As Lisa has already mentioned, we've been having some great fun with my brother. Improv + movies = good.
Continuing the trend, we decided to see A Mighty Wind, the new Christopher Guest movie I've been wanting to see. It's a good one. I think I probably still prefer Best In Show, but I really liked this one. The music is good (in all its cheesy glory, and yes they do all their own singing and playing for the most part), the acting and improv are as brilliant as ever, and it is thoroughly enjoyable.
Isaac had his first exposure to real Chicago stuffed pizza (or at least what we new residents consider good pizza here, whatever) this evening, which was also a rousing success.
On the docket for tomorrow is a visit to the Shedd (as promised) and some work stuff later on. We'll also hit Von Freeman's session if we're not too worn about by the end of the day. We'll see.
Counting down the days. Eek! A good eek, but eek!
Last night, Joe, his brother Isaac, and I went to see some improv. Finally! Our first in Chicago. We went to the Playground Theater for Cinema 2.0, basically a feature-length film dub game. They played a movie with the sound off, and the cast and band improvised the soundtrack. Much hilarity ensued.
The movie was Top of the Food Chain, AKA Invasion, a 1999 sci fi spoof from Canada. At least, some IMDB users claim it was a pretty good spoof, but to us it looked like it would have been an absolutely horrible movie with the real soundtrack. As it was, they re-did the plot to make it about "math invaders," so there were lots of attempts to involve math, e.g., "Firearms... plus idiot... equals danger!" And the whole thing was, in general, laugh-out-loud funny.
Anyway, it was a great time, and hopefully any Chicago focus out there will consider going because they're doing it again next week with Cool as Ice, the Vanilla Ice movie! We'd consider going again, except, well, we've got more important things to do.
We've had one power outage since we've lived here. We just barely missed another one. I saw a flash outside out of the corner of my eye, my UPS beeped, and everything across the street when completely dark. My building has escaped it, as I think has my whole side of the street. Because it's night, it's hard to tell. Still, it's weird when this happens.
Two weeks left. Less than one week now until my brother comes to Chicago for the first time. Lisa and I are looking forward to that very much. We're still not entirely sure what all we're going to do with him. I expect yet another trip to the Shedd may be in order. I also want to take him to the Apartment Lounge to check out the session on Tuesday. Oh, and probably some ice cream from Margie's.
In the past few weeks I've spent very little time at sessions. If it weren't for the fact that I'm getting married in two weeks, it might be getting me down. As it is, I'm trying to get as much work done as possible when I'm not neglecting thinking about wedding planning. We've released three or four new sites in the past month or two, have a couple more in the works, as well as a redesign that's been incubating for months and months and months. We're not as busy as I'd like to be, but we're not starving either. Regardless, I'm practicing, but not getting out to sessions as much.
Many people from my family in New Hampshire can't make it to the wedding. When we made the decision to do it in Michigan, I knew this was part of the deal. It seems impossible to say anything more about this without sounding like I'm trying to throw some kind of guilt trip on those who can't come. Well, believe me, there's no such feeling here. I wish you all could be here, but I understand if you can't.
And of course, if it's 80 degrees and sunny in New Hampshire on May 3, and cold and crappy in Michigan, don't tell me.
We're here in sunny (okay, dark right now) Michigan enjoying a little time with Lisa's family. There's wedding planning to do tomorrow: looking at places for ring engraving, getting our marriage license, and meeting with the pastor again to try to settle things a little more. This being The Holy Week (Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday), she's busy, but she's fitting us in tomorrow for a bit.
We went to see Spirited Away this afternoon again. Again for us, first time for Lisa's parents. This time we saw the english dubbed version, which was as good as promised. John Lasseter from Pixar was executive producer, and apparently he had a lot to do with the dubbing being so good. It's a lovely movie, very beautiful, with much more to it than the typical Disney feature. But I've said all this before.
When we get back to Chicago, I need to remember to go back to the Kinko's which captured by computer's power adaptor last time we were there. We were printing wedding materials, and forgot to grab my power cord when we finished.
This is a nerdy note, but the more places it's published, the better. My scanner, the Canon D660U, a flatbed and film scanner, is finally supported under Mac OS X. I don't know how many of us there are that have been waiting for the drivers, but eventually this news will get out and people will be happier.
As of now, you have to go to the asian website to get the drivers, but they seem to work fine. There's no standalone version, so you have to have Photoshop (7.0 or Elements both work) or something else that can use Photoshop plugins.
This solves many problems for me and Lisa. No longer will she have to keep the old version of Photoshop (which only runs in MacOS Classic, the slower, memory-intensive emulation layer) on her machine just to drive our scanner for film scanning.
I just bought the basic version of Vuescan a few weeks ago, which I see now I didn't have to do. I don't really regret support Hamrick, though -- it's good software that runs on almost literally any computer. Its flatbed results are at least as good as the Canon drivers, and faster. The film results are nowhere near as good as Canon, though, so I'm especially glad to have these new drivers for that purpose.
While I'm being a nerd, I think this is cool.
After having a shitty, shitty day Thursday, today felt like a dream come true. We got some work done, discovered that Carly will chase a ball after all, and just generally felt better about things. This weekend will be spent in Michigan to further work on our wedding plans. The vows aren't set yet, but at least the music is. How often do you think people use Béla Fleck's music as the centerpiece in a ceremony?
Another cake is finished, and another must be made.
You may or may not know that I'm responsible for our wedding cake. (I just mentioned it in passing, I guess). It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now that I've been told what it costs to purchase a wedding cake, it seems like an even better idea.
That doesn't mean I know how to make a perfectly wonderful wedding cake. I don't. But I have the tools, and have been practicing. Today I made the one which will be the primary recipe -- a really good chocolate cake. Right now it looks like I'll have the twelve inch base be this chocolate cake, then the nine inch middle tier will either be just chocolate, or (if I'm feeling frisky) one layer each of chocolate and white. If there's any white at all, it will be in the top tier. Then again, maybe we'll just make the whole blasted thing chocolate.
The frosting will be raspberry, our favorite. The decorations are still uncertain. However, there's a recipe for practice frosting in the book, so I should be able to get some practice with the old piping gear in time. We shall see. At least I'm feeling less like a buffoon. Slightly.
The countdown is now officially here, lest anyone forget that it's coming right up.
Congratulations to a fine pair of friends.
This was the first Jewish wedding I've been to as a guest (i.e. not in the band). It was a lovely time, and will probably be the last wedding I go to before my own in four weeks. Eek!
I must bake more cakes between now and then. Fortunately I have the book, which is very important. Now all I need are the decorating skillz.
Not everything in this world is ugly.
I'll be posting more about the madness once the need strikes. I'll just say this for now: everyone needs to keep a very close eye on people like John Minnis from Oregon, who is proposing legislation that would cause protesters to be treated as terrorists. I may not have a lot of faith in the executive or judicial branches of government these days, but I'm hoping that the legislators will have the sense to throw that out. Equating civil disobedience with senseless violence is extremely dangerous at best.