Item! Japanese Village on Laurier is a pretty cool place. You sit in a group around this giant grill and someone comes out and cooks your food for you. It is quite cool to see your food being prepared for you. Plus, you get more of a thrill out of it than going to Subway! We went for Mel’s birthday and it looked like she was having a great time. Heck, everyone was having a great time…even I was even though a cold had taken my body hostage.
Item! Hallowe’en movies are out in full force and it’s a great time to be alive. Or, at the very least, in the vicinity of so much suspense. I have picked up some decent films in the past week and I must say…they make the grade! First up is The Hills Have Eyes by Wes Craven. It was a great flick even though the thought of a dog being one of the heroes is a little far fetched, but at the same time, I cheered each time the dog would attack the enemy. I enjoyed this film so much that once I realized that the remake was made by Alexandre Aja (the creator of one of the greatest horror films of my generation…Hautes Tensions), I picked it up as well and watched it on Saturday night. It stays pretty faithful to the original but then they introduce an entirely new third act which takes place in a village. Which was great in my opinion. This is what a remake should be. The same, but different in some aspects to give some new breath to the franchise. I was disappointed that they didn’t have the crazy cut to the credits like the original. For those in the know, you know what I’m talking about. I have heard there are sequels to both the original and the remake but I heard the original sequel was so bad that Wes Craven disowned it. I almost need to see this just for that fact!
Item! Value Village is the place to go for cheap CDs. I picked up two Big Sugar albums at $3 a piece. I also realized that Gordie Johnson’s new band Grady seems to take songs from the Big Sugar catalogue and put them out in their own style. Interesting!
Item! I Wanna Hold Your Hand is an excellent, excellent Beatles related flick from 1978. Robert Zemeckis’s first directorial debut (Back to the Future baby! Forrest Gump! Roger Rabbit!) captured what is known as Beatlemania, where he pits a group of teenagers trying to get into the Ed Sullivan show when the Beatles roll into town. One of the funniest parts is the fact that it takes them 7 hours to get from New Jersey to New York City due to a wrong turn. What a great explanation of how it could turn from night to day! It’s a funny film and I enjoyed how he cleverly has the Beatles show up in a few scenes, without actually being there themselves.
Item! Vero and I went to Costco on Sunday to try out our new membership card. We went in there with our thinking caps on as we want to figure out if we really are saving money by buying bulk items. Coupled with a few coupons, we must admit that on name-brand merchandise, we came out on top for a few things. However, there are a few things that we checked out that didn’t really save money at all.
– Chicken – 13.9/kg at Costco, 11.5/kg at the Loblaw’s Superstore. Granted, the chicken may have been on special whereas the Costco price may be what it is usually.
– Salmon – 18.9/kg at Costco, 12.5/kg at the Loblaw’s Superstore. That seemed to be quite the difference!
– Paper Towels – This was an interesting one. There was a package of Bounty paper towels (12 rolls of 134 sheets) that came out to something like $16.75 after applying the coupon. However, right next to the Bounty was some generic brand (Cascades?) which was $16.34 regular price and it had 12 rolls of 178 sheets. Riddle me this…is it just me or are advertisers genius considering the Bounty was flying off the shelves while lonely old Cascades paper towel was just sitting there? Granted, Bounty *is* the quicker picker upper, n’est-ce pas? I’m sure I’ll be cursing the Cascades paper towel when I spill something? All sarcasm aside, I’m glad we were the smart shopper that day!
– Laundry Detergent – Here’s a crazy idea…why don’t we jack the price up on some Tide laundry detergent to $24.99 for 110 loads, while Gain laundry detergent sells for $14.99 for 110 loads? I definitely want to hear from those who can tell what the difference is!
All in all, we did manage to get some great deals on other things…granola bars, air fresheners…and we do feel that in a year, we will end up saving enough money to cover the membership. But unfortunately, not everything is cheaper like we had hoped, so that we can avoid going to multiple places when picking up things we need.
We are curious to hear from others who frequent Costco! This is our first time going there on a regular basis so we’re not sure what to expect. We heard the food is excellent…but is it so much better to pay a little more for it?
Item! Windows 7 seems to be out and about. I had a lead on a student discount that I could get and I passed it to Eric as I’m pretty sure his computer can handle that amazingness, while mine cannot. Speaking of my old computer that Vero inherited, it’s back in the house and for a few months the power supply needed replacing. On a whim, I tried to turn it on yesterday and sure enough, it worked! So now I’m dealing with the insanity which is the actual operating system. It does not want to co-operate with me…not sure what’s wrong with it…programs take forever to load, windows don’t want to open. I am in the process of backing up every little piece of data from it (hey, did you know that USB 1.0 is slower than my network connection?) and once done that, I’ll format the sucker and put WinXP onto it again. That computer has held up over the long haul. I didn’t have problems with the OS for quite a few years. If I feel the need to put Windows 7 onto it, I’ll investigate that option in the future, but I doubt it has enough power to handle it. Windows XP does the trick for playing my old Sierra games. Has anyone tried out Win7 yet? It sounds pretty amazing compared to Vista.
Item! Has anyone got a Star Trek communicator/phaser I can borrow for Friday? Also, if anyone is interested, a gang of us are heading to the Mayfair Theater for 7PM on Saturday to go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Let me know.