Pushing Back the Dawn

I ate my weight in candy last night at the departmental function where everyone was dressed up. Two years in row there has been a Super Mario brothers theme...I guess it's a testament to the pop culture viability of the Nintendo franchise that twenty-somethings think it's still hilarious to dress up as Koopa Troopas (both years the costumes brought home the costume prizes).

So I wore the wench dress, minus the gruesome make-up because although I bought some fake wounds, they looked ridiculously cheap and I didn't have time to make up some fake blood. I was busy instead throwing together a matching pirate costume for Hubby in similar fabric (different colour) than my wench dress. He sported a goatee, and I must say that I prefer a nice full beard to the fancy facial stuff :)

Although even a goatee is better than this:


This morning I wasn't planning on wearing a costume to work, but alas I looked over at the purple cat ears I bought ages ago (I think for a high school dress-up day, as royal purple was one of our colours. Not very realistic though) and the matching purple leotards and thought "what the heck". I was the only person dressed up on the bus (next to the toddler dressed up in her stroller), and garnered surprisingly few smiles on my commute. Where has everyone's sense of humour gone? Come on people: bring out your inner child!

And then tomorrow will be Teela costume. I made an Orko doll, and he's got wire arms so that I can wrap him around my leg the entire night . Yeah!!

iT's CoMInG!!!

I recently read somewhere (Wil Weaton’s blog?) that Halloween was like “Geek Christmas”. Because what other time of the year are costume-obsessed cosplay geeks allowed to revel in their awesome costume-making skills? Or the outcasts and goths find themselves reflected in every seasonal aisle in town? Even the drunks and the skanks have reason to celebrate, as the older I get the more I realize handing out candy is just to distract the kids while you drink your face off in the sluttiest costume you could scrounge up.

So I like it a alot. And this year my husband wanted to go as Adam Prince of Eternia (alter ego: He-Man) from the beloved 80s North American animated show He-Man (part of a larger, corporate-endorsed/cross-over-friendly line of toys/games/movies featuring the “Masters of the Universe “).

At first I was going to make a companion costume as She-ra, the most recognizable female characters from Masters of the Universe.


But her costume was more difficult and, for continuity’s sake (geek alert): She-Ra was Adam’s sister. His twin sister. So….eww. A few weeks ago I changed my mind, and opted to create a far less demanding costume of Teela, the love interest in the show. She’s a rocking warrior and whatnot, so I’ve been spending ridiculous amounts of time making a costume from scratch.

Really, I’ve just got the components of the vest created: the body piece + a collar + swirly boob thingies. Tonight I need to put it all together, and make a little felt companion “Orko”. Last night I got my sword (which needs to be repainted) and FINALLY found a body suit that was under $70 (can’t see in the picture, but she wears the crazy gold vest over a white body suit. It turned out to be the most difficult thing to find around town, I’m sure I checked six or eight places…dancewear places/lingerie shops/ American Apparel/Zellers.). I revisted a large department store and found new stock in just what I need for an affordable price. It needs some modification, but not too bad.

On top of all this, I’m seriously considering making a second costume, just to mix it up a bit at the various events I want to attend this weekend. A departmental thing tomorrow night, a Life Science student party downtown at a club on Friday, and finally a house party on Saturday night. My second costume? A beer wench: made with an existing shirt I own, and the ginormous underskirt from my wedding gown, overlayed with a tie-up vest and petticoat I have yet to make. But I found the perfect grey fabric! And it’s only $2 a yard! So it would be cheap to make…and then I got to thinking that the dark grey would be somber and would fit PERFECTLY for a “beer wench from hell”…literally. Accessorize with gothic spider rings and fishnets, paint my face a pale white with open wounds on my exposed shoulders and maybe a bloody wound along my neck. Black plaited wig, and a few beer mugs and voila! “the most popular wench at Lucifer’s Lair”!

Again: I love it. Love it love it love it.

faaaackk....my other earbud from my quasi-working headphones just died too. They are not even six months old! I bought them at Radioshack (or, what was once called Radioshack. I don't know the name of it now...AMERICAN ELECTRONICS or something) and they were expensive.

If I didn't have alot of goddamn work to do right at this moment, I would launch into a bitchy tirade against our disposible culture. Stupid gaddamn Walmart stupid cheap electronics and goddamn DVD players that cost $40 and why can't a washer/dryer combo last more than ten years and holy goddamn I don't wanna kill babies from toxic chemicals leeching from electronics in China because we ship them over when they break and just buy new ones and AGHHH!!

solo scenester

I am a dumbass: I missed Basia Balut in concert because I didn't get tickets in time. It was sold out by noon on Saturday, and so when I sashayed into the hotel lobby to get some tickets for her show (as well as the Woodhands show) at 6 pm, the pretty girl on the other side of the table broke the bad news. She said that they do keep back some tickets at the door, so I paid her for my $8 late show ticket and jumped on the bus to the North End by myself because - dude - what else did I have to do? It was an adventure, getting to the venue via public transportation in an area of town I'm not very familiar with. My timing was good, I arrived at the show at 7:35 (for an advertised start time of 7:30) but still no go...big ass sign on the door that told me I was too late. Again.

