it seems as though easter is a much bigger deal in sydney than it is in other places (although semana santa in sayulita was pretty out of control). this year the easter holidays are followed by anzac day so everyone is going away for some r&r. i’m writing this post on friday evening and scheduling it to be posted a bit later so you all have something to enjoy on easter sunday 🙂 by the time you read this we will be up in brisbane/noosa visiting noa, her parents and clara and richard who are friends of ours from wellington. we’ll be back wednesday morning.
hope you’re all having a wonderful easter break everyone! here is a video we took of us painting easter eggs last wednesday 🙂
brenda has been honing her already amazing sewing skills, churning out all kinds of wonderful upcycled creations for nayou. she’s making clothes for herself as well now and doing an amazing job at it. the top that she wore to the arthur premiere was made the day before! earlier this week brenda made a dinosaur hoodie for nayou out of merino wool. the weather in sydney is getting cooler in the evenings so this will be perfect for him. today i decided to dress him entirely in brenda’s 2011 autumn collection. behold!
and yes, the pants, the t-shirt, its all upcycled!
you may or may nor know that my sister aya is the estate manager for russell brand and katy perry. while her work related stories assure me that this is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds, other members of her family (like myself) get to reap the benefits of proximity to celebrity. case in point – the premiere of russell’s new movie arthur was on friday night and brenda, myself and some other friends got to attend!
we showed up in time to see russell do the slow walk down the red carpet and also see some other random b-listers follow suit (ronan keating anyone?). i didn’t really know whether we had tickets to just the movie or to the whole vip/red carpet area (it was the latter), so by the time i asked the people in charge we were the last people to strut down the walk of fame. it was funny to see everyone start taking photos of us as we set foot onto the red carpet and then stop suddenly as they realised we weren’t famous in any way at all. that’s cool – it comforts me to know that we are on the same memory card as russell brand. that is the closest to celebrity status as anyone can hope for right?
unfortunately we didn’t get to meet russell in person but he did come into the cinema before the movie to joke around. he is a very funny guy and it was hard not to like him. the movie itself was good as well. its not going to win any awards, but as far as romantic comedies go its fine. its getting slammed in the reviews, but i am decidedly not a rom-com sort of a guy and i enjoyed it so that’s saying something. one of the best parts about the whole premiere is that we were each allowed to take three things from the concession stand for free. we were literally kids in a candy store once we found out. what i can i say – we are easy to please!
after the movie brenda, sean and i went out to my favourite bar in sydney for a drink and went home for a nice long sleep. we were so excited to not have to wake up early in the morning for a change! i took full advantage and woke up at 11am on saturday, but brenda couldn’t kick the habit and was up and about at 8. its still nice to get up early if you can do whatever you want though 🙂
so where was nayou while his parents were out cavorting? he was in the good hands of my aunty yanny, uncle colin and my cousins! this was his first time staying over away from us without his grandma so it was a pretty big deal. plus he hadn’t seen yanny or colin since new year’s so we weren’t sure how things would work out. when we told him about the sleep over on friday morning he was decidedly not keen on it. we were worried that brenda would have to stay home with him, but yanny was absolutely amazing and let nayou warm up to her in his own time. by the time brenda left their house he barely even said goodbye to her! so nayou got to spend some time with his relatives (including his great grandma!) while we partied on knowing he was in good hands. yanny was truly a rockstar because she also knew that we were a bit worried so she kept us up to date with text messages and photos throughout the evening. that made all the difference for us and we are both really grateful for that extra touch!
a big thank you to aya for getting us the tickets and to yanny, colin and everyone else for making it such a smooth and stress free experience for us! it was wonderful to have a night off and to have such a cool event to spend it at!
this weekend we laid low, taking it pretty easy. the only event we had planned was nayou’s friend sara’s 2nd birthday party. gordon, sara’s dad, works at dr. d with me and we were staying at the same hotel when we first arrived in sydney. we used to hang out a lot but now they live in manly so we don’t see them much at all. i hadn’t seen sara since new year’s eve and it was amazing to see how big and articulate she has become. kimberly, sara’s mum, is a raw foodie as well so we had all kinds of delicious treats to snack on. brenda prepared some goodies as well so it was a veritable feast!
by the time we headed home nayou was deliriously tired. he has more or less given up on his nap, but he still needs to have a good siesta once or twice a week to catch up. one thing we did learn on the way home was that even if he’s knackered, nayou still keeps his sense of humour. he was playing with those little plastic fish that restaurants put soy sauce in, and next thing you know we’re staring at this:
nayou’s latest obsession (or one of them anyway), is to make “mickey cakes”. this was inspired by maurice sendak’s “in the night kitchen” which we used to read a lot. its one of those really cool nonsensical and surreal children’s books where a young boy called mickey goes into a kitchen in his dreams, gets mixed into batter by three giant chefs and put in an oven to be baked into a mickey cake.
