A couple of weeks ago I watched my brother Robert and his wife Lisa perform at an open mic night at Lydia's in town. They sounded good, and I have always wanted to get the skill/nerve to perform in public.

The open mic at Lydia's is very cool too. There are many different genres of music and everyone gets around four or five songs to sing, so the setlists entice you if enjoy the performer and give your ears a break if you do not.

I decided that I would like to play at an open mic night in the future - maybe in a month or two. I figure I can pull off a solid set of four or five songs. I hope to play a couple of original songs, a couple of obscure covers and maybe one well known cover - possibly an instrumental version.

I have been playing more guitar recently and bought myself a classical music book, which is challenging but fun.

When it comes to movies and music, I am on a retro kick. I figure that there are a lot of bad present day movies and a limited amount of time on this earth. So I am starting to watch proven classic films from the AFI 100 years, 100 movies list and listen to some albums from Top 100 Canadian Albums (legally and for free at grooveshark).

So far, I have watched Casablanca and the Graduate for the first time...and heard some Neil Young tracks that are great and I had not heard yet..."here's lookin at you kid"