Category: Uncategorized

I’m lucky to live in an apartment that has floor to ceiling windows. The windows give me a great view of the city but it also gives the apartments across from me a great view of my living room. When I first moved in, I kept my blinds closed during the evenings because I felt like I was on display. As I got settled, I wanted to see the view during the evenings and I got lazy so the blinds stayed open.

Laziness also keeps a lot of my clean clothes in the dryer after I’ve done my laundry. I can’t be bothered to put it back into my dresser or a basket. This means that after I shower, I have to go get clean underwear directly from the dryer. The dryer is also in full view of my living room windows. I shower in the evening, so for several seconds every night, I expose my pudgy bare ass to anyone looking at my apartment as I look for clean ginch. I suppose I could get the underwear before I shower and bring it into the bathroom with me but that smacks of extra effort.

I generally don’t lounge around naked in my apartment at any other time. No one wants to see a naked dude doing chores or washing dishes in his apartment. I wonder if anyone has seen me in that short window of opportunity (no pun intended) where I am naked.

In 1999, I went to the theatre to see a movie called American Pie. It was a film that garnered a lot of buzz for being a new, raunchy teen comedy that re-energized that genre. Though the movie was rated 18A, a lot of teens under the age of 18 were able to buy tickets and get into the theatre. I know this for a fact because at my showing, several ushers came in and said they were going to check IDs. I was with some friends and we were all over the age of 18 so it was no big deal to us. The movie was rated 18A though, which meant you could be under 18 and still see the movie if someone old enough brought you in. Some resourceful kids in front of us turned around and asked us if we could be their movie “chaperones”. We reluctantly said yes but only if they would explain what high school kids thought was cool at the time. The answer was not us. Anyways, it didn’t matter in the end because the ushers checked less than half a dozen IDs in an auditorium full of underage moviegoers.

American Pie went on to make a lot of money and two theatrical sequels. I thought American Pie 2 was great but I wasn’t a big fan of American Wedding, the third movie. I didn’t even bother with the four direct to home video “spin-off” films which didn’t involve many of the original cast.

More than a decade later, the original cast has re-assembled for a new movie called American Reunion. I liked what I’ve seen from the trailers, one of which you can see above. It’s great that they brought back all the original cast members, even many of the actors who just had small parts in the first film. It’s interesting to see where all the actors have wound up since they made the first movie. One could argue Alyson Hannigan is currently the most visible performer out of the bunch with her regular work on How I Met Your Mother. Some of the actors don’t appear in mainstream Hollywood films anymore. It’s interesting to note that actor John Cho probably has risen farthest since his very small role in American Pie. His character had about two minutes of screen time where he originated the pop culture term “MILF“. If you don’t know what that stands for, go ask your Mom. In the last ten years, he’s gone on to star in the Harold and Kumar movies and he is the new Sulu in the Star Trek reboot. All that from being “MILF Guy #2”.

The Internet has and continues to give us wonderful, awesome things. Some of those things are illegal. An example of such illegal things would be pirated games. Don’t download pirated games, if not for your own conscience, for me. My livelihood depends on honest sales of video games. Then there are the gray areas. In this particular case, I’m talking about broadcast television. The streaming of broadcast television over the Internet has been a tug of war between the channels themselves and the people who stream it free. The channels believe this is stealing. Is it stealing if I find a stream of a channel at work but I already pay for that channel at home?

I mainly use these free streams to find broadcasts of Vancouver Canucks games that I don’t have access to while at work. The one site that I use frequently can be found here. It used to go by another name but I won’t mention here because they had some legal trouble a while back and I don’t want to bring that up again. You can probably watch every single NHL game that is being played on any given night, which is crazy if you think about it. If anyone asks, I didn’t give you that link.

I have less than three weeks left on my contract at Radical. I’ve enjoyed my time on Prototype 2 but I’m also really looking forward to having some time off. The seven months or so have really flown by.

Tonight was Halloween and I’ve seen more fireworks lofted into the air in my neighbourhood than New Year’s Eve and Canada Day combined. It wasn’t even close. At one point, I counted six different fireworks displays going off at the same time as I watched from my balcony. I’m not sure when Halloween turned from being candy focused to ordnance focused.

The new Safeway downstairs in my apartment complex opens on December 9th. I’m really excited to have another choice for buying groceries and other items. As I’ll be unemployed by that time, I’m going to enjoy the grand opening festivities with the senior citizens in my area. I’m gonna race Delores to the prune aisle.

I can’t even tell who some of my blog readers are coming from now. Not that I get a million readers a day but who do I know in Salt Lake City? Thanks for visiting nonetheless!

Ok, it’s getting cold and I want to slip underneath my duvet.

 

If you’re north of the equator, you’re probably aware that the temperatures are dropping and winter is fast approaching. There was snow falling in New York this week and many parts of Canada are now below freezing at times. I’ve decided for a third year in a row to see if I can survive the entire winter without turning on the heat in my apartment. I was successful in my previous two years. I had to wear some extra layers on some nights but it wasn’t too bad at all. I attribute most of the success due to the fact that my apartment door faces the hallway heating vent. My building heats all the hallways and the vent pushes warm air into my apartment from underneath the door. If this did not happen, I don’t think I could have lasted all winter.