So back on the bus I jump, make a pit-stop at the liquor store, and end up at a friends' place in the West End an hour later. I spend an hour and a half there eating some of their left-overs (yay for grad student mooching!) which consisted of an amazing glazed ham with potatoes, carrots and salad (with wine). My mouth is salivating just writing that. We watched most of a James Bond film but the combination of incredibly comfortable couch, glazed ham and red wine soon meant I was slack jawed and napping. This despite consuming a red bull less than three hours before. I had to be prodded awake to catch my bus downtown to the late show at Coconut Grove. By myself.

Anyway, I show up in time to watch the second act set up. Coconut Grove = hipster mecca. Not the same hipsters as the Marquee though - these guys are visibly trying much harder to be cool, and are also significantly younger. They hang around in packs of five or six (like I did in grade nine!) instead of two or three, although it's possible I was just being hyper-sensitive to the clique atmosphere. The Bicycles played, and it was blah and quirky all at the same time. I think I was still recovering from food coma. Peter Project (scrathy scratch scratch - cute guy. I picked him out of the crowd earlier - zing!) with MoreorLes played next. Same thing: reception was lukewarm. And while I have no pretenses about accurately judging a hip hop artists ability to rap, the girl in front of me seemed to, and she exclaimed loudly half-way through the set "this is lame". To wit: he rapped about food.

Twice.

Another set change, and Young Rival came on. The did a great set (although I was sitting by this time). A intense style of jumping bass lines & repetitive riffs, they really got the crowd going. Like White Stripes, but bigger sound. Eventually I got up from my seat (but not before I was approached by a Dutch boy, asking whether I was interested in moving locations to the bar we locals nicknamed the "dirty dome". Apparently him and his buddies were going to make the most of their night as they were unexpectedly laid over due to engine problems on their trip from California to Amsterdam).

Last set change of the night, and Woodhands comes on. One half of the duo sets the mood by yelling obscenities into the mic. The other is wearing a charming vintage Star Trek T-shirt. It doesn't take long for the entire crowd to start dancing like crazies (me included) as they open with some of the tracks from the newer album (like here: warning, will open sound bite). Knowing virtually no one at the club meant I was free to really give 'er :) The drummer was amazing, and everyone was sweating profusely by song four. Very adept headlining act too - they were sure to give each opening band credit during their inter-song banter. The set was only supposed to last 45 minutes, but they played until 2:30 (club was supposed to close at 2 am) and then only reluctantly leaving the stage amid cries of "one more! one more!". But the tech guy had to get home to his girlfriend (or something), so we all streamed out of the club onto pizza corner. I tried to graciously finagle my way out of a dinner date with a charming Montreal photographer named Xavier who had failed to pick up on my non-verbal communication signs all night long, and met up with someone outside the club whom I recognized from work. We chatted a bit about the show, and research, and the East Coast before parting ways. The last act of the night did not disappoint, and was completely worth the $8 ticket price.

Seaweed sisters

One East-Coast July day we brought our (twin) nieces to Duncan's Cove.

Hilarity and (probably illness) ensued.

From the book I read yesterday:

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It is supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices...Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Good news: Can't stop listening to O My Heart from Mother Mother.
Bad news: The right earbud on my still-sorta-new headphones busted.

HPE Lowdown

Picture of the tambourine guy, stolen from www.thecoast.ca HPE blog:

We arrived for "Golden Hands Before God...", having missed "The Love Machine". They struck me as a mix of The Divorcees hard country rock and a 70s hairband. Not my style, but they were rocking it hard - all five or six of them had long beard and most had long shaggy hair. The tambourine player in particular was posing and jumping around like a true rockstar, always centre stage and always straight faced. I got a kick out of him.

Next up was "Rebekah Higgs", a local gal who I've never heard play live before. She was wearing this astoundingly constructed purple dress that made her butt look great...a suspect she may have made it (she confessed to a "love of crafts" before her set started). Anyway, she was adorable but her voice was consistently high-pitched and child-like, which sort of got on my nerves. Great stage presence though.

Then "Amos the Transparent", whom we had come to see. They were alot more hard-rock than I was expecting, based on their music available online. But the lead singer's voice is great; he hits and holds notes clearly, great tone. They kept my favorite song for last, and it was awesome. They seemed excited to be on the East Coast, and swore in delight at the people by the stage singing along to their songs.

