Thanksgiving weekend: twenty-eleven

Wow. What a weekend it was. I believe one of my favorite ever. Of course Thursday was filled with all of the usual family stuff. Early dinner with my dad's family and pie with my mom's later in the evening. I also actually managed to make it over to my parents early this year and watch some of the parade with them. At pie with the Broshinsky's I had some time to look at photos with Karen. We both took some time to show off some of the shots we had taken, that was a lot of fun. After looking at some of her work I'm getting really excited about taking my photography class next semester and learning more about how to use my camera. That really just about covers Thursday, nothing really out of the ordinary but great nonetheless.

Friday I actually took part in some Black Friday shopping for the first time as a customer. Well, sort of. I went to Target in the afternoon after things were done being really nasty and bought a vacuum. Exciting right? I also got Blu-rays of all the old Christmas classics, which is slightly more exciting. After that my day really began. I went geocaching with Tiffany Conger. We had a great time. We found 4 total caches including a revisit to my first attempted cache that I never found. It was nice to be able to finally cross that one off the list.  We also found one that was up the side of Mt. Olympus on some crazy metal contraption. I'm really not sure what it was. Neither was the guy that placed the cache actually. If anyone can tell what this thing is from the picture it would really be awesome to know. It has an enormous engine attached to an even bigger winch all attached to a small tower. It was the craziest thing. It was really cool though. Although we ended up having to drive up part of the mountain on a pretty sketchy looking dirt road. I was a little worried for the safety of my car to be honest. Even after the sketch drive there was a little bit of a hike up to this thing which Tiffany was really not happy about but I bought her tea after. Hopefully she forgave me for that. :/

Post geocaching, we decided to grab some pizza at some new pizzeria Tiffany's cousin works at. I think it was called Limon something or other. Anyways, really weird pizza. The one we got had olive oil, mozzarella, spinach, prosciutto  and blackberries. Weird right? It was really good actually. A little sweeter than I'm accustomed to for pizza but I enjoyed it anyways. We ended up taking our pizza back to my house and chatted about our Nooks for a while. She ended up loaning me Percy Jackson Lightning Thief. I was fairly surprised to get this particular recommendation from her as we saw this movie together. It is arguably one of the worst films I have ever seen; however, several chapters in now, the book is not too terrible.

Next up: Black Metal Friday. Woo, what a night. I headed out to the Donahue's for some drinking and black metal. It was a grand time. Haley set up a black metal shrine on their table that was really cool. I tried to get some photos of it. I haven't edited them yet but I think I got a few good ones. We had mead and butter beer and other beverages. The butter beer was particularly interesting. It was served warm and I believe Haley said it had beer, butter, and eggs in it. It ends up being almost sweet and very rich. It's an interesting concoction but I think I enjoyed it. So, drinks were consumed, conversations were had and as the most metal of us left, the night gave way to pop music, dubstep and dancing, kind of an interesting transition I must say. Overall; a very fun night. Unfortunately it didn't lead to the greatest morning come Saturday.

We worked on our engineering project pretty early Saturday morning. As you can imagine I was a little grumpy about this situation but with the due date closing in and our machine still not climbing stairs we have some work to do. We made attempts to attache some spikes to the tires in hopes that they would catch the stairs and pull it up. It seemed to work pretty well but unfortunately We were impatient and tested it before the glue dried. It managed to pull itself up one step before everything tore apart. It has been re-assembled and testing will commence this evening. Fingers crossed.

Wow I didn't really realize how packed this weekend really was. I'm looking back at what I've written and realizing it's really a lot of stuff. That doesn't even cover it though. I spent a significant amount of time on homework, a great guitar hero hunt, put lights on the house, deep cleaned the kitchen, and more!Wow, what a weekend. Hope you all had a great one as well. :)

It was a dark and stormy night

Ok, this is freaking exciting. Five Iron Frenzy is back! The band officially announced their return last night at 7 PM. With it came the release of this brand new FIF song. Here's the thing that's really amazing. Since they are releasing this new song without the help of a record label, the band has asked for the help of their fans to raise the money necessary to record, produce, mix, master, market this new album. Kinda risky right? Wrong. The goal of the fundraiser was to raise $30,000 by Jan 21 2012. In less than 24 hours after the announcement of the upcoming album, FIF fans have donate over $80,000 towards the production of the new album/touring/marketing/etc. HOLY CRAP. The band has promised that any money past what they need to produce the album will go toward putting the band back on tour and I'm certain that donations will continue to flow in hopes that after an eight year hiatus, FIF might make appearances.

