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...

Halloween 2

It's that time of year again!

So last year I carved my first pumpkin (see it here if you missed it). I had so much fun doing it that I've decided to make it a new yearly activity. So without further ado here is this year's carvings for your viewing pleasure.

This year's pumpkins (these were a bitch to carry back from the store as we didn't have a car this year).

The stencils we decided to use this year.

Stencil transferred onto pumpkin.


The beheading, gutting and cutting begins.


After the carnage.

Lighting them up.


The pumpkins all lit up in the dark.


... and that folks is it for another year.