honeymoon - day 9

Today was our last full day of honeymoon-tastic Canadian adventure and, by and large, it was a day of wrapping up some loose ends. We started out with a decent room service breakfast then headed across the street to check out the interior of the Cathédrale-Marie-du-Monde. Just like its exterior, the interior was beautiful.



After the cathedral, we met up with the only person I know in Canada, Canadian composer, arranger, instrumentalist, and all-around nice guy Guillaume Jodoin. Guillaume and I went to grad school together at USC and it was really good to see him after five years.



Guillaume and his girlfriend Marie-Pierre showed us around their apartment and then took us out into Montréal to see some of the non-touristy sites. Guillaume and Marie-Pierre showed us some of the more up-scale neighborhoods including the bizarre enclave of Westmont where a vast majority of the city's rich, English-speaking residents live in a constant state of French-denial. Their architecture is very elegant English manor-inspired. Their street are named - not only in English - but named after things that scream "United Kingdom!" There was Trafalfar Avenue, Belvedere Circle, Park Hill, etc. For a city were every other street is named some variation of either Rue de Sainte-Catherine or Boulevarde de Maisonneuve, Park Hill sticks out like a picture of fish and chips stitched to the front of the French flag.

After seeing some fo the sites, Guillaume and Marie-Pierre took us to a great little Jewish deli called Schwartz's that should be in every Montréal guide book. Get the «viende fumée» sandwich and a dill pickle. Just trust me; it's delicious.



Once we finished at Schwartz's, we headed to HMV, bought some French/French-Canadian pop music and then bid "adieu" to our tour guides. Manda and I returned on foot to our hotel and settled in to planning for our travel tomorrow morning. We headed down to the hotel's Business Center, jumped online for a bit, and then set off to buy souvenirs for our coworkers from within Montréal's Underground City, a massive underground mall that they built to allow shoppers to contribute to capitalism while shielding them from the cold.

Our honeymoon has been magical or, as the Québecois say "Our honeymoon has been magical" - 'cause ... you know ... they all speak English. I've loved Québec and loved spending such a fun-filled and action-packed vacation with my wonderful wife.



It's been a great start to our marriage and the first of many new adventures to come.

honeymoon - day 8

This morning we bid "au revoir" to Québec City and drove back to Montréal so that we could return our rental car. By the time we reached our new hotel, it was afternoon. Our new hotel, the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, sits right across the street from an absolutely gorgeous church called the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde, a smaller scale (though still enormous) replica of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.



Despite the beauty, despite being in the heart of Québec's biggest metropolis, we were so exhausted from our whirlwind tour of the very white Great White North that we spent our day hanging our in our pajamas, marveling at the cathedral ourside our windows, and watching Little Miss Sunshine. Funny movie, but not the be-all and end-all of cinema as so many people made it out to be for us.

Essentially, we're kinda' beat from so much R and R. We're both looking forward to heading home on Friday and spending the weekend unwinding and slipping comfortably back into everyday, non-Wedding life. Canada has been incredible, but our sofa and 65° weather is really starting to sound pretty incredible, too.

honeymoon - day 7

Before we headed north on our honeymoon, Manda and I jumped online and tried to figure out what there was to do in Québec in the Winter. So many of the sites that we visited said "SKI!! SNOWBOARD!!" Unfortunately, neither of us know how to do either and didn't want to spend 10 days banged up and recouperating from trying to learn. We did, however, find one promising lead: The Valcartier Vacation Village.

Online, the website promised snow tubing, snow rafting, ice skating, and something called "ice karting" which was described as go-karting on a frozen track with spiked tires. I think there was something else about the parking lot being paved with gold and the urinals being able to cure cancer. After today, I can assure you that all of it is true and all of it is fantastically fun. (Well, okay. I made up those last two features, but everything else is true.)

Snow tubing was fantastic.



There were about sixty different tracks available, each one rated from Easy to Double Black Diamond.



And there were no lines. Maybe it was the sub-zero temperatures. Maybe it was the fact that it was a Wednesday. Whatever the case, there was hardly anyone there and we felt like we largely had an entire snow park to ourselves. As for the tube runs, even the Easy ones were hella fun. The most difficult were insanely steep and pretty extreme. I wouldn't quite call diagonally falling down a hill while sitting on a rubber donut "difficult," but the increase in each hill's "difficulty" rating definitely meant an increase in its thrill level.



