The Adventures of Budman

Everybody Has Aids

2007-11-25T12:33:00.000-03:00

Well, since over the weekend two people mentioned to me that thay still read my blog it has inspired me to write a few (hopefully not too long) posts.

First I'd like to start with what I did LAST Saturday. My brother convinced me to go see this band called Me, Mom and Morgentaler. The story goes that in the late 80's at a Marianopolis College variety show, a bunch of people got together (about 10) and formed a band. The name Morgentaler is reference to Dr. Henry Morgentaler a controversial abortionist from the 1970's.

The band made one record - Shiva Space Machine. They put on many amazing shows (as quoted from my brother) but never made it big and eventually broke up in 1994. In 1999 they reunited for a show and that was the end of them.

Now, 20 years after the release of their only album, they decided to reunite for the last time and re-release their album. Originally, they had 2 show dates but it sold out so quickly they put on 2 more. I saw them on their third night.

I only had listened to a few songs earlier in the week and hardly had time to really get into them, but let me tell you, that concert ROCKED!! (unlike another concert I recently went to...)
These guys are all pushing 40 but had SO MUCH energy on stage. They all came out wearing white uniforms of all kinds (chef, tennis player, suits, etc.) and PIG MASKS. After the first song, the masks came off, but the expressions on their faces showed they were really having a good time.

Their music was very ska/punk-ish and a Mosh pit formed, which Lorne and I joined in by the end of the show. Lorne couldn't believe the number of young people who were there. He thought was pushing it, but there were 18 year olds floating about.

Halfway through one of their songs, the singer, Gus Van Go (who also manages The Stills) introduced the Funky Ass Soul Punches, which was when all the members played a note at the same time. Then they beat their record with 182 Funky Ass Soul Punches!

During the encore, Gus jumped into the crowd and walked to the center and told everyone to sit down and relax while he sprawled across the floor and started talking to us. I was amazed how everyone listened and were just chilling.

Finally, when the show ended, Gus told the audience he wanted to greet people at the front and BODY SURFED his was to the front of the venue.

Lorne and I left with bouncing energy and a copy of their CD which I enjoy quite a lot.

UPDATE: I just found a clip of the smae show I went to on youtube:

The Budman Update

2007-11-17T00:21:00.000-03:00

I lost track if anyone reads this blog. I guess I've also lost interest in writing on here. I'm usually writing about things I've been doing which aren't always that exciting. I"m not saying my life is boring, just that I've got into a routine:
I work Monday to Friday, 8:30 - 4:30.
I joined a floor hockey league and attend games every Wednesday. I'm doing pretty good actually and have scored at least one goal per game except one.
Weekends I pretty much spend with Aurit or my family.

This past week, although wasn't really too bad, just felt like ass. Bad, sweaty ass.

I'm been tired every day this week. I haven't sleep well for some reason. Some afternoons at work were brutal. I'd be at the computer and my eyes would feel so heavy. I had to work on something and new mistakes kept appearing. I finally finalized the thing but at the very last minute. At least I got it all out of the way to enjoy the weekend. Unfortunately, my boss told me of a little project he'd like me to tackle that is due Monday night or Tuesday morning. I can tell right now I won't be able to do it all in one day, so if I want to impress my coworkers I should move my ass and work a little this weekend. Oh how I was looking forward to relax...

Well at least tomorrow should be a nice relaxing day. I got McGill Improv workshop and at night I"m seeing this band Me, Mom and Morgentaler with my brother Lorne. I don't really know their music but they have been getting a lot of buzz for their reunion and re-release of their only album.

THis will make it my second concert of the week, the first one being BON JOVI.

I'm sorry, I will admit I like a few of his older songs and big hits, but i"m just not a huge Bon Jovi fan. For some reason some people just can't understand why. They put on a good show but I just wasn't loving it. On the other hand Aurit (and 10 billion other women) were just screaming their heads off. I've never seen such a reaction from a man in his 40's shaking his hips.

Ok I've had enough of the waking world for tonight. I must delve in to a deep sleep in my warm bed or it may happen here before this cold, cold computer.

Budman out.

Improv Summit Ottawa Edition

2007-11-04T23:34:00.000-03:00

Last night marked the first edition of the Carlton Improv Association (CIA) Improv Summit in Ottawa.

Having participated in several summits hosted by McGill as well as one last year in Toronto, I was delighted to fight out that the McGill Improv team were interested in participating in Ottawa's competition.

This year has been a turning point for McGill Improv because of the great turnout of new members. over the past years, more and more members were leaving and not many new members were staying. At one point we had more alumni than actual students in the club. Last year, even though I had already graduated from McGill for 3 years, was still performing in the shows. However, this year a bunch of new people with some experience have joined our ranks and after only a few workshops and no real shows, decided to band together and tackle a summit! I was excited to, for the first time, watch as a bystander, the fury that McGill had to offer.

Overall the night was a success and I had a lot of fun (as the rest of the audience did) but I felt some things could have been better.

*DISCLAIMER: I had a fun time at the summit but have some feelings on the way things were run. In the following paragraphs, what i write is by in no means supposed to offend anyone. In the end I hope that whoever reads this can benefit from it for future events. If any CIA members read this, I love you guys and know that I myself couldn't have done a better job so please don't take my rant too personally.*

We were 2 cars, 10 people - 7 performers and 3 supporters. 5 of us were supposed to stay overnight while the other car was to head home after the show/after party.
We left after lunch that followed our weekly Saturday workshop and arrived in Ottawa around 6:30pm. The show was to start at 7:30pm so we had plenty of time to settle in and for the performers to warm up for the show.

My buddy Owen, a former member of CIA had come to watch and it was really good to see him. I felt really bad when I had found out he had planned a whole night ahead for me to accompany him to a mutual friends birthday party but had to decline since i came into town with a bunch of friends and felt awkward ditching them. Owen, you're still welcomed to Montreal anytime!

It turned out one of the teams dropped out last minute so the competitors ended up just being McGill, Toronto and CIA.

The show was being held in a room in a residence building which brought a large size of an audience (~50) which was slightly full for the size of the room.

7:30pm came along, the room packed and one of CIA's members, came on as the host. The format of the night was for each team to perform a 30 minute set and at the end the audience voted, ranking the teams from 3 to 1 (1 being the best). The order of performance was McGill, Toronto and CIA.

I've been to more than one summit and other kind of organized events and know from watching that the job of a host is to warm up the audience and get them excited for what they are about to watch. I didn't feel that at all with our host. After a quick introduction, she introduced the first team. Everyone cheered!... and then waited. McGill was warming up and no one got them to tell them the show had started.

After a few minutes of silence, McGill Improv came on full of energy with large thanks to Jeremy. He then transferred his energy to the audience by doing typical warm up/introduction bits like "on the count of three yell out a biblical name!".

During the set (and all the other teams sets) there were lots of laughs. Because there were no mikes, the players had to pause between laughs or else no one could hear them. I am not sure if this is always the case or because the room was small and the crowd was big, that the players had to do this.

McGill did a bunch of interesting games and ended on freeze. Things were going really well during freeze until all of a sudden the host yelled freeze, totally confusing everyone, came on stage and said that their set was over... I felt that McGill should have a had a better time warning so they could concluded their set properly.

I felt McGill did a good set and got a lot of laughs but after speaking to a member of the team, she was a bit disappointed stating that the scenes weren't so developed and that a lot of the laughs were due to cheap gags. That may have been true but after watching the entire show, I can say that the crowd was one that really liked cheap gags and sexual humor. There were no real great scenes that really stood out from the rest. However, going back to McGill, for a team who performed a show for the first time with those members, I thought they did a pretty damn good job. I'm sure they will learn to grow better with every next show they do.

After a 5 minute break, it was Toronto's turn. Toronto only had TWO guys. They decided to do ONE single long scene for 30 minutes. Now don't get me wrong, I laughed a lot and thought it quite amusing but also felt it was totally unprofessional what they did. It was basically the two of them just fucking around on stage. It felt a lot like in movies when there is a scene between actors and the scene has no point to it except that it was fun for the actors (like in 40 Year Old Virgin when the 2 guys are doing the "You know how I know you're gay" bit).

The two guys came on and sort of explained what they were going to do and then just kind of joked with each other. One guy was drinking an Arizona Ice Tea caned drink throughout his entire scene and even the "all-star" scene that happened 30 minutes later. Throughout the whole show, CIA members were awarded audience members candy for suggestions. These guys came up and just started throwing candy everywhere like it was no body's business.

The scene they ended up doing was about a Canadian journalist who was doing a story on a Ukrainian boy at a summer camp. The whole scene had sexual innuendo, implying that the Canadian was a pedophile and that the Ukrainian boy, Uri, had no idea and loved the man. Uri wanted to go back to Canada with him but couldn't for the obvious reasons that pedophilia is illegal in Canada (and every else in the world). This basically went on for 20 minutes, until they started talking about a book the journalist could write about. While talking about this book, which was basically a recap of everything we had just seen, the actors were talking about how the book would end, implying how they themselves would end the scene. An actual quote was "Maybe we can do a flashback!", followed by a flash back scene. The ending was very clever but then CIA told them they still had TEN minutes left, so rather than ending there, the characters were back the "writing the book" scene and came up with a couple of other alternative endings. It was quite funny but I think I appreciated it more as a performer than other audience members would have and I doubt I could sit through that again.

After another 5 minute break, it was CIA's turn to shine. They did a good set as well using a bunch of games they stole from McGill from the many times they've watched them perform (haha - it's an ongoing joke McGill and Carlton have, even though it's true).

After everyone performed, it was time to vote. During the counting of the votes, there was a short set with 2 members from each team doing a questions only game.

The moment of truth finally came when Carlton counted the voted themselves (which probably should have been done by an outside party):
McGill came in 3rd place, followed by CIA and the winners, Toronto.
I don't think anyone on McGill Improv really cared for coming in 3rd since they had fun and got a good reaction from the crowd, but I was surprised when I heard that Toronto beat Carlton. You'd think Carton people would support their own team (the whole crowd was just Carlton students) and Toronto's set wasn't that much funnier.

After the show we discovered there wasn't really much happening except the performers going for a beer at a local bar so we decided not to stay the night. We went to the Barley Mow, had a couple of beers, chatted with other players and even had a small run in with suicide. Suicide chicken wings that is. One member of CIA ordered them, ate 3 of them and then let others try them. I put one in my mouth and before even being able to swallow my bite, my mouth was totally on fire.

By midnight we were on the rad heading back to Montreal.

I think with a better turn out in number of teams and a bit better organization of the actual event, the CIA summit could continue to grow better and better in the upcoming years.

Halloween 2007 - Making of the Beaker costume

2007-10-28T22:07:00.001-03:00

Since 2000 I became obsessed with making crazy Halloween costumes.
Those being:
2002 - The Incredible Hulk
2003 - A ghostbuster
2004 - Optimus Prime
2005 - Doctor Octopus
2006 - Cobra Commander
Past pictures of the above can be found in these links:
link 1
link 2

This year I out-did myself and decided to dress up as Beaker from The Muppets. I give 100% credit to IAN BARRET for suggesting that character as my costume for this year.

After spending a couple of weeks getting all the materials and a good few nights putting it together, here is the result:

I was so focused on building the damn thing I never organized any plans for the night! I almost didnt' have a party to go to, but in the end went to two house parties.

Every year I put together a cool costume but I never got a response as this year. I got a bunch of comments including:

"You are the most amazing costume maker int he world" - Andrew Ladd
"You are the king of Halloween Costumes" - Guong Le
"I think you're too old to be dressing up" - Josh's Mom

A lot of people asked if I had bought my costume. The answer is no, i made it completely by myself (with a little help from my mom - she sewed the nose).

Like all my past costumes, I got a lot of help and inspiration by looking online to see what others had done. So, I decided to share with the internet how I made MY costume:

My costume is made mostly of foam, cardboard, fabric and tape:

I started with a big square of foam I bought from Fabricville (a sewing supply warehouse).

I apologize for the lack of photos but basically I took a baseball cap and cut the visor part off. This was the base for my head support. I then took a cardboard box and cut a large squarish piece which I then folded many times to make it bend and wrapped it's base around the hat. After tapping everything in place, it basically looked like a one of those straight chef hats. This piece was then covered with a larger piece of foam (so it started at the top of the cardboard but extended pass my forehead all the way to my shoulders. The foam was then wrapped in pink fabric that I bough tand secured temporarily.

From here on I had a hard time figuring things out because i wasn't sure where to place stuff along the base and could see anything while wearing it. Most of it was done by "guestimation".

I moved onto the eyes and nose.

The eyes were basically two plastic decoration balls I found (for what purpose they are for I'll never know). Unfortunately, I found the hard way that they were two small in proportions to the rest of the mask. To fix this problem I wrapped them in foam and tapped the ends shut:

For the nose I bought a piece of styrofoam:

and then wrapped that twice in foam to get the right size:

I was starting to get somewhere:

With help from my mom (last years Cobra commander costume needed a LOT of sewing which my mom did - this year I just need help with the nose) I got the nose covered with orange stretchy fabric.

I attached the eyes and nose to the mask by basically cutting holes in the fabric/foam/cardboard and farcing the ends of the
nose/eyes through the holes. To keep them from falling out, my mom sewed the nose onto the foam/fabric and on top of that I had attached string to the ends of each piece which I then ran across through the mask and tied to the other end of the cardboard, like so:

Since I pretty much had once shot with everything, I didn't want to cut the string and tie it off yet so I lef tit lose and throughout the rest of the building process, the left eye kept popping out...

SO i had the eyes and nose done but needed a mouth. I took more cardboard and taped it onto the hat going downwards, below my forehead (this time only folding it around the front half of the hat). Then I cuta frown though the fabric, foam and cardboard and made it so it folded outwards:

Now I had somewhere to see!

I sewed some black fabric onto the eyes for pupils:

Now that I had an opening to see, I didn't want people to see my face, so I covered the hole with half black fabric and half mesh so I could still see:

As an added effect I took some fishing wire and attached it to the mouth so I was able to open it by just pulling on the wire:

The last thing needed was hair. I cut the cardboard on to and folded it and the foam down and added a few stiches to close down the top:

For hair, I bought two bright red boas for Halloween:

They were mostly feathers but I couldn't figure out any other alternatives to making the hair the size I needed. I took the boas, wrapped them around the top and stitched it all over to keep it secure.

The final result:

The rest of my costume was basically a REALLY big blue shirt. I knew i"d never find a shirt with a 25 in collar so I took the biggest I could find and made my own collar. I had a tie and I wore a lab coat.

Beaker was ready for damage!

FIRE!

2007-10-22T12:05:00.001-03:00

Last week at work, an alarm went off. It was the first time I heard such an alarm. It was basically a loud ringing noise followed by a recording saying that an alarm was activated and the situation is being looked at and that we should wait for further instructions. Following that alarm, another message came on shortly telling us to evacuate the building.

In the end it was just a drill.

Today, the alarm went off again. This time it was for real.

I was in my office and thought I smelled smoke. My first thought was "Oh yeah, I borrowed the glue gun from work. I better take it out of my bag". Then the alarm went off and I realized that I REALLY had smelled smoke.

My office didn't even wait for the evacuation message, we left during the investigation message.

Soon after, the rest of the building followed.

Turns out a dumpster on the main floor int eh back garage caught on fire. I'm guessing from a cigarette and the smoke just traveled to through the vents.

We're all okay and a=now it's back to work.

Pop Montreal

2007-10-06T14:07:00.000-03:00

Right now, Montreal is being flooded with all kinds of concerts in part of an annual event called Pop Montreal. I think the bands are usually more independent, underground types (someone correct me if I'm wrong), but I know they get some big names too (this year Patti Smith is in town).

My friend Sean runs a music blog called Said The Gramophone and was presenting 3 shows this year. One of them I attended last night. There were three bands: Yeasayer, Plants And Animals, and Grizzly Bear (they played in that order). Plants And Animals are a Montreal band while the other two are from Brooklyn.

I'm not very good abut explaining music, but I thought the show was really something. Before Sean even mentioned the show to me, I had never heard of any of the bands. The quick knowledge I got of them was from this link.

The show was at the Ukrainian Embassy located near Hutchison and Laurier. The place was pretty small. The inside was like a cheesy auditorium. There was a second floor balcony.

Overall the three bands were really good. I felt that the first and last band were more similar to each other than the second band, but each were unique in their own way.

Grizzly bear were really dynamic and in turn I decided to support them and by their acclaimed album Yellow House. I'm listening to it now and it's GREAT rainy day music.

Sunday = Family Day

2007-09-30T22:49:00.000-03:00

For some reason today, on such a beautiful fall day, happened to be spent completely with family.

The day started with my pop and I going for breakfast at Chez Cora's. Afterwards, we both wanted to do something but didn't know what that was. That something ended up being shopping because that's what we did. I was interested in buying more mature looking sweaters for work since I own about 7 hoodies and I figure I should look nice at work every once in a while.

I had a chance to visit Old Navy and got to see my former manager Craig, who I hadn't seen since i quite back in May. It was good to see him again.

I ended up at Sears where my dad and I bought matching sweaters (yes we're weird like that, but to quote Will Smith from Men in Black - "I make this look good"). I also got my own sweater for 50%, so yay me.

We had a quick coffee break and ended up back home. I had wanted to watch a movie this afternoon since the weather looked shitty when I woke up but when I returned home it was so nice, I convinced my mom that we should go outside and do something. She suggested we go to Mont Royal and walk around. My dad was tired so he stayed behind.

The mountain was pretty busy but really nice to be at. We parked the car at Beaver Lake and walked around. We walked around the lake and saw all kinds of animals. My mom pointed out a squirrel that was right near us. As I pulled out my camera to snap a photo, my mom tried to move out of the way but the squirrel started to chase after her instead. Luckily for my mom, an infant saw the squirrel and chased after it, thus saving my mother's life. Thanks little dude!

I didn't realize how close the lake was to the summit of the mountain, so after a 120 minute walk we ended up at the lookout. What a view!

I was a little disappointed that the leaves hadn't changed colors yet. At least this means I have a reason to come back again sometime soon.

After dinner, I ended up hanging out with yet another family member, my brother Mark. We played this pop culture trivia card game he got for his birthday from my other brother Lorne. The point of the game is to get 20 points to win. You get 1 point for every right question. I was being clobbered by Mark but ended up winning 20 to 19.

All in all I think I spent ore time with family today than I have in a really long time.

For those who have Facebook, you can find pictures of Mont Tremblant and other things I forgot to upload of things I did over the summer. So add me as a friend if you havn't already or join Facebook if you aren't a member. Get with the times people!

I'm glad that's not me

2007-09-28T13:34:00.000-03:00

The other day I ordered a bunch of custom labels from a company in the states. I've dealt with them before and aside from one major problem (I asked for white text and they sent me black text) they seem competent and my contact seems like a very nice person.

