I went on a date today, and it wasssssssssssssssssssss…
….
…
…good! In fact, we met for bubble tea and then ended up going to the Dr Sun Yat Sen Gardens and then wandered around and then had dinner.
nerdream
Last night I had a dream that I was at a skytrain station next to a mall and I was carrying a bagfull of my favourite dice. This teenager wanted to look at them so I let him grab them, but then he went into the mall and dumped them over the ledge down to the two levels below and I spent the rest of the dream scrounging around looking for them. I found some other dice that weren’t mine, including a rubber cylindrical die that had 6 numbers on each side.
I also had a dream that I was a slave for gladiatorial games in a secret underground complex. I kept trying to escape but the masters were aliens (though they looked human) and whenever you stabbed them or chopped their heads off they’d just go back in a few moments, good as new. Finally I managed to elude them and run into the kitchen – the cook wanted to help me and my companion escape so he told us where to find his truck. We ran out into the garage and I fly his canopied pickup truck (hmm…did I spend too much time in Brian’s truck yesterday?) out into the city full of regular modern human folk. We escaped, but then we got pulled over by one of the aliens but all she did was give us four speeding tickets, then she left.
Speed Lines to SFU
I wonder if anyone would be interested in attending this anime convention which I just discovered. I’m particularly interested in seeing the panels with voice actors and voice directors, but that’s just a small part of the con. There’s also gaming happening, though there seems to be zero structure to it at this point. The bad news is it’s $35 to get in. I am trying to contact the organizers to ask some questions – maybe I can get a deal if I run some Spaceship Zero. It’s August 20-22 which is a little poopy.
Berry Me Not On the Lone Prairie
Oh, the blackberries I picked today! Don’t even try to imagine it, because you can’t. What’s that? You can’t help but try? Oh alright – well then imagine me, Janet, Brian and Dominic driving out to Abbotsford, passing Kraus Brothers Farms and having to turn around at the Yarrow exit, driving back, and signs where the ‘O’s were made to look like berries, and therefor were darker than the other letters so that from far away they seemed to spell SHIRTCAKE. Imagine also sneaking into the strawberry patch, and the hot sun beating down on us, and planes in formation passing overhead as part of the Abbotsford Air Show, and my SHREK popcorn bucket (free with combo at Capitol 6) filling up quickly with plump blackberries. Imagine me going through Janet’s entire oven pot of berries to get a little white spider out.
Now that you’re finished imagining all of that, imagine Ted Danson wearing a too-large phallic, animatronic capybara hat designed by Henson Studios, canoeing around and around a backyard swimming pool filled with blood.
On our trip, we learned a valuable lesson about trying to fit four people and several bucketfuls of berries into Brian’s exterminator truck. The lesson was: don’t. Especially when it’s really hot out and especially especially you’re driving more than a few blocks of clear traffic. For the curious among you, the trip to Vancouver from Abbotsford on a Sunday evening during the Abbotsford Airshow constitutes more than a few blocks of clear traffic. It constitutes legions of blocks of congested traffic. Yvonne’s ear-congested.
Speaking of ear, prior to all of this berrydactyl madness, we went to the Congee House on Broadway & Main for breakfast/lunch, which I call lunkfast, and there we met up with Yvonne and Tynan and had some exotic foodstuffs which you can read about on Y’s blog. The 1000-year old egg was touted as dire, but in fact it was not too bad. It was just like regular (duck) egg, but with more alarming textures and colours. And I had congee for the first time. It truly was like rice porridge, which I’m sure I would love as much as Yvonne if in fact I was a big fan of porridge or cream of wheat or tapioca or rice. As it is I am only a moderately-sized fan of all of those (perhaps more so of rice).
On Ursula’s advice I have purchased bananas and juice for the construction of some blackberry smoothies a little later.
A very jamesy day
Garage Sale Booty:
Aggravation game for 40 cents (for James) – missing 2 marbles.
A baker’s dozen of markers & pencils (good ones too) for $1.85
After the garage saling I called James to tell him about his prize. Since my previous plans had their berries picked, I went with him for a long walk with his dogs on the endowment lands. Maybe I should capitalize endowment lands, but I’m not going to because they’re already endowed enough without me making a point of it. It was almost like hiking, except the terrain was largely flat. I enjoyed it, and we saw a nice fat banana slug. Then James took me out for lunch at Acropol and then we went back to my place and played a game of Magic: The Gathering. It was a close game, but my legions of vampires took out his angels & griffons. Then I started working when he left and he came back later to watch War of the Worlds. I’m running Spaceship Zero in 7 days and I still don’t know what the plot will be.
Shovels shovels
This morning I had a dream that I was at a garage sale and there were two different plastic toy shovels that I thought I could use for something (I can’t imagine what, in real life) so I spent minutes and minutes trying to decide which one I wanted to get. When I finally decided I asked the lady (there were two of them behind the table) “how much?” and she said $3. I hemed and hawed about the price for another seemingly endless time until finally I decided I didn’t need them and walked home.
Here’s hoping my real foray into garage saling goes a bit better today.
Tennis Fu
James had me down four games – 5-1, but then I came back to win 7-5. It was quite sweatenating!
They told me it was a good idea…
…so I thought I’d share it with you.
Whenever I save a file to my hard drive that I know is only temporary, I save it with the word ‘toast’ in it. So, let’s say I’m downloading an exe file to install a new program, or I’m saving a jpeg that I want to convert to a gif and then send it to someone. When I hit SAVE AS I’ll add the word ‘toast’ into the file name, so the file ilikeyourwiggle.jpg becomes toastilikeyourwiggle.jpg or ilikeyourwiggletoast.jpg or some such.
Then, when it’s clean up time, I just do a search on my hard drive for the word ‘toast’ and when they all come up I can send them to the trash can with…as Grand Moff Tarken says…one swift stroke!
I Can't believe it's not butterday
It’s already the 12th? Crazyness.
Tonight I played D&D. It was mostly the party trudging across the blighted hills without incident, but there was an encounter with strange beetle swarms, and a rogue displacer beast. Then when they used the cromlech to mystically transport to the continent of Maal, they appeared in the middle of a fight, and couldn’t see much because of the mist (a byproduct [biproduct?] of the teleportation) but they were attacked by these floating demonic jellyfish which had paralytic venom in their stingers, and that’s just for starters.
Today I did some voiceover work, but due to confusion about the time difference between here and PEI, I couldn’t get ahold of the director so I had to direct myself. I hope they turn out alright. Right now I’m uploading angry amounts of wav files to the ftp space I got in a trade for a gmail address.
Wonder Toren Power – ACTIVATE!
Sixteen episodes of original Superfriends (1973) plus 16 episodes of All New Superfriends Hour (each of which actually consists of 4 different tales) (1977) plus 16 episodes of Challenge of the Superfriends (1978) plus 24 episodes of World’s Greatest Superfriends (1979) plus 62 shorts plus 8 episodes of Legendary Super-Powers Show plus 8 episodes of Galactic Guardians equals 150 episodes of Superfriends, only one of which I am missing (Shark Attack) as of receiving a new tape in the mail today! Neato.