Disappointment and excitement

I decided yesterday that I was going to sign up for a cooking series at the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver. It's an 8 session course with one class per week. I'm really excited about it but when I called today, the class is already full! I'm on the waitlist and I'll find out by next week whether or not I get in. The school also offers another 8 session course on pastry and baking that starts in March so I think I will register for that in the meantime.

There are a variety of different classes offered at a cooking store near where I work and some of them look really interesting. I think there is one next week on vegetarian cooking, and another this weekend on soups and stocks that I thought looked good. Maybe I'll sign up.

I have decided to explore some of my hobbies (cooking in this case) further to see if I could somehow develop them into some kind of career or something like that. In that same line, I'm going to go this weekend and dig myself a garden plot in the new Pine Community Gardens!! Yay!! Nobody has dug any closest to Burrard, but I think that is where I will try to go. I need to be as close as possible to home so that next summer when I'm in the middle of cooking dinner and realize I need some of my fresh homegrown vegetables I can just run down the block and pick some - or send Luke. :) I'd love to be able to grow our own vegetables and maybe if we ever move to an island have a huge garden and participate in farmers' markets and other community events like that.

On another note, Luke and I are just about finished "Smart Couples Finish Rich" - well Luke finished reading it last week, I'm just about caught up. We are trying to get all our finances in order as a bit of a New Year's resolution. We've been talking about pensions and I was really unsure about what my company offered and not really sure how to find out about it. I was happy to find out that I do have a pretty decent pension plan that the union matches and that I have been contributing to it since I started working, which is about a year and a half ago. So I can sleep a little better now. We're still planning on hooking up with a financial advisor in the near future to do something with RRSPs and mutual funds I guess. I'm really not interested in money stuff like that, but if it will help me not work sooner then I'll do whatever I have to do. I'm not really a big fan of working, maybe I just haven't yet found my niche. Which brings me back to the beginning of this post! Cooking classes! You'll all be inviting yourselves over to taste my delicious inventions... just wait. :) And now, goodnight!