Cremes

Last night we went to see Michael Buble at Jones Hall, in Houston’s theatre district. It was quite the entertaining night! We were a bit late leaving because we had to print out directions to the place, and to the parking garage most importantly. The traffic was crazy, they are doing construction at a pretty busy spot, so the two lanes have to merge into one, and there’s merging before that too with a little side road. We were trying to get off just before the merge spot, but no one would open up the traffic even just a wee bit for us to slip on through. People get really mean when there is traffic. So we had to make a little detour, but we were on our way pretty much after that.

When we got to the garage and parked, we walked over to a restaurant called Perbacco’s. It’s a little tiny restaurant right across from Jones Hall. That way we could take our time eating and not be rushed. The food was pretty authentic Italian. I had the spaghetti marinara, which had chicken - something I’ve never had in spaghetti before but it was really yummy. Mike and I each got a glass of pinot grigio which was actually really yummy. (Wine always tastes better with food.) After that, we went to check out the Michael Buble merchandise that they were selling. I didn’t see anything I liked, there were a few tshirts but they had a huge MB on them. There was a cute teddy, but not cute enough. The nicest thing was a set of two martini glasses (really well made, heavy glass ones) with a matching glass shaker. But just looking at it I knew it was probably about $50 or more, so I wasn’t about to get that! We waited around a bit, then went to go find our seats.

We were sitting wayyy up high, on the balcony area, but dead center, which was nice. I like being in the center. It took awhile, but at like ten past 8, the lights finally dimmed, and out came some guy Tim Rykert, who turned out to be a very funny guy. He’s Canadian, so he has to be good! :D

After about 20-30 minutes from him, Buble came out. Here’s the playlist for the evening (I scribbled it down on our ticket stubs so I wouldn’t forget):

• Feeling Good (from It’s Time, 2005)
• Sway (from self-titled, 2003)
• Try A Little Tenderness (from It’s Time, 2005)
• Fever (from self-titled, 2003)
• Come Fly With Me (from self-titled, 2003)
• Moondance (from self-titled, 2003)
• You Don’t Know Me (from It’s Time, 2005)
• That’s All (from self-titled, 2003)
• For Once In My Life (from self-titled, 2003)
• …some operatic thing…
• This Love (yes, the Maroon 5 song)
• Billie Jean - hehe yep, and he did a darn good job of it!
• I’ve Got You Under My Skin (from It’s Time, 2005)
• Smile
• Home (from It’s Time, 2005)
• You And I (from It’s Time, 2005)
• The More I See You (from It’s Time, 2005)
• Save The Last Dance For Me (from It’s Time, 2005)

That last song was really cool, because he stopped singing a few lines in and told people that if they wanted to dance to go ahead and do it, apparently some guy in the front was shaking his butt or something? I don’t know.
And then the encore:

• How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) (from It’s Time, 2005)
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love (from self-titled, 2003)
• A Song For You (from It’s Time, 2005)

But yeah, he seemed like a pretty down to earth guy. He went and danced with one woman in the audience, and she grabbed his butt, it was pretty funny. Pretty much everyone was standing up for the first two songs in the encore, and me and Mike danced a little, as much as the tiny aisle would permit, not to mention my sandals were hurting my feet.

After the concert, we got in the truck and headed for home, tired but happy after a good show. Came home and played Gamecube for a bit (that’s what Mike is doing right now actually), and then hit the hay. It would have been nice to have binoculars or something, but I guess it’s ok. Next time I’ll remember to bring them! Apparently the Lion King musical is coming to the Hobby Center (which is also in the theatre district) next August, so we might possibly go. It’ll continue the tradition of going to see a show each summer, anyways! :D

PS. I have pictures of the two of us gussied up and once Mike downloads them from his camera, I’ll post them up.

I’ve been buried in books this summer. Quite literally. With Barnes and Noble so close, it’s hard not to. Coles has nothing on B&N. Us Maritimers are missing many good stores, and this is one of them. I thought I would list all the books that I’ve read so far this summer and books that are waiting in my reading queue.

Bridal Bargains:
This was a pretty good book, I learned a lot of things about saving money and about popular scams that go around. Of course, most of it is based in the US consumer markets, so I’m really at a loss on how to do the same money-saving techniques. Pretty much, I plan to not go overboard on anything. But it was a really handy resource and very informative. I encourage any bride that’s not trying to bankrupt her parents to read it.

