Ryan McFadden

Now some of you may think that I was in Toronto this past weekend. Nope. Just a clever back story. I was actually LIVE at UFC 71 – Liddell vs Rampage. A classic battle of well, one guy with fists vs guy who wears a chain. You know, that old chestnut. But I have EXCLUSIVE pics.

The one on top is Cordelia. Now, to the untrained eye, Cordy is in control. But to those with a little more background in the art of fighting realize that Paige has pulled guard — a position that is actually preferred for many fighters. In only a couple of moves, she can either slap on an Arm Triangle, perhaps even an Arm Bar, or even is she spins and swivels her hips, a leg lock.

This next picture is quite impressive. This is Paige performing a Sweep. This is a move designed to reverse position on the ground. One only has to look at the look on Cordelia’s face to see the concentration of combat.

And next, Paige continues the beautiful move by now going for a rear naked choke. While this is all textbook, Cordelia should’ve been able to defend against this move. Sadly, she’ll have to do extra laps tomorrow as punishment for such a poor showing.

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Evil Dead the Musical.

What a show.

Seriously. It was held at the Diesel Playhouse (the old SCTV Firehall). A nice venue with a licensed bar up front. Kari and I got there a bit early, had a few drinks, hung out, had a good time.

Now, when I was ordering these tickets, I was worried about our seats. When Kari nixed the ‘splatterzone’ (something about not wanting blood on her at 9pm on a Saturday night in TO) I got the next best tickets. But the place is so small that there’s no such thing as a bad seat.

The show was hilarious. The music was okay, not in the realm of Les Mis, or a Chorus Line but the lyrics was just damn funny (You f’ng stabbed me, you stupid Bitch). Do the Necronomicon ‘borrowed’ heavily from the Timewarp of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (at one point, the lyrics even mentioned — like the Timewarp, only better).

And then when the blood finally did start flowing, wow. They doused the first three aisles pretty damned good.

All in all, a great time at the show. The rest of the weekend was pretty good too. Kari and I didn’t head to Toronto until almost noon (we ended up having 3 showings, which delayed our departure) but we did the usually Salad King pilgrimage (I’m down to 1 chili in the spice department, but my poor belly’s telling me even that might be too hot for me now — mind you, it could’ve been the spicy Caesars that soon followed….)

Went to Bakka books. Picked up another couple of winners (I’m hoping).

Then, back in Londonland, Brian, John and I got together to watch the UFC from the night before. Now, Brian had inadvertently discovered the outcome, then he inadvertently gave us the result…but the first four fights were all pretty good. Damn exciting.

All in all, a fantastic weekend…throw in the fact that someone is highly interested in our house (no offer yet), and it was a whirlwind of activity.

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I don’t know why, but I decided to back up all of my word documents on Tuesday night. You know, just because. Backed them up, then continued working. Wrote about 2000 words. Went to see my beautiful words the next day…and they were gone.

The whole file was corrupted. Bye bye Secret of Folloman Finn. And because it was on a portable drive, for some reason, Word doesn’t make backup files. Nice. Very nice. I’ve downloaded about five different programs, all trying to ‘recover’ the latest edition of Folloman Finn…but with no luck.

So then I ran the chkdsk and scandisk programs. Chkdsk actually stopped and asked ‘found error is secret of folloman finn.doc’ Repair y/n?

What it was REALLY asking me was ‘do you want me to permanently wipe this file from your hard drive, winking it out of existence, snapping my fingers and erasing it forever, making it disappear as if God himself stepped down and formated your hard drive?

Hmmm, who knew?

So it’s gone forever.

Two saving graces. One, I backed up only 3 hours earlier (I could’ve lost days or weeks worth of work…that would’ve been depressing). Two, I actually posted some of those new words to my own site — which I can now pull back.

The unfortunate thing is that the lost words were the climax of Chapter 2 — Nathaniel (Troubleshooter extraordinaire) vs Vernon Archer (Crucifier extraordinaire).

Damn.

Remember, folks, always back up your work.

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My how time flies when kids are howling at you for a year (plus the nearly three and half years that Paige has been howling). Here is a look back at the highlights of the past year. There have been some terrific highs…and some not so low-lows.

Day of Birth — Doctor catches Cordy, barely. Paige comes running in with scissors, asking if she can cut the cord (no pun intended). “Can I help?” she asks. Seems to be a bit past her bedtime, but what the hell. Or maybe it was all a sleepless delusion — just getting me ready for the next few months of hell…errr, I mean bliss.

1 Week Birthday — waiting for colic to begin. Because all kids have colic. Seriously, who does this twice? Or if you’re Roman Catholic, who does this fifteen times?

1 Month Birthday — Still no colic. I keep calling telehealth asking when my baby will explode but they don’t seem to have an answer. I make sure not to leave a call back number.

3 Month Birthday — Colic hits with a fury. No, wait, that’s me throwing a temper tantrum (I’m being polictically correct — it’s actually Kari throwing a tantrum…something about lack of sleep). All is good. You know, life is just too easy. Hey, Kari, why don’t we move? You know, do another renovation? Fantastic. Besides, it’s not like Cordy can move. She just lays there. Seriously, can’t she do anything? Like a trick? I love showing people ‘kid tricks’. I can tell the people who already have kids, because, well, they’re never impressed with tricks.

6 Month Birthday — Cordy now knows how to shore up a load bearing structure, build headers for first floor doorways in a balloon frame, and also how to sit without use of the bumbo. Yay!

8 Month Birthday — Crawling begins. She’s also using power tools. They kind of go hand in hand. Crawling. Hmmm. Does she always move that much? I’ve taught Cordy some tricks. Everyone is really impressed with all her new tricks. I mean, really impressed. Like they’ve never seen a kid wave bye-bye.

1 Year Birthday Man, cake does feel good between the fingers, doesn’t it? What you don’t see is me licking the cake off her fingers. It’s already goo-ified so I don’t have to chew. Nice.

Happy First Birthday!

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A good premise — what if the lone female werewolf, trying to live in the human world, was commanded to return to the Pack to help them fight for their very survival.

I can see why it was a HUGE hit. Seriously. I also wonder why more males don’t read romance books. You know, to figure out what makes chicks tick. Because this one was a housewife’s wet dream (ummm, is that possible). You know, the one chick in werewolfdom, who can’t decide what she wants, has to travel back to her Pack to face an unknown threat.

Now the Pack, of course, are all males. All perfectly sculpted males with flowing curls, brilliant smiles, and they love to get naked. And they all want Elena (the heroine) in some regard (daughter figure, sex figure, sister figure, whatever).

Of course, the Threat is really just MORE werewolves who also want Elena. You get the idea.

And darn it all — she just can’t decide who she wants!

Lots of sex…but not ‘guy’ sex, sadly. Lot’s of ‘then he was insider, they rode the wave of passion’…yada, yada. I really should’ve read the sex scenes, you know, so I could use that in my everyday life to get more sex for myself. Like who knew that tying the chick to a tree was one of their fantasies? Now I do. Now I do.

As usual, this is the first book in a long series (the Women of the Otherworld) and I have a feeling that they’ll probably get much better, more complex, and more textured worlds.

It’s hard to rate this book because I’m not the target audience. Of all the books I’ve read recently, this is one I can truthfully say isn’t meant for me. All this passion and stuff really makes my robotic innards squirm.

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