In the middle of the entire park, as though it had been the first tube run and the rest of the park build around it, was Everest - a massive, insanely steep tube run that stretched up into the sky via a four-story set of steps. I eyed that damn ride all day, anxious to ride the most extreme ride in the park. In my old age, I can't seem to go on rollercoasters anymore without getting motion sick. Snow tubing, however, I can do and I can do it for hours without the faintest hint of motion sickness. And so I kept eyeing Everest as a chance to take on a big thrill ride and not get knocked on my ass by it.

The only problem is that you can't ride Everest on your own. There's a minimum of at least two people required per run. As best as Manda and I can figure, it's so that you and your tube weigh enough so that you don't shoot off of the track and die. It took a while and a lot of "It'll be fine! Totally safe!" requests from me, but Manda finally agreed to join me on a Grand Finale run down Everest before getting some dinner and headng home.

The short version is that I'm never going to be an Olympic Luge participant. I wiped out - hard - smashing into the ice retaining wall at about 30+ miles per hours.



My knee, my foot, my arms - all of them scraped and banged against the icy track in an attempt to slow myself down. What went wrong? My ski goggles had fogged up so I put them up on top of my forehead, fearing that I wouldn't be able to see where I was going. Unfortunately, as soon as we got going down Everest, tiny bits of snow and ice flew up into my face, latched onto my eye lashes, and instantly froze my eyes shut in the -25° temperatures. I couldn't see a thing. When I couldn't see, I leaned the wrong way into a turn and wiped out with YouTube-worthy grandeur.

I'm kinda' banged up, but nothing broke or sprained or tore so that's good. I think I still owe Amanda a few dozen more "You were right"s, but disasterous wipe out not withstanding, we had a great day. The tubing was excellent. The ice-karting was fun - if a bit hard to steer (go figure).



All in all, I'd go again. Except for maybe Everest.

Maybe.

honeymoon - day 6

-40° Fahrenheit. That was the temperature today with the windchill factored into the mix. As for the Celcius conversion, it coincidentally was also -40°. Turns out we found the one spot where Fahrenheit and Celcius line up. Way to go, Canadian Winter.

Rough day for a trip to the beach. However, it was the perfect day to check out the Hôtel de Glace - Québec's 100% ice and snow hotel. While the original plan was for us to check out the Valcartier Vacation Village, the low temperature made us rethink the idea of racing down innertube tracks in sub-zero winds. And good thing we did.

It was fucking freezing. Cold is cold and the Canadian Winter is really cold. But -40°? That's just insane. It'll be a while before I'm complaining about 50° nights in San Mateo again. Anyway, we got a slow start to the day, but eventually hit the road and stopped by Dunkin Donuts on the way.

When we finally made it out into the rural country side, the wind and the temperature were doing a number on us already. The car's heater was roaring as we pulled up into the Ice Hotel's parking lot. The hotel sits in a wide field, molded by power-blasted snow and chainsaw-carved blocks of crystal clear ice. And while it's freezing as fuck, it's absolutely beautiful.



Gothic-inspired arches and quasi-Roman statues, all carved from ice, are everywhere inside. The hotel has some 30 plus rooms, 10 plus suites, a wedding chapel, a bar, and a dance club - all made from snow and ice.



Interestingly, the bar has a refrigerator which sounds odd until you learn that it's set to 5° above freezing so that juice and soda doesn't freeze. Our tour guide informed us that the staff actually tosses their gloves into the fridge from time to time in order to warm them up.



The regular guest rooms are all identical and just look like an ice version of a monk's cloister with a block of ice, a thin matress, and some reindeer pelts for a bed.



The suites, however, are all carved into their own themes, each one different from the rest. There was the Igloo Room, the Medieval Room, the Native American Room, the Yeti's Cave Room, and the Chessboard Room.



Our camera was having trouble taking pictures. It runs on AA batteries and at sub-sub-zero temperatures, the batteries only lasted about a picture or two out in the open air before the camera would stop working. We had little hand-warmer packs in our pockets and we had to keep putting the camera in my pocket, warm the thing up again, and then snap some pictures until the batteries froze again.



