Good times at Medieval Times

Last week I had the pleasure of being brought for dinner to "Medieval Times". For those not familiar with Medieval Times, it's sort of a theme restaurant where you can go for "Dinner and Tournament" (to quote the website) all set to the theme of being part of the crowd of a good old fashion jousting tournament back during the "medieval times". 

I was a little hesitant of the idea of pretending to be in "medieval times" watching a bunch of actors badly act out a jousting tournament while eating my dinner at the same time. But as it turned out it was a hellavalot of fun and the acting wasn't as bad or cheesy as I had expected. The actors playing the knights really went all out when striking each other with long swords, maces, battle axes etc. which added a lot to the choreographed fights.

To further add to the aunthenticity, the place is designed like a big jousting ring where everyone sits around the centre watching their knight duke it out for honour, victory and the affections of the king's daughter.

The menu itself was a set menu where your food is brought to you during the tournament by a "bar wench". No utensils are given so you eat off the plate with your hands which adds to the experience of being at an old fashion jousting tournament.

Everyone is given a knight to cheer on and is seated in the section corresponding to your knight. We got assigned the Blue knight to cheer on. And of course, there is one evil knight who is a dick. In this particular evening, this honour was given to the Green knight (seen below, gloating to the king after he had swiftly dispatched the Black and White knight after making fun of his girly arms or something to that effect).

There was a sort of story to the entire evening. I wasn't paying much attention to the story as I was more concerned about my chicken leg and the cheering for the death and carnage when the knights finally got down to the fighting. 

My knight, the Blue knight unfortunately did not win the tournament but he did get quite far before being questionably killed by the Red knight (whome he had previously, quite skillfully, slashed in the gut with a long sword).

Before getting to the Red knight, the Blue knight had to face the Yellow knight.

They jousted honourably....

...before the Blue knight knocked the Yellow knight off his horse. Whereby then the battle proceeded to combat to the death on foot...

After distpatching of the Yellow knight it was onto the Red knight who dubiously killed the Blue knight and who also went onto win the tournament. Of course, not without being slashed in the gut at least five times before hand.

However, the Red knight's road to victory was not a straight forward one. He first had to vanquish the dreaded evil Green knight before finally claiming victory. He was doing quite well until the Green knight being the dick he was, cheated and sent his henchman in to help. Thus capturing the Red knight and revealing that he also had captured the prince (whome I didn't even know existed up to this point as I wasn't really paying attention to the underlying storyline).

To cut a long story short, the Red knight and the prince manage to break free from their captors. A big battle ensues whereby it's the Red knight and prince versus the evil Green knight and his henchmen with the good guys ultimately winning and vanquishing the evil Green knight.

Alls well that ends well. Everyone's belly is full and there was much death and carnage and quoffing of beer/ale. Afterwards all the knights magically became undead and congregated in the bar allowing us lowly patrons to go and continuing our quoffing of beer with them and have our pictures taken with them if we so wished.

Rain Rain Go Away,...

Having grown up in Ireland and spent the last couple of years living in Vancouver, expecting rain during winter is pretty much the norm to me. Last week it started raining here after the whole month of November being dry, and sunny with temperatures averaging about 25 degree Celsius (approx. 77 degree Fahrenheit) every day.

So, when the rain starting coming down last week it was a welcome relief to me to finally get some sort of moisture in the air. In fact, its pretty much been raining non-stop for the last 5 days now. Well, to be honest, its been more a constant light drizzle rain with the odd spell of mild to heavy showers thrown in now and again.

To say that LA and its local inhabitants are unprepared for any sustained period of rain is a huge understatement. The drainage on the roads here are terrible and the general infrastructure here was just not built to take any sustained amount of rainfall. On top of that, the local LA drivers here have no idea of how to drive in the rain. Most people think its still perfectly OK to fly down the freeway at 100 miles per hour when its pissing rain and the roads are not draining the water properly.

As a result of a combination of all of the above, in the last few days the local news here has had a field day with stories of possible or impending flash floods in various areas and stories of big car accidents on freeways because of one car or other spinning off. There have been evacuations of neighbourhoods near hillsides because of possible mudslides and the local TV channels have periodically been flashing big scary red flash flood warning signs with matching scary siren noise in the middle of programs. The local news have dedicated about 80 percent if not more of its nightly news segment on freaking out about the non-stop rain and the chaos it's causing. The way the local news is going on about the rain, one would think the end of the world or another hurricane Katrina type situation was about to happen in LA.