The headlining act were "The Inbreds", indie old-timers and by the way the crowd thickened, a local favorite. Unfortunately, we were both pretty much asleep at this point and we only stayed for a few songs.

Next on the list: Basia Balut playing surprisingly early at the Molson Room, so that means two things: 1. I might just go alone since the companion who offered may be busy, and I don't have to walk in the sketchy area of town in the middle of the night by myself 2. I can catch Woodhands later in the night, and get my groove on. By myself.

Off-topic: So I'm always surprised by how many good looking guys go to the Marquee as opposed to every other establishment in the city, which is usually dominated by the fairer sex. By far, this is the place to be to pick up if you are a girl. Of course I look. And twice now (last month at the pre-pop show, and then again last night), I've eyed the cutest boy in the room (in my opinion) and twice now they've ended up on the stage later in the evening as part of a band. Apparently, if I wasn't attached, I would make an excellent groupie. Shameful.

Build it and they will come

This is why Flash was invented.

Thanks Pajiba!

Halifax Pop Explosion! + trees

Great bands lined up this year. The perpetual dilemma is always finding enough cash to attend them all : tomorrow night is Amos the Transparent with Rebekah Higgs and Basia Balut on Saturday are both must-go's. My husband is away this weekend so I'll be all by myself and will need to recruit someone to attend the Saturday show with.

And in response to my failed experiments lately, I turned to my supervisor for some advice. He came swooping down to my desk this morning about 25 minutes before I was planning on leaving for my tattoo appointment, and we went through my work to date, double checking all my sequencing primers, their orientation, etc. Anyway, it made me sort of nervous. I was sweating harder sitting at my desk than I did later in the tattoo parlour. Thankfully, he found all my work so far to be satisfactory, and it was possible my sequencing efforts were failing due to nothing I could control or know about in advance (my insight into the genome has since improved, so I'll rerun some of the tests tonight to see whether I can get a different outcome). I semi-jokingly asked him whether I "passed the test", and he said that I had indeed passed the test. So I ran outta here as fast as I could to keep him from changing his mind.

And here are some pictures of our tiny pathetic shrubs and landscaping in front of the house. They'll look good in ten years, probably :)





(I just pulled my PCR reagents from the fridge while those pics were uploading. There is a whole fridge, and we are all crammed into one corner of one side of one shelf. Sigh.)

date with Andy

tomorrow at noon tomorrow at noon tomorrow at noon tomorrow at noon tomorrow at noontomorrow at noon tomorrow at noon tomorrow at noon...

Update: Awesome experience, I can definitely see why people would become addicted to tattoos. I am so giddy right now! The design is stunning and he complimented me for "sitting" very well for my first time, especially since the tattoo was centered on my upper spine. I would do it again in a heartbeat and would recommend it as well - I am in no discomfort whatsoever and the only thing I feel right now is the bandage tape pulling awkwardly at my skin. The varying amounts of pain (from nearly unnoticeable to quite pronounced) meant that even when I was feeling like a needle WAS actually going through my skin (very rare during the 1.5 hours I might add) it subsided in less than a minute as he moved on to another spot. The only thing I would change if I could: to go with the lighter/redder brown ink he had instead of the greener/darker one.

And get this: apparently the design was so fine he used an "outline needle" to fill the whole thing in, which as he explained to me increased the pain because the needles are fewer and closer spaced than a "filling in" gun. Ha! How about THAT for bragging rights?

I found that the best music was Volcano by the now defunct band Hot Springs (Montreal), although the opening act featured Hayloft by Mother Mother (Vancouver) on repeat. Yeeeeaaaaaa!

When he went out to smoke a cigarette, I snuck in one badly aimed and unfocused picture before he bandaged it up. Voila!

Buck up

None of my experiments really worked today, although I still have one to finish so maybe the week will end in a bang (doubt it). The crappy car we drive had to be "inspected" today - a joke since we both knew dropping it off that the thing is going to fail. I imagine we'll end up paying $750 dollars in repairs this time around which is a total kick in the nerdy pants when I have much better ideas on what I could spend that money on.

And on the agenda this weekend is a massive, soul-cleansing, exterminate-every-dust-bunny cleaning marathon. Wood needs to be split and stacked, every fixture that our water comes into contact with needs to be scrubbed hard (the water purification system we paid 3 grand for is doing a shit-tastic job so our water cycles through the disgusting colour rainbow of grey, red, or yellow. We have someone coming next week to give us yet another opinion) and those chairs still haven't been entirely recovered.