We had a great time until we just couldn't take the cold anymore. Once we'd reached our breaking point, we retreated to the warmth of our hotel room, bought ourselves a pay-per-view movie, and holed up for the night as we tried to shake off the intensely to-the-bone cold that we had endured at the Hôtel de Glace.

honeymoon - day 5

Today we watched the Super Bowl. I know; a strange thing to do in French Canadia. However, the entire experience was a lot of fun and completely different from any Super Bowl party I'd ever been to in the States. For one, the game was being shown on a massive movie screen at a performing arts theater downtown.



The whole thing was co-sponsored by a local French radio station and Budweiser. The tickets said that the doors openned at 1:30. We arrived at 2:00 hoping that we hadn't missed kick-off - clearly completely forgetting which time zone we were now in - only to find that they were showing a Montréal/Pittsburgh hockey game complete with all-French commentary.


(Sorry about the quality of the indoor photos. It was hard to get decent pictures.)

At first we were confused. Then we were worried. We had this bad feeling that we'd just bought tickets to our first all-French Super Bowl. That's the thing about Québec City ... While Montréal is pretty bilingual, Québec City is considerably less so and everyone around us in the theater was yammering away in French.

After a few hours of all-French hockey (hours), the MCs of the day took to the stage, said a lot of things I didn't understand, gave away some raffle prizes and tossed t-shirts into the packed crowd, and then introduced a live cover band.



Yes, our Super Bowl party had a live cover band interlude after the three-hour hocky overture. The band was pretty good and proceeded to play a bunch of American punk and hard rock tunes: Rage Against the Machine, Greenday, and their "specialty," a butt-load of System of a Down. The funny thing was that, since they spoke French but performed in English, their songs had a very thick French accent. Imagine Green Day without any consonants and you get the idea.

"Oo oo 'ave duh tiie/oo 'eesen doo meh when/ah-boot nah-teeng an eh-vree-ting ahl ah wance" Etc. Weird. It went on for an hour, after which a local university's cheerleading team took to the stage.



They lept around performing their pyramid formations and routines while Amanda and I stared at each other in disbelief, desperately trying to figure out the the heck was going on.

Three and a half very weird hours after we first arrived, the actual game finally got off to a helluva start. We were both fully expecting the theater to be full of American tourists, but it wasn't. We were also fully expecting the game to be in French after the hockey game they first showed. But it wasn't either. We sat there for the next 4.5 hours with a theater full of die-hard, French-speaking Football fans watching the Detroit, MI feed of the Super Bowl in English. It was so much fun to see the game in that environment, even if the Bears didn't win.



Another day, another crazy Canadian honeymoon adventure.

honeymoon - day 4

Today was deceptively busy. At the end of the day, I sat down to review the day's digital pictures with a feeling that we'd taken things pretty quietly that day.

Man, was I wrong.

We started out walking down long the sled run outside of our hotel. While there, it turned out that we were just in time for the annual Boat Pushing Race.



Essentially, some crazy Québecois row out into the frozen waters of the St. Lawrence River in a canoe, row as far as they can until they reach the large sheets of ice that cover the bulk of the river, then jump out and push their canoes across the ice the rest of the way. I'd read about this in my 6th grade French book. What I hadn't grasped at the time was the scope of the "sport." It's a massive endeavor. Those guys are nuts.



After watching the weirdos in the river for a while, we took a stroll down the oldest commercial street in North America, browsed some of the shops, and spent way too much money on postage and postcards to send back to our families State-side. We strolled around Vieux-Québec for a few more hours taking lots of pictures along the way. There was the guy with the all-wooden marrionette puppet show busking for money.



There was the annual soapbox derby that we passed by along the way.



There was the skating rink in the middle of town where some passing tourist offered to take our picture. There was the kindly old wood-wooker who taught me how to play the spoons.



Eventually we headed back to the hotel and I passed out. Manda wandered around the hotel for a bit while I was zonked out on the bed. When I woke up, we headed out for some Canadian fast food - more poutine and some damn good hot dogs. One thing I've learned while we've been here is that the Canadians really know hot dogs. That and that it's really freakin' cold in Québec during the winter.

honeymoon - day 3

Marchez dans une «wonderland» de l'hiver. Or ... you know ... however you say "walking in a winter wonderland" in French. This morning we checked out of the über-chic Hôtel Gault in Vieux-Montréal and rented a car for our (allegedly) 2.5 hour drive to Vieux-Québec in Québec City (By the way, if you're keeping score at home, there are three different types of accented letters in that sentence. Yay, HTML). Rural Québec looks amazingly like rural Pennsylvania, and if you were to add French roadsigns and frozen rivers covered with ice fishing shacks to Lancaster, they'd be indistinguishable.