Apparently according to the news, tonight we're meant to have a huge storm (I'm guessing that might equate about a really big down pour in LA standards) and then we should be back to sunny skies again on Thursday. 

To put things a little bit in perspective. Last year when I was living in Vancouver, around this time of year, it rained for almost 2 months without any let up. No one batted an eyelid and the only grumbling came from me and my wet socks.

Comfy Sack

I've been in LA for a little over a month now. When I first arrived the apartment I ended up renting came with only a stove and dishwasher and nothing else (not even a basic fridge as is common with apartments in LA). So, over time, I've been slowly furnishing my apartment with the "essentials".

Recently, I decided it was time to put a bit of loving into my bare living room. It badly needed a sofa or some sort of seating to entice me to spend more time in the living room area. Sitting on the cold hard wooden floor or spending all my time in my bedroom on account of there being a soft mattress to sit on wasn't cutting it any more. I paid for an entire apartment gods dammit so I'm going to use the entire apartment.

So, as of today my living room is no longer bare. It has this...

It's a "Comfy Sack!" or a big ass bean bag to everyone else. I wish I had bought this first over my mattress. I could have saved myself a pretty penny and used the Comfy Sack as a bed too.

The name doesn't lie. It is very comfortable... a little too comfortable. I fell asleep in it shortly after the first time I sat down to watch a movie on my laptop.

While My Ukulele Gently Weeps

About 6 months back I got the bright idea of purchasing a Ukulele... 

...And like all my past musical endevours I've picked up said Uke twice, maybe trice since then. While unboxing some of my stuff this evening (yes, I still haven't unboxed a lot of my stuff since the move) I came across my little Uke. Inspired by my find I started strumming out a few chords and decided to youtube some Ukulele videos and came across this fantastic rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

So off I went and learnt off (very badly) the first few bars of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Feeling very chuffed with myself I went back to youtube to see how my endevours faired against other Uke players on youtube land. Then I came across this little guy (bare in mind he's only 5 years old)...

...I subsequently retired the Uke back to the box in which I found it.

Halloween 3 : The Jedi Strike Back

I'm a little late this year on the Halloween post but considering I've been internet deficient for the last couple of weeks I'm sure you can understand the lateness.

If you've been following this blog for the last 2 years you will know that since landing in North America I discovered the great North American past-time of pumpkin carving. Thus began my Halloween pumpkin carving adventures.

You can find my last 2 forays into pumpkin carving madness here (my 1st pumpkin carving) and here (my pumpkin carving from last year).

Having 2 years of pumpkin carving experience behind me, this year I got a little bit more ambitious. First off, gone are the crappy plastic carving tools. This year I got a set of professional carving tools (see below) from my lady friend and attended my first pumpkin carving party in Sacramento as a wee stop over on my way to my new home in L.A..

So without further ado, behold this years pumpkin massacre. Mwuhahaha.....

This years crop of pumpkins offered up for sacrifice

My brand new implements of destruction (and yes that's an electric carving drill you see; used for doing carves that don't go all the way through the pumpkin)

With professional tools available to me this year I needed to find a pattern worthy of what the tools could do (I felt that the force was strong in this one)

Transferring the pattern to the pumpkin

After the tools had done their magic

Lighting up the pumpkin

Yoda goes to the dark side (a bit blurry)

OK, this year it looks like I may have bit off a bit more than I could chew. I could blame the pumpkin for being thicker than the average year or I didn't have as much time to perfect the carving since I was massacring it at a party but the truth is, I was just over confident.  When it comes to pumpkin carving, I'm still a Padawan.

For completeness, here's a pic of some of the other pumpkins at the pumpkin carving party...

And yet again, we survive another pumpkin madness massacre for another year...

Back To Digital Civilisation

I have internet again! It took a few weeks and it looked like it was going to take a few more weeks but thanks to my girlfriend's persistent hounding with the internet company we got the installation date bumped. :D

It  feels nice to have information at your finger tips again. To be honest, I felt a little lost without having the power of the internet at hand whenever I needed it. When did I become so dependant on technology? 

So, as promised in my previous post. Behold my new wheels that will help me get around L.A. until such time as I can afford a car and get a proper US driver's license...

