Trust Tommy

Today, we bought a smoothie maker, and much hilarity ensued. Here is how to make one, Collison style:

Frozen fruit, only 2€ per packet from Dunnes Stores. Why struggle with fresh fruit when you’re going to be eating it cold anyway?

Next, natural yoghurt. That squiggle on my hand was testing whether a pen works. It did.

Either milk or orange juice can be used.

Pour the orange juice into your concoction, which admittedly doesn’t look particularly appetizing. Just you wait… :)

Nope, it’s no more appetizing this way up. Anyhow, put the lid on, and T minus 30 seconds until….

Vroom vroom.

Do I realize that they’re Christmas themed glasses? Yes. Do I know it’s still November? Yes. Do I care? No. In fact, I’m listening to Christmas music right now. I regret nothing! :)

Viva la Navidad!

So, one’s for me, who wants the second one?

Yes, we’re just like An Post, and Royal Mail.

I’ve come to notice that Sundays are usually bad days when it comes to the internet – there are less people online and more people outside doing real-life stuff. Good on them.

In light of this, I’ve decided to slightly alter posting – since I’m a community junkie (I only do this for the interaction, and because I enjoy writing), we’re going to make Sundays MusicSunday.

This week’s review is of Don’t Know Why by Norah Jones, which is possibly one of my favourite songs ever. Jones’ voice is quite unusual and pure, while the back up instruments (on the entire album too) are sublime, very crisp.

It’s what I refer to as background music – a lot of music (rock, punk and metal are big culprits) take up the airways in a room and make conversation difficult, while this can be playing dulcetly in the background without inhibiting the chatter.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Tubs is full of win – may more energetic than Kenny ever was; and connects with the kids perfectly. JEdward didn’t sing so I still don’t know what they sound like. Probably for the best, right?

I’d like to share with you a couple of invaluable tools that I use in the course of my writings.

1. Jazz Biscuit’s CC Search
link

Jazz Biscuit is a site that searches Flickr’s (one the biggest image hosting websites out there) CC photos. CC stands for Creative Commons, and refers to photos that the author has allowed to be used elsewhere, sometimes with strings. The most common are that you have to link back to them (the original author, which Jazz Biscuit does automagically) and that you can’t sell the images.

It’s by far the easiest image website out there – working on what I call the simple ‘press button, receive stuff’ concept (based on this) – there’s no registration involved no nothing.

The only downside is that it only searches though posts people have tagged – which leads to two problems: firstly, people who are lazy and don’t tag their photos or add any CC license don’t get their pictures noticed. Secondly, people who abuse the tagging feature – either by applying tags of no relevance to their photo to gain views or by the more innocent simply uploading 80 photographs of the same event with the same tags screw up the search process.

2. SXC.hu – Stock Photography
link

This is a stock imagery site, so the photos are all staged, but in some ways that’s good. It’s a bit of a fail though because you need to register. The process is relatively pain-free though, and the benefits once you do are quite nice. SXC differs also from Jazz Biscuit because all the images are much bigger – usually about 2 MBs; and a lot larger in size: 3000px photos are the norm over there.

Both are very good sites which I use regularly, and would highly recommend :)

So, as well as the strikes on Tuesday, the other great topic of conversation is the torrential rain that we’ve been having. It has led to floods, which are awesome – as long as it’s not your house. I mean, it’s lovely to watch all the bad things happening because of it when you’re wrapped up in a cozy blanket and listening to it pounding off the roof. It provided the soundtrack to me going asleep last night and was also there when I groggily groped for my phone this morning, silently deciding that I’d sell my soul for another few minutes in bed.

The Collison house hasn’t seen any flooding really; big puddles are the closest we’ll get. I suppose it’s something to be thankful for – but when friends in another part of the country have the week off school because of them – it’s hard to be appreciative.

When I was being dropped home today by friends, they convinced me to wait into the car for a while (about 10 minutes) because when I first tried to exit, I was met by someone throwing a bucket of water over me.. or so it felt. In true Irish style, though, when I’d gotten into the car not 5 minutes earlier, it’d been dry.

So, yeah, the floods aren’t really affecting me, so if the rain would stop – that’d be lovely thanks :)

I wouldn’t be what you’d call an avid reader. I’d like to be though. I would read about 2 book a month – which isn’t fantastic. Not when you put me against some of the people who did the MS Readathon certainly.

What happens when I do read a book is that I’ll start it, and then get slowly hooked, but ever so gradually so that I don’t really notice. I’ll see it lying on my beside table and pick it up, saying I’ll only read for a while before getting back to working.. and then realize an hour later that 60 minutes has passed.

My current read is The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. I read Angels and Demons a while back and loved it, but it only occurred to me to read his other books recently. The version we have at home is a whopping great ‘Illustrated Version’, which is quite entertaining, but annoyingly un-portable.

When I was going to Boston I decided to buy a book at the airport but didn’t want to buy something new because I mightn’t like it. I convinced myself that 7.99€ is not an abomination of a price to buy the book a second time – a more travel-sized edition, too.

I’m very much enjoying this book. I love thrillers. I love reading a book and dying to know what comes next. I’m like an adrenaline junkie, only with thriller books. Dan Brown does this perfectly.. but almost to the point where I’m so curious about what happens next that it’s a case of I’m this close to throwing the book across the room because he’s kept me in suspense for so long, so he finally says “fine, he opened the book and the writing said this:, finally finishing the point that he began 4 chapters ago with “and Robert opened the book and gasped at what he saw…..

