Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Your mind is the scene of the crime.

This was my first midnight screening and I’m surprised it took me this long to see one. I have been anticipating Inception for so long it feels like this movie was always in development but the last year was building up to 12:05AM Friday morning.

I will be unable to give Inception a proper review because:

• I saw it at the end of an already long day, which featured a full day of work and an Ice Dragons game
• The story is complex and layered that to fully appreciate all levels you have to see it again
• I’m completely biased and love Christopher Nolan’s work
• To talk about the story and how it fits requires spoilers

To be brief: the movie was excellent. It was complex, intense, well cast and most importantly, original. With remakes, sequels and adaptations being the trend in Hollywood it’s incredibly refreshing to have a new story come along and entertain the way this did.

On the topic of the cast you can’t go wrong with Leonardo DiCaprio as your lead but I was exceptionally pleased with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard’s performance, they complemented the rest of the ensemble perfectly. I thought the visuals in the movie were incredible too and even though you knew what you saw wasn’t possible it felt completely real. As DiCaprio’s character says: “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

The soundtrack was composed by one of my favorites, Hans Zimmer. The frantic and tense music he created added a lot of character to the movie and I will be repeating the soundtrack many times in the coming days as I come out of my Inception high. I was worried that listening to the soundtrack before seeing the movie would affect my immersion of the movie, that I would be listening for the musical cues more. However, I think it aided my enjoyment and listening to the soundtrack again has felt like a completely new experience after the movie.

When the movie was over I wanted to return to the dream state. The movie left me feeling good, but after sleeping on it (for a whole three hours) and thinking about it further I liked it more and began appreciating the entire story. I will go back to theaters to see it again to pick up the pieces I missed, to put the story together and better understand the dream.

I was unable to complete the second annual Tube Steak Challenge for 2009-2010. At the count of 45.5 my quest to repeat the Tube Steak Challenge comes to a depressing end. Looking back on the year I think there were some highs, but it was a hot dog season filled with lows.

Not going out on May Long weekend was the lynch pin for this challenge, as you can expect to eat at least eight hot dogs over the course of a weekend.

We did a lot of barbecuing this year but our interests spread out to salmon and other meats more than the cylindrical snouts and entrails. I never went out of my way to eat a hot dog, and while 45.5 is a lot, it’s not enough. I will pick up some mustard and some fresh buns and hope that the third iteration of this challenge is a little more successful.

There are two movies I am looking forward to most in 2010. The first is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, but my excitement for Inception is miles ahead of the first half of the final Potter movie.

Since Christopher Nolan finished work on The Dark Knight I have been patiently waiting to see what he would do next and while the details for this movie were slow to emerge last summer I was excited at the prospect of something. Now that trailers and plot summaries are released I’m full throttle looking forward to this.

As if I needed more convincing, the soundtrack is being scored by Hans Zimmer, who is one half of the dynamic duo that has done Nolan’s two previous Batman films.

If I don’t put this link somewhere I’ll forget it. This is the from Zack Hemsey who composed, recorded, and mixed the song used in the third Inception trailer. It’s amazing and if it’s an indication as to what the full soundtrack will sound like then this movie will be even more incredible.

Not going camping on May Long weekend really impacts this Tube Steak Challenge. In fact I didn’t have a hot dog in all of May, and with my July 1 deadline looming I am at risk for not making 52 hot dogs in a year. Thankfully to the move to the house hot dogs and buns were purchased and helped add to my count by 7.5 to bring the total up to 45.5.

It was a legitimate .5 as Jenna was unable to finish her one hot dog. Until I have a proper tradesman come out to the house to add a line from the gas meter in the basement up to the deck our BBQ is off limits and the quality of the hot dogs will decrease significantly.

With two weeks to go I have to eat 6.5 hot dogs, the race is on!

Same team. Out in the same number of games. Shaving the beard on the same day. I thought the lessons that were learned on May 11, 2009 would have helped the Canucks and I. However, history repeats itself and now there are a summer of questions.

This year the beard lasted 27 days, April 15 – May 11, before the dream died. This year felt different, the team was a year older, Henrik Sedin had a phenomenal year, the Canucks had a stellar home record and we were going to go far. After a few shaky performances against Los Angeles we were lined up for a round against Chicago, something the team wanted when the regular season ended.

Where is the problem? What is preventing us from going to the next round? San Jose has been a constant threat to win the Cup, but would always fall short, and after years of criticism finally proved themselves and are positioned to give their fans something they have been expecting for years. Will Vancouver go through the same lackluster performance in the playoffs like San Jose did? Or will the team fall short of expectations and eventually go through a rebuilding phase?

All these questions and all I have is the aftermath of a month of not shaving and the hope that next year will be different. Perhaps these beard posts will become a yearly tradition where everything falls just short of winning it all.

Enough speculation, one thing that we do know is that my beard didn’t grow properly this season. I still have a French look, my cheeks were bare and smooth and the goatee looked faint from a distance. Here are two photos a day for 27 days combined into an animation. There are two sizes available, one is 300×305 (3MB) and the other is 500×508 (7.8MB).

Maybe next year it will be different…maybe

It’s a travesty that my Tube Steak Challenge has taken a back seat in the last few months, but it has come back to life in the last week with an addition of seven.

The count now stands at 38. This leaves 70 days to go, exactly ten weeks, to consume 14 hot dogs. Since we the house conditions have been cleared we may have to rely on hot dogs for the month of June. At least they can be grilled in a back yard on a large deck.

Today we cleared conditions of the house so we can officially say that we bought the house. We felt a little hesitant announcing home ownership during the last week for fear of jinxing it or having some issue creep up and affect us losing the house we already lost once before. The conditions included financing and inspection, seemingly simple, but any number of things can go wrong with them.

