Calgary, like probably every city, hosted a Harry Potter release bash downtown last night. The Downtown Association converted a block of the outdoor mall into a reasonable approximation of Diagon Alley, which is awesome.

Even the misanthropic jerks who wear their ignorance or disinterest of Harry Potter like some kind of friggin merit badge have to admit: they don't do this shit for The Wheel of Time books.



It was crazily packed, but fortunately I'm my own camera boom. Neil and Teri were going to join us with their kids, but they couldn't make it through the crowd and had to abort.

( More pictures. Entirely safe to click and spoiler-free! Except for Harry Potter being dead in the last one. )

This morning, we buy two of the books. We'd just have gotten one, but Lisa's got first crack at it and I couldn't very well go to Comic-con without being at least most of the way through it, because it will be discussed. And then I'd have to break a foot off.

Lisa decided to buy a new camera, the Canon S3 IS, because her A70 is circling the drain. So we went to Best Buy to buy one. This involved her standing around the camera section trying to get noticed.

I, on the other hand, was left to my own devices. These devices included:

- the MacBooks and iMacs in their Apple cubby;
- my 1 GB thumb drive.

I copied over 450 photos from one iMac, and more than a hundred from a second machine, whilst trying not to arouse the suspicions of Best Boys.

Next time you're in the computer store, check out Photo Booth on the Macs with built-in webcams. It's like anthropology.

	The Starbaby from 2001: A Space Odyssey.		Dads. For some reason a lot of dads don't emote. They'll push the button but they don't emote.
	The weird part is, this is the same guy but he's wearing a different shirt and the computer's moved. He's come back on a different day to not emote into the computer some more.		Not all dads, mind you.
	Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jack Black.		Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mohinder Suresh.
	This young man has some social impediments. First, his Mayim Bialik hat.		Second, he's kissing himself on a webcam.
	Ladies and gentlemen, a post-drugs Lindsay Lohan hallucinating a pre-drugs Lindsay Lohan.		This dude looks like a Mike Mignola drawing.
	A Night At The Roxbury. I hope his homies aren't licking him. He looks like he'd be greazy.		Ladies and gentlemen, Minnie Driver.
	The fun part about this one is the lack of distortion. This is what this guy always looks like.		This one isn't distorted either. This is what Best Buy employees always look like too.
	Aw, Dr. Ruth doesn't want her picture taken.		80s Guy has nothing but contempt for your modern technology and your webbed cameras and your thumb drives. In fact, he's got a completely different finger for you to drive.
	More surreptitious birding.		And again.
	One more.		But not this guy. This guy is so fucking metal he has to be fucking metal from a safe distance.

He looks a lot better with feathers. For some reason, as soon as he grew feathers he got shy, and hunkers down in the nest when we talk to him. When he still looked like a frozen Safeway turkey he'd drink water from our fingers: I guess his vision wasn't good enough yet to tell us apart from his parents.

On Thursday, probably exactly two weeks after it was laid, one of the eggs hatched. None of the other three did: we've looked at them in the light and they were never fertile.



At first he (we're calling him a he. We can't tell. We can't even tell on the adult canaries, except that one of them lays eggs and the other one sings) looked like a tiny pink scrap of pinkness, with Doc Brown white fringe over parts of him.

Lord, baby birds are hideous.

I wanted to name him Junior Birdman, after the Joker's line in Batman, which is a reference to a song apparently. Lisa's counterproposal was Peanut, after the junior Birdman from Harvey Birdman. He looks like a peanut.

We'd thought Feep would be a good father, since he likes to feed Peep as if she were a hatchling. He also forcibly impregnates her. I think there's a Lolita thing going on there.

However, neither of them seemed particularly interested in feeding the baby. We were disappointed but not that surprised because the featherheads are kind of idiots. So Lisa took the baby formula that she'd offered the parents, ground it into goop, and we squirted into the baby's mouth using one of the syringes I'd been given to rinse out where I used to have wisdom teeth.

We couldn't feed him while we were at work, of course, but he hung on until the weekend, when I could feed him while Lisa was at Otafest, and she could feed him while I was gaming.



Fortunately on Sunday Peep perched on the side of the nest and watched Lisa feed the baby, and after that she had the idea. Now Feep feeds Peep, and Peep feeds the baby. A lot.

He was bigger on Sunday already.



He's bigger today, probably due to his nearly-constant feedings. A lot bigger. When he's laying down he still just looks like a pink lump, but when he raises his head for food he's more than twice as big as he was when he hatched.

I couldn't get a picture of that, but I did get a picture of the three of them. Know why Peep looks a little surprised in this picture? Because she's sitting on a goddamn condor.

Today our canaries laid a second egg! Well, only one of them did.




We're not keeping the babies, since it's only a two-canary cage. Mom will take one and Kyle will take one and after that we'll either give them away or sell them. Lisa would prefer to give them away to friends so she knows that they'll be taken care of. I suspect she'll have trouble giving them away at all.

After this litter, I think we'll use Mom's canary-birth-control plan: switch the eggs with fake ones when the birds aren't looking. Lisa plans to sculpt some out of FIMO, but Cadbury Mini Eggs would probably work just as well. They look just the same.

Play the Pygmy Pigeon Progeny Pool!

My first con table was a success, in that I sold about $120 of things. Kyle nearly sold out of his book, and we discovered that Lisa's anime and My Little Pony prints really pull the traffic over. Except for that one dork who hated My Little Pony and asked Lisa if she had anything good.

My book cover is apparently confusing. Also we must make comics that are actually sequential.

I guess it would have been nice to see more of the con, but that's what San Diego's for.