When I called this time, she was delighted to hear form me and assured that the job I had asked was a piece of cake and she took not of all the specifications I asked. One very important one, which i failed to ask the previous time, resulting in a last minute panic on my end, was to make sure the colored parts of the label had white in the background. the reason for this is because the labels are clear and if not "backed up by white" the color is too see through and is difficult to notice especially on a dark surface. She told me not to worry and that they can definitely provide me with what i want. I was informed I'd receive them today.

Low and behold they came in today! I excitingly opened them up and discovered that they were perfect!... except I soon found out there was no white behind the color. So I call up my contact and am put on hold for several minutes. The secretary finally tells me she can't find Ruth, then she says "wait, she just walked in". Our conversation went a little something like this:
"Hi Josh how are you!?"
"I am fine Ruth, I hope I"m not disturbing your lunch"
"No, not at all, I just have a CRISIS on my hands that I'm trying to fix"
"Oh.. well... I hope I'm not adding onto it but the labels arrived and you guys didn't do what i asked"
*Long amount of silence*
"Ya... I don't know why we didn't do what you asked... I'll get back to you on that.... Thanks"
*click*
Thankfully I'm not on a super deadline but this does push things back a bit...

The Lost Post - Weekend at Tremblant

2007-09-12T19:09:00.000-03:00

It's the Jewish High Holidays and since i had the day off work and not much is going on tonight, I wanted to update my blog and discovered this post I never posted.

Enjoy!

--

I'm still under "trial" at work so I'm not entitled to any vacation time at the moment. Instead, Aurit and I decided to spend the weekend together somewhere and under much recommendation, we were up north in Mont Tremblant Village this past weekend.

We left Friday evening and came back home Sunday evening. The weather was beautiful the whole time.

On Friday we arrived around 7pm and checked into the Homewood Suites by Hilton. Let me tell you the hotel was NICE! We stayed in the smallest least expensive room and it was still HUGE!

It came with a kitchen and even ha a balcony. From the balcony I was able to see the Gondola so we were pretty much on the top end of the village.

We checked in, ate home cooked grilled cheeses (made by yours truly) and then hit the town.

For a short while.

We were pretty tired.

Saturday was PACKED with things. We slept in until 9:30am and caught the free breakfast the hotel offered. Then we hopped on the gondola (with free passes given to us by the hotel) to the top of the mountain.

At the top, we got a great view of our surroundings. We then took a trail around the summit. It was a lot more fun then I had expected with parts of it going in and out of the woods. It was FREEZING on top and I was suffering since I had asked the cleaning lady at the hotel if I needed a sweater and she said no.

After our little tour, we went to watch a bird of prey show. It was great! They had an owl AND an owl! (That ones for you Chris Dye)

There were other cool birds to look at, as well, like a hawk and a bald eagle.

We headed back to the city and went looking around.

Aurit got a chance to go shopping and we decided to take a walk a bit out of the city to relax at the beach! NOt beiong prepared to go swimming (and the fact th ebeach was kind of dirty) we made our way to the hotel to get our bathing suits and went to the swimming pool complex (which we also had free passes to) and hit the hot tub. It was SO GOOD!

Afterwards, we went back to the room to eat and grabbed a couple of beers at this bar that was a micro brewer. We had spent a long day gallivanting and were exhausted.

On Sunday, we slept in, got free breakfast and checked out. We decided to spend the afternoon at this zip line/tree jungle gym called Acrobranche. Basically, it was an obstacle course between trees where you had to cross some sort of bridge in high up in the air to get between 2 trees. Along the way were zip lines that were super fun.

All in all the weekend was awesome!

Summer Update

2007-08-25T15:40:00.000-04:00

I know it' sbeen a while since I've updated.
Long story short, i've had a wicked summer which involved a weekend getaway to Mont Tremblant. I've also been in Ottawa for a wedding. Now I"m in Toronto for an engagement party. Soon (hopefuly), I'll put up pictures and the like of thigns i"ve been up to.
For now I'll leave you with what my dad asked my uncle who was surfing the net on his computer:
"Tell, me Barry, is this internet thing accross Canada?"

Happy Birthday To Me

2007-07-26T23:28:00.000-04:00

Since my post this morning, it turns out i did have a very interesting birthday.
All day I knew it was my birthday, and co-workers were wishing me a happy birthday but I was really tired from the show and had a lot of thing son my mind that it didn't feel like any special day that was different from any other day.
Throughout the day I kept getting tons of happy birthday wishes from all kinds of friends (new and old) on Facebook which started to give me that feeling that today could be different.

Things really picked up after work.

I got home as my parents left to go out for a friend's dinner. Eventually Aurit came over with a cake box (which I couldn't open yet), a card and a present.
She ended up buying me The Game of LIFE - Simpsons Edition! It's pretty damn cool. We played it right away and she totally kicked my ass (She made 1,154,000$ while I had a measly 852,000$. Then my parents and my brother Lorne came home (they picked up Lorne from a baseball game) and we had cake, which happened to be chocolate cake with chocolate sprinkles and icing and cookies and more chocolate!

Everyone was right, this day was special.

Can't wait until Saturday night!

Happy Birthday Day To Me

2007-07-26T08:01:00.000-04:00

Twenty Six years ago at 6:45am on this day, I was born.
Today's date, also being the age I turned, makes this years birthday a "Champagne" or "Golden" birthday. I.e. It's supposed to be a special one.

So far so good.

All of last night was spent was spent with the police. No I wasn't in trouble for breaking the law, for I was with THE Police!

Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.

I didn't write "saw The Police" because it was quite difficult to see them from where I was sitting since the ticket I was given by my brother as a favor for helping him with his house/birthday gift was for the seat that was PHYSICALLY the furthest distance from the stage possible. I was in the last row of the blue (highest) section, directly opposite the stage at the other end of the stadium.

No matter, I had binoculars. Too bad the show sucked....

NOT!

It was FREAKING AWESOME! I sat with my sister in law, who was closer to my age when the police were popular the first time around, so she weas so into it. She kept making me get up and dance. I've been listenign to the compelte box set (Message in a Box) all week, so I recognized all of their songs minus one or to.

They opened with Message in a Bottle, followed by Synchronicity pt. 2, and Walking on the Moon. What a great start to a great show. I think they ended with Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, took a 5 minute break, came back and did Roxanne, So Lonely and Every Breath You Take. Then it was over....

Then they came back on AGAIN and finished it off with Next To You!

I woke up this morning EXHAUSTED but managed to sleep in an extra 20 minutes and somehow still ended up at work at the same time.

Then as I got to work, the elevator doors opened ontheir own before I could even push the button.

Hopefully the rest of my day will rock.

Pranked!

2007-07-21T01:11:00.000-04:00

Totally out of th eblue some chick called me and said "Mr Budman? Is your refrigerator working?". To which I replied "No, it's off and I'm sitting naked in it." Lots of laughter ensued from what I'm guessing were 3 or 4, 12 year old girls. Then they hung up.

Nice going guys!

Movie rental from hell

2007-07-19T20:28:00.000-04:00

So about 3 weeks ago I rented the movie Night Watch. It's the movie based on the book of the same title which I happened to have read recently. The movie was horrible but I had a 7 day rental on it so I didn't rush to return it.

A few days ago I remembered that I rented a movie and never returned it... I recalled that I last saw it on our stairs and then on top of some books. I ask my mom if she returned it and she couldn't remember. I ask my dad and he had no idea what i was talking about.

Since both my parents couldn't remember if they returned my movie or not, I went to the video store and they confirmed I still had not returned it. Well at least I knew that it wasn't at the video store! So where the heck was it?

Books... movie... books... library...! The books were books my brother borrowed from the library that my mom was returning for him. To the library, in St. Laurent! I called them and I was right, my mom returned a VIDEOTRON DVD RENTAL to a LIBRARY.

So it wa at the library! NO! Turns out they decided to return it themselves, and they did, to the "Videotron video store in St. Laurent", as the person on the phone told me. I looked on line and there were TWELVE Videotron stores not too far from the library. I called the nearest one and they told me they didn't have it.

I called the Dollard store and told them my story. They said I could just go and pay them 6.99$ as if I bought the movie used and forget about returning it. Otherwise, my late fee was already at 8.99$.

I was going to just do that, but a couple of hours later, the St. Laurent store called me back and said they found it! Today I picked it up and returned it to the DDO store. The guy was nice and after hearing my long and complicated story only charge me 5$ instead of the 9.25$ it had accumulated to.

The moral of the story? Don't rent crappy movies.

The Perils of Living in the Boonies

2007-07-16T13:40:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to go see a kick ass show by an Australian band called The Cat Empire. I always have a hard time explaining what kind of music they are since they fuse all kinds of styles togther but I read in an article recently that they are jazz, funk, ska, latino if that makes any sense.

The show was at the metropolis and was 100% better than at the Bell Centre. I went with Dan whom I had met while looking for a job through JEM. He's a cool, very funny Jewish guy originally from Hudson. I guess you can say it was a man-date.
We were both pretty tired from the rest of the weekend so we both agreed on sitting on the second floor. We had a gret view of the stage and I got to rest my poor, weak, chicken legs.

The opener was a guy by the name of Jeremy Fisher. Although it was the first time I ever heard of him, I quite liked his music. He sounded like he could be Paul Simons and Bob Dylan's bastard child (and even looked a bit like Dylan). I think I'm goign to check out some of his music.

The Cat Empire came on shorlty after and kicked ASS! One thing they like to do it seems, is just go all out. You know how at shows, a band may go into crazy solos for their last song or in the encore? Well they did that at their 2nd song of the night! They repeated that formula throughotu their set.

Or th epart that I saw rather...

I completely didn't put together that Sunday night concert + work monday morning + living so far away= big trouble. Halfway through the show I started thinking and realized that I if I stayed until the end of the show (~11:00-11:30) Id get home by 12:45am! so I left at 13:30 and got home at 11:45pm and hoped into bed at 12:20am.

Surpisingly enough when I woke up this morning I wasn't too exhausted, just regular exhausted.

AUGH!

2007-07-16T13:31:00.000-04:00

My current task at work is to spray paint some clear bottles to a shiney metallic blue.
The process involves:
1. spray painting the clear plastic wih a gray primer
2. Spray painting the primer with the metallic blue paint
3. Sparaying the paint with a shiny gloss

Simple enough, right?

Wrong.

The gray primer was super easy to apply. The blue paint was a bit more difficult (different brand we got) but still manageable, except that I screwed up a spot on one and had to rub apiece away and reprime it. The lastley, just adding the gloss. Howvere, nowhere does it say that the gloss EATS AWAY at the paint! At least, as far as I can tell, while the gloss is still wet, the paint easily comes off, because I accidently dropped on of the tubes and the paint completely smeared off. On top of that the last tube I did, as soon as I put it down, I accidently just nicked a tiny part with my finger.

The whole painting process takes 5 minutes but I have to give 2 hours to dry. Now I have to redo a couple of tubes and I still have at least 6 more to do. The worst thing of it all is that my "studio" is a huge carboard box that I placed in the hallway. I was told by my boss to go do it there, yet everyone else keeps telling me it smells too much ad that I better be careful or the president of the company (who is on vacation for a week, thank god) will kill me if he sees even a spec of paint on the carpet or wall. I'm too young and sexy to die.

AUGH!

Budman meets the White Stripes

2007-07-08T22:16:00.000-04:00

Friday night I went with Ian to go see the White Stripes perform at The Bell Center. The performance itself was phenomenal. I had tickets for the floor which was a standing area. We managed to get all the way to the front, so I had a great view of both Jack and Meg white. Their aesthetics were truly mind blowing. I've heard that Jack White strictly makes them wear only red, white or black but this was ridiculous! There was a giant red back drop, all the speaker boxes and organs were red. Jack's guitars were red and white. They wore red shirts and pants. All the mic stands were either red with a microphone that had a white wire or vice versa. All the crew members wore black suits with black ties and bowler or pimp hats with red feathers in them. The strobe lights were even red! There was also a platform behind the band with 3 staircases that when Jack walked along, white smoke would rise behind his foot steps.

As for the music, it was kick ass. They opened the show with Blue Orchid and ended the show with Seven Nation Army. They played equally as many songs from Elephant as they did from their new album, Icky Thump. They even teased us a bit by playing riffs from some songs but never playing the actual song, instead leading into a different song altogether.

The only down fall of the show were a bunch of guys totally off their rocker on drugs. They were really pushing people, screaming in people's ears, forsing others to let them body surf (which is prohibited), and totally screaming absurd things (like "Meg White is the such a hot bitch!". I like their music, but Meg White is not really that good looking...). After all that, the security guards didn't do anything at all. All they did was stare at them and give them false warnings. I'm never going to watch a concert at teh Bell center on the floor again.

I left with a smile on myfae though because I bought a kick ass White Stripes shirt! It's a picture of a skeleton ribs and a heat (as if it were my own) completely made up of buttons.

More Drama

2007-07-08T22:00:00.000-04:00

Wednesday I met up with Emilie. She is now in New York for the summer before she returns to Montreal for Law School at McGill in September. We spent the evening chatting over food and beers at Else's. First time I was there. It's a cool place I will admit. This was followed by a quick game of pool which I lost, this time legitimately (a.k.a by not scratching the 8 ball).

Emilie complained that I wasn't writing enough drama on my blog so here goes:
After pool, I left Emilie and headed to the metro. There I met 5 really hot chicks from Sweden looking for a nice tall jewish guy with curly hair and glasses who could be their tour guide for the night. Even though I'm dating someone and had to get up early for work, I couldn't say no to 5 hot Swedish chicks! So we hit up EVERY SINGLE bar on St. Laurent. by 2 am I was throwing up on EVERY SINGLE street corner on St. Laurent. On my way to the hot Swedish chicks' hotel, with 2 girls in each arm and one on my back, I bumped into Aurit on the street. She was not pleased and kicked me in the balls, right in front of the hot Swedish chicks. I wanted to apologize, but I was with 5 hot Swedish chicks! So I crawled my way to the hotel room where we had lots and lots of sex.

I hope that's enough (completely fabricated) drama for ya Emilie!

Have a good tiem in New York City!

So How Is Work Going?

2007-07-08T21:53:00.001-04:00

Every one wants to know how things are going at my job. Short answer:
GREAT!

I really like it a lot. So far I keep getting to do different things. I started with just adding French text to already existing labels. Then I was asked to create a label using an existing design to accommodate a new fragrance. Recently I graduated to designing labels completely on my own. It's fun but also a challenge. Sometimes I get a reaction like "Wow that is great! I really love the design!" and at other times I get "Oh.... well, I hope you have other ideas". The main thing is not to get discouraged and especially not to take anything personally, because my personal tastes don't really count, it what the client wants that counts.

The coolest thing about my job is that sometime in the near future you'll be able to buy the actual products with the labels I've designed in stores such as Pharmaprix and Jean Coutu. Soon enough, my room will be filled with womens beauty products.

Canada Day in Montreal

2007-07-08T21:33:00.000-04:00

While my weekend in Ottawa was spend mostly relaxing, my Canada day weekend was spent entirely being slave drived.

Saturday I was home helping my mom stain our backyard fence. We didn't get too far for my Aunt and Uncle arrived from Toronto to stay with us for the weekend. Saturday night I hit the Jazz fest with Aurit. We saw a couple of shows that were quite good. We then went to St. Sulpice to meat up with my buddies Mike and Zain, who was leaving the next day to move to Ottawa. The last five times I saw Zain, he was either moving away or back to Montreal (all within the last year or so). Make up your mind already! St. Sulpice was a lot of fun. We ended up being a nice sized group (~10 people) just chatting away. Aurit had a drinking contest with Mike and realy showed him up. She topped it off by finishing his beer before we left.

The most interesting part of the night had to be the metro ride home. I had parked my car at Namur and by Vendome Aurit was telling me how she really had to go to the washroom. We were on the second to last metro of the night and I had to think quickly. Earlier that week I met a friend at a bar, Finagens, located right across the street from Snowdon Metro, so I suggested we stop there for her quick rest stop.

We get to the bar and she runs to the bathroom. The bar is dead. The only ones there are the owner, someone chatting him up at the bar, and a table of about 5 drunken people. they see me standing all alone and ask me if I"m there for Karaoke. Next thing I know, they convince me to sing Macho Man by the Village People. So I did. Half way through, I look up and see Aurit pissing her pants laughing. The other patrons went wild! Most random karaoke ever!

Sunday, was spent helping my friends Maryam and Sean move into a new apartment. It took ALL freaking day, but the free pizza dinner made it all worth it. Aurit met me there and even helped clean up a bit before we headed to the Old Port for Canada Day festivities. Note: NEVER drive to the old port on Canada Day! It TRULY SUCKS! We finally found parking and went to the stage. We got there just in time to watch Jeff Marting, former lead man for the Tea Party, and his set was AWESOME! For one song, there was a crazy acrobatic doing tricks on a giant ring hanging from the ceiling of the stage. The fireworks that followed were tons of fun to watch and some were just gigantic, like the whole city was being swallowed up!

Monday was no day of rest either, I spent the day painting the fence again. Aurit came over and helped so that was fun. It started to rain though right before we finished so the back wall looks stained except for 2 small parts. The fence kind of looks like Alfred E Newman's smile.
After dinner, Aurit and I went to Lorne's house to watch a movie. We ended up watching the 1989 classic Say Anything starring John Cusack. I highly recommend it.

St. Jean Baptist Weekend in Ottawa

2007-07-08T20:48:00.000-04:00

In typical Budman style, I spent St. Jean Baptist weekend in Ottawa and was in Montreal for Canada Day.
What brought me to Ottawa you may ask?
The answer, this guy:

Who's that strapping young fellow? Why one of Carleton Improv Association's finest, Owen Hewitt.

Owen had invited me out to check out the last CIA show before the summer as well as spend the rest of the weekend hanging out. And that we did, lots and lots of it.

Friday night I arrived in Ottawa by train, just in time for a kilt clad Owen to pick me up and drive me to Mike's Bar, the graduate bar at Carlton University. I met the other players and soon discovered that I was going to be in the show when I was given a set list of games.

The was fun to do and it was the first time I performed with all those guys, but unfortunately hardly any one showed up. On the bright side, those who did really enjoyed themselves and free drinks were being given out because the bar was closing for renovations over the summer.

Saturday was a really great lazy day. I slept in, had a great home cooked breakfast (Owen's parents are awesome hosts!), then sat outside for a while. Have you ever just sat outside and enjoyed the weather? I started to observed all the ants scurrying about on his patio stones. Now that is something fun and interesting to do. Watching all these ants run around and doing stuff.

