11 Years!!!

On May 13th, Melissa and I celebrated our 11 year anniversary! Yay! It’s an anniversary of sorts as we are not actually married, but just because we aren’t, doesn’t mean what we have and what we worked to building together doesn’t count! I know some people are more traditional an believe marriage is the appropriate step to take with your significant other, but that “mentality” just never appealed to Melissa or myself. And I’m not starting a religious argument here (that would be a waste of time) as we chose to for go both the holy sacrament of marriage from our catholic upbringing and the legal eagle city hall wedding alternative.

Why? Well…that’s none of your damn business!

Actually we just always had other things we’ve wanted to put our time and money in. Moving out of our parents house into an apartment, then into a house, then a baby (Sam!), careers, trips, etc, the list goes on. We all have our own priorities in life, and we’re happy they way things are right now. Now that’s not to say one day, in the next few years, we may want to get married, but to do so in a church would be a little hypocritical as our Sunday morning are for sleeping in and breakfast in bed (waffles anybody?!?). We prefer a nice beach/tropical/island wedding! A nice, relaxing event with close family and friends, that would end with a dip in the big blue… preferably the Caribbean, and would lead into a beach party lasting until dawn. Now that’s our idea of a wedding. Leave Gods&Laws aside, and bring a wedding back to what we should be celebrating: love, fun, a life shared and… food!

Despite that dream wedding, I know Melissa is the love of my life. I see that as plain as day, and she tells me she feels the same way (whew!) , which is a wonderful feeling. A feeling which is only stronger now that Sam is in our lives, a tie that binds us, flesh and blood, more meaningful than any marriage license could ever be! Sam truly moved our life goals and dreams into new territory, beyond the material. It’s tough to describe as it’s more of a state of mind rather than a series of emotions. Yeah yeah, getting all mushy here eh? Well, too freakin’ bad! My blog, my mush!

All this to say that Melissa has changed my life in the most amazing ways in the past 11 years. She’s allowed me to stay true to myself while helping me through the good and bad, but always making me laugh the along the way. She’s honest and caring, beautiful and engaging, intelligent, passionate, witty… and short! I’m 6 ft. 2 and she’s 5 ft. 2, so we don’t always see eye to eye, but we always kiss (with Melissa on her tip-toes) and make up. So, I know she’ll be reading this, a smile on her face, which is the way I see her when I think of her. Happy and beautiful. The most brilliant star in my sky that I’m so thankful to have had light the way these past 11 years.

I only hope my love has given her the same.

These 11 years we’ve shared have gone by so fast, with a lot of fond memories along the way. I can’t wait to see what the next 11 will bring!

Game Review: Boom Blox 8 / 10.

Surprise! Surprise! Mr. Spielberg has another hit on his hands, but no I’m not talking about the next Indana Jones movie, I’m blabbering about the Nintendo Wii game called Boom Blox! Steven Spielberg involved in video game development!?!? I know, sounds cool, and it is! He has signed a three game development deal with EA and the first fruits of this creative clash is Boom Blox. The idea for the addictive, and easy to play game, apparently originated from Spielberg’s childhood with his love for destroying his toys. Now who hasn’t done that… and found it fun?!? Well that fun was expertly transferred to this game through simple actions that make game play a breeze.

The game is a cross between Jenga, Tetris and demolishing buildings and is generally set around a structure of several blocks, from a dozen to a hundreds, that the player must interact with in some way. The aforementioned blowing up is one such activity, but the (over 300) levels of single player “story mode” allow for many various ways of engaging the blocks and accomplishing missions. Actions such as pulling, pushing, removing, throwing, exploding, grabbing, flinging, sliding, pounding, spraying are all possible with a cache of accessories including a baseball, a bowling ball, a bomb ball, a fire hose, etc. Too many to name here but suffice to say the game play is solid. The blocks also come in about 20 different types that all have a unique functionality. Bomb blocks (explode when thrown at, knocking things in every direction), vanish blocks (disappear when touched) and chemical blocks (explode when touched by another chemical block) are just a few of the unique block type that vary game play and your strategy to completing a level greatly.

The unique use of the Wii remotes’ motion capture makes throwing stuff at these structures all the more realistic as the force of your throw is reflected in the realistic and complex physics engine the game is built on. If you need to gently tap a block out from between two others, light throws will do the trick. If you need to launch a block 50 feet into a pyramid of bonus point blocks, well a good hard throw with an appropriate angle of impact, will get you there. But don’t be put off by angles and calculations and such. The simple point, click and throw game controls are a breeze to learn and soon you will be a master. Trial and error is key on more difficult throws, but that’s OK right?!?!! You want a freakin’ challenge!

