The 30th Kyle invited people over to his place for a barbecue and to watch The Ultimate Warrior documentary. I wasn’t going to stay for the Warrior doc but after five minutes I was already laughing because it was ridiculous, nostalgic and just plain classic. I’d love to have transcripts of his interviews and rant sessions because he comes across as being completely nuts, and watching clips of his matches was awesome because I could almost remember everything that was going to happen. I’m just glad I stopped watching wrestling when I was a kid because I’d feel a deep, deep shame if I still did. Unless it’s the “pro” wrestling that comes to the rink in the summers. That’s a whole other thing entirely. The 29th The Rattlesnakin' Daddies were playing at The Deckhouse tonight so I headed down there with Nathan and Kyle. The crowd sucked but I still enjoyed their set. James sat in with Troy and Mike too so the the electric and mandolin added something different to the tunes. Mike didn’t break out the kazoo in the set I watched though. Kazoos is like magics. This photo of Kyle was taken around the time of his eleventh beer and in between one of his bouts of randomly shouting at the guys to play some AC/DC or Skynyrd. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I told Kyle that they weren’t going to take his requests to play “Back in Black” and “Sweet Home Alabama”, he seemed pretty set on making his fancy requests. Kyle stared off into space for a while too and then decided he was going to head home, only to have Nathan somehow convince him to go to The Heritage with him. I wasn’t about to have any of that foolishness after witnessing what I did last time I went there on a Friday night. So after the guys packed up I joined Mike and James at China Star for a bit before calling it a night. Mike bought me egg rolls. I like egg rolls. Thanks, Mike. The 28th We had a pretty impressive thunderstorm tonight that went on for what seemed like hours. I was working through it so I sort of lost track of the time and later on as I was watching Louis C.K.’s Shameless stand-up DVD (hilarious, by the way) the lightning seemed to be scary close. Hobbes was petrified so I managed to nab him and take him to my room when I finally decided it was time for some sleep. I put him under my covers and he peeked out at one point and looked around worriedly from underneath the protective blankets. The rumbling freaked him out too much though so he sought refuge under my bed, finding company with the half inch of dust. The 25th David Bowie is dead. Yes, it’s true. I’m very sorry to announce that he died sometime between 4 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Monday, June 25th, 2007. I found him floating belly up in the fishbowl this morning. He is survived by his mate Iman. As much as I don’t like it when one of my fish dies, I can’t let it ruin my day. I went out for breakfast at The Cup with Tammy for the first time in a while. I was craving hashbrowns cooked extra crispy with no onions. Then I went home and took some more photos of Hobbes being lazy. I actually didn’t get any work done today because I went over to Maurice’s studio to help him set up his Bondi Blue iMac. I figured a I’d spend a couple of hours installing stuff and showing him how to check his email and such before I headed home. Turns out I was there for six hours because the previous owner hadn’t wiped the computer clean before he sold it to Maurice. After wiping the drive and many system installs/upgrades, I had to call tech support to get his dial-up set up and now I remember why I will never go back to dial-up. S.L.O.W. Oh, man. It was painful to watch Google even pull up a page of results. I figured to install security patches for OS X would be quicker if I actually downloaded at home, burned them to a CD and brought the disc back to the studio. That’s for another day though. At least now he’s pretty well all set to venture into this strange and complex world of personal computing. And even though I didn’t get any work done, it was nice to just be able to spend an afternoon outside the confines of my little office and in a big, sunny studio. I did manage to get some work done tonight though, thankfully. I really need to plow through some projects or I’m going to have clients screaming at me really soon. I probably shouldn’t even be spending time writing right now or going for bike rides at 1 a.m. like I did earlier for that matter. But check out this sign that is apparently advertising a Dew For Worme Sale Sale. Hot diggity! Let me at them Dew For Worme Sales! Then let me at my grade one English equivalency exam! The 24th I drove up west to visit my grandparents today and hoped to take some photos along the way. Once I got up there though the weather turned crappy so I didn’t bother going about the house and property taking photos. Plus I got there just as dinner was being served so I sat in with them, my aunt and uncle, and my cousin Spencer. He has Down Syndrome, is as strong as an ox, and is hilarious; especially