The Case for Christ:
This one I really enjoyed. I had a few problems with it, seeing as though he only consults Christian scholars to talk about the evidence that Jesus Christ was who he said he was, but still very interesting nonetheless. It gives you food for thought at the very least, and gives you something solid to tell people who scoff at the Bible thinking it a mere storybook full of fiction. The New Testament is one of the most reliable ancient resources we have.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:
Still about 100 pages from the end, this one has been quite the interesting read, as all Harry Potter fans have come to expect. I’m really looking forward to another spashy ending full of cliffhangers at each chapter. Me and Mike are reading this one together, he looks over my shoulder as I turn the pages, or he reads to me as I rest my eyes. I bet we’ll finish it within the next two days!

Coming up:
Can You Keep A Secret?:
Been wanting to read this one for a long while, since I am a huge fan of the Shopaholic series.

High Fidelity:
Mike and I have been passing this one back and forth but for the past month of so it’s just been collecting dust.

The Secret Life of Bees:
This one’s been hanging around for awhile too, so I should read it sometimes!

True Believer:
A big fan of Nicholas Sparks, I’m also dying to read this one, but I think Jamie has it so I will have to wait!

I have a few more that I want to buy in the next little while, but with all the school reading that I have on top of everything else, it doesn’t seem like I’ll get all the books read that I’d like. At least I won’t run out of new reading material for awhile!

A few things have been going on so I thought I would do up Mupstyle Bits and Pieces update.

First of all, I got a call from my mom last night, and she was kinda upset. Apparently she talked to the doctor and the prognosis isn’t good. They’ve given him a couple months to live. I’m still mulling it over in my head, deciding whether or not I should go home and be with my family or not. I definitely don’t want to leave just yet, we have tickets to see Michael Buble this Saturday and yes, I know it sounds selfish to want to go to a concert more than seeing my dying father but Mike spent a lot of money on them that we really don’t have so I want to at least make sure that he gets his money’s worth. I think that I may end up going home early though, if things don’t look like they’ll improve. I really don’t want to leave Mike though, we’re having such a great time together and I don’t want to spend 5 months apart if I don’t have to. I know we have the rest of our lives together, but I hate being apart. I’m going to need all the love I can store up to make it through this semester.

Tonight is my Spanish exam. I’m in the middle of my short break which is turning into a long one as I sit here and write, so I’m going to have to make the rest of this thing fast. Anyways, hopefully the day goes by rather quickly because I’m sick of Spanish and I just want to get this exam and the next course over with. I think I can easily do it within the month. As long as they don’t take FOREVER to send me the rotten thing. Bah.

Like I said, this Saturday night we’re going to see Michael Buble at Jones Hall in Houston. Very excited about that. We haven’t been able to go out much lately, what with the not feeling good lately. Stupid yucky weather making me feel like crap.

Me and Mike went to a Sunday School class for engaged and Newlywed couples last night. It was pretty interesting, might go back sometimes. We’ve started reading a marriage help book together, it has some discussion things in it that’s helpful. We have a unique relationship, so most of the stuff doesn’t even seem to apply to us yet. We’ve been living in the same house for the past three months, so some of that stuff is already sorted out! I think we’ll be just fine. :)

Anyways, study beckons to me. I can’t imagine I’ll have anything much to say for the next while, Mike and I are currently spending our evenings reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince together. I’ll definitely say something about the Buble concert, so stay tuned!

Early this morning, as Mike was on his way out to work, he kissed me goodbye and asked me to call him if I wanted to meet for lunch. I was about to call when he beat me to it, but he only called to let me know that he was tied up in meetings today and wasn’t sure when he’s have a chance to grab lunch. So we decided to do it next week sometimes.

Anyways, Jamie and Val invited me to go out with them, so we all went to Gourmet Express, a new fast diner-style Italian place that recently opened up. Anyways, all was pretty normal. We all got our orders, I had Spaghetti and Meatballs. It was all fine and good, until I cut my meatball in half and realized that it was uncooked in the middle. We brought it to the attention of the waitress, and they apologized profusely. Even the manager on duty come over and wanted to see what the problem was. We waited for awhile for my replacement meatballs, but they never came.

Eventually, the manager brought over what she called “a treat”, which ended up bring a fried ring of dough, with icing and chocolate chips in the middle. Man, it was good. We ended up each bringing ours home. But yeah, that was an interesting meal.

Since everyone is so interested in hearing the differences between the two types of bowling that I’ve observed in my 2 hours of American bowling and lifetime playing NORMAL bowling :P, I thought that I would illustrate the differences for you all.

First of all, the balls are bigger and have three holes in them in American bowling. Canadian balls are smaller, and all the same weight and size so you don’t have to pick up your own unique ball, with different weights and are color coded according to weight and finger hole sizes. So you only have one ball to chuck at the pins in American style, so every time you bowl, you have to wait for your ball to come back before you can continue your turn, instead of just taking the next available ball. They also get returned to you under the floor, instead of watching them return.

