Month: November 2008

P1010104, originally uploaded by palm0014.

Inadvertently, I haven’t been posting much at all. I have been really absorbed into my Multimedia assignment and now I have to study for my Pop Culture exam (this coming Friday) as well as start working on my Multimedia take-home exam. Ark!

That being said, winter has arrived here in Ottawa, I’m sitting here watching Paul McCartney music videos from the 70s while studying, watching Mike build the leg lamp for the party next week and cramming.

Looking forward to the party next week but will have to get cracking on the Christmas trivia challenge!

So I hope everyone is enjoying themselves while they go out to the malls and get some gifts. I’ll pop in once in awhile but don’t expect much for the next while. Exams are quite killer (ha! I’m reading a chapter on horror films when I am writing this).

Saturday turned out to be a miserable, miserable day with the rain not stopping all day long.  This killed Krista’s plans to come out for a photo shoot to get some good snapshots of her and I for a colleague who is moving away to Edmonton.  I spent the morning working on my Photoshop assignment.  I had to play around with various photo elements and merge them together.

At first I decided to try and put the CN Tower on the front lawn of Parliament Hill.  This was working out fine until I had chosen a sepia shot of Parliament Hill and I couldn’t get the colours to match.  I am going to talk to the Professor about whether or not this is possible.  Seeing that this option was squashed for the time being, I then decided to play around with a picture of Spider-Man and put Doctor Octopus tentacles on him.  That was neat and I thought the motion blur on the tentacles was really cool as it makes it look like they are actually moving.  I’ll post a picture when I get the chance.

Seeing that the day was a bust, Vero and I decided to shop around town for some Christmas gifts and other items.  First off, we dropped into the new Canadian Tire in Orleans which is right next to the Wal-Mart.  Competition arises!  It was the grand opening and it was packed to the gills.  It was quite the impressive store and I had a good chuckle when I saw that they even had a grocery aisle!  Vero looked into winter tires and it was a first come/first served basis so we decided to go to the store closer to her house.  Vero managed to find some great plastic bins on sale and even scored a $10 off coupon for her next purchase.

Next up, we headed to Wal-Mart to shop for some Christmas gifts.  Vero managed to find a few things for her family and I noticed that there were He-Man DVDs on sale for $10.  Maureen, this note is for you as I’m pretty sure John was trying to get these.  That is a steal of a deal and I wish I could find Thundercats at that price!

By this time, it was already getting dark out and we were miserable from being out in the rain all day long so we decided to head home and have a nice supper.  I had a craving for red wine (must be the cold weather coming in) and was glad to see a few bottles laying around the house.  Looks like Mike had a bunch from his sister’s wedding that he brought up.

After an amazing pasta meal with some burnt garlic bread, we spent some time looking at houses for sale around Ottawa after chatting about what the ultimate place to live would be.  Unfortunately I could not find any with a recording studio!  The mls.ca website has been revamped and after ten minutes of cursing at it, I found the navigation experience to be quite amazing and you should take a look at it.  We also looked at houses for sale in Hearst and Kapuskasing and marveled at the prices of houses up there!

We then settled down to watch Run Fat Boy Run which is about a guy trying to win back a girl so he decides to run in the London Marathon.  It stars Simon Pegg who is always hilarious to watch and I highly recommend the film.

After a night filled with wine and comfort, I convinced everyone to watch From Russia With Love as I had just hung up a movie poster of the film in the living room and it was entertaining as always.

If your search for French bands isn’t producing any results in Wikipedia, be sure to realize that there’s a French version as well.

This should be made into a fortune cookie.

iplaying: Inspirez – Noir Silence (Immortellement Célèbre)

The weekend was quite the bust as Vero came down with my cold so we dragged our asses around on Saturday.  I spent most of the day editing Samantha and Marc-Andre’s wedding video (which is actually coming along super fast considering…I’m down to the last hour!) and learning some new tricks from Vero in the editing suite.

I was thinking about going to the James Street Feed Diner originally to see Joe and Danielle but Mike and Melissa won tickets to a horse show on the Saturday night and asked if we wished to join them.  Who can say no to a horse show?  We mustered up our strength and headed out to the Scotiabank Place, not knowing what to expect.  Dave also mentioned to snag a ticket which was great.

The five of us entered the virtually empty hockey arena and proceeded to the box that Mike’s work owns.  I have never been in box seats before at the arena so it was quite the treat.  They had a washroom, tv and comfy seats for us to hang out in.  We did have to go down and get our own drinks but he said that this was not usual.