For the most part, we enjoyed the drive except that I kept falling asleep and that it actually took 4.5 hours instead of 2.5. Plus, there was the half hour detour down a long country road with no place to make a U-Turn and without any driveways in which to turn around.

Despite the downsides of the drive, Québec City quickly made us forget all about them. In short, it's stunning. Our hotel, the fortress-like Château Frontenac, is a breath-taking castle high on the hill that overlooks the city.



The streets of Vieux-Québec are quaint, snow-covered lanes that look like colonial America or 18th Century Europe. They could have come directly out of a made-for-the Hallmark Channel Dickens movie, if the Dickens movie involves destitute orphans shopping in expensive boutiques.



Our hotel room has a riverside view which lets us watch the massive sheets of ice float down the St. Lawrence River. There are snow-covered cannons that face the river juxtaposed beside a circus tent-topped gazeebo and a tobogen slide.



As chance would have it, Amanda and I are honeymooning in Québec City during Carnaval, a massive two-week love letter to winter that Québec throws each year. There is ice sculpting and sled races and river races and more ice sculpting. There's an all-ice hotel, plenty of all-ice outdoor bars, and even an all-ice performing arts stage complete with its all-ice electrical room (don't ask me how that works). Amanda and I walked around taking in the fairy tale-like sites for most of the evening.



On our way back from an over-priced and lousy dinner (although, I did have the Bison Ravioli), we got pretty severely snowed upon. Its the first time in years that I've been caught outside in the snow, and I loved it. After catching snowflakes on our tongues and walking the gorgeous streets of Vieux-Québec at night, we returned home to our castle over the river for a well-deserved long winter's nap.

honeymoon - day 2

After sleeping through breakfast yesterday, Rooni and I were detirmined to head down to the Hotel Gault lobby and take in the scenery this morning with a side of toast. Here's what we learned:

1. French french toast from french baguettes is kinda' odd.
2. My mom horribly over-cooks poached eggs.
3. Unfortunately, that's how I like poached eggs.

We followed up breakfast by bundling up and setting off on foot to the Metro station. We tried to buy the Carte Touristique, an all-day Metro pass, from the station agent only to find out that it's only purchasable at a specific Metro stop. Even though I'm violating my promise by writing this down, the nice old station agent let us get on the train if we promised that we wouldn't tell anyone and that we head straight for the needed station, which we did. After getting our day-passes, Manda and I set off for the massive towering piece of modern architecture known as the Stade Olympique beside Montréal's botanical gardens.



Why? Because that's where the Insectarium is, a two-story temple to all things segmented and disgusting. We saw huge beetles. We saw huge walking sticks after searching into the terrariums for a while (stupid natural camouflage).



Manda and I also both stared down our worst fears - huge moths and huge spiders, respectively.





By the end of our time there, both of us were feeling less enlightened than we were completely skeeved out. Our cure ended up being a long and pointless journey by train and by foot (lots of foot) to the let-down of all bagel shops. The guidebook said something about it being so notoriously fantastic of a bagel shop that New Yorkers are known to head there at all hours just to stock up. What we learned, however, is that these must be tongueless, blind New York infants who have never eaten any other bagels before.

On the walk back to the Metro, we stopped at Chez Claudette's for dinner and our first foray into the slimy world of poutine, or as it's known in the US, french fries slathered in gravy and covered with hunks of cheese curds.



It was no Olive+Gourmando, but the service was really nice and my feet loved the rest.

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig and by now we were old pros at the Metro. The only problem was that once we got back, we realized that Amanda had left her winter hat at Chez Claudette's. So, it was out again, out again, jiggity-jog to track down her lost chapeau, then back through the Metro in a mad dash to try and make it back before our day-passes turned into paper pumpkins at the stroke of midnight.



