The 29th There was a mom pants extravaganza everywhere I went yesterday. Every stop I made, I made a new friend, can't stay for long, just turn around…wait, no. Every stop I made during my errands treated me to at least one woman strutting her mom stuff in her mom jeans. The extravaganza really only began once I hit Wal-Mart but it was still fairly rampant everywhere else which is expected on a nice Saturday afternoon, I suppose. I planned a minor pizza party for last evening so Shawn, Bryanna, Laine and Katharine came over to enjoy massive amounts of Michael's pizza and garlic fingers. Two 18" pizzas and a 16" garlic fingers to be precise but Kat also brought perogies, Laine brought a bunch of veggies, fruit and donuts, and I made cookies so it made for a ton of food. That translated into hardly any pizza being eaten and there basically being a whole pizza left over. I so bloody sick of pizza now. We played some Balderdash which inevitably ended with a few rounds of "Write The Foulest Definitions Possible" but to Nathan it apparently meant he should draw pictures of Shawn and me in compromising positions. I'd scan and post them for a laugh but that would be more work than I'm willing to do and they've been thrown out in any case. Kat ended up crashing here on the hobo bed and made German crèpes for breakfast which were mighty tasty with some jam and cinnamon sugar. It was her German grandmother's recipe and hopefully it's still kicking around here on a piece of paper because I want to make them again. Though, I should hold off on eating those for a bit considering the amount of pizza, donuts and cookies I've eaten in the past two days. The 24th It's nice to finally be able to sit out on the back step and enjoy a freshly brewed cup of coffee and some midday sunlight. I like to watch the little birds flit to and fro from the bird feeders, and chase one another through the branches. I like to feel the breeze and watch fallen leaves from last autumn dance with one another across the yard. I especially like listening to all of the neighbourhood dogs yap and bark at each other incessantly amid the droning and sputtering fits of my neighbour's wood chipper, the underlying low pump-pump-pump of techno music emanating from a nearby car that never drives away, and the squealing of some douchebag's muscle car's tires somewhere downtown in the middle of the afternoon. Ah, spring is in the air… The 21st Why is it that some cashiers feel the need to keep scanning an item over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again when it's obvious that the UPC isn't going to scan into the register? ENTER THE GAWDDAMN NUMBER YOURSELF, MORON, AND SAVE ME A FIVE MINUTE WAIT RESULTING FROM YOUR STUPIDITY! Anyway… Nathan managed to score me a comp to the Joel Plaskett show at The Wave so there was no way I could miss seeing Joel play. I drove to Ch'town and didn't have much of a plan except to eventually head over to the university with Tammy and Jill to catch the show. I ended up hanging out with Tammy at her new apartment while she painted the cupboards and Jill worked the door/CD sales over at The Haviland Club during Saddle River's CD launch. Since Tammy didn't have any grub I made an investigative run a few doors down to the convenience store/café/coin laundry to see if they had any good junk food. I made off with just a bottle of Pepsi but they has some pretty good spices and some Lebanese dishes. Now I wish I had a Lebanese café just around the corner from here. I'll have to try their kabobs sometime. I wonder what their $1.99 breakfast is like…hmm. We decided to make a run a few streets down to the grocery store a little later on. We had no dishes or silverware to eat with so we had to stock up on a few basics which made it seem like we were off on a picnic or something. I was actually excited to be in a grocery store but, moreso, to have a big scoff eaten from paper plates with plastic forks and knives. Cold roast chicken, potato salad, veggies and hummous…it was awesome. Some discount Dairy Milk Bunnies made for a nice finishing touch to the meal. I went to get Jill at the Club and we all arrived at The Wave while Joel was already playing. It looked for a second that I was going to get sent away from the sold out show without a comp waiting for me but the guy learned how to read or something and found my name. Other than the hordes of idiots around us, everything was pretty good at the show. Joel and the band were punch-you-in-the-throat loud, and they put on a great show. It's too bad we missed some of it but we got to hear four or five songs before they came back out to do a long, crazy encore. Afterwards we headed to the motel room Saddle River rented for the night and a bunch of people congregated there for beer and tunes. It was a classy place with its two built-in bottle openers affixed to the white, stuccoed walls, and adorned with a gigantic, sun-faded print of a nature landscape. Garlic fingers from the Greco forty feet away from the room was most welcome but I definitely didn't need those at two in the morning. The 20th Tonight I had my first Frosty Treat flurry of 2007…the first of many. The 14th Saddle River had the first of their two CD launches tonight out in Tyne Valley at Britannia Hall. I had never been there before and the place was absolutely packed so I had to sit on this crappy fold-out chair all night. There was lack of blood flow to my butt cheeks on several occasions but that's what I get for being late, which I always am. The band sounded super swell in that room, they had a good rapport with the crowd and everyone was into the show. Besides all being excellent players, they have an affable and funny stage presence, and some great material. It's funny to see Troy having to stand way back from the mic and the other guys when he really belts it out. After the show I drove back in town with Nathan to go to a party and Troy and Jill's. That place was packed too and their dog, Atticus, was running around like a nutcase. Other than being insanely hyper, he's a pretty good boy and a good looking dog. While he ran around knocking stuff over with his tail, everyone drank, played tunes and had fun, and at one point Tom got on the guitar and somehow was convinced to play a song about a certain anatomical portion of Crazy Shirley. Hilarious and odd to hear that song being played for a bunch of strangers and people who probably don't even know who the hell she is. Later on, one of Troy's uncles was talking to Tom and, being as dead pan and serious as possible, told him he didn't appreciate him singing such a song about his aunt Shirley and that she was a very respectable woman. Tom went silent and just stared into space, not even able to look at the guy or anyone. Just speechless and bawling inwardly. Had I not known it was a joke it would have been one of the most awkward moments ever. I'm sure for Tom it was a good fifteen or twenty seconds of pure discomfiture until Mike told him Nelson was joking. The 11th Jimmy Coco made a triumphant return to host trivia for tonight only and our team triumphantly reclaimed the first place ranking. Are these two things related? Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't. What really matters is that it made for a dose of Classic Coco and a cool $7.50 each at the end of the night. The 10th I took French Immersion up until grade eleven and I've had these buttons since about grade two. They gave them out during French Week which I mostly remember during my first three years of school at Greenfield. That was the school with carpet everywhere and accordion classroom dividers that had enough space underneath them that you could pass stuff through to people on the other side. They also seemed to have quite a celebration for that special francophone week that involved food, videos and a bunch of activities that related in some way to French culture. I particularly remember when someone (probably mothers from Evangeline) brought in chicken fricot and it was dished out to everyone in styrofoam bowls. I can remember being so excited to have homemade fricot in class, the droolworthy smell of it everywhere and scraping a plastic spoon against the bottom of the bowl to get every last drop of broth. Something tells me they must have brought in galettes blanches as well to go with the fricot. i may be confusing events but there was also a time they took the class to a maple syrup shack where we got to see them boiling off all the water and they gave us a sample of maple fudge, plus they took us out into the woods to see how they tapped the trees and collected the sap. We also got to go on a horse-drawn sleigh ride in the snow which was really fun but they'd probably make kids wear helmets and safety goggles for a something like that nowadays. One other thing that stands out was crowding into one classroom while they put out the lights and let us watch some video about Carnivale in Quebec. It beat doing math, congugating verbs and spelling for sure but that damned Bonhomme Carnivale was mildly creepy and has always seemed to be unbelievably French to me. I guess that's sort of the point but he's got those black eyes and that hollow smile that have never sat right with me since it was impressed into my young French-immersed brain. Maybe he gets less creepy once you get to know him better or are French in the first place. In any case, they would show all of the snow sculptures, the ice mazes and buildings, and talk about how bloody cold it would be but everyone still went out and had fun. Meanwhile, I just wanted more fricot. The 8th A bunch of us went to see Grindhouse last night and I could tell by how awesome the poster was just how awesome the movie was going to be. The filmmaker from Nova Scotia who had his fake trailer for Hobo with a Shotgun at the first of the movie couldn't have won a better contest. His trailer was hilarious and really well done, fitting in perfectly with the double bill. The other trailers between the two films were equally hilarious and more ridiculous. Planet Terror was probably my favourite of the two movies but I really enjoyed both. The blood and gore was way over the top, as expected, and so was the campiness, acting and cheesey plot. There were some wincer moments and some unbelievably funny bits. And you can't go wrong with Rose McGowan having her amputated leg replaced with a gigantic machine gun. Death Proof sort of took a while to get into but did it ever deliver in the end. Amazing stunt work, the cast was great, and Kurt Russell was perfect for the role. The chase scenes were absolutely insane and the twist at the end made for some of the funniest scenes ever with Russell. After the movie Shawn came over to hang out for a bit but ended up getting stormstayed here. Yes, stormstayed in the first week of April. We got more snow in one night than we did all damn winter. It led to much shoveling, much movie and TV watching, and ordering some overpriced Greco pizza. I remember now why it's good maybe once ot twice a year, and only if I'm craving pizza and have coupons. Otherwise I'd go somewhere else for pizza and if I'm going to get overpriced pizza it might as well be from Michael's. The 3rd I had a meeting in Charlottetown today so I got up extra early and still managed to be late. It's fucking genetic, I can't help it. After I got out of there I needed some food and still had a hankering for the Formosa even though I had just been there a few days before with Tammy and Kira. I went in for a quick lunch and got back to my car to find a fifteen dollar parking ticket beneath the wiper. Bloody effing hell. I went to visit Melissa and Jade for a bit and thankfully Melissa told me that if you pay it within seven days it's only five bucks. It said so on the ticket but I was so disgruntled about getting it that I didn't even bother to read it. I paid the five dollar fine then headed over to Value Village to see if I can find any more navy blue shirts to add to my collection. I actually found a bunch of shirts but, of course, none of them fit me because I guess I get fatter every year. Maybe I could just start wearing mumus. The 1st I went over to Shawn's with Nathan to have a barbeque, but since it was Sunday the Co-op was really the only place open which left me stuck with very few options. Sausages were alright but they didn't have any proper buns. No matter—I wanted to grill something even if it was raccoon. The first barbeque of the year was pretty good but the main problem arose when we decided to go to Dairy Queen for dessert. I ordered some foolish Turtles thing in a chocolate-dipped waffle bowl that had immense amounts of caramel in it. It was just too much, even for me, plus it had dollops of whipped cream in addition to the ice cream that really made it overkill. Oh, and the waffle bowl didn't help matters either but I'd be damned if I'd leave that uneaten. The bloody dessert cost five bucks after all. Their ice cream isn't all that good either. F.U.D.Q.