Cultivated Nonsense

New Years Eve (Really, Really Late)

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:32:32 -0500

I should probably note the goings on of New Years Eve since it was an out of the ordinary event. I guess the summary post yesterday took a lot out of me.

I got out of work early and headed home to play a little Xenogears before the festivities started. Every year my parents have always had a little new years eve gathering at their house for dinner and then some games after. This year I got there around 3 and we played some Mario Party on the Wii. After dinner my dad and I played some NBA Live 08 on the Wii as well. We're still trying to figure out how to play defense.

After that, we did the traditional game of Pokeno (for pennies) and then we switched over to a really cool game my sister got called Apples to Apples. It's extremely fun. One player is the judge, flips over a card with a word on it. Other players play one of their cards that have various words, people or things on them and the point is to play a card that's related to the word flipped over. The judge decides which word wins and the person who played it gets the green card. It's much more fun if you've got a bunch of people who have a strange sense of humor.

After that my sister had to take off to another party, so we watched a movie on the discovery channel HD about a super volcano in yellowstone which was interesting in a strange morbid sort of way. After my mom went to bed, my dad and I played some more NBA Live and finally sorta figured out how to play defense. At least...people were stealing the ball this time around. We rang in the new year playing that, and then I went home, excited to get to be able to do the first fold in my Origami page-a-day calendar.

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All Christmas-ed Out

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 09:06:51 -0500

Yesterday I went over to my parents house in the morning and hung out there pretty much all day, playing various Wii games. We started with NBA Live 08 for the Wii (without looking at the instructions, so we were lobbing shots at the basket from the other side of the court) which was...fun. Like the reviews said, it wasn't a really great game but it was entertaining enough that it was interesting. Probably not in the ways the game designer intended though.

I managed to get my dad to play a game of Mario Party 8 which I thought was fairly good but he didn't enjoy it as much. My mom ended up winning the game. After that my parents played some tennis and I ended up falling asleep for a little while on their couch. After I woke up, we played some Wario Ware Smooth Moves which my mom really enjoyed and my dad, predictably didn't.

My grandparents (mothers side) came over for dinner and to play some Wii sports after, which was cool, and they looked like they enjoyed themselves.

But, as a result of all this activity, I'm totally Christmas-ed out. I need to take today to clean up my living room a bit, call school to get my registration for my capstone project fixed up and generally relax.

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It's A Penguin Christmas

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 09:04:08 -0500

Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.

I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.

Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)

It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.

Fishy Crystal Thingy

In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.

Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.

And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.

My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so...it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.

We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.

Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.

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It's A Rock Band Holiday

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:17:15 -0500

I just got back from the christmas party thrown by my dad's side of the family. As I've said before, sometimes this party can be a little...less than entertaining. Mostly due to the people there I don't really know and/or get along with. This year though, it was pretty fun. Everybody was cool, lots of good conversation and food and stuff. We walked in to the spectacle of one of the dogs (there's usually a TON of dogs at this party) wearing a reindeer costume and looking very pathetic. All the other dogs were picking on him and it kept flopping in front of his face so he couldn't really see all that well. Pretty entertaining for a bit, but they took it off him quickly.

The highlight of the event though, was Rock Band. One of my cousins (her husband actually) has Rock Band and he brought it over so we could play it at the party. We played for a couple hours, with various people rotating in and out. I managed to play all of the instruments and sing some as well. I started out at guitar and played that. I was going to play drums after that, but my sister accidently bumped the difficulty on her bass part to Expert so I swapped with her quickly.

Then I got talked into singing. I picked War Pigs as the song and apparently I knocked it out of the park because people were commenting about it for the rest of the night. It's probably because I'm known as the quiet guy who doesn't talk much. Of course, I can also sing pretty decently (if the song is in my range) so I probably ended up surprising some people. I also ended up doing vocals on Tom Sawyer and Enter Sandman.

Just a mini Rock Band review. Pretty fun game for parties. I like the way Guitar Hero handles the guitar parts more than how Rock Band does it, and I also like the feel of the Guitar Hero controller. The drums were pretty fun, but hard to get used to because of all of the stuff you had to do at once when playing them. Overall, two thumbs up, but I probably wouldn't want to pay the full price for the set unless I was going in on it with other people.

All in all, a good way to kick off the Christmas party season. It finally feels like Christmas time to me.

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The Longest Day Of The Week...

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:41:30 -0500

...is the day before a 5 day weekend. I was figuring out how much vacation I had left to take and as it turns out, it's enough to take Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas off, so now I've got a 5 day weekend for myself. Handy.

Today is crawliing along like the day before a vacation normally does. I'm just looking forward to all of the festivities of this weekend. Tomorrow is my dad's side of the family, Sunday I'm going over to my friends to operate on people, Monday is the small family gathering and then my mom's side of the family in the evening. Then a day to recover.

I'm finally starting to get into the realization that it's really Christmas time and the year is ending very soon. Good riddance to 2007 I say. Since 2007 is the first full year that I've been blogging, I decided to do a summary post towards the end of the year. I've been going through all of my blog posts from the last year, picking out the big things that happened and I'll be constructing a 2007 in review post which should be up sometime before 2008 rolls in.

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I'm Thankful For Exploding Pies

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:32:38 -0500

Well, another fun thanksgiving this year. As always, we like to keep things fairly small and just have a nice dinner with the immediate family.

Before the activities officially started, I was watching the Today show on NBC and it quickly became apparent they had run out of stories to cover. They were doing a story about a kid (couldn't have been more than 7-8 years old) who choked on a cheez-it at school and his best friend saved him by performing the Heimlich maneuver. The bad part about this story was the fact they had both the kid and his friend on to interview them. It was...painful. Both kids were camera shy and had a hard time saying anything. I had to turn the channel for a bit since I couldn't watch the trainwreck any longer.

The day officially started out around 9-10am when the traditional assembling/decorating of the Christmas tree while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade took place. As always, my dad supplied the "It's too early!" comments as we were putting up the tree and my mom continued to want to put the lights on as we went which is totally against the tradition. Dunno how much longer that tree is going to last though. Getting kinda ragged and the base is a bit tippy this year. We also watched a little of the National Dog Show (long enough to see the dog that looked a lot like a mop) before switching over to football for the rest of the afternoon.

I ended up falling asleep during the Green Bay/Detroit game because it was kinda boring. Apparently, I slept through the interesting part of the game where Detroit tried to mount a comeback. I woke up a few minutes into the Dallas/Jets game to find that my sister and her husband had arrived. We hung out around my parents house for a bit and then we headed over to my place (minus my dad who was watching the jets get creamed) for some Wii bowling.

We headed out to Buffalo Head, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner location when we eat out (which we did this year, as opposed to my mom cooking last year). The roads were a little icy as my dad found out several times We thankfully arrived in one piece, but it was scary there in a few spots. True to past thanksgivings, nobody had the turkey special. I ended up with some stuffed shells that were pretty good. Somebody else in the restaurant had ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie for desert which got me wanting some pie. Apparently my mom wanted some too since she said she'd make one when we got home.

I hung out at my place for an hour or so before heading back to my parents for pie and to watch Grey's Anatomy. The pie was a little more eventful than expected. A couple bites into his, my dad doubled over and made something of a surprised noise. I can't remember exactly what he said, but when he straightened up again it had looked like his pie exploded all over his shirt. We're not entirely sure what happened, but it was very entertaining. Well, for us anyway. It's not like he shoved the pie towards him when he was taking a bite. Straight down fork movement. The best theory we could come up with is some kind of sabotage.

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Rock Concert Movement #564: The Morning After Review

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:25:25 -0400

The Blue Man Group

It is traditional for your audience to "spread the word" after the show by telling their friends and family about the experience. This word of mouth advertising generally aids in generating "buzz" for your show and increasing your megastar power.

Frequently, these reviews begin by discussing how good their seats were, especially if the audience member was seated in the 4th row, dead center.

All right...I can't keep that up. I was trying, but it's hard to talk about everything i want to say and still keep that style up.

If you haven't gathered by now, I went out to Albany last night with my parents to see the Blue Man Group perform at the Times Union Center. In short, the show was awesome.

Electric Dress

The premise of the show, if you've never seen it, is that the blue men are trying to learn how to put on a big time rock show by ordering an instructional video from an infomercial, with a credit card provided by a member of the audience. In fact, there was a TON of audience participation in the show, and the blue men often left the stage to grab some unsuspecting audience member or to engage the people in the "crappy seats"

The light show was very well done, one of the better ones that I've seen. Although not quite on the level of Trans Siberian Orchestra. Needs more lasers! There was a lot of electronic effects, from robot light type things playing the music to one song ("I Feel Love") where the singer came out wearing an electronic dress that lit up in time with the song. They also did an entire song wearing LCD screens and syncing up with the video that was playing on there, which was fairly cool.

Electronic Blue Men

The sound was really good considering we were so close in an arena with the majority of instruments on the stage being various kinds of drums. It wasn't terribly loud for a rock show and my ears are fine this morning which is a fairly rare thing to happen the morning after I go to a concert.

It's really hard for me to describe in words what happened (as you probably could tell by the rambling nature of this blog post...) but I'll try to highlight a few things.

Before the show began they had a couple of screens going with scrolling, entertaining text to keep people occupied while we waited.

Looking Out Into The Audience

One of the things was that we were going to play a trick on the people who came in late. Whenever we saw question marks that were laid on their side scrolling across the screens, we were supposed to take out our cell phones and wave them around in the air, thus confusing the people who came in late into thinking there was some sort of cultural ritual involving question marks and cell phones.

Well, as it turns out the people who sat next to me were a group of older individuals who seemed to have no real idea what was going on. They also arrived late.

The first time the question marks showed up, everyone started waving their cell phones around and I turned and looked at them to see what their reaction was and they were awfully confused looking. It was worth it.

Pipe Drums/Cotton Ball Launchers

That same group of people was being picked on in the beginning of the show when they were trying to pull somebody from the audience to use their credit card to purchase their rock concert instructional video. The blue men came off the stage and went right to our row and tried to take the purse from one of the ladies sitting at the end. She ended up slapping the guy's hand and he went off to somebody in the front row who was more cooperative. She also had a heck of a lot of stuff in her purse...

During the show, they threw out an awful lot of stuff into the audience, drumsticks (to the first row anyway), guitar picks and lots of streamers and cotton balls (from their pipe drum/cotton ball launchers that they used during the encore.) My dad was able to grab one of the streamers they flung out into the crowd at the end of the show and I almost got a guitar pick, but it bounced out of my hand.

Overall, I recommend going to see the show if you've never been. It's a combination of humor, good music and just plain fun that's really hard to pass up.

Water Drumming

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The Wedding

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 05:58:29 -0400

I was too exhausted last night to post, but as I've been mentioning, my Sister's wedding was yesterday. And if you're wondering why I'm posting this on a Sunday morning at 5:30 AM...I just awoke with a cramp and can't go back to sleep...blah.

The day started for me with breakfast with the groom/groomsmen at the bowling alley. They have really good French Toast apparently. Anyway, it turns out my aunt Terry is also waiting tables there now. She snuck up behind me and whacked me with a menu. Ow... After breakfast, back to my place for a bit so I could entertain my dad after he got kicked out of the house (the bride and bridesmaids were using it to get dressed.) We ended up playing a little Madden 07 on the Wii and then got all dressed and headed over to the church.

The ceremony was cool. I had to help usher people around. We had a bit of a problem to start off with since my entire family pretty much showed up at once, so we ended up having like 8,000 people sitting on the left hand side of the church and nobody on the right. There wasn't any restrictions as to bride/groom side at this one, but that's how it ended up working anyway. Thankfully more people showed up to even things out...

The notable thing that I can remember from the ceremony was when they kissed for the first time, my cousin Matthew yelled out "Ewwwww!!" That had everybody in the church laughing.

After the ceremony we went over to the town park for pictures...lots and lot of pictures. Standard stuff. Of course then we went over to the fire department and did some pictures with one of the fire trucks since the groom is a volunteer firefighter. Then we rode around in the limo for a bit and headed to the reception, which was also fun. The food was really good, especially the salad. I need to know what dressing they used on that. After that the other groomsman kept going out for "bathroom breaks" where "bathroom" really means "alcohol" and "break" is another word for "shots". I didn't participate since I didn't really want to get drunk.

Overall I had fun, despite the fact that it was really really hot in the Tux. It was cool seeing some of the people I knew from High School again after so many years.

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Old Habits Die Hard

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 10:14:27 -0400

I went out to dinner with my family last night. It's the first time we've gone out with the whole immediate family (My mom and dad, plus my sister and me) in while.

Now...for some reason or other, whenever we were out somewhere and the waiter/waitress started reading the dinner specials, we tend to crack up into laughter. I'm not sure why. Might have to do with some of the weird stuff that is mentioned. But it happens. Nobody's laughed at dinner specials for months.

Sure enough, I'm reading my menu trying to figure out what I want when out of the corner of my eye I see my dad trying to hold in laughter. Then my sister does it...now I'm trying not to laugh and my mom is trying to pretend she doesn't know any of us. The moment we all go out again is the moment it starts up again. Hmmm...

We're an odd bunch.

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The People Are Listening!

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:43:14 -0400

Last night was my Mom's birthday, so the whole family got together to go out to dinner and then we went over to my place to play some Wii type stuff.

At dinner I discovered several surprising things:

After 2-3 years of having nothing in my AIM Profile, most of my family actually still checks on what appears to be a daily basis to see if I've decided to put something in there.
My family reads this Blog (Hi!)
Pretty much every amusing story I brought up was followed by "Oh yeah, we saw that on the blog"

I got my sister to sign up for an account on Vox as well.

Back at my place, we quickly discovered that one of my Wii remotes was non functional. The buttons worked, but the motion sensing is all broken. I put in a warranty repair request to Nintendo to try and fix it. We shall see. It's a good thing I borrowed another remote from my friends. I had intended on having 4 remotes, but...at least we had 3. We did some Wii Sports bowling and a little Tiger Woods golf.

And we had pie! Lemon Meringue, specifically.

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