It can get annoying at times, but I guess you could say it’s rewarding.

What did you think of it? And what other thrillers would you recommend?

The reason for my going to Boston was of course because I wanted the visit my brothers. The reason I went when I did, however, as opposed to any other week, was because in nearby (a mere 58 miles away) Providence, Rhode Island, RENT, the Broadway Tour was performing. I’d fallen in with RENT over the past few months, and would often pine over the Tour Schedule, wishing they were coming near Boston, before someone on MSN mentioned their wish to roadtrip across America when they were old enough. This sent the cogs of my mind whirring – ok, my brain thought. There was none directly in Boston, but could we drive to one of the other places? Let’s see.. it’s going to be in Madison, Milwaukee, Toronto, Providence, San Francisco..

“What was that last one?” asked another voice in my head.
“What? San Francisco? Wrong side of the country..”
“The one before that! Providence! That’s up in the north-east like Boston, am I right?”

A quick Google Maps search showed me that they were close. That was it – I was going.

I quickly typed an email to Patrick, that went something like this..

Hey,

Remember everyone jokes that I should come and visit you in Boston? Yeah, well, RENT’s nearby, and I really wanna see that.. I can haz visit you?

Don’t forget I’m your favourite younger brother

That was the gist of it – it was actually a 600 word email in the end. I got my reply the next morning:

Patrick Collison: redefining short and sweet since October 27th, 2009. :)

And that’s what we did. I booked my flight and 3 tickets to RENT on the Saturday night. The journey to Providence with Patrick was rather hilarious. The route is simple enough.. deceptively so, almost. We got all the way into downtown (they call it downcity, though) Providence before we made a mistake; we didn’t exit the motorway when we should have. Hardly a terrible mistake and easily rectified by taking the next one off.

When we filed into the theatre at 19:40, I saw the familiar stage set up:

I knew from background reading that the show’s creator, Johnathon Larson had said that theatre was too top-hat and tails and that RENT should appeal to the younger generation. He did all he could to achieve this, including selling the tickets for the front two rows of seats at 20$ each in a rush lottery 2 hours before the performance. Also, he made his show quite informal. The large metal structure in the right of the picture represents a Christmas tree in Act 1, and a church steeple in Act 2. Finally, instead of a grand opening with ornate curtains and everything, what you see in the picture was how everything was set up, and crew-members (this was in the stage directions) milled about and walked across the stage informally. This was interesting because it was different. Also, you had the problem-that-wasn’t-really-a-problem of not knowing when to clap, because you weren’t entirely sure when it was starting. It was quite funny to watch people start applauding as someone came onstage only to realize it was only a stagehand, and stop.

Finally though, Adam Pascal strode onstage (to monumental applause) and starts strumming, and is quickly followed by the cast.

The show itself was fantastic. Despite seeing it before both live and on DVD, is was a fresh experience to see it in Providence. The acting was top class and set was stunning. The music would be the only fault I would find. Even though I thought I’d never hear myself say this, the drums were too loud, which drowned out the vocals. Songs like Rent and Out Tonight were almost ruined by the overzealous drummer, or the screw up of the sound technician in charge of the actor’s microphones, making them too low.

I wanted to take a video of one of the songs, to show here and to have a piece of the show with me when I went home, and originally had my eye on What You Own, a thundering rock ballad. However, I feared the drummer would ruin the song, so settled on one that didn’t have drums in it: La Vie Boheme B:

MAUREEN
Are we packed?

ALL
Viva la Vie Bohème

In closing, RENT far from disappointing – and it was epic to see the two leads, Anthony Rapp (whom I got a picture with) and Adam Pascal in what’ll probably be their last times playing these roles. When the tour finishes – they retire from the show. Tour Schedule here

Note to RSS readers – there’s a youtube video here – click through to watch

Yup, I’m back in Limerick – sitting at the kitchen table and looking out at the Irish weather. It met me off the plane last night too. There was a palpable sense of ‘ooh, plane landed! start raining!’ in the air this morning. My body clock is pretty screwed because I arrived home and went to bed around 07:30, getting up at 14:30. The flight home last night was very smooth. I arrived into the airport, went through security and generally marveled at how different the entire process is when you’re trying to leave – the scrutinization just isn’t there on the homeward journey.

The flight itself was easy. The TV for my assigned seat (and the rest of the row) wasn’t working, so I moved to a different one with the help of the stewardesses and watched Taken, which was very good. Liam Neeson is quite awesome. He’s just made for the cool, badass roles like this and Michael Collins.

Photo owned by bigpresh (cc)

We landed at about 05:50 and Mom collected me from the airport and we spent the journey home from Shannon discussing my trip and what was new at home.

I finally wandered into bed around 07:30 and fell asleep soon after, finally waking up about 7 hours later.

It’s good to be home. The teacher’s strike is tomorrow so it’ll be Wednesday before I can settle back into the nice routine of work and school. Days off are nice but are annoyingly unproductive.

Anthony Rapp (Mark Cohen in RENT, the show I was at last night) and I at the stage door of the theatre last night.

There will be a RENT post going up, but I don’t have the photos (Patrick took them, and I’m not meeting him until later). Needless to say it was completely awesome.

For now, I’d like to share with you the reason I was so annoyed at being in America this weekend; missing the floods: