This set looks so cool. I really love all the minifigures in it, and that robot is awesome. I love the clear dome at the top, and who doesn't love red light bricks? There are so many cool LEGO sets this year. A lot of the Agents sets, the Space Police sets, and I love the new Pirate sets. I don't have any of the new Space Police or Pirate sets though. This is the first LEGO set I've bought since shortly after Christmas when I kept finding big sets on clearance at various stores.
Anyway, when we got back from Wal-Mart, Adam was at my house. It was really strange at first. I hadn't seen him in 8 years, and I was being really quiet the whole time. He is less than 3 years older than me, but he still seemed much older. He looked like you'd imagine a computer programmer to look, I guess. He had pretty ordinary glasses, a polo shirt, shorts, and some Nike sneakers, and short, curly hair. He looked like a grownup. The next day he dressed more like a kid or something, it was kind of amusing to me. Haha. Anyway, he is pretty cool. As I got more used to him, we talked a lot more. He plays guitar, so we talked about guitars and music quite a bit. His favorite bands are Tool and Chevelle. I also told him about how some of my cousins and I have been talking about making music together. We call it "cousinband" when we talk about it, but if we ever get it started, we'll probably come up with a different name. A lot of this side of the family is musically inclined, and I think I probably have the least natural talent out of everyone else in the family. I told him if we ever make some cousinband music that I'd let him know so he could make some contributions, possibly in the form of guitar parts, since he's our uncle, and he's only a little older than us so he seems more like a cousin anyway.
Speaking of being musically inclined, that evening, we played the board game Cranium. My mom and Nancy were on one team, my dad and Andrea were on another team, and I was on a team with my sister and Adam. We were doing terrible at first. We had to do so many of those "humdingers" where you have to hum the melody of a song and the other people on your team have to guess it. I am terrible at humming, and the song I had to hum was "Don't Worry, Be Happy". I thought they'd get it right away, but they didn't get it at all. Those are the only words I know to the song, by the way, so I just kept humming that part over and over again, those 6 syllables, as everyone stared at me. Haha. The time ran out, and I yelled "Don't worry, be happy!" From then on, my sister and Adam did all the humming, and they are both amazing at it. During the Pictionary-like parts of the game where someone has to draw a picture, my sister was the designated artist, seeing as how she is a really talented artist. It was really funny, because we had some old pieces of paper from when we played the game years ago, and they were just sitting around the table. She had to draw an eyeball with her eyes closed, and I guessed what it was, and then I looked over at one of the years-old pieces of paper and there was an identical eye drawn on it, so apparently she had gotten the same card when we played it a few years ago. It's funny that she's so consistent, and she didn't remember drawing that eyeball before. She also had to draw a convent at one point, and later I found an older piece of paper with an identical convent on it. She kept joking about how even though she's been taking studio art classes in college, her art skills haven't grown at all.
Adam is allergic to cats, and we have two, so he was barely able to breathe all weekend. My mom was digging through the medicine cabinet and she found some Benadryl or something for him. While looking through the cabinet, she found a plastic bag full of candy, which I'm guessing my sister stashed in there a while ago and forgot about. She's always buying candy and not finishing it or not even starting it. There was a bag of gumballs in it, and a box of gobstoppers. I asked her about the candy, and she said she didn't remember it, but that she probably did stash it there since she's always doing stuff like that. So anyway, I told her I was thinking about putting it in my Mickey Mouse gumball machine, which is older than I am. I think it's from the 60's or 70's or something. But I didn't want to put them in there without asking if I could, but she said I could. Then she was talking about how she loves old fashioned gumball machines and wants one for her apartment, and she was talking about one of those HGTV home decorating shows or something where some woman made a gumball machine into a lamp. We both agreed that that was kind of stupid, because she took something really cool and made it into something rather ordinary. I said "If you're going to make an old fashioned gumball machine into anything, you should make it into a fishbowl." and then I kept thinking about the idea, and said "You know how people put marbles in the bottom of fishbowls? You could even put marbles that look like gumballs in there." My sister loved the idea and now she says she's planning on doing it.
Anyway, we all piled into our minivan and went to the surprise party for my uncle Mike. It was actually a pretty funny excuse that the host (Dave) made for inviting Mike over. Usually for surprise parties, people do things like invite the guest of honor over for dinner or something, and they have no idea anyone else is there, but Dave came up with this elaborate story about hurting his ankle and needing to get a chair out of the attic so he needed Mike to come over and help him get the chair. So Mike was on his way over and we were all there in the living room. His family pulled up in their minivan, and got out. His family came in first while Mike was obsessing over his parking job, and they were of course in on the surprise. Dave went outside with crutches (he was faking the hurt ankle), and was talking about the chair in the attic, and we could all hear Mike talking to him about how he also hurt his back recently so he didn't know if he'd be much help, and we were all trying not to laugh inside the house so he wouldn't hear us, but everyone was giggling. He walked in the door and we all yelled "Surprise!" and he just stood there quietly with a smile on his face, but like he didn't understand yet what was going on. Then Dave set his crutches down as he was walking in the door, and was like "It's a miracle! My ankle is healed!"
I think I was actually possibly more surprised than Mike was when he walked in the door, because he had shaved his moustache off. I don't think I've ever seen him without a moustache before, except in photos of when he was really young. I think he's had a moustache since before I was born. I've seen him with a thin beard before, but never without the moustache. I still wasn't used to the moustache loss when the party was over. He also told me he's thinking about growing his hair out now that he's retired from the army. He was a bit of a hippie decades ago and had long hair.
After a while, my sister and my cousin Patrick and I walked down to Westcott street to go to the new age bookstore there. I like going in there. It used to be better like five years ago before they changed management or whatever. They had a section with books about music. I have a really good book I bought there years ago called "Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy" and one called "Sacred Sounds" about the healing powers of music. The first one is way more scientific and philosophical too, and it really interesting. The "Sacred Sounds" one has a lot of new age BS in it that I don't believe, but it's still rather interesting and has made me think about certain aspects of music in another way. Anyway, I didn't find any books I wanted this time, but it was fun going there.
We went for another walk later, and I picked up a red leaf from the ground. I've been picking up a few leaves lately since it's autumn, and the album I'm working on is very inspired by nature, autumn especially, and I want to incorporate a red leaf into the album artwork somehow. So I've been picking ones up I think look good, and I'll decide which ones I want to put in the album artwork. The one I choose will just be scanned or something I'm sure, but I was thinking about maybe taking like 10 of the others and actually preserving them somehow and putting them in the album insert for real and those would be part of the deluxe editions or something. I think that could be really cool. I've put a lot of thought into how I'm going to present my music, and I want to make it very special.
Anyway, we got a lot of group photos taken at the party, so if anyone sends them our way, I'll possibly post a few. Patrick and my sister and Mike's two kids and I were all being very silly by the end of the party even though we were all very tired. We were doing that thing from that improv comedy show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" where one person puts their arms behind their back and someone behind them puts their arms under the first person's arms. I don't know if I explained that well at all, haha. I kept having people be my arms because I was saying a lot of really funny things and making funny faces that went well with their arm movements. It's a shame more people don't know how to have fun at parties without alcohol. We were all sober and being really silly and having a lot of fun.
Adam had to leave this morning, so my mom and Andrea took him to the airport, and my dad took my sister back to her apartment. This morning while my sister was still here, she and I filled up my Mickey Mouse gumball machine with gumballs, and it was only half full, so then we put gobstoppers in it too. They are a different size than the gumballs and the gumballs say "dubble bubble" on them, so I'm not in danger of breaking my teeth on a gobstopper trying to chew it thinking it's a gumball. Haha. Here's Mickey:
I haven't been using the computer much this weekend because I've been so busy with family stuff. I think I'll work on music for quite a while, and probably put together that LEGO set today.
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