Sunday, 17 March 2013

Jamming and Running

OK, short one this time I promise!

Last Saturday night I went into town with a bunch of new friends. Had an absolutely fantastic night with Sarah, Charlene and Emanual. Emanual is moving to Vancouver from Kelowna an a couple of months. I had a real good yarn and we hit it off pretty well. He enjoys all sort of outdoor activities and especially likes paragliding which is cool. So hopefully I have an activities mate when summer rolls around. He also like backcountry trail biking so now I am trying my best not to get my hopes up for a bike to wing its way across the Pacific to me!

My boss was away again this week (conference in Vegas, what an awful place to hold a conference!) so work was more of me trying to convince everyone I knew what I was doing without someone to fall back on for tricky questions. Got a big basis of design report done though so that was pretty fun.

On Friday night I had another Jam with Brice and Travis. This time another guy, Steve (what kind of a rapping name is that), came along and played a much better bass guitar than me. I played acoustic rhythm which suited me just fine and did a bit of singing. Godamn its so much fun. I found out the space we rented was $75 for 3 hours which included a bass amp and a drum kit. Pretty damn good rate I reckon.

Today is a lovely sunny Sunday and I am writing this after a bit of a run. I didn't run to work this week much for varying reasons so embarked on an exploratory mission. I ran to Central park and zig zagged my way across it a couple of times. I found a model boat club at a small lake and had a yarn to a guy there. Then I zig zagged my way around the park a bit more. There were some really nice trails and with my headphones in to cut out the background noise I could have sworn I was on a trail outside the city at times. I also found a couple of side track so I decided to see where they led. The tracks were pretty overgrown but someone had clearly but stepping stones across streams and bogs so I kept going until I happened upon some hobos camp! This happened twice! After I found my way out of the park I decided I needed a bit of an extension as I was only at about 34min. So I set off east along the skytrain path. At about an hour I made it to Edmonds Skytrain station and then headed for home. As I turned around I found I had a pretty stiff headwind all the way home so that gave me a pretty good workout. just got back at about 1:45. Felt pretty good, I don't think all of the 3kms to and from work has diminished my medium distance too much which is good. I'll have to find another half marathon to sign up to here I think to get those ks back up now that it coming into summer.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Curry and Deep Cove

So I guess it has been two weeks since the last entry. Bit of a worry because I think I am doing less interesting stuff. Gotta do more of that. Hayden also just started his blog so I better not pike on this blogging thing!

One thing that is pretty exciting for me but probably not for anyone else is cooking a mean curry in the slow cooking I found in the cupboard. I figured it couldn't be too hard so I bought a whole heap of veges and chopped em up. I couldn't find nice fatty coconut cream at the super so I just had to settle for coconut milk. I also didn't really know what paste to buy so I ended up doing a butter beef. I guess thats a thing somewhere. Here are before and after photos:



It was pretty yum which a good thing as I made a metric shit tonne of it. I ate it for dinner every day of the week and then froze a couple of meals worth!

Last Saturday a guy form the choir was having drinks and jamming so I went along to that. There was a pretty good group of us there: Matt, Sarah, Bob, Rhoddy, Stef, Sy Yunn and Colin. It was pretty funny playing with a group of fairly musical people as everyone is busting out harmonies all over the shop. I probably ended up playing guitar for about 6 hours straight so my finger tips were pretty ruined at the end.

Sunday was a fantastic day so Sarah and I decide to get out and aboot and check out Deep Cove. It was on the North Shore and I was pretty stoked to finally be getting out of the city. It was pretty busy when we got there so we spent a while finding a park. There was a bit of a walk to do to get to a look out. The forest could definitely be New Zealand:


The walk was probably about 30min and at the end there was just a big ole rock cliff thing so it opened up to a great view:


Out to the right is Vancouver and you could see a couple of tall buildings in the distance. Pretty awesome spot for only being a 30min drive from downtown!

During the week I finally got to see Sound City which was cool. A film Dave Grohl directed about a recording studio in LA that was closing down. The studio had a legendary Neve control desk at was responsible for about a billion big names getting their albums into the world. Very cool film.

The choir is pretty good. We are learning some hilarious choreo for a couple of the songs and I am struggling a bit with the singing and moving thing when I am trying to learn both at the same time.

Last night I went and had a jam with Brice (from the choir) and a mate of his. I didn't really know what I was getting into as they had actually rented a space to play. I did a poor effort of convincing anyone I knew how to play a bass guitar but all in all it was pretty mint. Brice is a pretty mean guitarist and had a voice effects box which was cool. Good times.