Ok, so last night was Halloween. For the most part it was a good time. We started the evening out with getting things ready for Trick-Or-Treating. We were picking up Andrews friend Zach and I was taking them around a few neighborhoods. The decided start time was around 5:30.

Well, it would have been if Andrew had remembered his helmet. He wanted to dress up as his Biker Scout so I asked him to triple check that he had every piece that he needed. He claimed he did so we headed out. It wasn’t until suiting up that we realized that the helmet was missing. The 8 mile round trip back to my place took a good 30 min!!! I hate traffic!

Once we got out and doing the trick or treating everything was cool, we headed out for the town home areas (less walking, more candy). I got the chance to start in on the new book I got: The Looking Glass Wars. The downside is that I was starving. I never did get the chance to eat before going. After the candy fest, we hit up Taco Bell where I had one of the most gut busting burritos on the face of the earth.

We finally went home to wrap up things for Andrew. The candy all looked good (there was even some cool looking Korean/Japanese/Chinese candies.) I sent Andrew off to bed and then went out for my own Trick-Or-Treating. A friend of mine said I should go to Bungalow Billiards for their Halloween party and Costume contest. Even though I didn’t have anyone to go with, I went down there and signed up for a table (why go to a billiards place if you’re not gonna play!) The contest wasn’t judging until Midnight so I have about an hour and a half to kill. I went ahead and changed into my Biker Scout. This is where I should have known better.

No, nothing bad happened to me or my armor, let me get that out now. But the core of the people in costume were in bad “Party City” costume in a bag style costumes. Something you can wear while getting drunk and not care about the next day. This should have been my first clue. I got to my table and started setting up to practice my shots (all while still in armor BTW). One of the guys at the table next to me came up and asked if I wanted to put $5 on a game. I proceeded to laugh hysterically.

“There is no way I am betting money on a game where I am wearing this armor!”

He offered up just a friendly game then and I accepted. I was fully expecting to get sharked into a pay game which I was ready for (I had no cash). Turns out he just wanted to play, and I was cool with that. He was there with a girl who was smoking hot, and dressed as Alice from wonderland. When I asked him what he was dressed as….

“Man, I’m dressed as a Gangster!”

“ummmmmmmmmm……..Kay” I replied. His costume consisted of a white T-shirt, and a ripped white cloth wrapped around his head. This would be the first point in the evening where I felt bad about our society. Through out the game, his girl would come up to him and do things to be affectionate or talk or just whatever. The response he kept giving her was always:

“step off bch,” or “get the fk off of me!”

Now, there was never any violence, so it wasn’t really my place to say anything, but wow did it make me sad. I could tell that 1: she normally gets treated like this from him and 2: She was eating it up and going back for more. This is one of those things I can’t fathom. My friend John tried to explain it to me, but I am still a bit lost on it. Apparently, some women like to be treated like crap.

Anyways, around midnight, the contest started and I got suited up (had to take off some of the arm armor to play). While standing in line next to a banana (who continually reminded me “I am a fking banana!”) I started to realize that, I was one of the few people in this crowd that wasn’t drunk. The contest was judged by applause, and at midnight, in a bar, filled with drunken people, who do you think is going to get more applause.

Hmmmm, On one side we have a half naked drunk chick shaking her ass(ets), on the other side we have a ………..(I could tell that the announcer was drunk) Guy from Star Wars! Yeah so, I decided to cut my losses and head out. Over all it was not a total loss for the evening. I got a lot of compliments about the costume, I got to play pool, I got out of the house, and yes, I got the chance to weep for humanity.

Wow, the annual Patton Halloween party is usually something to behold. This year, it was LEGENDARY!!! (those of you who watch “How I Met Your Mother” will understand that one). This year I went as “Myspace.” I figured that enough people would be giving me crap about having a myspace account now, I would just beat them to the punch and go full boar. The costume was taken quite well, though Shipley said he might have to revoke my ghetto status because I spent too much on it. Somewhere around 11pm I changed into my neon Pirate costume so I wouldn’t get lost in the woods. I blinded most of the party goers and NASA called and asked me to take it off.

The party itself was awesome as usual. Personally I partied until about 3am when I just couldn’t make it anymore. It was great to see all those who came out for the party. Even the special guest of Cheeky Monkey Boy!! Robert came out all the way from Atlanta! (he brings out great gifts too, right Shipley?) Highlights of the party include, taking everyone’s picture in a my-spacey pose, the Annual walk through the woods (which I barely remember), the cuddle fest on the back patio to keep warm, and slapping Shipley on the back multiple times, not to mention taking all my pictures in the myspace style Ye Gods, I can’t wait for next year!