On a related note, I experienced the famous L.A. freeways and L.A. traffic for the first time this weekend. To say that it was a stressful experience is a bit of an understatement... and I was only the passenger! Not looking forward to the day when I finally have to drive those freeways myself.

Oh public transport how I miss thee

As I'm sitting here in Starbucks with internet access available to me I figured that I should take advantage of this and do a quick post update.

So, I've moved again. Goodbye Vancouver and goodbye Canada. I've now moved my ass State side down to L.A. (well more precisely, Glendale). I've been here a week so far and although most of it has been spent in my new job I can safely say Glendale (and by association L.A.) is definitely not a town made for the weary walker among us. 

Having just landed and not having any mode of transport I've been forced to use either the so called public transportation or my legs to get to places. So far I've taken to walking to everywhere as the buses here seem very very infrequent. On my 40/50 minute walk to work every morning the so called bus has not yet, ever pass me once. All the bus stops I pass are usually always empty. Coming from living in Dublin all my life and recently coming from Vancouver where the public transportation was very good, at 8/8:30am in the morning you would always see the bus stops chocker block with people waiting to catch the bus to work. Thus, it is just so unusual for me to see bus stops empty in the wee hours of the morning (not to mention the sidewalks).

What is even more frustrating is that as you're happily walking along you suddenly find that the damn footpath has just decided to disappear from you for no apparent reason at all and now you're forced to walk on the thin curb as traffic is whizzing pass you with the driver's all wondering "who is this fool attempting to walk everywhere?".

So, yesterday, I decided to buy myself a bike as a stop gap to having some proper wheels of some sort (I'll post a picture of my new baby on my next update). After walking around for close to 3 hours to/from and between the two bike shops (of one of which was just a crappy shack with next to nothing in it) I found on the internet within "walking distance" to where I live,  it felt great to be able to cycle home on my shiny new toy at the end of the day.

Now I've to save up for a car of some sort if I'm to be upwardly mobile in L.A. Too poor at the moment and got a very empty apartment to furnish first. So it looks like I'll be holding out till sometime after winter before I can afford a set of motorised wheels. Until then I'll just have to rely on my new bike, my legs and "public transport" *cough* *cough*.

Minty Fresh Moistness

Every now and again I come across some mundane little thing that make me go "Wow!" and tonight was one of those times. I present to you the "Wow!" mundane thing of the moment:

 

Folks, what you see above are not two incredibly deliciously refreshing mints. They are in fact the coolest thing I've come across in a while... they are moist towelettes!

While I was out this evening having a few drinks and some food with a friend I was presented with said item pictured above by the nice waitress. As I reached for one of them thinking they were mints the waitress promptly informed me that they were towelettes and not to eat them. We just had to pop them into the little bowl of water and watch the magic happen.

The picture above does not do them justice in terms of conveying how incredibly small they are. So, here is a picture of the towelettes in comparison to the size of a Canadian penny and a Pez:

Now you understand why I mistook them to be delicious mints.

"But surely that tiny little thing can't be much of a towelette", I hear you say. Friends, be prepared to be amazed by the awesomeness of the minty fresh moist towelette...

... and viola! One large moist towelette ready for use...

... And here's a video of the magic happening in real-time with additional sounds of amazement added to enhance the awesomeness of the object (apologies for the crap quality of the video):

Again, coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

The Soviet States of America?

A couple of days ago I needed to send my girlfriend, who lives in the US, a reference letter that my current landlord gave us. The reason for this being I am due to move State side for work in a little over a weeks time and my girlfriend, being awesome, is planning to go on an apartment hunting trip down to LA for me. Thus the original reference letter from my current landlord was needed so that it could be shown to any prospective new landlords.

Given my past experience with Canadian mail being quite unreliable for delivering mail in a timely manner (they once took over 2 months to deliver a small package to Ireland for me) I decided to suck it up and spend the 40 odd dollars to have the letter sent via UPS express mail. At least this way I was guaranteed that the reference letter would reach its final destination by morning the following day. The following day came and went with no sign of the letter. I started cursing UPS and their so called "guarantee" on express delivery and the fact I wasted so much money for a guarantee not kept. Today my girlfriend contacts me sometime around late afternoon on gmail's web chat to say that the letter just arrived. A day and a half later than guaranteed but I figured no biggy, at least it was still faster than sending it by regular mail, and then I was shown this...

