Tasha and I went to dinner with my buddy Paul, whose mom was in town from the United Kingdom.  She’s very sweet and funny, and we had a great time getting to know her.  I had a giant 16 oz prime rib that was very excellent!  We stopped by Borders after dinner because I wanted to see if they had a book called Fretboard Logic.  They didn’t, so its off to Amazon with me!

Aside from that, I’ve gotten back into some of my old D&D notes from the best campaign I have ever run.  Tasha kept copious notes during the campaign, I’m amazed at how much I forgot about until re-reading through our Livejournal archives and all my old campaign plans.  This process has gotten my creative juices flowing, we’ll see if it helps my current campaign!

Tonight Tasha and I decided to go to the annual Homeowners Assocation meeting.  We got to meet some of our neighbors, which are mostly older than us from the looks of them.  The agenda wrapped up pretty quickly, we got to see the budget report (woo, not very interesting) and during the general discussion they brought up that they are thinking about upgrading the water slide at our community pool.

Water slides are very expensive, and the guy presenting showed us options ranging from the $3000 70’s public pool special, all the way up to a $15,000 molded plastic twisting job that looked like a small version of a water park slide.  It had a corkscrew and looked pretty neat.  Some discussion was had about the merits of doing that in the current economic state versus the amount of use and improvement to the neighborhood, eventually they deferred the topic to a future meeting.

It was nice to get to meet our neighbors, they seem like a pretty good group of people.  There’s a bunch of community events coming up, including a neighborhood-wide garage sale.  We might have to get in on that, I’ve got too much stuff for the size of house that we have!

Tonight I purchased my first electric guitar from Ebay, it’s a 1998 60’s reissue three-tone sunburst Fender Stratocaster!  I was originally going to save up and buy a new one, but this one showed up used and in great condition from a reputable buyer so I jumped on it.  The above image is from the seller of the auction, there’s a few superficial scratches but that’s fine by me.  I’ll have to get it set up once it arrives, but I’m pretty excited about it!

I’m putting this post up now because tonight is our No Doubt concert… its going to be a good time, hopefully the weather holds because its an outdoor venue (Fiddler’s Green).

Tonight’s workout was pretty tough.  Our warmup was four different combinations focusing on different types of body shifting.  We then moved on to do those combinations with partners for awhile.  Thankfully, we took a break for water because I was dying about 3/4 of the way in.  We ended the class with some kata, we did Heian Sandan, Empi, and our individual kata a few times (for me, it was Sochin of course!)

After class, I was chatting with Sensei Gordon who is a sixth dan (I believe).  He threw a few techniques in “just messing around” fashion, I countered them back and commented that I hadn’t had much of a chance to free spar since I’ve been out here.  He said “Well, we can fix that” and out to the middle of the room we went.  There were other students doing kata, but they stayed mostly out of the way from us.  I got in with several of my usual tricks, but Gordon got the last word with a Heian Yondan style technique where he grabbed my shoulders and threw a knee strike right into my slightly untensed stomach.  Almost knocked the wind out of me, but I got tensed just enough to make a grunting noise.  That was about the end of it, but I requested more of the same after class in the future.  He said that it wouldn’t be a problem and that it was fun.

Sensei Yaguchi was watching us spar, and when we were done he told me “Good, but big problem!  Tense stomach more!  Tense legs and stomach!  Tense tense tense!”  I felt like my showing was passable, and at least I got some good feedback from him.  And I have a sparring partner again!  I have a passing distinct fear that Sensei Yaguchi himself is going to want to free spar me one of these days.  That will be a “tense your belly and attack” day, for sure!

Not much happening in my world today.  Slept in late, didn’t get to cook out due to the rain, and been watching TV and surfing the Internet all day.  I worked on “Light Up My Room” by Barenaked Ladies on my guitar for a bit, its coming along nicely.  My fingertips on my left hand are continuing to get sore, now the skin is flaking off of them and its kind’ve a weird sensation.

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting the MythTV back into use, but it’s going to require a little bit of infrastructure work since the new wireless router that we got only has one wired port.  I suppose I could either get a wireless card for the MythTV or the Xbox360 and that would solve the problem.  My SchedulesDirect subscription expires in June too… I might just punt and use that machine as the foundation for my Multitouch table project, but I’m not sure that I’ll actually execute on that project this year now that I’m saving up for an electric guitar.  There’s also the small matter of not having the appropriate power tools to build the case.  We’ll see how the year progresses and I’ll decide what projects to take on!

This is my first guitar, which I got from my parents for my 20th birthday.  I’ve been working on my guitar skills lately, practicing on this and my other guitar (a Seagull S6 acoustic/electric).  After our grocery shopping, I decided to create a page on my new guitar website TheGuitarZero.com to show off my guitar gear.  I recently signed up to be a Musician’s Friend affiliate, and luckily enough they have a way to link directly to product pages and still get my affiliate’s bonus if anyone buys anything.  Pretty neat stuff!

I’ve still been shopping for electric guitars, and I really like the aesthetics of the Fender Standard Stratocaster.  During my research, I came across Brian May’s signature Red Special guitar.  Brian May is the guitarist for Queen, and his Red Special guitar has a very interesting story behind its construction.  I want this guitar because I’ve been a big fan of Brian May for a long time, however with so many intricacies and oddities in the guitar itself it is probably no the best to cut my teeth on.  It’s still going to be quite some time before I have the money saved up to buy my first electric, so I’m happy shopping around and looking at the options.

As soon as we are done paying off my last student loan, you bet both of these guitars will be in my stable.  Fun stuff!

Tasha and I had a chiropractic appointment this morning, then we had some lunch and decided to clean the basement up a little.  It’s now a bit more settled in but it seems we have more barware than we do cabinets to contain it.  So we still have a small contingent of boxes that are still to be unpacked.

This evening we are continuing our long week of movies by watching the Bourne Trilogy.  I’ve not seen these movies yet and the first one is pretty good so far!  That’s all for now…

After work, Tasha suggested that we go shopping.  We hit up the Flatirons Mall, where I drooled over the MacBooks.  We moved on and did some other shopping before ending up at Borders.  I picked up the Adventurer’s Vault supplement for Dungeons and Dragons and have been reading through that tonight.  Tasha and I had dinner at PF Changs, which was a nice change of pace.

The rest of tonight has been spent vegging out in front of CSI Miami reruns… this has been a good start to an extended weekend!

I’m watching the news tonight, and two things catch my eye that strike me as strange.

1. Soccer.  There’s actually soccer highlights on the news like its a sport I should care about for some reason.
2. They’re having a series of events for THE tornado that happened out here last year.  Not just one event… many cities, all with different events to remember the victims of THE tornado.  If that happened back in IL, South Pekin would have some sort of national holiday or week-long series of parades or something.  Plus, we’d be having memorials every two weeks in the summertime.

Colorado is weird.

Tonight Tasha and I had a real date night for a change, hitting Angels and Demons and the new Star Trek movie. Both were very good, but the standout winner of the night for me was Star Trek. I’m not going to ruin it since many people haven’t seen it yet, but WOW was it excellent. I have been bored and nonplussed by the Star Trek franchise for quite awhile, but this lit me right on fire again.

It was so good that Tasha wanted to turn right around and see it again, and had we not already seen two movies tonight I might just have done it. Go see it. Right now. Why are you still reading this?