The 31st I decided to do some thumbnailing for some design work outside in the backyard today instead of being stuck inside. It was super nice out today and I figured it was a shame to be stuck inside. We jammed again tonight and have another new song. Hopefully The Neil Forbes will jam yet again tomorrow night and get some better recordings of our songs. For more information on TNF until the official website is launched, click here. The 30th We finally got a truly nice day today. It was so nice in fact that I decided to mow the lawn instead of staying inside working all day. I really should have worked but whatever. I wanted to be outside. Plus I probably just would have wasted my day anyway watching Millennium if I hadn't gotten off my ass and done something useful. I went through a box of tapes and came across all of my Millennium tapes the other day. I decided that I should probably just tape over them but watch them before I do. I don't think I've never gone back to watch the series after it ended. It is surprisingly better than I was expecting but the dialogue can be pretty lame and overly dramatic at times. Lance Henriksen is one of my favourite actors and he just makes the damn show. It's really too bad that the series ended after just three seasons. I would have liked to see at least one more, and with some better writing because they really started to stray at the end with the filler shows. The 28th I finally made my bed. For about the past two and a half weeks I've been sleeping on the couch every night because I've been too lazy to make my bed. All of my covers and sheets were just piled in a ball on my bed and everytime I thought to make the bed it was at 4 or 5 in the morning. At that point I just wanted sleep and falling asleep to the TV is something I haven't done since I lived at home. And so tonight I will sleep in my bed and hopefully not wake up with the weird nerve issue in my foot and leg like I have the past two days. I don't even want to think about what's causing that. I will also not have to deal with my cat scratching the arm rest right next to my head at 8am. Nor will I have to put up with him jumping up to chew or claw my arms in an effort to wake me. Tonight I shall sleep well and hopefully I won't be awake watching TV until the crack of dawn. The 26th I'm drumming for The Neil Forbes which is basically just Neil and Shawn. We've jammed a few times and recorded some crappy sounding demos but the tunes are good. Once I get the hang of them and try to find some way to spice them up a bit things should start coming together. I would really like the weather to improve. It's pretty much the end of May and I think I've gone out biking at night maybe once this month. Even then it was cool enough out that I needed to wear gloves. It's just pathetic and we're going to end up with another rainy summer like last year. Maybe this weekend will be nice so I can actually go outside and do something entertaining. By the looks of the theatre situation, this weekend will be a glorious film fest for all. I've seen Star Wars twice already so maybe I'll go see Monster-in-Law or The Longest Yard. I'm sure both of them will be superb films. The 19th Today was a pretty full day. I had to work in Charlottetown so I got a lift there this morning with Tyler and Melissa. I worked on a website all day, had Thai food for lunch and ended up with all of my clothing been drenched in the aroma of deep fried food. But none of that mattered once Luke and Ryan came to pick me up. We went directly to the theatre and got tickets for Star Wars Episode 3. They had seen it at the midnight showing the night before but didn't want to risk it being sold out at home so we stayed in town and spent some time over at their buddy Jacob's for a while. They told me about this game they made up where you toss poker chips at a stack of poker chips. It doesn't sound like much fun based on that description but it's addictive and fun and I'm going to buy a set of chips this weekend so we can play. We'll also hash out the official rules so that they aren't forgotten. So with bellies full of Domino's pizza, we went back to the theatre and after watching the movie I certainly wasn't disappointed. I've been waiting for years for this movie to come out and see the transformation of Anakin into Vader. This third installment tops the first two by far. It lost most of its cartoony nature and was dark and intense like it should have been. The Emperor completely made the movie. I have to see it again tomorrow night so hopefully the lines won't be too foolish. The 15th I was walking home from Shawn's tonight and was crossing the street to walk down behind the Lefurgey Cultural Centre when all of the sudden I heard lots of glass smashing followed by a bunch of kids running through the backlot and out towards me. My first thought was that they had just busted out a bunch of windows out of the newly renovated centre. I'm still pretty pissed when I think about the fire that almost totalled the place last year so there was no way I couldn't say something to them for causing damage there. Three of them came out onto the street and passed by with three more still to come. I turned and asked them as they walked past how many windows they busted out of that house. They played dumb and asked, "What house?" I pointed to the Centre and they said, "Oh, no. The crackhouse. We wouldn't do that to a regular house." So with that, my reaction changed from assusation to indifference. "Oh...the crackhouse. Ok then." We proceeded to talk about the dealer who gets tortured by kids all the time and was evicted because he's a scumbag who can't pay his rent and looks like he crawled out from beneath the Scrambler. Apparently the reason the word "Gummerside" was spray painted in the house is because the guy has no teeth and they say he gives gum jobs. Nice. To whom, I don't know and don't want to know. The 14th There was a Rock Revival concert at The Jubilee tonight and the band Ryan Landry is in played a pretty heavy list of tunes. I wanted to go see them play and try to support gigs like that in town but, to be honest, I wasn't expecting an amazing show or anything. I figured it would be a bunch of young people playing music they liked and people there to have fun and support them. Well, the band was awesome. The nailed a bunch of Zeppelin songs and did a really good job with everything overall. But their drummer made my jaw hit the floor. The guy's only 15 or something and he's one of the best rock drummers I've seen live. It was crazy how tight and loud and full the band sounded and they've only been together