Posts categorized “Life”.

Last Friday (back when it was still February) evening I went to a concert with @jayseman, @gendlec, and my brother. We went and saw Jonathan Coulton at the Moore Theater in Seattle, with special guests Paul and Storm and Molly Lewis (aka sweetafton23).

It was a good show. And now, thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can watch (almost) the entire thing here. Not all of Paul & Storm’s act was put online, so I had to take some of their songs from the Portland show they did around the same time. But they did the same stuff, so IT’S OKAY.

Anyhoo, here is good musics for you to enjoy. A playlist with a whopping 30 videos in it:

A funny side note: @gendlec didn’t know that Molly was going to be in the show, and she’s a huge fan of Molly. So when Molly came out on stage @gendlec went NUTZ with excitement.

Once again November has proven to be the busiest/stressiest month of the year, so no real surprises there (and hence only three posts on this website during the entire month). Carrie & I spend most of our energies getting ready for our craft shows. She additionally has a bead festival to put on. But let me now try to recall some goings-on:

One of the most fun things was the re-incorporation of Nathan the Orange Fool into Fools Play Improv after a six-year hiatus. He moved back to Olympia recently and so has re-joined our illustrious cast alongside official newcomer Jamie the Ginger Fool. And with Esa the Periwinkle Fool more-regularly attending as well, that means that Mike & I are going to be faced with two-person shows far less frequently. Good news all around. In fact I took advantage of this by taking off the weekend of my craft show.

Carrie stayed on-site in Bellevue during the weekend of the Bead Festival, leaving me home alone. Well, during the week leading up to the Festival she went shopping for various sundries, and came back with New Super Mario Bros. Wii for me as a surprise early Christmas present because she loves me, or at least that’s the reason she gave. Also so I would have something to occupy my breaks between making crafts for my craft show.

The Tuesday after the Bead Festival was Carrie’s birfday. I had already given her a main present (a new outfit that she wore to the Bead Festival), so on her actual birfday I just gave her a li’l something extra, the holiday album by Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces. We went over to her folks’ place, where we were joined by L&C, which was ve’y fun. We played a lot of bowling on the Wii. Carrie’s mum made “linguine with clam sauce,” which is just like a meal that my mum used to make called “clam sauce spaghetti.” As you can tell, the only real difference between the two meals is the width of the pasta used.

Then two days later we were right back over there for Thanksgiving. With a lot more bowling on the Wii. But less linguine. But more turkey.

But the day before Thanksgiving we went out to the new(ish) place on 6th Ave called “Sax.” It had a very strange atmosphere that I couldn’t put my finger on. Thankfully somebody else did: Sax feels like somebody remodeled their basement into a bar. There are no decorations on the walls, there is a green carpet, and the wood paneling isn’t quite of the highest quality. It is almost as if they set out to make a neighborhood dive bar but then changed their minds halfway through and tried to make it into a classy bar, and so it exists in this weird limbo in between them. But we did share the Slider Trio appetizer, and it was very delicious. They really season the meats well.

The day after Thanksgiving, Carrie had a craft show called Gritty City at a hole-in-the-wall gallery on the very southern edge of downtown T-Town. It was difficult to tell from the outside that the building was anything other than either (a) abandoned or (b) just some old-timey storage/warehouse building. But inside was actually a really awesome space. I would love to get into this show next year because it seems like it would really jibe with my aesthetic.

The next day was the craft show out in Purdy that we do together. I had a couple of new product lines this year: Kawaii necklaces and soldered pendants (which as you can see I am putting up on Thirsty Robots). I didn’t do quite as well as last year, though, and the booth fee was much to high to justify doing it again. So next year I’m going to be looking into doing other, more artsy shows that cater to a younger crowd that would “get” my stuff a little bit better than the upper-middle-aged women who are the primary demographic of the Purdy show.

So now I’m done with craft shows for the year, but Carrie has one more this coming weekend, so she’s still crazybusy. And I’m spending this entire week dealing with the fallout from the show; packing back up my inventory, putting all the new stuff up on Thirsty Robots, etc. Plus I got two special orders that I have to make this week.