	Booth We went splitsies!
	Towel Boy Michael and Marci got the table across the aisle from us, which was awesome, even though the Nerf I had planned did not actually happen.
	Silent Bob Now THIS costume was genius.
	This is how I experienced most of the con--on my tuckus as the con filed past me. As you can see, all of these pictures are taken from the same position.
	Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuh ruh ruh ruh ruh! Sand people got no reason to live.
	Daw.

This weekend we travelled to the west coast to visit Lisa's grandmother, who she hasn't seen in almost ten years. Her grandmother lives in Powell River with Lisa's Aunt Wendy and Uncle John, who Lisa met once, when she was two.



Roads don't really go there. We could have driven, but it would take about twenty-four hours of driving to get there, and also two ferry trips. So instead we flew to Comox, on Vancouver Island, and took a ferry ride back to the mainland, which was a hell of a lot faster and, as we found out when we learned how much B.C. ferries cost now, also cheaper.

( Click for pictures! )

And check out my new celestial warhorse! Bad ass.

My pumpkin is nerdy. Lisa's pumpkin is silly! We actually got trick-or-treaters, for the first time ever. Hooray for not an apartment!

( Moving-related pictures )

darkjazon alerted kyohazard that we made yesterday's Calgary Sun, and now, as part of the Great Tubes Of The Interwob, I'm telling you.

Behaving in silly ways on the local media reminds me of the good ol' days. (sniff.)

The key to Zombie Walking, we realized last year, is theme.

We were going to go as four different dead rock stars, but we ran into planning snags. It was difficult to think of various dead musicians we each resembled. Also, we wouldn't have seemed like a group to any but the most attentive onlookers.

Kyle was always going as Elvis, of course. The jumpsuit he found wasn't half bad--and at $20, it wouldn't be a problem if blood got on it. Plus, being a big fat guy really helps to sell the Elvis thing. So, Elvii all round!

I had to buy white clothes, stretch an average-sized wig over my above-average melon, and shave off my goatee, but it was worth it. Because weren't we the belles of the ball.

( hhnnngggguuuhh )

Lisa and I had to take off once the mob reached the park at 8th Street, because we had a coworker's wedding to go to. I passed my sunglasses-with-muttonchops-glued-on to Justin and the Elvii continued on with only three. For further coverage, check out Kyle's post.

Also, more photos are here.

"Why not drive to Montana ourselves to buy Weird Al?" Lisa suggested.

Hell of an idea! I'd never been to Montana before, and it only costs $31 to rent a Budget car for a day.

However, by 9:30 all the cars were gone, so they gave us a Pontiac Montana (an SUV now sold only in Canada) with a tank filled with gas and irony.

We like to rent various vehicles so that we know what we like when it's time to buy one. We're sure not buying a Montana. Like the Ford Freestyle, shoulder-checking is impossible because you can't see out of the rear side windows. The Freestyle was fun to drive, though, and the Montana isn't--I wore its cockpit like an uncomfortable and poorly supportive coat. The sides hit my calves. The interior is all-around small, and yet the exterior of the vehicle is very large somehow, like some kind of reverse TARDIS.

Also, the passenger side door latch was half off.

After driving the Montana from Budget back to our house, Lisa didn't want to drive it any more at all, but I asked her to drive the leg between Vulcan and Milk River. After that stint she really didn't want to drive it again.

( Vulcan )

We stopped in Milk River, just before the U.S. border, to eat the ham sandwich lunch we packed. Milk River is a tiny-ass town out in the middle of nowhere. I tried to use my bank card to buy a bottle of water and two chocolate bars, and discovered that my bank card has been set to deposit-only, because I've used it at a place known for swiping cards. My card hasn't been swiped, but they've locked it for my protection, they said, twice. Which of course means for their own protection.

"Too bad you can't tell me where I used it that you don't like," I observed to the customer service woman. Naturally she couldn't. However, I don't work for the bank, so I can tell you that the last two places I used it were HMV and Manchu Wok in TD Square, and you can make of that what you will.

Luckily I have my brand-new TD Visa card, or the trip would have become very problematic at that point.

( Alien Customs )

( Montana )

And, of course, we accomplished our primary mission.

It may seem like a lot of effort to go to to get an album that I could sort of gotten here at home, but it was worth it. We played the album in karaoke mode, and from that we learned that we should never go to a karaoke bar ever ever. How can you put a price on that kind of experience? You can't.

Also, it took me an hour to extract the DualDisc from my MacBook's slot drive--since they're slightly thicker than normal discs, it got stuck inside the slot. I was only finally able to get it to eject by sliding a piece of paper into the drive on top of the disc, to keep the disc from hitting the top of the slot on the way out. And so I learned not to put DualDiscs into my computer. Priceless.

Last week I asked mister_sable to send me an art proof early, as I was going to be in the woods this week.

"Literally?" he asked.

"Sure, we're going camping," I said.

"That's crazy!"

"What?" I asked. "It's a thing. That people do!"

On Saturday we picked up our rental car, a Ford Freestyle. It's not a station wagon, it's not an SUV, it's not a van--it's the Ford Breaststroke! My initial impression of it was not great, as its visibility is limited: there's a lot of metal between the windows, and what little you can see through the rearview mirror is blocked by the headrests and the kid-pacifying DVD player. However, once we got used to that, we came to really like it: it has the fuel economy and overall handling of a car, but it's taller so it doesn't wreck my knees climbing out of it. We want one.

Our destination this year was 100 Mile House, BC, the crappy two-stoplight town Lisa had grown up in, so named because it's one hundred archaic units of measurement that Canada doesn't use away from someplace else. It's between 83 Mile House and 103 Mile Ranch. Naming things is so tedious, I find.

( Pictures )

The second greatest Mac app ever.



Rest of the gallery here!