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Week in Review

The one week long train trip of no-junk food went along pretty smoothly. There were a couple of pennies on the track but no derailments. Of course Kelly’s D&D session chocolates never count. I celebrated my victory over sugar and fat today by having a small banana strawberry licorice blizzard and then I felt sick. Not only that but it did nothing to alleviate the heat. My next train trip will be 2 weeks long, and I believe it will start now.

Last weekend I went into Chilliwack with Marlo and we hung out with the Woodses. Marlo had a birthday brunch at the Airport Cafe and I had no-sugar added blackberry pie and it was tasty on my pastie. We took a dunk in their new pool, played some 4-way Godzilla on the X-Box and went to a garage sale. Probably other stuff too.

This week has been mostly filled with painting zombies, but I also got in some tennis with Stephane. Oh and I saw Yvonne as well! That was exciting. I wanted to go see Rodin but no time. No time.

I saw most of Troy and it stunk, although the fight scene with the spears was pretty innovative.
I saw The Big Sleep and it was good. (Here’s a test, what movie replaced it on the “movies to see” sideboard of this blog?)
I saw something else and I don’t remember.

Oh and I just got a hair cut – shaved really but not to the scalp. With a little rogue blonde bit sticking out at the front. And Marlo painted my nails.

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Money vs Fun?

V-Con, where I can put my artwork up on display for all to see and buy, and the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, are the same weekend.

Can’t decide! Can’t decide! Brain aneurysm!

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Trials and Tribulations of the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets

The Thickets have a show in Bellevue Washington at the Penny Arcade Expo on the 26th of August. Or maybe it’s the 27th. Now I’ve confused myself. Now I had never heard of the Penny Arcade Expo (or PAX) before, but a lot of my nerd friends are pretty excited that we’ll be playing it.

We’re trying to organize t-shirts and stickers to have at the show, and we’ll also be bringing CDs down. Of course these are strictly promotional as we won’t be selling anything in the US (for obvious reasons). Of course whether or not the border guards believe that remains to be seen. We could have our products confiscated, or we could just be denied access to the border.

Even before the Bush administration, crossing the border was always a gamble. One time we played in Atlanta for DragonCon and Jordan got turned back at the border, so we had to have a fan drum for us.

The second problem is that of our bass player. When I was first asked if we’d play the show, I asked everyone if they wanted to do it. They all agreed. They all said they were available and would do it. That is, except for Jordan, our drummer. Nevermind though, our guitarist Mario is also our backup drummer, so he’ll sit in for Jordan. Recently, however, Bob backed out of the deal, leaving us high and dry on the bassist front. But wait – Mario has another band, and that band has a bass player named Aaron, who, I’ve been told, has played with us once before. So hopefully he’ll know our songs and, more importantly, agree to come down and play with us. I’ll be meeting him again this coming Saturday, and we can suss out what all is going to happen.

If we don’t have a bass player or one of our five band members is not allowed to cross the border, that would be sad. Even though PAX doesn’t have the budget to pay us to play.

The good news is, we’re working on new songs. Lots of them. I’m sure none of them will be ready for PAX, but Allen at Divine wants us to cut a new album, and so do we. And we’ve also decided that we’ll be spending the money we’re getting from selling our touring van on new costumes and merchandise. So now we’re trying to figure out what new costumes would be cool. Any suggestions?

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Back in the Game

I played tennis with Stephane today. I think it’s been about a year since I’ve picked up that racket. Since they tore down the tennis court right by my place I’ve been bitter and forlorn, but recently on my bike rides I’ve seen that the court at Heather & 18th hasn’t been as busy as I thought it would be, so I scheduled a game with Stephane. I’m pretty rusty, but I started to get some of the old moves (“supersmash!”) back towards the end. We played two regular matches and one short match – Stephane won, and it was very hot.

Today is my first day of a week long no-junk-food diet. I knew I was eating too much junk food, but I decided to go cold turkey for a week after I bought three large bags of Lays from Sunshine Market because they were on sale, and ate all three bags within the span of 20 hours. Actually the diet started last evening right after I finished the third bag. So far it’s been going fine, except that Stephane & Sheri wanted to go out for crepes after the match. I figured I’d get a healthy crepe. I asked for a cream cheese crepe because that was the cheapest of the savouries, but they didn’t have cream cheese, so I got a honey and coconut one. Not bad, I thought, but then when it came, it had a scoop of ice cream with it. I tried to give away the whole scoop but Stephane would only take half.