And that spins us right on out of November and into December. I’m certain I forgot some stuff that I would have wanted to mention, but such is the nature of the November beast. Ah, well. I leave with with some Baman Piderman:

Tomorrow, time permitting, I shall post my “Of the Month” selections for December ‘09.

So I’m only just now getting around to posting about what happened leading up to, during, and after Halloween. Why? On account o’ the busy-ness, and some unavoidable delays.

My wife caught a powerful sick that lasted the entire week leading up to H’ween, so I was busy taking care of her as well as doing everything around the house that needed to get done. I also had to drive out to me mum’s place a couple of times so that I could borrow her sewing machine, which I needed to create the body portion of my H’ween costume. I’m not a very good tailor, so it took a while, but it came out shockingly well. More details in moments.

The theme I decided on for my H’ween punkins this year was “fossils.” Probably because my friend Three Ninjas is so into them. So about a week and a half before H’ween I carved the first one: an ammonite fossil!

Then the day before H’ween my pal Leiapico had a punkin carving party! It was also a costume party but I didn’t have my costume completely finished yet. Anyhoo, I carved another punkin at the party. You should recognize it pretty easily:

Then during the day on H’ween I carved a trilobite fossil:

Then I had another punkin left over, so I carved a fossilized dinosaur thigh bone into it just for fun.

And here they all are!

Normally Carrie & I make Reuben sandwiches with potato/green bean/sauerkraut soup on H’ween evening and give out full-sized candy bars to the trick-or-treaters, but this was an unusual (and special) year in that Halloween was actually on a Saturday, so we actually performed our Fools Play Halloween format (Fools Play Trick or Treat) on Halloween night! As per usual, all the Fools dressed up in costume, so here’s a run-down of what was what:

Yeah! I designed it so that I could put the jellyfish “hood” down. I also made slits in the long tentacle sleeves about even with my hands. I then sewed strips of velcro on the slits so that I could cleanly close them when I was in full costume, but I could open them and stick my hands out when I was performing or interacting with grab-able things. I also put my purple shirt on over my jellyfish bottom for the duration of the show.

The Fools were not, of course, the only people dressed in costume. A huge percentage of the audience came in costume as well, which is what we want for our Halloween show. Some of my faves were Tia as a Starfleet Medical officer (with a costume she made herself), and her boyfriend James as Master Onion from Parappa the Rapper. There was also a very good Velma from Scooby-Doo.

Anyway, at the end of the show our apprentice Jamie, whose soul we’d manage to free from the influence of dark magic (long story; don’t want to bore you with the details) and who had overcome the brainwashing of Sir Ian McKellen (who wanted us dead for tearing a page out of his copy of the Forbidden Book of Improv Lore (but, again, I don’t want to bore you with the details)), managed to turn his soul completely around and became an official frikkin’ fool: Jamie Pederson the Ginger Fool!

Originally we were going to give him the Orange shirt seeing as how Nathan Geyer the Orange Fool hadn’t performed in about six years. But in a shocking turn of events, Nathan Geyer was actually in the audience that night, and jumped up in protest when we were about to give the Orange shirt to Jamie. He said he was back in town now, and so he was going to reclaim his Orange shirt and start performing again. So we had to scramble to find another shirt for Jamie and the best we could find was a shirt the color of crystallized ginger, so the Ginger Fool he became. So in one night we got a new Fool and saw the return of a long-lost Fool!

So, yeah, that was fun.

But because I was at Fools Play on Halloween, Carrie & I didn’t do our Reuben Sandwich Feast as per usual. We were gonna do it the day before, but she was still having the sick in her (which is why went to Leiapico’s punkin carving par-tay), so we delayed it until the Friday after. I made 12 Reuben Sandwiches. They were good.

Anyway, one of the reasons why this post is so late is that my digital camera broke back in September, so I didn’t have it with me at Fools Play to take pictures of everyone’s costumes! I had to wait for the person who took these pictures to get them off the camera and email them and then have them be sent to me, etc. Took a while. But there they are, baby.

OFFICER KANE

But there they are, baby. There they are.