So I was thinking about this in terms of other fundraising efforts that I have seen. It seems that people were much more willing to donate to a bunch of middle class American rockers than to the tons of relief efforts that have been happening over the last few years. It's kind of an interesting priority. Most of us are a lot more willing to donate money for the promise of a new CD of our favorite band than to send money to disaster stricken countries to aid people that really need it. That being said, I plan to donate next payday to the FIF cause. I try to donate to more worthy causes when opportunities arise but I think I could definitely do better. End minimally fact based social rant. 

Ok now, that is out of the way. I am waaaay beyond excited for this new album. I was a little concerned when I first heard about it, fearing that it would be a half-assed attempt at a comeback from a bunch of guys that have long since lost their touch on their various instruments. This new song they released really boosted my confidence in the band and in fact, made me feel bad for doubting them. These guys still have it and I am stoked to be part of the backing they need to get the gears rolling on the next chapter in FIF history. 

                                                                                        

In all fairness, I did say bring it on.

Holy crap. This week has been absolutely insane. I have been working my butt off trying to get the new Mystery Theatre show open. The Agents of Chaos (including my assistant director) were busy most of the beginning of the week tearing out everything from the old 3300 South haunt building. It's really kind of sad to see it go. A lot of my life happened at that building and as cliche as it sounds, I did a lot of growing up there. During the move I took a couple opportunities to head over there and take a few pictures. I think I got some kind of cool shots of the old building but I really haven't had time to look through all of them. I'll hopefully get them posted in the next little while. Anyways, I took Mon-Wed off of work this week and worked 12 hour days Sat-Wed at the show. From 3D haunt space to the Cromwell Bed and Breakfast took a ton of work and a lot of hours. Fortunately I occasionally had some help from the cast, my mother, and now that the move is over I have Allegra and company to give me a hand.

During all of this craziness I still have school going full speed to finals. It's coming up really quickly and getting pretty stressful. It seems like we're behind in every one of my classes. My engineering class is behind because it  is a Friday only class so the Fridays that we have had off put us a week behind schedule each. My trig class is behind because our teacher is an idiot. He consistently shows up late, leaves early, and a couple times has just not shown up for class. All of us in the class are concerned about learning everything we are going to need for the final and being up to speed for calculus next semester. My chemistry class is behind for unknown reasons and we are tearing through material at break neck speed trying to get caught up.


On the bright side, my engineering project seems to be going fairly well. We started welding together the remainder of the components over the last few days and it's really starting to come together. We hit a couple snags yesterday and had to take things apart but we came up with a new solution for our gearing so we have a plan to get it all welded back together this weekend. It should be pretty exciting to get the thing going.

It's been a rather exhilarating few days and I have managed to get a lot done. I can't wait for life to get back to normal though. I'm way behind on sleep and nodding off at really terrible times. :P Oh well, show opens Saturday and then hopefully I can get things back to normal. I don't think I've ever been this excited for Christmas time. I get the whole week off between Christmas and New Years and it is going to be a very well earned break. I think I'll start my countdown now. :)

As an afterthought; for a while I was doing fairly regular updates on my non-smoking progress. I haven't updated on that in a while and I don't want anyone to think that it's because I've slipped up. Things are going exceptionally well. Since my small slip up while drinking that I posted about I haven't had any problems at all. The only time I even think about smoking anymore is occasionally when I take a deep breath and notice that my lungs don't hurt. It's pretty fantastic. :)

Bring it on....unless there's another option.

Holy crap. Things are about to get a little crazy. Haunt season just ended and that means I have like 15 days to get the next mystery open. I met with James and Brian yesterday to start planning out the space for the new set and I started to realize how much work I have to do. It's a little scary. I'm a touch behind on homework and I have TONS of work to do to get this show ready. I'm a little nervous. Finals are coming up, work is getting kind of busy, things are just piling up. Game on.

Speaking of work, there are some kind of cool things going on. My first real mechanical project is taking shape. It was a project to add a belt drive motor to a mechanical mixer to add an additional rotational axis (kind of). Anyways, we fired the thing up yesterday and it appears to work just fine. We need to modify the cover to make it fit over the new components and I think it's ready to go. I'm pretty excited about that. My next new project I've been working on is for freeze drying. I can't actually say what it's for (which makes it seem a lot cooler than it is) but I need to basically make a freeze dryer. We want to experiment with the process without spending $10 grand on a dryer. It should be pretty cool. :) I've been doing a lot of research on the process and different configurations and should be ready to start buying parts and piecing the thing together here in the next couple of days. Exciting right?