writ. dodging classification

Well I’ll start off this post by giving some credit. Laurie is taking credit for the whole weekend and its events. I’ll give it to her, she’s a damn good planner, and everything couldn’t have worked out better. I’ll just take my own credit that i was a driving force in getting the baseball game together, although Laurie did a bit of the leg work. I’m an idea man though .. i can’t be concerned with details hahaha ;).. just kidding Laurie’s just way better at getting this organized than I am.

Anyways. We headed out to the DC Improv on Saturday night, , Laurie me, and our neighbors Annette and Ryan, to see this guy name Bob Marley. Some of you may remember him as the cop in Boondock Saints who came up with the Gorilla stomper theory at the beginning of the movie and proceeded to get made fun of by Wilem Defoe throughout the rest of the film. Anyways he was alright. He had some truly funny stuff, but he was inconsistent. Some things he talked about brought up some really funny imagery in my head, but in the end he sort of diverged into stuff I really couldn’t identify with all that much for most of his set. The thing i was really surprised at was the comic that came on before him. It was this guy who had Ceribal Palsy. He was extremely good, and had the whole audience laughing throughout his whole set. He tied together self-deprecating jokes, into political humor, tied with a lot of topics everybody there could probably take something from. He was just a good comic, disabilities or not.

Then of course, there is the event that stole the whole show at the Improv on Saturday night. We were there for the late show. It started at 10:30. At the end of Marley’s set.. for some strange reason our waiter came around for another last call, after he had already given us 1 last call. He said there was a special guest that just showed up so they were extending the show.

So who shows up? None other than Dave Chappelle. Clearly surprised the whole audience started cheering, and it took a few minutes before Dave could even speak. He was good. Not even going to attempt to recreate it here. Its amazing how quick his whit is and how well he plays off the crowd. Oh, and Yes, a bunch of idiots yelled out, I’m rick James Biatch!. Not to mention some chick who decided she couldn’t wait till after the show to tell her, probably drunk at some other bar, friends that Dave chappelle was at the improv, thus distracted me from being able to pay fully attention, to some of the beginning of his set. Sometimes i wish i could just stand up and smack people in public and send them home.

Anyways, Sunday continued the weekend with Nationals vs. the Orioles. That came together real well. We planned to meet everybody an hour before the game and tailgate in the parking lot, cooking up some burgers and hot dogs. That rocked. Mmmm hot dogs. Mmm beeer. The game was good. Nats won 3 to 1. The O’s never really got started in the game, which was their downfall.

So yes, the weekend was busy, i slept very well last night haha.

We went to Beauty and the Beast at the Toby’s Dinner theater that was opened up in Baltimore, in canton. I was very impressed with the new Toby’s place. Well its more like a second Toby’s. The original is still running in Columbia. The great thing about it is, I think both theater’s have a different appeal to me. The one in Canton is a more traditional stage, which is cool. I imagine they can do more traditonal stuff with props, which is great for some bigger shows. The Columbia one is more a pit. where the stage is the floor in the center of all the tables. Laurie and I have always been right on the floor, which i really like for some reason. I think its because i think its cool to be right next to all the actors. Seeing little cues they give to each other, stuff you woulnd’t normally recognize.

But yes it was Laurie’s birthday which was great we had a lot of people come from her family, as well as my parents came down to see the play as well. It was great they could come. Then everybody came back to the house to see what we’ve done with the place. Many hadn’t been to see it yet, and my parents hadn’t seen it since move in day.

All in all the whole weekend rocked.

And Happy birthday Laurie ;) .. ok sure this is a day or two late for the blog.. but i did get it ontime in real life!!!

2 townhouses + ping pong table + 2 kegs of german beer + birthday king and birthday princess crowns = absolute crazyness.

as mat pointed out in his comment on the last post. I’m getting Older!! .. 27 to be exact.

So 2006 is here. Happy New Year. Laurie and I are moved into the house. (still i swear i’ll have pictures up here some time. I hardly have time right now to make this post.) We’ve made pretty amazing progress since we moved in on the 28th.

Anyways… hope everybody’s new year was exciting!

Ok really. There were no monsters involved (or hurt even) in the making of this Sundays events. Laurie and I had a day long date on Sunday doing Christmas type stuff. It was fresh off the heels of Jason’s Christmas party on Saturday night, and a marathon shopping/Wall-mart trip around Arundel Mills. We rocked the hell out of all the things we needed to shop for. So it was great to spend Sunday doing fun stuff.

It started off seeing this thing called “The Living Christmas Tree”. The idea is pretty simple.