when he turns around and says “cheese” when I try to surprise him by taking a photo or when he makes fun of my grandfather by imitating everything he does. He also has a not-so-subtle way of letting everyone know he wants to leave by just putting on his shoes and going out to the car where he’ll sit until everyone follows him. Or come back in the house after locking my uncle’s keys in the car. After they all left for home, I stuck around for a bit to play some Queens and eat homemade chocolate chip cookies. I love my grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies. The absolute best chocolate chip cookies in The Universe. I also love beating my grandfather at cards. Not to be malicious and competitive but just to see him give me a dirty look and get mad at me. The sort of mock-mad where he ends up laughing at me because I’m laughing at him because he knows it’s funny that he’s mad. I wish I had a photo of that. Getting a hand of four-forty to blast ahead and win a round of Queens will tend to make anyone mad though. The 23rd I finally bought myself a digital camera. I kept putting it off because I wanted to get just the right one, wondering if I should go with a regular digicam or a DSLR, and because every time I got ready to buy one I’d read a new review or three and re-consider my original choice. So I settled on a Canon PowerShot SD1000 Digital Elph because it seemed to be a good overall camera, is tiny and slim, and was on sale. Sales always help the decision-making process. Shawn had people over for a barbecue so I brought the Elph with me to give it a test run. Some notable shots would be this one of Bryanna and Potato, of Shawn’s foot after Bryanna painted his toe nails, and one further down of Shawn after Bryanna put a snake skin top on him and some lip gloss. He’s dead sexy and apparently not averse to any of these things being done after you get some rum into him. Well, except blush. He drew the line at blush. I’m going to try to keep the shots of Potato and of my own cat to a minimum on here because I know I’m going to take a million before long. I had to post this one of Potato though. The 22nd I drove up to Ch’town with D’Arcy and his buddy Thane for Nathan’s CD launch at The Guild. If you haven’t heard The City Destroyed Me, you can check out the entire new album here. The place was packed and the tunes sounded great. I always like to go to his shows when I can, especially if he has Dale on drums. Watching Dale play is interesting every time and what he played for “Big Brother/Cruel Father” was one of the coolest, catchiest sounds ever. I wish I had taped the show now. After the show, I headed over to The China Garden with Tracy, Tammy, James and Gill to get some grub. At the time, the food was good. Hours later, the food was not so good. I might have to think twice about going back there to eat again. At least I wasn’t sick like I was the last time I ate at a place here in town. I think I’d rather have a fingernail pulled out than eat there again. We met up with a bunch of other people, Nathan and his crew over at Hunter’s after that to hang out for a bit and check out the bands. We had just missed Pat Deighan’s set but he was nice enough to get all of us in for free so we got to check out Smothered in Hugs. I’ve heard of them but never been to one of their shows. The sound is terrible in that place but I think I’d like to see them play in a better spot sometime. The 21st As I was dropping off Shawn after K-town trivia, we noticed lots of fire trucks on Notre Dame Street in front of the Legion. Turns out there was a fire in Little Big Man’s old house. I felt this was important to mention for some reason. The 16th Shawn had another barbecue tonight and this time everybody had a huge feed of mussels, except me due to an inconvenient allergy. I thought maybe I could try a few and hope I didn’t end up curled into a ball on the bathroom floor in a puddle of vomit but why risk it, right? I used to love mussels until I had a bad one at some food fair when I was a kid. Why my mom ever thought I’d like a cold, pickled mussel is beyond me. Why I actually ate it is even more beyond me. I did discover, though, that Ah Caramel cakes are much better after they’ve been in the freezer for a while. Shawn had to work so he missed out on going to the Harvard Street park with Nathan, drunken Bryanna and drunken Laine that night. Sadly, there were no teeter-totters as everyone was hoping for so I stood in the cool night air while Nathan tried to get a lighter to work and the girls swang on the swings as they discussed Velcro penises and pavement vaginas. I don’t understand or want to understand either. The 15th James and Gill-with-a-G invited a bunch of people out to their place in the country for her birthday. I finally got to try some of James’ famous vegetarian chili. A bowl of that with Gill’s corn bread made for a damn good second supper. What wasn’t so good were the canned Lebanese stuffed vine leaves and stuffed eggplant that Tammy brought. I tried the