Tomorrow it's up early and off to the airport where we'll snag a rental car and set off for Honeymoon: Part Deux: Québec City.

honeymoon - day 1

I think we were tired. Maybe it was the one hour of sleep before a handful of cross-country and international flights. Maybe it was the eight months of wedding planning. Whatever the cause, when we finally made it to our hotel in Montréal, Amanda and I slept for 16 hours. We missed our first complimentary breakfast. We missed our first two windows of opportunité to have our room made-up by housekeeping. By the time we finally managed to wake up and get ready to face the cold, we'd managed to miss the morning as well as the 3 or 4 PM closing time for many of the touristy things here in Old Montréal.

Bundled from head to toe in snow clothes, the Mrs. and I headed out into Vieux-Montréal to take in The Basilique de Notre-Dame, the city's catholic basilica and a beautiful piece of architecture.



We wandered around inside for a while, warming up and apparently offending God by keeping our winter hats on. Basilica staff later scolded us for this. There are some odd pictures hanging on the walls inside the basilica. They all depict the savior of the indiginous Native population of Canada being saved/educated/warmly greeted by the good God-fearing missionaries of the first Canadian settlers.



After warming up, snapping some pictures, and blasphemously squeaking our snowy shoes through the reverent halls of the basilica, we set off into the city again - this time to find a bite to eat.

4:30 PM is a weird time to try and eat in Vieux-Montréal in the winter. Most lunch places had closed and most dinner places hadn't openned yet. Luckily for us, we found a great café called Olive+Gourmando. The inside was cozy, the atmosphere was hip French-Canadian, and the food was delicious.



I had a ham panini with chipotle mayo. Manda had cream of cauliflower soup and what she tells me was "the most delicious bread (she's) ever eaten." Afterwards we had a hot chocolate and an "extraordinaire brownie" that was truly extraordinaire.

We spent the rest of the evening takin in Old Montréal on foot. Old Montréal is beautiful. It feels simultaneously very Old World European and Modern Art friendly.





We went down to the Centre Du Science de Montréal, past a frozen section of the St. Lawrence River that people were ice skating on, up into Montréal proper and the Place D'Armes Metro stop where we both struggled with fuzzy french class lessons of whether the French word for "map" was masculine or feminine (we never quite figured it out).



By the time we made it back to the hotel, our feet were sore and our faces were frozen but we'd had a great day, taken some great pictures, and were ready for the warmth of our pajamas.

it's award season ...

And thankfully, I'm happy to announce that I've been nominated for two Game Audio Network Guild (GANG) awards this year. The cool thing about the GANG awards is that the nominations come from other industry audio professionals and the entire voting audience are your peers. It's a really nice honor.

The first I'm nominated in is for the category of "Best Original Vocal - Pop" where the song "Dr. Kunkle's Funnkel Cake" picked up a nomination for the game Thrillville. The second nomination is in the category of "Best Game Article, Broadcast, or Publication" for the October, 2006 Aural Fixation column in Game Developer magazine entitled "Musical Symmetry."

Any GANG members out there who might be reading this should log into the GANG forums and check out all of the nominations.

we're back!

That's right. We're back from the snowy Canadian wilderness. And by wilderness, I mean downtown Montréal.

We took a bajillion photos while we were there and wrote up some pretty detail notes on what we did each day so that we wouldn't forget. Over the next week or so, I'll be putting up our notes and posting pictures for everyone to see.

In short, we had a fantastic time. To everyone who thought we were nuts to head into Canada in the middle of winter, we couldn't possible have hoped for a more perfect honeymoon. So much snow. So much beautiful scenery. The Mrs. and I totally recommend heading to Québec in the winter.

As for today and tomorrow, we're just looking to settle back into normal, non-wedding life. Like I said, specific honeymoon info will be coming as of Monday.

hitched without a hitch

It was perfect. Absolutely perfect. After the months and months of planning, every detail of our wedding turned out exactly as we hoped it would. Pictures will be coming soon. As of right now, my wife [; )] and I are now frantically trying to tie up last minute details before we head off for our honeymoon.

This is shorter than I'd like it to be, but I just wanted to thank everyone for coming. Thank you all for sharing in our wedding and being a part of it. It meant the world to us both.

