I Walked Into the Past….

A few of the local Zellers stores closed down in our city in 2012 and they had massive clearance sales before they closed their doors for good.  The Boyfriend and I decided to check it out and see if we could score anything for cheap.

We were in the electronics section when I came across something from a bygone era hanging on one of the shelves.  I was immediately swept back to middle and high school and I was shocked that these were still in production let alone available for purchase anywhere other than the internet:

And there you have it, folks…a discman.  Something not been seen since the late 90’s to early 2000’s.  I definitely had one of my own and it went everywhere with me in a backpack full of CD’s; until of course I got my first mp3 player, that is.  So let’s all toast a piece of history that I’m sure was a part of all our teenage worlds back then.

But really? $40 for the damn thing?  I can’t see it being wanted for any reason let along someone paying that much for them.  Perhaps that is why the Zellers are turning into Targets up here…

What the Heck Happened to Halloween Costumes?

I remember Halloween when I was a kid.  I remember costumes that we threw together with thrift store items or bits and pieces left over from old costumes stored in a Rubbermaid box under the stairs.  I recall one year when my grandmother made me a costume of an angel and I believe my sister was a devil.

I was in the mall last year around Halloween and some company had rented out an empty space for the month of October and set up a Halloween store so The Boyfriend and I decided to peruse and see what was up.  They had some awesome makeup, props, and accessories but the thing I couldn’t believe was how much the costumes had become all about guys getting fun and creative costumes and girls getting costumes that showed the most amount of skin and really didn’t make any sense at all regarding the supposed “theme”.

For example, I give you the two wizard (read: Harry Potter rip-off) costumes I spotted.  As you can see, the male version is quite good.  It looks like the movies did.  The female version, however, is somewhat…off:

Now I’m not a prude and I’m all for sexy costumes if someone desire to wear one, but I don’t understand why the guy gets to wear the actual GOOD looking costume and the woman is stuck either wearing the male version if she actually wants to look like the movie character, or she had to parade around with her ass cheeks hanging out in close to freezing weather.  It’s Canada up here, people…we used to have to wear costumes that would fit over snow suits.  It’s freaking cold on Halloween.

Another example we stumbled across was an M&M costume.  Yes…the candy that apparently will not melt in your hand (I still call shenanigans on this) somehow managed to be turned into a sexy costume.

My problem with this?  IT’S NOT A FREAKING COSTUME!!  It’s a skin tight tank dress with a picture of an M&M on it.  It’s like when you were little and you’d get the cheap costume with a picture of superman on the smock and a cardboard picture of his face with a crappy elastic around your head and you’d have to pretend to be Superman looking like a weanie in a plastic blue smock and a mask that broke in five seconds.  And you don’t look like a weanie in this one…you look like a chick wearing a bar dress with a stupid picture of an M&M on it.  NOT a costume…dress with a picture of what your costume was supposed to be.  There is a difference.

Just to emphasize my point, I give you the following comparison.  Again, the guy’s costume actually LOOKS like what the character is supposed to be, and the chick is wearing a tiny, short dress with a picture of the desired character pasted on the front of it.

I am of the opinion that if you want to wear something “slutty” for Halloween, dress like something that is supposed to look that way.  I don’t understand taking the name of whatever you want to dress like, putting the word “sexy” in front of it, and then destroying what the concept of the costume was supposed to be in the first place.  For example, in the Batman universe, Harley Quinn (on of my favourite characters) is always sexy.  I’ve seen her in the jester costume and I’ve seen her in the awesome outfits she wore in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City (Google searches for pictures here and here.  A “sexy” costume of her would make sense.  A sexy costume of Robin, The Boy Wonder?  That just doesn’t make any sense to me:

Heck, one of those even has a picture of Robin in the bottom corner and honestly, I don’t see his boobs popping out of the costume.

I don’t know…honestly I prefer to still make all of my costume with odds and ends from the thrift store.  I love picking through the racks and finding the perfect item to go with the concept and pulling it all together to take the wee tots trick or treating.  I still have a giant Rubbermaid bin of all the costumes I’ve had in the last ten years in the storage closet (much to The Boyfriend’s chagrin) just in case I need to use something from a past outfit and I love it.  I think it’s great to see people dressed up in original costumes or things they made themselves.  It seems like there’s so much more care and fun put into it.

I know it’s a month early and all but Trick or Treat everyone…hope you all have a great Halloween and get your hands on massive amounts of candy!!

They’re BAAAAAACK!!

Can anyone tell me when this started happening? I remember these things from when I was a kid and people were scrapping over them in toy stores. I remember that my cousins had one and when the batteries started to die it sounded like a demon from hell.

Why are these things back? Are we really that much of a lost society that on top of just remaking movies from 20 years ago, now we’re going to just re-release the same damn toys? And the poster says you cab pre-order it…so that means they’re anticipating crazed parents and spoiled rotten children duking I out in the aisles again. Sigh…

Disney Blu Ray is a Rip Off!

I love Disney movies.  Who doesn’t, right?  We all grew up watching the classics like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, or Aladdin.  Two out of three of the previously mentioned films were recently re-released in theatres in 3D for the enjoyment of a whole new generation of people (and let’s face it, the enjoyment of the previous generation as well).

While I didn’t get the chance to go and see The Lion King when it was released again, I did have the pleasure of re-experiencing Beauty and the Beast in all it’s glory on the big screen.  Something I hadn’t been able to do since 1991 when it was first released and I was only 8 years old.  I was annoyed by the 3D because it was distracting and pointless, but experiencing that movie again on the big screen literally brought tears to my eyes.

So of course, I wanted to purchase a copy for myself before Disney threw the movie back into their horrid and hated vault.  I HATE the Disney vault but that’s a topic for another post at a later date.

I trotted on down to the nearest Walmart and went straight to the Disney section, excited to own a copy of Beauty of the Beast for the first time since owning it on VHS.  Yes, that’s right…VHS.  My excitement at spotting my bounty was short-lived, however, when I saw the price tag stuck onto it.

Yes folks, that’s right.  The price was actually $36.93.  My jaw fell to the ground and I literally said out loud, “Are you FREAKING kidding me?!?”  I then stood there for a long time and studied the Disney Blu-Ray section of the movies in Walmart, slowly coming to a realization.  They were all insanely priced.  Now I know that Disney movies have always cost a little more than your typical film and, in my opinion, this was alright because they were always top-notch productions that lived on pretty much forever.  But to be requesting almost $40.00 of my hard earned money was asking a bit too much.

I studied the section a bit more and made another discovery.  All of the films in the Blu-Ray section for Disney were not just Blu-Ray discs.  They all included the Blu-Ray, the DVD, and a digital copy.  This, my friends, is bullshit.  They’re charging large sums of money to essentially buy three copies of the same damn movie all at once.  I don’t know who thought this up, but they’re either a marketing genius or the scum of the earth; quite possibly both.  We don’t need 3 copies of a movie.  NOBODY needs 3 copies of any movie at all…ever.

So I looked around for just the Blu-Ray copy, because that’s all I wanted.  I did not want three copies of one movie…I wanted the Blu-Ray because it’s a beautiful movie and one I deem worthy of paying the already too high price (as compared to DVD) of buying it on Blu-Ray.  But it doesn’t exist.  If you want a Disney movie, you HAVE to purchase three copies of it.  I even saw a version that also included the 3D version as well.  So you were getting FOUR copies in that one.  Eventually I broke down and bought three copies because I was terrified of missing my chance and finding out it went back into the vault before I got my hands on it.  Have I mentioned how much I LOATHE the Disney vault?

I spotted another film I’ve wanted to own since it’s release as well.  I saw the movie Up.  Then I saw the price.

Yup…$39.93.  No freaking way.  I paid too much for Beauty and the Beast because I love that movie and it makes me feel like a kid again.  There’s no way I am going to pay that kind of money for new Disney movies.  It just won’t happen.  So I left Walmart without Up and went home, hating Disney just a little for their shenanigans and thievery.  Later, I ended up finding a treasure trove of Disney DVDs and Blu-Rays at a used video store and scored them all for under $15 dollars each, including Up which had the Blu-Ray, DVD, and digital copy.

So this is my message to Disney.  I love your movies.  I have ALWAYS loved your movies.  However, I will never purchase your movies for the prices you ask for them based solely on the fact that you threaten us with taking them away forever and hoarding them in your stupid vault like a bully.  Please pay attention to what I have to say next, Disney, because it’s very important.  You will get far more of my money if you come to your senses and charge reasonable prices for them and make them more widely available.  I may have forked over the cash for Beauty and the Beast, but that’s the exception.  It’s a childhood nostalgia thing and nothing more.  Your movies aren’t worth $40 dollars and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Multiplayer Gaming Is Not What it Used to Be

When I was in high school, I spend a HUGE amount of my time playing 4-player Goldeneye with my friends.  We would play after school, on weekends…whenever possible.  It was incredibly fun to sit around with my friends, chat with each other, trash talk when we got a good kill, and just generally share the experience with my friends. 

There were so many other games I used to play with other people as well.  I remember playing Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 with my sister all the time.  Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing…all of these games have very fond memories for me and all of these memories involve me hanging out with people and having a good time while gaming.

It seems lately, however, gaming has shifted into a multiplayer aspect that I don’t really like.  I had my first experience with online multiplayer when I bought myself a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops and played with some gaming friends from around the city I live in.  It was really fun because I knew the people I was gaming with and I even ventured so far as to play with people I didn’t know.  That wasn’t so bad either, but definitely not my favourite thing to do as I would end up with the Bluetooth yammering in my ear all the time, mostly the voices of what I assume were 13 year old spoiled brats who probably shouldn’t have been playing such a violent game in the first place.

So that was my last experience with online multiplayer as I found it to be lacking in the personal aspect that made multiplayer so much fun when I was younger.  I was just sitting alone in my living room playing with people I didn’t know and randomly being insulted for either killing someone (the point of the game), being killed, or just because I’m a girl and some people don’t understand that we play games too.  If they hear a girl over the chat, they’re either immediately cat-calling or telling you that you suck.  Not the best gaming experience.

Recently, I’ve played co-op games with The Boyfriend and it’s been awesome.  We’re on our second round through Resident Evil 5 and we’ve also enjoyed the Lego games as well.  I love being able to spend time with him playing these games and experiencing the story with someone else.  Being able to discuss it is awesome. 

And therein lies my biggest complaint with modern games.  There aren’t enough co-op games that I can actually play with someone in the same room as me.  There are a great deal of co-op games, don’t get me wrong.  But they all require the people playing to be on separate machines to play together.  I can’t pop a any old co-op game into my PS3, sit down on the couch with The Boyfriend, and play together.

For example, I got him Dead Island for Christmas and it says right on the box that it’s a co-op game.  But only online.  Which I find to be complete and utter crap.  Do the gaming companies just assume all gamers now have no actual friends anymore and must always just be grouped with online people?  Or are they just doing this to sell more copies by forcing us to play it on separate systems?

I’m going to go with “The gaming companies just want more money”.  There’s no other explanation for this turn of events and I’ve gotta say, they’re not going to get it out of me.  I refuse to buy multiple copies of one certain game just to play the multiplayer.   I’ll just lose out on those particular trophies and simply play the single player campaign.  The multiplayer games of today aren’t worth the money and the stress of wondering if I’m going to get grouped with a bunch of jerks that tear me down for being a chick or insult me for some other arbitrary reason.  I just won’t play.  That’s the bottom line.  It’s far more fun to play with my friends in the same room than it is to play with a bunch of strangers online.

Yes…I Bought This

This, my friends, is a freaking Steve Irwin action figure.  I scored this in a Liquidation World and was absolutely stoked to see it on the shelf.  This man taught me so much about animals and conservation and was ultimately badass.  It even talks!!!  So yes, I had to buy it and he now sits proudly on the shelf of my desk at work.  RIP Steve…you were one of my heroes growing up.

I Miss Video Games…

For those of you who don’t know me all that well, I’m a gamer.  I love video games and have been playing them since I was small enough to hold the controller for my parents’ Atari.  My most formative childhood years were spent playing Frogger, Donkey Kong, Pacman and of course, Pong.

Then of course, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) arrived.  I still remember the very first time I held that controller.  My uncle rented a system to have at my grandmother’s house for Christmas and I watched in utter fascination as he and my other uncles all played Super Mario Bros., taking turns and getting really excited.  At some point in the evening, my Uncle Kevin looked at me, placed the controller in my hand and said, “Here, why don’t you give it a try?”  That was it.  I was hooked.

I got an NES shortly after, having begged my parents constantly.  They were great about it, since usually we only got stuff like that for Christmas.  That system lasted me for years.  I played it until it literally would not play another single game.  By the end, there was no sound.  I had to wrap the cord around the box tightly to get any colour and I had to stick a VHS tape into the slot to keep the game down.  But I still loved it and mourned its passing when it finally died on me.

After that, my mother got us a Nintendo 64, a joint gift for Christmas for my sister and I.  Again, I played the crap out of that thing.  My sister would watch me play games like Ocarina of Time and my friends would come over for marathon sessions of GoldenEye 007 multiplayer.  A custody battle broke out over the system when I moved out and was only solved when my mother determined we would each get the system a month at a time.  I ended up buying an original NES from a pawn store for the months that I didn’t have the N64.

Over the years I’ve also added an Xbox, a Wii and a PS3 to my collection and gained a whole lot more when I moved in with the boyfriend (including an Atari!!).  I played games so very much over the years and it was one of the things that bonded the boyfriend and I so well when we first started dating.  The very first gift he ever gave me (spontaneously) was a copy of Double Dragon for the NES…a game I had lost years ago when my first system died.

Sadly, however, my life as of late has not been allowing for very much gaming.  I find that I’m missing it terribly.  Work has been crazy for months and if I’m not doing overtime, I’m exhausted when I get home.  It always seems like I have social commitments, I have to go to the gym, or any other thing that pops up and there’s never any time or energy left for gaming.

The most gaming I’ve done in the last month of my life was to play about ten minutes of Mario Kart 64 at the Games Day Summer Pwnage event.  I loved it.  The atmosphere was charged, everyone was social and talking about the games and I had a great time trash talking and shooting blue shells.

So yes, I miss gaming.  I look at my shelf and realize that there are so many games I’ve purchased and started that I haven’t finished.  Some of them I haven’t even started at all.

All our games, siting lonely on the shelf...

The boyfriend is starting to complain that I never game with him anymore and I’m starting to get really annoyed by the lack of gaming presence in my life so I’m going to try and get some more play time in.  Right now we’re working on Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 because it’s a cooperative play game we can do together and also, it’s Harry Potter, so it’s awesome.  Wish my luck in getting back to my gaming roots this summer, it’s been way too long.

Movie Review: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

The boyfriend and I had an experience lately that bears repeating.  We were bored one night, flipping through Netflix, and arguing about what to watch.  Finally, he suggested Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  I was annoyed enough with the flipped that I just said that was fine and he could put on whatever he wanted.  So he chose this one and we settled in to watch.

I will start by saying that I hope to hell that whomever made this movie intended for it to be as over the top ridiculous and cheesy as it was because if they were actually going to frightening, they failed on an epic level.

In rating it on the Cheese Scale, I give it a good rating.  This means it is it was quality cheese.  These movies are amusing, contain a the right amount of humour and character likeability with an amusing plotline.  The downside is, there’s not a whole lot of rewatch value to these ones.

I will say that the reason I liked the characters is that they were acted so badly.  I laughed my ass off at their apparently intended serious acting that was so awful, it blew a school play out of the water.  I love stuff like that, it makes my bad eighties movie just that much better.  To give you a run down of the bizarre and sometimes baffling things this movie had to offer, let me share some of the finer points of the film with you.

Just in case you care, there are definitely spoilers in this post.  If you are peeing your pants in anticipation to see this film, don’t read the rest of this or you will be saddened and dismayed.

First of all, the Klowns come to Earth in what can be described as a falling star/spaceship/circus tent.  Yes, their spaceship appears as a circus tent.  The first person to find this tent is an old man thinking he’s going to get rich and his blood hound named Poo.  That’s right, his dog’s name is Poo.  I believe at one point he calls it Pooh Bear, but it’s funnier the other way, so that’s what I go by.

The main character breakdown is as follows:

1. An old police officer who hates all the young punks in town (anyone under thirty) and continually mumbles monologues about how he hates those crazy kids.  Somewhat akin to the unmasked villain at the end of every episode of Scooby Doo.

2. College guy and girl up on make out hill who see the falling star and make the discovery and try to warn everyone.

3. Young police officer who is more open minded and used to date the chick that was on make out hill.

4. The moron twins who drive an ice cream truck and think that it will get them laid.  They talk rather like the teenager on The Simpsons with the squeaky voice.

The generic teenager working all the crappy jobs.

The Klowns themselves are bizarre.  They are really tall, look like they’re wearing blow up clown outfits and have very creepy but also very fake looking rubbery faces with yellowed, pointy teeth.  I’m actually fairly certain they spent most of the budget on the costumes for the Klowns.  They kill people by shooting them with a ray gun that cocoons them in cotton candy and then liquefies them, allowing the Klowns to insert silly straws (yes, silly straws) and suck them out through that.  Grotesque yet humourous.

They also have guns that shoot popcorn at people.  In the beginning, I was unsure as to what this would accomplish but apparently the popcorn later turns into snakes with Klown heads that try to eat you.  This just confused me to no extent.  Why would popcorn do this?  Eggs I could see, but popcorn is so buttery and delicious that I can’t see it harming me.  Though, I guess I couldn’t imagine being liquified by cotton candy and sucked up through a silly straw either, so there you go.  Something I found particularly amusing was the creation of a balloon animal dog that followed a scent trail.

During the inevitable takeover of the town, a biker gets his head punched off by the little Klown after the biker breaks his little bicycle (the Klown was wearing little boxing gloves at the time and acting quite impish).  A shadow puppet on a wall captures several peoples’ attention, then the several people and they are fed to a bag of popcorn…and we all know what happens when the popcorn gets involved.  There is a car chase involving a little Klown car, an ice cream truck, and a police car which is just ridiculous.  During all this, the townspeople are being collected up in their cotton candy cocoons with a giant vacuum on the Klown car.

One of my favoured discoveries in this film was the way to kill them.  Are you ready for this?  Pop their big, red noses.  Yes folks, that’s right.  The Klowns’ weakness is that giant red nose they all sport and by destroying it, they will spin around in a bright green tornado, turn into a crystal and then explode.

Just as a random observation, by the way, the main chick changed into leg warmers in the second half of the movie and then was kidnapped inside a giant balloon and taken back to the space ship.  I think she deserved it because the leg warmers were polka-dotted.

And now, for the final battle.  We arrive at the local amusement park, where the Klowns have moved the space ship to better disguise it.  Five Klowns get out of a tiny car and kill a security guard with pies…he melted and the little clown put a cherry on top of the goo pile.  This was awesome.  The boyfriend and I laughed quite a bit.  The ice cream truck losers fell into a ball pit with two girl clowns with giant, inflatable boobs.  They were in heaven.  They (dumb ass preppy guy and young cop) rescued the leg warmer chick and then they all tried to escaped.  Dumb ass preppy guy (wearing an argyle sweater) opens a door and finds another door.  He commented loudly, “Another Door!”.  This gag is repeated and every time he says, “Another Door!” like it’s the biggest shock in the world

The last boss (yes, I play too many video games) was a giant Klown with a crocodilian style head.  There was no special effort in finding his weakness, it was the same as the smaller Klowns.  The young cop popped his nose with his badge.  The spaceship blew up and that was pretty much it.

I love cheesy movies and this delivered on that whether it was intentional or not.  There was some unfinished business, however, that bothered me at the end.  How did the moron twins escaped the big boobed Klowns and why it was never defined whether leg warmer chick officially wanted young cop (that would be my choice) or dumb ass preppy guy in the argyle sweater?  The three of them just hugged at the end.  Though perhaps after all their harrowing trials, they will form a permanent threesome and live happily ever after.

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Random Thursday Playlist

I was reading through the random blogs on the Freshly Pressed page last night when I came across one called My iPod is Making Me Crazy and had to click on it. It was about the randomness of people’s playlists nowadays thanks to the shuffle feature on our mp3 players.  This got me thinking about how random my own playlist was and I decided to keep track of the first 25 songs.

I made up some rules to follow while doing this.  One, I couldn’t skip anything that came on.  Two, I wasn’t allowed to write down the song and then skip to the next one because I didn’t know if that would influence the mp3 player’s song choice or not.  Three, I couldn’t lie no matter how stupid the song was that came on.  The fact that I had to implement this rule ahead of time should be some kind of indication as to what kind of music could be contained on my 8 gig player.

So without further adieu, I give you the first 25 songs of my day:

1. Science Fiction Double Feature – Rocky Horror Glee Show Soundtrack.  Yes, I love Glee and I do own all the soundtracks the have shot out onto the shelves in the last year and a half.  As sad as that may be, I totally enjoy them.  I love Rocky Horror and when they announced they were doing an episode based on it, I nearly danced with joy.  It is one of the only girly things I do and I think that I’m allowed one or two.

2. Get It On Tonight – Montell Jordon.  Immediate flashbacks to high school, riding around in a friend’s older sister’s car with this song cranked up so loud they had to roll the windows down.

3. I Will Buy You a New Life – Everclear.  I love this song and miss this band.  However, I cringe every time the singer rhymes new with the word…new.  I will buy you a new car, perfect shiny and new?  No…please use anything other than the same word.  I always thought it should be blue.

4. Winter Born (This Sacrifice) – The Cruxshadows.  I love this song.  Its dramatic and dark and different but still not so very deep and scary goth that I run away.  The boyfriend played me this song about a year and a half ago and I then immediately scoured the internet, searching for more and loving almost everything I found.  It’s a lot of mythology themed stuff and for some reason, I really dig that.

5. Harder to Breathe – Maroon 5.  I dig the sound of Maroon 5.  Enough said.

6. So Help Me Girl – Joe Diffie.  Yes, you caught me.  I like country music.  I grew up in a place where it’s common to see people walking around with cowboy hats and giant belt buckles that say “Git R Done”.  No one can escape it forever…believe me, I tried.

7. Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) – Wyclef Jean ft. Akon, Niia and Lil Wayne.  I know, I try to avoid any songs with people singing who have names that start with “Lil” as a general rule.  However, the Dollar Bill part of the song is just so catchy that I find myself using it in daily life.  I now hang my head in shame.

8.  Disenchanted – My Chemical Romance.  This was from The Black Parade album.  It actually brings back memories of seeing My Chemical Romance live at our local arena.  They played this song and said they were working on it for their newest album.  I remember being disappointed later when I listened to it because I liked it so much better than the album they were touring when I saw them live.

9. Heart Heart Heartbreak – Boys Like Girls.  I have no story for this one, it’s just really catchy.

10. Over My Head – The Fray.  Again, no story.  I just like the little background beat.  It makes me bob my head.

11. Walking on the Sun – Smash Mouth.  I always likened the sound of this song to something that Austin Powers would totally groove to.  It’s just got that feeling to it.

12. Creep – TLC.  Ah, Crazy Sexy Cool.  One of the first CD’s I ever owned and I still have it, somewhere in the basement collecting dust.  It was probably far more mature themed than my mother actually realized when she gave it to me for Christmas, but then again, I also got Smash by The Offspring that year from my aunt, despite the parental warnings of explicit lyrics.  So I’m thinking that my parents didn’t really care all that much as long as I behaved myself.

13. Help! – The Beatles.  It’s The Beatles.  They require no explanation.

14. Tomorrow Never Dies – Sheryl Crow.  Always picture the entire opening scene of the movie when I hear this.  I love Bond songs, they’re always just so great and get you right in the mood for the movie.

15. Follow You Down – Gin Blossoms.  Not my fave song from them.  I prefer Till I Hear It From You off the Empire Records soundtrack, but this is a pretty good one as well.  I recently heard a tidbit on the radio that they may be making a comeback and whilst perusing Wikipedia, found out that they indeed released a new album last fall.

16. Wake Up – Three Days Grace.  I’m always happy when I hear something on the radio that totally rocks and it turns out to be a Canadian band.  These guys rock and they proved it when I saw them in concern with Work Stacey last year.  It was a great time.

17. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Sarah McLachlan.  Yes…I am one of those sad people that has yet to have managed to get the Christmas music off of my mp3 player and it is now mid February.  One year I left the Christmas tree up until August and only took it down because I moved so I figure I’m not doing to bad on this.

18. Cold Day In July – Dixie Chicks.  I love the Dixie Chicks.  In my eyes, they can do no wrong and when all that crap went down in the press because of one innocent statement, I was behind them all the way.  Then, when they released the documentary “Shut Up and Sing”, it was awesome.  Even the boyfriend liked it and he is so not a fan of country music.

19. I am Stretched on Your Grave – Abney Park.  This is a band from the steam punk genre.  I love it…it’s dark and twisty and so very different.  They’ve got violin, a male and female vocalist and a song about the zombie apocalypse.  What more could you ask for?

20. The Hand That Feeds (DFA Mix) – Nine Inch Nails.  This one is the boyfriend’s doing.  He’s a HUGE fanboy of Trent Reznor and all his works so when we started dating, he’d sit me down and I’d listen to all the songs, get the explanations about what they meant, stories behind the albums and everything.  Eventually, I started to really like it all as well and genuinely like pretty much everything he does now too.

21. Nobody’s Daughter – Hole.  The boyfriend has a not so secret celebrity crush on Courtney Love back in the day.  So when her new album came out last year, it was a must buy for him.  I ended up loving it a lot.  It’s a great CD and I listen to it quite frequently.

22. Bootylicious – Destiny’s Child.  Sometimes I forget that Beyonce wasn’t always just Beyonce.  I remember the days of Destiny’s Child.  This song was my favourite one they did.

23. Who Says You Can’t Go Home? – Bon Jovi.  I freaking LOVE Bon Jovi.  My mother raised me on four or five different albums from different artists and the Blaze of Glory album for the Young Guns II soundtrack was one of them.  I killed that tape.  Like Meat Loaf and Tiffany, it died a horrible death, finally chewed up by my tape player, refusing be be played any longer.  I finally got to see Bon Jovi live in Toronto in 2008 and it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to.  It was the most expensive and worth every penny.  When the opening notes of Blaze of Glory sounded across the stadium…I have to say I felt all tingly.

24. Through With You – Maroon 5.  Yeah, they appear a lot on my mp3 player.

25. Lightening Crashes – Live.  Nice.  Rounding out the list with a classic song from the 90’s.  This was the one that everyone danced to at school dances and it was just so intense and deep.  It’s always one of those songs that takes me directly back to high school.

A Second Snow Day: Beating Cabin Fever

I awoke this morning to much of the same weather as the night before.  The snow was coming down like a white blanket outside my window, the lane way looked like we hadn’t used the snow blower at all the night before and there were people up and down the road in all directions shoveling like their lives depended on it.

I dutifully checked the local college website and informed the boyfriend that his classes were canceled for the day and he could stay in bed.  He mumbled a rather unintelligible yet distinctly celebratory noise, rolled over and went back to sleep.  I then checked my work email, hoping for good news and that I could go back to bed as well.  Unfortunately, there was only an email saying that the office was open and if we felt it was safe enough, we were to head on in.

Wanting to keep everyone informed, I sent a quick note saying the college was closed in case anyone had kids that were attending and went to have a shower and work up the courage to dig myself out of the lane way.  I got dressed, I put my hair up a la ponytail style (that’s right, I’m all about cutting edge fashion) and I said goodbye to the boyfriend.  I then decided to check my email one more time and lo and behold…SNOW DAY!!