The pins are a little fatter too, but not really all that noticeable.

The scoring method was a tad different. Instead of a sheet, the scoring was all electronic and automated. We entered in our names, and there was a monitor overhead that kept the score. Each player only had two turns instead of three, except at the end, so if your first turn was a strike you could go twice more. And on the monitor, instead of a shaded-in square for a strike it was an X and instead of a shaded-in triangle for spare it was a half-X. During the gameplay, little bowling animations would show up on the screen, those were probably the highlight of the night.

The shoes and uncomfortable chairs were the same. Happily, the place was a Pepsi establishment, and with the group package we got, we had free pop and popcorn. Oh, another big difference, was the price. They had different weekend and weekday rates (probably that’s the same as home), but the weekend rates were $5 a game!! As opposed to Friday/Saturday $1 a game bowling at Pubnico Lanes.

So that was my bowling experience. I kind of prefer the speedier way that Canadian bowling is, you don’t have to wait for the machine to tell you who’s turn it is, or to get your ball back, or to reset the pins even if you got a gutterball and didn’t hit anything. Everything down here is either automated or drive-thru.

Here’s a few more things I found interesting down in the states:

• Drive thru banking
• Drive thru dry cleaning
• Pizza delivery orders online
• The amount of stores that manage to survive

This post is more for me than for you — I just wanted to leave a link here so that I would remember to look these guys up when Mike and I start looking for an apartment.

http://www.judwin.com/props/regatta.html

If you’re curious you can take a look, they’re quite neat apartments. I especially like the studio apartment plan, H. Chances are it’s too big for us just for starting out, but it would be nice to have two floors.

We won’t really start looking until I come down in December, but it’s nice to have a few options already to know what’s out there. It also depends if Mike gets rehired by these guys, for something long term.

Anyways, that’s all from me for today, toodles!

Well, life really hasn’t gotten anymore interesting lately, thus why I’ve been avoiding any more blogging. Sometimes it seems pointless to even bother when I don’t get any more than 3 people commenting. I guess I should just write for myself. But if I did that, then I would never write, because I’d just get a private journal. But I haven’t kept that up in ages either. I think the only reason that I keep writing in this one is because it has a (very small) readership, but that somehow compels me to keep going in some weird sort of way.

Anyways.

I’ve started on my research paper for History, doing it on the Cajuns in Louisiana. It would be cool to take a trip down there, but Mke has so little time what with this job, that he really only has two days out of the week for fun. And that’s not long enough to spend ten hours of it driving and 20 hours of it sleeping. The most I can hope for is another weekend trip to Nacogdoches, which in itself isn’t so bad. It’s a way to get out for a few days.

This weekend I believe that we’re going to some alcohol-themed activity at the Museum of Natural History or something. It’s only from 7-10 though, so we might end up doing something afterwards. Last weekend we went bowling (don’t even get me started on the weirdness of American bowling) and then headed to Ben’s house for Mario Party until 2am. I was so dead tired on Sunday, I almost decided to stay home from The Phantom of the Opera, but in the end I decided to suck it up and go since the tickets weren’t cheap. It was pretty good, the Phantom was nowhere near as good looking as he was in the movie. Well, good looking until he took the mask off, but you know what I mean. He looked like an old man in the play. Although it was pretty cool when the chandelier fell down and stuff. It didn’t really fall, it kinda of floated down, but I don’t think it makes a difference.

Yesterday’s excitement was all about cleaning out Mike’s room. It has a floor! Who knew? So I did our laundry and folded all the clothes and put them away, but I still can’t find Mike’s DVDs. It’s starting to worry me, some of my DVDs are in there. Not to mention some really awesome ones of his. They’ve gotta be in that room somewheres, but who knows. It’s possible that they’re at the apartment in Nac, but we looked last time we were there and didn’t see them.

But yeah, it’s been all about the schoolin’ lately. I’m going to write my Spanish exam on Monday, so I need to review and study for that. And then I have my essay that needs to be researched for, but it’s slow going. I got myself a library card for the public library and took out a few books, so I’m going through all this stuff. I’ve started with my internet sources.

All I can hear in the background is the stinkin’ Dr Phil junk. Grrr. I’ll have to go turn it off before I can concentrate on the studying. I’m getting sooo tired of studying, I can’t wait to be done with this school year.

The last three days I have been perpetually locked up in the house. No car, no people, no fun. The day sucks pretty much until Mike gets home, then we have about 5 hours to hang out until it’s time for bed. I’m so glad today is Friday and we finally have a weekend. Being on my own, stuck in the house, all the time really sucks. I do have the pool key now, but of course it has to thunder and lightning pretty much every day, with rain intermittently thrown in. I was awakened by a doozy of a storm last night. It’s giving the same weather for the next 6 days. I miss the sunshine.