about a month ago i was playing with nayou in bed and we decided to pretend to make our own mickey cake. it was an instant hit and we have been building games and stories around it ever since. it usually goes something like this – we pretend we are in a restaurant (typically in the amazon jungle with lots of hungry animals), and announce to the guests that we have a special secret dessert. the animals all howl and demand to know what it is, but we tell them its a secret. then we retire to the kitchen (another corner of the bed) where we mix flour, eggs, sugar, butter, worms, stars, ginger and mickey into a batter and bake a cake. then there is the reveal where we present it to the hungry guests and we have fun finding mickeys arms, legs etc sticking out of the cake as we eat it. the game ends with us flushing mickey down the toilet to wash him off. we are at the point now where we can only whisper the words “mickey cake” in the house because we don’t want anyone to know what we’re making. brenda even bought flour, salt and food colouring to make real mickey cakes!
my friend dave from work organised a camping expedition to kanagra-boyd national park this weekend, so we left the bustle of sydney behind for our night together in a tent! unfortunately is was drizzling intermittently the whole weekend, plus it was rather chilly up in the mountains, but we still made the most of it by huddling around the fire and goofing around. the park is in the middle of the blue mountains, and the campsite is right in the middle of it. the whole area is forested with eucalyptus trees which make the air smell so nice. its always a treat to be taking great big lungfuls of fresh mountain air after being in our urban center!
nayou enjoyed digging around in the leaves and playing with the campfire. he was in good spirits the whole time, despite missing his naps on both days and being surrounded by a bunch of adults he had never met before. he slept like a log in the tent too which was great. actually all three of us did thanks to the most amazing air mattress that a friend of ours lent us. if we can find one of those, we’ll be sleeping in luxury anywhere!
it was nice to hang out with some colleagues outside of work too. much of the socialising in sydney centers around drinking, which i have been less and less interested in as time goes on. plus i’m more inclined to spend what little free time i have hanging out with brenda and nayou, so this was a good opportunity to shoot the breeze with them. i think there were ten of us in total, including nayou. jesse – who had me laughing so hard i had to leave the room the first time i met him – decided to blaze brave new paths in outdoor fashion when he couldn’t stand the cold anymore.
i would love to say that we went on long hikes and marvelled at the scenery, but we actually ended up just chilling out around the fire. there are some nice looking trails around, but the wet and the cold didn’t make it exciting enough to venture out. it cleared up on sunday and brenda got a nice morning walk in while nayou and i snored away, so at least one of us got out 🙂
the drive was quite long – about four hours each way due to traffic and road works! nayou was a trooper despite his eyelids being very heavy, although this was aided in a large part by brenda’s amazing entertainment skills. one of the funniest games was when brenda pretended to be nayou and nayou pretended to be brenda. i wish i had taken video of it, but i had to drive. i did get some shooting-blindly-over-the-shoulder shots though! we got home around 4 and nayou was asleep at 7 (normally he goes to sleep around 10pm)!
and now for something completely different – here is a photo and a video that i shot last thursday at our favourite cafe, room 10. nayou’s wearing a super cute shirt that brenda made and the smashing necktie from his grandma. super styleee! oh, there is a funny story about those blue shoes he is wearing. there was this really small stream next to our campground and nayou slipped into it within a few hours of us getting there. brenda put his shoes on a stick and dried them over the fire, but accidentally burned all the velcro off them as well! we’ve been duct taping them shut all weekend. hehehehe. oh well, they were on their last legs anyway!
when i was in university i really got into web design. this was during the heyday of people discovering the web as a new and interesting medium for visual design (1997-2001), and i was heavy into designers like kaliber 10000, joshua davis, yugo nakamura, erik natzke, and gmunk. flash was still a new technology then, and director (remember that program?) was also still a force to be reckoned with. i spent a lot of my free time playing with photoshop, and anything macromedia. most of the time i made these silly “toys” which were a way to try out new ideas, but sometimes i made fully fledged websites or interactive installations. one of the nice things about going to brown was that you could design your own courses if you had a passion, and i took full advantage of that to feed my enthusiasm for the technology.
when we unpacked all of our stuff from seattle i found a cd-r with most of my creations. unfortunately the disc is corrupted somehow and i am unable to get some of the data off it… which makes me really sad because i’ve thought about some of these pieces from time to time and wondered if i had backups anywhere. perhaps i’ll see if i can find some data recovery expert who can help me out. i did, however, manage to rescue some of the projects, which i thought i would share with you all. the bulk of them have audio so i’ve set them up to pop up in new windows. i like to think they have aged well, considering they are all over a decade old. i’d love to hear what you think about them, so feel free to leave a comment!
cubes – an experiment with z-sorting in flash. i remember this was a major pain in the butt to do at the time. (hint: click your mouse and hit the number keys to play)
jellyfish – i think i had read something about artificial life and wanted to see if i could create something like it. this is one of my favourite things i made. the only thing that bugs me is how the creature “bumps” into the edge of the frame… oh well.
fire – this was me trying out procedural textures in director. this thing used to run sooo slowly on the machines at the time. now it doesn’t look like much at all.
brickles – this was made during the time that me and my friends had started a video game company. i was so sick and tired of thinking about game design and playability, so i made a mean game.
particle – not sure why i called it that, but its an experiment with looping movies in flash… or something like it.
mondrian – another play with 3d using director. i love piet mondrian and thought about what his work would look like with an extra dimension. i also remember being really excited about the charles mingus loop too. i’m such a nerd!
