So I wasn’t being completely honest when I said no more tea. I’d simply switched from black to orange tea. Even that didn’t work though, and a mild panic attack had me down to even lighter, Chinese tea.
A warm, relaxing mug can be rather addicting.
The great thing about tea is that it doesn’t just taste good, it serves a purpose. Cleanses the palette. Aids digestion. Combats the Yang of greasy foods with Yin. Green tea in the morning serves to awaken the senses. Longjing calms the mind at night.
The steeping process is beautiful. Green tea is especially prone to scorching, so the water can’t be too hot, or the tea will turn bitter. Not hot enough, and the leaves won’t fully release their flavour.
Note: Each frame of the video is a different photograph, taken five seconds apart. About thirty minutes in total.
They call it the battle for Ontario. The Ottawa Senators against the Toronto Maple Leafs.
One of the publishers I deal with at work schmoozed me, along with Joel and Louise. We’ve given them a fair amount of business over the last little while, each of us involved in a different part of the process, so he treated us to a Sens game. Even though my team (the Leafs) got pounced 7–2, it was still an exciting game; lots of end-to-end action, close penalty kills, and Heatly scored a hat-trick. The Leafs were simply out-finessed. Great seats too. Coincidentally, we ran into Rockstar Jeff at the game.
Eva Avila, this year’s winner of Canadian Idol, lead the national anthem. To my surprise, I was able to follow with the French, but it was all phonetic. Something I learned in grade school, but never actually understood.
It was a little disheartening to see how everything is so commercialized. Scotiabank place, VIA Rail goals (complete with train horn when someone scores), Jubilee Timex time. Even Pizza Pizza sponsors a free slice if the Sens win and score six goals or more.
There were probably an even number of Sens fans and than Leafs fans, but the latter were definitely more vocal. Any Sens chants were drowned out. It’s easy to tell how galvanized fans get in such a rivalry from comments I received on a previous post.
The best part was before the game even started. Master Corporal Paul Franklin from Edmonton, who lost both his legs in a suicide attack in Afghanistan, came to drop the ceremonial first puck. They rolled out the red carpet to centre ice, and he hobbled along with metal legs. Both sides of the rivalry cheered and clapped as one, louder than any other point in the night, proud of their surviving soldier.
Before giving her food, I use to ask Dolly to shake or beg or give paw, and she’d lift one paw up (always her right one) for me. Now she’s associated the paw-lifting action with being fed, so she skips the step of me saying anything and automatically does it.
The first time we kissed. The first time we held each other. The first time we slept with arms entwined, bodies bare and buried under the covers.
It was before the snow melted on the verge of spring, when I would open the windows to dry the sweat from our skin.
I put on a song that made me cry, because she said that it turned her on, and with the tears welling up in my lids, we stared into each others’ eyes.
From the moment we touched, there was never any awkwardness. Only a complete trust, a comforting familiarity, as if we’d known each other for years, a gentle nuzzle of the nose from my baby-faced doll.
And now it’s over.
Someone who saw this video sent me this very touching letter about her story of rape and recovery.
A tribute to Nick and Alison, my old laid-back roommate (who taught me how to make a mean grilled cheese, offered a significant challenge in Counter Strike, and introduced me to Lamb) and his new bride.
I would say something about the wedding, but the video says it all.
At one point in the night I was running around with my Karachi Outpost strapped on my back, and my camcorder bag around my shoulder, feeling like a one-man documentary team, even though my focus was on video instead of stills. There are a couple of camera issues, such as focus and zoom speed that still bug me when I watch the footage, but until I can afford a Canon XL2 my cheap Hitachi DVD-cam will have to do.
Surprisingly, the easiest part was picking the song, something that can take days itself. I needed a single track that would work through landscapes, kissing, and drinking, three things that evoke vastly different emotions, and Tulips by Bloc Party was perfect. Even the timing of the lyrics worked out. I wish I could say that I was able to obtain a score for the music, analyze it, and symetrically break down the scenes according to the development. To be honest I just didn’t have enough footage, so I just put what I could in the parts that would fit, without interrupting the flow of the story.
The entire clip took about three solid days to complete, half of which was just getting the scenes in the right format to work with in Adobe Premier 2.0. I was plagued by video format problems and asynchronous audio issues. It was also the first time I was able to try this latest version of Premier since I was running 1.5 for a while. The process really pushed the capabilities of my system; loading only Premier with the whole sequence took up 1.6 gigs of RAM. Render time was about 20 minutes on a dual-core AMD 4400+. Uncompressed video size is almost 2 gigs.
