Theatre Trip – 9

Alright people, 9 officially came out on last Wednesday (09/09/09) and Brei and I took in an afternoon showing this past Saturday. My verdict? Not as awesome as I would have liked, which was quite disappointing. For a couple hours after seeing the movie, neither Brei nor I could figure out exactly what we thought was lacking but we knew there was something. It just felt like a piece of the movie was missing. We discussed it over dinner, and I started to realize that it was a lack of character development that was missing. The characters were all very unique, but the audience didn’t get to learn enough about each of them to really make a valuable connection…which made the movie seem a bit impersonal. I felt like I wasn’t really emotionally involved with any of the characters, which is a shame because it was such a cool concept for a movie. Visually, the movie was pretty spectacular. The detail in the animated post-apocalyptic world was very impressive…and very dark which is fitting for a film produced by Tim Burton. The 9 were also very well produced and each had their own very unique look. All in all, this was still a pretty good film and I’ll definitely have to give it another watch once it’s released on Blu-ray. If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, here it is.

-yycofee

Settlers of Catan

Have you ever heard of this board game? Me neither…until a few weeks ago when a couple of friends told me how much fun it was. They reassured me that despite its nerdy name and gameplay, it’s a lot of fun…so this past Friday, Brei and invited said friends over for the sole purpose of playing this game. Here’s the Coles Notes version of the concept:

Players are adventurers who have settled a new island. This island is made up of a series of hexagonal pieces (hexes) joined together. Each hex represents a type of resource: lumber, ore, brick, wheat, wool, or desert. A number between 1 and 12 (each number combination that can be rolled using a combination of two six-sided die) is placed on each hex. To begin the game, each player gets to place two “settlements” and two “roads” on the game board at intersections between the hexes…like the spots circled in green in the image below.

The dice are then rolled by each player in turn, and if the number on the dice matches the number on any of the hexes your settlements are touching, those hexes will “produce” one unit of the underlying resource. In the above example, if a 5 is rolled, the red settlements will produce one unit of lumber each, netting the player two lumber cards. The game continues in this fashion with players accumulating resource cards as the game goes on. These resource cards can then be exchanged with the bank to purchase more roads, settlements, development cards, or to turn settlements into cities. The ultimate goal of the game is to accumulate 10 “victory points” through ownership of settlements and cities and various other challenges (eg. longest road). If you want some more detail, you can visit the Wikipedia page here.

This game sounds kinda dorky…and it definitely is. But we had fun nonetheless. Combined with a few alcoholic beverages, it makes for a pretty fun evening.

-yycofee

P.S. Rob: I’ll get you playing this eventually…

Garage Building: Days 3 & 4

So I’m sure you’re all sick of me blogging about my stupid garage, but it’s what has been taking up most of my weekend time for the past little while. But don’t worry, it’s pretty much done now so there shouldn’t be too many more posts about it

This weekend we were able to make some really good progress on getting this thing looking like a real garage. We got the big door installed and it’s working great (growing up I never had an automatic garage door opener, so having that functionality is pretty awesome). Brendan and I managed to get the entire roof shingled with only a couple minor mistakes, and the dads got our small door and windows installed. All that’s left is to finish the soffit and fascia, get the siding installed, and run electrical from the house to the garage. I’d say we’re about 85% complete. We even cleared enough room to allow my car to fit, and my Mazdaspeed 3 spent it’s first night covered and locked up last night…very exciting.

With any luck, we’ll have this thing polished off in the next couple of weeks before it starts getting too cold. I’ll try to post some photos of the almost-finished product in a couple of days.

*Update* Man, I almost forgot to mention all the super hard work Brei put in weed whacking all the gigantic weeds that had infested our backyard. Her dad bought a brand new gas-powered industrial strength Weed Eater for us to use for this exact purpose, and it worked great. Brei was destroying weeds and raking/bagging them for a few hours while we were up on the roof getting the shingles finished. The backyard looks waaaay better now…almost like it’s ready for a deck and some sod! Great work sweetie!

