Da Vinci’s Inquest is rapidly becoming one of my favorite shows. And, *gasp* it’s Canadian! It’s a cop drama set in Vancouver, but it doesn’t hit you over the head with the fact it’s Canadian, or try to hide it like some other Canadian shows. It just exists there. The writing and acting are top quality. It has a lot to live up to when compared to other cop dramas like LAPD Blue and Law and Order. But, I think Da Vinci’s Inquest easily stacks up to these. Finally, a Canadian show worth watching that isn’t a goofy comedy sketch show!

Jen is on her way back to Finland. I took her to the airport today, after extensive and strenuous packing adventures. She accumulated a vast array of stuff while here, which necessitated shipping two boxes of things that wouldn’t fit into her luggage. I was kind of emotional today. I’m going to miss her a lot. She was the biggest part of my life for the last half of a year. It was fun and comforting coming home to a trusted friend and confidant with whom I could share the minutia of my day. I find myself feeling surprised that what I initially felt would last forever seemed to end rather suddenly. I am very close to this quiet girl, even though our hug goodbye was only the second hug since I met her in June. The first hug was when I picked her up at the airport. I had to fight back tears as I watched her turn towards the security check before the boarding gates.

Anyway, the place feels very empty now. I spent the evening moving things back to how they were before. Like winding the clock back for daylight savings time, I’ve turned another corner in my life.

Well Jen is leaving next Sunday, so reality is setting in. My beloved roommate and I will return to our solo lives in less than a week. So, we’ve got a busy week ahead, cramming in all of those things we said we’d do before the six months was up, but had left until the last minute. There are movies to be watched, places to go, and photos to shoot. Tonight we spent about three hours shooting the last of the vampire photos. This was a very difficult one. We wanted it to be the best of the three. Coming up with an idea that didn’t look too similar to the others, yet retained a similar mood and contiguous story was no small task. The teamwork aspect of this photo was even more important than the others. There were lots of ideas flying back and forth, and several moments of frustration and eye rolling on both of our parts. After a couple of hours, both of us began to feel satisfied with the results we were getting. And now that it is done, I can say that I think it’s a worthy finale for our trilogy. When it finally comes out of the suzi9mm Photoshop machine, you will get to judge for yourself.

After the shoot, we watched Trainspotting. This was a movie that I have never seen but always wanted to. I must say it was pretty cool. I need to learn to do a Scottish accent like those guys have…

Things are starting to look a little bit brighter in the world of improv. I got cast in the Santa Survivor show at the Staircase on December 16. I’ll be playing in another show on December 14, which is part of a private booking at the theatre. The anticipation of being on stage again kind of kicked me out of my funk. I had been attending workshops and other training courses, but none of it seemed to make any sense, since I didn’t have any shows planned. So last night, after finding out about the two December shows, I felt like I was alive again. In fact, everyone in the workshop was on fire last night. It was a very funny class.

I also booked four spots for Crazy 8’s. The shows will be on March 25 and 26, and April 22 and 23. Those are Friday and Saturday nights at 8PM. Now I can start thinking about it in more detail. This is gonna be fun.

Last night we had a mini movie marathon. Jen, KPR, Nada and I were in attendance for the event. It was a very long day for me, so I didn’t last for the entire thing, but here are the movies we watched:

The Bourne Supremacy - Pretty cool for an action movie. The car chase was intense. Matt Damon’s character handed out some some serious ass-kicking too. This is not an exclusive gripe aimed at the Bourne Supremacy, but computers in movies still annoy me. Why do they have to make little beeepy beeepy noises whenever something changes on the screen? I think anyone who uses computers a lot turns off the sounds, like Windows making a whooshy spaceship sound every time you click on a menu. :eyeroll:

Open Water - This was a dumb movie. It had lots of filler, and not much substance. It wasn’t even creepy or scary really. Even this many words is too many to waste on Open Water, so I’ll stop now.

Shaun of the Dead - Definitely my favorite movie of the night. This is a clever British spoof of zombie movies, particularly Dawn of the Dead. It was well written, directed and acted, with likeable characters and a good-natured mood throughout.

Noi Albinoi - I must admit that I wanted to like this one, but couldn’t. It’s an Icelandic film. Very artsy. The whole thing looked cross processed so it had some very odd colors… Scenes were tinted mostly blue and green. It was extraordinarily slow. To make matters worse, the subtitling was almost subliminal, flashing two or three sentences on screen for about 2 seconds. It was pretty difficult to concentrate hard enough to pick that up at that point in the night.

King Arthur - I was weakened by Noi Albinoi, so this one put me under. King Arthur is a historical fiction along the lines of Braveheart and Gladiator but not as good. It had the glossy look and nice lighting/costuming of a high-budget film. But it was lacking something. The characters were not terribly strong, and they spent a lot of time talking about fighting and talking about doing stuff rather than just doing it. I fell asleep a few times during this film, so I decided to just go to bed instead.