back to the states (Indiana) at the end of July/first of August.
3. I started teaching Computer Applications at the middle school, and love it.
4. We moved into our own place at the end of October.
5. My brother and sister-in-law had their first child — we’re now an aunt and uncle to one adorable William Herman.
6. We had our first (U.S.) Thanksgiving with Indiana family in three years.

That pretty much sums up the last few months! It’s been an exciting adjustment period getting all settled in back in Indiana. This weekend we put up our Christmas tree and today we got our first central Indiana snow… about a quarter inch in fact, which helped get me into the Christmas-y mood. (After living in Canada for three years, I’m not used to NOT having snow by now so I was having a hard time believing the holiday season was actually here.) It was hilarious driving to work this morning because it felt like everyone was driving SO SLOW over such a minuscule amount of snow. Dare I say I adjusted to driving in Calgary snow?

Our Christmas cards will be going out shortly, and I’ll post one up here closer to Christmas to share with the rest of the world. It’s a pretty cute one, if I do say so myself. Not because I made it, (I’ve got too many knitted gifts to finish this year, so we opted for a Walgreens photo Christmas card instead of my usual handmade) but because the new family photo is darling. Hope you have a wonderful holiday season!

Musings on May Long

lesley — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:46:05 +0000

May long weekend was a quiet but nice one, ending with the explosive new Star Trek movie. But first, Lucas and I experienced the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus on Saturday after breakfast with friends Tom and Jamie, and then took an hour long rollerblade through the Eau Claire area and Prince’s Island Park. What did we see at the Jack Singer Concert Hall? Not your typical orchestral performance, to be sure. We attended Video Games Live 2.0 (Calgary’s second year doing it), where the music of video games came alive via the orchestra and chorus. They played a lot of great classic game soundtrack pieces along with some newer stuff, with some little surprise bits thrown in. It was incredible!

I got my first MP3 player this weekend, too. It’s not technically my very first, as I had a small one that I could put maybe 30-40 songs on that ran on AA batteries and was a piece of crap, but it’s my first REAL mp3 player. I wanted something simple: music playback (of course), and video playback. I ended up with a Zune, even though it’s a Microsoft product, but in the end it had all of the specs I wanted (at least 8gb, video, music, radio, etc.) at a price that didn’t break the bank. Lucas got a new mp3 player while we were at it, too; we’ve decided that getting each other mp3 players would be an early anniversary present since our anniversary is next month. But don’t tell my mom because she hates that we give gifts early! We can’t help it sometimes; we get too excited when we have a good gift to give and often we give them to each other early. Oh well. I’m happy with our purchases and now I can carry knitting technique snippets with me wherever I go along with all of my music. I’m still fiddling with getting my mp3 tags written properly so that things show up on the player properly, but so far so good.

Lucas and I train into downtown and home together each day and the little extra time we get to spend together is very nice. And while I generally enjoy public transit, having my favorite music and knitting at hand on the half hour ride each way has made it all that much better. Having Lucas to snuggle up against, music and knitting at my fingertips, uninterrupted for an entire half hour each way every day? I almost forget that there are others around us. Which is something I wish I had last week, as on the way home from work on Friday we experienced yet another Loud-Phone-Talker. She was sitting directly across from us and early on in the ride she pulled out her cell phone to call her ‘friend’ Becky. She called Becky to cancel their plans for the evening, as Loud-Talking-Girl had apparently “forgotten about these other plans she had when she was at work.” It sounded like the lamest excuse to cancel plans ever, if you ask me. The best part? She wasted maybe 3 seconds after hanging up with Becky to call another friend and ask HER to get together that night instead. What a jerk! Loud-Talking-Girl kept going on and on and on about, like, omigosh, some of the absolute silliest things. Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except she was talking SO LOUDLY to her friend on the phone that the entire train car had no choice but to hear every word. Sorry, but I doubt the entire train wanted to know about how you split your pants at work today. Or “the coolest” new t-shirt you bought at the mall that says “I heart boys who recycle” on it, made from 100% organic cotton. What you talk about is and should stay your business (and the person you’re on the phone with) only. Don’t be *that* person on the train. I started having visions of myself snatching the phone out of her hands and throwing it out the window to quiet her down, which made me giggle and I had to turn and suppress my giggles into Lucas’ shoulder so that Loud-Talking-Girl wouldn’t think I was laughing along with her as she reacted with deafening guffaws to her friend’s every quip.