Fortunately everything is in the clear, the issues raised from the house inspection were not important enough to impact the sale of the house and gave me a long “honey do” list for this year and a few years to come.

I brought my camera along to the house inspection on Saturday and if I wasn’t photographing issues (which our home inspector did anyway) I took pictures of other areas that the MLS listing didn’t show off.

Backyard

Living Room

Kitchen

Basement

Others

Sadly, furnishings is not included and when we take possession we will be surprised by how empty the place is and how little furniture and decorations we own. Everywhere you look there is a shelf, a corner, or a ledge that needs something on it so it will be a slow process on filling the house and making improvements the we want.

Now that we have our new address and a move in date we begin the process of contacting businesses to update our address, arrange for utilities and packing up our life and moving east.

Sometime in December I noticed that my vision was not as sharp as it used to be. I thought it was because of different lighting conditions at work or the darker days, but I found text was not as clear as it had been. Maybe it had always been a little fuzzy following my PRK surgery, or maybe something else changed. When I compare my vision from the left eye to the right eye there is definitely a difference and the right eye is noticeably blurry.

At the last appointment in 2009 with my ophthalmologist noted the pressure in my eye was a little high and to stop using the Flarex eye drops. Was it because of the pressure that my right eye started to lose focus? Or was it all unrelated? I was on track to have an appointment in spring of 2010 but I was concerned with my vision so I scheduled for an appointment for early February.

The pressure in my eye had decreased and was no longer a concern but the vision in my right eye was a 20/25 and the left eye was 20/20. The chances of the right eye improving were doubtful, but there may be no benefit in having surgery again on the eye. I can function day to day without an issue. Driving, playing hockey and other activities are fine; but when I am required to read text on a screen, especially at an angle, I have to get in closer to read it. Some days I feel I can see a little better in the right eye but after I do a quick left eye versus right eye comparison I’m reminded of how far from perfect 20/25 is.

I cannot do much about this for the time being, my anniversary is in two months and I wonder how my eye sight will be then. Will I need to get a pair of reading glasses soon? Should I consider surgery again? If so, would I go for PRK or Lasik? For now CanSeanSeeYet.com will be partially updated and may stay that way for the remaining two months on the domain registration.

For all other PRK surgery recovery posts see here.

Day two of the playoffs mean day one of the playoff beard. Vancouver starts their series against sixth seed Los Angeles tonight and I am hoping this will be the start of a beautiful thing and by June I will have a disgusting and shameful beard.

Again, the word ‘beard’ is used loosely, I don’t know if I will be able to better the growth I did last May. Perhaps I can last more than 27 days? Time, and my face, will tell.

I have a few other posts in draft status but this one is worthy of being pushed out the door promptly.

For the last four months, nearly to the day, Jenna and I have been thinking about houses. We look at For Sale signs when we are driving, we watch any property hunting or home renovation show we can on TV and we constantly check MLS.ca for homes and new listings. In the last sixteen weeks we have considered building a house, moving to Beaumont and living anywhere from Terwillegar to Tamarack.

In the last four weeks we have listed our condo, sold it and have an offer accepted on a house both of us love. The 24 hours leading up to the offer acceptance was amazing and is nothing short of a real estate miracle.

Wednesday April 7 we met with our Realtor in Sherwood Park to look at a few houses. The first house we saw caught our attention and became our favorite of any we had seen in the month prior (between Open Houses and tours with our Realtor). There were things that needed work but it was a strong candidate. The second house we went to immediately caught my eye and before walking into the house I was in love. You could argue the proximity to Little Caesars Pizza and being on the same road Gord lived on were factors, but they just sweetened the deal of a house that was amazing.

I raved about the house for the next few days and built it up so much in my mind. Both houses that appealed to us would require a second showing, but we used Saturday April 10 as an opportunity to see additional properties and see if those houses still stood up in our mind. They did, and on Monday April 12 we returned to Sherwood Park to see the two houses we liked. Our Realtor broke the news outside of our first stop that the house I loved most was not available, because an offer had been made on April 10th and that we should move on to find that right place for us.

It may have been the crushing news outside of the house, or that the house didn’t appeal to us on a second viewing, but the place didn’t speak to us the same way and we continued looking at properties on Monday night. At 9PM on Monday we got home and felt deflated about everything. The houses we liked were unavailable or weren’t as good and after 20+ viewings we were back at square one.

Tuesday morning I received a text from our Realtor saying the offer on the house had fallen through and we had a second chance to view the house and see if it was worth making an offer. This house had been on the market just over a week and had a lot of foot traffic so we knew time was important and arranged for a viewing four hours later at 2PM. I left work early, picked up Jenna and critically evaluated the house I loved a week prior. It still looked good and as we went room to room we started building our future, imagining coffee on the deck, working on the kitchen island and living on a quiet road.

We were still in the house at 2:30PM when another Realtor showed up with clients, we finished up our viewing and decided to make an offer. Over a cup of coffee we prepared the papers and our Realtor drove the offer to the sellers agent. When he arrived their agent was on the phone with the Realtor we had seen at 2:30PM and was interested in putting in an offer. When she found out an offer was in place she backed out for not wanting to get into a bidding war, something we were hoping to avoid too.

A few restless hours went by and at 8:34PM we received a call from our Realtor, talked numbers on our counter offer and ten minutes later the house was ours. 24 hours prior we were going through the break up process of a house we loved to owning it.

Our Realtor said the right house comes along when you are ready, and had told us that offers do fall through and there could be a chance for us to get this house. We were doubtful about any of that working out, but it did. It was the perfect ending for a house we loved and a story that him, and us, will share for years to come.