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Saturday, June 30, 2007

I've Been In Your House a Million Times! 

Yesterday (Friday) was another weird weather day where every few minutes it was doing something new—bright sunlight, mist, torrential downpour, almost-hail, etc.

Here's something that pissed me off a little bit. Y'know on Wednesday I made a bunch of hamburgers on the grill. Well, on Thursday Carrie & I both had a couple more burgers during the course of the day. And then at the end of the day she discovered that I had a full, un-opened jar of Trader Joe's pickles in the fridge! You don't understand; those are the best pickles EVAR. They would've been so good on all those burgers! So for lunch yesterday I made more burgers and put some Trader Joe's pickles on one of them (the other one was a Gorgonzola burger, so I didn't want pickles on that one). And I also just ate three pickles straight from the jar. So good!

Anyway, after lunch I took Carrie back to the store, then I came home and watched some BSG. Neighbor Gary showed up! We hung out for a while before I had to go pick Carrie up from work.

At 6:00 Carrie went and got Lawrence and taught him to drive in the rain. At 7:00 everyone was supposed to meet up at the Parkway for some fun Friday evening friends time. Since Carrie was out teaching Lawrence to drive, Christine said she'd come pick me up shortly before 7:00. Well, she finished her errands early, so she picked me up early and we hung out the two of us at the Parkway for a good half hour before anyone else showed up. We talked about all of the vagaries of being homeowners and got a head start on a big pitcher of hard cider.

Carrie & Lawrence showed up and we all ordered food (Carrie & I split a quesadilla). Then one of the new Bead Babes, Marika, came and joined us! Very cool. While we were talking with her we asked her where she was living, and she said she lived on such street between such-and-such streets. Wow, we realized, that's really close to where Laura lived before she went to Europe. After quizzing Marika on what her house looked like inside and out, we quickly realized that she didn't actually live close to Laura's old house. She lived IN Laura's old house!

Coincidence? You decide! But we thought it was absolutely awesome/hilarious. As Carrie said, "I've been in your house a million times!"

Eventually we were joined by Melissa and Travis. We'd invited both Viki and Gary (separately), but neither of them ended up showing up, which was too bad. But it was still a very, very fun evening. Eventually Carrie drove the two of us back home, and I was allowed to put on an episode of BSG in the bedroom (though we switched to Home Movies when it was time for us to actually fall asleep).

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Friday, June 29, 2007

Weird Weather 

Yesterday (Thursday) the weather was all weird all day. It couldn't really decide whether or not it wanted to rain, pour, hail, or be sunny. Sometimes it would be almost all of them simultaneously.

In the afternoon Carrie & I made a major life purchase. We went down to Mattress Mania and bought a very nice, rather expensive mattress set with a 20-year warranty. The mattresses we've been using are really old (probably more than 25 years old) and are basically worth s**t. Especially to Carrie; she's much more sensitive to sleeping conditions than I am (I can sleep pretty much anywhere in any position at any time—it's kind of my superhero ability).

These last six months have been very strange for me. Just look what I've bought... a lawn mower, a mattress, a backyard deck, fixings to make a patio, and, oh yeah, a HOUSE. It still hits me as strange sometimes that I'm a full-fledged domestic homeowner.

We're very excited, but it means that we will NOT be going to Disneyland for our anniversary this year, because we spent all of our Disneyland money on the mattresses.

Anyhoo, after Carrie went back to teach her class I headed down to Olympia to meet with Kevin to talk about making a logo and business cards for his company, Dibble Technologies. As you can see, he doesn't have one right now. He also let me borrow Runaways, Vol. 3, which I took home and immediately read from cover to cover.

It was quite an adventure getting home, though, because it decided to do a massive torrential downpour while I was on the freeway. But it all worked out and I'm safe and sound.

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Thursday, June 28, 2007

So You Think You Can BBQ 

Yesterday (Wednesday) Carrie did not come home for lunch due to some work meeting stuff. Left to my own devices I... y'know, I can't even remember what I had for lunch. Sigh. My memory has really been pretty crappy lately.

Anyhoo, I went to Safeway in the afternoon. We were gonna have people over in the evening to BBQ and watch So You Think You Can Dance. Carrie left me a grocery list of things to buy. She helpfully labeled the list, "So You Think You Can BBQ."

I got everything no problem, though it was surprisingly difficult to find the charcoal. It was all hidden in an aisle that was not appropriately labeled, i.e., it was under the fresh meat.

I came home and cleaned and cleaned, the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen and everything. I even let Roomba run around until he ran outta batteries and yelled at me.

Carrie was home much later than usual because her old friend Erin stopped by the store to pick out stuff for her wedding jewelry, wedding jewelry that Carrie is going to make for her! So Carrie was there helping Erin for quite a while.

Carrie came home for a bit, then went and got Lawrence and taught him some more driving stuff out at Point Defiance. Whilst she did that I got the coals all a-blazin' in preparation for barbecue funtimes. Lawrence & Carrie came back and soon thereafter Christine showed up. There was a chance that Jen might have come too, but her enfant was too fussy and grumpy to enjoy hanging out, so she decided not to come after all. But Melissa and Travis did show up.

I qrilled up some burgers and bratwursts. Melissa brought a salad. Christine brought a bottle of wine and a Key Lime Pie for dessert. And there were a couple of bags of chips. And another bottle of wine. I like Wednesdays a lot.

And even though there were a tonne of people over here with a tonne of food, there is very little cleanup because we used paper plates and plastic forks. The only things that need washing are some tongs, a spatula, a platter, a knife for the mustard, and several wine glasses.

I forgot to water my flowers before I went to bed, but that's okay because it rained pretty much all morning today.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Don't Do It a Stupid Way 

Yesterday (Tuesday) Carrie had a split-shift, but she also had a meeting that started and therefore ended late, so she wasn't home until a couple hours later than she usually would have been.

I watched a whole heap of BSG 2.5 during the course of the day. Curses to Carrie for giving me one of the best TV shows evar when I should be more productive!

In the evening I worked on some work stuff, and realized when I was halfway done that I was doing it a stupid way. So I started over and did it an intelligent way instead. Carrie came back home during this time and made us some macaroni to eat, and then scooped up some ice cream for dessert. It was pretty late by the time I finally went to bed.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Yesterday (Monday) I finally posted my danged review of Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End (PotCAWE). You should so totally go read it now!


Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End

Anyhoo, yesterday was a weird day. In the afternoon I successfully did my new regimen of afternoon Konpyūtā work, shot of a blog, and did my daily grind.