Like I said, pictures will be coming soon! But first, Canadia!

at long last

It's midnight which means that today is my wedding day. Right now, Amanda is at a hotel in Oakland with her maid-of-honor and my sister and they're having some sort of bridal sleep over thing. I hope they're having a great time. : )

In 11 hours, I'll be a married man - and married to an incredibly woman whom I love more than anything. I miss her right now. I wish we could spend tonight together - there's a "young kid at Christmas" level of excited anticipation in me right now and I'd love to just joke and laugh with Amanda about the long road we've taken to get to this day, reminisce about the tastings and fittings and vendor interviews, laugh about all of the millions of little details that only she and I would ever notice if they were right or wrong.

Of all of the to-do lists that we've written, of all the plans that have come and gone, there's only one thing left on my list and that's to write my toast for tomorrow's reception. I'm slacking a bit. Something in me is sorta' intimidated. How do you say thank you to all of your friends and family for traveling 3000 miles just to say "we support you"? How can a corny joke and a glass of cider thank Amanda's family for being so incredibly supportive of us for our entire relationship and for accepting me into their family so graciously?

You know what? I just realized that I've just written my toast. Everything I wanted to say is right here. So, I think I'll print this out and read it tomorrow. Manda, I love you. I can't wait to marry you today. I'm incredibly lucky to have you in my life and I promise to live the rest of life trying to live up to your vision of me. You're the best.

Good night, everyone. See you in about 10 hours. : )

see you soon!

It's Wednesday on the East Coast and that means that a fair amount of people - friends and family - are heading west for our wedding today. Can't wait to see everyone.

Manda and I are neck-deep in the final preparations for everything and doing our best to wrap up a bunch of really nice finishing details as best as we can so that everyone has a nice time.

We're tired, but really excited about the wedding. I can't wait to finally be Mister Jesse Harlin. ; )

See everyone soon!

t minus 8 days

Until we get our wed on. Our to-do list of about 60 items is now down to about 20 something, which is nice. What's not so nice is that we still have about 20 some things to do.

The honeymoon is all planned and we're really looking forward to heading off to Quebec. We've spent more money on this whole shindig than I thought we possibly could. But it looks like it's all coming together.

Just a few last minute things to tie up and then we can hopefully just sit back and enjoy the day.

I don't know how much I'll get to blog over the next week. I'll see what I can do, but I'm not promising anything, you greedy SOBs. It's entirely possible that the next time I write here, my wedding ring will be clacking against the keyboard keys.

Well ... you know ... like, when I lay my hand flat on the keyboard and smack on it. Whatever, you get my point.

the game that's sweeping the nation!

I realized something today. I realized that I'm a shallow and judgemental asshole. No, don't try to defend me. It's true.

How did I figure this out? Well, you see, there's this guy that I see relatively frequently around and about during the course of my days. He's kind of a dumpy guy and he always wears t-shirts that are tucked into his pants. His t-shirts always say inspirational things like "Make It Happen" or "Dream. Believe. Achieve." Anyway, I've seen this guy around and everytime I see one of his inspirational t-shirts tucked into his pants, I find myself trying to figure out if he's 1.) a hopeless nerd with no fashion sense, or 2.) retarded. But you know what? He's neither! Turns out, he's simply foreign. Option 3. And this is where I realized that I was a judgemental asshole. I found myself trying to figure what was wrong with this guy that gave him such a lousy taste in t-shirts - completely aware of the fact that whichever answer it would be, I'd inevitably just think "Oooohhh ... that explains it."

What is that? Am I really that freakin' shallow and stupid? Maybe we all are. Here's a game. See how you do. The the rules are simple: I'm going to show you three pictures. All you have to do is tell me which of these pictures shows

- a group of retarded people,
- a group of nerds, or
- a group of foreigners

Leave your answers in the comments and I'll give you the answers tomorrow.

A.


B.


C.

long awaited story-time

Okay, so not so much long awaited as long promised. Not this past weekend, but the weekend before that, my brother came up from LA to take me out snow tubing for the weekend. I'm not a drinker nor am I the "wild and crazy stripper" kind of guy, so when the idea of doing something for a bachelor party came up, I was pretty short on suggestions. Ry, however, came up with some really great ideas, the winner of which ended up being a weekend trip to go snow tubing outside of Tahoe.

The plan was this: drive up and snow tube all day Saturday. Saturday night head back. Sunday watch the Eagles playoff game while eating hoagies. A great plan and one I was really looking forward to.

