April, otherwise known as Davetober (at least to me) is the month where everyone cool commemorates my monumental birth! Combined with the fact Viv and I celebrate our anniversary on the third of this month, it is pretty much a given that this fact would make April ‘09 a busy and eventful month. Well let us see, shall we?
I started the month playing what most would say is my favourite game; Rock Band 2! I do love this game, simply for it’s replay value. The constant dlc means that game constantly grows and expands. I love waiting for Friday to come around to find out if a song I love is going to be available on my favourite game.
For mine and Viv’s anniversary, we decided to have a nice, hand cooked three course meal. It was a most delicious success! For our starter, we had Thai salmon fish cakes with rocket salad. This started my love of Thai red curry paste as a wonder-ingredient.
For our main course, we had rare rump steak with breaded mushrooms and cheesy-mash potato. The steak wasn’t the best cut seeing as we got a slightly incompetent butcher, but as a meal, it was amazing.
For the desert, we had pecan brownies a la mode! (i.e. with ice cream) I love the brownie recipe that I used for this because it produces beautifully gooey brownies with crunchy outsides! We made a fair bit of brownies, but they were all gone by the end of the night!
One of the amazing random things that happened when we all went into Wolverhampton. There were FUCKING OWLS!
Fluffy white barn owl! Viv wanted to take him home!
Three days later, I heard news that almost literally blew my mind! Blue October were playing in Birmingham Carling Academy later in the year. I was so excited that I even started hyperventilating a little and came running down the stairs!
The following day I was up stupidly early, took the metro into Birmingham from Wolverhampton and bought myself two tickets for me and Viv to see my favourite band on the 4th of June.
As well as purchasing tickets for Blue October, we decided to do some window (and possibly real) shopping. We had a lot of fun as these photo’s are testament to.
Viv found a hat that, in her own words ‘makes me look like a pink jellyfish”
Oh yea, I’m so cool
Viv freaking loves giant tea cup!
Am I doing it right?
We even found a place that does Japanese style photo stickers! And in the top right is our Blue October Tickets!
While out and about, we visited Urban Outfitters, a store that in my opinion, tries far too hard to be hip and alternative, and just seems fake. Their worst flaw is that everything is OVERpriced! I’ve seen headphones that are £30 in Dixons being sold for £50 and £10 necklaces for £20. But this is what made me rage the most. I was almost incandescent with tangible WTF-ery
In case you can’t quite make it out, that price tag says £50! That’s £50 for a watch that looks exactly like the kind you can get out of £1 toy vending machines in supermarkets. I spent about 5 minutes looking at trying to decipher what made it worth £50, but I failed. Sure, it had an alarm and told the time and pretty much the standard features found on watches 1/10 the price, but nothing else. It didn’t set the time automatically by radio. It didn’t have a pulse monitor or gps for sport tracking. It didn’t have Bluetooth (Bluetooth always makes things better). I just couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t even stylish. I mean, if it WAS in fashion to wear watches like this, why by fake overpriced ones? Why not buy the real naff watch for a literal fraction? Davyd’s brain hurts!
Overpriced watches aside, me and Viv had an awesome time in town
There was more rock band playing as the month progressed towards my birthday, and as it did, I grew more and more ambivalent towards the idea of celebrating. This was partly due to the fact I found no significance in my 23rd birthday and partly due to the fact I felt the actual fact it was my birthday was being sidelined. I know this sounds selfish but everyone was like “oh, it’ll be a great chance for you to do this” or “I can pick this up and do this”. I am aware of how selfish this sounds, but I didn’t just want people to sit around and praise me, I wanted people simply to come together with only the intention of having a good time, not thinking about running errands and the like.
In the end though, things worked out well for everyone I think. I had a quiet day which was what I was more hoping for to be honest. I believe everyone is allowed to throw one birthday wobbly every once in a while, and that was mine.
I spent my birthday with Viv at her place and there was cake. Not just any cake, but Chinese cream and fruit cake, the best cake in the world IMHO. For lunch we had fish and chips, with me having a really nice fishcake! It was a nice day in the end.
Nom Nom Nom Nom cake, it even has my name in on it!
I want it now!
I need no spoon!
I even shared some!
Three days later, me, Viv, Vince and Wessie decided we’d try something amazing and possibly suicidal. We would attempt the get the Rock Band 2 achievement ‘Bladder of Steel’.
For those of you who haven’t heard of this achievement, I shall explain for you. Rock Band 2 features something called the ‘Endless Set list’. While not actually endless, it does involve playing every song that comes on the Rock Band 2 disc. That is 84 songs ranging in difficulty from “playable on expert with your eyes close” to “on easy but is still raping my fingers”. There is an achievement for completing this, depending on the difficulty at which you do it; Silver Artist for Medium, Gold Artist for Hard and Platinum Artist for Expert. Bladder of Steel takes this and turns it up to eleven! You must do the endless set list, on an difficulty thankfully, but you cannot take any breaks at all! No pausing, no pressing the Xbox guide button, no disconnecting instruments, no having instruments run out of battery, no failing. If you do anything that interrupts the continuous set list, you fail the achievement. That’s over 6 consecutive hours of fake plastic rocking out. This would be epic. This would be hard! And so began the first attempt!
And we failed a song! In the first 20! OMG. I threw a big tweeted wobbly, but thanks due to the awesomeness of Viv and her family, we attempted again.
And failed again. This time a guide button got accidentally pressed, meaning we wouldn’t get the achievement. But seeing as a couple of us were hyped on energy drinks, we went for a third try.
And failed for a third time, due to me striking the drum kit guide button with a drumstick. It was at this point, realising we wouldn’t finished until midnight if we restarted here, that maybe we should leave it for another time. It was probably for the best as there’s a good chance it would’ve been very bad for our health! Lol!
Later that day, I came to a funny revelation. My dad had actually forgotten my birthday. Now I’m going to cut him some slack with this because my Gran was very ill with cancer at the time, and in all fairness, it took me a week to realise that he had forgotten, so we’ll call that even.
The next day, Viv went home and I was left all lonely with work to do. So I did what anyone would do, I sat down with some ice cream and Jack Daniels and got to work. This proved to be a surprisingly productive combination and within a week and half I had all my work done and submitted! There was some Rock Band 2, computer crashes, printer smudges and even a bobble head of Viv in the intervening time, but it all got done.
Overall I think April was really good looking back on it. I do regret being so immature with regards to my birthday, but we’ll forget about that. Shall we look at some statistics?
Number of Updates: 33 (That’s more than 1 a day)
First Update: “Davyd is playing ROCK BAND 2 (Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:02:58 GMT)”
Last Update: “Davyd HAS HANDED IN EVERY BIT OF WORK! (Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:39:50 GMT)”
Favourite Update: “Davyd "chinese people don't dunk their babies in water unless they're making soup out of them!" - Viv's responce to being asked if she's been baptised (Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:30:12 GMT)”
That is an actual quote and how could it NOT be my favourite for the month? There were some close contenders but this one wins out!
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