I mean, if you have a cell phone conversation on the train, realize you’re in very closed, close quarters and so your conversation isn’t exactly private. I find it annoying when loud-talkers blatantly force the rest of us to listen to certain things that seem very weird to be sharing with the general public, such as talking in a petty way about another person or sharing details of their last medical exam on the phone. We don’t want to know about those strange growths, and talking in such a way about another person makes you look catty. Or high-schoolish, especially how some conversations come across to those who have no choice but to be subjected to your drama.

Oh well, just another rant. Cell phones seem to be at the heart of my latest two issues, this being one of them, and the second being people who talk on their cell phones while driving. But that’s a rant for another time. Thank goodness for the new mp3 player, though, because I’ll be able to tune out people like Loud-Talking-Girl very easily now. The morning and afternoon commute will be that much more pleasant :)

Oh, and I also cannot discuss May Long without mentioning that I went and saw the new Star Trek movie last night. Wow, was it ever awesome! I was so stubborn about being a Star Wars only fan for so long, but after seeing the trailer for the new Star Trek movie a few months back, I gave in and watched the original Star Trek series of movies 1-6 (we skipped 5 as we didn’t have it and I was told it sucked anyway) in preparation. I really enjoyed the new movie, and my admission of that here I guess means I’m no longer a secret Star Trek fan. Now that it’s all out in the open, don’t get too disappointed, Star Wars fans… there’s enough love to go around <3

Happy Holidays From Our Family to Yours

lesley — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:33:44 +0000

Warmest holiday wishes from our family to you and yours! We’re busy getting ready for Christmas by finishing last minute projects and shopping in preparation for our trip to Indiana. And as if Christmas preparations weren’t enough to keep us busy, we’ve also been working on the early stages of wedding planning on top of that! Last week we officially booked the wedding chapel in Las Vegas that we wanted for our date and time, but that’s about where the official plans end and lots of ideas that have yet to be nailed down begin. You can follow along with us as we sort out all of those fun details on our newly created wedding website to help us organize and share all of that info. You’ll also notice a shiny new link to it along the top menu for quick access. The official date is set for Friday, June 20, 2008 in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We’re really looking forward to a fun-filled weekend of celebrating our marriage with friends and family!

We hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday, and we’ll see you in the new year! May it be filled with lots of love and happiness. :)

love,
Lucas, Lesley, and Oliver

Hungry? Browse Our Recipes.

lesley — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:17:29 +0000

Some server downtime at work the past several days has inspired me to organize my recipe box. I know that doesn’t make sense, but while our servers were down, I had some time to spend browsing the only website we can access at work: our own. I stumbled upon a recipe section and started printing off new ideas to add to my already overflowing and unorganized recipe box. It made me realize that I’ve not been cooking enough lately! Well, not exactly that we’ve not been cooking, just that the spice and variety of what we’ve been cooking for meals lately has gone stale. All of the recipes I’ve come across over the past couple of days has inspired me to remedy that by pulling out my old recipe box fresh from storage in Indiana and formatting all of my old recipes to be online and digitally accessible. My hope is that formatting them will cause me to “find” recipes I’d forgotten I had, and in turn, revitalize our plates with something “new.”
When I first moved to Calgary I had a lot of time on my hands. The first thing I had shipped up to me was my slow cooker. I was using it several times a week for awhile, trying out new recipes with all that spare time I had. Then I ran out of ideas and got into my sewing. Now that I’m back to work full time, I’ve noticed a definite decline in my motivation to cook a nice, full meal beyond Hamburger Helper or perogies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with Hamburger Helper or perogies, but we definitely need variety, that spice of life, to juice things up a bit. And while coming home after a long day at work leaves little room for motivation to invent or try out new recipes, I thought if I organized all of the recipes I’ve been squirreling away over the years, not only would it refresh my memory of what possibilities we have to choose from, but it’ll also make it easier to plan ahead so that cooking won’t seem like such a chore when we get home from work.