We went to the local corner store to pick up some lunch where this young (~19year old) girl who was selling flowers started to chat us up. The 3 highlights of our conversation were:
1. I mentioned how I was the "comedy relief" and she corrected me stating it's "comedic relief"
2. She INSISTED we both add her on facebook
3. She liked when she heard my name because she's also dating a Josh

After lunch, I took a nap and then went for a dip in Owen's pool. The water was SO cold, that I even though I was in it for abotu 10 minutes, I was shivering for a couple of hours. After the quick dip, we watched the 3 hour miniseries of Battlestar Galactica. I have to admit that that show is GOOD! (well the miniseries at least). I can't wait to start watching some episodes.

After a scrumptious dinner, we hit up the town. We met up with a friend of his, Vicky and headed to a bar in town. There were hardly any people there but that didn't stop us from having fun! I got a few drinks in my and they were real cheap as well. I also got to witness some chick bring a guy to the bathroom to have sex. Twice. And each time it was a different guy. And the two guys knew each other. Skanky.

Sunday was spent relaxing at the house again. Owen and I spend most of the day checking out old shows found on tv-links. Ah, Red Drawf, how I still enjoy your British humor. I then returned to Montreal at 7:30pm.

I spent most of the day on Monday with Aurit. Monday night, however, I went golfing for the 3rd time in my life. I was with my brother Lorne, his brother in law Dan, and Dan's brother in law Guy.

It was fun to play with the guys since I quickly discovered they were all completely different type of golfers:

-Dan was the most professional of us. He had the proper clothes, nice set of clubs, goes about 15 times a summer and can really golf.

-Lorne on the other hand, likes to be very technical. He was there stretching before each swing, measuring to make sure he's standing in the perfect distance away from the golf ball, etc. and then when he actually hit the ball it most likely not go far or where he intended at all.

-Finally, Guy's mentality, being a fairly big guy, was just to knock the fuck out of the ball, Happy Gilmore style.

I think I was somewhere in between Lorne and guy. In the end, I played a pretty good round of golf and really kicked ass in the putting part.

The Misadventures of Joshua Budman

2007-07-08T20:45:00.000-04:00

This past couple of weeks I"ve been really busy doing lot's of fun and exciting stuff. Unfortunately I was way too busy (lazy) to write about them while they were happening. So, now that I have a couple of hours before bed, I decided to start catching up the blog with my latest adventures. Enjoy!

Budman's got a new book

2007-06-13T22:15:00.000-04:00

The other day it was so nice outside I took a bike ride with my brother Lorne. I suggested we go to Chapters because I was in dire need of a book. I got tired of buying Rolling Stone magazines.

Here's a quick story on the book I ended up buying:
When I lived in Australia, I was in a theatre and saw a trailer for some crazy effect movie called Night Watch. It said that Night Watch was the first story in a an epic horror/fantasy trilogy. I had never heard of it but the movie looked really cool and reminded me of Constantine. Unfortunatley I forgot the title of the movie and only rediscovered in on a web site about last year when the DVD came out. Turns out the movie was in fact a Russian film that Sony PIctures bought the rights to Distribute in North America. I wanted to watch the film but the video store guy told me it wasn't very good because it was a low budget film and it was in Russian. I totally forgot about the movie until a couple of days ago when I saw a trailer online for it's sequel Day Watch. I had a sudden interest in the story again and afte a quick search on Wikipedia, discovered the movies are actually based on books writte by a Russian, Sergei Lukyanenko. There are in fact 4 books, Night Watch, Day Watch, Dusk Watch and Twilight Watch. I ended up buying Night Watch (translated in English) and so far so good. I'm a slow reader but I read 100 pages since yesturday! For me that's awesome.

As for the story, the book is based in modern Moscow and unknown to humans, there are a race of Others that have super powers (some are magicians, vampires, werewolves, etc.). The others are divided into Light and Dark and after years of fighting made a truce. In order to keep the truce, the Light side has a 'police' force called the Night Watch and the Dark side have the Day Watch. The first book is apperently the story of how something (I dont' knwo what yet) is going to happen that screws up the balance.

It's a real easy read with not much detail (not like some authors I've read who spend like 10 pages describing a room) and most of the book is in first person from the main characters point of view which makes it interesting for me.

Well, I"m off to go read!

Getting the feel of work

2007-06-13T21:45:00.000-04:00

Yet again, I"ve been lagging on current posts. I can't help it. It's just now that i have a job, I spend at least 8 hours a day in front of my computer, so I don't really have the urge to sit in front of it at home and write in this blog. Why now, you ask? Well... I'm kind of bored.

Work is going really well. I like it a lot and there is always something to do. I have a lot of deadlines coming up. The only crappy things is because it's all new stuff and some people were away on vacation, things have been a tad disorganized. I've been working on lebels for a specific line of products and I've almost completed them. However, I went over the final drafts with my boss and said something along the lines of "Now that i"m done with this stuff, I should go and do -*some task pertainig to the labels*-" and she gave me a look of death because it turns out I should have done that in the beginning. Oops... Well, now I know for next time and although I now have to go back adn alter everything, it shouldn't take me too long.

Discharched from the Navy

2007-05-27T13:37:00.000-04:00

After working at Old Navy for just over one year and seven months, Thursday marked my last shift ever at Old Navy. I made sure to use as many discounts as I could before they took my privileges away, and purchased a couple of shirts from Old Navy and new pair of pans from the Gap. I'm looking tres hot.

Had I not caught a cold, I think my last day would have been more exciting, but I was feeling pretty shitty. the shift went by really slow and felt much longer than a normal 7 hour shift.

The highlight of the day was when a customer asked me for help, stating that there he couldn't find the size of the article of clothing he was looking for on the floor. Taking his word for it without checking my self, I discovered on the computer system that we indeed had stock, so I went to get the staircase to look in the storage area on top. Meanwhile, my boss Scott came by and offered his services by looking up there for me. He couldn't find anything. That's when I decided to check on the floor myself, and low and behold they were in fact all there, so in the end I made Scott go up for nothing. The customer thanked me and started to walk away. However, as he was walking away, purely as a joke, Scott loudly and in a fake angry tone yelled at me saying "That's it! This is your last day here!". I missed it but apparently the expression on the customers face was as if he had seen a ghost. Priceless!

The coolest thing about that day was that when I had started my shift, The Arcade Fire's No Cars Go was playing on the Old Navy CD. When I took my lunch break it was playing again. Finally when I punched out and walked out from the back room for the last time, it was playing once again! Freaky!

Goodbye Old Navy, it's been a blast!

Joshua Budman, Employed Graphic Designer

2007-05-27T13:19:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, I was my frist day at Jets, Sets and Elephants. The office is located at the corner of St Laurent and Cremazie Ouest. Not being familiar with the bus route and due to the bus strike, I got up really early and ended up getting there extremely early - before 8am. I went for coffee but by 8:30am I got bored waiting around and went upstairs.

Once inside I got a tour of the office. It's quite nice with many little offices and a few cubicles. there is a giant kitchen with a fridge and not one but two microwaves. They also like to brew coffee continuously throughout the day, so I think I'm finally going to get hooked on the stuff (for years I've been convincing myself I dont' drink "coffee" since I usually have fancy coffees like mochachinos or caramel machiatos at Starbucks).

I got to meet everyone at the place and they all seem very nice. I soon discovered that I have my very own office with a brand spanking new mac computer, a huge monitor, my own phone with an extension number and even my very own kleenex box!

I didn't know what to expect on the first day, but my new boss got me started right away! We sat down with he marketing person and we discussed what is planned for the company, how they want to produce about 17 different lines of products marketed for all kinds of people. Then I was given my first little project deadline, which was to fix up a particular label set on the computer, print them out, cut them and paste them onto bottles to have a mock up (sample) of the real thing. I was really surprised that when my boss came to check up on me and we ended up playing with the label file together, that when I gave a suggestion on something we should try, that she actually took my advice and tried it out, instead of giving me a speech like "well you're new and I've been doing this for 15years so your input isn't good enough" or something.

All in all, my first day was great.

Growing Up Way Too Fast!

2007-05-15T22:49:00.000-04:00

I've noticed a lot of changes have been happening in my life, all for the good, but still they are changes.

I finished school in December and didn't really know what to expect in the new year. In the past few months I've gotten pretty frustrated looking for a professional, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, got booted out of my room while my brother, sister in law and nephew were living with us and at times even felt lonely.

However, things are starting to look up. I started to crack down in my job hunt. I've been preparing the past 2 weeks for a networking party held on Thursday. The agenda of the party is to give a 1 minute speech about myself to an audience of about 150 companies. Following the speeches, we are then given a chance to talk to all the employers who are interested in us and swap cards, info, etc. To prepare for this event, I totally redesigned my resume (making it more graphical looking than a simple word document), created a new business card, and am currently designing my very own website.

Today things got even more interesting. I had a second interview with a new company that is starting a new label for beauty/toiletry products. They are looking to train someone just out of school and seem to think quite highly of me. In fact, it freaks me out a bit since now I feel the pressure is on and I"m really going to have to work at it to keep this image they have of me as true as possible. I"m not exactly sure on my specific work tasks but I'll be working under the art director who will act as a mentor and really get me involved in the beauty/fashion/marketing realm. I'm also going to have to work with the team and not only listen to what ideas they have to offer, but offer my own ideas as well. I get to use my chemistry skills of researching journals for experiments by researching for trends in the market - what's hot, what's not, etc. It sounds very push-pull. I'm going to get my own office with a brand spanking new Mac!

With that in mind, I'm going to have to quit my job at Old Navy. I'm playing with the idea of maybe working on Sundays, but only time will tell.

I've also noticed a change in my need for going out. I've started to slow down a bit. While in Australia, I went out almost every night (of course, I was on vacation). Now I go out maybe twice a week and I've hardly been drinking. I haven't gotten drunk in the longest time. This may partly be due to my getting older in age. I think the fact that I"m dating someone is also a factor. Yes you heard correctly, I'm dating someone. I really don't want to go into detail so here's the answers to the obvious questions:
-It's been 3 months
-She's Jewish
-We met through the Internet

Since dating someone, of course I've been spending a lot of time with her, and also driving more downtown, hence the decline in drinking. Plus, instead of going out partying all the time, I've come to enjoy just staying home and watching a movie.

So as much as I can only hope for more positives changes to occur in the future, my plan right now is to handle all the current ones and see what happens.

Getting older sure is scary!

Sunday Night Improv at Théatre Ste. Catherine

2007-04-22T23:44:00.000-04:00

For the longest time I have known about the weekley workshops held on Sundays at Théatre Ste. Catherine but have never had a chance to go. Tonight I finally had that chance, and went.

The actual workshop was form 5pm - 7pm. I got there a tad earlier and bumped into Dan, who is a regular at TSC sunday night improv, and a (former?) member of McGill Improv. Inside I saw Anders (from Uncalled For) as well. The workshop itself was quite different from the McGill Impov workshops. You literally have to run up to get in a scene. Also, the "director" will stop you if need be and give you pointers/suggestions/add elements to the scene, etc. They try really hard to push technique and knowledge and try to build a scene, putting being funny on the back-burner. We went over basic terminology. A few of it I was familiar with and a lot of other stuff I never heard of, but am now aware of it.

After workshop there was a 1 hour break followed by a "Survivor" improv game. The way it works is that all the participants get a number and are randomnly called onto stage to play a game or do a scene. After the scene, the audience votes on a scale from 1 to 5 - one being the worst, five being the best. The players in that particular scene each gain the points the scene made. Then they have 2 elimination rounds and when it's down to the final 2 people, they play this "hat" game where both performers do a straight scene but anytime during the scene, when someone reaches the other's hat and grabs it off their head, they win. If they attempt to reach the hat and miss, they lose. Best 2 out of 3 makes you the winner of the Survivor game.

I was nervous when I volunteered to participate in the game, but I gave it my best and it was worth it since I ended up second.

After the show, there was a small discussion on how well they show went. Overall it was well liked. The director said he enjoyed a lot of the scenes that didn't get a lot of laughs a lot more then the ones that did. All the scenes I were in did well but I think it was a lot of gag laughs, mostly due to my part. The one thing that was brought to my attention during the discussion was that I played a panicked person in each game. Little did the director know I wasn't acting (I was hyper ok!) .

In the end I really enjoyed performing with new people and trying different things. If I get a sunday off work again soon, I"ll make sure to hit it up.

Pitch Black

2007-04-18T23:25:00.000-04:00

Tonight I went out for dinner with Norm, Lauren and Aurit. The restaurant being O'Noir. The whole thing is that you eat your meal completely in the dark. Also, all the waitstaff are 75% to 100% blind.

Our reservation was for 9pm (they have meals set up twice a night). We walked in and each got to choose 1 entree and 1 main dish and 1 desert from a list of about 4 choices for each part. On top of the choices given, there is also a "Suprise" dish option. I didn't really like any of the entrees they had to offer so I decided to live dangerously and ordered the supirse entree. OFr the main dish I chose marinated shrimp with rice and chocolate cake for dessert.

We then met with our waiter, Guillaume (who was wearing sunglasses) and he instructed us to put a hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us and in a chain like motion, we were led inside the dark, to our table. Except for a faint light coming from the exit door and sign, it really was pitch black. In the background was nice chill music. When we got there they had Lamb playing which would eventually change into some moe upbeat stuff that reminded me of the Love Boat. Finally when dessert arrived the music had switched to St. Germain. All in all it was very relaxing.

After several minutes Guillaume arrived with our entrees. I tried eating it with my fork but quickly started to use my hand to feel what I was eating (since it was a suprise) and to help guide food onto my fork or into my mouth. I immediately recognized the salad with cucumbers I was eating but I had some squishy fish smalling thing. I tried it and it tasted okay but I kept thinking it was squid and decided not to eat it (turns out it was shrimp and scallops, which I love, so I guess not know what you're eating really puts thoughts into your head).

After chatting a little I finally started to relax (for some reason as soon as we hit the dark, I tensed up). Our main dishes showed up. My shrimp were delishious.

Dinner was followed by dessert which I found was more difficult to eat because I kept using my hands to help and there was melting ice cream all over my plate, thus making my fingers extremely sticky.

Judging by the noise we heard, there were probably 3 or 4 other groups of people there with us.

After who knows how long, we finally called over Guillaume so he could lead us to the exit so we could pay.

Even though Aurit didn't want to eat any of the main courses, they were kind enough to let her join us at the table and only have dessert. Each meal was 30$ but she got charged only 7$.

In the end, it was expensive, but definitely something worth trying once in your life. It's a totally different experience to eat and enjoy the company of others when totally in the dark.

A night with David, Usher that is

2007-04-18T19:09:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to see David Usher (former frontman of Moist) with my brother last night. THe show was really good. It was at Club Soda. It only cast around 25$ and was a very intimate show. Him and his band had a lot of energy even though some of his songs are slow.

They mostly played songs from his new album, Strange Birds, and most of his hits from his other albums (I believe he's had 5 now as a solo artist). On top of those, they played 2 Moist songs (Push and Ressurection) which really made me happy and they did a very interesting cover of Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. It couldn't of sounded any more likea David Usher song when they were through with it.

There were two encores and for the finale David Usher let tons of girls (~30) sit ont he stage while he sang in the crowd (earlier he was walking around as well with no security at all!).

He really has a great voice and sounded no less better than he does on the records.

Budman gives this show 2 thunbs up.

Why my life should be made into a sitcom - Reason #243

2007-04-12T18:59:00.000-03:00

It came to my attention taht today was a job and training fair at the Palais de Congrés. Although it didn't seem like it was something specific for graphic designers, I decided to give it a shot and attend. I went and printe dmy CV, dressed all nice, brought business cards and even my portfolio.

As soon as I got there I realized I had made a great error as all the booths were more for specified jobs (the Army, Home Depot, McDonalds, etc.). I figured, though, since I was there, maybe I could talk to a few booths and see if I could get info on their graphic design departments. I start walking around and decided to approach a booth:

Booth guy: "Hello"
Me: "Hi"
BG:"How are you today? What can I do for you?"
Me: "I realized that this fair is not really for me, but you see, I"m a graphic designer looking for work and I saw on your sign the word 'marketing'. I know that marketing and graphic design are related so I was wondering if I could get some more info on your company"
BG: "It's telemarketing"
Me:"oh... right..."

The Way You See Me

2007-04-11T22:04:00.000-03:00

A few weeks ago I went to a confidence building workshop called "Know it, Believe it, Sell it!" for tips on how to keep up my spirits and not get discouraged while looking for a job. One of the exercises we were given was to choose a bunch of words from a list that I thought best described me. The next step is to get people who know me to choose words from the same list that they think best describes me, and then compare them with my results.

The point of the exercise is to find out if others percieve me different in ways that I see myself (both good and bad) and if so, maybe i should try and change things (or not change things that I think I need to).

So faithful readers (friends, family, creepy old guy) I ask you humbly to look at the following list of words and post an anonymous comment with the words you think best describe me. Please answer truthfully and seriously:

Focused
Serious
Creative
Honest
Planner
Energetic
Dependable
Aggressive
Opinionated
Down to earth
Pragmatic
Effective
Balanced
Judgmental
Expressive
Reserved
Helpful
Generous
Responsible
Calm
Assertive
Objective
Giving
Anxious
Go-getter
Selfish
Tired
Thinker
Outgoing
Worrier
Organizer
Flexible
Artistic
Arrogant
Passive
Untrustworthy
Leader
Carefree
Sensitive
Procrastinator
Kind
Scatter-brained
Unreliable
Fascinating
Concerned
Happy
Controlling
Cautious
Follower
Shy
Dreamer
Frustrated
Social
Hard-working
Excitable
Antisocial
Nervous
Self-centered
Fair
Sad
Adaptable
Rigid
Spontaneous
Gentle

Thank God You're Here!

2007-04-11T10:17:00.000-03:00

Monday night i watched NBC's newest improv show called "Thank God You're Here". The premise is that every episode there are 4 "celebrities" that guest star per episode. Each celebrity is brought back stage and given a costume they have never seen before. Then they are brought back up front where host David Allen Greer directs them through a door which leads to set they've never seen. From there, they have to improvise their way through the whole scene with actors who have set lines and whose first line is always "Thank God you're here!". The scene goes on until judge Dave Foley (who got SO old looking) hits a buzzer.

After each guest does thier scene, the final scene is done with all 4 together. Finally a "winner" is chosen and receives some plastic award (The Summit awards are way cooler looking).

The episode I saw had Wayne Night (better known as Newman from Seinfeld), Bryan Cranston (the dad from Malcolm in the Middle), Joel McHale (some guy I don't know) and Jennifer Coolidge (Stiffler's mom from American Pie).

I'm not a professional improv player but after doing it for 4 years I could tell some of it, although funny, was pretty bad improv. For example, Wayne night was dressed in a white medical jacket and was plummeted into a scene where he had to promote some sort of pills. When asked certain questions, instead of accepting everything he was given, he was blocking pretty badly ("Actually, I'm not a doctor at all, and those aren't vitamins, their supplements to vitamins"). Although he got some laughs, I felt that it got tiring after a while.

