I simply have to share this Extreme Shepherding video I think it's possibly the best thing I've seen this year, I don't really care if it's faked or not, it's amazing.

As usual I've abandoned this blog for ages, I never did finish blogging about my holiday :-( We made a scrapbook of it, so I should remember what we did and be able to fill in the details, not that we've actually finished the scrapbook, though we've put more in than on the blog I think.

I've been pretty busy planning wedding details as we did set a date, early September. We didn't want to hang around too long, though weren't sure 6 months was long enough to plan everything, it seems to be okay though, still 4 months to go and most things are sorted, so that can't be bad.

Mostly then life has been revolving around wedding preparations, it's quite scary how much it all costs and just how much there is to do, though I've gone from being scared at the prospect of the wedding day, to beginning to think that actually, it might be fun.

I'll leave it there, don't want to overdo the blogging by launching into another one of my epic entries.

Holidays are here again. I'm blogging from my parent's house in America where Matt and I are staying at the moment, if I can find a camera lead I'll try popping some photos up too, but at the moment there's no one around to ask, so I'll just do a text diary of what we've been up to. I apologise in advance, that it's quite detailed and probably boring.

Thursday 5th March
Made a futile attempt to check in online, knowing that it didn't let me last time as we're travelling on my Dad's points. Matt booked a taxi for 2:15 AM. I tried and failed to get some sleep in the afternoon as I knew I wouldn't at night, instead panicked about whether we had everything we needed, checked passports and tickets approximately 497 times. Played a few LAN games of Dawn of War while waiting until it was time to get the taxi to the airport.

Friday 6th March
2:10am - Stood outside waiting for the taxi, paranoid that it wouldn't arrive.
2:15am - Taxi didn't arrive!
2:17am - Phoned them, heard a noise further up the road, I went to investigate while Matt was ringing the taxi company.
2:18am - I found taxi, lost, trying to find us, waved it down to where Matt was waiting with the bags.
2:19am - Got in taxi
2:30am - Arrived at the bus station. To find police parked in bus stop, arresting someone.
2:40am - Boarded coach
2:50am - Coach tried to leave, missing 2 passengers. Man who had been sat on the bench next to the coach for last 5 mins suddenly chased us down, banging on the side. It was his coach, he hadn't realised.
3:00am - Stopped at Leicester Forest East service station to change coach drivers, but no sign of new driver.
3:05am - New driver turned up. He'd parked on the other side of the motorway and had to walk over the bridge.
5:15am - Arrived at Heathrow after a fairly uneventful journey, during which I managed to get about 45 minutes sleep.
5:30am - Arrived after a short walk and toilet stop at Terminal 3. Wandered around where it said Air Canada, finding only bag drops for people who had checked in online. Figured that maybe checkin doesn't open till 6.
5:45am - Staff began laying out the Air Canada checkin queuing ropes.
5:50am - We wandered over to join the other few customers hanging around the Air Canada check-in.
5:55am - Check-in staff started arriving over at executive first desk, but nothing yet for economy.
6:05am - Check-in, woman at desk not terribly helpful, seemed to expect us to know what we were doing, but we got our tickets and got rid of our luggage and headed up to security.
6:15am - Through security without any problems.
6:30am - Got some breakfast rolls and probably our last decent cup of tea from EAT.
8:00am - Our gate opened, so we headed through ready to board.
8:30am - Boarding began, the plane was pleasantly only about half full, but even better than that there was plenty of leg-room! I made a decision that if Air Canada planes are like this we should visit Canada instead of my parents everytime. My Dad later said that they'd probably upgraded the whole plane to Economy plus, something they do sometimes, so I guess you can't guarantee that you'll always get the nice legroom with them.
8:45am - Announcement that plane would be leaving a little bit later than planned and also taking a slightly longer route due to the weather.
9:10am - Plane began moving. It seemed to be about 10 minutes from this point until we finally took off, but it probably wasn't.