Then I went grocery shopping with Marlo at Safeway (the grapes are $1 cheaper at ‘shines) and with the exception of some white bread (they didn’t have brown in that price bracket) I did pretty well.

And that was a really boring entry. Oh but then I ran over a puppy on my bike and it’s brains splattered into my mouth and it made me crash into Patrick Stewart who was wearing nothing but a housecoat.

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Xena

“The last full planet to be discovered – in 1930 by US astronomer Clyde Tombaugh – was Pluto. But recently some astronomers have campaigned to have Pluto downgraded to ‘minor planet’ status. It is so small – its diameter is a mere 2,200 kilometres – that it is unworthy of the status of full planet, it was argued. This bid was finally rejected after heated scientific debate.

But now the discovery of Xena, which is only slightly bigger than Pluto, will re-ignite that row. Both Pluto and Xena are components of the Kuiper Belt, which is made up of thousands of small asteroid-like objects, many mere lumps of rock, that sweep the outermost depths of the solar system. As members of the Kuiper Belt, neither Pluto nor Xena should be rated full-fledged planets, it is argued.

The trouble for astronomers is that they do not have an exact definition of a planet. Many say that, if Pluto had been discovered today, it would not have been called a proper planet. “

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DeviantART

Oh here’s something else I forgot. Marlo convinced me to get a DeviantART account (which I pronounce Devian Tart even though there’s no room or time for spaces in this crazy world), which I think was a pretty good move and she also helped me upload a bunch of pictures so she gets extra hugs. It’s amusing to see what other people comment on my various drawings and just my site in general, more so when they are ESL and I can’t understand what they’re trying to say.

Here’s my gallery: http://torenatkinson.deviantart.com/gallery/

Still more news:

Toyota announced that it would open a new $800 million plant in Ontario. The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure.

A Japanese man recited 83,431 digits of pi.

A member of Britain’s parliament identified himself as a Jedi, and A woman in Florida won the right to bare her breasts in public.

In New Zealand a baby boy undergoing penis-enlargement treatment was accidentally given ten times the recommended dose of testosterone by his nurse, causing the boy to become angry and irritable and to develop pubic hair. A doctor warned that the baby might also suffer from painful erections, but that problem had yet to arise.

President George W. Bush gave a nationally televised speech about the war in Iraq to an audience of soldiers. Bush, who served in the Air National Guard, said there was “no higher calling” than military service and mentioned the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks five times. After the speech, there was some question as to whether the soldiers had clapped enough.[The New York Times] The U.S. Army, having increased the maximum enlistment age from thirty-four to thirty-nine and the maximum age for officer candidate school from twenty-nine to forty-two, having offered $20,000 more for college per soldier, and having lowered its recruitment goal for this June by more than one thousand as compared to the previous year, announced that it had exceeded its June recruitment goal by 507 soldiers.[CNN.com][USA Today][The New York Times]

Scientists in Pittsburgh killed a dog, then resurrected it hours later with fresh blood.

China decided to outlaw sexual harassment,[BBC News]

In Kota Belud, Malaysia, a Kadazandusun Chief Bobolian urged people to stop dressing animals in costumes because doing so offends the spirits and could turn a longhouse to stone.[Daily Express]

A sixty-million-year-old venomous mouse fossil was discovered.

Two Brooklyn, New York, teenagers were arrested for killing a fifteen-year-old boy for his iPod.[The New York Times]

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Wednesday is a whole new day.

One thing I forgot to mention about my bike ride with Marlo on the weekend is that we stopped into the SPCA to look at cats, just for fun. There were definitely some cuties there. But, Kodos is still my favourite soft furry funny retarded noisy cat. For now.

This morning I had a dream that I was back in high school, but I was an extrovert instead of an introvert, without any of my inhibitions. So much that I just sang and danced as I walked down the halls, and the teachers hated me. And if I liked a girl, I swept her off her feet instead of keeping it to myself like I actually did. So that was a fun dream.

Last night Graeme and Marlo and Geisel and Geoff came over and after watching a bit of Eddie Izzard ‘Dress to Kill’ we played Heroquest and everyone died. The quest specifically said “work together” but they refused and they got there just desserts with whip topping and a cherry. Then I took photos for my zombie vs S.W.A.T. painting, which will be fun.

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Summer's Here and It's Time to Shut Up

In my many hours of daytime TV I see a lot of commercials. I hate commercials, as you all know. The mute button is wearing out on our remote control. However, some things get through. I’ve noticed a few trends this summer:

1. Commercials that start out with “Summer’s here and it’s time for…” buying our product. Kentucky Fried Chicken and I think Red Lobster or some steak house are the two main guilty parties. What a pointless tag line. Do people only eat chicken in summer?