What does this mean for you? Well I’d like to make our recipes accessible to anyone online. I’d like to share the plethora of recipes that I’ve collected over the years with anyone that is interested in them. Some are original, some are recipes that have been passed down through my family, some I’ve found in books or on other websites, and some are old favorites that I don’t even know where they came from. Just a collection. And when we add recipes to the collection after trying them out, I’d like to share them here and highlight what we did. Eventually I’ll add photos. Hopefully this is the first step towards revitalizing our dinner table, and yours. We’ve gotten started adding recipes to our new Recipe Page, but it will be a fairly slow and lengthy process converting all of my scraps of paper over, so be patient! There’s around 30 recipes there now and we’ll continue to add more here and there until every single recipe I have is up. Whew! Enjoy :)

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!

lesley — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 19:37:38 +0000

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving wishes! This long weekend was very busy, and there’s lots of new pictures to share. Oliver’s 4th birthday was Friday, the Flames vs. Edmonton home game was Saturday, and we had Thanksgiving dinner with Jeremy, Vicki, Clay, and Allison on Sunday. (The food was delicious, by the way!) Today we’re relaxing and enjoying the extra long weekend day off.

You’ll find all of the new pictures in our gallery. Oliver’s birthday pictures are under Oliver->Fourth Birthday (2006). Pictures from the Flames game Saturday are under Miscellaneous->Flames Game Oct 7 2006, and Thanksgiving pictures are filed under Miscellaneous->Canadian Thanksgiving 2006. Enjoy, and happy Thanksgiving!

P.s.- For anyone having any troubles accessing and viewing the Flash version of our gallery, you’ll now find a link across the top of it that will take you to an HTML version instead. Let us know if there are any problems!

ZOMG Pictures Updated!

lesley — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:02:21 +0000

After such an eventful weekend attending and celebrating the wedding of our friends, Kali and Caley, I decided it was high time I updated our photo gallery. Along with the wedding photos, there’s a new picture or two of Oliver and I; we got our pictures “professionally” done a few weeks ago at Petcetera and Lucas took some great shots of Ollie and I in Prince’s Island Park this weekend, too.

Speaking of pictures, I’m sure you’ll want to check back after this weekend- our Pirate Pub Crawl- there will undoubtedly be a ton of new swashbucklin’ photos to take a gander at. And no, for the last time… we did not make this holiday up. International Talk Like a Pirate Day is this coming September 19, and you can read more about the official holiday that prompted our pirate pub crawl celebration here.

Yarrr! Enjoy the new pictures, and congratulations to Kali and Caley!

michael mann – blog faerie

oliver — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:05:12 +0000

the bipeds left me again last night, this time to take in a movie at a place called a “theatre”; i’m still not sure why they sometimes leave to do this – there’s a perfectly good ceiling right here at home to watch movies on.

i spent the night sitting in the bedroom window as i’m apt to do, waiting ever-so-patiently for their return, when suddenly i heard something. i instantly ran downstairs to see what it was, secretly hoping it was uncle rob as he’s the only one that lets me sit on the couch. before i was halfway there my nose told me the truth:

it was acclaimed hollywood director, michael mann!

apparently there’d been a mishap of some kind at this theatre place (i tried to convince them not to go…) and michael was here to give them a personal apology. he said he couldn’t wait long but that he wanted to give them a gift, to make up for their horrible evening, and did i have any suggestions?

i said i had, indeed, and began sketching out my idea in hushed whispers lest the neighbourhood cats overhear – they’re always plotting to thwart my fun. michael listened intently, and when i was finished slapped both his knees with his hands and explained that while he also despised cats with every fiber of his being, he wasn’t sure how that applied to the problem at hand. dejected, i slumped to the floor but my chin had barely touched the floor when he bellowed an “aha!” and ran across the room to the computer.

i waited beside him as his fingers worked a feverish pace on the bipeds’ keyboards, lips and brow scrunched in concentration, muttering shell commands to himself and smashing the enter key like the cymbal in a big brass band. i wondered if this was what he looked like when he worked? then i began to wonder why it was that i knew michael mann at all, i’m just a dog?

before i had time to fully contemplate my last question, mann shot straight up out of his chair, sending it skidding across the floor and let loose a victorious hurrah, pointing at the screen:

a blog.

a blog? michael mann thinks he can just come into my house and lay off some lame story about a bad movie-going experience as the basis for the installation of a weblog on the bipeds’ computer? “I THINK NOT, MR. MANN,” i shouted as i chased him out of the house.

so there you have it, a blog. i hope you enjoy the bipdeds’ ranting and raving – just don’t believe anything negative they might say about me, it’s all lies – i’m a perfect prince. but you already know that.

if anyone needs me, i’ll be doing my rounds – someone’s gotta keep the ceilings safe around here.