Also, after 1 episode, I feel like i had enough. The rest of the episode wasn't too bad, neither was the 2nd episode they aired afterwards, but I dont' know how much of that I could really take. It was funny, but the way it's set up, it's as if the actors are always leading the scene and just allowing the celebrity guests to "insert joke here", and after a while it gets boring. The only person I saw to somewhat break from that was Bryan Cranston, who immediately got into character and was trying to push his way through the scene which I think truly made him deserve winning the episode.

It's already April!?!

2007-04-03T19:20:00.000-03:00

Either i'm getting busier and busier or I have less improtant things to talk about but I notice that my posts are getting further and further apart.

So what have I been up to that's been keeping me so busy?

Not a whole lot...

but lets see:

-Since December i've been done school and looking for a professional job in graphic design (anyone know of someone hiring?). It's been so tough with everything going on (distractions, work, losing interest, etc.) but I'm trying hard to stay focused. I've been meeting with councelors, going to workshops and sending my CV out on the itnerent almost everyday. I may be in luck. A teacher recomended me to her friend whom I'm meeting on Thursday. I'm not too sure what he does or what he's loking for but let's hope for the best.

-I"m still working at Old Navy which is becoming more and more fun (surpisingly). I've been there a year and a half!

-In March I was busy getting involved with McGill Improv. We had Vaganza at the beginning of the month and The Summit at the end. I've been busting my balls to get the summit website (http://improvsummit.com) updated but it's so time consuming. I promise really soon there will be photos from the event, which was a BLAST by the way! McGill Improv didn't make it to the finals but I had the honor of participating with member from Sherbrooke, UQAM and U de M against members of Ottawa, Toronto and Carleton for the All Star Round.

-Right now it's passover. Last night was the first sedar and it was a typical family dinner here at the Budman house. Both my brothers were over with their wives (and son), although my brother Mark and his wife connie and son Charles live here, so they didnt' have far to go for dinner (just a long walk up the stairs).

-It's really hectic around here with the extra people in the house, but my brother put an offer on a house and may possible move out to it in May! I can handle a month (originally it was for July!). It's been great hanging around with my nephew though. He's the cutest kid ever (And the craziest). I taught him to say "awesome"!

-Also, today happens to be Emilie's birthday. She's now 23. Although I've only known Emilie for a short time (since the summer) she's got to be one of the coolest, hippest, interesting (and possibly craziest) chicks..er I mean "girls" I know. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Montreal Parking Meters SUCK!!!

2007-03-19T20:45:00.000-03:00

I'm currently downtown waiting for the others to show up to practice improv the summit on Saturday and I'm totally bummed! I had the chance to use my brother's car ro drive downtown but unfortunately I got to learn how shitty the meters here are!

First I put in 1.25 and it gave me about 25 minutes. I went to get 5 loonies and went back. I added 3 loonies and it only gave me an hour! Then I thought maybe I needed to do something special to add time to what I already put in and I hit cancel.

That was the worst mitake.

Not only did I soon discover that no matter what it would just reset what I already paid for, it DIDN'T give me back the 3$ I just spent. So I put in 2$ more and only got 40 minutes! Now I have no change... BOO!

Is it like this elsewere because this really sucks...

The fun side of an (semi) unemployed person

2007-03-19T14:01:00.000-03:00

Yes I've been looking for a job but that hasn't stopped me from having FUN!

In the past month or so I've gone out at least once a week. At the beginning of the month I partook in Vaganza 7 and it was awesome! I stood up the whole 24 hours and performed improv almost every second hour.

With work, I went to a sugar shack a few weeks ago. I volunteered to watch a couple of kids from a community church while they were bused to a sugar shack for the first time. I had 3 kids, 2 girls and 1 boy and they behaved greatly (both girls were 11 and the boy 8). It reminded me of the time I worked at Sunny Acres Day Camp. There was a part when the kids were entertained by a guy singing who was teaching them songs to sing and dances to dance. I participated as well and realized I was the only adult having as much (or more) fun then most of the kids.

Two weekends ago, I went out with my friend Emilie. I hadn't hung out with her in ages. We went to see this show spearheaded by Jason Bajada. I never heard of him but he was one of Emilie's favorite musicians and the show was quite good and chill to listen to.

Last week I went bowling with a bunch of people at Sharkx. I actually
bowled pretty damn well. In my second game I got a turkey (3 strikes) and scored a total of 164.

This past weekend was also loads of fun. Saturday was not only St. Patricks day but it also happened to be Aurit's birthday. The night started with dinner at 3 Amigos with a whole bunch of her friends followed by drinking at Thursday's.

Yesturday I went skiing for the first time in 3 years. I went with my brother Lorne and my friend Arvind. We went to Mont Broment and it rocked! I had SO much fun and the view was beautiful. The weather wasn't too cold, it was icy but there was also lots of soft snow and we skied from late afternoon well into the evening (9pm) so we got a bit of day and night skiing in.

Who says you can't have fun when you're not working?

Life of the (semi) unemployed

2007-03-19T13:44:00.000-03:00

As most of you know, I graduated from a Graphic Design program in December 2006. I still work at Old Navy part time and have been spending my free time looking for a professional job. By "looking for a professional job" I mean "kinda sort of" looking.

I will admit I have been putting in more effort than before. I joined 2 organizations that aid in teaching skills to help find jobs. Both of them have excellent workshops I've attended and I have a counselor in both who also give great advice. I have about 4 websites I check for job postings and have been sending out my resume a few times a week. I even cut my days available at Old Navy so I could spend more time concentrating on the job hunt. I fixed up my resume and even printed some business cards.

I'm also building a website for the improv summit happening this saturday (March 24th) - http://improvsummit.com
It's not finished yet but when it's complete I'll have something non-school project to put in my CV.

Although I've done all these things it doesn't seem like it's enough. I still need to put my portfolio on the web, make my CV more graphical (it's only in word format now), start researching for companies in the field and start concentrating on cold calling. Cold calling is basically calling a company without knowing the person you are going to talk to. The whole point isn't to call asking for a job but just to learn more about the company/industry. The outcome to put your name out there while also discovering more about what it's like to work in that field.

I will admit I've been a bit distracted as of late (for example I didn't do anything this morning because I went skiing yesterday and I'm completely exhausted).

I'm going to keep trying to update this blog but as you can tell the posts are more spaced out. That's because lately I find it so hard to be structured while not having a concrete schedule, which hopefully will occur in teh next month or so.

Vaganza 2007 - 24+ hours later

2007-03-03T23:32:00.000-03:00

Vaganza is OVER! It started yesturday at 12pm and concluded today at 12pm. Due to a meeting I had with a counselor at JEM, and partly due to the snow "storm" we had, I was only able to make it to Vaganza at 12:30pm. After a quick bite, my first performance was at 1pm.
For the most part, until 7pm, there were probably at most 5-10 people in the audience who were not improvers. At 7pm, Uncalled For, the first special guest, took the stage and the audience had definitely grown to 20-30 people. This stayed like so for most the night, with some traffic of people coming and going. 3am marked lock-down with this years theme being After maybe 4am, all the audience members left and remained that way until 11am where a whopping 2 people showed up. It sucks that we had such a a bad turnout due to the bad weather.

In the end, we all had fun, I managed to stay awake the whole time (by 5-6am I was having a great difficulty doing so) and we raised about 200$.

For pictures click HERE!

After Vaganza I went for lunch with my mom in which I found myself blacking out mid-sentence several times. I promise never to make fun of my dad again (who has a sleeping problem).

Until next year!

Also, don't forget the OTHER big improv event: IMPROV SUMMIT! It's on the Saturday, March 24th. Universities involved include Carleton, McGill, U de M and UQAM.

Best sense of direction EVER....

2007-02-25T12:21:00.000-03:00

Friday night I was driving down to Laval. By accident, instead of heading North, I went South. Unfortunately, I didn't really know which direction I needed to go specifically, I just knew by sight that I hit the wrong exit. That being said, I knew I just needed to go the other direction (but did not actually know which direction I was going not, which was South). No problem. I just needed to get off at the next exit, turn around and go back on the 13.

Not so sweet.

I got off at the next exit but ended up on another highway (250) heading West. Ok, so I was now going back towards my house, no biggie. Just get off at the next exit and turn around... The next exit was Dorval! I drove past the airport! Finally, I got off at Cardinal dt. turned around and ended on the 520 est. I was getting somewhere!

And then more lost...

When I hit the 13 yet again, I accidently went South. Again. This time I didnt' even know it and I drove all the way until the highway stopped existing and it turned into the 20. Again I got off the next exit, which was Lasalle!

Anyways, 45 minutes total of driving, I finally made it to Laval.

On the way home it took me 15 minutes.

ON the bright side, I'll never forget to go North to Laval from now on.

VAGANZA 2007!

2007-02-23T15:56:00.000-03:00

That's right. McGill Improv's annual 24 hour spectacular is back!

Click the picture to read all the info!

For those who don't go to McGill, it's in the Shatner (SSMU) Building located at 3600 McTavish way up the hill on the left.

When you're done with us, there's Nuit Blanche, an overnight festival happening all over Montreal. Sleep deprivation of 48hours! Hooray!

Note: The word Vaganza was chosen for the sole purpose of it being a shortened version of the word Extravaganza and has no affiliation with the word Vagina (although they look/sound the same). That being said, I had no intentions of a pun when I put down "Unlimited re-entry" (in fact I only realized this after I printed it)

Job Hunting Sucks

2007-02-21T19:48:00.000-03:00

I finished my graphic design program back in December. At first I used the holidays as an excuse to dick around. Then I sort of looked around for jobs but was getting so many leads from my recruiter, was busy working on stuff for my client and was working a lot at Old Navy.

Now it's almost March, I haven't had an invitations for an interview, haven't heard back from the 2 interviews I did have, stuff with my client is on hold and Old Navy cut down everyone's hours. This leaves me with tons of free time, and I"m bored out of my mind. I know, I know, you're probably yelling at your computer monitor now wishing that you had nothing to do because you're so sick of work/school/killing hookers and burying them in your farm, but a lot of nothing to do gets boring after a while. I've been going out a lot lately but don't feel I deserve it because I spend my days either in front of my computer (reading Dr. McNinja comics), watching tv or a movie on TV or going downtown.

On the bright side I did start to apply to more jobs. On the really shitty side, I just discovered today I had 2 spelling mistakes on my CV from DAY ONE! Unfortunately I don't own a copy of the program I used to type up my CV (Quark Xpress) on my PC at home (actually I downloaded a ripped version. It worked fine and I was completely surprised until I realized I can't save for some reason...). So, I have to go to school to fix it up. Would someone night hire you for misspelling urgency as ergency?

I did go to a YES (Youth Employment Services) orientation and learned that networking is key. Anyone need a graphic designer??

New book time!

2007-02-08T18:55:00.000-03:00

I was reading Tad Williams Otherland series. I read the first book and really liked it. The second one was SO bad. It just kept dragging on and on. I wanted to finsihed it but I lost it. That goes to show how much I really wanted to read it all. After not reading anything besides a couple of Maxim magazines I decided to buy a new book. I was looking into getting this book a friend recommened about Professional pick up artists. It looked really interesting but WAY to expensive for me (40$!). So I opted for Stephen King's Dark Tower book 1. I heard good things and decided it's time to try it out. A nice 10$ price tag helped seal the deal.

Job seeking looking up... way up

2007-02-08T18:27:00.000-03:00

Today I had an interview for a graphic design job at Joseph Ribkiff (designer womens clothing).
In typical budman fashion, I had to print my portfolio (yet again, this happened last time) the DAY of the interview. This time however, I didn't even have time to eat breakfast. Last time I printed my portfolio it cost me 50$ because I got charged each time they had to open a file. They suggested the next time I put it all in a PDF file and that way I only get charged once for the open fee. So I did and it was cheaper. Yay! But all the prints came out with slightly different colors due to the program. Fuck! ("Oh! I like it much better that you changed the background from purple to blue" "Wait... I didn't change the backgr... WTF?!?"). Thankfully no one that looks at them would realize those are different colors so I'm in the clear.

I made there at 9:52 with my interview at 10:00am. I realized when I parked I forgot the person who I needed to meet's name. After screaming on the phone at my mom to turn on my computer and find it, I was all set. I run inside, and a couple of people walk by from both directions, one with a bunch of clothes. Reminded me a tad of "the Devil Wears Prada, but not as crazy.

After rushing in and being told that I had to wait, I put my coat in the closet and sit down. I look around and realize, Amélie, my former classmate and friend has been waiting there the whole time. She had an interview after mine.

The whole interview was 15 minutes. I met with the person, sat down, got asked to explain myself, she flipped through my portfolio faster than 747 jet, explained to me that they need someone to make layouts and work with photos on all kinds of jobs and finished with the fact that she'll need to try me out for a little "test". At most I'll be given a logo and a picture and text and just need to make a small poster or something.

So I'll just wait and see

McGill Improv Masked Ball

2007-01-28T01:38:00.000-03:00

Last night I attended a formal masked ball. It was great. The people who organized it put lots of effort decorating the ballroom with all sorts of theatre props (including giant puppets hanging from a rope). There were a lot of interesting masks. I felt that the fact it was a masked party, a lot of people seemed to act slightly different. Perhaps the masks made people feel secure and incognito or soemthing. I know I felt that way a bit.

For pics, click HERE!

Budman strikes back

2007-01-25T01:39:00.000-03:00

Last night I went to Grumpy's Bar to perform stand up comedy at the Open Mic Night. After watching my old video of me doing stand up 3 years ago I decided to give it abother shot. Unfortunatley I got so busy I didn't really have time to prepare properly. Having a pint and a half before going on stage also didn't help - I was pretty tipsy and was having trouble seeing straight. Fortunatley for me, the guy before me really sucked and I got a bunch of laughs.

A bunch of my friends came otu to suport me. I was told by many of my friends that I was pretty funny. In the end, I thought I was really sloppy but I did get some laughs from other audience members (i.e. not just the pity laugh). I was even told that some of the other comedians thought I was funny, so that's cool.

Turns out the host of the night, who is a comedian, was at the open mic night at the Comedy Nest back when I performed the first time. He even remembered me and after my set, gave me his card and told me he know runs the open mic night at the Comedy Nest and suggests I give it a try there. I might in the future but i think I need to come up with some better jokes before I start running there.

Here's a video of the night:

My very first interview

2007-01-25T01:24:00.000-03:00

Yesturday was a long day.

Still being tired from 12 hours in front of the computer the day before, I had to get up early and run to a print place near my house to print my portfolio. It cost me 40$ but with less than 2 hours until my interview I didnt feel like running around for prices. I had 30 minutes to eat breakfast and put the sheets in proper order in my portfolio book.

I showed up on time and met the woman who was to interview me. It was an interesting interview since we moved from the cafeteria to her office and then to conference room because we kept getting booted out from where we were talking. She showed me a lot of the stuff they do there and explained to me what I'd be doing. I'ts all very cool and interesting.

The only snag I hit was when we had a tiny argument over nothing. It wasn't anything bad it's I was making apoint on something and she thought i had made amistake and was trying to correct me by explaining to "right" thing. The only problem was that the thing she was re-explaining to me is a ket thing to know if I wanted that job and although I didn't want to correct her, I also wanted her to know that I did in fact know what she was talking about (even though that wasn't what I was trying to talk about from the beginning). So, in all Budman history, things got awkward for a few minutes, but not enough to have narrowed my chances to have the job or anything.

She told me that she had other interviews to do first before she could let me know if I got the job or not.

Trying hard not to stress

2007-01-22T19:48:00.000-03:00

I have an interview tomorrow.
It's 5:50pm.
I've been infront of the computer since 10;30am laying out all my work so I can print it out in a professional looking way.
Some files are so big it's taking like 20 minutes just to open and save in the right format.
The printer place upstairs closes at 7pm and I still have 8 other things to layout before printing.
I don't htink I'm going to have time to print tonight at all.
I hope I can get it done tomorrow so I have a printed portfolio before I show up at t he interview.
*sigh* That's what I get for waiting last minute. Man I got to learn to stop doing that...

In the style of blurry

2007-01-22T00:49:00.000-03:00

I aolmost forgot! Here are some photos of the trip and a short video too!

Toronto Improv Competition 2007

2007-01-21T23:28:00.000-03:00

This past weekend, University of Toronto, hosted a small competition between 8 Universities. McGill Improv accepted the invititation and a bunch of us took the road trip down for the weekend.

My brother Mark happened to need to go back to Toronto the same weekend and had a rented minivan with space for some friends and I. In total we were three cars. Car #1 was myself, my brother, Jeremy, Holly and Chris. Car #2 was Fiona, Nestor, Auralie and Adrienne. Finally in car #3 was Arvind and Bryan (Arvind call his car Melissa).

The plan was to leave friday night around 5:30pm-6pm and leave from Toronto sometime in the afternoon. We hit our first snag when my brother Mark and I went to pick up the rental. When asked to suply my driver's liscence, I discovered I no longer had it. After desperately trying to remember what I had done with it, I recalled that recently I had gone to play some pool at a pool hall and had used my card for collateral for the pool balls, and I guess I never got it back. So, we were stuck with 2 cars and only 1 person legal to drive at the moment. My brother's solution was to give me his car keys so that I could go to the pool hall to pick up my own liscence and that i meet him at the house. So I drove without a liscence to go get my liscence. At the place, the guy looked through all the cards and mine was the last one. Phew!

Chris and the others showed up at my house at around 6:30pm-7pm due to traffic and we were on our way. We stopped at Kingston where we met up with car # 3 and had a deliscious PIzza Hut dinner. However, upon our arrival, Arvind recieved a call from car#2 claiming that they hit a WOLF. There was minimal damage to the car, but the wolf was dead and they had to fill out a police report. This became the recurring joke of the weekend, it was awesome.

After, dopping off my brother at his place, we all met up at our hotel room by 2:00am, to which we stayed up another hour or so drinking! (who needs sleep, we're on vacation!).

Saturday was a packed day. We got up and headed to Ryerson College where we met with the Ryerson Improv team and did a workshop together. It was great meeting new people and trying some different things. Afterwars we got free pizza!

Once the workshop was done, we headed over to University of Toronto fo another workshop. This one was run by Jerry Schaefer, an instructor for the Second City. He showed us some great exercises and games focusing on emotions and being physical characters. I enjoyed it a lot and felt exhausted after finishing the 3 hour workshop.

Next was dinner and then returning to U of T for the actual competition. The format of the competition was to have 4 teams compete on friday night and for on saturday. Each team had 25 minutes to perform their set. Any games were allowed. The points were half made up by the ratings of 2 guest judges and half by the audience. The 4 teams of saturday night were ourselves, Ryerson College, Queens University and our good buddies from Ottawa, the Carlton Improv Association.

The order of the teams ended up being CIA, Ryerson, Queens and finally us. The atmosphere of the night was really good. At first I felt SO tired but when went on, all this energy came out of nowhere. I had a blast! Everyone from our team agreed that we put on a good show and really kept the audience entertained. We were even introduced as the Wolf Killers.