8 hours of flying later, during which Matt got a little sleep, I got none, just read and watched bits of films:
Move our watches back 5 hours
12:30pm - Plane lands at Toronto airport. Very easy pass through customs and to collect bags.
12:50pm - Met by my parents, pile into car to head to hotel where we're stopping for 2 nights. Stopped on the way at an Italian place for lunch.
Will stop with the boring timings now and just write:
My first impression of Canada was sadly that it was no different than America, but it was a fairly industrial bit to be fair. The hotel we were staying at was in Hamilton, we checked in and unpacked, had showers etc. before heading out for a walk along Lake Ontario. Then we drove to Brentford which is where Matt and I were going to be watching an Arrogant Worms gig. We found the Sanderson Centre, then left again to go and eat at a Wendy's. Wendy's food was really nice, good quality burgers, though the medium portions are definitely what we would call a large in the UK. My parents dropped us back at the centre and we wandered around for a bit as it was a bit early to go in. Matt ventured out onto an ice rink, which I'm not sure was all that safe as it looked like a frozen pond which could be beginning to thaw. Then we headed up to a shoe shop, which was handy as Matt needed some new boots, I tried not to show my pleasure when both shop assistants said eh at the end of a sentence. Hooray, we are in Canada after all.

The Arrogant Worms gig was highly entertaining. They sang some of my favourites, plus some songs I didn't know. It was actually only two thirds of the Arrogant Worms, being assisted by Mike Ford of Moxy Fruvous as the third Arrogant Wormser's wife had just had twins. I picked up 3 new CDs, plus one of Mike Ford's solo ones, and they were giving away The C album (Moxy Fruvous) if you bought anything, so Matt and I each got one of those.

My parents were picking us up at 11pm, but the gig finished around 10, so once we'd bought the albums and had a chance to meet the band we still had around half an hour to kill, so went to a "Traditional Irish Pub" across the road. It had nothing Irish about it, but never mind, we had a drink before heading back across the road to wait for my parents and then it was finally time to get some sleep after 44 hours of being awake. We got to the hotel about 11:45 and went straight to our rooms to sleep.

Saturday 7th March
Went into Toronto. Split up from my parents with arrangement to meet back up around 5. We had an idea to find a comic shop that was mentioned, but after walking for ages down Queen Street East and only getting to about number 600, we decided 2000 and something might not be doable. So we doubled back. Looked in various touristy shops, had a very nice lunch in Chinatown where they put you onto big round tables with other people, something you'd never see happen in England. Then we wandered to a few more shops, went up the CN tower, got engaged :-) wandered a bit more and went back to the hotel.

I should probably say more about getting engaged I guess, but I don't know what to say really, we'd been talking about getting married for a while and Matt decided to ask officially while we were there. Yes I do have a ring, no we haven't set a date.

We ate at the Golden Griddle restaurant which was attached to the hotel, got evacuated by a fire alarm just after ordering, the staff said it happens sometimes when kids staying in the hotel pull the alarm, they weren't very happy. The food was very nice, but far too much, Matt and I didn't finish ours.

Sunday 8th March
Clocks went forward 1 hour, just to cause added confusion, clocks in the UK don't go forward until the end of the month, so on the plus side there's now only a 4 hour difference, so it'll be easier to adjust back when we fly.

Matt's 21st birthday. We spent the morning at Niagra Falls, which was still partly frozen, very impressive, although nowhere near as loud as I was expecting. Very, very cold. Then we spent the rest of the day driving to New York, customs wasn't too bad, though we had to go inside to fill in the Visa Waiver form and get our prints taken. We stopped a couple of times on the way, had lunch at Arby's. Ended up arriving at the apartment in New York about 8:30pm. The apartment is on a 12 month lease by Dad's company, so we were able to stay free. We went out to a diner for food, so Matt could have the birthday pancakes we'd promised him before again collapsing to sleep.