Then I picked up Carrie from work and watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica 2.5. A while later I noticed a handful of news reports online (starting with a blog post on Michael Tanner's MySpace page) saying that Chris Benoit and his family had been found dead in their home. Wait a minute, I thought, wasn't he supposed to have fought for the ECW championship on Sunday? Sure enough, he'd dropped out of the match at the last minute. Needless to say, this put a damper on the rest of the evening.

At one point I went to Fred Meyer to drop off Carrie's paycheck at the bonk (and to buy some laundry detergent). Rachel at the bank declared that she wasn't looking forward to going to the midwest with Linnea & the girls this week, because apparently it was 90 to 95 degrees over there. Yikes! Don't blame her for not looking forward to that. They're all gonna be out of town for ten days.

As I was walking back to the car my brother called to see if I had heard the news about Benoit. We all agreed that it certainly seemed like it should end the whole "Mr. McMahon is Dead" angle that they had going on in WWE.

When I got home I mowed the lawn, but I had a devil of a time getting the mower to start at all. I had to prime it an awful lot before it would finally catch. A little unnerving, considering this is only the third time I've used it. Well, it ended up working, so I guess nothing to worry about yet.

Don't recall too much what happened in the evening. I did turn on Raw for a few minutes. They had quickly whipped up a tribute to Benoit (their archive crew is phenomenally good at doing super-high-quality work at a moment's notice), but I couldn't watch very much of it because people like Tazz and C.M. Punk getting teary while trying to talk was too much for me. I watched some more Battlestar Galactica instead.

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Monday, June 25, 2007

Steaks! 

Yesterday (Sunday) Carrie & I did not sleep in quite as much, and actually got some cleaning done in the morning. I only made some scrambled eggs for breakfast, not no fancy French toast this time.

I left for Fools Play practice around 12:30, but right before I left Brandy stopped by to pick up her laptop and a stack of CDs. It was good to see her.

Practice was fun. We talked a lot about FPRL and practiced a new format we're gonna call "Home Cooking." We also worked on Nostalgia Podcast. Jake had to keep going into the other room to keep from laughing too loudly at that. It's funny!

After practice I went straight to my folks' house, where my dad was barbecueing despite the fact that it suddenly began pouring! It was weird weather all weekend; I don't think it even cracked 60 degrees yesterday.

Anyhoo, what was my dad cooking? Steaks! And potatoes! And corn! Well, I didn't care about the corn so much (I haven't eaten corn in over two years). But the steaks and the potatoes were quite excellent, and I even had a li'l bit of salad.

When I was leaving Alexis gave me a couple of Hello Kitty coloring pages to give to Carrie and asked if I would tell Carrie that she missed her. I assured her I would.

So then I went home and gave Carrie the pictures and relayed the message. In the evening we watched some BSG 2.5 before switching over to Home Movies for sleep.

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Macmergency 

Yesterday (Saturday) Carrie & I slept in a little bit. Not a lot, really. But then we languished for quite a while before actually getting up. In fact, she languished while I made some breakfast. What did I make? French toast. From scratch. That's right! You heard me. I made French toast from scratch. Well, okay, I didn't make the bread, but I did take the sourdough bread, dredge it through some egg/cream/nutmeg funtimes, and fry it up in some butter. And to go with it I made some scrambled eggs. It was all really, really tasty.

After that the plan was to spend the afternoon cleaning, but I unfortunately had to spend the afternoon doing an emergency save of my MacBook here. I somehow managed to actually screw it up so that when it started up it gave me a "panic" message and said I had to restart my computer. And then it would give me the same message every time I restarted it. So I went online and discovered that there are about a dozen effects you can do if you hold down different keys while starting up a Mac. One of them came in especially handy, because i discovered the fix for my problem involved inserting the OS X Install disc into the disc drive... the disc drive that had a disc already in it... a disc I couldn't eject because the computer would never fully start-up. So holding down the "C" key at startup forced the disc to eject! Neat!

I was then able to run the stuff from the install disc that I needed to, and a couple of hours later the computer was up and running with no loss of data (a couple of my third-party-installed programs aren't working anymore, like GiMP, but I can just re-install them and they'll be fine). So, a very distressing problem with a very effective fix. Honestly, right now it's like nothing ever happened to my MacBook.

But by the time that was all fixed and whatnot it was almost time for me to leave for Fools Play! I was able to wash some dishes before I left, so that was good at least. Oh, and also Carrie gave me BattleStar Galactica Season 2.5 just because she likes me! She totally roxorz!

Taisha came to this episode of Fools Play, but unfortunately not very many audience people showed up. But I still had a blast performing "Fools Play: A Life," especially for me a scene where I was doing an infomercial for my new line of cookware. I kept making Mike bust up. We also debuted the new recurring character bit "Nostalgia Podcast."

After the show we all went to Rib Eye as per usual. I talked to Jake about my idea for a Professional Wrestling video game that isn't kayfabe. I just think it would be really cool.

When I was paying I brought out my NES Controller Wallet in which I keep all my methods of payment. Josh saw the wallet and exclaimed how cool he thought it was.

"My wife gave me that for Christmas!" I said proudly. "She also today gave me BattleStar Galactica Season 2.5!"

"Can I marry your wife?" Josh asked.

The answer was, of course, no.

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posted by Christopher at 11:24 PM

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Saturday, June 23, 2007

Round 1: Dirty Heel, Fight 

Yesterday (Friday) I brought Carrie home for lunch and then we had lunch. Hmm... that was a good sentence I just wrote, eh? Anyhoo... I took her back to work after lunch, then came home and went to enjoy my pretty backyard. While I was back there I heard what sounded like a car pulling into my driveway. I poked my head around the corner and saw none other than Neighbor Gary getting out of his car!

He has moved back to Tacoma for the summer, living just a ten-minute drive away with a couple of his friends. Kickass. So we hung out for a while, then I sent him on his way so I could clean the kitty litter and then drive on down to Olympia to hang out with Tia!

I met Tia and her friend Alanna (sp?) at the Barnes & Nobles down there. While there I picked up the CUTEST BOOK EVAR:


Sea Creatures

It's so cute that Tia bought one too! After that the whole crew went back to Tia & Siobhan's apartment and hung out for a bit before deciding to go out to dinner.

Deciding where to go to dinner was a little torturous only because everyone except for me and Siobhan were incredibly indecisive—and Siobhan wasn't even going with us! So I eventually decided that we were going to Mekong (the one in Oly, not in T-town). I, as usual, had the Phud Thai, and it, as usual, was excellent.

We then went back to Tia's place, where Alanna & I both created characters for Soul Caliber III. Alanna created some girl based on a MUD that she and Tia do. I, on the other hand, made Dirty Heel. Yes, that Dirty Heel. Came out looking pretty good, too! With the beard and the dark glasses and everything. It was pretty funny fighting with him.