At the end of the night the votes were in. Ryerson came in 4th with 19 points. We were 3rd with 29.5 points folowed by Queens with 30.5 points, which left CIA with 1st place with 35 points! In the end we were all glad we made it to 3rd because the 1st and 2nd palce teams had to perform the winners of the pervious night at the finals on Sunday at 7pm. By then none of us wanted to still be in Toronto, so it worked otu better for us. Plus I was glad to hear that CIA kicked ass. I hope they do a great job tonight (good luck guys!).

After the comp, we al lheaded to a nearby bar called O'Grady's and chatted the night away. Hopefully, a bunch of these gus will make it out to our Iprov Summit in March.

Sunday, I parted was from teh group to spend time with my brother and try to head back to Montreal a bit earlier. I got to see my nephew Charles in all his glory.

Somehow, we left at 3:30pm and got to my house by 8:30pm. No wolves were harmed.

I'm on Youtube!

2007-01-18T01:03:00.000-03:00

Recently I found a copy of a video of me when I tried stand up comedy at the Comedy Nest for the first (and only) time. It must have been at least 3 years ago. I remember that day. I wrote up a few jokes and a friend of mine, Dave Akerflug, ran the Open Mike Night at the time and recommended I should try it out. I invited EVERYONE I could and ended up filling the place with friends and family - about 40 people.

Actually, I don't think I did such a bad job. I remember being really nervous but I adlibed a bunch of stuff.

I just realized if you listen really carfully halfway through you can hear someone say "God! That was horrible."

Adventure Time!

2007-01-16T23:00:00.000-03:00

Oh man this cartoon is AWESOME!

"It's time to believe in yourself" "NEVER!"

And no, that's not a pic of a kid giving an old man a blowjob...

Whats been going on

2007-01-16T02:19:00.000-03:00

Since finishing school, everything has been so different. My whole routine is out of whack. I guess nowadays, everything is revolving around my work schedule which seems to be totaly random. Somedays I work at night, others during the day. However, I have been pretty busy lately. Here's a recap of my past couple of weeks:

Been spending more time with my brother Mark (he does live with me now). From tiem to time we play his favorite game Scene It. Yuo watch clips on a DVD and answer questions. He has a bunch of versions - Tv, Movie, Movie Extended Pack and James Bond. Usually we play the TV version first so he can kick my ass and then I kick his ass in teh movie version. Both of us equally suck in teh James Bond version.

Speaking of James Bond, I saw Casino Royal with my mom. I liked it. Daniel Craig as teh Blond Bond isn't too bad. I quite liked the beginning action sequence but dreadfully hated the lagging ending (it could have ended after the bad guy died!).

I started to work on my portfolio. I even saved some jpeg versions of some of my work and soon will have them up for all your viewing pleasure.

I got my first client, ever. I'm to make this guys website. I already started the design and waiting to hear his feedback and to get paid for the first part. I'm really bad with the money part but i've ben getting help from my "lawyer".

I unexpectedly had the opportunity to aply for a wicked job, so I made up a resume super quick and sent it off. Fingers crossed for an interview soon.

Norm came back from Australia and brought me VEGEMITE! It was so good to hang out with im at Ian's party that I attended on saturday.

Prior to that party I was at a belated New Years Eve party which kicked ass! There were so many people there in this tiny apartment and it was a lot of faces I hadn't seen in a long time. I had a better time that night then actually on New Years.

I acquired a damn cold this weekend and have been feeling up and down. I went to take some cold medicine and after taking it discovered it expired... in 2003! I felt fine this morning but was worried I'd feel ill or something. I actually slept quite well.

I'm really looking forward to next weekend. I'm heading to Toronto with McGill Improv to participate in some competition being held by University of Toronto. My brother happens to be going back to Toronto anyways and rented a van so it made things uper easy for my friends and I!

Under Construction

2007-01-03T17:11:00.000-03:00

I decided for another new year, it'd be nice to have my blog looking different. Having spent a year studying graphic design, I thought it'd be fun to add a custom look to my blog. Unfortunately, it's tad more complicated then I expected and I may have to do some learning before I can get this to resemble something more exciting. So please, don't be scared with the slow changes that will be going on in the near future.

On another note, on New Years Eve, I went out with a bunch of friends to 2 house parties and a club.

Pictures of the night can be found HERE!

Highlights of the evening and new years day included:

- Having vegetarian tacos at Tiffany's

- Getting a call from Norm and Lauren in Australia

- Having a some of Glen's Sea Dog blueberry beer that he brought back from Boston and forgot about until that night

- Being told I looked like I was a member of The Hives by the way I was dressed (It was by Glen but cool none the less!)

- Going to a house party filled of drunk french people

- Asking host of said party how much it costs to live there and getting the response "Who are you?"

- Piggy backing Kelp down some street in the rain

- Finding out after walking 10 blocks that we were heading the wrong way.

- Stopping at some random alley for a piss and finding a really cool graffiti picture of spiderman

- Meeting some chick at the last party who then asks me if I met friend Chris, then she walks away. I turn to Chris and ask how long they have been friend's and he says "I just met her tonight" so we realized we got the ol' 1,2 and called her back. After 5 minutes of debating, another girl comes up, grabs the chick and open mouth kisses her. To this day I don't know if they were lesbians or if it was a ruse to get away from us

- Drinking rum and coke out of a bowl like a cat

- Spending the day at Emilie's watching Freaks and Geeks

- Leaving Emilie's by almost walking down to the basement until corrected on the proper route to exit the building

- Eating slamon patties made by my mom for dinner

- Bowling over 150 with my brother Lorne

-Getting my ass kicked in Halo at my buddy's place.

2006 - A year in review

2007-01-03T16:13:00.000-03:00

2006 and is over and done with. This past year went by really fast. As 2006 began, I was still riding the high from living in Australia (as I had only been home for 3 months). My everyday schedule took a turn as I returned back to school to study graphic design. From then on I basically worked hard at school and worked hard at Old Navy.

On the downside, a lot of my friends moved away in 2006 and I stopped going to improv due to too much school work. On the other hand, I made great new friends and found the time to participate in a wide selection of activities. Those included:
- Manhunt
- Kareoke at Dollar Cinema
- A Medieval dress up party in February
- A murder mystery dinner party in Hudson
- dancing at Jupiter room (with porn on the TVs)
- Watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with friends dressed up as Oompa Loompas
- Dressing up as Cobra Commander for halloween and ending up at one of the craziest free open bar parties I've ever been to
- and of course the several music concerts I went to:
- Death Cab For Cutie/Franz Ferdinand
- We Are Scientis/Arctic Monkeys
- The Dresden Dolls/Panic At The Disco
- The Raconteurs
- The Tragically Hip

By the end of the summer I went on a roadtrip with Glen and his 2 buddies, Steve and Jay. It rocked! we had an amazing time in Boston. Party Bus!

By the end of the year, I finished my graphic design program. it was a relief in a sense but I soon realized that when I have nothing to focus on I get sad and lonely. While I did have fun over the holiday break I felt like something was missing. Like I didn't have an urge to really do much. I think the fact that I was all alone at home for a week while my family in was in Toronto may have had something to do with that. Then my parents returned with my brother, his wife and son, and the house just became filled with noise. It' s been kind of hard at home with the extra people and having to live in the guest room.

Thankfully on monday things wil get a bit in order. Connie and Charles go back to Toronto and I get my room back while my brother Mark gets the guest room. My plan is to also start working on my portfolio and start job hunting.

Happy New Year everyone!

A Budman Christmas

2006-12-26T03:13:00.000-03:00

For a holiday which I don't celevrate, I had a pretty damn good time this year.
It was very relaxing and I really needed that.

On Christmas Eve, I got out of work an hour early (6pm instead or 7pm) and headed downtown to my friend Eric's for a Jews Night Out Party. The night was supposed to be anight of just playing xbox but ended up entirely different. I got treated to vegetarian take out Chinese food (who would have thought that general toa tofu would taste so good?). Then we played a round of Scene It - Friends Deluxe Edition (who would have thought how annoying that theme song could really be?).

The rest of the night was spent playing cards and listening to music.
Note: when at a party with a homosexual couple and you're asked the question of why you don't like a certain song (Daniel Powters - Bad Day to be specific), do not answer with "Because it's GAY!"
Note 2: When such an answer is used, the proper thing is to try and ignore having said it and not to try to fix things by saying "oh I didn't mean it like that? I just mean um... that I don't like that song... um...."

Christmas day morning was spent watching Nacho Libre. This was followed by heading to my brother's house. At his place we played Scrabble. It was a really fun game with words such as "aloof" and "ching". My favorite move was getting "oy" and "yenta" at the same time! I ended up winning by totally fluke. I was behind 17 points but I got rid of all my letters and my brother was stuck with only 1 letter... whcih happened to be Z worth 10 points! Haha it was awesome.

By afternoon, I learnt that the open invitation and Scrabble was just a ploy for my brother to get to come over so he could slave labour me into helping him remove stuff from his ceiling in his basement that was being renovated.

Two hours later, we went to his brother in law's and had, you guess it, Chinese food!

The night ended with watchign Running On Empty, a really boring movie with River Phoenix and Judd Hirsch.

All in all it was fun times!

Merry Christmas all!

Spring Cleaning in December

2006-12-21T15:01:00.000-03:00

Now that I'm done school, I'm cleaning out my room. I stumbled on a bunch of old records from my brothers collections. They seem to have a lot of great stuff that was popular back then (Example: Pink Floyd - The Wall/George Micheals - Faith). My question is, are well known records of any value, or is it just rare stuff? I'm not hoping to sell them for money or anything, just curious on how these things work.
(For some weird reson my brother has multiple copies of Tears for Fears...)

Kareoke Queen

2006-12-19T01:54:00.000-03:00

Sunday night was Kevin's birthday celebration. Since I hadn't had a chance to celebrate completing school, I decided to go all out.
We went to Boite a Kareoke and sang our hearts out. I did quite a few songs, even Backstreet Boys - I want it that way (but with changed lyrics. I want it that way = Which backstreet boy is gay, etc.)

Here are photos and video (!) from the night:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v155/registeredname/Kareoke%20Night/

I'm DONE!!!

2006-12-15T16:40:00.000-03:00

Two exams and a presentation later (the latter 2 being a complete joke), my final day at Interdec College is complete. It's been a grueling 15 week/3 semester year of school and it's finally OVER! Now I don't know what to do with my life...

Well thats not entirely true.

The plan for now is to work full time at Old Navy while simutaneously having fun and working on my portfolio.
After the holidays I'm hoping to hit up the job services office at my school and see if they can help me find a job. In the meantime, I was given contact info for a 1 month stage in NDG that are looking for someone to build a simple website for them. If I can do that and still work at Old Navy i would totally consider it.

Now that I"m a professional graphic designer, don't all ask me for favors at once.

I CAN"T BELIEVE I"M FINISHED SCHOOL FOREVER!

Just stay calm...

2006-12-08T13:14:00.000-03:00

Next week is my final week of school. In exactly 1 week from today I will be a graduate of the graphic design program at Interdec College.

I've been pretty on top of things that I'm not too stressed but it's been tough staying clam with all my projects and exams and the fact I've been sick every 2 weeks for th epast 2 months.

On the bright side, I just got an extension on one of my craziest pieces yet!

On the down side, I was just informed that the computer technician of the school took it into his own hands to attempt to update the computers in the room we use and in the words of director of the school, ended up "crashing the whole room". So apperently, all the data MAY be saved but the room is unusable right now.

THANK GOD I backed everything (I hope).

In need of a beer SO BAD!

(but i"m not stressed!)

What a pleasant surprise

2006-12-04T01:22:00.000-03:00

Today, in the midst of doing school work infront of my computer, hence shuting myself to the outside world, my mom enters my room with a huge smile n her face. She then motions to someone outside my room to enter as well. In walks Kishan Salgado,a friend mine from when I was kid. We used to play together while growing up until about the age of 12 or so which is when his family moved to Toronto. I hadn't seen him in about 10 years!

He was in town for the hockey game with is girlfriend and decided to check out the old neighbourhood since a couple of other peopel we used to hang out with still live on the street.

Wow that was a crazy suprise and it totally made my day!

The Soundtrack To My Life

2006-11-27T12:08:00.000-03:00

recently, on Mariana's blog was a post about making your own movie soundtrack. It's simple: take your mp3 player/computer,etc. and put it on random. Each song corresponds to a life situation.

As of late, i feel like my life parallel's more and more to a teen comedy movie (think american pie but way funnier).
Here's the soundtrack to my life:

Opening Credits: Who Cares - Gnarls Barkley

Waking Up: Why Do I Keep Counting - The Killers

First Day At School: Unconditional - The Bravery
(yay glam rock)

Falling In Love: Song for the Dead - The String Quartet
(No wonder I have trouble meeting someone, i'm obviously insane...)

Fight Song: Fallen Leaves - Billy Talent
(at least THIS song makes sense)

Break up song: What's It Like To Be A Ghost - Taking Back Sunday
(wow ait really is a breakup song.. I think... it's angry though!)

Prom: The Grace - Neverending White Lights ft. Dallas Greene
(wow movie Josh has a way cooler prom than real-life Josh)

Lifes Ok: The Good In Everyone - Sloan

Mental Breakdown: On-Line - Gnarls Barkley
(watch out, I'm going to snap on MSN one day...)

Flashback: Sing - The Dresden Dolls

Get Back Together: Chances - Xavier Rudd
(wow, Australian alt-country slow rock with didjeridoos!)

Birth of Child: Hang 'Em High - My Chemical Romance
(gee, I can't WAIT to be a dad...)

Final Battle: Get it Together - The Go! Team

Death Scene: From The Ritz To The Rubble - The Arctic Monkeys

Funeral Song: Star Bodies - The New Pornographers
(I AM a star!)

End Credits: Three Or Four - The New Pornographers
(thats reffering to how many sequels there weill be, apprerently I'm NOT dead after all. Budman lives!)

Some of it really scares me how cool/accurate it is...
I also find it funny how I have 908 songs on my player with 50 groups but I got repeats of groups for the above...?

The Budman Update

2006-11-16T20:03:00.000-03:00

I've got one more month of school until I am officially a graphic designer (ok, I guess officially starts when I get hired...). I've been really busy as of late and things will only get busier. That being said, this blog probably won't be updated too often until after Dec. 15th when I'm done school. For those who actually come and read about my adventures here's a recap of what i've been up to lately:

-Been working on 6 final projects for school, each will be amazing (I hope).

-Still working at Old Navy but was lucky to get my schedule down to 2 days a week.

-Saw the Tragically Hip in concert for the first time. I think it's every canadians duty to see them at least once. It was a pretty good show. Loud.

-Got to see Sean, who was in town from Scotland. Us improv folked, laughed, cried and played games together it was loads of fun.

-Got my ass kicked in pool by Emilie, (I scratched the 8 ball 3 times).

-Bought Bonobo's new album Days to Come and it's AWESOME! It's way more upbeat than his first CD and different due to the addition of vocals.

-Bought a 2 DVD set of Looney Tunes cartoons and am dying to find people to watch it with me.

Ok back to work...

*End Transmission*

Cobra Commander Talks Halloween

2006-11-03T01:28:00.000-03:00

I know this post is late, but I couldn't help it! I've been busy fighting the 'Joes!

On Saturday, I was invited by the Society of Evil Bad Guys to a social gathering to talk about plans for taking over the world, evil inventions, and of course, girls. Leaving Destro and The Baroness for some "Alone Time" (Destro likes the hard whips...), I arrived at the designated headquarters. I got to chat with Venom, The Joker, Alex (from Clockwork Orange), The Zombie Scare Crow, and this new guy who didn't even have a name. He didn't even seem to have any super powers or anything. He just sort of bled out all over the place. I guess his evil plan is give harmful disieses to his enimies.

After an hour, Joe and Daniel Hawkins (from my favorite band the Darkness, next to Clay Aikin, of course) picked me up so we could rendez-vous at our equally evil friend, White Trash Bashalder. There, I got to have the most delightful chat with Teen Wolf. Did you know that Pert Plus really works? He never has a split hair, ANYWHERE!

Shortly afterwards, I recieved a call from Jackie Kennedy. Ok, the secret is out, her husband was the one who funded COBRA's operations in the 60's. After his death his wife and I remained friends. We'd chat over tea every thursday. She was in the neighbourhood and invited me to a shindig at a loft converted to a dance party.

I had to walk through an alley to get to the place, so I knew it HAD to be good. Inside I saw all kinds of characters - Thing 1 and 2 from Dr. Seuss, A Telletuby (the drunk one), both Borat AND Ali G, evil genius Tony Clifton, and evn Darth Vader. Woh that guy is such an asshole. He steals the designs from my metal mask and didn't even give me a chance to have a picture with him, let a lone simple thanks. I already gave the orders to Destro to detroy the Death Star. Take that, bitch!

I was crashing downtown and needed to attend the party at my final destination (Destro phoned and said he needed the place to himself, that dirty dog).
Upon reaching the apartment, I encounted more interesting people including the most evil person of them all, Chris Dye, the lawyer!

By 2:30am, The Joker and his friends crashed the party then decided crashing 1 party wasn't enough and ask me to direct him and his companions to the loft party. After kidnapping Adrienne, we returned to the Loft Party, dropped them off and then returned to Adrienne's in time to see all of her guests leave. This made her sad. I added all of those people names to my list of "people to kill". Zartan will be occupied for a while.

By 4am I was fast asleep. By 9am I was wide awake.

At 2:30pm I decided to invade Old Navy. Unfortunately they confused me with someone else and forced me to sell clothes. Little did the costumers know that I swapped all the good quality clothes with cheap imitations! Muhahah! (What, thats not evil enough for you?)

Not only did I leave my mark behind but I came in second place for best uniform ever designed (and won an HMV gift certificate).

Finally by 7pm I returned to COBRA headquarters and got a back to work on planning to destroy the G.I.Joes!

Pictures of my night can be found at:

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v155/registeredname/Halloween%202006/

Halloween 2006: Making of Cobra Commander

2006-10-30T01:14:00.000-03:00

In the past years I've dressed up as crazy characters. This year, what started a a pretty crappy voice imitation, turned into a pretty wicked costume.

This year's costume was a challenge for me. A lot of it needed to be sown and I don't know how to sow.

I researched online and found a great way to get the costume started. First I went and bought a chef uniform jacket:

and with the help of the ever awesome Amy, dye master extraordinaire, dyed the jacket blue:

There was a pocket on one of the arms which I cut in half and made int lapelles. Gold buttons were also sown onto the jacket.

I wanted to make the costume as home made as possible and I went and bought actual fabric:

The blue fabric was used to make the hood which I sowed onto a visor (with the front removed) to give some support on my head:

The fabric was then tacked in on the bottom to give it more rounded look.

The red fabric was used to for the logo on the jacket, which was completely sown on piece by piece

For the smaller logo, I traced the logo with a marker first and then just cut it off in one piece. I turned out so much better than had I cut it into piece by piece:

I bought a couple of belts and used carboard and black tape to make a gun holster:

(Augh, I can't seem to upload anymore photos... Thanks Blogger! You just nee to use our imagination)

A clothes line was into pieces and then twisted them to make a wider cord which was taped togther and sown onto the jacket into place.

Finally, red ribbon was used to make stripes along the pants.

Ok OK! So my mom helped me, what?

Using a 1$ security shirt I bought at a thrift shop as an undershirt, and the linning of my ski gloves, the costume was complete to give this years Budman's Crazy Costume.

Wedding Time (no not me...)

2006-10-26T12:07:00.000-03:00

Before I got sick ( I caught a stupid cold), I had a nice break from school work by attending a wedding in Toronto. My cousin Lori got married and it was a lot of fun. It was a different kind of wedding from one I've ever been to since it was a joint wedding (the groom, Dan, is Christian). They tried combining the two religions customs. The most interesting part was when they made both the groom and bride step on a glass. The music was ok (a DJ) but then the groom's brother who has his own cover band, went on stage and they played 80's covers and it was really well done. i got to rock out on the dance floor.

I also learnt a way how NOT to pick up a waitress. When at a restaurant and trying to get the e-mail of a waitress, when she screams out load something along the lines of "AUGH! just great! I got peabut butter all over my arm!", do not, I repeat do not reply with "Do you want me to add some jelly to that?" (hey I thought it was funny...)

Whats your genre?

2006-10-17T19:32:00.000-03:00

Have you ever looked at your genre list on your MP3 player? I'm not sure if it counts for all players but on mine (Creative Zen Vision:M) the songs can be listed by genres as labelled by the files themselves. Since it's all manually done, I think different people give the same genre different names. I found mine to be pretty interesting.

The list is as follows:
Acappella
Acid Jazz
Alternate rock
Alternative
Alternative & punk
Alternative rock
Alternative-rock
Ambient
Demo
Desert Rock
Easy Listening
Electronic
Electronica & Dance
General Alternative
Grunge
Hard Rock
Hardcore Punk
Indie
Other
Pop
Post-punk
Power Pop
Progressive Rock
Punk
Trip Hop
User Defined

Just Relax

2006-10-17T19:27:00.000-03:00

For past little while, I"ve been getting busier with school work. I've felt like I've been on the verge of a breakdown. Today, though, after evaluating what needs to be done and for when, I've realized it's not SO bad. It's still mad crazy trying to finish everything on time but when it's over, the outcome of my stuff is going to be sweet. I promise when I'm done school to post up my stuff that I've done.

Best Day Ever!

2006-10-09T09:35:00.000-03:00

No I didn't win a million dollars or got asked by 2 hot girls to join in their threesome, but saturday just turned out to be a really great day. Being that it's the long weekend and having to work both sunday and monday, Saturday was the only day available for me to have fun so I took off a day from doing homework.

I started the day with improv which was an excellent workshop led by Bryan. We were only 5 and had to do it outside which to me was bonus since it was so nice outside. I really learnt a lot at workshop that day and had tons of fun.

After lunch, I met up with my buddy Joe and we headed down to the Old Port to play Manhunt. The turn out was great. We had about 20 people and it was so busy in the area making th egame a ton of fun.

Following manhunt, Joe and I visited my friend Nadine who just had eye surgery done. Without her glasses, she was looking foxy. We had to bail early because I was invited to go watch a movie with my brother in the west island. Joe convinced his roomate Stephane to come with us he and drove us all the way to my house!

The night ended with the movie we saw - The Departed. All I will say is that it's the new Martin Scorsese film, it has an all star cast, is a remake of a Hong Kong film, and is about a cop who goes undercover in the mafia and a mafia guy who is undercover as a cop.

GO SEE THE DEPARTED!

Tired of Looking 17 pt. 2

2006-10-09T09:29:00.000-03:00

At Billy Ruffian's request:

Tired of looking 17

2006-10-04T10:33:00.000-03:00

After being mistaken for being the age of 17 all the way to 22 several times in the past few weeks, I've decided to grow an aweful beard (it doesn't really connect all the way...) a.k.a I've been too lazy to shave and I'm using this surely as an excuse.

Lets see how long this lasts.

Also tonight is LOST!

Steady As She Goes

2006-10-01T02:24:00.000-03:00

Tonight I saw the Raconteurs perform live. Those not familiar with who they are, they are aband comprised of Jack White from the White Stripes, Brenden Benson (a semi-famous solo artist) and half of a band called the Greenhornes. I liked their music on the CD but all I can say is that it KICKED ASS hearing them live. It was one of the best shows I've seen in a while,up on my list with my Franz Ferdinand experience. You all missed out by not being there (especially you Norm).

As a side note during the intermission between opening band Dr. Dog (which were pretty good and had one guy that was like Neil Young and one guy that was like Joe Cocker), this pretty chick started talking to me. She was talking to me about all these great shows she went to and how she drove all teh way from Vermont just to see this one. She was eyeing me a bit before the show started and I will admit I got a bit excited when she decided to strike conversation with me. That is until I found out she was only 16:
Her - "Yeah so my school is a lot smaller than the ones here so it's always fun coming to such a big city"
Me - "So you go to a community college or university"
Her - "No I"m in high school"

If The Raconteurs ever release a live CD I suggest you get it.

Some High School Reunions Don't Suck

2006-09-28T23:59:00.000-03:00

A couple of months ago I bumped into someone I went to high school with during one of my shifts at Old Navy. We played phone tag for a while but finally got together tonight. We ended up at Winnie's to chat about whats been going on in the past 9 years! I found out she used to me married, she found out my mom still makes my lunch. In the end she even treated me for dinner! In return she told me I have to bring to her to an improv workshop because it sounded so cool to her.

Win win situation.

Great News

2006-09-28T20:07:00.000-03:00

After a waiting period of 5 weeks, my mom finally got the results from her surgery. Everything came out negative. There were no traces of cancer anywhere else. She has to have radiation done to ensure all the bad cells are gone but no chemo.

A relief for everyone.

Is this blog getting boring?

2006-09-23T19:19:00.000-03:00

Unfortunatley, nothing super exciting has been going on lately to really rant about. I feel like more and more I find myself looking for things to write about to keep this blog going. When I first started this blog, it was entertaining because it was new and I kept adding fun links to click on but it got hard to keep it up. Then I switched to ranting on all my girl problems which I no longer have (now my girl situations are just non-existant ratehr than problematic). The blog definitely hit a strong point with my Australia trip since I had tons to talk about. Since I've been back I guess I started with what my plans were and then a bit of things I was doing in school here and there but I found it difficult to post all of my art work. Fortunately I think I recently found a solution to that problem so keep posted soon to see ALL the stuff I've been doing since I started school.

I"m not sure what direction this blog should go into next. I guess I can always make it a porno site... naw that wouldn't work... ANy suggestions? In my photoshop class i"m learning a new technique everyweek, so I"m thinking maybe I"ll add a new technique on here just to show you all the kind of stuff i"m learning. Sound like fun? Also my dream is to one day have a web comic going but thats far away from happening since i need: ideas, create a look for the comic, and time, which I don't have much of.

So dear readers please don't stray far away. I'll think of something!

Just don't want to grow up

2006-09-16T01:10:00.000-03:00

Although it has been 2 years since I've graduated from McGill University, yesturday I was at Activities Night. For those of you who have not attended McGill, Activities Night is a clubs night where all the clubs set up a table and explain what they are all about in exchange for new members. Still being a member of McGill Improv, I thought it was my duty to come and help out. I also set up a small booth for Montreal Manhunt. 36 people signed up for Manhunt and were super enthusiastic, while we got 6 pages of e-mail for improv! Tomorrow is our first official workshop and I'm hoping a lot of people will show up. There seemed to a be a lot of people who actually knew what improv was and had performed in the past, so maybe out of the 100 or so people who signed up, some will actualy be interested in keeping McGill Improv strong since there aren't that many members anymore.

Suprisingly (to me at least), while I was there, I happened to bump into a bunch of people I had known. Then I headed down to Gerts with Adrienne and we had a beer together. Guess some things will never change.

September 13th

2006-09-13T19:55:00.000-03:00

Is 13 really that bad a number? I woke up this morning thinking th eworse thing about today was that it marks the 1 year anniversary of my return home from Australia (now I can't say I 'just' got back anymore). Upon taking the bus with my mom this morning, I later found out today was more than that, that today also marked the 2 year ammiversary of my uncle's death when he had a freak heart attack and passed away so suddenly. By mid afternoon I later discovered the day was hardly over. I was in class just returning from lunch at 1:15. We were waiting for 2 more students to return from lunch but the teacher decided to continue teaching. At about 1:30pm, they came in telling us that there has been peope shot at Dawson College just down the street. While the teacher was continuing with the class, I was reading on line the latest news on the situation. At the time there was rumors of 1 to 4 suspects involved and about 4 people shot. By 2pm my class got cancelled. Knowing that the metro would be out of whack and that for sure Atwater would be closed, my two friend Yusin and Amelie and myself walked down towards Boneventure Metro. I split up with them and headed to Pulp and Paper at McGill to pick something up and get some tea. While I was there, my friends who still work there were also reading about it and the rumors were spreading all over the net. I headed home by train to avoid the metro rush and when I walked into my house i turned on the TV. I was super suprised to find the news on CNN. It was truley starting to feel like the Columbine shooting. In fact on CTV but they even started to interview a former victimk of the Columbine incident. After watching the news for about 2 hours it is known that there was in fact online 1 shooter. There was a cop in civilian clothes that confused a lot of witnesses. The shooter was killed and it is thought the police are responsible but it is still possible he commited suicide. No one knows who he is, if he was a student or not. A bunch of people locked themselves in rooms to avoid the gun fire. Shots were fired all over the place and the final total was 20 injured. 11 people in the Montreal General hospital were being treated for gun shot wounds to the chest, abdomin or limbs. Last I saw on the news that 1 of the victims did die.

It's just crazy. I know it's a bit extremem to say it since I wasn't actually there but it is kind of freaky knowing this all happened about a block away. Normally my friends and I gfo to eat at Alexis Neon where the food court faces the back of Dawson, btu today I had a lunch and my friends walked to a cafe towards Guy rather than Atwater. Knowing tha tmost of us were freaked, I cant even imagine how the people who were right there when it happened are feeling right now.

Someitmes the world really is messed up...

Labour Day Wekend Blues

2006-09-04T13:26:00.000-03:00

Tomorrow marks my return to school. I'm excited since I've been working ful time at Old Navy for 3 weeks and can use a cange of pace already. Don't fet me wrong, I love working there, it's just everything has changed and a lot fo my friends that I have made since working there have quit or been transfered. Three of the managers are different from when I started there last October. Which reminds me, it's almost a year since I've worked there! I'll get my "1 year of service" sticker soon!

I realize I never finished my Boston story so here's Part 2 of Boston:

We got up early and hit the city for some site seeing. We decided to go and check out the Boston Tea Party Ship until I finally asked someone at a hotel for directions to which we foudn out the chip got caught on fire a few years back and was in Maine being restored. After that we decided to just wander the streets and saw all the historical sites and fun attractions - Boston Common, The Beacon, Royal Gardens, Cheers, etc. We ate lunch in Chinatown and it was delicious. We walked around some more and then hit up Paul Revere's house, then headed back to the motel.

After a nice rest and watching of First Blood, we headed back downtown with the car. We actually went to the outskirts of the city and ate the the Cornwall, a really nice pub. Glen wouldn't stop commenting on this excellent sandwich he ordered.
After dinner we cabbed to bar scene at Quincy Markets and met up with Karen and her friend Jen and a married couple that was friends with them. While Glen was off doing his thing with Karen (just talking!) I was keeping Jen and the couple company and they must have had a few too many to drink because apperently I look exactly like Larry David. I can understand since I"m short, fat and bald. Then they decided I looked more like George Castanza.

Anyways, after a fun night of drinking we decided to head back home and coudln't hail a cab. All of a sudden this trolley bus decked out with lights, loud music and a smke machine shows up and tells us that for 5$ we can get a ride anywhere so we jumped on. It was pretty hapening on the bus with lots of people and the music and all. Thirty minutes pass an still no one exited the bus. I'm sure the guy was lost. We were driving around forever. Eventually every one got tired and started to sit. The music started to get annoying but luckily after about an hour on the bus, the generator blew and all the music and stuff stopped. Eventually we ended up at the car but by then I had fallen asleep and was woken up when we got there.

Sunday morning was an early breakfast and a nice drive back to Montreal with a quick stop in Lebanon for lunch at this really good sub place. ONce in Montreal, we were invited to stay at Glen's place for dinner. The highlight of the night was Glen's mom calling me Budman the whole time. Steve and Jay drove me home and that concluded a great trip!

Being my last day off before school starts, I'm hoping to finish some things on my computer so it's all ready for when I start school tomorrow. I'm almost done making web files of my graphic design work so I can post them up later.

Otherwise today feels like a pretty long and boring day...

On a sad note, I found out today Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter died today by getting stung by a stingray while filming his show. R.I.P. Steve Irwin!

The LOST post

2006-08-28T23:00:00.000-04:00

OK I came on to update my blog just now and noticed that my last post, which I had wrote as an excuse to keep people entertained knowing I wouldn't be up to posting for a while, was never actually posted but saved as a draft. So here is that LOST post:

My internet has been down for the past couple of days so I have not been able to update and continue my story on Boston. I promise to continue it very soon. In the meantime enjoy these little snippets:

-my mom is feeling fine and her stitches come out tomorrow
-my buddy Glen is leaving tomorrow for BC. Good luck to you buddy and sorry! I forgot to chip in for the beer!
-I played manhunt on saturday and it ROCKED! I didnt' get caught in the second round and I ROCKED!
-All of a sudden all these people want me to do graphic design jobs for them, yay!
-I'm working all this week including tomorrow morning at 6:30am
-I start school next week
-I'm now off to bed

A Day To Be Remembered

2006-08-22T21:55:00.000-04:00

Today is a day several things:
1) I havn't told that many people but now seems like the right time. A few weeks ago my mom got the results from her mamogram and the discovered a small tumor in her right breast. It was the size of a cherry pit. Today it was removed. My mom is doing fine and she's already itching to do all the crazy things she normally does. Our fingers are crossed that this is the end of it but the test results to see if there are anymore growths int eh neighbourhood will be available in about 2 weeks. So now we play the waiting game.

2) On another note, today just also happens to be my brother Mark's 40th birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARK!

3) On the same note, today just also happens to be my buddy Owen's 22nd birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY OWEN!

Budman in Boston

2006-08-21T13:55:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I went down south to Boston with my buddy Glen and his two buddies from high school, Jay and Steve. I will have to say that it turned out to be an amazing trip with no worries and everything just fell into place. The whole time we had very loose plans and just went with the flow.

Friday morning I got picked up by Steve and Jay around 8am. We headed to Glen's place in the south shore where we swapped cars. We had chipped in a got a rental for the weekend. I can't remember what model it was but it was a full sized car and it drove very well and had lots of leg room.

We made excellent time, only stopping once for lunch at some place called Pour Boys in Manchester. I was suprised when we past Lebanon, MA, because I thought the others were pulling my chain until I saw a sign.

We made it to our motel room around 5pm. We were actually staying in Beverly which was about a 40 minute drive from the city. We had rented a kind of an apartment type of room. It was fuly furnished, had 2 rooms, 3 beds and a pullout couch which I suprisingly had excellent sleep on. Breakfast was included as well and the owners were pleasent and very helpful with directions.

Not even there for more than 20 minutes, Jay, Glen and I went wondering over to the local supermarket and bumped into a girl named Gina who was on her way to the restaurant she works at. She recommended we go there for dinner and that she'd help us out with some tips on whats good to see/do, etc.

Once we settled in and got washed up, we headed out to Not Your Average Joe's where Gina was working. The food was quite good and Jay had fallen in love with this blueberry beer he tried called Sea Dog. It was quite good. We thanked Gina for her kindness and good service and she even admitted that she lived in the area and gave us her number if we wanted to get together or something. Actually our relationship with Gina over the 3 days was quite funny since by the last day she mentioned on the phone that she was the "Icon" of out trip which is actually hilarious since we played phone tag and never actually got together...

After dinner we decided it would be our best interest to actually drive down to the city rather then train there and cab back. Steve was kind enough to volunteer to not drink and we were off. We got kind of lost but ended up parking on this street called Newbury. We walked around and hit a few bars including The Other Side Cafe and Bukowski's. At Bukowski's I bought a pint of this beer called He'Brew. The tap handle was a little rabbi figure. I thought it was funny until I actually tried the beer which was absolutely HORRIBLE. It was REALLY strong and I couldn't finish it. By then I had a pretty horrible headache and thought I wasn't going to make it the rest of the night.

Fortunately, a friend of Glen's, Evy, and her two friend, Amy and Liz, came to meet up with us and the bar we went to was pretty happening that I hit a second whim and actually enjoyed myself the rest of the night.

The bars close at 2am in Boston so when we got kicked out, with a lot of direction asking, we finally made it out of the city and back home.

I decided to split up the trip story a bit as not to make each post too long. Expect to read more about it later.

Also, check out photos HERE!

Life Imitating Art

2006-08-15T23:15:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, I leaving school to meet with my mom and was running late. I was at school copying files to my USB key. While doing this, I was listening to Mobile on my MP3 player. They are a band from Montreal and their album Tomorrow Comes Today is quite good. Anyways, they have a song called Montreal Calling and the video for it just has this guy (I think he's a thief and stole something) that's just running his hardest down the street. When I was ready to leave and start heading towards my mom, I decided I was so late I needed to run. Just as I started to bolt up the stairs and leave the building, Montreal Calling comes on my player and lasted almost the exact time it took me to get to where my mom was.

I'm so cool.

DONE!

2006-08-10T11:05:00.000-04:00

After 3 months of hard work (the end was getting killer), I handed in my last file today at 11am. I may have seemed stressed as of late because of the work load but doing the actual work was a lot of fun. There are somethings I designed that are ok and others that I quite like and i dont hate any of it. In fact, for most of it, when I started workign on it I didn't think anything special but as I neared finishing the work it got better and better. I promise to post the things I made during my 3 weeks of vacation. It may take some time though because I really have to sort through everything, convert the files to web files and back it all up on cd. I'll probably space it out and post by course or something. Thanks to everyone who helped me through the semster!

As for my time off, I have 3 weeks to relax. Although, I had uped my availability at the Navy and they may recruit me for more hours. On the bright side, I like working and can use the money. Before I get all into work mode, I found out yesturday they goofed and didn't change my availability for next week so I'm only working 2 days unless they change it since I reminded them i'm available anytime (that goes out to all the ladies too) so I may get a chance to really relax for a bit.