Each block in the structure moves independently and can affect other blocks on the play field. Block weight also comes into consideration as blocks stacked low in the structure are near impossible to move unless some of the weight of the top layers has been removed. It’s impressive to see a 300 block tower collapse after a well placed throw to it’s base, then seeing all those bonus points fly up the screen!

Where the games really impresses and ‘takes off’ is the wildly fun multi-player mode. It’s pretty big and I haven’t explored all of it yet, but it’s a great party (dare I say drinking???) game. The agonizing reality of a missed shot, which allows your opponents (up to 4 players) to topple the tower and collect all the points, is heart felt as all your hard work in weakening the tower is lost! But revenge can be yours with the built in level editor! You can create your own new levels and exchange them with other Boom Blox owners. As you progress through the single player game, you unlock more and more resources for the level editor. Already you can find videos of Boom Blox Rube Goldberg machines on the net, some of which are really something to see!

I would call this first game from EA and Spielberg a success and I will enjoy it for a long time coming. It was a most unexpected birthday gift from my brother-in-law. So I guess I owe him thanks for opening my eyes to this engaging game. Because a great game is always more than just great graphics! Don’t you forget it!

Birthdays & Mother’s Day Weekend Extravaganza!

The Mother’s Day weekend is traditionally a big one in our families. Not only was it Mother’s Day, but it was also my mother-in-laws birthday on Saturday, my brother-in-laws birthday on Sunday and my own birthday on Monday. So we had a lot to celebrate, and we did, with three days of fun with family and friends! It all started off on Friday night as my good buddy Daniel and his wife Anna Maria invited us over for a great birthday meal! Anybody who knows me knows I love a good home-cooked meal, and Dan & Anna Maria gave me a yummy B-day gift with a great Italian-style lasagna (complete with bechamel sauce!!!) preceded by an entrée of lobster with marinated artichoke hearts. A nice salad and two types of cakes for dessert later, I was stuffed silly. Sam, while enjoying his bottle-o-milk, was a good boy being pretty quiet all evening while Mom and Dad played with Dan & Anna Maria’s two kids, Christopher and Amanda! After a meal like that, Melissa, Sam and I slept like babies… well for Sam that’s not much of a stretch, but you get the idea.

Saturday was a crazy, hectic day so the good nights sleep was, in retrospect, perfect timing. We had decided to have Melissa’s whole family over for the aforementioned birthdays/Mother’s Day mash-up and we had lots to do! As I try to do every year for my mother-in-law, I made some homemade spring rolls! They are always a big hit, so I enjoy making them, and I will most likely post the recipe in the near future. It was a BYOB party and we all had a great time with the last of the guests leaving around midnight. Sam was exhausted as he was passed around more than a 2 dollar joint. Check the link below for some pics of that day.

Sunday was my family turn as Melissa, Sam and I packed up the car and header to my parents place for the day. And what a beautiful day it was as we spent most of the day outside in the sun playing all kinds of sports with my 5 year old niece Meghan. We had some great salmon on a plank cooked on the BBQ (again, I’ll post this recipe too) and some Nanny-made apple crisp for dessert. Following supper, we gave Sammy-boy a bath/bottle combination which is a sure knock out for him. It’s was another great day with family that I live for. It was not perfect, however, as my sister and her family couldn’t be there with us , but we thought of them the whole day.

Getting home Sunday night and seeing my bed was a welcome sight. All that fun and my 30th birthday still hadn’t passed yet! I still had a couple hours left to say goodbye to my twenties, but I ended up sleeping them off and dreaming of what the next decade would bring with Melissa and Sam…

Smiling, Curious Sam

Those are the two words that would best qualify our son Sam. Always smiling, always curious. Sam is now two and a half months old, and for a couple of weeks now, he’s been an entirely different baby. Which is, of course, normal in his development, and we couldn’t be happier too! There’s only so much cute, unresponsive, bleary eyed, spitting up, pooping out newborn baby that new parents can take! Don’t get me wrong, those first two months were a beautiful, new experience for us, but come on, it’s always nice to get a little feedback on a job like parenting right? Now, Sammy-boy gives it to us in spades!

When he wakes up in the morning, he gives us a smile. I come home from work, Sam gives me a smile. Mommy comes back from shopping and… all together now: Sam gives her a puking! No, I’m kidding, she gets a smile too He’s just a happy baby, always doing the big smile and shy shoulder hunches… alas! No pic of that yet, but we’re trying our best. Every time we get the camera out, he’s completely fixated upon it and won’t pinch a smile for all the formula in the world, let alone for a crack at Pamela Anderson’s milking melons!