Anyway, after that I drove on home. Or, rather, I drove on towards home. I made a detour on the way to Christine's house, where Carrie was hanging out. I hung out there as well. We watched some Veronica Mars Season 2 and had some wine and a good time. Steph and Jamie showed up at some point as well. After exposing Christine to some Season 2 goodness (she hasn't seen the 2nd season yet), Carrie & I went on home.

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Patio it Up 

Yesterday (Thursday) when I picked Carrie up from work and brought her home my dad was already there, working in the backyard, prepping the area for our new patio! He wanted to go to The Rosewood for dinner, but Carrie oddly did not have a split-shift on a Thursday, so she didn't have enough time to join us.

So my dad & I both went to Rosewood and had tuna sammitches. I also had the French onion soup, though that took a while to appear. We also both had dessert! I had a big ol' cookie and dad had the chocolate torte-like thing. He also insisted on paying, which I think is crazy because of all the free labour he's doing for us in the backyard. But he was insistent.

We left there and went straight to Lowe's, where we wandered around and looked for patio pavers. We eventually did locate them and bought five of 'em for a test. He lugged them back in the trunk of dad's car and installed one in the backyard before he left.

I was up late working in the evening. Surprisingly, Brandy was up even later than I was. She saw that I was on Google and had me give her a call and we had a good conversation. After that it was very late, so I took out the trash (literally) and went to bed.

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Thursday, June 21, 2007

It's Easier if You Sing 

Nothing really interesting happened on Tuesday. To me, at any rate. I'm sure other people had wonderful Tuesdays. Mine just kinda happened. Nothing bad, y'know. Other than work stuff it was just kinda there then gone. There wasn't anything appetizing in the house for dinner, so I was bad and swung by Jack in the Box to try their new sirloin burger (not bad). I watched a li'l bit of ECW. Y'know.

One thing I did get done was that I updated the right-hand bar on my links page. I divided the blogs list into people I actually know in RL versus people I've never actually met. So if I know you in person and you have a blog (a non-livejournal, non-myspace, non-loowa, etc) but your site isn't on the list there, let me know and I'll put it up for everyone to see!

Yeserday (Wednesday) Carrie went straight to the Trader Joe's after work. We both just had a li'l bowl of cereal at 6:00 because we were hungry but didn't want to ruin our appetite for later.

Around 7:15 Carrie picked up Lawrence and began teaching him how to drive at UPS. Apparently (I wasn't there to verify) Lawrence drives a whole lot better if he sings about what he's doing as he's doing it. "Oooh, yeah, I'm puttin' on my turn signal / Now I'm turning left!"

They drove straight to Christine's, and I walked to join them there at 8:00 so we all (Me, Carrie, Lawrence, Christine, Steph, and soon Melissa and later Travis) could watch So You Think You Can Dance and eat some Lasagna that Christine made and salad that Melissa made, and drink a bunch of wine that Carrie brought and eat a bunch of ice cream bon-bons that I brought. And have a really good time. Which we all did.

After that Carrie & I went on home.

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posted by Christopher at 11:28 PM

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Tuesday, June 19, 2007

<sarcasm>Exciting Times</sarcasm> 

Yesterday (Monday) does not stick out in my mind as a particularly memorable day. One unusual thing was that Carrie had to teach in the evening, and she almost NEVER has to teach on Mondays. So she was home all afternoon, which is unusual for a Monday. I went to Fred Meyer to deposit some moneys at the bonk there—they've completely moved and remodeled the bank at Fred Meyer. It's much different now. I also bought some cheese and some salami and some milk and some kitty litter. Exciting times!

I caught the ST:TNG 2nd season episode "Time Squared," where Picard finds a version of himself from six hours in the future. I want to hear Wil's take on the episode (even though he's not really even in it).

I watched the last hour of RAW, Carrie came home, and we went to bed. Exciting times indeed.

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Monday, June 18, 2007

Der Tag der Väter 

Yesterday (Sunday) was of course Father's Day. For lunch Carrie & I met her folks at Doyle's just down the hill. I had a very good French-dip-style sammitch. The Au Jus was made with Guinness, so it was also very good.

For dinner we went to Anthony's Home Port in Des Moines and met up with my family. A lot of my family, in fact. There were I think 13 people seated at that table, five of whom were Minnesota relatives. I don't know that I'd ever met them before. Cousins of some kind. One of them was very funny. When asked what method they used to get to Washington, he replied, "Balloons."

After that we went back to my folks' place so Dad could open his gifts. Mike and I both got him Gene Autry CDs. He was very excited about that.

What I was very excited about, though, was the drawing that Alexis made for me:

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Sunday, June 17, 2007

Surprise! 

Yesterday (Saturday) Carrie woke me up in the morning and informed me that she was taking me to breakfast. But first we were picking up Lawrence and taking him to get his learner's permit at the DMV.

I wisely grabbed my DS before we left, because the whole DMV process took two-and-½ hours. At one point when we were wondering just why it was taking so long, Lawrence joked out loud, "It's because I'm black, right?" It took the ladies sitting next to us a few seconds to figure out he was joking. But soon they were on our side and rooting that Lawrence's number would be called next. When he did finally get called up they all applauded for him. Very funny.

By the time that was all done with it was time for lunch, not dinner. We went to the Pine Cone Café again. I had a Monte Christo sammitch! My favorite sammitch! With raspberry jam and everything. Lawrence had pancaces, and said they were some of the best pancakes he'd had in years and years.

We stopped by the dollar store on the way home so I could get some supplies for the evening's episode of Fools Play. While I was in there Carrie let Lawrence drive the car around a mostly-empty parking lot for a bit, then we all met in the bakery section of Safeway so I could pick up a cake, also for Fools Play.

When we were walking back to the car I realized that I needed disposable plastic forks for the cake. So while I went back to get those, Carrie and Lawrence went across the street to the pawn shop to see if they had a part Lawrence needs for his guitar. They didn't. So instead he got a PlayStation 2, a couple controllers, and a Grand Turismo game. For "driving practice."

We took him home and came home ourselves. I had to rest for an hour or so, then gather together all of the various sundries for Fools Play in the evening. It was a lot more stuff than usual.

That's because it was a special show — Fools Play Surprise! The surprises included:
  • The Red Fool is here—but he's not going to perform!
  • Chris is hiding somewhere in the theater, and whoever finds him wins a prize! (I was dressed like a Tamagotchi
  • We've been training our apprentices at the Fools Play Compound! Let's take a look at that footage...
  • It's YOUR birthday! Here's a cake and a birthday present!
  • Easter egg hunt!
  • One of the Fools has a suggestion card hidden on their person. You get to find it!
  • Shave-off!
  • Roomba Fight!
  • And, finally, at the end of the show Mike gets a limo!