Almost done

2006-08-05T12:25:00.000-04:00

It's always comforting coming to school and the security guard at the sign in booth says "Welcome home"...

One week left! I can taste it!

Oops... I mean... SUPRISE!

2006-07-27T18:38:00.000-04:00

So the otherday I was writing how I ALMOST spoiled my friends suprise birthday party by accidently mentioning some hints to her. Well it turns out that Yusin DOES read my blog and the party is cancelled. On the otherhand, instead of being disappointed with me she is quite excited and cheerful since it turns out every year someone she knows throws her a surprise party and let me tell you, this screw up was not expected at all.

Now, instead of meeting at her place for a suprise dinner, several classmates and I are gathering for dinner tomorrow night at Angelina and Guidos right accross the street from my school which gives me a chance to work hard tomorrow and then make a stroll over to the restaurant.

Speaking of school, I'm really feeling the fists of the homework really tightening around my neck and the more I try to rush through things the more i feel that I'm falling behind, so I"m quite happy to be celebrating mine and the other's birthdays to keep my sanity, haha.

Only two weeks left!!

Smooth...

2006-07-24T17:50:00.000-04:00

My classmate, Yusin, is turning 25 on thursday. Amelie, another classmate, contacted me through MSN several times telling me about a get together at Yusin's for her birthday. In her messages she mention Yusin's dad a few times. In my head I kept thinking "why is Amelie inviting me and not Yusin, to her own party" and "what does her dad have to do with anything?" until today when I saw Yusin in class and said "So I heard about our little get together" and she says "what get together". At this point little spark plugs starting going off and everything made sense - it's a suprise party! Oooooops...... Quick thinking, I turned extrememly red and started making absolutely no sense until Yusin made me explain myself to which I replied that sometimes I mix up people and told her I was talking about my friend Nadine's party. I also explained to her how once I was invited to a party and saw the host at school and went to confirm the place and time until I realized the person was actually not who I thought she was but a complete stranger...(that really happened so it wasn't hard to make it sound believable). Well hopefully I didn't ruin anything and lets REALLY hope Yusin doens't read my blog... haha....

In other news, I saw Lady in the Water. I liked it but it got really mixed reviews and is not in anyway a scary/horror movie. It's more of a fantasy movie. Think The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe with less plot and a shock here and there rather than the Sixth Sense or Signs.

In the music front, I picked up a few albums as of late.
Thom Yorke - The Eraser. I like it but it;s kind of tough to get into. It's sooting at parts and very like some of the stuff from Kid A - more electronic and less band heavy.
Muse - Black Holes and Revelations. I'm having ahard time getting into it but it's not a bad album. The only song I can say I really like is the last one called Knights of Cydonia
Angels and Airwaves - We Don't Need To Wisper. I heard bad things about this one but decided to get it anyways. I havn't even listened to it yet except a second from each song to make sure they worked and from what I heard everything sounds the same.

Ok... so I didn't really gert that great music after al, now that I think about it...
well I need new music for my MP3 player. Anyone have anything they recommend?

Panic! At the Budman

2006-07-19T21:27:00.000-04:00

Been hard to post more than once a week altely due to 1. being to busy with school work and 2. due to point 1, have not done anything that exciting to post about. That's not completely true though since sunday I went to go see a show with Norm.

I had bought tickets about a month ago to go see Panic! At the Disco. I was excited to take a break from school work and go out and enjoy myself at a show. Plus, I hadn't had a chance to really catch up with Norm in a long itme so it was fun talking about movies and comics and crazy things we rewmember from our childhood like Eerie Indiana (if you know what that is, you're cool!).

The show was at the Metropolis and the opening bands were supposed to be The Hush Sound and the Dresden Dolls. Which reminds me...

Another exciting thing that did happen is that my dad was over kind and bought me an mp3 player for my soon to be birthday (1 week today!). I picked out the Creative Zen Vision M. It's pretty awesome and definitely the most expensive thing I own at the moment. It plays music, videos, show photos, has a radio, voice recorder and can be used as a hard drive. Number of gigs: 30. Number of songs capable of holding: several thousand. Number of hours it can play video before dying: 4. Number of times I've almost dropped it already: 1...

Getting back to the topic at hand, I had downloaded both of the openers current albums but did not have a chance to listen to them. The show was suposed to start at 7:30 but instead started at 8:30 because the Hush Sound didn't make it through the US border. It suscks to because since then, I have been listening to their album and it's quite good. It's called Like Vines and it's very happy pop rock music. I highly recommend it if you just want to be put in a nice chill happy mood. The Dresden Dolls, on the other hand DID play and i didn't like them very much. THeir basically a girl on a piano and a guy thrashing on his drums. The music is... interesting.

Finally, Panic at the Disco came on at 9:30 and they rocked. The stage had a lot of props. There was a backdrop of a windmill with a this giant fan with lights all over it. They had in huge letters Panic! At The Disco with each letter that flashed in bright lights and let's not forget the moon with a mustache, the fake trees and the drummers drum kit that lit up to the beats.

During the set, they had 2 chicks and a guy dress up in cabaret 20 style clothing and run around doing crazy things. They played most of their songs in the exact same order as the album which was a bit of a drag but they totally suprised Norm and I when they covered Karma Police by Radiohead and Tonight Tonight by Smashing Pumpkins. Teh worst thing of it all was that we were probably one of the handful of peopel who actually KNEW those songs since almost EVERYONE was 16 or younger and mostly female(yes Norm and I DID feel a bit out of place). Even before the encore, they had a little interlude where the cabaret people were getting the crowd all exciting by talking about each band members likes and dislikes and how they are all single and looking for love.

The encore was great and they ended the show with the last song on the album which is one of my favorite song from them. Then during the last rendition of the chorus, the singer just jump out into the crowd! (I hope he jumped into some bounders because I doubt a few 14 year olds would br able to hold him up).

After the show, Norm and I walked through the Just For Laughs area and showed up just in time to get lost in this crazy fantasy thing where loud music was being pumped out of speakers and there were people manipulating giant hot air ballon sea creatures. It was literally out of this world.

And now something COMPLETELY different: I just recieved an e-mail from Eugene. I havnt' hread from that guyin a couple of years and apperently he stopped writing e=mails a couple of years ago but decided to start up again. His e-mails are LONG! I mean REALLY LONG! Take ther length of this blog entry and multiply it by 5, that's be about 1/3 the length of the e-mail I just recieved from him. I won't go into specifics about the content (actuallY i'm not even have done it yet and it's been about 20 miunutes...) but he was just writing how he's still in chem and he was taking a safety courseon radiation so he can learn how to work an x-ray machine to do tests on chemicals in his lab. The funniest thing I read from him was this:

The tech guy made them watch a movie and was talking about radiation and stuff afterwords:

Tech Guy: We all get gamma rays from background terrestrial based radiation
anyways, how much is living beside a power plant going to do to you

Eugene: Well, if it blows up, you might be in trouble. For instance, I
lived really close to one that blew up when I was a kid.

Tech Guy: Which one was that?

Eugene: Chernobyl

(He's dead serious, he was born in Russia)

Waiting Time

2006-07-11T18:51:00.000-04:00

I'm currently at school. I've spent all afternoon working on this assignment for my photoshop II class. Basically, it's taking a scanned picture of woman from a magazine and then tracingit in photoshop using the dodge (shadows) and burn (hgihlights) tools. The result looks more like something that was done using a spray gun. I just finished doing the eyes and although not perfect (...yet?) it looks pretty wicked. However, due to the file being 425MB i ahev to wait 10 minutes until it's on my USB key. So here I am killing time.

Nothing new lately in my life except I recently got a raise at work. The yearly evaluations happen in the summer and mine was highly positive and I just have to continue dong what I'm doing. The want me to work there more btu with school, I'm going to have ot keep my 2 shifts per week limit.

Other than that, I got see see Adrienne, Mariana and Dustin who were both in town for Nikki's wedding (Mazol Tov Nikki and Rob!) and there was a party at Andrew's friday night so it was most of the improv gang back together again. It was a chill arty adn Bryan organized a kick ass version of the Family Feud on a whima nd it was quite funny.

The rest of this week I'm devoting to homework and will have to miss manhunt again :( Fortunately, I'm going ot be seeing Panic! At The disco on Sunday and that seems like a promising night for fun times.

Well the USB transfer is done. I'm out of here to shop for an MP3 player.

I Pod You Pod, We All Pod for iPod

2006-07-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

My birthday is coming up at the end of the month (gah!) and my parents have insisted on buying me a portable mp3 player as a gift. So much so that my dad has the money all ready to be spent this second. Unfortunately I've been so busy with school I haven't had a chance to research what's good/bad, new, or actually what's even out there. I've never owned an mp3 player and am unfamiliar with even the common features. I have been told that although an iPod is the most popular it's not necessarily the best. I do know there are two main times - smaller ones that are flash memory and larger ones that are like hard drives. Right nowI can say that I'm not too crazy about being able to watch movies on my music player but the advantage of getting a big hard drive one would be being able to store some of my homework on it.

Anyone recommend a certain brand or model? Or even a good website to check out for reviews? Any suggestions can help point me in teh right way.

I Like Rocks A.K.A My Trip to Ottawa

2006-07-02T23:12:00.000-04:00

Many months ago I had met Owen Hewitt through the McGill Improv Summit. Carlton University had come all the way from Ottawa to compete. I had again met Owen a month later during Vaganza 6. Since then he'd been inviting my out to Ottawa. I finally took up his offer and went out there this past weekend to celebrate Canada Day.

Friday evening at 5:05pm I was on a VIA Rail train headed to Ottawa. The whole ride was under 2 hours! I read a magazine half of the time and fell asleep for the second part. Once I reached Ottawa, Owen was there waiting for me. The two coolest guys in Ottawa were ready to party.

We reached Owen's lovely home where I met his parents and had a nice chat with his mom. She was very pleasant and had left us an amazing turkey dinner to eat. The highlight of the evening was when during our conversation, Owen's mom commented that I had to most elegant hands, to which embarrassed Owen. Also, him and his parents talked a lot about politics and history and religion - all subjects I"m not too knowledgeable on - which spawned our inside joke of "I like rocks..." Which one is to say when you are completely lost on the topic of a conversation.

After dinner, we had our first beer of the weekend. Well, Owen had more than one, but I'm a slow drinker and I had almost one. He showed his book collection and when I commented on how I always wanted to read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, he gave me his copy! He even wrote a note. That means when he becomes a famous poet I may have in my hands a one of a kind item. I can't wait to read it.

The evening was spent at his long time friend's Tina's house. She was turning 22 and to celebrate her birthday had a few friends over. I met a few cool people and we all chatted in the kitchen which was the tiniest room in the house (see Andrew, it's not just at your place that this happens...). Tina was having a fun time drinking and I got to watch her play this checkers game where each piece is a shot glass and when you lose your piece you drink it. It was fun to watch because she started to drink all the pieces, the ones she lost and the ones she moved and just anyone she felt like drinking. Her boyfriend Steph showed up and he was a cool guy. Owen and I got him cracking up so hard. The highlight of the night had to have been when Tina fell on the ground and withered like a fish behind her couch.

Around midnight I think, we called it a night for we had a big day ahead of us.

I got woken up at 9am and headed down to the kitchen for soem of Owen's world famous pancake mix pancakes. By 10:30 we were out of the house and on a bus to the downtown area. Already I was starting to sdee red and white everywhere.

Once we reached downtown, there were already tons of people outand about. Owen was dying to go see one of his favorite performers, Buck 65, who was to perform twice that day, so we headed immediately to his stage. Unfortunately we showed up near the end but I got to witness one of the coolest things. A bunch of performers - Buck 65, Kinnie Starr, some guy who played amazing accoustic guitar and this group called K'Naan, were all sitting on the tiniest stage just listening to each othet while a bunch of spectators like myself and Owen were able to just relax and listen. It was the chillest thing ever. I really admired how the other artists bobbed their heads to the one that was performing. We had only come in on the last song but I was told that each artist played 4 songs and they each took turns. We had missed Buck 65 but shortly after the show got a chance to talk to him while he was selling/signing cds. Owen got him to sign his lucky hat and had a nice chat with him.

Right next to the cd table was a both with this special guitar called the Six String Nations Guitar which was handmade from a bunch of historical pieces aof wood and what not including a piece of Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle and gold from Maurice Rocket Richards' gold ring. I even got a picture taken with it and will have it sent to me by e-mail. There was even a suggestions ballad for a name for the quitar to which I could only come up with "The Canada". I know, original...

It being the hottest time of the day, we headed to the Highlander, a Scottish pub that Owen traditionally goes to every Canada Day. There we listened to soem duo play classic rock tunes while we eat great pub food and had some beer.

After lunch Owen was kind enough to give me a tour fo the city and talk about all the historical sites and buildings. He really knows his stuff especially since h's studying history and wants to be a librarian. Once our tour ended, we hit the grass and I dozed off enjoying the cool breeze. When I had awaken, the sky had begun to get grey but thankfully no rain. We walked off our haziness (I think the sun/beer mix had hit me) and we had a quick dinner just after finding out that France had kick Brazil out of the World Cup.

By 7pm, we were back at Major Hill's Park to catch K'naan, Kinnie Starr and Buck 65 perform ful 30 minute sets. When Buck 65 came on, everyone rushed the stage and really got into it. He put on a great set and Owen was rocking out.

After the show, we had bumped into thsi girl that Owen had been playing phone tag with and had a bit of a liking to. I only later found out he had met her only once before but we were going to try and hang out with her and her 2 friends for a bit. As we followed them, I noticed then and all day rather, that someone had been writing on the ground with chalk stuff about "Bring Peace and Justice" etc. I think i even made a coment to Owen. Then suddenly his friend stops and starts to take out chalk and write the same thing to which I immidiately thought "oh...".

Nothing much was going on so we ditched that group and were about to head home until I rememebered about the fireworks and convinced Owen to let me stay and watch them. He knew the perfect spot to view them and they were AMAZING! Some were SO big and loud that you could feel the ground vibrate and it looked like they were going to fall on you. It was spectacular.

On the way to the bus, I could tell that all the families had left, leaving behind tons of drunken people read to fill up the bars since it was only 10:30pm.

Once we got to his stop, we debarked and somehow ended up walking right in the middle of a group of 14-15 year olds since teh sidewalk was narrow. Figuring we;d split directions at any moment, Owen and I made no attempt to pass the first half of the group. Unfortunately this went on for what felt like TEN blocks.

The night ended winding down in Owen's basement watching a hilarious episode of South Park to which the gang goes to Canada and it is all done in the style of the Wizard Of Oz. My favorite part being on "French Canada being the Best part of Canada".

Sunday morning I managed to sleep in until 11am. Really needed that. Thsi time I had Owen's world famous pancrepes because they came out kind of thin but tasty none the less. To kill time, we went and caught Superman Returns. My brother didn't like it that much but I thought it was pretty good. The effects were crazy but the bad guy plot could have been a bit better.

We returned back to Owen's and had a delicious BBQ with his parents and his brother Andrew who had come from Edmonton to stay with them for a week or so.

5pm came and it was time for me to say my goodbyes and head to the train station. Owen left me off and I got inside just in time to board the train. Almost an hour and a half later I had returned home to Montreal.

All in all I had a great time and a much need break from school.

Sushi Party!

2006-07-02T22:40:00.000-04:00

After a couple of weeks of craziness, I decided to drop all homework related stuff and focus on having fun. And fun I had.

Thursday morning I drove down to schol with the ol' van. I knew parking would be a bitch so I had planned to park in teh underground parking at in the building of my school. Unforunately I had a hrd time finding it and accidently drove down this incorrect very narrow, very curvy and VERY steep driveway to which I had to reverse out of (how I didn't crash the car I don't know...). Afterwards I found the parking lot and found a spot close to the elevator (with trouble getting into the spot. How I didn't crash the car I don't know...). I spent all afternoon fixing my menu project and I think it looks great. Sometime soon I will post the final edition of the menu of the made up restaurant I created called Bracha's (after my mom's hebrew name).

At 5pm I headed over to the rendez-vous point at Amin's (while almost breaking my dad's side mirror while exiting the car lot. How I didn't crash the car I don't know...). There, Amin, Norm, Lauren, Kevin, Mariana and Ian were there ready to hit the West Island. We took 2 cars and eventually met at my place. We decided on supplies and went shopping for food. Back at my house we spent the bulk of the evening making sushi using chopped cucumber, peppers, carrots and cooked smoked salmon.

Yes everyone got in on the fun:

Here's how most of sushi turned out:

and here's how my sushi turned out:

Once done, we did what you should always do after eating sushi - go play at a park! Yes, we relived our youth for a short while until we returned to my house to watch the Daily Show and the Stephen Colbert Report.

Then we literally crashed. Everyone basicaly mass slept on the pullout couch or occupied one of my spae sleeping areas. I wisely took my bed because in the morning the only complaint I got was about the house cuckoo clock which happens to go off EVERY 15 minutes.

Lauren had work at 9am so everyone save Ian and Kevin left at around 7am. I went back to bed however and only really got up at 10-10:30am. After cleaning up and eating, I brought the guys downtown.

Ian had wanted to be dropped off somewhere so he could watch the world cup. Fortunately a wicked spot opened up in time fo rme to grab it right in front of Carlos And Pepe's on Peel. Then when I went to pay for parking, Ian noticed a giant sign saying the place we were standing in front of was showing the game. We walk upstairs only to find a really fancy lounge with several T.V.s, couches and people wearing suits and dressy clothes, while I was wearing my cowboy hat and Ian was wearing a hoodie. Although we seemed out of place, no one cared and we stayed to watch the Argentina play Germany during overtime. Germany lost, but I thoguht it was a cheap win because they only won due to penalty shots. It was fun though, since Ian told me a lot about the World Cup that I had not known.

I then went home got soem errands done and got ready for my trip to Ottawa.

Small Break

2006-06-28T17:13:00.000-04:00

I've been SO busy lately with school. It's just been project after project. Actually, the way it works, I should be able to multi task but it hasn't been happening. I've been working countless hours to finish somehting just in time and right after handing it in, I'd have to START the next project which in the last case, was the next day. This week, I've also got the house ot myself since my parents are in Toronto watching my nephew, Charles, while my brother and his wife are in Vegas for his 40th birthday trip (even though it's in August?!) so it's been quiet in the house and with staying up late all alone working on stuff, I started to go a little crazy... I hadn't something in today half assed btu got an extension and on top of that instead of actualy having ot redo my stuff due to the mistakes, all I have to do is write a note stating I understand what I did wrong and what I would do to fix them. My teacher rocks!