This weekend was filled with all sorts of everything. You wouldn’t think that so much could be gone through in such a short period of time, but it’s true! The first thing that I need to get out is probably the thing that cause the most emotion through the weekend. It is the end of an Era. After three years of a relationship, Amy and I have decided to part ways. There were a number of things that led up to this. Even she and I came to the realization that it was coming. For all those concerned, the part was amicable. she and I are still friends and still talk frequently. Her path is just leading in a different direction than mine. Like all things of this nature, it hurts, but it builds on our character and we use it as strength.

That being said…… LADIES….. THE LINE FORMS AT THE LEFT!!! GIGGITY GIGGITY GOO! (Ok, I’m just kidding!!)

So this weekend I decided I need to go out and have a drink (or 8). I talked with Paul and he said he was coming to the area anyways, we could go play poker and such. Well, me being the lush that I am, I started in on some ciders before he got there. By the 3rd cider and the hour and ½ that Paul was late, I was starting to get pissed (in more ways than one) (ok see, that’s a multinational joke, pissed = drunk, damn it so not funny when you have to explain it). I obviously wasn’t driving anywhere, but I didn’t want to sit at home and drink (oh wait, I already was). Finally, my Upstairs neighbor, Don, came down and was wondering why I hadn’t made it to the poker game. I grabbed my coat and we headed out to Bungalows. There, they brought me one of the most glorious sights….. a 32oz cider. This would be around the time I realized that, as much as the movies make it out to be easy, playing pool while intoxicated does not lend itself to good pool. I still won, 3 out of the 5 games, but damn my shots were off.

Amazingly, I woke up with no headache on Sunday morning. We got up and made our way out to the comic book store (and a lovely cup of chai). After that we came back and started preparations for PUMPKIN FEST 2006!!! Yup, it’s time to gut those melons again! We lit the fire and got things all toasty, invited the neighbors over and ripped into a few orange bastards. As you may have seen in the patio decorations, Andrew and I had 3 pumpkins to carve through. One of them being a 45lb monster! Andrew picked the Flash symbol for his, I did the Imperial cog (with a rebel projection). For the beast, the skin was so thick that we couldn’t do anything fancy to it. So we went traditional. You can see pictures of all of them in the gallery.

After our fruit carnage, we went to wrap up the pre-Halloween weekend with a movie. And what would be more appropriate than Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D!!! It was amazing, of course. The 3D effects were awesome. They didn’t go out of the way to throw things in your face or anything. They just provided depth to the movie. I almost wish they had done more outside of the screen. If you have the chance, go see it! I was amazed to see things that I had never noticed before (and I have seen this movie a lot)

On a side note, as I wrap up things. Andrew got the chance to get in on the Cheese It! action. He finished up a little music video of his own. Check it out here.

Hope everyone’s weekend went well!

A new idea has popped into the collective brain. (you thought about it Doc, you just didn’t know it). We love gaming, we love movies, and we love comedy. Why not take them all and smash them together and make something out of it! Enter Cheese It productions. This is a new “company” that we will produce machinima movies and distribute using a number of methods. With the advent of Myspace films and Youtube, the problem of hosting and bandwidth is a think of the past. Things are already in motion as we speak.

Cheese it is proud to bring you a video for Captain Dan (the authentic pirate hip hop artist).

My Cannon:

And now it’s time for yet another weekend update! There are a few things I need to post about and I am not entirely sure where to start (of course). First let me go with: Don’t go see Man of the Year! I love Robin Williams, I have always been a HUGE fan of his work. I remember the days when he was on Happy Days and Mork and Mindy! I have seen him Live and own a good portion of his movies. If you were to dice up this movie to just the parts where he was in it, it would have been a decent movie. They tried too hard to throw in lots of political intrigue and mystery and it just distracted from the whole point of the movie! So my suggestion to you, rent it, and then if you don’t see Robin Williams on screen, fast forward till you do. Nuff said.

Next, this Sunday we were all kinds of busy! We started out with a trip down to see Jody. Jody is the girl who cuts my hair. Ever since I separated from the military, I have decided to not get any more “barber” style haircuts. I have a decent enough job to afford me this small luxury. I have been seeing Jody for just over 2 years now so we sat and chatted it up for about 1 ½ hours while she cut mine and Andrews’s hair. (wow, that didn’t sound as gay in my head.) After receiving my extremely manly haircut, we headed down to pick up the weekly run of comics. (I should note that Jody works up in Great falls, and the comic book store is the south part of Fairfax so that’s about 14 miles)

After the Comics trip (which usually involves me BSing with the comic guys for a while on the finer parts of the DC universe) we saw a little garden place attached to the university mall parking lot. The just so happened to have a lot of the decorations we were planning on picking up to do up the front patio. So I figured, why not get it now! We picked up 2 bushels of corn stalks, 2 bails of hay, about 1 lb of miscellaneous gourds, 2 regular pumpkins for carving and one gianormous pumpkin! When we got everything home, we set about the decorating. This took up the rest of the evening. One of the bails of hay gave up it’s life for the sake of our new scare crow (or scare Emperor). Don, the upstairs neighbor got into the act too and we did up his patio to match. We even got a visit from another of our neighbors, or more importantly, his father. My other upstairs neighbor has his parents visiting from India and the father came out to help up with the decorations. He was extremely happy to see all the stuff going up because, as we learned, they have a very similar festival in India! It was very cool to have him there and hear about some of the traditions.

Lastly, there is something I think I need to clear up. There has been a little confusion as to a particular relationship I am having. It would appear that I am in a very abusive relationship with Maya. You see, she continues to make me do many things that end up causing me pain. Yet, I always go back to her. She yells at me sometimes too. Of course, I tend to yell back and sometimes it upsets me because Andrew can hear this. I really think things are going to get better so I keep seeing her.

Ok, if you haven’t guessed yet, Maya is my virtual Personal Trainer. She is a part of a program called “Yourself Fitness” for the X-box. I picked up this program a long while back and, like I posted earlier, I recently started up again. Apparently, not everyone realized who exactly Maya is. Sorry Dad, but I have to call you out on this one. I got an e-mail the other day from my father that had me (and the rest of my office, again, sorry dad) rolling. I won’t quote the whole thing, but here is a snippet:

“Your comments about Maya show you need help in interpersonal relationships. You goal is should not be what makes you happy, but what makes the other person happy. I have not met her, but she is a human being.”

Once I regained my composure, I sent out a little e-mail reminder to him that She, in fact, was not “a human being.” Now my office mates tease me about abusing Maya and hurting her feelings all the time. My Dad did write back to let me know that my Mom explained that the joke was on him and she told him who Maya was. So thanks, Dad, that really was one of the highlights of the week!

For years I have ranted and raved about MySpace. I have always stated that it was a den for the html inept. Those who were seeking to demolish a website by Homer Simpsonizing it. (anyone remember the episode where he made a website that was all animated gifs?) I always thought of Myspace as a place where people fought to have the most friends on their lists to say “Ooo Look at me I have 50 friends!” Well, I am not entirely wrong. 90% of Myspace is exactly that. People who don’t know the html code they are working with load image after image, video after video onto their page and break all the tables so you end up with pages too wide for your screen all on a background that makes reading text impossible.

However, there is that other 10%. I recently check out the Myspace phenomenon by creating an account. Amy had built one (which I encouraged to help her make friends out there) and so in efforts to better understand the beast, I ventured into the untamed world of Myspace! Honestly, after looking at what the site can actually do, and the backbone behind it with all of it’s capabilities, the site is not bad. It’s built effectively, has a ton of tools to help you find people of varying interests. The school finder actually works pretty damn well and I was able to find some old classmates that I hadn’t talked to in years. Sadly, it’s the 90% of the crappy users that give Myspace a bad rep. If you keep pages tasteful and clean, they can actually be useful.

So you may have noticed that there is a new button in the side bar on the left. That would be the link to my Myspace page. I went through great efforts to keep it themed with the rest of the site here. Another main reason for this would be the fact that Myspace has become extremely mainstream. Many movie sites, musicians, actors and writers are using it to publicize their works. So with this in mind, I am treating it as an extension of my personal website. Let me know what you think.

Not sure if I had made the formal announcement yet, but….. She’s back in my life. For the past few weeks I have been seeing someone, a girl, fairly regularly. I used to see her a lot a while back, but our goals were different and we needed some space. Lately I have found that we both want the same thing and that is for me to be happy. We have seen each other about 10 times in the last few weeks, so I think it’s starting to get serious. When I get home from work, I am eager to see her, and she always seems happy to see me as well. (At least that’s what she says).

If you haven’t guessed yet, Maya’s back.

Yup, I started my workouts again! The current plan is 30 min every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Then I go down to the gym and hit the rowing machine for about 15-20 min on Tuesday and Thursday. I have managed to keep this up for 3 weeks now and I have to say, I feel great. I am focusing on my upper body strength. I want to say that after the 3 weeks I can kind of feel/see some results, but that may be somewhat mental. Aside from a few candid photos from like dragoncon or such, I don’t have any before pictures. But you can believe, when I am done, the Spidey/Green Lantern/Nightwing pics will look awesome! What are YOU doing to exercise?

Yup, it’s still here. Sorry for the lack of updates lately. When you spend all day typing at work and get home only to do more stuff, the writing seems to take a curb side. I hate it when it does that as I really love to sit and wrote. Giving my brain the chance to empty out its daily contents so I can start fresh the next day. So given the updates as of late you can imagine there is a lot in my head right now. Sadly, it’s not all going to be emptied out here. As much as I love pouring out all of my feelings and such here, there are some things that just don’t need to be pasted all over the interweb.

As of late there has been not too much of note going on. Yesterday was Andrew’s 14th birthday. This year I got him his own Guitar. It’s an acoustic Epiphone PR-150. It got very good reviews on all the sites I checked out, and it came at a great deal with lots of accessories. Unfortunately, while tuning it for the first time, he wound the E-string a tad too tight and it snapped. He didn’t even get the chance to play too much. I picked up new strings and we spent about 30 min learning how to re-string a guitar! I also picked him up a 512mb Ipod shuffle. We are an Itunes house so I wanted to get him something that would integrate with Itunes so he could easily drag the music he wants to it. Given that he is always listening to music, he can swap tunes off it really quick and easy.

Last night we went out for his birthday dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack. We had gone there a few times before as well as going last year on his birthday. When we walked in, I mentioned to the hostess that it was Andrews birthday (in hopes of embarrassing him in public, like any good Father) and she sat us very quickly. The place was moderately filled for a Wednesday evening. We browsed the menu and figured out what we wanted to eat. A full 15 minutes later we finally got a visit from our waiter with the first of many “I’m sorry it took so long.” We placed our order for two of their “Complete Meals” which has the appetizer and deserts. I also mentioned to him about Andrews birthday. The waiter made promises, of course, for speedy service and getting bread out quickly before the appetizers.

The drinks came out quick, but then we lost our waiter again. A bus boy brought out the appetizers and they were eaten and dishes cleared before we finally got some bread. Our “Speedy” waiter claimed that in “A minute and a half” our food would be out. 10 min later he came back saying (with yet another “Sorry for taking so long”) the food was almost ready. 2 full baskets of bread later, we get our food. The whole time we watch the waiters come out for two other birthdays in the restaurant (Andrew jumped every time he heard the clapping start, thinking it was coming towards him). The deserts were about the only thing that came out in a timely fashion. We boxed up our food and sat and waited.

And Waited

And Waited

20 minutes later we see our waiter. At this point we have been there for about an hour and a half. He come by and picks up the remaining plates and asks about the food. That’s it. I figure he is on his way back to get the check or to come out for the birthday things. Nope, we lost him again for another 10 min. When he comes back (mind you we have been sitting there with no plates and food boxed for 10 full minutes) he asks if we were “Ready for that birthday thing.” It’s now just after 8:30pm. We got to Joe’s at around 6:50pm. 2 people, in a restaurant that is not all that busy. I was pissed. I told him, “No, I’ll just take my check please, it’s far too late for that. Every time he came by the table it was some sob story about “Things are running slow back there” yet every other waiter managed it just fine. I know, I had plenty of time to watch them. Another 5 min goes by while he prints out the check. Big surprise, he doesn’t compensate on the check or anything. He just drops off the check with a “Sorry for the worst service in the world” comment. I made a point of talking to the Manager about the horrible service. He seemed sympathetic and offered us a free trip back as “His guests” where they would re-do his birthday dinner.

Now, let me clear up something. I like Joe’s Crab Shack. The food has always been great and every other time we have been there, the service was amazing. I have nothing against them. Some people though. Having done the whole waiting tables thing before, I know how it is. This guy wouldn’t even come up with a reason as to why he was gone, just “sorry”. So aggravating! We went home and I sat and watched “Bones” to cheer me up. Cause nothing makes one happy than watching 2 wives fight over their newly liquefied ex-husband!