Watching Movies

It's been a while since I've really had time to sit down and watch movies, and it is something I've been indulging lately. In the last three weeks I've watched Anatomy of a Murder, Gladiator, Basic Instinct, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Brief Encounter, West Side Story, In Bruges, Batman Begins, The Enforcer, Army of Shadows, social network, Ninotchka, The Town, La Vita Bella, The Vanishing, and Charade. I was especially impressed by In Bruges, Army of Shadows, and The Vanishing. Charade was pretty good too, but I watched it the night after seeing the incredibly awesome "The Vanishing," so it took damage by sheer proximity to the glowing greatness of the former film. 

Nick and I set off some more thermite in the back yard, which yielded incredible photos on the D40. I'll post more about that later though, I don't feel like compressing the photos for upload. I'm getting a lot better at photography. I'm hoping to be come good enough to get great candid shots (as those are the pics I most enjoy looking at later), but it's hard operating all the controls on a DSLR in manual mode while things are happening. I'll have to get better!

Our last intern left on Friday, and he's getting prepared for his 8 month trip to Thailand (sweet!) but Scott returned from Europe earlier today, so the base is back to it's quiet efficient self. Scott was pleased that we had not destroyed the kitchen in any way.

I'm going to be buying a laptop in the next week or two, and then it's off to Becca's to try working remotely for a week or so before returning to Logan for Thanksgiving. Huzzah! 

Knifin' Around

So for those of you that don't know, Nick and I have a Trailmaster knife. We did a lot of research to determine what the sharpest blade we could afford would be and the Trailmaster won. Well, mostly, it catered to our innate immaturity with the marketing videos. Seriously, you should check out the hilarious videos on the page linked to above.

Anyways, when you have a 9 inch stainless steel bowie knife (of sorts) it's imperative that you get out there every now and again and actually slice stuff. The obvious answer is to roam about the woods doing things parents typically tell children not to do. Like smoking. And getting married too early.

Well, Sunday was one such day for Nick and I. It was a pleasant fall day, we didn't have a whole lot to do and earlier this summer we had visited an abandoned railway grade nearby that has these imminently slice-able weeds that grow about as tall as a person. They're really pulpy and fairy heavy, which makes for incredibly fun slicing. So, we decided to take a stroll and have some fun with the Trailmaster. And of course, we had to bring along our new toy: the Nikon DSLR. After all, good photos make for good memories.

At first we tried photographing the actual slicing in progress, but even at a shutter speed of 2,000 the camera just wasn't fast enough to catch our supersonic slicing attacks. We took a lot of photos and got a few good ones of the dried out weed husks exploding at the moment of bladular impact:

Upon reviewing the photos however, we realized that the best part of them wasn't the slicing, but the faces we were caught making mid-swing. So without further ado, here are the faces made when knifin' around:

We hope you found those as funny as we did. As you'll notice, our faces are rarely in focus as these were taken from larger photographic attempts to capture the knifing carnage. Just the same, look at us in all of our manly glory!

I for one think the second-to-last picture is the funniest, but Nick likes #4 from the top. Nick's Stallone impression is also pretty good.

A Trip to Chicago

Becca was visiting for her fall break last week and we took a trip to Chicago, it was pretty intense as trips go. Nine friends, four days. If we missed you this time, you should get in touch so that the next time we're road trippin' we can visit you.

On the first day (Friday), we went south and had lunch with my father on the north side of Columbus. We caught up, talked about the future of the company, and I bought two rather swanky button up shirts from the Eddie Bauer outlet for a mere $15 each. Granted, I could have purchased shirts at the salvy for $3 or $4, but they never have my size, and let's face it, Eddie Bauer is just omigosh: posh.

After the Columbus interlude, we proceeded on to Indianopolis for the evening to visit with one of Becca’s old friends. On Saturday we got up, went to a farmer’s market in the rain, took a walk, and played some board games (due to the inclement weather). We've been playing this game called Monopoly deal. It's pretty fun, and I'd recommend it if you like Monopoly but don't like it because it plays like Monopoly. The card version is very quick (say 10 minutes a round) and is more fun.

Becca’s friend was a lot of fun to chat with, but by late afternoon we had to say our goodbyes and we drove north to have dinner with the Nearing clan in Lafayette Indiana. These are our old Feast of the Hunters Moon friends, and it had been years since I had met with them, so it was really nice to catch up. They treated Becca and I to a nice meal at a rather swanky pan-Asian place in downtown Lafayette.

After dinner, we drove still farther north and met with a mutual friend from Oberlin in south Chicago. We chatted with him for a while. He is attending the divinity school at the University of Chicago and had only recently started, so we got to talk about what life was like in graduate school. He was living in a sort of Church-dormitory and there were these really cool lamps that doubled as exit signs. The writing is actually a part of the glass:

After a while, two more Oberlin friends showed up and we drove to north Chicago and spent the night with these other fellow Obies.

On Sunday, we woke up, tried to go to the Chicago Public Library (it was unfortunately closed until later in the day), so we chatted in a coffee shop about careers and life decisions and how to find work you love. Behold us in the coffee shop being REASONABLE SOCIALIZING GENTLEMEN (and women):

Then we walked around the city for 3 hours. We saw an art gallery that was fairly atrocious, had lunch at a hip burger joint (we got 10+ to our hipness as a result), and I bought my mum a gift at a gourmet tea shop. The tea shop was manned by this Asian dude that seemed to know more about tea than most people know about their spouses. He was pretty cool and talked with us about the chemistry of brewing tea. All those shelves behind him are tea samples for customers to try:

In the evening, still more Oberlin friends stopped to have dinner with us. The company was great, but we were totally exhausted, so we collapsed early.

The next day we just woke up and went back to Oberland where we resided the rest of the week doing things less dramatic. Until today of course. Nick and I went knifin' around the woods and got some great photos of us making hilarious faces. Will blog about that later. Perhaps tomorrow, time-permitting.