Getting Older

This past Sunday was my birthday (turned 26) and I spent it with a lot of friends and family at my in-laws cabin that rests of the shores of Pigeon Lake. Aside from nearly polishing off a 1 litre bottle of Vodka in a day and a great meal, I also got a new helmet for the ski-doo/snowmobile and a gift card for a local electronics shop (I can almost hear that 360 calling my name).

One interesting thing that I discovered while we were out at the lake was that my dog has a love/hate relationship with snow. She is still pretty small so she gets cold easy (and at a mighty -20C high for the day it was pretty cold), but she's also an energetic pup that loves to jump into the freshly fallen snow and play around. If only digicams didn't fail at this temperature I would have some pictures to share.

Also as a bonus add-on to my birthday I was treated last Thursday to a delicious meal at a great restaurant here in Edmonton known as Japanese Village. Located in a historic building from the early 1900s this restaurant serves you a delicious helping of food prepared Japanese style with a master chef slicing, dicing and singing/entertaining you while he cooks. The restaurant does serve your typical sushi but they are better known for an addictively delicious steaks, shrimps, lobsters and chicken served to you with beans, soup, zuccini, mushrooms, onions and a desert bort of sherbert. Well worth checking out if you ever come to town.

I also finally recieved my DVDs from the great guys over at texturemonk.com, there were over 13 DVDs in total with a mixed set of nice high resolution reference photos combined with a few tiling textures and misc bitmaps. Overall I am very impressed with the quality of the DVDs, especially for a bargain price of $80 USD, and I am also very impressed with the guys that run texturemonk.com (since we had an issue with the DVDs getting lost in the mail, so the guys quickly sent over another set over to me, free of charge and gave me an extra month subscription for their site). As such if you are an artist looking for some a nice texture set for cheap, check out texturemonk.com, you won't be sorry.