My poor neighbour - she is giving me free plants for the garden (more hostas than I know what to do with) and she set out some stuff for me to plant weekend before last. I didn't get around to it, and of course that meant they stayed in the wheelbarrow for the whole week. Apparently she commented about it to the husband (who she hilariously calls Andrew even though we have corrected her multiple times) but we were never home during daylight hours the entire week. Friday we left for Hometown for Thanksgiving weekend and I felt so guilty upon returning after the long weekend that I took one look at the wheelbarrow and decided to plant those motherfuckers right then.

It was 11 pm on a Monday night.

I didn't even bother to get changed, I just threw on my sneakers with the skirt and tights I was wearing (oh, and my houndstooth jacket) and got to digging. I was mixing peat and manure by the light of the front porch, and if my neighbours didn't think I was crazy before, suspiciously digging in the yard at midnight in near formal attire will have convinced them otherwise.

PA Notes

Plethora of passive aggressive notes on the 15th floor, where I had to go yesterday to pick up some supplies for the lab. If I only had a camera with me, and someone/something to distract the lab workers from my snickering and snapping....

Ha.

Link to the explanation of DRM - digital rights management. Basically, the reason why the songs I bought two years ago on iTunes for my iPod that broke down within 12 months won't work on my new Creative Zen mp3 player.

Blocqué

God this is hard.

You know when you know you have to do something, but no matter how much you tell yourself "this is important"... you still can't quite get your fingers to play along or your mind to just sit still for long enough to obey?

I am having one of those days.

I got an email from a colleague about a job opening at the one and only spot I want to work when I graduate. And do you think I can sit still long enough to throw together a bilingual cover letter, one that I have been planning on getting done for weeks now in preparation for just such an opportunity?? My mind is buzzing with lots of things that have nothing to do with jobs or realistic futures or responsibilities. I have checked facebook a dozen separate times today, just out of habit. Today, I AM one of those GenerationADD kids.

Current Soundtrack: Rose Cousins

web weary

I suspect the coverage of the election(s) may have pushed me over the edge. That, plus all the news of our doomed economy... lately my usually fervent internet-info consumption has waned. I haven't been on facebook in ages, my celebrity gossip knowledge is superficial, and this blog has gone dormant for several weeks.

The weather is changing; the sun comes up after we have left for work and comes down shortly after arriving in the evenings. The past two weekends we have spent improving the exterior facade of the house with a paving stone walkway and additional landscaping (adding more sod to the side yard and shrubs/plants/trees to the front yard). I hope I can find a job now after graduating and are able to sell the house in a market where no one can get a mortgage...

I have finished reading Catch-22 (for me, not one of my favorites but I recognize why it would be for others) and started the more frivolous Harry Potter series. Currently on book four.

The appointment is booked for my tattoo on October 21st. The design, sketched by my husband, is something like this:

The artist needs to tweak some of the lines as they are too close together for a tattoo. We had a discussion about white ink. He convinced me to go for a natural brown colour instead, something like a henna tattoo or a birthmark, which would be subtle but not marred by the cons of white ink; mostly that everyone reacts differently to the ink, that it is prone to extra inflammation because the titanium oxide white colour breaks down the fine metal instruments (placing shards of metal into the skin along with the white ink) thus creating heavier scar tissue that often has to be retattooed several times, and that it is prone to extreme fading in sunlight. He told me the first few white tattoos he did were fantastic, and buoyed by the success, he went on to do a few more. They turned out terrible. He has beautiful white markings on his face, but he also has a circular leaf design on his chest done in a subtle brown and that looks great too. I'll post a picture when it is healed.

I also ordered some glasses online a few weeks ago, they should be arriving shortly. (Actually, I just checked my email to grab a picture of them and found an update saying they had shipped on October 2nd- they might even be here by the end of the week!). I tried to balance the look I wanted (crazy reddish plastic frames with thick heavy arms) with the cost factor (these were one of the cheapest frames among the half dozen sites I checked) and came up with these for $37.00 Cdn INCLUDING UV-coating, anti-reflective coating, tax and shipping. For prescription.



These were my second choice because they are different then what I normally wear and are more flexible for at-home adjustments:

Unfortunately they are about $30 more expensive AND they look like stupid freakin' Palin glasses so it doesn't matter that I had my eye on them before she was even vetted, there is no way I'm ordering the goddamn glasses now.

And of course, with Halloween coming up shortly, I've started to think about costumes. I am going as She-ra, the epitome of sexy 80s superhero (big category, I know) and have been trolling around for do-it yourself ideas. Next weekend we're off to Hometown for Thanksgiving - I might be able to get something done on it then. My new-ish coworker has decided she will be hosting a Halloween party this year at her place, so there is no backing out now.