Week 2 of Fencing 101 has come and gone. All of my limbs are still attached and are at factory setting. We actually got to handle SWORDS this week, so I’m pretty freaking’ stoked for next week. My balestra, a simple jump step that helps you quickly go forward and requires you to land on both feet at the same time, needs some serious work. My timing is quite off and I’ll admit that when you add arms to legs all my coordination goes out the window. 
Still, I’m glad that I have such a large studio space in which to practice. I am still walking about in a sitting crouch to work on my leg muscles, but I really have to work on my footwork if I’m gonna stay up with the class.
During the past two weeks, my mom in law has been in town. It was a quick trip that was moved last minute from August to July, so we didn’t really have too much to time prepare and look for activities while she was in town. We were rather boring hosts. While she was in town, we sold our closet set from upstairs so that we could move things about and clear our bed (post renovations)*. We’re gonna have to go through and clear out a lot of stuff that the closet used to hold – but we need the space.
I have to admit… I’m glad that we did this renovation after Cloud was put down. He would have peed everywhere upstairs. It would have been to him a padded toilet land made of cotton, silk and soy. So, while I am still very sad he’s not around, I’m a low-grade glad that I haven’t had to deal with 24-7 laundry while we got sorted out upstairs. We’re a few weeks into being a 1-cat family and things are starting to go back to normal. At first, I worried because Griffon started throwing up his food in lumpy little puddles. I was worried that he was sick because he was all alone…then I just figured that we hadn’t scaled the food back enough and he was a big barf machine. I guessed correctly and barfatron has been dialed back to 2 now that he’s only eating for one.
I’ve also been doing more research into Emily Carr for the Spring 2011 season. It looks like the Continuing Education classes finish in fewer weeks, so I can do more classes in a semester and still be on a part time schedule. This is promising because the idea of getting a student loan months before moving into my 30s is a bit unpalatable. It’s funny getting back into the school mindset. I had forgotten how distracting class calendars can be and how often the electives you want to take will not count towards completion. There is a pen and ink illustration class that I would really like to take. I would love to be a children’s book illustrator and the style would suit, but I’ll admit that I am more interested in taking the class because my grandfather drew in pen & ink. We have a few framed pen and ink English country side pieces that he did and I like the idea of doing a few sets in a similar style. Perhaps I could do neighbourhoods of Vancouver. It goes like this for class after class after class. So, perhaps it’s good that I want to do this part-time and on a budget or else I’d be a student for decades to come.
I joined up with Foursquare. I’ve been reading about the game for a while now but decided that I didn’t really need another location based social activity. Twitter kinda covered that and I didn’t really see the point. It just so happened that recently Mashable (@mashsocialmedia) started to post stories about Foursquare, just as I added them to my twitter feed. I found a few friends playing, so I decided I would give it a shot for a day. And then I discovered: MY APARTMENT BUILDING HAD NO MAYOR. Ok, I coached myself, I’ll just play until I’m the mayor of my building.
Well…I’m mayor now. But I need to at least find out what a few more of the greyed out badges on my list are for…and then I’m done for reals.
So, should you be playing Foursquare – I am too. We can play together, but…
IF YOU TOUCH MY APARTMENT CHECK IN MORE TIMES THAN ME WITHIN A 2 MONTH PERIOD I WILL DESTROY YOU.
*pant pant*
I bought and finished Monkey Island 2: SPECIAL EDITION. For some reason I remembered the ending being very different. I had also forgotten a whole swack of other parts like the gambling hand signs and how to get nails. When they released #1 for the iPhone and had a mini-series from Telltale Games, I figured that I’d see the occasional subscription story on my consoles. Believe me, I was in a contented lala land with that alone. The fact that #2 has now come out gives me hope like never before that I will be playing my favourite PC game of all time, MONKEY ISLAND #3 THE CURSE OF MONKEY ISLAND, on my PlayStation!
As I watched the credits roll, I was reminded that Ron Gilbert was behind the new Deathspank game that was coming out. I have to admit that until I saw that Deathspank was being developed by Hothead, I was a little leery about the title. The game name was odd enough, but when I had half paid attention to the trailer I was further put off my all the fighting. I figured it was just another cartoon fighting game designed to appeal to adventure gamer fans with no other choice. After finishing Monkey Island 2, I launched the Deathspank trailer and gave it another shot. I was still unsure whether there would really by any adventuring at all but I texted Cas to ask him if he knew about the association between my favourite game series and Deathspank. The next day, Cas walked in with a copy of the game.
So far I like it a lot. It’s a bit of a parody RGP like WOW or Diablo, only cartoonier with funny dialogue/voice acting & the zany point-click-combination puzzles you’d expect from Ron Gillbert. I am frustrated because I suck too much at combat when Cas isn’t playing the helpful sidekick so I have to slowly level grind to get to the next section – the very thing I HATE about MMORPGs, so I’m taking a break out to blog. 
While I was looking for a link for Ron Gillbert, I found the following news! Why is this important? I had also given up on the idea that there would ever be a PAA: OTRSPOD episode 3. If this oh-so-awesome franchise was put on “hiatus” (rather than in the trash) because of Deathspank and Hothead goes back to making games like they were before…SQUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
*pant pant*
Yesterday, Donna & Nick picked me up around midday to head out to Langley. I know – I don’t usually go to the Lang on weekends if I can avoid it, but seeing as I was offered a carpooled/air conditioned chariot for my troubles, I joined the Justice Gang on their Journey to: BC REN FAIR 2010.
We arrived in time for a jousting demonstration which was pretty cool. Nick is very into photography, so he tested out some slow-motion capture of the jousts. It was pretty hot and some of the horses were a bit spooked from the armour + the crowds, but he still managed to get a few cool motion shots. Donna, who is a pony fan it seems, took some shots of the horses & their finery. The rest of the event featured a merchants area, food & tavern space and some “medieval” games. We avoided the rat-a-pult and cannon + beanbag kiosks and opted instead to spend our shillings at the archery booth.
It’s been a very very VERY long time since I last held a bow. I started upside-down and then I nocked the arrow on the wrong side. Way to go k – glad to see those early YEARS of archery instruction your parents paid for was put to good use. After those two gaff-ups, I got to actually shooting the target. I shot the bullseye at least once (and got some shillings back for it) and felt it was money well spent. Now I have been bitten by bow-fever and feel the need to shoot more things. bwahahah. If you’re headed to an archery shooting range or know of any events coming up that would let me get my quiver-on, please drop me a comment.
Yesterday night I downloaded CS5 for my work machine and I have 4GB on order to bump this machine’s functionality. I’m hoping that the upgrade from CS3 to CS5 will clean up some of the hiccups I have been experiencing since the 2nd last OS update. I often find my font files missing and often my illustrator will crash when it goes to look for a file to open. If things have been behaving really badly, I have to do a permissions check (which usually sorts out the font problems). This works for the next few times I reboot/log on, but eventually, all my adobe programs crash over and over again, forcing me to reboot so that I can work during the week. I have enough ram (I beat minimum requirements) for CS5, but the ram bump should help me when I’m managing large scans or big files in photoshop. I’m really excited to see if I can push a lot more from this machine. She’s 4 years old now and they are already calling her the classic MacPro at Simply computing. I prefer ORIGINAL, but what are you gonna do?
First thing I’m gonna try out is my Seagull vs. Pigeon poster in CS5. I had a design idea when I was in San Francisco, so I’m gonna take my new creative suite for a spin.
*see Twitter for an update on our bedroom renos. We had to remove 40 sq ft from our bedroom mezzanine upstairs which, quite honestly, bites.