CAMERA TRUCKS UPWARDS as OFFICER KANE puts his arm around CINDY. They turn and walk away down the alley in SLOW MOTION and are soon lost in the fog as the END CREDITS MUSIC begins playing.

FADE OUT.

THE END.

Hmm… I went somewhere weird at the end of this post. Oh, well.

Thursday evening I headed up to Seattle to watch some Three Ninjas perform. He was at a pizza place called Piecora’s on Capitol Hill. He was performing as one of the headliners of “The Pickle,” which is some sort of fancy open mic night that happens every month. It took place in the back room of the back room of Piecora’s (seriously, you have to just keep going back).

They had some major, major technical difficulties and ended up starting almost an entire hour late. ‘Twas kinda crazy. The show opened (when it finally opened) with one of Jason & Geoff’s co-workers or something. He did a short set of singer/songwriter/solo guitar stuff.

Then there was a dance crew, who called themselves the Young Avengers. They were a group of kids/teens who had self-organized so they’d have something to do other than get into trouble, which is very admirable. They weren’t exactly the most polished and tightly choreographed of dance crews, but they had great enthusiasm. They called their dance style “Jerkin.’” I hadn’t heard of it before but apparently it’s a west coast thing. This was one of the first Jerk performances in Washington State, so that was kinda cool. Here’s a video of the kids practicing:

Then it was time for Three Ninjas and his friend Miss Geoff to perform. I recorded the show with Mathias’s camera. Weirdly, the show only took place like five blocks from Sandy & Mathias’s apartment, but neither of them came. Anyway, as you can see, the Young Avengers also became a part of the show!

I had to leave right after I stopped recording so I could go pick up Lawrence from work and drive us back home. I’d wanted to see more of the show, but they just started so danged late that I was 15 minutes late picking up Lawrence as it was.

When I got near to Lawrence’s house I got a phone call from my own wife saying that I should just stay there when I dropped him off ’cause she and some other Bead Babes were gonna meet us there and have wine and order pizzas. So that’s what happened, and it was great fun.

GREAT. FUN.

Carrie & I have been married for five years. No joke! That’s, like, some kinda special anniversary, ain’t it? Well, to celebrate we took some time off and went off on a little vacation along Hood Canal.

We stayed at a cabin near Tahuya. You know where Tahuya is, dontcha? C’mon, everybody knows where Tahuya is!

We stayed at a cute little place called Maggie Lake Cabin, which is near Lake Maggie of all places. The cabin was really nice. Small, but it was just the two of us so it was just fine. It had a nice kitchen, and a futon and a super-comfy recliner, and an enormous deck that looked off down a hill towards a little pond (it was dry, but it’s been a dry summer). The most notable thing about the cabin was that it had a loft bedroom that had a ladder leading up to it instead of stairs. Well, we took Suki with us, and at first she wasn’t having any of that ladder. We had to put her on the ladder, then move her front paws up a rung, then move her bottom paws up a rung, etc., all the way up the ladder one rung at a time.

To get her back down we had to put her front paws on our shoulder and carry her down like a big baby.

Eventually she figured out how to climb up in, and then she decided to climb down it. Bad idea! She made it about halfway before getting all tumbly and twisty and is kinda lucky she didn’t hurt herself. We carried her down every time after that.

One of the days we drove all the way around to the other side of Hood Canal and went to Hoodsport Winery, where we loaded up on berry and fruit wines—blackberry, raspberry, rhubarb, apple, pear, & cranberry. Don’t know if you know this about me, but I loves me the candy wines.

Since we were in the neighborhood already, we continued up the Olympic Mountains to Lake Cushman, which is frikkin’ gorgeous. It was a Monday in September, so there were basically no other people anywhere to be seen. We walked along the shoreline and I took many photos:

In one part there was a really nice tidepool type of pond, and there was a rock in it that for some reason fascinated Suki. She tried to bite it a couple of times:

Suki had a great time at the lake. She did a couple of things that we’d never been able to get her to do before: fetch a stick (she’s only ever gone after tennis balls before) and swim on purpose (she’s had to swim a couple of times when she fell off logs, but she’d never done it willingly before). I got ‘em both on video:

We (mostly Carrie) cooked a ton of great food during the vacation. We had enormous burgers stuffed with gorgonzola. We had fettuccini Alfredo with langostino. We had scallops wrapped with bacon accompanied by cheesy grits. We had li’l smokies wrapped in crescent rolls. We had cinnamon rolls with orange frosting. It was all good, but it was quite a lot of cholesterol.