It appears that US Customs decided my mail was of a suspicious nature and decided to open it up and then hold onto it for an extra day for scrutinizing. UPS, I judged you prematurely. All is forgiven. I mean seriously? What the fuck! They didn't even bother trying to reseal up the damn envelope properly. What if I had sensitive information in there?

Over the years with my comings and goings in and out of the US for business, holidays or whatever I've gotten pretty used to being treated like a criminal/terrorist and having any sort of privacy or my so called civil liberties shat upon. Apart from the obvious inconvenience of having my photo taken and finger prints scanned like a criminal every time I want to enter the US I've also put up with the odd instances of finding the cheap shoelace I use to secure my luggage zipper having been cut open and then upon opening up my luggage finding a lovely note by US Customs and Border Protection stating that in the interest of national security they've broken into my luggage and gone through all my shit. 

I've always figured that this was just the sad times we live in and I had no choice but to just suck it up as an expected inconvenience of  being a foreigner in America. But for some reason, this time around, this one small act of invasion of privacy has really irked me more so than all the other past instances. Perhaps it's because this was more unexpected than before or because the act so closely resembled the type of crap that people read about that used to go on in cold war Soviet Russia. Or maybe I'm just more annoyed about how my mail was half assed thrown back together again with no accountability to the delay caused or to the final state it was in or what could potentially have happened to the private information contained within it (which luckily this time around was just very mundane stuff).

I always thought it was a federal offence in America to open up someone else's mail. I guess these laws don't apply when someone classifies it as potentially a matter of national security.

Upon further research into the legitimacy of this, I subsequently discovered that the opening of private mail arriving from and going to foreign addresses outside of the US by US Customs and Border Protection agencies is now quite a common place practice in today's modern America. Furthermore, it's perfectly legal, for the very argument mentioned above.

So, in short, if you're sending mail to or from an address outside of the United States, to or from an address within the United States, expect that there is a very good chance your mail will be opened and scrutinized by US Customs and Border Protection before it arrives in its final destination. 

First Post Of The Year!

OK, so I might be a little late for first post of the year but still, better late than never.

In truth, I was actually going to give up on this blog since it looked like I never had much time to update it in the past barring the odd post now and again. And even when I did have time to update it, I never really had anything interesting to share so my posts just ended up being random stuff I found on the interweb as space filler.

Still, I think I'll have another crack at this blogging thing. It might be good to have an outlet of sorts to allow me to stretch my literary muscles from time to time.

So, what have I been up to since the last time you heard from me? In short, work has kept me stupidly busy for the most part of the year (partially the reason why this blog went on hiatus for so long). But on the odd occasion where I managed to escape work the following things happened to me:

• I tried out the great Canadian tradition of Curling (which turned out to be a lot harder and much more fun than I thought it would be). 

• I ran away from Vancouver for a brief period to escape the madness of the Winter Olympic Games here.

• Went to Italy for a wedding where I came across a very funky looking bug...

• ... and subsequently got all my shit stolen as I was about to leave Italy for Switzerland! And when I say everything, I mean everything! Much fun and games shortly ensued (see the next post bit for one of the fun and game things that happened to me after my shit was stolen). And when I say fun and games I mean lots of running around to police stations and trying to find embassies and filling out legal documents.

• Was temporarily, unexpectedly stranded in Amsterdam (if you're going to be stranded somewhere you could do a lot worse than Amsterdam) after being refused to fly back to Canada because the emergency passport I was issued  by the Irish Embassy in Switzerland to replace the one that got stolen on me was insufficient to allow me to fly.

• Eventually made it back to Canada much later, lighter and poorer than originally planned.
• Didn't officially exist for a few months after having to send all and any documents that say I exist off to the Irish embassy in Canada in order to get a new replacement passport.
• In the meanwhile I attended my first Roller Derby. Was a bit boring until I finally figured out the rules and understood how each team scored. Without understanding the rules it was just literally watching a bunch of girls roller skating around in a circle.

• Finally got my new passport and all my other documents that say I exist back. I now officially exist again... yay!
• Decided to quit my job. Officially did my last day last week... double yay!
  
• Got a new (and hopefully much better) job State side in Los Angeles. Starting next week... triple yay!

...And that leads us to now. Currently just sitting around slowly packing up all my worldly possessions and cleaning the apartment getting ready to leave Canada for the States.

One of these days it would nice if I didn't have to move countries every time I moved jobs. One can always dream...