Archive for July, 2004

Just an update on the comic caption contest deadline. I moved it up to this coming Sunday. I get back home sometime Monday, so I’ll get the winner up Tuesday. Then we’ll try it all again the following week. Thanks for all the great captions comming in. It’ll be hard choosing my favourite.

Oh, and I finally launched the new Adventive Cross Cultural Initiatives website — seeing as there was now more content on the new site than was on the old one. Check it out and feel free to email the Director of Propaganda with mistakes (I know I can count on my nitpicky friends!)

On Saturday, I learned to do something that I should have learned when I was a little girl. I learned to do a cartwheel. Sort of, anyway. Jenn says I need to stick my feet up higher when I do it. Anyways, who knows what you’re going to learn when you’re out throwing an aerobie around.

And how about that Rockin’ Comic caption contest? There were a dozen entries in the first two hours and as I post this entry, that number has more than tripled. I can’t wait until Richard gets back online. I wondering if I should close the contest early? Maybe run it for a week instead of two. I’d hate to see you all get bored of the contest before it’s even over.

In other news, Jenn and I are heading to Maine later this week for some camping and visiting and of course, at least one round of mini-golf at the world’s best mini-golf course I’ve ever been to — Pirate’s Cove in Bar Harbor, Maine. Arg!

Last night Jenn and I went for an aimless drive in the country and at the last minute stopped in at the Dairy King (no kidding) for a treat. While we were waiting, one of the other customers was chatting with the guy at the till about a mutual buddy of theirs.

“Yeah, so Jim just takes his guitar down to Sparks street and busks for a couple hours when he needs some money. He says he can make $30 an hour easy, and it’s not like he doesn’t like playing guitar anyways.”

Jenn asked me why I don’t busk, and I was thinking all the way home, why aren’t I doing that? It’s not like I don’t have the time, and I couldn’t play four or five songs a few times just to see what would happen in an hour. Then, as I do, I start thinking about the legality of it. Am I just a pan-handler if I don’t have a permit or something? And I’ve heard that for some places you have to audition at the beginning of the season to see if you’re good enough to busk. So, I don’t want to check it out and find out that I can’t busk, but I don’t want to go busk and find out that I shouldn’t be. I’ll probably end up not doing either.

But, back to the Dairy King (sorry, no website to prove they exist) wasn’t that the name of of Kevin and Danny’s ice cream place?

Just got back from the library — uh, Chapters — and was reading a great little book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s about punctuation sticklers. Now, I know I can’t spell and I can’t punctuate, but I aspire to better and I liked what I read. (By the way, Blogger’s spell checker hasn’t worked for me since their newest “improvements.”)

Anyway, the author sheds some new light on the old punctuation of plurality discussion we were engaged in breifly a few weeks back. She says possessive punctuation works differently depending on the situation. She says that if the pluralization has the ‘iz’ sound like Moses, it becomes Moses’s but Jesus is always an exception and becomes Jesus’. So, Darren and Jenn Foulds’s house (or more simply: the Foulds’s) is correct.

I forgot to mention something when I was writing about the Lost Dogs concert I went to a few weeks ago. As we were sitting and waiting for things to get started (I had the isle seat in the second row — good view) I was craining around to see how many and what kind of people were filling up the room. I noticed a young guy (and please consider that Jenn and I were below the average age at the concert) wearing a dark blue t-shirt (could have been long sleeved) that said “I Do All My Own Stunts” on it and had a picture of a stick person (the kind you might see on a road sign) falling over.

I thought that I recognized it from the GCS website. After the show I wandered around to see if it said GCS or Grass Roots Church on it. It didn’t and because I wasn’t sure, I didn’t approach the guy to ask. He was busy chatting with his friends anyway.

I meant to e-mail Chris to ask him about it but forgot and then only remembered about it today while I was poking around on the GCS site (because I was working on the new Adventive website. Guess I’ll fire him off an email now.

In other Pacholczak news, I’m reading Steve Greggs Revelation: Four Views book tonight while Jenn crochets and Legally Blonde plays in the background.

I had this idea this past weekend. It either formed during the ride back from the baseball game on Saturday, or on Friday afternoon. In either case I was driving west down Lees Av with the CBC on. And if I was driving, it probably means Friday afternoon because Jenn drove home from the baseball game.

The idea is for a comic about a rock band. There will be a drummer, bass player and another guy who plays whatever else needs to be played; guitar, keyboard, didgeridoo, whatever. These three are the main characters that the reader probably always see. There will also be the lead singer / guitar player. He’ll be really snotty and into himself and his musical skills (which are much lower than he thinks) and of course, he’ll take the rest of the band for granted. Okay, so, nothing really earth shattering yet, but…

The comic always takes place during a concert and for all the reader knows the same one. There is no comic outside of the band playing this concert although the story may arc for several days or weeks (or months depending on how often it’s drawn.) The band will even morph it’s style throughout the comic, changing from rock to grunge to punk to country and western to whatever. But the band doesn’t notice, they just keep playing the song. Kind of neat, eh?

My other idea for a comic is to save me time and effort. Every couple of weeks, I’ll draw a single panel comic without a caption and post it on my blog. It’ll be up to the readers to come up with the caption — kind of like a contest, but without a prize! At the end of the contest, I’ll post all the captions and select my favourite. Hey, it’s my contest, I can make the rules! Any takers?

This photo of the crazy cabin that I was at this weekend doesn’t do the building (or the builder) justice. It’s crazy — and inspiring. It was designed and built by one of the guys at Jenn’s office. What you can’t see in the photo is the roof (it’s a three story with probably twelve different sections of roof fanning out from a central point at the top centre of the bulding. The owner/builder took those of us who wanted out onto the roof and I laid down with my head poking out from the top most part looking down along the central beam and it looked great. As well, when you stand up on the tip top part of the roof you’re just about level with the top of the forest and you can see all around.

This plan of the first floor kind of gives you an idea of the concept for the house. In the center of the main spiral staircase is the central beam that travels up fourty feet to the roof and serves as the axis for the whole place. Each floor has the sections of the pie divided up differently and sticking out at differing lengths. The second floor is mostly open to below and has two bridges, one that crosses the living room to the master bedroom and another on the outside that joins two decks together.

On the third-ish floor there’s an office-library-tower place that looks out over the whole property. It’s also where you can get onto the roof if you pop out a window. There are three scale mockups for the cabing up there. This is a photo of the smaller support structure, there is another at a larger scale and the third is an outside wall and roof shape model.

It was quite incredible to hang out there. Oh, and there’s a small solar panal on the roof about a square metre in size that powers the place. It’s not hooked up to the grid so that’s all he has for electricity. We had a big storm around supper time and the lights ran well off the power stored in the battery from the solar cell. The cabin is heated by a wood stove. There is no plumbing.

I had free tickets to the Ottawa Lynx baseball game on Saturday night. On of the fellows from church managed to secure a box for a bunch of us. It was fun to get out to a game, have a few laughs with (and at) some of the folks there and to get a surprise box of… Foulds Elbo Macaroni. Thanks Andrew!

Another highlight of the night for me was yelling at the little kids playing musical chairs. They needed the coaching because they obviously didn’t know the rules. Right at the end of the game, one chair, two kids, the music stops, the littlest kid is right at the chair’s seat and he freezes! So I yell, “Sit down!” (almost instictivley) loud enough that he should be able to hear me, but he snaps out of his stupor and continues running around the chair while the other kid sits down and wins the game. Disapointing. So were the Lynx, they blew their lead and lost the game.

Oh, and how about this… The Ottawa Lynx played the Norfolk Tide. The Lynx’s mascot is a Lynx — simple enough. The Norfolk Tide’s mascot is a dirty yellow dragon with spikes on his head — any ideas why?

So, I poke around various Harry Potter websites from time to time. Today I found a link to a band called Harry and the Potters It’s a duo of two brothers who thought it would be funny to dress up in v neck sweaters and play rock and roll in libraries. They’re not really even that big fans of Harry Potter — they’ve read the books a couple of times, but were just looking for an easy way to play music to people who wouldn’t normally listen to them. Their website has a few songs available and they’re not too bad. “Save Ginny Weasley” is one of them and it’s almost worth a listen.

You might remember me posting about a bike ride I went on with some friends from church a couple weekends back. Well, this is a photo of us about two thirds of the way through at a park on the shore of the Ottawa River. That’s Quebec on the other side. I’m the fellow in the back with the fauxhawk. The big guy beside me is Andrew, but not the Andrew from church who visits and posts on my blog.

In other news, I’ve been reminicing about “The Great American Cross-Country Road Race” for the Commodore 64 the past few days. So, I downloaded a copy of it to play yesterday on my C64 emulator. 1985 — almost twenty years old! Where has the time gone! Anyway, I think I’m actually better at it now, because I’m more patient at it.

I’m heading out in a few minutes to get my contact lenses. I’ve been wearing glasses (and therefore shooting pool much worse than I should be) for a good fifteen years or more. Because of my funny eyes, my eye doctor told me that I’ll probably want to keep my glasses for regular use and then use contacts for special things. Apparently they don’t provide the same crispness for folks who are working in front of computers as real glasses do. But, they’ll be good for bike riding and other outdoor stuff I think.

P.S. I don’t like what new changes Blogger™ has recently made.