Monday 9th March
New York - got a taxi to central park. Walked around it a bit before splitting from my parents again. We walked to the Empire State building, and found a fairly large Comic Books shop on the way. The view off the Empire State wasn't great because of the weather, much like CN tower had been, you could just see the local area. We ate at Burger King, to see if it was better than in the UK, which actually I think it was. Then walked to Broadway and Times Square, I wasn't overly impressed with it to be honest. It was distinctly lacking in taster. The police station was possibly the weirdest thing, or maybe the subway, those both seem to be odd things to advertise with neon hoardings. We used the Subway to get to South Ferry so that we could get a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty. The Subway was much more confusing than in London, no help as to which direction, we thought we'd got on the right one only to discover we were going the wrong way, so we had to wait till a station with a free change and swap lines.

We got to the ferry port for the Statue of Liberty at 3:50, thinking that there was bound to be a ferry fairly soon, but it turns out they don't run late afternoon, the next ferry was 9:30am, so we walked back along the river to the apartment.

Had some cheesecake for dinner :-) went to bed early.

Tuesday 10th March '09
While Dad had a conference call, Matt and I set off to the Statue of Liberty again. However, the sole of my boot started separating from the body of it and the blister I'd developed yesterday started hurting a lot. We had also discovered that you aren't allowed to go up the statue anymore anyway, so decided maybe we weren't that bothered and walked back to the apartment ready to leave.

Drove from New York to Hanover, PA. Stopped at the Railway Carriage diner just outside New York, where for dessert we had much nicer cheesecake than the one in New York. Possibly the nicest cheesecake I've had. We bought some to take back with us too.

Arrived at my parents' house late afternoon, unpacked and went to veg in front of the TV in the basement for the evening.

Wednesday 11th March '09
Today - I woke up at 5 and managed to doze a bit longer, but finally gave up at 7, so I came to sort out my Mum's computer for her as it was getting pop ups and figured I'd blog while I was here. Mum is at work this morning, then we're meeting her for lunch before Dad flies off the UK.

Labels: America, Canada, Engagement, Holiday

Wow, 7 months since I last blogged. Oops. So, there's lots of things I keep thinking about blogging about, but then they seem a bit trivial so long later to bother typing about them. The only one that I still have a desire to do is the list of best 80s films, this is after watching a programme at Christmas which supposedly listed the top 40 80s films and yet missed out Ghostbusters! Travesty. Other films missed out were The Empire Strikes Back, (possibly they had a no sequel rule) Die Hard, Flight of the Navigator and The Princess Bride, though I can understand the omission of that as it is a bit of a cult film. I can't really complain as it was voted for, not chosen by anyone, but clearly the voting public are wrong and a much better Top 40 of the 80s would be one that I put together. So none of this democracy rubbish, instead I present the Top 40 of the 80s according to Ali's. Except I can't be bothered with 40, so it's my top 10.

First: The wrong Top 10 as presented by Channel 5. (For whole list see here.)

10. Beverly Hills Cop
9. Lost Boys
8. Top Gun
7. The Breakfast Club
6. The Terminator
5. Airplane
4. Aliens
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. Dirty Dancing
1. Back to the Future (at least they got something right)

The Top 10 80s films according to Ali

10. The Goonies
9. Die Hard
8. Flight of the Navigator
7. Karate Kid
6. Terminator
5. Ghostbusters
4. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
3. Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi (Okay I'm cheating a bit)
2. Princess Bride
1. Back to the Future/BTTF II (yes, cheating again, note III is not an 80s film)

Although I've been thinking about this for a while, it's still a kind of gut instinct list and is missing many films that I'm having trouble with because they should be in the Top 10 as well, I'm particularly sad that I had to kick D.A.R.Y.L and Lethal Weapon off the end and Batteries Not Included. This is harder than I thought, after all The Lost Boys and Flatliners are excellent films and they're missing, hmm. Maybe it's not possible to make a definitive list.