But I got to be honest, Sam isn’t always a happy baby, but when he’s not, we have some back up plans ready to spring in to action. Lately Sam’s been a fussy sleeper during the daytime. Maybe it’s because he sleeps an average of 9 hours straight a night! Of course, we love that, but Melissa sometimes has a hard time with him during the day as he fights his sleep. So we call in Mr. Fan! The ceiling fan in our bedroom is a great distraction for Sam. He forgets about his tears and watches the fan with a pair of big eyes and an upraised chin!

Sam is also starting to watch T.V.! Now I’m not sure this is a good thing, but he only seems to like watching hockey so far, which is just fine with me, but maybe a little depressing for Mom! Here he is as we caught him taking over the remote control and being surprised when we catch him in the act! The little guy is sneaky, I’ll give him that!

Another thing that Sam loves is the Snugli baby carrier we sometimes put him in. Now that he can hold his head better on his own, the Snugli is a great way to keep him close and his curiosity peaked as he rides around, belly to belly, with Mom or Dad. As you can see, Dad takes advantage to play some Mario Kart Wii! It’s the perfect setup, Dad bops up and down and weaves left and right during the game play which keeps Sammy entertained and Daddy gets in some game time! We both win!

To finish off today, here’s an updated family picture. Notice Sam’s attention is on Mr. Fan which is off to the right of the photo. Getting this kid to smile on camera is harder than getting Nessy on film! But if you ever see Sammy in person, there’s no doubt this kids got quite the smile!

Movie Review: Iron Man 8.5 / 10

The first blockbuster of summer 2008 is here, and it rules with an iron fist! Iron Man opened on May 2nd across North America and made just over a cool 100 million at the box office. I was among those movie goers who happily paid up 8 bucks for a matinée screening at a local mega-super-duper-plex. I have to say right off-the-bat that I am not a comic book guy. I’ve owned maybe 4 comics in my life, and they were the unfortunate result of a misguided, yet well intentioned surprise Christmas gift exchange.

This review is spoiler free, so no worries! I won’t rehash to much of the plot or characters either. The IMDB plot description will suffice:

When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil.

Having said that, I do love a good super hero movie, but have found that in the past couple years, we’ve been flooded with them. Batman Begins, Spider Man2, XMen 2 and now Iron Man are among my favorites. You might’ve noticed that the movies I named have one thing in common: interesting characters. In that category, Iron Man may very well lead the pack with Tony Stark, a performance by Robert Downey Jr that seems tailor made for the man. He’s the movie, plain and simple. I wasn’t a big fan of his before this, and now I’ll probably check him out more because of it. I can’t remember laughing at the movies as much as I did at his deadpan, quiet delivery of some of the funniest lines of dialog this year. His chemistry with Gwyneth Paltrow, playing the involved, strong, yet ‘girly’ Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts, is natural and never seems forced. Supporting players Terrence Howard and Jeff Bridges (The Dude!!!) also play well and add to the overall feel of the movie.

What does seem forced, however, is the villain of this Iron Man creation story. The overall plot is predictable and the villains gradual revelation is anti-climactic: everyone in the theater sees it coming except for Tony Stark. But I won’t delve into it anymore than that. Go see the movie and let me know what you think, of what may be the only major negative point, in this fun ride of a flick.

Notice I haven’t talked about the action? Well it’s good, needless to say, and the action scenes actually drive the plot of the movie, which is a rare thing lately. Suffice to say that the amazing special effects (check out the details on Iron Man’s suit ) and characters deliver this movie into summer blockbuster goodness territory! It’s a great start to the summer season, hopefully the momentum will last! Iron Man has set a standard, will the other summer flicks step up as well?

We’ll find out soon enough, as Speed Racer (May 9th - retch!), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (May 16th - meh…) and Indiana Jones: And the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (May 22nd - yay!) all open this month!

For me, a true test to liking a movie is if I would buy it on DVD, and Iron Man will be on my shelf the day it comes out!

Johnny out!

8.5 / 10

Quick Post: 30 in 30

You may or may not have read my post about doing 30 things in my 30th year as a way of saying goodbye to my 20s and jumping in to the next decade of my life. Check it out here if you haven’t

Well, my birthday is only days away and I’ve set up a new page called “30 in 30″ that will chronicle these little mini adventures. I’m hoping it will be a fun read, because I know I’ll have fun doing the list!

You can check it out by clicking the “30 in 30″ tab at the top of my blog header.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading!

Summer Movie Season!

Today is the first ‘official’ day of the summer movie season with the opening of Iron Man. IMDB describes the movies synopsis as such:

When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil!

Sounds exciting! I guess…I mean we’ve had 42 super hero movies in the past 5 years, I this one gonna be any better? Well, the critics have spoken and 93% of them are saying ‘Yes!’. Head on over to rotten tomatoes to check out that stat. It seems the movie is an all around success, which is a good thing for Marvel who is completely financing the picture with a budget at a cool 180 million US. Will that success translate into box office mulah? We’ll find out soon, but at least they have the comfort of knowing they will have my 8$

I’ll be checking this one out this afternoon and I’ll let you all know about it in a later post. I just have to check it out, with this much positive spin, it reminds me of Spiderman’s opening buzz back in 2002 when it opened (that’s Friday, Saturday and Sunday) with 114,844,116 US!!!

That seems like an impressive number, but it’s not the highest grossing summer weekend movie of all time! In fact it’s only the 7th! Can you name the other 6 summer movies that have had a bigger opening weekend? Let me tell you, I was surprised at some of them!

Baby Pictures!

One of the biggest questions we had as parents awaiting Sam’s birth, besides the whole “is it a boy or a girl” thing, is what Sam would look like. Because on the ultrasound, you get squat. The pic on the left is Sam’s first official picture! That’s his ultrasound at 12.6 weeks, and let me tell you that Melissa and I stared at this picture an obscene amount of times before he was born. We’d just lay in bed wondering who’s nose, eyes, ears, hair, etc, he’d have. Would he resemble his Mom or his Dad? Maybe, and most likely, a mixing of both?

These questions filled our heads and conversations with family and friends until the day Sam popped into our lives…

Weekend Round Up

This weekend was a special one. I was sick. Food poisoning, had some bad cheese stuffed pasta. That was a first for me! And I’m actually glad it was only that, because having the flu could have been a big deal if Sam would have caught it! So Friday started off with a bang, literally, as I rarely left the bathroom . Once I had blown chunks, I started feeling a lot better… yeah sorry for the details, but it’s my blog so there!!!

Melissa and I have an agreement that she gets up during the week (Sunday to Thursday nights) to feed Sam and I get Friday and Saturday nights. I know, it doesn’t seem fair to me either, but it’s been 5 weeks now and things are going good. The one thing I love the most about this arrangement so far, is Sam and I get some quality time Saturday and Sunday mornings. We go downstairs in the basement, to let Mom sleep, and we pop in a movie.

It’s a great arrangement! Sam gets his bottle and some cuddle time with Dad… and Dad gets a little movie time in during a busy week schedule. This week, we watched The Shawshank Redemption which is quite possibly my favorite movie ever. If you haven’t seen it, please close this browser window, turn off your computer, get in your car and go rent it. I started giving Sam his bottle during the opening credits and Sam was asleep soon after. One great movie later (about 2h20 minutes), Sam wakes up during the end credits. Perfect timing.

As an added bonus, Sunday was a beautiful day to work on the property. Getting some fresh air was just what I needed after being inside a not-so-good smelling bathroom . Plus, yes another super bonus, Mario Kart Wii came out on Sunday! Yes it’s fun, yes it’s worth it! So while you’re out buying the Shawshank Redemption on DVD for a paltry 5$ at your local tech store, you might want to check out Mario Kart Wii as well!

I know what you’re thinking…and NO, I don’t get any commission on those sales

Sam, however, was not impressed by the sunny day or Mario Kart Wii. He has recently discovered his fingers! He loves his fingers and can be heard sucking away furiously on his fingers throughout the house… as seen in the pics below.

P.S. I case you were wondering, that first pic is actually me when I was a kid and sick with the flu. Our dog Sandy, would come and sleep beside me on the bathroom floor. I really miss that dog but I don’t miss that bathrooms color scheme! Yikes!

Favorites: Far Side

When I was a kid, while eating my cereal every morning before school, I would read the comics page in the newspaper. My favorite comic was “The Far Side”, a one panel strip by Gary Larson. His ingenious wit and ability to make absurd the trials of humans and animals alike, made me a big fan of his. He has since retired from syndication, but he still produces books, anthologies and even T.V. shows all related to his many beloved Far Side characters.

It being Friday afternoon, everyone could use a good laugh after a long week right? So I’ve found a few Far Side panels for your enjoyment! I you like these, I recommend checking out his compilation books as they make great coffee table fodder… also a single panel can get a great conversation going around the dinner table! Check out his official site here.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

P.S. The kid isn’t me