The heat isn’t on yet right now but luckily the lows are still a few degrees above zero. It’s not exactly toasty in my apartment but I’m still ok. I’m worried though that some weather forecasters are calling for a colder than normal winter for British Columbia. They blame it on La Nina which is totally different than El Nino for those who are keeping track at home. Will this colder winter prediction come true? If it does happen, will it force me to turn on the heat? Only time can answer those questions. I’m only doing this to save money. I pay about $23 in electricity per month year round and I’d like to keep it that way.

Among the many items of free food that Radical offers daily is a salad bar. As a dude who perpetually struggles with eating enough vegetables on a regular basis, the salad bar is something I should be definitely visiting more than say, the potato chip rack.  I have to admit though, I haven’t really been eating too many salads at work. I attribute this mainly to the selection of salad dressings they have. None of them look very appetizing at all and I’m not going to just eat a bowl of raw vegetables like a bunny of sorts.

Then the genius switch turned on for me. I decide to bring in my own salad dressing. After I flirted with the idea of buying a deep fryer at Superstore, I meandered over to the salad dressing aisle and bought me a bottle of raspberry vinaigrette. That stuff is tasty. I now have about two servings of salad a day. It’s quite delicious when I eat it but I’m hungry again about a half hour later. It certainly doesn’t satisfy me like a bag of chips does. Nothing beats grease when it comes to making you feel like you’ve had something substantial.

And that’s my story about salad.

So a few weeks ago I was at a Real Canadian Superstore to buy some groceries. This one had a particularly excellent housewares department. I was browsing their selection of small appliances when I happened upon their deep fryers. Their most simplest and basic fryer was about $20, a real good value. A more expensive fryer with a stainless steel finish and digital controls was still only around $40. I was thinking this might be an interesting item to add to my set of kitchen appliances. I could deep fry chicken wings, french fries, onion rings, and even that weird county fair stuff like deep fried Oreos and butter. I wouldn’t have to go out for chicken wings as much as I could make them more economically at home.

As I pondered the deep fried food options that would opened up to me, common sense kicked in. Buying an appliance, that if used, would guarantee an increase in my deep fried food consumption is not a good decision in terms of my overall health. At the moment, if I’m sitting at home and I crave french fries or fried chicken, I gotta get off my ass and go to a place that makes that stuff and buy it. My lazy butt is currently helping me be more healthy. If I get a deep fryer, what’s to prevent me from making a week’s worth of fried chicken in one weekend and eating it over the course of the entire week? What if I start doing experiments? I’ve always wondered how deep fried battered bacon strips would taste. Right now, it’s just something I’m mentally picturing. If I had a deep fryer, I’d probably try to make that one night. I can just see my stupid fool ass battering up strips of bacon and dipping them into that golden liquid of joy.

I quickly was jolted back into reality at the store and I decided there would be no deep fryer for me… at least for now. They also had slow cookers, maybe that’s what I should be looking into instead.

I returned home from work last evening and as I looked outside my living room windows I saw a most interesting development. Someone, in one of the apartment across from me, had decked out their patio in strings of colourful lights. I don’t want to label them definitively as Christmas lights because there’s a possibility these lights are for Diwali, the festival of lights, which is celebrated in southeast Asia. They do look suspiciously like Christmas lights though and not the traditional lanterns and oil lamps associated with Diwali. A modern take on a long celebrated festival? Perhaps. Diwali lasts five days so we’ll see if they are still up next week.

If these are indeed supposed to be Christmas lights, these will be the earliest set of lights I’ve ever seen; a week earlier than Halloween, a full two months before Christmas itself! Let’s see what happens after next week.

In the more than ten years I’ve been going to my hair cutting lady, I believe I’ve only cancelled or moved an appointment less than a dozen times. On the weekend, I got up, looked in the mirror and realized my hair had grown out of control. I’m not sure what happened but one day my hair was looking alright (not awesome either though), then the next day it looked like crap. I checked to see when I was scheduled to go in for a cut. I was booked in for the first week of November. I didn’t want to wait that long.

So today, I called to see if I could move my appointment up. Luckily they had a spot open at lunch time tomorrow. I usually go about five weeks between haircuts but something about these four weeks made my hair grow out all crazy. I think I’m going to get her to cut it a bit shorter than normal to see if that will fix things.

This week, Electronic Arts will release its one title which will make more money for the company that any other game this year. Battlefield 3 is EA’s crown jewel for 2011. They’ll put every single resource behind it to market it and support it on a global scale. So far, this is the closest they’ve come to competing with the Call of Duty juggernaut (which arrives a few weeks after BF3).

On a more local scale, I haven’t figured out how I’m going to get my copy of BF3. I haven’t paid full price for an EA game since before 2006 and I’m not about to change that even though I haven’t worked there in over a year. I usually get one of any number of people I know who still work at EA to get me EA games. The problem with BF3 is the demand is sky high. I’m almost certain the company store will institute a rationing policy where each employee will only be able to buy one copy of the game per platform. Even then, I guarantee the company store will sell out of PC and Xbox 360 copies on the first day. They might even sell out PS3 copies as well. I can almost see the lineup at the store snaking back from the lobby into the cafeteria area.

I could, of course, buy the game at full price at a retail store but that just seems wrong. I wonder if I’ll be able to resist once I see everyone online and knowing they’re playing BF3.