HNY

I'm not one to indulge in the tradition of setting resolutions to be achieved in the forthcoming year, but I can't help myself this year - albeit a little early.

skribe's top ten things to do in 2008:

1. Get laid (again)
2. Get monumentally rich
3. Achieve world domination (again)
4. Speak unaccented anything including English
5. Not die (this really should have been number 1)
6. Do 6 impossible things before breakfast each day - maybe more.
7. Breed (again)
8. Meet myself and not lose a fight this time.
9. ??
10. Profit!

Mothering Milestones # 782628

Today I bought JOOB his first ever kid's value meal at Unnamed Fast Food Restaurant. I even went back to the counter to demand the stupid dinky freebie toy that was supposed to be in the box.

When did I even care about this? Arrrgh.

For the record: JOOB ate half his chips, spilled the rest, nibbled some burger meat and bits of bun, slurped some juice and tried to throw the cup away, and emptied out the box to use as a garage for his toy car.

Oh, the collectible toy ended up in my bag, unopened.

JOOB: Sit Up Comedian

The cat walks into the room.

"What's that?" prompts Skribe.

"Cat!" announces JOOB.

Whoo. This is the boy for whom all things are "cat" so I'm somewhat nonplussed. "That's like asking a dog what you find on top of a house," I say. "Roof."

"Hey, JOOB," Skribe turns to our boy. "What do you find on top of a house?"

And the boy answers, "Oof!"

Without. Missing. A. Beat.

This kid's going to be trouble :)

All Is Cat

Language is instinctive, apparently. One of our most primitive urges is to first put names to things, and then to actions, and then to put them together in meaningful patterns.

Unless we're talking about JOOB, who's decided that it would be far more efficient and interesting to distill the English language down to about a dozen words and sound effects.

All things are "cat". Milk, biscuits, dinner, teddy bears, books, nappies, hats, shoes, aeroplanes, buses, cars, spoons, cups, seagulls, other babies... all of them are described as "cat". (Except grown-ups and himself, who are "Dadda"; and dogs, who are "oof oof".)

Things moving forward go "brrm brrm". Things going backwards go "Deh. Deh. Deh. Deh". Flying things go "ooooom" (flap arms). Really big trucks go "ah ooh ah ooh ah ooh", or should, because he clearly feels all big trucks ought to have sirens.

"Hi" is the sum of his conversation with other people. "Uh-oh" is when he throws something away, or drops it, or turns it upside down, or when bumps his head on the floor.

Twenty months old, and already determined to rationalise words his way.

QOTD

Brendan Nelson : Lorem ipsum dolor

-- Helen Razer, explaining that Nelson is the placeholder leader

Overheard On The Bus

Mum playing happily with toddler.

Mum: "Where Nanna? Where nanna?"
Little girl points at another passenger.
Mum: "No, that not Nanna. Nanna not here. Where Blake? Where Blake?"
Little girl looks around.
Mum: "Blake not here. Blake gone. Blake at school. Where Mum? Where Mum?"
Little girl points to her mother.
Mum: "That's right. Mum here. Where Dad? Where Dad?"
Little girl looks around again.
Mum: "Dad not here. Dad in jail. Dad gone. Where Nanna? Where Nanna?"

And repeat.

On the last day of Movember my true love said to me...

SHAVE THAT BLOODY THING OFF!

QOTD

Mr Howard these days treats working people as economic commodities. I do not, I never will.

-- Kevin Rudd

Movember-day1-6

My first six days of Movember. Please sponsor me by visiting http://www.movember.com/au/donate/. My number is: 71709.

Movember

I'm doing Movember this year, and while I don't expect to be able to equal the vibrissa growths of those closer to the simian tree roots than I, I do hope to be able to raise a few bucks for a very worthwhile cause. If you'd like to sponsor us, then pop over to here. Rego number is 71709. All donations over $2 are tax deductible. We're also looking for team members - both boys and girls - so if you're interested leave a comment and I'll forward you the details.

Hopefully I'll have weekly photo updates of the mustachioed progress here.

CBS-CSI-frontpage

Our video made the CSI-NY front page. Woot!
Check it out!

JOOB Phone

JOOB has taken to using one of our old computer mice as a phone substitute. Blow me down but he actually received a call on it. Here are the pics:

JOOB receives some disturbing news from his stockbroker about his share portfolio

JOOB tells his stockbroker what he thinks of him.

Fly around Everest

I've been playing with Google Earth's new flight sim feature.

RC helicopters are hard to fly, right?

WTF?

JOOB sultanas

Joob not only likes eating sultanas but he also enjoys the box too.

Never Smash a WD40 Can

Skribe Productions Promo

Click to Play

In Second Life choosing your video partner is easy. Choose the best: Skribe Productions!