Thankfully, I'm at the end of the hump for a short while since all my next projects aren't due for a few weeks. I was totally dying earlier in class and was totaly about to fall off my chair. Things are going to get crazy again but in the meantime I'm taking a break starting tonight. I'm gong to go see Nacho Libre with my bro. Tomorrow night is a sushi party at my place which should rock. Friday I'm off to Ottawa to hang out with Owen and celebrate Canada day. Nothing beats his e-mail I recieved the other day:
Dude before you come i need to know a few things: 1. Is there antyhing you can't eat besides pork? 2. What time are you do in? 3. Are you afraid of titties? We'll be seeing plenty on Canada Day 4. When is your train back to Montreal?
Oh Owen, how much we'll have together.

I better get back to work since i"m still in class but a quick blurb: We use a program called Quark that basically is a text editing program (for layout in magazines, books, panflets, etc.) and a feature in it is called Jabber Text. It basically fills the area with random text. I had apractice example to do in class and this is what came up in the jabber paragraph:

The Klingnons fight Quark. one Jabberwokcy marries two.

Holy Crap I'm screwed....

2006-06-19T23:52:00.000-04:00

I don't understand what I did wrong but school is just going crazy. I've been trying realy hard to keep up to date with things but today felt like it was all for nothing. I have this assignment due tomorrow. We basically only had a week to do it plus we have all kind sof assignments for our other 5 classes. The prof made a special class today to realy break into the assignment. My whole plan was to get most of it done during class and finish it off tonight for tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, the 4 hours of work I spent this morning was all lost. When I was transfering my file from my computer to my USB, I accidently transfered the file from my USB to the computer, thus erasing my new file with my old file. I tried cancelling the transfer once i realized my error, but upon doing so my new file diappeared completely. I t was frustrating but I kept my cool and realized I'd have to stay up late tonight to finish it.

There are 5 parts to the assignment and I was halfway through the first part this morning. Once the first part is done, the other 4 are the smae thing in different variations, thus would take less time to do. I finally finished th efirst part after a few hours and then flew through part 2. Things were looking good until I came to part 3 and was unsure what to do. Not to worry, I decided to just take a chance and get through the work, since it was already after 11pm. Then all of a sudden, what I was doing stopped working. I couldn't understand what was going on. Everything was fine and then it just stopped working. I then realized somehow I accidently changed one of the modes in the computer program. Unfortunately for me, I must have done it at the beginning for I noticed that both part 1 and 2 which I finished, were all set in the other mode. WhenI tried switching back to normal mode, all my work disappears meaning everything I did may be wrong.

Now I am frustrated and tired.

It' snto really a big deal since if I hand it in late I only lose 10% and now i cna really make sure i get everything right. It's just that I have another huge project due wednesday which I also have not finished and was planning on working on that tomorrow. Now that I can't I may ahve to hand that one in late too! I feel totaly swamped with work and don't understand how it happened all of a sudden.

I know I'll get through it all eventually but I just had to rant. It's shitty being in shitty situations.

It's 12am and I'm goign to be exhausted tomorrow which won't make getting my work done before deadlines any easier. I may have to become a hermit for a the next couple of weeks if this keeps up.

I could really use a hug right now...

Manhunt 5: The Return Home

2006-06-18T10:17:00.000-04:00

Yesturday was the 5th edition of manhunt. This time it was held back at where it all began, Carre St Louis (crack park) at the end of Prince Arthur and St Denis.

This time, instead of it being from St Laurent to St. Denis and Pins to Prince Arthur it was Prince Arthur to Sherbrooke. For added bonus, it WASN'T raining AND we had the St. Laurent street sale to help for cover.

For the first game the hunter was Marc D. Rowland, he's the real version of the character Robert Patrick portrays in Terminator 2. I ended up at Sherbrooke and bumped into Jason whom organized Frosh with back in 2002, so that was cool. Afterwards I hit up St. Laurent and saw no one so I thought i was safe. I was wrong. I turn onto Prince Arthur and was spotted. I ran back through the crowd and turned into a parking lot which led to a dead end. In the end Andrew caught me. The rest of the time I spent hunting people and got a couple of victims.

Round two was a lot better. I ended up staying incognito for 20 minutes. I was walking aorund the streets and then due to a scare, ended up at Carre St Louis and didn't notice anyone with the orange arm bands. I walked around, sat on various benches and hid behind numerous trees. Ken was standing behind one tree the whole time but I ignored him for he was definitely not caught. Some bystanders were kind enough to give me the heads up of hunters hidden in the grass on teh other side of the park. A couple of 11 year old girls walked by me as I peeked out from behind a tree with my hood up and said somethign rude to me in french and placed their hands in my face like I was thinking of molesting them or something and them showing me I was way out of their league. Finally I decided to make myself comfortable against a tree, glancing around every now and then. I kept that up for about 10 good minutes until out of nowhere Andrew comes and gets me. I was so confused as to how he found me until he pointed out to me that literally 15 feet directly in front of where I was standing were all the hunters who decided to quit a few minutes early, relaxing by a bench. I can't believe I didn't notice them. Admitting my fate, Andrew and I decided to get Ken. As We chased him, the two people who were hiding in the grass, Adair and Rebecca, thought they were going to get caught and jumpped out of their hiding place. I saw this and immediately changed my course for them. In a quick effort to escape, Rebecca jumps into the fountain and gets soaking wet. Apperently it was both her and Adairs plan the whole time but Adair chickened out last second.

Fun was had by all and we got to converse about it over great bbq food and some beers. Can't wait until the next one. Unfortunately I won't be around for the immediate next one since it's on Canda day but for those who can, I highly suggest it!

Rocking out with your block out!

2006-06-18T10:02:00.000-04:00

Friday night I went to see We Are Scientists and The Arctic Monkeys at The Medley. I had an extra ticket and was looking for someone to go with. In the end I went with Rachelle. I met her at Lauren's birthday party and she's Lauren's coworker at Starbucks. She's probably th emost positive enthusiasitic person I've ever met and never heard of either band but was really excited to go.

As for the show itself, I think I enjoyed We Are Scientists more than The Arctic Monkeys. I never heard of W.A.S. before buying tickets but I downloaded their cd and it wasn't bad. However, at the show, I really gotinto them because a) I knew all the songs and b) they had great stage presence. Their last 3 songs really rocked. The way the stage was set up, rather then take away the first band equipment and replace it with the second's, they had both drum kits on stage,one behind the other. Durting my favorite song on the album, I notice some guy walk on stage and take a picture of the crowd. At first I thought it was some roadie but then he sits down at the second drum kit and I immediately knew it was the Arctic Monkeys drummer joining in! He totally started to rock out with them. It was awesome to see TWO drummers do this kind of drum roll accross their kit at the SAME time!

After a great set, the Arctic Monkeys came on and they looked SO bored. The music was good but at this point I was farther away from the stage (we went for a bathroom break and lost our spot) and would have enjoyed myself in the mosh pit for I couldn't really jump around since it was so packed on the floor. When the singer did speak, you just couldn't understand him.

After the show I bumped into Dave Kolin. The last time i saw him was at the Franz Ferdinand concert. He STILL has to walk on crutches and he's going to rock concerts! He's truley crazy.

In the end, I did enjoy myself for having discovered a new great band, hanging out with Rachelle and buying a sweet Arctic Monkeys t-shirt (for almost the price of the show)

Celebrating Birthdays In Style Since 1998

2006-06-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

Today is Aussie Lauren's 19th birthday! Happy Birthday! To celebrate a bunch of us had dinner at Le Taj a fancy Indian Cuisine restaurant. Norm had told me it was a dressy night for us, so I wore my blazer, shirt and tie all day since I couldn't go home and change beforehand. All day people at school were wondering why I was dresed so nice. After the twentieth response of "to impress you!", I got bored and decided to tell the truth.

After a long and frustrating day (actually week) in front of the computer and not getting good sleep, I felt totally at ease (and tired) at the dinner. The food was great (I had butte chicken) and the company was even better. I had bought Lauren two Canadian tank tops at Old Navy and she appreciated them (or is really good at lying, haha), while Norm and Amin bought her a wicked dark red cowboy hat. Now I have a partner to hit the streets with in our fancy shmancy cowboy hats. To check out photos of the night click HERE!

Tomorrow is work and The Arctic Monkeys show. Yay!

This One's For Norm

2006-06-13T23:10:00.000-04:00

Been working all on an assignemtn that's due tomorrow. The assignment was to take something out of it's context. I don't how my crazy mind cam eup with it but I decided to take the poster for the Usual Suspects and replace them with characters from Looney Tunes. I drew all the characters by hand, then scanned them and traced it in Ilustrator and finally added color and text. I ran out of time and couldn't make all 5 characters so settled with 4. I'm totally exhausted and have a big day ahead of me tomorrow but promised Norm I'd post it before bed.
So here it is, enjoy:

Stupid Rain

2006-06-11T20:56:00.000-04:00

So the weather has been really crappy lately and I think it was starting to get to me. Thursday I finished one of my assignments but jsut couldn't get into the next one. I finally gave up and headed over to Amin's where he was having a "dye your hair" party. Well sort of. Him and Norm dyed their hair the other week (his a blue mohawk and Norm,s head was completely purple save a bright red exclamation mark on the side) and wanted to redye their hair again to make it more vibrant. Lauren decided to add red streaks to her hair and due to peer pressure decided to let her bleach a few streaks in my hair. She did it pretty randomnly. You can't notice it but I could tell that the hair where it was done looks all frayed and thin. In fact whenI was thanking Lauren on my cell phone and explaining what had happened to my hair, I was in the car with my mom and upon hearing the words "dye in my hair" my mom stops the car, put it into park, turned on the inside light and started to examine my hair. It's a good thing I didn't dye it bright red...

Friday I worked all day and for the first time in a long time had a headache. At the end of work, one of the employees (a girl still in high school) comes and gives me a hug and says "that's because you look so sad today". See how much the weather affects me!

Saturday was no better, I tried working on my MP3 panflet, right now it looks good but I wanted to move on and add thigns to it and just couldn't come up with anything that looked good so I gave up. Thankfully I had something to take a break from it for saturday night I headed over to Lauren's apartment to celebrate her birthday. In fact it was the first event of a week of things involved to celebrate her birthday (lucky suck...). We had desdert, some drinks and even some skipping in the rain. I ended up getting home and going to bed at 3:30am.

Bright and early this morning I got up and went to work (well only at 10am but still that was 5 and a half hours of sleep) and actualy had a lot of energy. I realized that outside it was sunny for abit and maybe thats what changed my mood. In fact I was so good I asked a coworker if she wanted to go to a concert together (I have an extra ticket) but things got awkward because I then realized that all the other staff memebers were around us (we were all exiting the mall) and I think it toally looked like I was asking her out which probably isn't the best since a) we're not really supposed to date co workers (not that that is my attention) and b) my boss ended up being right next to me and overheard. I lost my cool and hid myself in my jacket. Once outside I said goodbye to everyone and forgot to get my coworkers cel number so I could remind her about the show since it was like a "that sounds cool, maybe I'll come" kind of answer. I don't know when I'll see her next since the next time I work is friday which is the day of the concert. Oh well, at least I didn't pull a Budman and actually asked her to join me. Baby steps.

Portfolio Update

2006-06-11T20:23:00.000-04:00

I realize it's been a while since I've shown my progress in the work I've been doing for school so here's a few treats for my fellow friends and family.

For my image processing course, our assignment was to find a picture and make 7 copies. To each copy we had to make a drastic change like change the texture and color. Once that was done using this tool funciton in Photoshop called the History brush, where I was able to paint on top of the original using my 7 versions as if they were 7 different paints. It sound complicated but it's not at all.

Here is the original photo I used, a pictre of Sydney, Australia:

and here is what I came up with. I quite like it.

For my Visual Communication class, I have 3 small excercises I have to complete. I already finished the first 2. The first one was to make a self portrait without using your photo. In other words, to show something that represents you, soemthing that someon can look at and go "from this I can totally understand it's Josh". Wanting to be a little creative, instead of doing my first idea of making a collage of items that are meaningful to me and arranging them to look like a face or body (it's been done a lot), I decided to compile a bunch of words that represent me and arrange them so from far it looks like a picture of me.
Here is my result:

If you save it and then zoom in on my face you'll notice that my hair, mouth, contour of my face, glasses, etc. (basically everything except my clothes) are made up completely of various words. It took me a while to do but was more tedious than difficult.

Finally, the last new thing I have to show you all is the second excercise for the same class, which was to create a coin that has on the front some sort of image that represents my view on the economy. I don't really have a view but ended up somewhat choosing a view and came up with this.

More cool stuff to come, I promise.

Manhunt 4 et al

2006-06-06T09:31:00.000-04:00

This morning on the way to class, I was sporting my cowboy hat, my shades and was listening to INXS - Guns In The Sky. I'm the coolest guy ever.

in other news, I went to Manhunt on saturday and it rocked. As usual, it was raining off and on but was enjoyable none the less. This time it was played at Parc Jeanne Mence. There was a lot more open space and less building and pedestrians (especially due to the shitty weather) than the other times we had played.

During the first round I was walking with Adair, figuring out our strategy on how to play at the new region, just as we turned the corner to see the first hunter. Adair used me as bait and quickly disapeared as I was hunted down. I cheaply tried my open umbrella trick ( at the guys face - I know I"m an asshole) but it failed and I was caught. I spent the rest of the round running after everyone one and got tired fast. I did manage to tag at least 3 people.

During round two I decided to try something different. I was tired of running and thought if I pretended i was a hunter the whole time I wouldn't have to run as much. I was wrong. Fortunately it kept me untagged for 20 minutes. I fllowed Amy for a good 15 minutes pretending to hunt her and she just kept walking ahead. To keep up my facade, I kept stopping to breatj like I was out of breath (for the most part I was) and at one point I even deliberately dropped my umbrella to give her a chance to run away. Then I spent the next little while chasing after everyone I saw. It totally worked until Emily (who had known I was not a hunter at first) had since become a hunter and saw me and came to gave a high but when I jumped out of the way and ran, my gig was up. Out of nowhere appeared Norm, and I was a dead duck.

After the game we headed to Phil and Adair's for the usual beer drinking, hot dog eating, resting party. This time they were kind enough to let us throw our socks in the dryer. Thanks guys.

On another note, last night I saw X-Men 3. I liked it and totally needed to disappear into Movie Land for a while but if I had to rank the 3 movies from favorite to least favorite it would be X2, X3 and then X1. This movie definitely had a lot of action but they killed off a lot of people which should have brought a shock factor but it lacked something, and they also introduced a lot of cool new people but again did it in such a way and didn't use them so much that it lost it's appeal. Plus there are like a billion characters in the comics that I don't see the point in making up new characters for the movie.

The Advetures Of Budman - Weekend Edition

2006-05-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

My mom rushed me out of the house this morning, telling me we were going to be late for the bus. Then the metro broke down and she was worried I make my 8am class on time and sent me off to get breakfast on my own. So here I am in my class - all alone - just realizing class got moved to 9am on Wednesdays as of last week...

On the bright side, I finally have the time to write about my weekend which, as most weekends, was packed with fun.

Friday was my day off school and I was at Old Navy working from 3pm to 10pm. After work, my friend/boss Mike and I went over to my high school buddy Mike's house ad watched Hart's War. It's an older movie but I had heard good things so was iterested in watching it. It stars a pre-"I'm a hollywood bad ass" Colin Farrell and a "I'm starting to get too old to play bad asses in movies" Bruce Willis. In the end it was an ok film but I thought, being a war movie, it'd be more lke Savign Private Ryan, but instead the whole movie focuses on the racism that was going on in a POW camp between 2 african american soldiers and the rest of the camp. Not a typical war movie.

I had about 5 hours of sleep friday night for I had to get up early to meet Lauren downtown. I can't remember if I had spoken of Lauren before but a quick intro: She is from Australia and is travelling across the world. She is currently living in Montreal until the end of the summer. She only got here a few weeks ago, where by chance on McGill classifieds, met Norm and has since joined our circle of friends.

She had told me she bought a matress off of someone and needed help picking it up and moving it to her new apartment (which is not furnished). So I made my way downtown and we headed to pick up the matress. About 1 minute before we get there, I find out she had bought the matress for 10$ and had never gone to check it out. When we got it, it was old looking covered in all sorts of stains, but I'm sure really comfortable. Lauren didn't care, she said she'd wash it with disenfective and it beats sleeping on the floor. we carried it by foot to her new place that was just a few blocks away but unfortunately, we turned right instead of left and walked a few blocks in teh wrong direction before noticing our mistake.

Once we found her new place, her new roomate, Amy, let us in and we chatted for a while. Turns out the world is tiny. Amy just happens to be Norm's ex-girlfriend's best friend [Spaceball's quote: Lonestar - "What does that make us?" Helmet - "Absolutely NOTHING!"]

The rest of the day was spet helping out my Aunt. She's also moving into a new place. By far the funniest moment fot he day was when my mom asked me how the matress moving went. When I told her how dirty it was she screamed out in concern "That's DISGUSTING! She's going to catch AIDS if she sleeps on that!" Oh mom, how much I love you, haha.

Saturday night I went out dancing with Lauren, Norm, Amin, Kevin, Neil and Norm's friend Jetendra. Norm and Amin had just returned from NY and had dyed their hair. Norms is purple with a red exclamation point coming out the side and Amin's is shaved into a pseudo blue mohawk. I was sporting my new cowboy beach hat that I bought at Simons earlier that day.

We headed up to Jupiter Room in hopes of a packed place filled with dancing. Instead we found a dead place with hardcore porn on the TVs. Not just regular hardcore porn, either. Gigantic breast porn. Thankfully, they turned off the porn, replaced it with Caillou for a few minutes and stopped on Terminator 2. The place did get sort of packed and my friend Mariana and her friend were in town this weekend and decided to join us. It was great seeing her again!

After a while, the music got boring so we moved to Cafe Campus minus Mariana and her frien Rachel since they wanted to get up early and take full advantage of Museum Day. Cafe Campus was a lot better but packed. Highlights of the rest of the night include some random guy sticking his finger in my mouth while I was posing for a picture, and this random chick who decided to join our dance circle. Afterwards when we had left the place, Norm comes up to me and was like "You know that chick was totally into you but then you moved to the other side of the circle." Oh? "And then she gave up and went back to her friends who all gave her sympathy hugs for trying." Oh....

Norm was kind enough to drive Lauren and myself back to my house. No I didn't pick her up. On sunday was the Amazing Race 2 event organized by Hillel West Island and was supposed to be a race similar to the one on TV. To make things easier, Lauren crashed at my place. (That's for clarification for my brother Mark)

Suday morning, we got up around 11am and I got to make Lauren breakfast. Thankfully she wanted her eggs scrabled since it's the only thing I know how to cook! 12pm came around and my buddies Simon, David and David came to pick us up for the race.

The race was intense. I promise to write a full description of it in another post. My team ended up in 4th palce and Lauren's team bailed the race at the halfway point and she went home early, but had a lot of fun.

Sunday night I went back downtown to hang out with the gang and caught the last 30 minutes of Spaceballs (love that movie).