So while I’ve been cramped in the house, I’ve been scrapbooking and studying. FINALLY finished Mike’s and I’s scrapbook from my trip here last summer. I’m about to start my research paper (on the Cajuns! Fun!) and be done with History 2343 for life. (But more fun is yet to be had with History 2353.) I haven’t even worn shorts the last few days, haven’t gone outside so I haven’t been warm. Been surviving off of frozen entrees (that I swear aren’t big enough to satisfy a small child) and Pepsi.

The remoteness of this place makes me yearn for Wolfville, and how you can walk to anywhere you need to go. Or take a bus if you need something cheaper or more specialized. I hope the place we live in down here isn’t so remote. But I imagine living far away from city nucleus costs more than it does to leave near it. Since it seems that only the rich live far from the city (so different from the way it is in Nova Scotia… man, lots of people who live in Halifax suburbs are loaded — all the poor ones live out in the countryside). Whatever, I digress.

I’ve got some business plans that I’m going to unveil in the near future, so stay tuned. On that cliffhanger, I’m going to go see if Mr. Mailman brought me a textbook yet.

I didn’t have anything special to talk about, so I thought I would comment on a few scrapbooky things that I enjoy. Any males reading have permission to skip over this entry!

I’ve done a bit of scrapbooking, and one thing I’ve started to notice is that the smaller stores, albeit more expensive generally have better quality materials, and better selection. Usually at places like Hobby Lobby and WalMart, you get a few of the names known throughout Scrapbook Land, but not really the selection. And you get several of the cheap, ripoff types. (Sandylion, anyone? Some of their stuff is fine, but in the general view of things, they should probably stick to making stickers for kids. Personally, I love their fuzzy collections in kiddie stickers.)

Two scrapbooking stores that I like are Two Much Fun, all the way in New Minas, Nova Scotia, and Novel Approach, here in Friendswood, TX. While the one in Friendswood is bigger, there’s a certain charm about Two Much Fun that I like. Not to mention, I have a coupon card going on there that I’m filling up! But both places have knowledgeable staff who are obviously scrappers, and they have online schedules of classes available. I have yet to take a class, but I really should do it, I think it would be lots of fun. They’re offering a Christmas card class this Saturday, and I’m thinking about maybe going! (Everybody knows about my newfound love of cardmaking!)

I’ve also bought things from Scrapbook.com, which I would recommend. They had a decent catalogue (they had what I wanted and couldn’t find in stores, but only in black, white and silver), and the delivery was fast and I even got a coupon to save money on my next order (on pretty pink paper no less)! The newsletter that they send you once you give them an email address is actually helpful, telling you about sales and showing layouts for ideas. I got a few coupon codes for sales with it too.

Two scrapbook stuff designers that I really like are Jolee’s Boutique and Doodlebug Designs. The Jolee’s site is pretty crummy though, but at least you can save the stuff you like to a printable list to take with you. However, the layouts and ideas on the Doodlebug site are really nice, it’s inspring me to start using eyelets, which I never really got into. There’s just so many ways to be creative with scrapbooking, it’s almost as though you could never get bored with it.

I only wish it wasn’t such an expensive hobby! But I guess for the amount of time it takes to complete a project it’s not really all that expensive. I would estimate about 200$ for a well done, 4-5 month project. And pretty much that means working on it every spare second of the day. But it’s something that I enjoy, very much, and I hope to be able to do several more projects. So if you are on my card mailing list, don’t be expecting a store bought card while I’m in this phase! :D

Today I brought those pictures to the photo centre in Wal-Mart, and I got them printed out for 28 cents a piece. Not too bad! I got 33 of them, and they came to under $10. They’re a little bit bigger too, so that’s a plus. It was a bit time consuming to go and scan them all but it only took about 20-30 minutes before I had all my pictures. So good deal all around, I would definitely use that to make copies again. You can use memory cards from digicams as well, which is pretty swell.

Tomorrow, the plan is to pick up scrapbooking supplies and then start on the book. I organized all the photos and stuff, I’m still waiting for a few more so that I can round out the album, but I can at least start on it. It’ll be nice to have something to do besides studying.

I’m nearing the end of that history course though! Good news. I’m getting a bit antsy that I won’t finish it in time, and that worries me. I still haven’t heard back from people about the Spanish exam, I wish they would get on it so that I can register for the second part. It’s been about a week since I called them, and these are things that really need to be settled soon, before I forget everything. I’m cramming too much information in my head all at once!

Anyways, not much to say, blah blah blah. These blogs get less and less interesting. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother keeping one.