Hi Everyone! Sorry for the radio silence of late - I've been busy, busy with school and work, so finding some time to dedicate to writting has been a little difficult.

Remember that wee video I put together for Para Paints? Well, I'm rather shocked to say that I was selected as one of the 5 new members of the Para Paints Blog Crew!!! How neat is that? The other members are Sarina at Pink Little Notebook, Sara at Saige Wisdom, Meredith and Susan at Newberry Sykes, and Kes and Tash at The Dreamhouse Project. I need to start planning what I'm going to add colour to.

Two weekends ago I had to the opportunity to see the Ai Weiwei 'According to What' exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and it was stunning. If the show comes to a city near you I encourage you to check it out (I believe it's now moved on to Washington D.C). Once I had seen the show I went to do a bit of browsing in the gift shop. The AGO's shop is always rather impressive, and while some of the items are a bit pricey, they always seem to have a few neat things I wouldn't mind bringing home with me.

One item that stood out to me was the Chick-A-Dee Smoke alarm.

Now, before you think I've gone completely off my rocker consider that the design idea comes from the birds miners used to bring with them to work to detect deadly gas, and more importantly, smoke detectors have got to be one of the more unattractive but necessary things in our homes. I love how this adds a bit of whimsy to a normally unimpressive safety device.

Most of the marketing images I found had it placed in a kids room, but I think it would be fun wherever you would put a smoke alarm. What do you think? Would you buy one for you house?

Good Morning! Are any of you wondering where the weekend went - I know I am. I think it's because last weekend was a long one due to Thanksgiving, and I'm rather partial to long weekends so wish every weekend was at least three days long.

I came across this image a while back and I fell instantly in love. This was the living room of David Collins, who was an Irish Architect and Interior Designer based in London.

What do you think? Do you like this space as much as I do? If you could use one thing in this room in your home what would it be?

PS - I couldn't find the original image on the AD Spain website. It and more shots of David Collins' apartment can be found here.

Last year Para Paints introduced the Para Paints Blog Crew, and with the enticement of 15 gallons worth of free paint I blogged about what I would do if I was chosen as a member. Unfortunately I wasn’t one of the lucky few.

This year at Blog Podium they announced that the Blog crew would be back for a second year. Yippee – a second chance! A member of the crew still gets you a years worth of free paint, $250 towards painting supplies, and social media exposure, but this year they’re offering up the chance to name a colour – how neat is that? Haven’t you ever wondered how they come up with some of the names for paint colours? Seriously – there are hundreds if not thousands of different colours available – how do they name them all? (Personally, I believe there’s heavy usage of dictionaries and thesauruses).

Of course, it couldn’t be as easy as writing a blog post this year, this year they upped the ante – to be considered as a potential member of the 2014 Para Paints Blog Crew bloggers had to submit a video detailing what they would do in their space over the year. WHAT?

My immediate reaction was ‘Nope – not going to do it. That’s scary, and I don’t want to put myself out there like that’. Some people would say that blogging is already putting myself out there, but even though I’m sharing my thoughts on things that interest me, I’m still feel like I have a bit of anonymity – I can hide behind the keyboard a little bit. Video on the other hand is different – you can see me, and not some carefully chosen photo at the top of my sidebar, but me in ‘real life’ without the downcast gaze and the zit carefully removed from my chin. What’s more, with a video you can hear me, which is a rather foreign concept in my blogging world where I communicate solely via my written words. What if I sound funny? What if I suddenly start using ‘um’ and ‘like’ every second word? What if, what if, what if? Before Para had even finished their video presentation about the 2014 Blog Crew I had decided that it just wasn’t for me.

A couple of weeks went by and then I finally started writing my post about BlogPodium, and as I was typing out my notes from Sarah Richardson’s keynote speech a couple of points jumped out at me:

It turns out recording a video is a lot of hard work – setting up shots takes a while, and then there’s the actual taking of the video. I had genius plan to write out my script, but it turned out I couldn’t see that far without squinting – not really the look on video I was going for. Then I thought I could set up my laptop on the coffee table below the camera, and have it scroll slowly through the script (rather like the opening scene of Star Wars), but I couldn’t get the speed right so I either sounded like I was racing to finish, or I had to pause periodically to wait for more words to appear – either way it wasn’t working. In the end I ended up just winging it – I looked at the camera, opened my mouth, spoke for what seemed like ages, and then hit the stop record button. Then of course there was editing the video – there’s nothing like learning new software on a deadline.

Anyways, after all that I decided that since I’d gone to all that trouble to step outside my comfort zone, I might as well go one step farther and share it with the world, so here you go – me, way outside my comfort zone:

Ta-Da! What do you think?  I have to say I’m rather pleased - I only said ‘um’ twice, and not a single ‘like’

There were nine bloggers who submitted videos, so I’m going to ask you a favour – Para has posted all the videos on their Facebook page, please head over there and watch them, and ‘like’ and comment on the ones you like. I know how hard each of them worked on their videos, and if they’re like me they found it scary to put themselves out there so show them how much their efforts are appreciated.

If all goes well, I’ll hopefully be chosen as a member of the 2014 Para Blog Crew and, as luck would have it, I’ve already come up with the name for my paint colour – ‘Homeboner white’. It has a nice right to it, doesn’t it?