Monday, April 16, 2007

Quest For Fire












It's ever beneficial to have times of unwinding and relaxation for the
soul. The soul needs to breathe much like our lungs. This past saturday
night, Sarah and I trucked up to Guelph to see some good friends
(Laur, Viv, Jill, Schoones Senior and BWil) and cook some meat
and marshmallows over an open backyard firepit. It was glory.
Though Schoones Senior was hellbent on burning way too many
large dry items (i.e. a large wicker table/stand), it ended up being
a monumental night. Though all of us joked about singing a few camp
songs, only rumblings of 'jaybird' and 'wings of a buzzard' were
heard. Everything was communal from beer to rum to cubans - all
the way down to the sausages and smores (though some sausages
ended up spewing guts from the cooking rack creating what were
dubbed as 'danglers'). It was a night of just...pure being. The air
was crisp and the fellowship was ripe. Some people got too close
to the fire and had sausage explode ONTO them while others
seemed to keep getting smoke in their eyes from any fireside seat.
It was good to see those people. They are people whom Sarah and I
love and wished we saw more often. Good folks.

Covered with sausage innards and marshmallow goop, my jeans from
that night are now completely written off. Sarah and I awoke the
morning after with a deep smell of fire wrenched into our clothing and
hair. Sheer treasure.

'It's times like these you learn to live again'.

Monday, April 02, 2007

IPod Nation


It finally happened. Sarah and I caved to the monsters of technological
advances within digital music. For a long time, I thought we could
manage just fine without any sort of digital crutch. The crux of my
addiction, though, stemmed from the receipt of a free Sony MP3
player from work (being someone who takes calls for Sony). Before
this catachlismic event, Sarah and I seemed to get by just fine without
such a device. Having the ability to put songs on and off of computerized
stick, though, and then play them back at your leisure, while organizing
thematic playlists, became a fast spreading disease.

The main problem with the MP3 player was that it was just a tease
for the real thing - at only 512 MB, that's only a mere 120 average
length songs. Enter 60 Gigs of raw IPod power. I feel like a sucker
or a slave to marketing but really...this thing is damn good. At over
5,400 songs, I am only just cracking 50 percent of its memory
capacity. Sweet mother of pearl. My biggest criticism of listening to
other IPods was mainly due to my fear of not being able to get more
bass into the EQ of the song mix - I was wrong. You can add
bass.

Seriously though, a pod is a feature-filled bag of fun. The coolest thing
about ours is that in purchasing it from Ebay, we got a sort of ancient
model as the 60G is no longer available from Apple - they now
only feature the 30G and the 80G. 80 GIGS! I just think 80 is an insane
amount of memory. Unless you're a hardcore gamer or programmer, a
common hard drive size on a desktop computer is 40-80ish. It's gonna
be hard to fill 60 as it is. I'm gonna try though, dangit.

I know that this product won't change my life but somehow, I felt cool
upon receiving it in the mail. Is that bad? I guess it's the notion of knowing
road-trips and going to camp for the summer will be made much easier
and won't have to entail lugging crates of CD's around everywhere.
It's minimalism in a capitalist form. Sheer genius.

That's all for nizzle, my home-izzles.

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