2. Mr Devo’s music from Life Aquatic is being bastardized. Case in point: the Skittles and Nestea commercials.

3. Um…I guess that’s it. Except that commercials stink. The only one I don’t mind is the Holiday Inn commercial with the guy who has his best ideas in the shower. “Proving that my client is innocent!” in court wearing only a bath towel. I can never forgive commercials for their cleverness, but I find the actor quite adorable.

Oh and fucking babies running around to the Bach (?) symphony with the words “No… no no.. no no no no no no! You can’t…you won’t…change my diaper now…” makes me run from where ever I am in the apartment to turn it off.

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Why do they call them bylaws?

This morning I dreamt that I had an apartment in Chilliwack as well as Vancouver and I used a biplane to get back and forth.

Two crows attacked a jogger in London, drawing blood.
In the Solomon Islands a hermit who had lived in a cave for forty years decided to return to his village after his fire went out.
A study showed that the world military budget was about $1,035,000,000,000 in 2004; the United States accounted for nearly half of that.[Washington Post]
Body parts, including a leg and part of a spine, fell from a plane approaching JFK International Airport in New York City. The parts came from a stowaway who had hidden himself in the plane’s wheel well.
Body parts, including a leg and part of a spine, fell from a plane approaching JFK International Airport in New York City. The parts came from a stowaway who had hidden himself in the plane’s wheel well.
Researchers found that one in five women would consider having their breasts removed if it reduced their odds of contracting cancer,[Reuters] that babies are soothed by suckling the nipples of men,[Times Online] and that 99 percent of women are against comb-overs.
In Augsburg, Germany, zoo officials were being criticized for a planned attraction that will show elephants and rhinos in their “natural environment” by surrounding them with black men in grass skirts.[The Scotsman]
Two women were upset when they visited a Houston mausoleum and found that the cremated remains of their mother had been replaced by a can of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.
Plastic surgery on women’s genitalia was becoming more popular; surgeons reported that they were keeping busy plumping outer labias, tightening vaginas, and restoring hymens.
Scientists studying the Devils Hole pupfish, of which only 180 remain, accidentally killed eighty of them.[Live Science]
British pranksters kidnapped a Dalek from Wookey Hole Caves.[BBC News]
Disney digitally reduced the size of Lindsay Lohan’s breasts to make a film called Herbie: Fully Loaded less offensive.

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Drawing and staying out of the sun.

My weekend was spent mostly working. I’m under tight deadlines for a couple of art projects and I’ve spent 6 of the past 7 days at the drawing board. Today I finally got the last of the two full page drawings for Freeport Trilogy Revised (3.5) in, so now it’s back on to the monsters for Iron Crown’s CYRADON rpg.

I did manage to get some exercise on Saturday in the form of a bike ride. Marlo and I rode to the place near commercial which sells a million and one ice cream flavours including garlic, ginger, pear blue cheese gorgonzola and wasabi. They had both tiger stripe AND licorice flavours, but I went with the ginger since I’ve never had it before. I could spend an afternoon there just sampling all the different flavours. They’ve got little tiny sampling spoons and I think they’re filling a lot of landfill with those l’il bastards. Also I had my first trip to Uprising Breads which was fantastic, and cheap.

This coming weekend I’m planning on going to Chilliwack to visit Chris & Angie, and also to practice with the band. It’s always frustrating to try to plan things with the band because, besides the challenge of trying to line up 6 people’s schedules (people who live in 3 difference cities), it’s rare for emails and phone calls to be returned. I hate using the phone, and three of the band members don’t have or don’t use email, if you can imagine such a thing. So I text messaged Merrick on his phone to arrange a practice this weekend and let me know what day. That will dictate when Marlo and I go out to the wack. Mario – one of our guitarists and the guy with the jam space in his house behind an RV lot – says Saturdays are out for practice because his other band practices that day, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be in Chilliwack on Saturday. We could still practice Friday night, or Sunday some time, or Monday afternoon, I’m hoping.

This morning I had a dream that I was at work with no pants or underwear…yes indeed I did. The warehouse was outside – that is to say there were no walls or ceiling, and it started to rain. Taylor knew that we had pyjamas in stock so I grabbed a package and put the pyjama bottoms on, but my naked legs were wet from the rain and I had a hard time getting them on.