former because I’d had something similar at Cedar’s before which was pretty good except the canned version was, well, something else entirely. As for the stuffed eggplant, Jill-with-a-J said it was better than the vine leaves so I reluctantly gave it a shot. My stomach lurched after one bite and that was that. Never again will I eat canned Lebanese delicacies, I’ll only eat the non-canned variety and make sure I also don’t have half a dozen brownie fudge cookies in my gut beforehand. Everyone else seemed to like them pretty well so I guess I just left more for them to enjoy. Everyone got into the dance mode but because getting into dance mode is something I never do I just threw balloons at the ceiling fan while disco or James Brown blared in the living room. We sat outside by the firepit most of the night, though. Mike caught a junebug in his hand, we ate chips and roasted marshmallows. But once people started to drift inside and lines from The Big Lebowski were dwindling, I decided to head inside and try a game of pool in the basement. I’d kill to have a pool table but I’d kill even more to have an air hockey table instead. I’ve been jonesing for a good game of air hockey for so long but options are pretty slim in town. Maybe I could open my own air hockey hall downtown and see how long it takes before it becomes a seedy hole that attracts sketchy types that somehow manage to take over the place in such a way that the tables get used to screw prosti-tots on after hours. Wow, that took an ugly turn. The 10th I picked up a couple of lobsters for myself yesterday as a treat. I cracked them open today after cutting the lawn and cleaning my car because that is apparently the best time to eat lobster. As grotesque and disgusting as they are, lobsters is darn tastee. It is nasty, though, busting open their bodies, what with the cracking and the squirting. All of the the juices, feelers, cartilage, pointy bits and the stuff inside of them that I’m still clueless about. I can deal with the green stuff, I try my best to ignore the red stuff but the body I will not go near. I took a gander at what was in the body and I felt the urps beginning. I’ll stick with the tail, the claws, and the little legs; mom can have the bodies. With all of the smelly, juicy mess of the lobster safely disposed of in the compost bin, I got to work figuring out what to do with the small bowlful of lobster meat I had. The possibilities were endless after doing a recipe search online so I decided to just dip some of it in melted butter and garlic, and then make a big lobster omelette. It’s not often that I make something like that with the onions, garlic and pricey lobster but once it made its way from plate to fork to mouth it was well worth it. It was a tasty omelette, so damn tasty. In a way it’s hard to believe that such a repulsive-looking, creepy crustacean with beady little eyes could taste so good. It’s even harder to believe that years ago only “poor” people ate lobster and that fisherman just threw them back into the ocean because they weren’t worth keeping. The 9th Laine invited me, Sharon, Shawn and Bryanna over tonight for some Spanish grilling in the backyard. I’ve never heard of a Spanish grill until we used it a while back but it’s basically a barbeque/campfire in a big concave bowl. This photo is of a Spanish grill but it’s nothing like what we had going on. Sharon made banana boats which are bananas with marshmallows and chocolate stuffed into them then heated over the fire in tin foil. They were really good but my experiment wasn’t so much. I wanted to try these things we used to make for cooking over the campfire at my buddy’s cottage when I was a kid. Cameron and his family would have fires on the beach and we would wrap a hot dog in biscuit dough and cook it over the fire. That’s my memory but for some reason I think they just told me about how to make them and we never did. But then, also, I seem to remember burning the dough and getting sand on it. In any case, I brought over some Bisquick to give it a shot. It didn’t go as well as I’d planned. We eventually got them to cook well enough to eat but even though people said they were good I sort of don’t believe them. I had one and that was enough for me. I just can’t eat hot dogs that aren’t grilled, and even then I don’t really want to. These were just heated inside the dough and tasted far too wiener-y for my liking. There’s something about a non-grilled hot dog that is very unappetizing to me now, all of the “wiener flavouring” comes right out because there aren’t any grilled, charred, shrivelled or crispy bits to mask it. I’ve unofficially given up eating hot dogs for the last several years but as of tonight I’m officially announcing that I am giving up eating hot dogs for good. I remember hot dog day at school and getting them for like twenty-five cents each or something. The aroma of boiled wieners wafting up the hallways of the elementary school just before lunch time smelled soooo good. Volunteering to go get the hot dogs