Sudden Burst of Relatively Current News

Wow, this must be the longest interval I've spent outside of the blogosphere yet. My achin' lungs! Let's see if I can figure out what important or at least interesting or at the very least factual things have happened in the past three weeks or so:

• Alison had a birthday. That was just a couple of days ago, so a pretty easy one to remember. I seem to recall people came over and said things like, "Happy Birthday, Alison," and I believe there was a barbecue involved. Seriously, it was a really fun time — perfect evening for it and the mind-boggling amount of assembly required to operate the brand new mini-barbecue didn't even phase me.





• The night before the party, which was Ali's real birthday, I took her out for a walk in the park after work, followed by a nice dinner at our favourite Indian restaurant and a movie.



Knocked Up, if you really want to know. Yes, it was fantastically funny. And incredibly raunchy, probably even more so than The Forty Year Old Virgin. The usual Freaks & Geeks suspects are in it, and a lot of Office alumni, too.

• Speaking of incredibly rauncy, there was also a birthday party for our friend Jill the week before, where the theme was "Trailer Park" and everyone was supposed to dress as trashy as possible. I was not really into the idea of making fun of the poor and uneducated as a theme for someone's birthday, so we went in our normal, only somewhat trashy attire. I had to admit, though, that it was pretty fun seeing everyone all "trashed up". Brought me back to my good ol' junior high school days.



• In further party news, we had one after our last yoga class with Michi, who is moving back to Japan with her new husband. This frees up my Tuesday nights, but at the expense of a really great yoga teacher and wonderful human being. We're sure going to miss her a lot — she made a huge difference in our lives.

The party was fun. People from other classes came too, everyone brought food, and we gave Michi some going-away money we'd collected. I'll miss seeing this gang on Tuesday nights.




• The decision not to continue the Tuesday yoga class with the new teacher is part of my new, paring-down-the-activities-to-keep-them-fun-and-make-sure-I-have-a-modicum-of-free-time strategy. This no time thing has really gotten out of control, and it's time I did something about it. Another phase of this strategy has been to back out of The Got to Get Got. I think I told you that they were a nine-piece band I was in, and it just seemed that every time they wanted to practise, it conflicted with something else. There were some shows coming up, which would have been really fun, but I just didn't have the time to devote to not stinking, which would have made them not so fun, for me or the other people in the band. Or the audience.

• Hopefully, with a little extra free time, I'll be able to spend some more time reading. Once again I've got a huge pile of books that I'm in the middle of. The ones I'm enjoying the most these days are I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter and Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd. The latter is a new book by a "quantum computer scientist" who tries to make the case that the universe can be seen as a a giant computer, computing its own evolution, with subatomic particles and their binary states as its "bits". Apparently a quantum computer is the next big thing computer scientists are working on, which will be much faster than our current, electronic computers, because its bits, being quantum phenomena, will have the ability to be both on and off at once. Huh? Don't ask me, man. Kooky! But the guy's quite entertaining and so far has been making sense.

The other use of my free time I'm looking forward to, besides more frequently addressing you, dear reader, on this very weblog, is hanging out in the back yard and doing some gardening with Alison. It's looking really nice now, and we're hoping to make it even nicer. It's great to have such an idyllic setting just outside our back door. Buster really likes looking at it too.





• Etceterally, I've done some more recording with Al Tuck; the softball season started last weekend and we won both games then, lost both today; I designed an identity and some pieces for Yoga for You, a new set of classes our other yoga teacher, Angie, is starting up with a friend of hers, and Alison took all the photographs they needed; Alison found out to her disappointment that her boss at the government has not been giving her shooting assignments because she believes Alison can't handle the pressure and is some kind of incompetent boob; I'm working on some songs to become the soundtrack of our friend, Silöen's, short film; and the as-yet-unnamed band is still looking for a name. Current contenders: The Lodge, Field (or possibly Zone) of Entanglement, and Chromakey Eye.

- Andrew