a few months. It was well worth the $7 and I really hope that the huge turnout will let the theatre know that things like this can work in town and lead to more shows like that. The 12th I spent all day backing up my data and installing my new hard drive and SATA card. A long, mildly frustrating process. But it's all done and everything is working properly for the most part. Which is good since I've got so much work to do tomorrow that I can't spend another day dealing with crap like that. Charlotte stopped by this afternoon to say goodbye before she headed for Niagara. She'll be living and working there for the next year or so as a chef-type person and it sounds like a pretty upscale restaurant. I watched Dead Man's Shoes tonight with Tammy and thought it was really good, even though I could only understand about a quarter of what the Irish cast was saying. It was pretty grim and the main character was completely nuts. I think the Irish have something with making revenge movies because I'm pretty sure the last few I've seen have all had that as the underlying theme. The 11th Today was the perfect day for a BBQ so I broke out my charcoal grill and set up in the backyard. Tammy brought over some food and it was just nice to eat outside in the yard with nice weather and birds chirping without any mosquitoes. Trivia was pretty good tonight and the team came in 2nd place. Afterwards, Melissa and I hung out for a bit and went for a walk because it was so damn nice and calm out. Of course, the minute we leave someone's car alarm is screaming from somewhere and you can hear it no matter where you go. And the minute we get back it stops. I don't understand why there isn't a 1-minute timer on those things so that they shut off automatically. If someone still messes with the car it should turn on again but no more than 1 minute at a time. If the alarm is going to deter someone it still gets the job done but it won't keep blaring because some idiot can't shut it off immediately. And when the alarm goes off it should make the car owner's remote beep or something so that they know it's theirs. Maybe both of those ideas exist already but I just don't understand why something like that wasn't thought of right from the beginning and used in every car alarm. Doesn't that just make sense? Anyway, it just pisses me off to no end. I feel sick. I ate way too much junk tonight when Tammy came over to watch Coronation Street that I taped for her while we BBQed earlier. We had Nibs, caramel chocolates, graham crackers with buttercream frosting, and when we ran out of frosting we used strawberry cream cheese. I don't know why I let myself eat all of that so late at night. The 9th BBQ is probably the best thing ever. My family had a birthday dinner for me tonight and BBQ steak was on the menu. My mom also made this awesome ice cream cake called mud pie or something and the slice I had should have come with its own insulin. Damn everything was good. I went over to Tammy's tonight and she had a bunch of CD and DVD rips from her cousin Patrick. One of the discs had two episodes of The Hilarious House of Frightenstien on it. That brought me back. I haven't seen that show in years and it's beyond classic. The comedy is pretty lame but there are a few good lines every now and then, and it's so cool that Vincent Price did so many little bits on the show. The Professor is awesome, I wish he could have been my physics teacher because he's nuts. No child watching that show would understand 90% of what the guy is ranting on about but for some reason I found him pretty entertaining. There was also a Turkish verison of Star Wars that was ultra-lame. It was basically a bunch of guys pretending to be X-Wing pilots with crappy helmets on sitting in front of a projection screen showing Star Wars. Not even a blue screen. They stole a ton of clips from the movie and mixed it in with their crappy shots. It looked like someone spliced a bunch of shots from Star Wars in with an extremely low budget version of the original Star Trek then tossed John Williams' Star Wars score (including parts from the Indiana Jones score) over top of the terrible action scenes, costumes and effects. I don't know why someone would even bother. The 8th We've had some pretty rainy and miserable weather here this weekend but we still managed to have a BBQ at Luke's yesterday. As expected, I ate way too much and also drank something I shouldn't have. I noticed that Movie Gallery had these little bottles of Red Bull but they didn't look like the canned Red Bull in the commercials. I figured I might as well try it so I got one bottle and brought it to the BBQ. Turns out the stuff smelled and tasted like medicine—specifically red Triaminic. I used to take that stuff all the time when I was sick as a kid and always wanted to drink the whole bottle because I loved it. So I used this as my opportunity to simulate that experience. I really don't recommend it. Drinking that stuff straight from the bottle is disgusting. It must have to be mixed with something. Alcohol, most likely, even though it warns not to do so on the label. The 6th Today brought an end to my 26th trip around the sun. That said, it's been a fairly good ride to date. Being 27 has its advantages in a way. I can say I've lived longer than both James Dean and Josh Ryan Evans, the supernatural midget from "Passions". Charlotte dropped by this afternoon bearing a birthday gift—a huge pot of cat grass since I can't grow it at all myself. Hobbes eats the stuff like it's candy. I just have to try and keep it from dying now which is tough for me to do with plants. My grandparents dropped by with a card and Sharon left one for me too. I went for dinner at The Loyalist with Tammy and Rhonda and they gave me a ton of candy and movie money. I also got my turtle cheesecake for free which was pretty sweet. Afterwards, I went to Tyler and Melissa's to hang out with them and Shawn for a while. We had some cake and Melissa made me this cool, personalized tiki head keychain. All in all it was a pretty good birthday. Thanks everyone. The 3rd I've never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but I really liked the movie a lot. It was obvious that they had crammed a bunch of stuff into movie format but it still worked. It was hilarious and they actually used puppets and animatronics which is nice for a change. The Vogons looked amazing and Marvin was much more effective as a live-action character. They could have went the digital route for all of it but it just goes to show that you can still make believable creatures and characters out of foam rubber, latex, and plastic.