Tag: park

Today marks the completion of my third decade on this planet and I am quite pleased to be able to announce that I ain’t dead yet. 😀 But worry not gentle reader, I’ll not be subjecting you to some passé retrospective about my life. Instead, I’ll just recap today and today alone.

I was up playing Wild Arms 3 till about 3 am as I just couldn’t sleep. Most likely due to an excessive amount of munching on holiday goodies while downing glass, after glass of soda1. I found one monster to fight that took around an hour to defeat but it jumped my characters up 4-7 levels! *grin* Then when I eventually got to bed; I slept poorly. Our apartment is just too dry this time of year and our little humidifier stopped working. This causes me to keep waking up with sinus headaches and a terrible thrist. I got out of bed about 8:30 – 9 and went back to playing the video game a bit more. Shortly there after, Michelle got up and gave me my birthday present.

What’d she get me? A case of blue balls Bawls. Then after lazing around most of the day; we headed out to the local mall to meet some friends.

I’d foolishly asked a bunch of friends to join us in watching the Narina movie with a follow-up plan to eat dinner together. There was one point that I’d not factored in these plans. This year, my birthday fell on a Saturday. Just about the last Saturday before Christmas. Traffic was insane and people all around were grouchy, though we did run across some nice people that helped us get around the parking lot2. We went over to the mall a little early and bought a new humidifer and then headed down to the theater. We got tickets, met up with our friends and went in to watch the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

*whew* What a movie! While not perfect, it was probably as good as we could hope for from a Hollywood production.
High points:

  • The actress playing Lucy was spot on. Most of the other actors cast in the movie were also quite good
  • The backgrounds were gorgeous.
  • The addition of the Nazi bombing run at the beginning of the movie really helped to give context to the time of the story.

Low points:

  • The costuming on the witch. Her outfits were ugly and just didn’t work with the imagery I have in my head for the character. Though I do have to admit the black , soulless eyes did work for me.
  • The witch was not nearly as afraid of Aslan as she should have been. In my memories of the book, the witch was terrified of Aslan but the movie seemed to put them on a more even footing.
  • Maugrim’s voice. The actor doing the voice did a fine job, but being the only character without a british accent really stuck out and annoyed me.

Overall, I’d say it was worth seeing in the theater and it is something I’ll be adding to our DVD collection when it becomes available.

After the movie was over, we headed to the restaurant. Oh, I should mention we had called earlier in the day to try making reservations but were told they don’t do that for parties of less than 8. And that they would have plenty of room for the 6 of us. When we got there; we were told it would be a 2 hour wait. We decided to switch to the Oyama Sushi restaurant. They seated us within minutes of our arrival (even though they were already pretty packed). Then they plied us with drinks until our food was ready3. We had a jolly time chatting and drinking (non-alcholic, for the most part) but all good things do come to an end and eventually we all headed home. It was a very good day and while I ain’t dead yet; I am a bit tired so good night, sleep tight and don’t let the space bugs bite!

1 a.k.a. pop to you heathens.
2 A few people threw their cars into reverse to open up bigger areas for us to drive through and things of that nature.
3 It turns out this weekend contains not only my birthday and practically the last weekend before Christmas but it’s also graduation weekend for the University! No wonder everything was so packed today! This also explains why it took so long for our food to arrive.

My drive to the office is short and rather dull, but it does take me past both the local police & fire departments. On most days, all that means is occassionally a cop car pulls out of the police parking lot. And on some days, there’s a Pepsi truck blocking half the road as they deliver soda. But on rarer occassions, life is far more interesting.

On those occassions, the fire department has car wrecks in their parking lot. The cars can be half crushed, upside down, missing doors, etc… Unfortunately, they finished up with their training and removed the cars before I got over there to take photos. *sigh*

Still, there’s also some new construction which just started up along my commute and I think it’s for an expansion on CPL. Given that they’ve only dug out a big hole in the ground so far; I think I’ll have time to get some photos before they finish up. 😀

Dear Mr. S. Bot,

Mr. S. Bot, do you mind if I call you Spam? No? Good. I thought I would take a moment to let you know this blog uses comment moderation to prevent you from ever appearing on its pages. Additionally, I use a variety of plugins to prevent you from even showing up in my moderation queue. Unfortunately, you’ve managed to find a few ways to sneak past those plugins so I actually have to do something about you. I’d rather not have to do that and since you are never going to be allowed to display any information on this blog or link to your own sites from it; please give it up and go bother somebody else.

Sincerely,
Mark

P.S. I know the odds of this actually cutting back on the flow of spam to this site are less then the odds of me throwing a snowball from my office parking lot at the sun and hitting it, but it’s nice to dream. 🙂

Heck of a surprise!

After work this evening, Michelle & I walked over to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner. On the way back to the apartment, a fire-engine went driving by. I didn’t think much of it; as we live close enough to the fire department that this is a frequent occurance. Then we walked up into the parking lot and saw two fire-engines at the far end of the lot. There were a couple of people standing around but nobody looked paniced and they didn’t have the big hoses out. So we took the groceries inside and then I walked down towards the fire-fighters to try finding out what was going on.

Apparently, it was a small oven fire caused by a piece of oven mitt (or something like that) getting caught in the oven and burning up. I’m not too clear on the details, mostly because they had an extremely noisy fan hooked up to clear whatever smoke was in the building. Overall, there was no need to be alarmed but it was something of a shock to come home to flashing lights with fire-fighters standing around the place.

This week’s selection of links from Pukka include:

Not from Pukka, but still worthy of notice: