Attacked by balloons in the car!

It’s that time again for the weekend recap!

Friday night was spent at Shenanigan’s for the final night of Club Circuitry. Normally we only frequent Asylum, but once a month our friend Adam and his wife Ashley throw a goth/industrial night at a local bar. Its a nice change from the Asylum crowd and the DJs that spin there play a vast array of music vs. the pretty standard set list at Asylum. I got to dance my heart out to Joy by VNV nation, which was the highlight of my night, and Richard tore it up all alone while I got water to some old Ministry. Can’t say I’ve ever heard either played at Asylum, which was really nice. It’s sad to see this night go away. Apparently on the 29th it is going to be a retro night at Asylum, so we shall see what comes out of the woodwork musically.

Other than that, for the last week or so my life has been  pretty consumed with work and coming up with ideas for my roommates bridal shower. Each of us (and some of her family and grooms family) took on various portions of putting the party together. I volunteered to take on the decorations, because.. well I am foolish. Silly me, I thought not only could I whip up a few DIY things to cut down on the cost, that it wouldn’t take too much time to do. WRONG.

Not only did I wait til the last minute to finally come upon some inspiration for her shower, I came up with ideas that weren’t exactly easy (or cheap) tasks. After scouting around for ideas on things to create, I stumbled across the website Oh Happy Day!

I think the hardest part about creating this on the fly was trying to find a decent container that wouldn’t need much modification and didn’t cost a fortune. I had a couple ideas but I pretty much just ran out of time – a quick trip to Home Depot solved my problem and I picked up a small nuts and bolts organizer for 4 dollars. I printed the label on a sheet of adhesive paper – filled it with goodies like a toothbrush, deodorant, tissues, etc. It was a hit!

While I was out I picked up a menagerie of party items like sparkly centerpieces, balloons, streamers, etc. I also created handmade bunting that said “Bride To Be” which came out smashingly. It was my first time using an exacto knife to cut out small little letters, and for the most part, it wasn’t too infuriating.

All of the toilet paper dresses and the bride to be.

We played a couple games such as breaking into teams and creating wedding dresses from toilet paper, how much do you know about the couple, a mad lib, and a game where we were each given 3 clothes pins and if we said bride, groom, wedding or married we could take the persons pin. I did well in that no one stole my pins, but I didn’t do so hot about stealing others.

As party favors the mother of the bride put together small little pails with Hershey’s kisses and the laminate I created. It looked really ace. Sunday was low key and Richard and I spent the evening playing a new Lego game we bought, Plank, and Tetris Link, which is a Tetris based board game. Its a combination of Tetris and Connct 4 (sort of) and its a lot of fun. Also when not in use, makes a nice little nerdy display piece.

Happy 4th of July errybody! For the past 10 years or so, the 4th of July has been just another day to me, due to the fact that I have always had to work. But this year, thanks to working in an office setting, I have the day off! So look at me go. On Sunday, Richard and I bought a small arsenal of fireworks from a TNT stand (the picture on the left). We just love to set things on fire and couldn’t help ourselves. Normally we hit up both TNT and Phantom, but there was not a Phantom near my house. Today, Richard mentioned that he wanted to see if we could find one and check out what they had left. We went and had lunch and then spotted one near by. Sadly they had been really picked over (considering today was the 4th – duh.) but we did manage to pick up a few more things. (pictured on the right)

We saw one called Snakes in the Grass that they did not have in stock. Normally I would pass on buying something like this as it is probably just a larger version of the regular snakes we got as kids, but the advertisement piqued my interest and we set off to find another Phantom to see if they had any. Not far from the one we were originally at, we found another stand that had them in stock. We took a chance and bought them and a few other things. By then we had three bags of fireworks plus a large box, it was time to call it quits. On the ride back to Richard’s house, he looked at the Snakes in the Grass packaging and it said that it emitted sparks – so this got me even more excited that we did not just buy over priced snakes. Richard went to work and I… did nothing. And it was glorious.

We invited our friends James, Aaron and his daughter Angelina over to come hang out and blow things up in the street. One nice advantage to living in a cul-de-sac is that there is hardly any traffic on the street. When we used to set off fireworks when I lived in Los Angeles, we constantly had to stop to let cars drive by. Most of the fireworks that we set off were the run of the mill fountain with sparkly showers and what not. We did have a few sleeper surprises though.

   

The first was the Snakes in the Grass that I have been ranting on and on about. DON’T BE TRICKED friends! This is just a large package of the old dumb snakes we used to get as kids. Talk about a let down! Normally when places like TNT and Phantom do buy one get one free items, they are mediocre items. We picked up some Phantom firecracker fountains – and no pun intended, talk about bang for your buck. These were rather entertaining and lasted quite a while, despite being 5 dollars. We will definitely buy these again next year if they are available. The next was Viva El Futbol. I’m not overly sure what prompted us to buy this, other than Richard just wanting it, but it was… interesting. It lasted quite a while, but at the end it blows itself up. Which scared the hell out of all of us. We also had another fountain that launched a HUGE spray of showers up into the air, and we were convinced that it was going to set us on fire. Last but not least was the Phantom Mystical Magic Fountain. The name really sold me on this one, but I honestly was expecting just a huge fountain of sparkles like the rest, but what the hay, give it a go. Much to our surprise it launched green, blue and red globs of color, which looked really awesome. My only complaint was that I wish it had launched them higher vs just kind of spilling out over the edge. I definitely want to get this one again next year.

Other than that Richard and James did really responsible things like trying to daisy chain those crappy little fountains that you get boxes and boxes of and throwing strings of Crack the Whip in the air trying to get them to explode mid flight. All in all we had over an hours worth of fireworks and a good time was had by all. Can’t wait to blow more things up next year!

   

Well hello friends and… friends? I would say family, but I am almost positive that my family has not discovered my blog. It is probably for the better or something. Anywho… My weekend was actually pretty low key for once. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they are always pretty low key, but I wasn’t all over the place, I mostly just hung out at home. On Saturday I went to Target to meet Richard for lunch. I also got to catch up with a few people that I used to work with, so it was nice to see them. Other than that, I spent most of the day sucking my life away playing Minecraft on my XBox 360. Later that evening we had a birthday party at our house for my roommate Sam. It was a nice mixture of people that I haven’t seen in a while, mostly due to the fact that we have not been working many concerts lately. While hanging out on the couch, Dawn and I both got notifications that a new geocache had posted. Lately I haven’t really done much caching, mostly due to having no one to go with, so when Dawn asked me if I wanted to go and try to get first to find, of course I agreed. Honestly I love the rush of trying to be the first person to discover the cache. We told Sam that we would be back soon and headed out to try and make the find. Of course where the cache was hidden, there was NO parking to be found. It was along the sidewalk of a busy street with no street parking, so we had to park in a neighboring housing area and make the trek on foot.

We walked quickly to the cache location – because every person you see and every car that drives by suddenly becomes competition – and began our hunt. The anticipation of opening the cache with hopes that there is a fresh blank log is what makes FTF hunts for me. Low and behold we were the first ones there. After a brief internal victory dance, we inked the log with our names and by then another cache had posted, and another, and another, and another, and another… We looked at each other and decided to grab the others. How could we let the opportunity pass us of getting 4 more first to finds? Long story short, we were able to snag all of them and we headed back to the party. Of course once we got back to my place, another had posted, but we decided to let it go. We did however find that this was good practice for our upcoming task of finding 100 geocaches in a day.

Sunday was spent mostly lounging around at my house, waiting for Richard to get off work. He came over and we played his new Lego game Heroica: Ilrion. This game took longer to build than it did to play but it was fun. I would like to get the other sets in this series and put it all together and play on a huge board. After that we decided to partake in our Sunday ritual of pizza and Asylum. This week we decided to try somewhere new (to me) for pizza.

Richard has mentioned Rosati’s Pizza more than once, and I suggested that we try it out instead of our old standby Celestinos. It is a mom and pop shop which I love because not only is the service usually better but the food tastes MUCH better. We ordered a medium pizza and garlic cheese bread. Now, I don’t know why I ever bother ordering garlic bread of any kind. I LOVE garlic. Like really love it. Like when we got to Mongolian places they have to clean the grill top before cooking others food because I put so much garlic on there, love garlic. So ultimately I am always disappointed with 99% of the garlic bread I get anywhere. This was no exception, but it was still good. Our pizza arrived quickly, which was nice because I was ready to gnaw my arm off. Richard mentioned that they cut their pizza in squares (Chicago style) and we had a brief debate prior to arriving about why this is a good or not good idea. I vote that the center pieces suck merely because I hate getting my fingers covered in molten hot pizza sauce and I am always forced to use a knife and fork to eat the pizza. Alas, this is exactly what ended up happening – but it was still very tasty, I would go back again.

After that we parted ways to get ready for Asylum. Another club had decided to do an all white goth night and our friend Ed decided he was going to wear white and try to get as many people as he could to as well. Richard and I agreed that we would try to put something together, but when he came over and I opened the garage to head out to the car, we both laughed when we saw each other clad in all black. My excuse is that I don’t own any white clothes and I am sticking to it 🙂