Venture Bros. Season 3 Preview Trailer

I've been following the blog of Jason Publick, one of the creators of Venture Bros. for awhile now desperately waiting for some news on the third series. A few weeks ago they announced they'd almost finished the drawing and animation, and would be transmitting in June this year. Problem is it will be Cartoon Network in the US. The blog did also mention they're preparing the DVD so I'll be looking out for an import. Shame we sold the PS2 with multi-region.
Anyway to keep us all happy they've released the Venture Bros Season 3 teaser.

Grand Theft Excitement

It must have been the TV advert that hooked me with the LCD Soundsystem backtrack. GTA IV was ordered last week but I realised Amazon quoted me a later delivery date instead of the international release of 29th April. So, I went and ordered the special edition with metal deposit security box, duffel bag, soundtrack CD, artwork and keyrings to guarantee I get my itchy-thumbed mits on it.

Just been looking at the game's website and discovered the Electro-choc radio station is mixed by Francois K. It sounded like Justice and Boys Noize were being played - gimme, gimme, gimme!

Happy Birthday Kerry

Celebrated with a special Brighton restaurant visit to Gars and treated Kerry to a champagne breakfast and present marathon. To relive her sky diving experience, I've bought her a trip to an indoor place offering a similar thing without the 10,000ft flight. A Peru trip guide, a gardening book, a ring, a CD, Tom Ford perfume and this little guy below. She also received a cheeky gift of Mario Kart with wheel (though some might think this was really for me).

Sunday was a lazy day apart from re-ordering the house with the builders demolishing the living/dining room wall the next day and us, ripping out the stairs cupboard paneling. The evening should have been a relaxing time enjoying our new kitchen until Kerry asked me to drain the spaghetti. Our kitchen sink was one of the outstanding things to be installed so any waste water needed to go outside. After unlocking the back door I picked up the pan and colander then tipped accidentally towards my hand. As you can imagine the boiling water hurt so legged it upstairs for cold water. Things calmed down a little bit after eating the rescued meal but then the pain struck back and in the end had to go to A & E. Managed to jump some of the queue to get pain killers and got discharged in two hours. Came back with a creamy hand in a plastic bag.

Yamato Drummers

Treated ourselves to some Japanese culture last night. With a tasty BOGOF meal at Wagamamas for dinner we bought tickets to see the Yamato drummers at the Brighton Dome. The warning posters mentioned 100 decibels and staff were handing out earplugs which was a good sign though it never got that painful or ringing. The bass sound-waves did ripple across the theatre with seat fixtures rattling at the beat of the largest drums. Two hours of drumming does sound a bit much but they combined some funny bits of pretend tennis playing, some miniature symbol shinanigins, some rockstar mandolin action and obviously full on drumming action. Prepare to get your hands sore after all the clapping as well as they were big on audience participation.

According to their Yamato website they've already done London for a few nights so you'll just have enjoy the YouTube video or even travel out of town. I also noticed their Jap-lish for the summer months scheduling as 'Undecidedness'.

HIP to be 'mare

Selling my mum's house or preparing for it is proving to be a trickier than I thought. Although there's a few websites out there to help someone like me, Home Information Packs (HIP) are an easy bit of money making for the experts and just time-wasting red tape. There's an opportunity there for a Dummies guide I'm sure.

• The Index and Sales Statement are easy and to be honest a bit of a joke.
• The Energy Performance Certificate was reasonable to organise at the cheapest price of £82. My mum's house did averagely but the report assumed bits of it knocking the score down.
  
• The Title Information was slightly misleading as the Land Registry is a mind-field of confusion. It turned out that all I needed was a letter confirming it hasn't been registered so no costs involved there.
• The Drainage report should be coming soon and instead of using an official conveyancing map to draw the plot I used Google Maps - fingers crossed for that will be enough.
• The Local Search is the only thing that's doing my head in and is probably where people would give up as there's so little information out there to help. The Breckland council lady didn't really explain it well enough for my non-solicitor brain to compute but it all boiled down to a couple of forms to be completed (LLC1 and CON29) plus £105. It's these forms that have to be ordered from a legal stationers - no downloading of PDFs or Word documents. This is another extra cost as the only place I could find the LLC1 offered minimum ordering of packs of 25 at around £13 plus £6 postage.

