It’s rare that Cas has a craving for pasta. Today, I received an instant message from him asking if we could have spaghetti & “meat” balls for dinner. I was tickled, but unsure of what I was going to whip up. Trusting my tweep pals on twitter, I put the call out and my foodie friend Angie got back to me with the following fun-t0-say veggie-friendly recipe. I’ve put the challenge out to @tothewestside to make a vegan version – so stay tuned!

Balls.

Nut Balls

2 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp marjoram
1 cup diced onion 1 tbsp salt
1 cup diced celery 1 tbsp black pepper
1 cup diced mushrooms 2 cups cooked brown rice
? cup diced parsley 12 oz soft crumbled tofu
1 tbsp dried basil 2 cups toasted finely chopped almonds
1 egg 2 cloves garlic
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees

In a large frying pan, sauté the onion, celery, mushrooms, garlic, fresh herbs & spices in the olive oil until tender. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and combine with cooked rice, nuts, crumbled tofu and the egg. Mix well – form into balls . Bake at 350 for 1 hour. Serve immediately.

Here is the first draft of my Seagulls vs. Pigeons poster. I took most of the layout from the Abduzeedo tutorial, but I think I’m going to do a few more variations with my own layout ideas. Stay tuned!

When I was 24, I had a few people over for a BBQ & games. One of these people was an excellent Vancouver artist and as he checked out my apartment he found my meager art area. At that time, I was only starting to paint again and was enthusiastically making regular trips to Opus for new supplies. Sometimes I would get pulled down an aisle that held tools and supplies that looked interesting and I would scoop them up without really thinking about how I was going to use them. Ah the joys of being single & having more disposal income than you really need. A few weeks before my party, I had picked up a lino block cutting kit as I had always been a fan of rubber stamps. However, since I had no idea how to use the tools and was more focused on painting than anything else – they sat unused on my shelf for years. At my party, Toren picked up my ink roller and asked me what I used it for. I don’t remember my reply – but I remember feeling silly that I had been buying supplies and tools more of the heck of it than anything else and told myself that I would stop. It worked – after that I stuck to the acrylics aisle. While I don’t usually try to dwell on memories of the doofus I was in my early 20s, this memory has stayed with me through the years and has encouraged me to not buy into arts & crafts before I am ready to start working with them.

Fast forward to now and while being glad that I stopped being an art-supplies shopaholic, I am very glad that I picked up these lino cutting tools years ago, because it’s an expense I didn’t have to bear today. Block printing is a BLAST! I started by taking my super-k character and whipped off a stamp one evening. Since then, I have been bitten by the lino-bug and I am working my way up to making a stamp of the Vancouver Library. I’m nervous because I’m better with curved lines than straight ones so I’m working on other projects in the meantime. I have a postcard project I am currently working on, but I can’t decide if I want to post the postcards before I block print them, or after. I’m hoping to send them to foreign cities (I’ll explain the project a bit more later) so, it’s likely that poor Sarah & Dave will be receiving a slew of Vancouver postcards in the next few months – that is – unless you know someone in a foreign country that would be willing to receive & send back my postcards :p

Follow my twitter updates for recent lino stamp creations. Back to the cutting board!

My nephew is awesome. He’s also cute, loveable & skytrainable. So, Cas & I kidnapped him for the day and got him out of the suburbs to hang with his awesome auntie & uncle in the big city.

The day called for puppet making, so I prepped a low table in the centre of the apartment. Luckily, I am a junk collector, so I had lots of bits and bobs we could use. I brought out my fabric thinking we might be able to make some more companions for Sushi Bear, but I think the glue gun is still outside of a 4-year old’s skill set, so we stuck to paper bags. Sushi Bear found out that he didn’t need any more fabric companions because he was such a hit with Jonathan that he joined us when we headed over to the Powell Street Festival. My nephew is kind of timid, so participating in the booth activities was a bit more than he was comfortable with and he doesn’t have the strength of personality to keep kids from cutting in line in from of him – so our trip to the festival was shorter than Cas had wanted (of course, what he really wanted was the Yakitori – but the line was a bit too long for the 3 of us).

Our kid stamina started to wain around 3PM but luckily for everyone, Cas and I are kid show connoisseurs so we popped in some Darkwing Duck & PeeWee’s Playhouse and spent the rest of the afternoon playing with our puppets & watching cartoons.

Last weekend I went with Donna & Nick to Whistler. It was supposed to be a quartet, but someone hurt himself Thursday and couldn’t join us. Note: This someone is a hero. He biked home highhandedly carrying my Jugo Juice rushing to try and make it before I had to head out for a work meet-up. Then, when he wiped-out on his bike (avoiding a vehicle), he held my drink aloft and came home limping, but carrying my prize in one piece. Truly, my knight in shining armour <3 Since we had planned a weekend of activity (horseback riding, swimming, canoeing and hiking), Cas opted to take the wise course and rest-up.

Since my companions for the weekend both had a professional camera and über-regular blogger-skills, I am taking the lazy way of updating you on my weekend. You can read Day 1 (canoeing adventures) to experience my harrowing escape from wild panthers (see photo) or Day 2 in which I sell my soul to a eucalyptus sauna.

However, while my ravaged by wild beast demon animals photo is very rad, the scrapes have already begun to fade and if I was going to pick one photo to sum up the weekend, it would be this one. This (even though it requires no translation) is me being fierce.

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 I can 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 a rather boring host & hostess, I’m afraid to say. 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)*. So, we were able to get everything in a usable place right after mom arrived, but we still have stacks of clothing piled everywhere upstairs. We’re gonna have to go through and clear out a lot of stuff. Other than a slow start (motivation is low chez nous this summer), I’m keen to do the deed. I like clearing out stuff. It’s a drag that it’s a perpetuating cycle – but we’re telling people to get us less stuff and we’re bringing home less while we recover from an European vacation, so there’s progress.

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 quietly happy 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 many classes you usually want to take that WON’T get you a piece of paper. 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, so it’s not surprising. I’m frothing at the mouth with anticipation now that #2 has come out. 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! I initially pre-complained that I would be disappointed if the animation style was really different, but then I realized that they have been developing the games in new + classic modes. This means that there is the POSSIBILITY that I could be playing the 2D game of old *swoon* Of course, I really enjoy the animation style from the special edition re-releases of #1 and #2, so I won’t be disappointed in any case.

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 will admit to shooting the bullseye at least once (and getting 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 find that font files will be lost and often my illustrator will crash when it goes to look for a file to open. I can stop the error within a reboot by loading safe mode and launching the programs. If things have been behaving really badly, I 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. Once done, I’ll see about using it for my comic next Wednesday. If you have any dating ideas or concepts you want to send me for my comic project, I’ll be happy to incorporate them into my schedule. It also helps me stretch my skills when I’m not just pulling things from my head. Finally, I’m a shitty writer and could use all the help I could get :p

*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.

Yesterday, I learned to fence.

Ok, that’s not quuuuite true. I learned the first steps and sweated my ass off in a beginner fencing class. Cas has been wanting to get back into it and I have been trying to find something that the two of us could enjoy. We’ve both made incentive charts to lose weight (both with realistic and non-realistic goals) so we signed up to take the beginner class together.

I have had a few false starts thinking that it started earlier than yesterday and Cas would come home to find me all rip-roaring ready to go only to have to remind me that it was the first Tuesday of JULY. Naturally, yesterday the heat-wave had to start and I was floored with my first weather migraine of the season. I had a really hard time getting out of bed. I had a rough time focusing and was moving slow all morning. By 2PM, I was done. I couldn’t look at my monitor without wanting to throw up, so I headed back to bed.

Cas came home around 5:30 to still find me passed out. He woke me and asked me if I wanted to still come out to fencing. I was mega groggy and I still had pins and needles over my left eyebrow (my warning sign for a migraine). I sat about in my undies for about a half hour moaning about how it was so unfair that I wouldn’t get to go to class before getting into my gym gear and deciding to, at least, walk to class with him. The fresh air did me a world of good and I’m certain I wouldn’t have made it to the end of the block if I hadn’t spent the afternoon sleeping off the headache.

By the time we made it to class (detoured from the Britannia Community Centre where we were registered to the La Salle classroom at the other end of Commercial Drive), my Tylenol had taken care of the rest of the ache and I was ready to participate (even if it was only for the stretches). Cas had warned me that it would likely be weeks before we’d get to handle a sword so I figured the class would be nothing but stretches and warm-ups. However, we started to do some foot work after our stretches and we even fake spared with our fingers to get some idea of the movement between partners. I can’t say enough good things about my initial reactions to the class & our instructor, Morgan. I have to work on my calf muscles as you spend your entire time in a “sitting position” or lunging. I’m not limping today as I didn’t really push myself too hard (see migraine notes above :p), but I have been walking around in an en garde position all morning and can’t wait for my next class.

On a separate note, as I resume my regular blogging schedule, I have been working on a comic art project for the past few weeks. If you’re interested, check out the link in the side-bar. I’ll be updating it weekly. I’m not planning anything specific, but I’m definitely keeping with a NSFW trend. You’ve been warned.

I’m in the process of uploading all my vacation photos. It’s taking me a while, but I’m hoping that after this weekend, I’ll have them all uploaded and titled so I can get on with my blogger life. I chatted up Dave & Sarrah while they are in town and Dave mentioned he has a similar blog issue to mine; I can’t seem to blog when I have a large update to post. I always get hung-up on getting my update posts done, so I’ll procrastinate posting until I’m months behind. So, with this photo update, I should be able to move on with my life post-vacationand get back to blogging on a semi-regular schedule. Let’s see. In the meantime, check out my Flickr for a photo update!