It was official, I didn’t have to go to work.  I decided not to go back to bed as I had already showered and was wide awake, so instead, I sat and watched about five episodes of Intervention and did some work from my laptop.  Yes, I’m just that exciting…working from home on a snow day.  However, I also cleaned the house which was the inspiration for the boyfriend’s motivation to put the tree up this afternoon/evening.

So that is what we did to keep ourselves from going insane because we couldn’t leave the house.  We dragged the giant box of Christmas decorations up from the basement, organized everything, got rid of a few things that were ready to go away, and we set to work decorating.

The mishmash of decorations in the lovely storage box that lives in the basement 11 months of the year

The pile of stuff the started accumulating after we went sorting through the storage bin

The boyfriend sorted all the decorations into various categories such as indoor lights (for the tree) outdoor lights (which we are estimating are over 20 years old), run of the mill decorations (shiny, coloured balls, garland, etc..) and sentimental ornaments to name a few.

While he was doing this, I used non-tree decorations and made other areas of the two living rooms look a little spiffier.  I used green and silver garland for the upright lamp posts in either room and they turned out looking rather nice.  I then set to work on jazzing up the lovely new entertainment stand.  I put green, leafy garland on it and we set most of our figurines on the shelves.  I have since noticed that we have a great deal of penguin paraphenalia.  When the boyfriend and I got together, little did the two of us realize that we both really liked penguins and between the two of us, we have a lot of them.

It looks a little cluttered, but I couldn't bare not to put them all out

When I was finished doing that (while at the same time torturing the boyfriend by making him listen to the Glee Christmas album), we started in on testing the strands of lights.  This proved to be difficult because some of them were mine from when I lived on my own and some of them were the boyfriend’s which had been collected over approximately the last 10-15 years.  So in testing them we found that some of the lights didn’t work but the others would come on.  We would simply replace the defective lights and move to the next one.  Some, however, were the ones that if one light didn’t work, the whole strand didn’t work.  After much frustration and swearing on the boyfriend’s part, we decided that we could make due with two working strands of lights as they were kind of long and if we were sparing, we could manage to get the whole tree done with them.  I don’t think we did too bad of a job considering he’d moved on to testing the outdoor lights (and diligently making sure they all worked and no two like colours were side by side) while I tried to string the lights on the tree.

This was problematic for several reasons.  The small amount of light strands, as mentioned above, the fact that I’m just not very good at stringing lights, and lastly, the fact that we have a rather fat Christmas tree and I have rather short little arms that will not reach around this.  The tree itself is in a corner and I could not just walk around it, so I had to get creative and reach behind the tree, throw the lights over the tree and generally stretch my wee little arms to the limit.  This was the end result (only of stringing the lights, this is pre-decoration):

Its kind of sparse in some areas, but overall, not to bad.

During all this rigamaroll, Mr. Peep decided to hide in his usual cautious place; the mat in front of the kitchen sink.  I’ll admit that it’s not the best hiding place, but he actually usually blends in quite well and he likes to sit there when there’s something going on that he’s curious about, but too afraid to get close to while it’s still happening.

He sits on the very furthest side of it and stares into the living room whenver we're moving things around

After this came the final stage of decorating (for now…outside stuff will come later when we can move through the yard).  We put the ornaments on the tree.  I would like to point out that none of our ornaments have any kind of theme or reason to them, they’re just a collection of things we’ve accumulated over the years.  Sometimes we will decide that a few are too ragged and they will get tossed.  This year we parted with a whole bag of strung beads and various other things for donation.  We each have our various sentimental ornaments that were gifts over the year that must go on the tree.

I always tease back and forth with my friend about how her tree must be perfect and matching have a theme and she always just stares in awe at the tacky mismatch and disarray of mine every year.  The year we lived together in an apartment was the best because I was the one that owned the tree and it was spectacularly tacky that year on purpose just for her.  You can see her well decorated and nicely themed tree on her blog here.  I will admit its very lovely, just not my style.  Even the boyfriend looks at our tree now and then and shakes his head.  After it was finished and we had all the supplies put away, Mr. Peep ventured out to check out the scene, immediately placing himself under the Christmas tree and chewing on the branches.

Our Christmas tree 2010

He has already knocked off one decoration...I expect to find more