This weekend I get to see the almost finished state of the house then onto battling estate agents at their own game with, what I'm slightly more clued up on, marketing.

Son of Rambow is skill!

More sitting on our arses continued on Sunday, this time in a big darken room called a cinema. Son of Rambow was an excellent watch for a British comedy about a couple of kids making their own film based on Rambo. It's based in the 80's so has some great detail with not just a nostalgic laugh at the clothing and haircuts like the smoking section in the cinema. It's hard to believe a generation could be watching this film and not remember video tapes. Jessica Stevenson, her off Spaced makes an appearance as the lead character's mum and there's a French exchange student that enters the story like a pop idol. If it wasn't for the meathead sitting behind constantly kicking the back of my chair I wouldn't have been distracted as much.

White Glastonbury

Apart from Kerry's birthday this month, April will be a quiet one in respect of going out. May in comparison will be full-(Bright)on with the Festival and Fringe. This is mostly down to financing the building work and eating take-aways and meals out. We've caught up with a few good (and bad) films. Can recommend Blue Harvest, the Family Guy Star Wars special episode though was disappointed they'd only did one i.e. no Empire Strikes Back or Jedi. Shoot 'Em Up was also worthy with some outrageous gun scenes going to keep you laughing. Super Bad was a surprise for us. It started off a little crass but as soon as the plot unfolded it got better and better. McLovin' it! One to avoid is Tales from Earthsea, the latest from the Ghibli studio. Nearly two hours of minimal action, story or interest and surprised that I didn't switch it off sooner.

Sunday was a surprising day. As you can see, we had a creative time in the back-garden making some snow things. The legs to the snowman on the bench kept breaking then the Easter Island head toppled over later. As the afternoon got warmer the head started to look like he was having a very slow stroke plus the limbs and head fell off from the bench guy.

We'd got up early that day as well to try and buy Glastonbury festival tickets. Like the years before it was a frustrating few hours constantly refreshing the web pages and getting unavailable or engaged phone tones, giving up around 11am. I left the laptop on and went shopping through the snow getting snowballed by Kerry and some strangers along the way. When we came back we expected to hear of a sell out. I tried again on the net and bingo - straight in, no fuss, no waiting - 2 tickets and a camper-van pass were ours! There's a few opinions out there in the media like Jay-Z's lack of pulling power or the weather's been rubbish too often. Personally, I think people gave up like us or didn't bother trying. All I need to worry now is getting a camper-van and thinking about a suitable festival costume.

Skip Watch

I've already moaned about about the small sacrifices we've made to completely change our kitchen however the past few days have made our life just a little more inconvenient depending on your level of patience. All the basics we need from the kitchen and dining room including my bike are now in the lounge. As we were clearing out the dust-filled dining room we discovered that our cooker had disappeared. It was last seen by the carpenter outside of the house. The project manager forgot to say he'd put it in his lock-up.

Plumber came round yesterday to relocate a bunch of pipes with the movement of the kitchen wall. He left around 7pm last night with all facilities working as normal until after the second flush of the toilet. After that it either wouldn't fill up the system or over-flowed so we had to resort to filling up an old plastic bottle until the builders came back this morning.

The worst of the inconvenience is the skip outside waiting for all the delayed wall remains. We thought we'd left behind the scumbags of Chavhampton but it appears there's some right cheeky neighbours seeing our skip as an opportunity to offload their shit. So far a vacuum cleaner, garden waste, rubble and even recyclable cardboard and paper have appeared mysteriously in the night. But last night took the biscuit when an old lady from down the road put two bags of polystyrene crap in the skip. Couldn't quite work out which house she lived in so returned her bags outside the house I thought she lived at. Can't wait to see the back of that skip before Neighbour Wars breaks out!