spoiled chinese girl

jemo (www.jemo.net) is this awesome band that I’m really happy to be friends with. I’ve been called their rabid fanclub, I’m their person who takes lots of pictures of them, I’m their person who tapes almost every show, and I’m their unofficial website mistress. (As in I run their unofficial website at www.jemounofficial.com)

I saw them tonight playing at the Cadaliac Lounge in Toronto, my first jemo show in months, fantastic. I was late, which sucked, they were supposed to go on stage at 9:45 and my plans were to get there at 9:45 (generally bands NEVER start on time, 9pm really means 10pm, if you’re lucky. Musicians sort of run on island time. If you get a musician who’s also an islander, 9pm could very well mean next week!)

Anyways, we walked in as they were on stage, but it sounded like they were just starting, into the second or third song at most, I can’t remember a whole lot about it, I loved hearing it and the sound was great. They played a new-new song, not their old-new song (Northern Lights) but a newer one who’s title I don’t know, and I don’t think was mentioned.

I’ve also been working on my music photography website, which is really nothing more than me taking lots and lots of pictures of all my friends who happen to be in bands, organizing them through Adobe Photoshop’s webgallery thing, prettying it up a little in Macromedia Dreamweaver and tossing it online. As a point of trivia, I currently posess over one gig of original files off my digital camera for band/music related photos. This isn’t including a good portion of digital images that were lost through a harddrive failure in the past year. (They’re on a CD *somewhere* and when/if I find them I’ll add them to my growing pile!)

Here’s my writeup.  It was a VERY PRETTY place to do the trials.  I definately like the look of it all.  And the guys that rode that day were exceptionally skilled, whether they were beginners, or expert.  It wasn’t particularly surprising that Ryan won but that’s beside the point.  Everyone did amazingly well.

Except me.  I was registered, I had my gear on, I had my unicycle with me, but I was too scared.  A lot of the beginner lines were actually way down the rocks closer to the water.  The thought of dragging myself, and my unicycle down to the water’s edge was bad enough, but the idea of trying to precariously balance on these rocks, these seemingly very uneven rocks, wasn’t thrilling.  I attempted the most easiest line possible (mount on one rock, gap about 12″ and land safely on another rock) but I couldn’t even keep my balance on the starting rock.

So I retired to taking pictures of everyone else who was competing.  It was still just as exciting.

The trials comp lasted just about 3 hours.  I was then invited to dinner and I gladly accepted.  It was an amazing time hanging out with the same group of people, but other environments to hang out are always welcome, apperciated, and definately fun.  Between the trials competition and dinner, I downloaded all the pictures off my camera, realized I’m a bona-fide shutter-bug, and started to sort through them to create my online gallaries.

Lots of fun.  Hopefully everyone who’s seen the pictures likes what they saw.

Today was unicycle basketball with a round-robin tournment. There was Toronto vs. Detroit, Detroit vs. Ottawa, Ottawa vs. Toronto and Toronto vs. Toronto. Yes, Toronto had 2 teams since we had the most members show up, and at the same time it looks like we stacked our teams so that the more experienced players and better riders (and generally more agressive members) all ended up on one team while more the innocent kids ended up on another. It was amusing to watch and really fun. Some of the skills these riders from out of town, absoloutly amazing.

Never have I seen a person on a 24″ unicycle with a really tall seat, be able to just bend over, still on the seat, pick up a basketball from the ground and continue playing. And this guy Jory doing the “Smiley walk” which is holding the seat, while doing a completely off-the-seat wheelwalk, but backwards. Insanity. I was just happy to be riding around! It was overall really fun.

Have you any idea what its like to tell border patrol:
“Hi, I’m going to Toronto for the weekend.”
“Your business?”
“A unicycle basketball tournment.”

Yea, it doesn’t always go over so well.

After the basketball tournment, we went for lunch with some pingpong, and then to the schoolyard for Flaming-Puck Hockey.  The teams were divided more oddly this time, being fewer people could be on the court, we played a round-robin with 6 different teams of mixed locale.  Finally it went back to home-towns, and I’m really not sure who won what, but the points system was really odd.  Thank/Blame Darren for that one!

After THAT we went to cosmic bowling.  I’m *NOT* a size 10 in shoes (they were too small) or can I hold a 13lb ball very effectively.  Half the time I played, I was playing like a little kid, holding the ball with both hands & rolling it from between my legs.  But hey, I got my one & only strike from doing that, and also was able to pick up a spare doing that as well!  Sadly I didn’t win the lowest-adult-score with it’s prize of a motorized toothbrush to “brush up” on skills.

Since I’ve been slightly unemployed, to fully unemployed, I’ve been doing a lot of random stuff.  One of the projects I’d really tried to take on is the revamp of my website lilfunky1.com  I liked the first design of it but what I wanted out of it isn’t what I wanted to put into it.  There was too much information and writing that I no longer felt like doing.

I’m absoloutly crap at the ass-end of website design, the database management and all the other “behind the scenes” type stuff, hence why I was never able to figure out Shannon’s ZenMo moblog software (which looks awesome on mil0.com) nor any other software, there was one I got running okay but I didn’t like the template and generally it was going to take too long to upload all the pictures anyways.  I finally gave up/in and created another static gallary.  I can’t get the pictures off my phone that often anyways, so a dynamic program isn’t necessary.

Since that was the plan there, and the majority of my website was based around photos of events I’d taken, I figured that turning the entire site into an online photo album was the way to go.  So right now I’m concentrating on revamping that and generally doing a lot of work there to get it to a place that’s easy to manage, easy to navigate, and still fun and simple.

I’d also reworked the graphics on jemounofficial.com not to long ago and am waiting for their next show (October 18, 2006 at the Cadaliac Lounge in Toronto) to get some new content up on the site.  Also I need to visit the studio to do some more tapings off stuff I have for them.  Music-wise I want to start a few more sites, one of which being a blog based around reviews of independent music.  I think it would be fun.

Anyways, I’m hoping to get the job posted below, but at least I have a direction I want to take these websites to.  I have lots of pictures to be taking in the near future, so this is going to be pretty amazing after a while.  I’ll let everyone know when the site goes live!

So a lot of my friends have cars, I have a car too.  But my car is pretty standard, run of the mill, it’s actually a popular “new car” for the year I bought it, so EVERYWHERE I go I see my car.  It’s a Mazda3 Sport.  Yea.  Exactly.  Anyways, some of my friends do some awesome stuff that include buying old cars, and restoring them to funkyness, while others just go and purchase their funkyness.  My friend Shannon (the guy who runs BME) is a buy ‘em old and rebuild the crap out of them type of person, and I always really like his crazy ideas for vehicles.  Rachel, on the other hand, as far as I know buys her cars already awesome, and races them across continents.

Which reminds me, I’ve seen Fast & the Furious loads, and I saw parts of 2 Fast 2 Furious and it wasn’t nearly as good, but I really still want to see Tokyo Drift because that sounds like my kinda movie.  But yea, I’m still more of the “buy it cool” type of person, I don’t know enough about cars to customize them any, I just want a car to look cool, it doesn’t have to particularly ACT cool.  Although I wouldn’t mind learning how to drive stick sometime soon.