was even better because you got to go to the staff room and see lots of people’s moms preparing all of the hot dogs. That was always very odd because I’d try to figure out whose mom was whose and the ones I did recognize seemed so out of place being in the school. They’d hand you a big plastic tray with a lid that was full of boiled wieners sitting in fresh hot dog buns. Even remembering the smell now makes my mouth water. Carrying it back, I always considered just taking off outside and eating as many as I could before a) I got full, b) got caught or c) puked. I never did though and would just take my two hot dogs when I got back to class and slather them with ketchup and mustard. The soft white bread of hot dog bun and the steaming wiener (haha, ahem) were pretty much the best thing ever. The only thing that’s appealing now is the bun because the idea of eating a boiled hot dog is just really gross. Like bologna, wieners tend to have a hard or crunchy bit of “something” in them every so often, and I’d rather not think about what that might be. The 4th Oddly enough, the cinema here in town managed to get 28 Weeks Later so I actually got to see it in the theatre. The trailer did absolutely nothing for me, it just looked like a bunch of foolishness. But I’ve been hearing good things about it, some people saying it’s even better than the first one. Well, the first is still better in my opinion but they did a great job of staying true to the original. It was a fairly interesting take on the story and the zombie mayhem was bloody, brutal and scary. The opening scene really lets you know what you’re in for and didn’t disappoint one bit. Plus one of the main characters is played by Robert Carlyle, and he’s been scary to me ever since I saw him in Ravenous. As expected for a Tuesday evening, there was hardly anyone in the theatre but what was unexpected for a Tuesday evening was the dude two rows behind us who was drunk out of his mind. I just figured he was a loud-mouth, douchebag who talked constantly throughout the film. I didn’t realize he was loaded until he fell down the stairs after he was asked to leave because of his drunken behavior. I was told afterward that he had done some fancy falling over the seats at one point and someone also said he wasn’t wearing any shoes. The 3rd John and Gail invited some people out to their place at Schurman’s Point today for a barbecue. I drove out with Nathan and Kyle, Carl was there and their friend Caroline showed up later. Their house was super nice, twenty feet from the shore with a great view of the waterfront across the harbour and Holman’s Island. We grilled up a tonne of food, sat around on the patio for hours, had a bit of a fire down on the beach early in the evening and ended up hanging out until almost midnight. I got more sun today alone than I probably get during an entire summer. I’m surprised I don’t have a burn of any sort of severity. I also got to play with their little shi-tzu Cuddles all day and all Kyle got to do was get bitten by her. The 2nd The Sleepless Nights were playing at Hunter’s tonight so I drove up there with Shawn, Bryanna (thanks for the photo) and Laine, picked up Tracy and met up with Tammy to get some Indian buffet at The Royal Tandoor beforehand. It’s been good there lately but I think I’ve had enough Indian buffet for a while; buffets in general actually. I’m going to have to start going beltless to buffets. I told Kat we would stop by the dairy bar where she worked after dinner but it was closed so Tracy suggested we go to Buzzie’s dairy bar in Cornwall. Seeing as we had lots of time to kill before the show I figured why not. Even after that little jaunt outside of city limits there would be at least two more hours before the music started and I thought how awesome it would be if there was trivia at Hunter’s before the bands. Turns out there was trivia and we showed up only a few minutes late. We didn’t win anything but it was plenty fun and it killed two hours pretty quickly. The Peter Parkers opened and they were alright, probably would have been better had I known their material. Just when I thought they were loud, The Sleepless Nights plugged in and let their drummer loose and it was like a bomb went off in the building. They played a great set, told a lot of jokes, but they announced that Mary was leaving the band and I believe they said it was her last show. Sadness. Mo’nique didn’t make an appearance either. More sadness. As we left, a drunken throng was also pouring out of The Velvet Underground across the street. The shouting, screaming and foolish hollering sounded like some wild, tribal warfare and I was very glad I didn’t park near that mob. Though, I didn’t park far enough away for my liking because as we were piling into the car some stray packs broke off from the herd and encircled the car. As I instructed everyone to lock their doors, suddenly, this dummy frat boy started pushing up and down on the hood of my car like some angry babboon. It was as if we were on a fantastic safari!