Kung-Fu Kitty

Well, my long-awaited violin has finally arrived! I'm fairly happy with what I got, considering, after all that stuff I read on the internet seemed to indicate that this seller was a sleezy scumbag who always sold wrecked violins. However, my violin is in fine condition. All the stuff that was said to be included was there, though there's no shoulder rest, which could be a problem. Also, the violin doesn't really look like the picture of it, but I think that I actually like this design better. The one I received is purple with a shape more like this:


I tried it with an amp, and the pickup seems to be working. Unfortunately, the volume and tone dials don't seem to do much and the headphones don't work at all. The main problem with it is that the tuning pegs are ultra slippery and there are no precision tuning screws so it's uber hard to tune. My fingers hurt from working at it. Overall, the tone is good, and all the accessories are fairly good quality. I think I'm happy with my purchase. Hourra!

I was going to, last post, describe what everybody was wearing at Bruce's housewarming party, but alcohol and time clouded my memory somewhat. I'll try that again. First of all, I was wearing a bright red satin strapless evening gown with matching long gloves. I love that dress. It was my prom dress and my mom made it. I wish I had more opportunities to wear it, as I've only had three so far. Here's a picture of me and Josee the first time I wore it:



That's the only scanned image I have of it, but I'm too lazy to scan a better one. As for the others, Sam was wearing a black suit with a black shirt and a Doppelgänger Effekt pendant. Dr. Awesome was wearing a white tuxedo with white gloves and a powder blue bowtie and cummerbund. Ryan was wearing a black tuxedo. Ellie was wearing a black halter dress with a hankercheif hem and sequins, as well as a white tie. Etienne was wearing a black tuxedo with his top hat. Jonah was wearing a grey (?) suit with a fedora... and I can't remember the rest. Sorry guys.

To change the subject, I'm currently writing an essay entitled "Baileys and Hot Cocoa: A Detailed Analysis". I'll post it as soon as it's done. I'm writing this because Kevin asked me to when he gave me a bottle of Baileys for Christmas. It's taking a while, but I'm getting to it. It's supposed to be five pages and I already have a page.

In other news, my violin hasn't arrived yet, and so, I'm seriously contemplating emailing the seller if it doesn't arrive next week. Grr...

On the evening of Saturday, June 18th, there was a formal housewarming party at the new Lambie estate. Present were all the most important lords and ladies from the surrounding area, including the illustrious Sir Thomas, who arrived fashionably late, as all the newly knighted would deem proper. It was sure to be an engaging evening as Lord Cook had even brought his katana. As the guests trickled through the doors and up the elegant spiral staircase to the Lambie hall, their ears were charmed with lovely classical and jazz music as they helped themselves to wine, cigars and an assortment of hors d'oeuvres. Everyone was dressed in their best finery.

Later in the evening, the guests assembled to play an amusing game of "I never", and participated in a kegel contest from which Madame Ilana emerged victorious. During the games, Emperor Kang arrived with a large bag of Mexican candy, most of which was atrocious. By the end of the evening, the notable Dr. Awesome was rolling around in it and pouring it over himself in a hilarious fashion. Much fun was had by all, even the mysterious Baron Mekashef, who refused to drink.

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Ok, that's all I've got...

This is a picture of the new violin I ordered off ebay. I'm super excited about it and it should arrive within a week. It's a five-string, so it's about as good as a viola and a violin put together! Its complete description can be found here. I can hardly wait until it gets here!!!

For this Battle of the Bands dealy, we made a beautiful (more or less) pamphlet, of sorts, which I finally managed to scan this evening.

Here it is. Unfortunately, Photobucket automatically resized it so the writing is a little small. Oh well, at least you can see the pictures. Enjoy!

Well, I figured that I hadn't written for a while, and, though nothing especially interesting has happened in the last week or so, it is time to update. At work, I've been deemed knowledgable enough to actually start making stellar animations. This is after spending a week and a half reading through the entire manual for trueSpace 6.6 and spending at least three totally useless days just playing around. I'm guessing that work will be much more interesting once I actually get started on these projects.


The battle of the bands, in my humble opinion, went very well. We placed third, and, given the terrible performance by the winning band, The Relief, I was slightly confused. The band who placed second was a high school cover band, Falling Short, who played mostly System of a Down. I thought they were pretty good, and I'm not surprised that they beat us. I'm not sure if the pamphlets we made were a success or not because they were distributed without me noticing, but I can safely say that we were the only band who had any. Eventually, I'll scan one of them and post it, but I don't have any at home right now.


Yesterday was Friendship day, and I watched the parade with Sam. It was a good one this year, over an hour long, with three separate bands and 81 floats. I had a lot of fun, but ended up with sun blisters on my shoulders... icky and painful. We also visited the tents set up around the elementary schools, and there were a lot of interesting things. I think that the native south american playing the flute lost my respect after he started playing the Titanic theme song. For dinner, we had some old friends over from Newfoundland. I think I overindulged when it came to eating, but I had a great time. My brother has gotten quite good at "holding the floor".


This afternoon, I'm going to tutor and then this evening, there's a band practice. I'm looking forward to that.

Completely by coincidence, I noticed that today is my blog's first anniversary. How exciting! I've been sharing my deepest, most philosophical thoughts with the internet for a whole year! You know, and quiz results and silliness, etc. I'll have to have a party all by myself.

At any rate, not much interesting has been happening in my life. Work has been occupying most of my time. I've finished the trueSpace manual, and soon I'll be starting some real animations of star systems and evolution, which should be very interesting. Today I made a couple of animations, very simple, mind you, just to test out how much time it takes to render videos. Believe me, it's a long time: about 20 minutes to render a 10 second video at mediocre quality.

The battle of the bands is coming up on Friday, and we have a big practice on Thursday. I'm a little worried, considering we haven't played since last Monday, but I'm sure we'll pull together somehow. We're playing songs that we know really well, so we should be fine. I hope. We won't win because our music is strange, but I think we'll put on a good show, at any rate. We have variety in our music, original songs, a french song... we'll be fine. It will be sort of embarrassing to lose to a Galt band though. Oh well, I'm sure we'll recover.

Well, my parents are coming home tomorrow after a five-day vacation. I hope they enjoyed it and I hope they'll enjoy all the cleaning I did in preparation... ok, not that much cleaning. I washed the dishes and vaccumed a bit. Yay me.

And now, for your visual delight, a couple more 3D pics I made at work:

Hello world! At work, I have to learn this really cool 3D animation program called trueSpace 6, and we're eventually going to make animations of the evolution of stars and such. It's a lot of work, but I've worked through almost half the manual alread (and believe me, it's a thick manual) and can do some basic functions, like building random three-dimensional objects. At any rate, here are some of my magical creations, made from tutorials:

A golden goblet



A weird part of sorts



And this is a martian ice cream scoop.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that... you see how productive I've been! (I love my job.)