We got home in time for Carrie to take Lawrence to his driver’s license test, which he passed (finally). And then that evening she played in her kickball league and they only lost by 1 point—and she scored a run!

I went back to work on Thursday, but Carrie had the rest of the week off. In fact, right now she’s at the Puyallup fair going to a James Taylor concert! Gotta love Sweet Baby James. I’m getting ready for Fools Play &Mdash; we’re doing Robot Repair Shop tonight, which is rather exciting because we haven’t done it in a couple of years. I should probably review it. Yeah, I’ll do that now.

On Friday my wife and I took our niece and met up with my brother and his girlfriend at Putting Zoo in Puyallup for some miniature golf.

This place is AWEXOME!

They have two courses, a “Water Course” and an “Obstacle Course.” The water course is by far the more fun of the two, so if you only have time or money for one then I recommend that one.

This place is a real miniature golf course. They even have a frikkin’ windmill for Christmas sake. They also have coolest single hole I’ve ever seen in a miniature golf course. It’s on the water side. You’ll know it when you get to it.

Putting Zoo is almost as awexome as Magic Carpet Golf in Tucson, AZ. It is in a bit better condition than Magic Carpet was. Putting Zoo was also being slightly remodeled and touched up here and there, which I think might be a mostly-permanent condition. But it didn’t detract from the ambience, and neither did being right next to the freeway—you hardly even noticed!

Plus there were about a dozen adorable little cats running all over the place, and the most spectacular thing happened. There is a course where you hit the ball and it goes up this little ramp and is very likely to catch some air. Well, my brother’s girlfriend sent the ball up this ramp and as it flew into the air one of the cats darted out of the shrubbery next to the course and intercepted the ball! It was astonishing.

So, as anyone who reads this probably knows, last week was hot. Weather-wise, I mean. High temperatures the whole week. Record-breaking high temperatures. I believe it got up to 103 degrees somewhere in western Washington.

Seeing as how this is the 21st century, the “information age,” the weather forecasts leading into the week were kinda hard to miss. I knew it was going to be hot. I don’t do terribly well in the heat; I tend to get overheated rather easily. So I did a very sensible thing. I went to Home Depot.

They had several boxlike air conditioners in stock. I of course looked for the cheapest one, which was $100. But they didn’t have any in boxes, just a couple of display ones. So I bought a display-model air conditioner for $75 dollars.

I set it up and the bedroom, and during the hot week my wife and I spent the majority of our time (time we were home at any rate) comfy in our nice, air-conditioned living room.

That was all well and good for the bedroom, but there were times when I needed to work in the office, which, due to being on the southwest corner of the house, is often the hottest room in the house. The cold air from the air-conditioned bedroom couldn’t be stretched out enough to reach the office. The air conditioner only cost $75 after all, so no use expecting such miracles from it. Instead I went and bought a $3 styrofoam cooler and constructed my own air conditioner much like this one. It worked not nearly as well as the actual air conditioner, but the air that came out of it was much cooler than the air in the office.

So the extreme heat wasn’t actually too bad for me for the long stretches. Every once in a while I’d get too hot, but I’d get in range of the air conditioner when that happened.

The funniest thing about the week for me, though, is another side-effect of living in the 21st century. The social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) became basically a week-long bitch-fest about the heat. I swear 75% of all posts last week were somehow commenting on (usually complaining about) the heatwave. Sometimes the same people would complain every day, sometimes even several times a day.

I thought the sheer volume of it was kind of amusing. Is complaining about the weather really going to make it change? I never posted a single thing about the heat (until right now, of course), and instead of complaining, which would not have made me feel any less hot, I took steps to ensure that I had nothing really to complain about.