You get a group of musicians to do the orchestra music for Christmas music – CHECK.
You get a chorus – CHECK
You form a chorus stand that is the shape of a Christmas tree (including lights!!) where all you can see is a person’s head – CHECK
Put Chorus in the Christmas tree and sing Christmas songs – CHECK

Along with this they had little skits on side stages to bring a story together over top of it just being a chorus in a big Christmas tree singing songs. It got a little slow at times, and Laurie and I cut out a little before the end so we didn’t get killed in the traffic exiting the parking lot. Overall it was pretty fun and a cool thing to do. kudos to Laurie for finding this. (as a theme for the whole day, she was totally in control of the events)

Next we headed on to walk around the National Tree in front of the White House. Took some pictures. Helped some people take pictures, got our picture taken in front of the tree. Was a cool thing to do on a December evening. Our only hitch in the whole plan was that it looked like it was going to start raining when we were driving into DC, but by the time we parked there was nothing coming down.

Then to tie up the evening we took a walk around Old-town Alexandria to look at all the Christmas lights on the trees, and the store fronts, and finally found ourselves in Cosi drinking warm drinks and talking about furniture and painting.

Picture courtesy of Joey O. (link to his site to the right)

Joey O., Sid, and Myself hit the Phillies game last Wednesday for some good baseball fun. I hadn’t really hung out with Sid in like FOREVER, so we met for dinner before and I saw his new place up in King of Prussia. It was good we caught up on a lot of stuff. Then we headed to the Phils vs. Cubs game. To which the Phillies won it in the bottom of the ninth inning by what seemed to be Jimmy Rollins getting him into a rundown situation between 3rd and Home plate, and getting out of it by stealing home. It was pretty awesome.

Once i get my latest Lomo Roll developed I’ll have a pic of Joey and Sid up from this same day.

drove to Connecticut on Friday .. didn’t get back till Sunday night .. bachelor party for Dan .. it was a blast

Yesterday i had the pleasure of seeing Batman Begins. Mr. Johnny K. and myself met up at the good ol’ treehouse in cockeysville to get some food and beer before we headed over to see the movie. John had seen the flick before, but liked it enough to agree to see it again since I had yet to see the film. Also, he was bored, I was bored, everybody else is off doing other stuff. Anyways. Beer was had, good chicken sandwiches consumed, and zing off to the movies. We did a bit of talking about biking and video games. Coincidentally we had some time before the film enough to head to dick’s sporting goods and look at some new bikes for John, since he’d been saying he definitely needs a new bike (his current one he’s had since he was about 12 i think, thats definitely reason for an upgrade).

Batman Begins, begins. It was pretty much everything and more i was hoping for the film. I really liked it. It got the batman movie franchise back into a darkly told story about a hero who really in his own right is pretty creepy and scary, and rightfully so. Batman, and Bruce Wayne needs to be portrayed in a dark and a little disturbed fashion. I mean there’s just not something right about a guy who runs around in a bat suit and fights crime. So when an actor is playing the alter-ego of that guy (i.e. Bruce Wayne) you have to get the feeling that he really isn’t quite all there himself. Christian Bale plays this role perfectly. He’s perfect for any role where you’re supposed to think he’s just not right in the head, no matter how handsome he’s made up to look.

With that said, Liam Nieson plays Raaz-Ah-Guul perfectly as well. I’ve only really known this character through the Batman: The animated Series, and the episodes with him have to be some of my favorite from the series. The story is a little different than what was written for the cartoon, which is understandable. The character himself is exactly what I was expecting, and well done.

My only commentary on the action for this movie was that I tend to dislike when action is portrayed with zoomed-in and jerky camera motions to portray more action than possibly was being shown by the actors in the film. I think its kind of cheap, and if they’d spent more time on some choreography, they wouldn’t need to resort to this sort of camera trick to give the illusion of more action going on than actually was filmed. I really only tend to notice this sort of thing when I see films in the theater though, so maybe its just disorienting to me when seen on the big screen. I’m sure if i see it again on DVD i won’t even make notice of actions scenes done this way. Even so, there were plenty of well done action scenes in the movie, that didn’t need the above mentioned film technique.

Loved the movie, i highly recommend it. The Scarecrow is a scary bastard….

So i figure it’d be a good idea to go cycling up the North Central Railroad trail that starts here in Cockeysville. Don’t worry I’m bringing a camel back, backpack of water and a water bottle. I’ll be fine ;).

I had a fun weekend of visiting my family with Laurie. We went out to dinner with my brother and sister-in-law to this Mexican restaurant that has some pretty good and very strong margaritas. Then on Sunday we were walking around Tyler Arboretum. I’m guessing one of the highlights for Laurie was finding old photo albums that have a billion pictures of me when I was a little kid, and of course embarrassing stories from my parents to go along with them ha ha.

EDIT at 3:15pm: Well when we were driving up to the trail. The temperature on a sign said 101. Who cares ! i got water. And it turns out the NCR trail is mostly shaded by trees, so it really wasn’t a bad ride at all, with the air current moving past you on the bike. It felt really nice actually.

that is all.