-yycofee

Garage Building: Day 2

We started day two of garage construction at a respectable 10:00AM and made some more great progress. Brendan and I finished nailing on the fascia and then got right to sheeting the roof while a few others worked on covering the walls with Tyvek. Once we finished sheeting the roof, we laid a quick layer of paper on top and then got started on the soffit…which is a super crappy job. Cutting every piece to size and then screwing it in is not the most fun thing I’ve ever had to do. Here are a few day two photos (I’m the fellow in the green and white hat for those of you who don’t know who I am):

As you can see it pretty much looks like a garage without shingles, siding and doors/windows. We’ll slowly chip away at those jobs over the next few weeks and hopefully have it done before the end of summer. I think we did very well for two days of work. Again, we wouldn’t have finished half of what we did without the help of Brendan…so another big thank you goes out to him. Not to mention all the help we had from Brei’s family and my own. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without your slave labour!! Hopefully the next photos you see of the garage are of the finished product.

-yycofee

New Theme

For those of you who have been here before, you’ll probably notice that things look a little different. I decided to give another one of the wonderful WordPress blog themes a try. I’ll probably be sticking with this one for the foreseeable future, but I may experiment a bit in the days to come.

Hope you like the new look!

-yycofee

Garage Building: Day 1

I’ve just cleaned myself up after our first long day of garage building. Brei and I took delivery of the garage kit yesterday and have enlisted the help of family and friends to get the sucker as close to finished as possible this weekend. Thanks to the very much appreciated help of Brendan (a carpenter by trade and family friend of Brei), day 1 was a smashing success. We were able to get all four walls up and get the roof trusses in place, so it basically looks like a garage with no roof sheets yet. Pretty good for one day. We’ll be reconvening tomorrow morning to get as much more done as we can.

Although the garage is in good shape, I can’t say the same for my body. I’m not much of a handyman, so carrying around a tool belt all day and using a nailgun at all kinds of weird angles definitely took its toll on me. I’m completely exhausted and my muscles are pretty mad at me. I’m sure I’ll be feeling even worse when I wake up tomorrow…but at least I can say that I learned a whole bunch and should be a bit more help tomorrow than I was today.

I took a few photos throughout the day to document our progress and enlisted the help of Brei and Kazia to take a few while I was working away. Here’s a few that show our progress through the day:

With any luck we’ll get most of the garage finished tomorrow. Check back for an update either tomorrow night or early this week.

-yycofee

This Kid is Ridiculous

Check out this video of some kid playing Mr Crowley on Guitar Hero World Tour on expert with one elbow and one hand, while solving two Rubik’s Cubes in succession with the other hand. Freakin’ ridiculous. (Hat tip to databadger for sending this to me.)

Wakeboarding Pics

So I mentioned a couple posts ago that while we were in Invermere for August long we got out on the boat and I tried my hand at some action sports photography while Brei’s brother-in-law, Lance, was wakeboarding. I’ve put up the full gallery of final images on my Flickr page, but here are a few of my favourites.

I’m pretty happy with how these turned out since it was my first watersport shoot. It’s definitely a whole lot harder than I thought it would be…those boats don’t exactly travel super smoothly across the lake. Good thing I sprung for the Image Stabilization on my 70-200mm! As usual, any constructive criticism is more than welcome…I’m always in the business of getting better!

-yycofee

Holy Crap is My Puppy Ever Cute

I know a lot of you have been waiting for some new photos of Dexter…so here they are!

These were taken about a week and a half ago so he’s definitely grown a little bit since then, but they’re still a good representation. In other Dexter related news…I registered him for puppy school starting the week of August 24th. He’ll go through 8 rigorous one-hour sessions with the lovely people at PetSmart…should be a good time.

-yycofee

Lazy July…

Well, it’s been about a month and half since my last update and as my buddy over at Watch This Sh*t told me, I’m a “terrible blogger”. I would argue that I’m not a terrible blogger, just a terribly lazy blogger. Regardless, I had a really good July and start of August…here’s a quick blow by blow of some of the highlights.

Let’s see…I guess a good place to start is the No Doubt concert on the 15th of July. I was never a hardcore “buy all their cd’s” No Doubt fan, but I did always enjoy their music…plus, Gwen Stefani is freakin’ awesome. Brei had told me that she was an amazing performer but that didn’t prepare me for the show they put on. I was completely floored! So much energy for the entire show, and Gwen really knows how to move the crowd. My only complaint is the fact that they closed the encore with Sunday Morning…I would have preferred to see Spiderwebs or Just a Girl as the closer…but I’m no expert.

The next day we made the trek out to Airdre to pick up our 3 month old puppy from the breeder. Little Dexter was still almost as tiny as when we picked him out about a month before and he was definitely just as cute. He made the trip home like a little trooper and got used to his new surroundings pretty quickly. Since then he’s grown a ton but he’s still freakin’ tiny…whenever Brei and I go to her parents place and see their two Bichon Shih-tzu’s we always comment on how huge they are compared to Dexter. You know your dog is really small when you call a Bichon Shih-tzu huge! He’s pretty much housetrained now and is getting better on his leash every day…although he still likes to nip a little bit. I’ll try to get a couple pics up in the next week or so.

The day after we picked up Dexter, I played the role of irresponsible new father and left Brei alone with Dex for the weekend while I went to her family’s cabin in Invermere for a golf weekend with the boys. I’m such a jerk. But the golf weekend was fantastic. We played three rounds of golf in three days…Friday afternoon at Copper Point, Saturday afternoon at Grey Wolf, and Sunday morning at Radium Springs. I played 45 holes of great golf and then fell apart on the back nine at the Springs…I’m pretty sure it was because I stopped drinking beer on that last nine We played poker into the wee hours of the morning both nights and went through a ridiculous amount of beer. A classic boys weekend. Thanks go out to Mr. Neek for getting everything organized for us and to Mr. and Mrs. James for letting me use their cabin with 7 dudes they’d never met.

August long weekend we went back out to Invermere with Kazia, Lance, and Jasper (there’s a photo of the little Jasper in my previous post). Kazia and Lance hauled the boat out from Calgary and after all the nightmares we had last year with it (would run for a few minutes then crap out…had to be towed back into the docks on a couple occasions), we got it up and running without a hitch. I’m not much for water sports, but Lance is a pretty decent wakeboarder so we got him up on the board a couple times and I managed to get some cool photos…which I will post at a later date (remember…LAZY is in the title of this post). Other than a few joyrides in the boat, we just relaxed and enjoyed the great weather.

Almost up to date… This past Friday Brei and I went to see the production of The Lion King at the Jubilee Auditorium. I really had no idea what to expect, but I’d heard nothing but great things about it. Brei’s sister had seen it so she knew a bit more than I did, but neither of us were prepared for how spectacular it was. The sets and costumes were absolutely amazing and the performers were out of this world. Especially the South African woman who played Rafiki. Crazy vocal skills. We had great seats about 6 rows back in the front right section so we were able to see all the subtle facial expressions of the performers. If you haven’t seen The Lion King I would highly recommend it…I think they’re playing the Jubilee for the rest of the month, so get some tickets if you can. As Rob would say “Watch This Shit”.

As for movies, we saw the newest installation of Harry Potter and loved it and saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and weren’t too keen on it. Don’t get me wrong, the special effects were amazing and there was plenty of boom-boom, but it was pretty much the same story as the first one. A little bit disappointing because I was so impressed with number 1.

I think that brings us up date…errrr…wait…I had another photo shoot two weeks ago as well. After seeing some of the wedding and newborn pics I’ve done, a colleague at work asked me to do some family portraits for her. For this shoot I enlisted the help of another up and coming photographer (Tanya) from my office to give me a hand managing the family and getting all the shots we wanted. So, Tanya and I met our colleague, her husband, and their three beautiful girls at Riley Park one evening after work for what turned out to be a really fun photo session. We spent a bit of time getting the necessary family shots under one of the huge trees at Riley and then spent the rest of the evening just having fun with the girls trying to capture their energy. We went home with some great shots and I just delivered the final images to my colleague yesterday…and she loved them! It’s always nice to get positive feedback about your images. I’d love to put a couple up on my blog, but at the request of my colleague the images will remain off the internet.

Alright, now I think we’re caught up. Thanks for getting through this ridiculously long post. With any luck they’ll be a bit more often than once every 1.5 months going forward.

-yycofee