After the show there was a lot of tear-down, but Mike thankfully came back from the limo and helped out a bit. I was the last person to arrive at Rib Eye, and there were no more spaces at any of the occupied tables! Thankfully Sandy (and later Jason) helped me start a NEW table.

I also gave Jason my digital camera to take photos during the show, so here's a slideshow of those photos!

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Saturday, June 16, 2007

Happy Birthday, Leia 

Yesterday (Friday) Carrie was forced to stay late at work because of meetings running long and all that. So I only got to hang out with her for like half an hour before I left. Why did I leave? Because that evening was Leia's 21st birthday party! Hooray!

It was a lots of funn. It basically consisted of eating food, playing video games, and watching people play video games. I played some Wii and I played some Guitar Hero 2, and I ate some pizza and I hung out with a bunch of my friends, so all-in-all it was an A+ night in my book! Here are some pictures I took:


Here's the gang all playing Wii

Leia taking a picture of me taking a picture of her

Leia's sister Hannah

The best present that Leia got! Sandy made her a Unicorn Robot during the course of the party!!! (Leia made the robot on the right)

Another photo of the robo-buddies

And Hildegard, enjoying the party as much as anyone else.

And here are Leia and Kedar playing Guitar Hero 2. Leia is really good at it! And watch Kedar keep on looking up at me while I film them.

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Friday, June 15, 2007

Last Hurrah (For Now) 

Yesterday (Thursday) my dad came over to work in the yard while Carrie & I were still at work. Carrie walked home at one point and was rather startled to see his car in the driveway. She forgot that he has a blue car now, so she didn't know who could possibly be parked in our driveway!

Anyhoo, after work I picked up Carrie and we quickly swung by the drugstore and then headed home. I took my dad out to lunch at E-9, where he had an onion/Swiss burger and I had a good ol' club sammitch. I took some of it home for Carrie, then worked in the backyard a bit with my dad, digging up grass in preparation for paving.

Geoff showed up while we were out back. He leaves for China today! So this was our last chance to hang out. We set up our laptops on the dining room table and spent many hours making each other listen to our music collections. "Hey, have you heard this?" "Wow! I really like that! But have you heard this?" That kind of thing. It was really a lot of fun, and a very fitting way to hang out with Geoff before he goes away for six months.

He left around 7:15 to go do capoeira, and I settled down with konpyuta and did what I promised to do: I wrote my review of Spider-Man 3. Take that, procrastination! Pow!

So I really didn't get any work-work done, which is unfortunate because there's quite a bit I need to still do. But hanging out with my best friend since kindergarten seemed more important. Weird, I know. But fear not! Geoff has set himself up with a blog so he can chronicle his adventures in the exotic Orient! It's called More Qi! There's nothing on it right now, but that's okay, he plans to post photos and maybe even other things once we figure out how he can.

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

You Should Have PHP'd Before We Left 

Yesterday (Tuesday) Carrie thankfully did not have to go in to work until the evening. She only had to teach her class. So she spent much of the day resting. I, on the other hand, taught myself how to program in PHP. Woot!

See, a couple of my clients have started using WordPress, which is PHP-based. One of them wanted it to do stuff that it isn't inherently able to do, so I had to teach myself PHP in order to get it done. It was a lot of fun! PHP syntax is very similar to Javascript stuff, the tags are just formatted a little differently, and there are some different inherent functions.

Anyway. That's basically what I did all day. And y'know what? It was fun.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

If Only I Could Surveil 

Yesterday (Monday) Carrie had to work, even though she just got back from a big ol' business trip the day before. Boo to that bear! When she got offa work she snagged Lawrence and took him down to the DMV to take his driving test, only to discover that the DMV was closed. While she was in the area, though, she went ahead and went to the Trader Joe's and bought some groceries.

I, in the meantime, mowed a good more chunk of the yard, all the way to the back fence and a little bit between the deck and the trees. It's coming along. Unfortunately there is a whole bunch of poop being uncovered back there. Some animal has routinely been using my backyard as a toilet, and I don't like it none! It's times like this I wish I could just set up a camera and catch the thing in the act. But I ain't Veronica Mars. I ain't even Keith Mars.

In the evening I finally got around to seeing Casino Royale. My biggest complaint with the movie is not that James Bond doesn't behave like "James Bond" (since this is essentially his origin story, his character has logically not gelled yet. If he continues to be like this in the next few movies, though, then I might have some issues. But probably not many, because this James Bond wasn't really all that different from "James Bond."), but with the way the movie is structured. TWICE during the movie James Bond is in pursuit of someone and we don't know at all why. There is no context to the scenes. They don't even explain what the villainous scheme is until very late in the movie, and then it's just simply "funding terrorism." It made it very difficult to get drawn into anything because we never really knew what the stakes were (except for the personal stakes of the characters, and even then that often wasn't explained until AFTER the action scenes).

That's all that I can remember of Monday.

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posted by Christopher at 10:41 PM

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Re: The Lack of Writing 

Why haven't I written a review for Spider-Man 3 yet? I only have to write that one and then the one for PotCaWE and I'm all caught up on my reviews and can move on to more important thangs.

Maybe that's why? Am I afraid of actually starting something important? The summer is rapidly slipping away and I've done nothing terribly productive with it so far. Grumble, grumble. So here's the what-what: no matter what, I'm going to write my Spider-Man 3 review tomorrow (Thursday). And I'm going to write my PotCaWE review on Friday. Period. The end. The foot has spoken.

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posted by Christopher at 10:37 PM

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Theremiah 

Yesterday (Sunday) I got up early-ish in the morning and successfully did some good bit of cleaning. I went to Fools Play practice in the afternoon, but only stayed a couple of hours because I had to leave to pick Carrie & Christine up from the airport! Hooray! I like them.

I dropped Christine off first, then took Carrie home so she could gather all her things inside and relax for a tiny bit. I then actually dropped Carrie off at the Babe Factory to see if Carrie could help out, because apparently they were severely short-staffed while Carrie & Christine were gone. But they were apparently doing all right, because they sent Carrie home only a few minutes after I left. She walked back to the house and met me there.

At 6:00 we went back up north to my folks' house where my dad was barbecuing some hot dogs and brats. Yums. We hung out there for a little while. Susan & Jason were out of town, but Alexis was staying with me mum and da, so Carrie colored some Hello Kitty stuff with her, and I briefly played hide-and-seek with her.

After we came back home I shut the house down and we got into bed and watched Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which, by the way, was given to me as a birthday present by Jeremiah. Jeremiah does this really cool thing where instead of giving birthday presents to his friends on their birthdays, he sends out all the presents at basically the same time, regardless of when your birthday actually is. The note that came with the package said something about happy either late or early birthday.

He also gave me Esquivel's Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Thanks, Jeremiah. Theremiah.

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posted by Christopher at 3:31 PM

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Hosted by a Puppet of Quetzalcoatl 

Yesterday (Saturday) I had planned on spending the vast majority of the day cleaning and cleaning and mowing the lawn. Well, it rained all day, so mowing the lawn was pretty much out. And when I was hanging out with Geoff on Friday he mentioned that he kinda wanted to host Fools Play as Quetzalcoatl, but he didn't want to have to spend so much time on the ground. He'd do it if he had a puppet, though.

So I spent much of Saturday making a Quetzalcoatl out of felt. I watched the special features of PotC:DMC while I cut and sewed. The puppet came out looking pretty good, but I stupidly forgot to take a picture of it! (Geoff, if you're reading this, is there any way you can take a picture and send it to me?)

I did spend the rest of the day doing dishes and laundry, and I got a substantial amount of cleaning done before I left for Fools Play.

It was Geoff's final Fools Play before leaving for China, so all five of the Fools showed up. We did the Fools Play Tribute format, which consists of doing one scene and one recurring character that showcases each of the Fools (for example, my character scene was The Odd Cuppo, and Taisha's was Cororan & Son). We did a Nanamo in which we used only characters that we'd never gotten to perform before. I played Nanamo's penpal, with whom Nanamo refuses to converse in person.

At the end of the night we did a clip segment wherein we re-created actual things that had happened on stage that prominently featured the Yellow Fool.

The night was a huge success with a very large audience, including Steph & Jamie from the Babe Factory, and Erik Melver—even though his wife is extremely pregnant and due next week!

After the show I went and picked Tia up from her place and took her to Rib Eye with me. It was cool to see her! So many people came out to Rib Eye that we took over every single table in the big half of the place. That's 10 tables! There was a lot of funny that evening, including Geoff wearing Tiare's coat and a pair of Red Robin glasses (see the videos in the previous post). Mike sang Geoff a song in which he apologized for eating his sandwich several years ago. Jason had a four-minute conversation with me, which is going to be used as background noise in a song he's gonna make. I wore Lacey's extremely metrosexual hoodie, which made me look like a complete tool.

I ended up staying until 1:00-ish, which is about an hour-and-a-half later than I usually stay. Then I headed on home.

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posted by Christopher at 11:10 PM

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Geoff & The Glasses 

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posted by Christopher at 5:01 PM

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Saturday, June 09, 2007

Let Me Handle Your Food, Won't You? 

Yesterday (Friday) morning before I went to work I drove down to the Tacoma Health Department and took my Food Handler's Test. It is so very boring and so very easy. But now I have the card, so I'm actually allowed to work out in the store and not just in the back (if I'm needed).

After work I made some Mandarin Chicken for lunch, I did some work, and then I went out and planted a whole new flower bed in the front yard. Well, actually it's not in the front yard. It's in that little strip of grass on the other side of the sidewalk. It's cute, though!

After that I wrote an entry for this here website, and then Geoffs came over and we hung out. He figured out how to connect to my MacBook here and so he dumped a whole bunch of his music onto it. Cool! We called Lawrence and he walked up from Starbucks to hang out with us.

We all went to for din-dins, then came back and hung out for a little bit more. Geoff showed Lawrence some cool pushing-hands stuff that was fun to watch.

Then at 9:30 we headed on down to Lakewood and went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End. I still have to write my Spider-Man 3 review before I write my PotCaWE (what an awkward acronym) review, but I'll just say that I did enjoy it.

It was almost 1:00 in the AM by the time the movie was out. So I drove Lawrence home to his place, and took Geoff back to my place where his vehicle was waiting to take him home. Then I went to bed.

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posted by Christopher at 3:04 PM

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Let's Do a Comparison, Shall We? 

Here's what my flower bed looked like exactly one month ago:
And here's what it looks like now:PRETTY!!

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posted by Christopher at 2:57 PM

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Friday, June 08, 2007

In the Driver We Trust 

Yesterday (Thursday) after work I came home and wrote an entry in this here blog. Then I headed up to Seattle and met up with Sandy. I got supremely sleepy on the way up, so when I got there I took a ten minute nap whilst Sandy got herself readied.

Then we got in her rental car and started the long, strange journey to go pick her car up from the dealership where it had been repaired.

First off, it was almost impossible to get to the freeway. For some reason the downtown entrances are all blocked off (like I discovered when I tried to use them on Tuesday). So Sandy planned to go through the international district and onto the onramp by SafeCo Field (like I ended up doing on Tuesday). This proved to be extraordinarily difficult, though, due to the fact that for some reason there was a fire truck parked at almost every intersection in the International District, lights flashing and spinning and all that. We didn't see any smoke anywhere, so who knows what that was about, eh?

Well, finally we got on the freeway, and that wasn't actually too all that bad until we got around Tukwila. But that's always bad. We went over on 405 to 167 and took that down to Auburn. That was wide, wide open all the way through Kent, and then came to a grinding almost-halt. We slogged our way down through to Auburn's Auto Mall, the horrifying string of car dealerships that stretches for miles and miles in the north half of Auburn. There we finally made it to the car dealership after well over an hour of travel.

After Sandy paid for the new radiator, the manager came out and looked over the paperwork and said that he'd go through everything, but he might be able to as much as half the price that Sandy was charged, and if so then he'd cut her a check the next day. I don't know if that was every actually done or not, though.

Anyway, we went and ate at a tiny little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place for an early dinner 'cause we were both starving (this was around 4:30 or so). We were given our place settings by a six-year-old girl! It was kinda adorable. The restaurant was just a mom, a dad, and their daughter running the whole place. The daughter brought out silverware and napkins and stuff like that while the parents waited and cooked and all that stuff.

I had two cheese enchiladas with onion, and they were very tasty. We also each had that drink that's like rice milk with cinnamon. It's called horchata. Get it if you're ever in a restaurant that offers it. Ve'y tasty.

After that Sandy & I had to slog through much traffic to get to Highway 18 so she could go to Mathias's mom's house and pick up two packages that Mathias had had delivered there. Then we went up Weyerheuser to avoid getting back on 18, and finally we got back onto I-5 and took that all the way up to SoDo, where we retrieved Mathias from Cobalt much later than had originally been planned. But we got a meal to go from the Mexican place for him, so it was all good.

We headed back to their apartment, and as we parked and were walking up to the door, long came Jason, with whom Mathias & I were gonna hang out that evening. We dallied in the apartment for a little bit so Mathias could open his packages (he got an animé DVD, some new fancy headphones and a signal scrubber thing so that his audio monitors would stop picking up radio signals).

Then all four of us walked to Neumos, where Sandy split off and continued walking on to the garage bowling alley to have a bowling night with her co-workers at Starbucks. Jason, Mathias, & I stopped at Neumos, because we all had tickets to see Busdriver live on stage there!

While we were waiting in line a redhead girl asked if she could buy a ticket off of us for $40. We declined, and then proceeded to waste her time by talking about exotic fish and animals with her. Later on her boyfriend or somebody arrived and they were offering $100 for a ticket. A little tempting, but I really wanted to see Busdriver and hang out with M&J. So no go.

We got in and staked out a position towards the right of the stage, close up but out of the way of anyone who wanted to get rowdy. This being Seattle, though, of course nobody got too rowdy.

Busdriver was actually opening for a band called CSS, which I learned did not stand for the internet term "Cascading Style Sheets." It stands for "Cansei de Ser Sexy," which is Portuguese for "tired of being sexy." Before the show started I bought Busdriver's new CD, RoadKillOverCoat. I bought it by handing a $10 bill to Busdriver himself, then he handed me the CD! Yes, Busdriver works his own gimmick table. He was on the phone, though, so unfortunately I didn't get to talk to him. Jason did later, though, and Busdriver actually remembered him from an earlier show! Jason made an off-hand mention of Master P, which will be important soon...

Anyhoo, there was a band before Busdriver played. It was called Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, which I assume is a reference to V for Vendetta. They sounded like early 80s energetic electro-pop stuff. Nothing terribly original, but very well done, and I really appreciated the fact that they wore matching costumes and had two backup dancers! They were very much a kitschy nerd band who were kinda parodying the music they were making. Like an electro-pop version of The Darkness.

Busdriver came on after NPSH, and he had a super mixing board thing, a digital turntable, and two mics (one for regular voice and one with a variety of effects). That was it. It was a really, really good set, and he really tried to work the crowd, which is always hard in Seattle. He made some subtle fun of Seattleites, saying how we made depression look so very stylish and stuff like that. Funny stuff.

Between several songs Busdriver would go off on a tangentical freestyle. During one of these freestyles he did a bit about Master P! Jason was proud for having planted that seed in his head.

My favorite moment, though, was when Busdriver performed a brand-new song based on the They Might Be Giants song "Man it's So Loud in Here" !!!!! It was spectacular! One of my favorite musicians doing a song by my all-time-favorite musicians! I turned to Mathias after he finished that song and said, "Well, I liked that a whole lot!"

We didn't stick around to hear CSS because we were all kinda tired and weren't terribly interested. So Jason was picked up by Jennifer, and Mathias & I walked back to his apartment so I could pick up my murse, which I had intelligently left there. I said goodnight to Sandy, who had also a very fun evening of bowling, and then I got in my car and drove back home.

It was after midnight when I got back, but I was hungro so I mixed some sour cream with salt, pepper, onion & garlic powder, bacon bits, and bleu cheese. I used this concoction as a dip for a bunch of carrots, which I ate in bed whilst watching Teen Titans. Then I fell asleep.

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Thursday, June 07, 2007

Kind of a Boys' Night 

Yesterday (Wednesday) after work my dad came over, and I took him to The Spar down on the waterfront because the last time Carrie & I were there a few trains went by. My dad likes trains. I thought he'd enjoy looking at trains.

So we went there and I had fish & chips and he had a patty melt. No trains came. Until finally, right as we were about to finish our meal a train came from the southeast. But only one. So it wasn't a complete bust.

After that we came back to my place and I showed my dad what we want from our backyard, and he got to calculating and planning. It's going to be quite an undertaking, actually, but it will make the backyard much more usable in the long run.

Shortly after my dad left I got a call from Geoff, who was at the Starbucks on the corner. I walked down to meet him and he bought me a hot chocolate (hot because the weather was all gray and chilly). Then we walked back to my place and went through my music collection and hung out for a bit.

I then went to the Mandolin Café for a client meeting at 5:00. It didn't last very long, so I came home and ate my leftover Greek food for dinner.

Then around 8:00 I drove down to Olympia to hang out with Scott, Kevin, and a couple of other people I'd never really met (one of them was named Matt... I can't remember the other one's name). Kevin had an Xbox 360 on a gigantic hi-def screen, and we played a bunch of different games. Kind of a boys' night. Let's see, there was a Splinter Cell game, Gears of War (which I did not like), another 1st Person Shooter, and Smackdown vs Raw 2007. The rasslin' one was fun, but I did not like that it was setup so that once someone started a move on you, someone else couldn't come up and interrupt it. So you'd have (for example) Kane putting Rey Mysterio in a submission hold, and then Mick Foley would run up behind Kane and start punching at the back of his head, but Mick's fists would just pass harmlessly through Kane's head without making any impact whatsoever. Very frustrating during tag matches when you're trying to save your teammate and you can't. I much prefer the hit detection stuff on, say, Wrestlemania X-8, where you could always hit anybody within striking distance no matter WHAT they were doing.

Carrie called while I was down there, and thankfully she was feeling better than the day before!

I eventually headed home and got back here around midnight. I was planning on writing my review of Spider-Man 3, but instead I went down to Olympia and was social and had a fun time. Oh, well.

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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

S/M/T 

Playing catch-up here...

SUNDAY
Carrie unfortunately had to work all freakin' day, despite having bad body ache problems. I went in with her in the morning to help her set up her classes. Then I went to the Fred Meyer and bought a gift bag and some mini eclairs.

Can't remember what I ate for lunch, but shortly thereafter I left for Fools Play Practice, which consisted of Me, Mike, and Jake. We actually worked on the performance mechanics of an awesome new recurring character bit we're calling "Wayward Wave 5." It's working out really well, especially considering it has an enormous character who is completely mimed—none of the Fools actually plays him, we just hear his voice and react to him as if he were really there. Very cool stuff.

I helped Carrie out some more in the afternoon by Wrapping up Gina's Babe Factory Birthday Present: a mini fridge for her college dorm room. It took an entire roll of paper to wrap it! I drove it down to the store and carried it inside and everything (along with the gift bag that had some fridge magnets in it), but I forgot to bring along the mini eclairs! Oh, well, they're in our freezer now.

After I dropped off the gifts I headed immediately up north again, to eat some of my dad's yummy barbecued chicken. Carrie did not accompany me because he had a mandatory store meeting (like I said, she worked all freakin' day). Susan, Jason, and Alexis were all there, though. Jason said that Alexis had been asking all day, "Is Carrie gonna be there? Is Carrie gonna be there?" Very cute. The barbecue food was all very tasty.

When I was walking back to my car to drive home it started raining! But it was almost completely incompetent rain. The raindrops were HUGE and coming down hard, but they were so spread out that I only got hit once ever few seconds. It was bizarre.

MONDAY
Monday after work I picked up Carrie for lunch and made some gnocchi. I took her back to the store and decided to unwind a bit by playing some Final Fantasy I. I was actually really close to the end, and I got up to fighting the final boss of the game when the stupid thing actually froze up! It also dumped all of the saves that I had made that afternoon, so I was basically back to where I was the day before.

I picked Carrie up from work at 3:45 and drove her to her doctor's appointment. I played some Kirby Squeak Squad while I waited for her. She got a prescription, but their prescription printer was out of order so they said they'd call it in to the Bartell's for us.

So I dropped Carrie off at work so she could quickly finish up a couple of things, then I went to the Bartell's to get her prescription. Only they hadn't called it in yet. And I'd left my cell phone at home to charge, so I couldn't call them and tell them to call the Bartell's. So I drove back to the Babe Factory and picked Carrie up. We decided to go later in the evening. Which we did.

But first I made us some pizzas for dinner.

Then Carrie called the Bartell's to make sure that the prescription was there before we headed on down. While I waited for the prescription to fill Carrie got various sundries for her trip. Everything with off sans hitch, and we came back home, where Carrie basically went to bed (she had to get up by like 4:00 in the AM in order to get ready for her flight).

I stayed up and watched a fascinating film: Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale starring Rebecca Romijn and Antonio Banderas. I enjoyed it thoroughly, even through the fantastically surreal last 20 minutes. I did much laundry in the evening while Carrie slept due to the influence of her prescription.

TUESDAY
I got up briefly around 4:00 to help Carrie get ready for her trip to Milwaukee. Then I went back to sleep and slept until 7:30.

After work I noticed that my car was low on gas, so I thought, "I'll fill up on the way home." Next thing I know I've habitually pulled right up into my driveway like usual. I sighed, back up, and drove to my usual gas station.

When I got back to the house I called Sandy to see what the Purtlebaughs were up to on Thursday. She said that there were actually a couple of things going on: it was bowling night for her Starbucks, and Busdriver was playing a show at Nuemos in Seattle! Awexome! I've never seen Busdriver live, so that's very exciting news for me.

Anyway, I asked what Sandy was doing right then, and she said she was taking her car in to get the radiator looked at, but I could come hang out with her if I wanted. I wanted, so I drove up and met her at the apartment. We walked over to the car place and picked up her car, and on the way home we stopped at the Elysian Brewery for a couple of burgers. Really good burgers! They have sauteéd onions and your choice of cheeses. I chose bleu, Sandy chose feta!

Then we went back and hung out at the apartment and ate pickles and push-pops.

I drove Sandy down to Cobalt to pick up Mathias. We went back to the apartment and tried to figure out where we wanted to have dinner. The problem with living in Capitol Hill is that you have an incredible amount and variety of choices. We eventually settled on Greek, and we all walked over to Byzantion on Broadway. I liked it very much! I got a combination plate that had souvlaki and meatballs and that yummy stuffed grape leaf thing, really excellent potatoes and a couple of other things. We all also got an appetizer, which was a whole bunch of other really good stuff. I even really enjoyed their hummous, which I usually don't like very much. Goot!

I got a phone call from Carrie while I was at the restaurant, so I did the polite thing and walked outside to talk to her.

After dinner we walked back to the apartment. It was actually starting to get cold, and I'd left my jacket in the car. Whoops! We hung out in the apartment for a while longer before Sandy went to bed and I packed up my stuff and went home.

Or at least I tried to go home. For some reason all of the downtown entrances to I-5 were inaccessible! I had to go all the way down to SafeCo Field to find an entrance to the freeway. Crazy!

Now I'm home typing all this out, and it's late and I'm going to try to get six hours of sleep tonight.

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Monday, June 04, 2007

Nostalgia Detour 

There's something in the air tonight.

I'm in bed now. Teen Titans is playing on the TV. Carrie is soundly asleep beside me. She's been in bed for several hours now; she has to get up by 4:00 in the morning in order to get to the airport to catch her flight.

Most all of the windows in the house are open, and I can hear the window fans drawing the cool air inside. It's air from a day that saw some sporadic rain, and there's something about the cool temperature and a slight whiff of some smell combined with the whirring of the fans that takes me straight back to a time ten or eleven years ago.

I was a college boy, though I was staying at my folks' place during summer break. I didn't have a job. I didn't do anything that required any amount of money, really. So I would stay up late at night. Very late. Everybody else in the house would be in bed by 1:35 at the latest (when Late Night with Conan O'Brien got over), but I would continue on for several more hours.

I liked having the run of the downstairs all to myself in the middle of the summer nights. The sliding glass door to the back would be open, the sliding screen door would be shut, and one of those big, white, square fans would be set up so that it would draw in the air, the air that was cooled by the lake just a few feet from the backdoor. And off to the left I would be able to hear the distinctive sound of the fountain in that lake.

I actually had an excuse for staying up so late, though it was sketchy at best. At 5:00 or 5:30 Transformers would air on the fledgling Sci-Fi Channel, and I would stay up to make sure the VCR recorded it correctly onto a video tape, many long years before it would become easily available on DVD.

These were the days when the Cartoon Network and Sci-Fi Channel were still getting their toes wet in the cable waters, waters which were themselves still a little unsure and sketchy. These were the days when TNT showed The Rudy & Go-Go World Famous Cartoon Show, and the Sci-Fi Channel would show a random assortment of cartoons in the wee hours of the morning. Shows like Bionic 6, Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone, Captain Scarlet, Snorks, and Transformers.

I would stay up all those hours through all those cartoons, enjoying my nocturnality. Often I would make a Monterey Jack cheese quesadilla in a frying pan with butter, and eat it with barbecue sauce. I would play on the brand-newish computer in the corner of the dining room. I would sit on the couch and marvel at the quality of cartoons from the 80s, and wonder why anyone would ever find Gerry Anderson's supermarionation shows to be anything other than interminably dull.

Then, when Transformers came on and I hit record on the VCR, I would climb upstairs and crawl into the top bunk in the room I shared with my brother (yes, we had bunk beds, but only after I started going to college, curl up in my Batman: The Animated Series sheets, and sleep until around 1:00 in the afternoon.

There was nothing to do that summer but hang out, play video games, watch TV, and do Fools Play. And think that that new girl who tried out for Fools Play was awfully cute...

This was also the summer that Susan and I would play Mario Kart 64 for at least one hour every day. But that, as Mako would say, is another story...

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Sunday, June 03, 2007

Year of the Cone 

Yesterday (Saturday) Carrie & I got up relatively early in the morning. We drove out to have breakfast at the Pine Cone Cafe in University Place. The readerboard there proudly proclaimed 2007 as the "Year of the Cone." I had CBH with pancakes. Carrie had French waffles, which are waffles that have been French-toasted with cinnamon and sugar. And then you put syrup on them. Mmm... syrup.

On the way to and leaving the Pine Cone we passed the staging area for some sorta parade or something that was going to go up Bridgeport. We didn't know what was going on, but there were a lot of old cars and a couple of high school marching bands.

Umm... let's see... after that there was some of my family stuff, after which Carrie was not feeling at all well. The massage she got on Friday really screwed up her musculature. So she laid down for quite a while in the afternoon, until about 4:00.

In the meantime I brought out all of my soldering stuff and got cooking. We'll see why in a moment.

Around 4:00 Carrie & I went down and joined some other Bead people (and some non Bead people) at Gina's house for her graduation party! Her house has a deceptively big backyard. You go out there and you think you know how big it's gonna be, but then you look at a corner and realize it keeps going. And also that it has chickens in it.

We sat outside on a swing seat couch thingy, which shielded us somewhat from the rather hot weather. I gave Gina a graduation/birthday present: I soldered her a pendant with Robot & Bird #3 inside of it:

She was very happy. She was so excited that she ran inside and immediately strung it on some chain and wore it. Very, very cute. She couldn't have actually been surprised, though, because she'd hinted to me a few times in very un-subtle ways that she wanted me to make her a pendant.

Anyway, we stayed there for maybe an hour. I ate a whole bunch of deviled eggs, potato salad, and a hamburger. I was on vacuum-cleaner mode for sho'. Then I dropped Carrie off at home and continued on south to Fools Play.

We performed Exhibition, and there was a surprisingly large audience for that format. It was most likely because it was Geoff's next-to-last show. We did a very excellent episode of The Espionager. I'll paraphrase my favorite story that I told:
I was hired as a bodyguard for a London mob boss. We got wind that the Espionager was gonna try to assassinate him, so we set up a trap. We took the mob boss to an abandoned warehouse. The Espionager, being as bold as he was, walked right through the front door as we knew he would, and stepped right into our trap: We'd rigged a solid steel box to drop and trap him inside. The inside of the box was lined with explosives, which went off destroying everything inside. I heard a sound behind me and when I turned around I saw the Espionager stabbing the mob boss through the heart. When we opened the steel box, we discovered that the Espionager had survived the explosion by shielding himself with the body of the mob boss, which was now a charred corpse.

It was a really funny show and a lot of fun to do. Afterwards we all went to Rib Eye, where Jason Brunee for some reason had brought a Fireman puppet. Geoff got his hands on it for quite a while, which was quite hilarious. My phone just happens to have (crappy) video capabilities, so I recorded some of it. I uploaded it to YouTube this morning. Unfortunately they're kinda hard to hear:



There are actually a couple of more. I might upload them later. Or not. Whatevs. Anyway, I sat with Devlin and Becky and ate a Cheesburger Dipper. Very tasty. Before I left a whole bunch of people gave me their tots, and I might have gotten a lead on a new client. It was a very fun evening.

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Saturday, June 02, 2007

Good Company 

Yesterday (Friday) Carrie had the day off, although she was still extraordinarily busy. She ran a tonne of errands and what-not. In the afternoon she even had a massage (more on that can of worms later).

I got a call from Leia, who said she was on the way to the Friday Harbor ferry on her way back home for good! Hooray! She's all done with school out there!

In the evening Lawrence came over and we all listened to music and started up the barbecue. Christine came over a while later as well.

At some point Carrie & Lawrence somehow got to talking about choir stuff, and it inspired Carrie to dig around and find a tape of her high school choir performance. Yes, an old-fashioned cassette tape. That's how long ago we were in high school. Sigh.

Anyhoo, we barbecued salmon patties with which we made salmon burgers. I made my special lemon/garlic fish sauce to go with it. Man, that stuff is goodtimes. Christine made a salad with mangoes & strawberries in it. There was some wine. It was a good time.

Then we all sat down and watched The Holiday, which Christine had rented. Carrie & I had already seen it of course, but it was enjoyable to sit and watch it with good company.

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posted by Christopher at 5:30 PM

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Friday, June 01, 2007

"Of the Month" June '07 

Link of the Month:
Paleo-Future
You may not know this about me, but one of the things that I find extraordinarily fascinating is how the future has been viewed throughout the ages. From Jules Verne to George Pal to George Lucas and William Gibson, the history of the future is one of my most favorite subjects. Well, this Paleo-Future website just happens to be all about it! It isn't very in-depth, but it does have a wealth of links and videos and pictures that I absolutely adore.

DVD of the Month:
Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls
Yeah, this came out a while ago, but it's practically all I've played for the past month. I never played Final Fantasy I before, and it has a charming directness in its complete lack of character development and it's almost-complete refusal to hand-hold you. Plus it's been beefed up with SNES-level graphics and four huge new dungeons! And Final Fantasy II is my favorite of all the Final Fantasies that I've played (though I stopped playing at SNES FFIII, so I don't know about the 3D, FFVII+ games).

Album of the Month:
Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
When I first heard her voice, I could have sworn that Amy Winehouse was a large, 30ish - 40ish black soul singer from the South. Imagine my surprise when she turned out to be a tinly little Jewish girl (she's only 23) from Britain! This album has a fantastic retro feel to it, harking back to the era of the girl soul groups and jazz from the 50s and especially the 60s, with a whole lotta Motown mixed in. It's great fun, and surprisingly sophisticated.

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posted by Christopher at 7:27 PM

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Can't Think of a Good Title 

Yesterday (Thursday) as soon as I got home Carrie left for Sonja's. In the interim I baked and ate an pizza. On her way home she called and asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. I'd just eaten an entire pizza. I wasn't particularly hungry.

I took a nap in the late afternoon and had weird dreams about the Fantastic Four and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. One of my long-ago friends was somehow in them both. She was a replacement for Sue Richards and a love interest for Odo, respectively.

Neither of us ate dinner before Carrie went and taught her evening class. During the evening I worked more on client stuff and confirmed to myself just how very cool Google is with Google Bookmarks.

I also went looking for free fonts, and found several sites. My favorite of them all, though, was one called Fonts for Kids. That's probably not a big surprise. But it has some really, really good ones, and tonnes of fake re-creations of movie/TV title fonts and things like that. Take a gander!

Carrie got home really late from her class—well after 11:00. We made spaghetti and went to bed.

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posted by Christopher at 7:58 AM

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