When we headed up to Soda Springs, we found the place pretty crowded. Lines were long. Lift lines were longer. But there was snow and lots of it. And I hadn't seen that much snow in years, so it was nice to be back in the cold white.

While snow tubing was a lot of fun, by far the biggest source of entertainment of the day were the hundreds of kids there who had never been in snow before. So many of them just ... didn't get it. It was hysterical. Here's my list of top five favorite snow-retarded kids:

5. The Eater - this kid just would not stop eating the snow. No matter what kind of snow it was, into his mouth it went. Fresh white snow? In. Old stepped on snow? In. Old snow-mobile run over snow? In. If that kid had had a fistful of yellow snow, it wouldn't have lasted long.

4. The Fish Out of Water - This poor girl ... her parents apparently didn't really explain to her that snow is cold. Really cold. Colder than, you know, rain or sunlight. So, when she got up there, she took her glove off, grabbed a big fistful of snow and instantly just began to cry. Not only that but she didn't quite get that if she just wiped off her hand and put her glove back on that everything would be fine.

3. The Lazy Girl - This girl was sitting in the snow digging at it with some piece of blue plastic. I couldn't figure out what it was at first. It looked like salad tongs. But, instead of the typical salad tong ends, it had two concave cups on either end. She was scooping up snow wads with it, then she'd beat the thing on the ground a bit, and then scoop up some more snow. Finally, it dawned on me that what she had was a snowball maker. I kid you not. Who the eff needs to use a snowball maker to make snowballs? Other than being fairly round, it tends to make some pretty crappy snowballs, too. They disintegrate easily and don't look like they hurt when you're hit with them. What's a snowball if it doesn't leave a welt?

2. The Girl With Vision - Most of the kids there were doing a pretty piss poor job making "snowmen." I put that in quotes because most of these things resembled little more than tiny snowball stacks. Lumpy wads of half-assed fun with a stray stick protruding from one side, that sort of thing. Generally, Ry and I just figured that these kids were never going to see a real snowman. That was until Ry and I saw the Girl With Vision. It was like watching the first caveman invent the wheel. You knew you were watching something revolutionary. As we were standing in line, she walked by on a mission with a HUGE snowball in her arms. We laughed and joked about someone finally having had "vision." About half an hour later, she walked by again. This time she'd recruited a friend and the two of them were pulling a sled brimming with huge snow balls. Forget the invention of the wheel, this project of hers had just taken on the look of the construction of Giza's pyramids. As we were leaving later in the day, we passed by her handy work: a massive snow fort constructed out of huge snow bricks and seemingly impenetrable to the piss-poor snowballs of the girl with the salad tongs. This girl was our hero.

1. The Lazy Boy - This kid took the cake, though. After mocking Lazy Girl amongst ourselves for a little while, we forgot about her and started to just talk about other things. About half an hour later or so, Lazy Boy comes walking down along the line of people waiting for the snow tube lift. He looked so forlorn and needy. Why? What was his problem? He kept asking everyone "Does anyone have a snowball maker?" Ry and I lost it. I was dying to scream "USE YOUR HANDS, DIPSHIT!!" but his mom was standing in line right in front of us. That, and ... you know, I would never actually yell something like that at someone. But I wanted to. That kid was a retard.

Anyway, that was the snow and it was fun. Hoagies and the Eagles win were also fun. But nothing beat the impassioned pleas for a snowball maker.

I do'h

Less than a month ago, Manda and I had our apartment spotless. My family was flying out to SF for Christmas and so we cleaned up, scrubbed, and dusted all over the place to make sure everyone would be happy and comfortable.

Less than a month later, it looks like a wedding threw up all over our apartment. There are supplies for making invitations, boxes of wedding gifts, piles of honeymoon-related snow clothes. There are branches. There are lamps. There are thank you cards, place cards, and greeting cards. There are receipts everywhere. There are empty bottles of every kind of sparkling non-alcoholic drink sold within the Bay Area. There are tasting cakes. There are magazine clippings of cakes and place settings and branches. There are binders with all of our notes and book after book after book of wedding planning guides telling how we need binders to keep all of our notes.

It's everywhere. With less than two weeks to go before the big day, I have the feeling that it's only going to get worse the closer we get. When it's all over and we get back from our honeymoon, maybe then we can start to dig out from it all.

totally late to the party

Rhino Records has just reissued all of the albums by The Pogues, Ireland's traditional/punk combo from the 80s.