The horse show turned out to be the ‘World Famous’ Lipizzaner Stallions show.

http://www.lipizzaner.com/

It consisted of the stallions performing routines like trotting together in a synchronized fashion and other neat things like jumping up onto two legs.  The announcer explained the history of the Lipizzaner Stallions which are a highly sought after breed of horses who were used in royal circles for both it’s elegancy off the battle field and it’s ferocity on the battlefield.  Pretty neat.

We were amused watching the horses prance around for us but overall, I personally wasn’t entirely amazed by the whole ordeal.  But we realized later that it’s all a matter of perspective.  To a fan of equestria…(?)…making a horse trot around or kick out its back legs may be SUPER hard to do and is a sight to see.  But for the uninitiated like ourselves, it didn’t seem out of the question for the horses to be doing this easily.  I compared it to a guitarist.  A non-guitarist can see Jimmy Page bust out a wicked solo and say “That’s cool, I like the sound of that.” whereas a guitarist would proceed to marvelling at the technical mastery he has over the instrument and bow to him like the guitar God that he is.

Let me note that during the show my eye was really bothering me and I assumed it was some allergic reaction to a sweater I pulled out from the archives (the closet).  It was getting really bad by the end of the show.  Vero wasn’t feeling all too hot either which was unfortunate.  We all headed to Moxie’s for a dessert along with Colin and Becky but Mike was nice enough to drive me back home and get my car so I could leave with Vero immediately after dessert.  I’m glad I did as she was feeling dizzy and out of it.  Poor girl!  I wasn’t faring too well myself as I watched a bit of Greys Anatomy on TV but I couldn’t keep my one eye open.  I went to bed and in the night I kept waking up to find I couldn’t open my eye!  Pink eye struck me!  Argh.  What more can go wrong?

Sunday morning I couldn’t sleep anymore so I got up around 7AM and watched a bunch of Greys Anatomy and Heroes episodes to catch up.  I also then edited a little more video for the remainder of the day.  All in all, it was a pretty subdued weekend for both Vero and I other than heading out to the horse show.  I didn’t end up going to see Spamalot either.  No tickets were to be found easily.  Ah well.

Special thanks to Mike and Mel for inviting us to partake in the Stallion show!  “Show us the corvette!”

On Friday night Vero and I headed over to Eric and Annie’s to babysit Philippe since they were (gasp!) going to the Celine Dion concert.  Eric commented that the concert wasn’t TOO bad as there were cool choreographed dancing going on.

Babysitting Philippe started out with myself going to St. Hubert to pick up dinner.  Let it be noted that 99% of the time the restaurant is super quick to pick up the take out orders.  The 1% of the time when it is not is on a Friday night around 6PM.  I waited around 20 minutes for the dinner and headed back.  Let it be noted that Vero must be the woman for me because she lets me have the chicken breast from the Econo meal (that’s the meal where you can get two quarter chicken meals but one of them has to be the leg).  That’s a match made in (chicken) heaven right there people.

I wasn’t feeling all too hot while babysitting and he was pretty quiet for most of the night so it didn’t go too bad.  It’s strange to realize how much I don’t know about children, but that’s not really a surprise considering I don’t exactly have an opportunity to understand the little details.  For example, I didn’t realize that Philippe would tell me what snack he would like.  Coolness!  Where did he learn these abilities?  He is a smart kid.  I also found it strange to see him move from the crib to a kids bed!  Was I in a giant bed where I took up 10% of the space?  I guess I can’t remember.

He didn’t take kindly to me hopping into his bed to read him a bedtime story.  Of course, Vero prevailed and got to read him the story while I watched TV downstairs.  I wonder how children minds work.  Sure, he knows that we are not his parents so maybe he’s a little scared.  But what frightens him about me reading the bedtime story?  Is it due to patterns in that when he usually has a story read to him, there’s no one in his bed but himself and his parents are sitting outside the bed reading?

I talked to Eric to confirm my theory and yes indeed, no one is usually in his bed when reading a book to him.  Clearly I was messing with the child’s patterns and I freaked him out.  Heck, I would be freaked out if some giant of a good looking man jumped into my bed with a good book and started reading it out loud!

After he went to bed, Vero and I watched Stepbrothers which stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.  It was quite the over the top hilarity and our favourite part is when one of them is sitting in bed with a Chewbacca mask on, reading a book.  Funny stuff.

In the end, Philippe never climbed out the window so clearly we were successful in babysitting.