Glee: A Nothern lites Entertainment Report

Greetings Bloggies.

So it is time for an installment of my very infrequent Entertainment reports. I have just finished watching one of my favorite TV shows. Glee.

Now those of you who know me know I am more likely to watch science fiction or discovery channel. Those that know me better would know I have no love for High school culture and any thing that glorifies it. The last thing that most know about me is a general lack of interest in pop culture and the associated music. These trends make Glee an anomaly in my viewing habits.

So why glee. It came to me as a recommendation from a once good friend. Needing something to reset my brain during the fall semester I started to watch it regularly as fluff. The surreal musical numbers and lots of singing and dancing creates an appearance of fluff. Neither the show nor my self stayed in the same place. The show went away after the first 10 or episodes. It reappeared at a time when I had been as far from my normal happy middle ground as I had been in a long time. And brought characters in to parallel emotional spaces. On one occasion I concluded that I have to be the least manly man on campus, I was feeling a little down watching Glee and eating GOOD Chocolate.

So what do I get out of Glee. More all the time is the answer. For one thing I do like music, I just have tastes that are not up do date and find too much of the stuff on the air sounds like every thing else out there. So in that context Glee wins just for range of music choices. Music is not the core of what I get out of Glee. As I had said at first it was for fluff. Later the emotional depth of it was running parallel to my own and it brought both uncertainty and comfort, but its easy to bring out emotions I already have. Lately as I get distance from heart break and the range of emotions a break up can cause I have been finding Glee doing some things much more powerful.

Glee makes me feel things. Things out of the scope of my day to day. And Yes today I was rocking out to both there KISS covers and Lady Gaga covers. If there is one thing I have learned I need to do is to keep emotions closer to my day to day existence to keep them form swamping me when they get bigger. Some how a odd little show set in one of my least favorite times of life helps with that.

So Here is to the most emotionally complex show on my TV.

GLEE.

Choices

Greetings Bloggies.

I have been chewing on this post for a while, it started out life as a guild to going out for chinese food. Which in Vancouver is a complicated question and still worthy of a post. It has morphed into something more personal. After a 2.5 year relationship ended it occurred to me that I had no compelling reason to want to move back to the interior.

I have spent an amount of time going through the heart break that came with the territory and it sucked. My recovery started to run in parallel to a reduced work load from the program. As I went from 5 days of classes and 8 days of home work a week to 4 days of classes and 1 in the office, all the way down to full time in the office I started to have time to look around.

My practicum was in Kits just off of Burrard street. This lead to two routes home, both exposed me to the city, North walking over the Burrard street bridge to down town or strait east over Broadway. No mater how I cut it I saw a good sized slice of town.

Between the mountains the water the food and other, I admitted it I love this city.

The important thing of this is the choice. Not the choice to love vancouver, the choice to stay here not because I no longer have reason to move to the interior but because I wanted to for its own sake. Not because the jobs are here and it makes economic sense but because I have choices of how and where to spend my time after work.

In some ways this strikes me as a contrast to how I made my choices earlier in life. Looking back I am starting to think of my 20's as a period where I either acted on defaults or constraints. I took and kept what I could get because I had few choices. I made do and a chunk of honest hard work and thrift made it possible for me to afford to make the choice to stay in Vancouver.

I like this city and I will stay here not because I have to but because I want to. I have some work to do before I have a proper home in this town and there will be hick-ups along the way. Nothing a good pint at a local brew pub could not ease the pain of.

A Robots Place Is In The Kitchen

Greetings Bloggies.

I have had the same thought several times.  I am reasonably sure that it is not original to my self but the source is long lost to me.  The thought in question is

" Never get a human to do a robot's job"

I thought it last summer on one of my earlier skytrain trips where the train seemed to running too fast and breaking too hard, I was convinced that a human was at the controls of the robot train.  More recently I was watching a portion of the movie 8 Mile, set in the 90's in Detroit.  There was a factory seen in which the 'hero' was loading stamped steel plates from one thing on to a dolly.  Lift shift drop, Lift shift drop, lift shift drop, a robots job.  Now I have a rice maker.

I had toyed with Idea of getting one as I finished the program gift to my self since the start of the program in September.  A couple weeks ago freshly exposed to an solid review and extensive first hand experience from a family member I caved in.  Thankfully they make them in single person sizes.  I spent the little extra and got the model that can cook brown rice.

In fact here is the list of things it can cook, that I know of.

Brown rice

White rice

Sushi Rice

Congee

Mixed rice, such as plov or name your rice with stuff cooked in it dish from any where in the world

Oatmeal.

The review, on brown rice it comes out fluffier then the times I cook white on a stove top.

If set to Sushi rice I do get the right kind of sticky and the urge to buy a bunch of seawead and start making roles.

Other quirks, a timer, which gets set for when you want the food ready not for when it starts cooking.  For this morning I prepared the machine with oatmeal water and dried friut set the timer for 7am.  At 6:59:59 am the alarm goes off and there is a bowl of steaming hot food.  The first time I used the timer I loaded it with brown rice for breakfast.  I got up to the smell of cooking brown rice.  Almost as good as waking to the smell of fresh bread.

I for one welcome our future robot overlords.

All Hail Zojirushi

Other features, beyond rice cooking.

a handle to pick it up by when you want to put it away.

A clock that keeps running when you unplug it so you don't have to reset the clock when you want to use the timer

A retractable cord to ease in the putting awayness.

To this machine I give it 8 out of 10 tentacles.

 

C Food

Greetings Bloggies.

Well it has been a while since I have giving the three people in my audience something other then filler. Though some of the comments on the filler were positive.

So about ten days ago I took the time to join some class mates for a its almost over dinner. There was a Dine Out Vancouver promotion. Fancy places offered discounted meals to attract new clients. I accepted the invite and joined my friends at C Food. A up class place at the foot of Howe Street where it meets up with False creek.

Its hard to give the meal a just review. It was gourmet, not proper meals. As much about the exploration of texture as it is about being filling. To make it filling the staff kept us fed with a steady supply of bread. This made the meal filling not just tasty.

Like any truly great meal the food is not the start or the end of the occasion. A truly good meal is a product of the people it is eaten with. So tucked away in the wine cellar, even if it was up stairs, with 9 or so class mates and some friends or spouses I had a good meal. As a group we went through a hard fast paced program. We helped each other where we could and it was good. So here is to my first truly great meal since an era ended recently.

Followed up with a lemon cheese cake with fruit compote.

My meal was a salid with smoked trout.

Some form of very yummy glassed salmon with mixed vegetables and something called sea asparagus.

Others has a lamb shank and there was even a dish with Octopus bacon.

Team Pants

Hi All

For the business management and stuff class I ended up after some confusion attached to a group for reasons unknown to me calling its self Team Pants. Well it was a fun group to work with and we did some good work on short notice and all. I snagged this photo from facebook.

The man in the tie is the instructor.

Kirk and the Quest for the holy Grail

The First Of May

Its the first of May and that means only one thing