Like most world famous punk acts, I've heard the name for decades. However, in a completely predictable ignorant bout of closed-mindedness, I decided that they probably sounded like the Sex Pistols since they were labeled as "punk."

Guess what? I was full of shit (also very predictable). They're not anything like the Sex Pistols. Instead, what you get is a very traditional Irish sound with very touching lyrics that are at once both timeless and and brilliant in their brutal urban poetry.

I bought their second album, Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, off of iTunes the other day and have been listening to it a bunch since. I HIGHLY recommend it. Seriously, the lyrics are genius. Do your self a favor and check it out.

never saw this coming

Weekend update delayed again. I'll get to it. It was awesome. Ry and I went snow tubing and had a great time.

But, at the moment, I'm just ... well, I don't know what to say about this. It's funny. It's weird. It's the first time I've ever had this happen. "Get to the point, Harlin." Fair enough.

David Collins and I have been receiving fan mail at work.

Yep. Yesterday we got a letter asking us to release the songs we wrote for Thrillville on an official soundtrack. Today we got a letter from some 10 year old kid who wants to learn how to play the tunes on guitar. And I'm not talking about email. We're talking letters. Actual paper fan mail.

It's too funny. : )

update tomorrow

I'm way too busy right now to talk about how awesome my weekend was, but it was and I'll talk about it.

Basically, though, it looks like this:

Ry + Snow + Amoroso Rolls + Eagles Win = great weekend

well, it's a kind of composition ...

I've been writing fiction recently. I seem to write it in spurts. I'll go for a long time uninspired and then .~*WHAM*~. Inspiration blindsides me on the train or something. Anyway, I'm writing a novel right now. Well, technically two, but the first one I've written myself into a corner and don't quite know how to get myself out of it yet. Anyway, the one I'm writing at the moment is significantly darker than the fairytale I'd been writing earlier for Amanda.

So, for the time being, I'm pouring my creativity out into my own version of the great american novel, or novella. Depends on how long I make it. Figures that I get struck with inspiration as soon as I'm not writing music anymore. Guess that creative energy needs to go somewhere constructive. Interesting how that works. I wonder what kind of scientific work has been done on creativity?

um ... wha??

I'm a big fan of Mac OS X. It's nice. It's stable. While OS 9 apps used to crash very frequently on me, OS X apps rarely ever crash - certainly not as frequently as the Windows apps I deal with seem to crash.

And yet, despite all of it's Apple-happy stability, I got this error message yesterday.



Deleting negative items? Does that mean it's giving me items? Do computers do double negatives?

Pet Peeve #2: those white ovals

Happy New Year, blah blah blah. I was going to write something all about the new year and all that, but I saw something on my way to work that irked me. For some time now I've had a strong dislike for those dumb white oval stickers with the black letters that seem to be spreading like some kind of automotive rash.

I can't stand these things. It was one thing when they used to simply be nationality abbreviations required for inter-European auto travel. My American-centric brain had a hard enough time trying to figure out what the actual abbreviations stood for. You know ... is "LT" Lithuania? or Latvia? (It's the latter).

But things went wrong somewhere. I don't know when it happened exactly. Maybe it was European ex-patriots living here in the States brought their stickers over with them as an expression of national pride some time in the 80s or 90s. Regardless of when the European stickers first landed, it seems to have taken a while before some dumb ass decided that they, too, could make themselves seem hip and European if they just made a similar sticker with their own made-up abbreviation on it.

That's where things started to get out of control. I remember the first time I was staring down an "OBX" sticker trying desperately to figure out what the hell European country that stood for, only to later be told it stood for The Outer Banks beaches of North Carolina. I was actually angry that it had caused me to waste brain power on trying to figure out something nearly impossible to just regularly deduce.

Now there're things like "HMB" for Half Moon Bay, CA or "McM" for McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Do they even have cars in Antarctica?!

But, as if that wasn't bad enough, now it's just spread to whatever the hell anyone wants to put in a little oval, whether it references a location or not. The one I saw on the way to work today said "MEOW".

...

That's just so ridiculously removed from the original point as to not make any sense. Yes, we get it. You like your cat. But ...

I dunno. I'm at a loss for words, I guess. I just hate those things so much. This is the only one I can get behind: