The Shear fun of Halloween!

Happy Halloween! I really get a kick out of Halloween. This year I wasn’t sure I’d be making a costume or anything, but a little persuasion from my girlfriend settled it pretty quick. For no real reason, other than the SHEAR fun of it, I went out dressed up as a sheep.
I bought a white sweater, a pair of women’s tights, a toque, and 3600 cotton balls from walmart. A trip to the dollar store for some eyeliner to paint my nose black, and some craft foam for my ears.


I didn’t have any fabric glue, so instead I used wood-glue to stick all the cotton balls to me. It was heavy, and stiff. Jen did probably 70% of the gluing though. She's a real whiz at arts & crafts. After the glue had dried, I could barely fit into the tights.
But, everything worked out, so once we had all suited up we hit the town!
My girlfriend was a block of Lego. Everyone at the bar was super excited when she showed up, and accidentally started knocking the buckets off her costume. Tinkerbell was also present, and freezing cold.
Finally, Wayne Campbell was there too. Except it was mature Wayne, who had long since cut off his long hair.
And there was a dude who was dressed as a box of wine!

Anyway, Happy Halloween everyone! I’m off to clean up the cotton that got everywhere. I covered everything in fluffy white cotton. Oops!

My First Brush with Crime

I like living in Saskatoon. I really do. It’s a fairly clean city, decent access everywhere; the traffic isn’t bad except around the after-work rush-hour, and there’s lots to do every weekend if you’re inclined to get out and do stuff.

The only pockmark on its reputation? My car got broken into.

On Thursday night last week, the girlfriend and I went out for a quick drive to the store. I unlocked my car, and noticed that my roadmap, pop bottles and CDs that were in my glove-box and console were strewn about the car.

Jen then says that my passenger-side door is slightly ajar.

Well shit. Evidently my car had been broken into. What was missing? The GPS I’d left in the console.

Whoever had broken into my car was definitely not your average miscreant either. My windows were all fine, and there weren’t any scratch-marks around the door or windows, so use of a slim-jim was probably involved (for those not in the know, it’s a tool made specifically to unlock car-doors). It more than likely took less than 20 seconds to unlock the door, and less than a minute or two to rifle through my front and backseat.

I don’t drive it very often. Maybe three times a week. It’s basically for road-tripping and grocery runs, so it happened between Monday and Thursday sometime. The doors had definitely been locked, as I heard 3/4ths of them open when I hit the button. But, Fie upon me for leaving valuables in my car I suppose, especially in a car that I don’t sit in and drive every day.

I should be thankful that unlike my family members and friends who live in major cities *cough* Winnipeg *cough*, my car windows didn’t get smashed, which is way more expensive than a GPS. I do feel guilty though, as it belonged to my girlfriend.

So how does it feel to have your car broken into for the first time? Extremely unsettling. I felt weirded-out for the rest of the night. I even had crazy dreams about it.

The worst part? It’s theft under $500 from a vehicle; such a small crime that the police wouldn’t even be able to do much about it even if they wanted to. I still have the GPS charger cable, but if that has the serial # of the GPS unit or not, I’m unsure.

So take it from me kids, don’t leave valuables in the car. It may be inconvenient to have to bring your mp3 player, gps, or radar detector into your home every time you leave your vehicle, but it’s way more inconvenient and expensive to have to deal with having these things stolen.

Good Natured Fall Fun in Saskatchewan

Fall means leaves, pumpkins, impending snow, and hoodies! And since the snow will soon be here, it was time to take in the fine autumn weather we’ve been enjoying out here in the Prairies.

What did we choose to do? Well, Girlfriend and I drove for almost 2 hours to enjoy some Fall themed fun!

We went to the Lumsden Pumpkin Hollow, located just north of Regina. It’s quite obviously meant for kids and families, but to hell with that! Neither of us had been to a corn maze or a pumpkin patch, and so we decided that we’d kill two stones with one bird.

First thing we did, hit the corn maze!

Here's the Where's Waldo moment of Hammelltime: Can you find me in this photo?
The maze was impressively large, and apparently in the shape of a pirate skull. We did manage to get lost, but I think that’s because people had kind of made their own paths, and it wasn’t always clear if we were on a real path or not.
They also had these “Corn-undrums.” Basically, picture riddles to solve during your maze your tour. We got most of them really quick, but this was one that I still have no F’ing clue what the answer is.

The first person to solve it wins 1,000,000 internet points.

After the corn maze, I fired the Corn Cannon! Look, a video!

It was neat, they had you firing cobs of corn at CFL Team Logos. No Roughrider targets though, as that would be damaging their rep with the local fanatics. I aimed for the Argos.

Next, they had this big giant pillow thing. You jumped on it. But something was wrong with it, and they cleared everyone off of it and closed it before I could take a turn with all the ten-year-olds.

There were some hay bails to take photos in front of as well. But after the pillow got shut down the kids started jumping all over the hay bails. Since I didn’t want to be a total creeper and join them, instead I took the slightly less creepy route and took a photo of this hilarious kid in overalls jumping down.

He biffed it and I laughed inside while he rolled around in the hay trying to get up.

Finally, we decided to shop for pumpkins. By this point, we had learned that there was no "pumpkin patch," which was really disappointing. I was expecting some little-people farm with a field to wander in where I could pick a pumpkin off the vine.

But, this being Canada, apparently pumpkin patches don't work like that. So we went inside the pumpkin store to find one. The best pumpkins had already been picked over, so instead I settled for a photo.

All in all, The Pumpkin Hollow in Lumsden was some good Fall Fun!




Angus and Julia Stone - I'm Not Yours

Captain America's Grave Dishonesty

I went and saw Captain America last night. All summer I wanted to see it, but I just never found the time. Finally, it arrived at the poor-people theatres and I set aside some time to go and take in this pulpy WW2 era action flick.

I enjoyed the film, and if you wanted to see a decent "Turn-Your-Brain-Off" action flick go see it if you haven't already. But that’s not the story I’m telling. I want to talk about my suspension of disbelief.

Nobody walks into a Marvel movie expecting the action to be realistic. I have no problem setting my scientific ignorance meter to full throttle when it comes to movies like this. Comic-book action movies are supposed be fun! People’s faces are supposed to make a “THWACK!” noise when they get punched, all of America’s WW2 soldiers are hunks, nobody rolls on the ground in pain after running from the concussive force of an explosion that should have blown out their eardrums, it’s all good fun!

However, as I was watching Captain America, there was one scene that really annoyed me:

Cap, and his band of Merry-Men, zipline off a cliff onto a high-speed train.

I couldn't find a picture of it, but from the looks of things, this was a very fast train. it wasn't some 1940s slow-chugging coal-burning engine, this thing was fueled by the power of the gods (quite literally). And since this was high up in the mountains, the god-train was being buffeted by blistering cold winds.

When they land on this train they start running along the top of the rail-cars to sneak inside.

THEY. START. RUNNING.

You just can’t do that. Not even Captain America could do that.

Yes Captain, you can throw your shield and have it bounce right back to you. You can jump 2 dozen metres over an explosion and while receiving nary a scratch or blowing out your eardrums. You can even avoid getting caught in trees when you parachute into a heavily forested landscape in the middle of the night!

But you cannot run on the top of a train. You have to crawl. It’s too rough of a ride, the wind is going too fast, and the top of a freezing cold domed railcar will be too slippery to run on at full speed. You have to crawl. The most you could manage is a hunched shuffle.

Oh, and lets not forget he has that shield strapped to him! Have tried walking around with an umbrella in a slight breeze? That’s difficult. Now try waving around a big shield in 50+ mph winds! That’s impossible!

What’s more, his compadres, who aren’t super-soldiers, also ran on the top the damn train! Maybe, just maybe in the Marvel universe the Captain could run on the top of the train with magnetic suction-cup boots attached to his feet; But the other guys? No way.

It’s. Total. Bullshit.

My suspension of disbelief went right out the window when that happened. I enjoyed the rest of the movie, but that scene dogged me all the way home.

C’mon Cap, you’re supposed to be the good guy, you’re supposed to play by the rules. You know who would break the rules of physics? The Red Skull (the villian FYI).

And you don’t wanna be like the Red Skull, do you?