One thing that's certain though is that the 80s was the best decade ever for films. If I had a choice of only being able to watch films from one decade, that's definitely the one I'd pick, I've started watching several of them off the list after suddenly having them brought back to mind. I don't know if it's to do with my age in the 80s, after all I've picked mainly kids films, but talking to others, even some who weren't born in the 80s and yet recognise the genius of these films, I realise that they were just better. If I were to try to put together a top 10 of the 90s I think I'd have the opposite problem than I do now, in that I'd run out of great films by number 6.

Anyway, all this blogging after such a long gap is making my brain mushy, so I'm going away again now, hopefully not for another 7 months, but I make no promises.

Hmm, was this post worth waiting for?

I know, I know, I haven't been blogging again, I'm very sporadic.

So anyway, what have I been up to? I went to see Indiana Jones, I have to say, I was disappointed, I admit, I was kind of enjoying bits of it, but then I just felt extremely let down by what felt like a rather large cliché at the end and so now I hate it. Maybe I will decide in the future that it's not all that bad, but for now it's in the Phantom Menace, Lord of the rings box, for films you waited years for that let you down. Admittedly it's nowhere as near the bottom of that box as the Phantom Menace is, and already I feel sorry for it for lumping it in with that, so it can't be all that bad.

I have to admit talking about Indiana Jones was me going off tangent and avoiding what I actually came to blog about. As regular readers might have gathered (if anyone still checks this since I wasn't updating much? James, hi I hope, possibly hello to Mark and Phil, Helen already knows what I'm going to say, but hi to you anyway) you might have gathered life was very confusing. It's still confusing, but in a good way now, a kind of, "Wow, is this really happening?" way. I'm not sure this is the best way to say things, and really it's too soon, but here we go... I'm seeing someone. Okay, maybe this doesn't seem like a huge revelation, but I've been single for... well... ever. So it's a big thing to me. Anyway, his name's Matt (or Mat as Helen insists, since Mathew is spelt with 1 t) and we've been hanging out a lot for a while now, but then we admitted to liking each other. If you want to know when just look at the date my entry went vague and confused. Anyway, it's very soon to be saying anything, but since the people who see us in real life had figured it out (before us in some cases I think) I felt it was only fair that my internet friends knew.

Well, I'll stop with my random evasive posts. Life is still terribly confusing and I'm not entirely sure if things are good, bad or indifferent - can things be indifferent? Oh well, they are now.

Anyway... I was forced to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks yesterday. Well, forced may be too strong a word. It's not like someone tied me down and taped my eyes open. It's just that someone had to watch it for work, or rather to check for work to see if it was faulty. Someone had returned it to the library claiming it didn't work. We were sceptical about her claim due to the fact that she'd already returned one copy of the same film and been given this as a replacement, the first copy had since been checked and was in fact fine. It seemed unfair to make the same member of staff watch the film again, so the thankless task came to me.

Of course the entire film played perfectly well. This leads me to believe that either:
a) The lady's DVD player is broken
OR, the far more likely...
b) She couldn't believe the film could be that awful, or the voices that high, so she presumed it must be faulty.

It's a shame I can't claim back those lost hours from work, no one should have to watch that film in their free time! Though I admit I did play WoW at the same time. Otherwise I may have gone mad.

Nothing much else of interest to talk about. I am tired and was going to have an early night, but somehow ended up not starting making dinner till 9, then ended up doing a few things and talking to someone on MSN when I should have been eating dinner, I then think I upset them and ate my dinner, which by that point was a bit gross as it should have been eaten much sooner. Now I am worried about having upset them. Such is life.

Forgive me for still being vague, but felt I should say, on reassessment, it's okay and I don't not want anymore, yes, I'm aware that makes no sense :-)

Do Not Want!

It's probably more accurate to say that in fact I do want something, what I don't want is to have to wait and possibly not have it. And yes, I am being intentionally vague, not that anyone reads this, but there we go.