The week and a half since the last post

Well, in my last post I mentioned that Detour180 was in town, but at the time of writing I had not been to their concert so couldn't write much about how they sounded. That has now changed as I went to a gig on the following Saturday night. I had not heard the band play for quite some time, probably since parachute festival 2005 I think. Since then my cousin Daniel has taken up playing the bass and joined the band, I think in that order but the timing was pretty close from memory. Naturally being a bass player myself I was keen to see and hear him play. Talking with him after the show he mentioned that he had a few 'jazz' notes in their (a nice way of saying he had some wrong notes). He must have done a pretty good job at covering them up because I didn't notice any, the entire performance sound pretty solid to me. The rest of the band sounded very good too. Nice job chaps.

It has been a pretty good week musically for me. First off with Detour180 and then on Friday night I went to see a band I had never heard of called Mute Math. One of my friends Shannon knew a couple of the guys in the band from her school days, and managed to score free tickets for 4 of us plus a guided tour of the band's tour bus and dinner with the drummer, guitarist and lighting guy. Dinner was very nice especially given the price. We went to a restaurant downtown called Relish. They have a good selection on the menu, I finally settled on a yellow curry seafood hot pot. But I digress, back to the band. The band guys were super friendly and seemed to be really nice people from what I could tell in my few hours with them. The concert was very entertaining, very energetic. I think I mentioned a last year that Jamie Cullum was the most energetic performer I have seen. He has now slipped to second place. The drummer must have had a pretty much endless energy reserve, I have never seen anyone hit the cymbals so hard. I really hope he has some kind of endorsement deal with a cymbal manufacturer because I am sure he must have to replace them rather frequently. By the end of the show there were 2 big chunks missing from the ride cymbal. He was a really good drummer though putting laying down some very cool beats and fitting in some particularly tasty rolls. The rest of the band were also pretty good and multi talented too, with all of them at some stage helping out with the drumming in some way or other, whether it be the bass player playing the bass a crash cymbal and a giant bass drum at the same time, or the singer drumming on the balcony railing. Apparently a signature of Mute Math is to destroy the stage by the end of the concert by throwing the drums around and smashing fluorescent light bulbs over their knees. All in all it was an excellent concert although I don't think Mum and Dad would have enjoyed it at all.


Spring has definitely started now in Vancouver with temperatures at a very pleasant 15 degrees or so and much less rain. I don't know if I have changed or if it is just that I am walking more over here than I did back home, but I have found myself actually looking at the flowers around the place and even taking photos of them. This last week there have been a lot of tulips popping up all around my neighbourhood. With all the nice sunny weather we have been having comes tennis season again. I have had a couple of games with Reuben over the last couple of weeks. The first one was not such a great day for it, after being fine all day it started raining literally as I got changed in to my tennis gear. It looked like it was going to clear up so we played anyway but it was a pretty wet game. Saturday was a much nicer day however so we were able to have a jolly good game once we found a court that was available. That is another fantastic thing about Vancouver, there are loads of free tennis courts around and they are all in pretty good condition.

Well that pretty much covers what I have been up to lately, oh except for dinner tonight. I have been eying a recipe in one of my cookbooks for some time now, it is a very simple dish involving wrapping some big scallops in prosciutto and frying them in sage infused olive oil and butter and served with caramelized apple. As apples are not in season and I don't like old apples I substituted the apple for pear and it seemed to work quite well. The prosciutto flavour works it's way in to the scallops really nicely and the dish tasted fantastic.

Easter and surrounding weeks

Well it has been quite some time now since the last exciting episode of 'The Blog of Paul Palmer', so I guess now would be a good time to write another update.

There wasn't much going on prior to Easter so I will not dwell on the period of time form the last posting up until Easter, other than to mention that I was quite well health wise. Work has been a little dull and doesn't look like it will improve much before I head home in June. The project I have been working on is in the testing phase at the moment, so no new interesting functionality to work on. On the positive side, the view out of my office is looking particularly nice at the moment, not so much rain.

Any way, I will now move on to more recent events starting with Easter weekend. It was nice to have a day off work on Good Friday, I think it was my first day off other than weekends since February. The weather was fantastic with temperatures reaching 18 degrees. I went for a long walk in the afternoon for about 5 hours (with a few short bus trips in there as well). I went to JJ Bean on Main St to buy a coffee however when I arrived there the line up was ridiculously long and there were no seats available so I turned around and walked back towards home again stopping to buy a gelato on the way. Cousin Ryan was having a BBQ at his place with a bunch of friends from church, so I stopped off at Granville island to pick up a steak on the way there. The steak was particularly nice although I slightly overcooked it so one end of it was bordering on well done. It still tasted pretty good though. It was nice being able to spend the evening outdoors again, I don't think there had been another night since early October that we could have been outside without freezing. Spring must be here at last.

On Sunday my home group had an Easter dinner. Easter dinner over here is remarkably similar to Christmas dinner and thanksgiving dinner. I was asked to bring an appetizer so had a great time looking through my cook books for appetizer ideas. I don't often get the chance to make appetizers, it always seems a bit silly making appetizers for one person. I narrowed down my options to 8 different appetizers and took a trip to Granville island to see which ones I could find the ingredients for. In the end I settled on a pretty simple yet interesting recipe for cantaloupe (rock melon) wrapped in Serrano ham and finished with a spiced vinaigrette. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of it so you will have do with a photo of the photo in my cookbook. When I made it, it looked exactly the same, but I arranged them in a circle on a dinner plate.
Before dinner we all went outside for a giant mini-Easter egg hunt, with over 200 eggs hidden for us to find. I really thought I was doing pretty well so stopped looking so hard so that others could find some, only to find that I was even in the top four.

This week has been pretty good so far. Detour 180 are in town so I took Wednesday off work so I could spend the day with cousin Sarah, Jono and cousin Daniel. Then we met up with Roz and Reuben for dinner. Game one of the Stanley Cup playoffs happened to be on at the same time as dinner, and I struck it lucky and had a seat that faced the big screen TV. Sorry Sarah if I looked as if I was looking straight passed you for much of the evening, I probably was, but I was listening to you. Anyway Vancouver won the game near the end of the 4th overtime, at 12:30 in the morning, the 6th longest NHL playoff game in history.