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Daily Archives: January 12, 2010

poor nayou has been dealing with the arrival of his two year old molars. we noticed he was quite cranky over the last week and when i finally stuck my fingers in his mouth i found some hard lumps making their way up through his gums. at least he is doing much better with the whole teething thing this time around. its so much better to be able to communicate with him and explain what’s going on. i don’t think he fully understands what we’re saying to him, but he gets the idea.

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we have been woefully lazy about taking pictures lately, so i really don’t have anything to share with you this time around. for that i am deeply sorry, but to make up for the lack of visuals, here are some of nayou’s favourite phrases. he is speaking more and more each day, busting out some new word or sentence and making us smile.

  • “[insert name here] sucio. necessita bano”. this is his current favourite. he loves to see things like trains and animals get dirty and tell them they need a bath. we have a thomas the tank engine dvd where thomas gets mud all over him and nayou is all over it. a variation of this one is “[insert name or body part here] boo boo. necessita medicina”.
  • “i see you!”. a surprisingly useful phrase if you happen to be a two year old.
  • “uno, dos, cinco, seis”. nayou has an aversion to the number three, the number four and any number larger than six. not that is stops him from sharing his passion for counting with everyone. he likes to get all of his pacifiers in his hand and count them out.
  • “come [insert name here]”. this one is accompanied by frantic waving of the hands.

i’m sure i’ve missed some other classic ones, but after surfing for a long time and teaching a yoga class today i am exhausted!

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we’ve had three days of great surf after a long drought that stretched back to christmas. brenda and i are far enough into our surf addiction that any drought longer than a week starts to affect our mood. there’s something so… magical about being on a wave, just riding along with this big mass of water. i understand why people compare surfing to meditation – when you’re on that wave, you are truly present in the moment. you become a part of the ocean and that feeling is so special!

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oh, and we finally saw avatar! in 3d! brenda and i went on separate days with dmitri and heidi and all of us loved it. the whole film, from the story to art direction to the special effects were amazing. sure it was a hollywood script and maybe it could have been a bit shorter, but i found myself glued to my seat for the whole time. this was the first movie i’ve worked on where the end product was really really satisfying. which is good because i spent two whole years of my life on it! and since everyone is curious about what my part was here it is: i worked for a year on the facial motion capture system, which records movement of the actors’ faces and applies it to a digital model. the rest of the time i was involved in sorting, tracking and massaging the huge amounts of data pertaining to the jungle. there were a lot of plants to keep track of and although the system we came up with was hardly adequate, i was happy to see such a gorgeous jungle on the screen. apparently a lot of other people thought so too.