Mine!

Click to Play

This is a 20 second short action film. I suppose the special thing about it, other than it is incredibly cool and fun (even if I do say so myself) is that everything was done by me...every character all filmed by me. Those familiar with Second Life will know just how hard that is. But enough patting myself on the back. Enjoy.

Doing Business in Second Life

Click to Play

A documentary on how to do business in Second Life.

Our Second Life

Skribe and ToxicPurity outside their secondlife office on Conference Island.

Dylan Hears A Who

Enjoy.

Parallel Parking

Click to Play

A tutorial on how to parallel park a vehicle in scondlife.

Time wasters

Here's some machinima that I've been pouring my time into of late.

Happy Chinese New Year

And the Oscar goes to...

Here's your chance to vote on the Oscar contenders.

A Typical Day in My Second Life

We have teeth!

It took 10 months but his bottom front teeth are finally coming through. Photos soon - hopefully.

Always wanted to be a writer?

Then write!

Everyone's just wild about Harry

With news that the last Harry Potter book is due for release in July I thought I'd share this:

Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word "wand" with "wang" in the first Harry Potter Book. Let's see the results...

"Why aren't you supposed to do magic?" asked Harry.
"Oh, well -- I was at Hogwarts meself but I -- er -- got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an' everything

A magic wang... this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

"Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work."

"Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "

Harry took the wang. He felt a sudden warmth in his fingers. He raised the wang above his head, brought it swishing down through the dusty air and a stream of red and gold sparks shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light on to the walls

"Oh, move over," Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry's wang, tapped the lock, and whispered, 'Alohomora!"

The troll couldn't feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll will notice if you stick a long bit of wood up its nose, and Harry's wang had still been in his hand when he'd jumped - it had gone straight up one of the troll's nostrils.

He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll's nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.

He ran onto the field as you fell, waved his wang, and you sort of slowed down before you hit the ground. Then he whirled his wang at the dementors. Shot silver stuff at them.

Ok I have found, definitive proof that J.K Rowling is a dirty DIRTY woman, making a fool of us all

"Yes," Harry said, gripping his wang very tightly, and moving into the middle of the deserted classroom. He tried to keep his mind on flying, but something else kept intruding.... Any second now, he might hear his mother again... but he shouldn't think that, or he would hear her again, and he didn't want to... or did he?

Something silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wang

Then, with a sigh, he raised his wang and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.

'Get - off - me!' Harry gasped. For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncles sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wang.

-- Found here

...save our gracious Queen

Wouldn't it be great to have a national anthem with a swear word in it? Well, the Poms, always at the sharp end of popular culture, have done it yet again.

Alien Invasion

Saw this sign in Northbridge a few days ago.

PerthNorg on Australia Day 2007 - Horses

Shot down at the Rotary Club's Australia Day breakfast with our trusty Nokia N93 camera phone.

Are Perth Drivers the Worst in Australia?

Which One is Eddie?

Or maybe he plays all three.

Update

For the last ten or so days we've both been flat-out working on a documentary that is due to go to air on February 4th. I say that with my tongue firmly held in my cheek because the producer keeps changing his mind and expects us to somehow slot in the extra footage that suddenly must be included at all costs. This has meant that the original source material for the 1 hour documentary has grown from and original 18 hours - which is stupendously huge to begin with (we produced the entire Byte Me series with far less) - to a massive 26+ hours. Most of which is crap. And that is putting it exceedingly nicely.

I need to mention that this has mostly been shot on HDV (high definition video) so it looks nice - well it would if they knew the basics of lighting - but it also means that it takes up a massive amount of space (both in storage and RAM). I say mostly shot on HDV because the key bit, the bit that HAD to be in the doco and was so important that they had three cameras covering every facet from go to whoa, only had one camera set to the correct format. The other two were set to PAL DV1 which is about one quarter the resolution of HDV.

Now we could have converted the HDV to DV1 and solved that problem, but of course the producer wanted the show in high-def (it's so very SEXY after all). That and we'd already edited about one quarter of the programme before the offending material was delivered to us and the producer didn't want to pay for the fuckup (ie have us start from scratch).

So that's where we are. How has your fortnight been?

Motherhood: Is It Catching?

So tired... can't believe the weekend's over already. For that matter, can't believe it's one week into the new year already. Did I send out all my NY greetings to everyone in time? Did I send out NY greetings to anyone at all? Is it really the 7th already?

It's an interesting contradiction: having a baby helps you connect with total strangers, but at the same time having a baby isolates you from the social life you once were part of. You don't go out as often, or for as long, and with a lot less spontaneity than before. On the other hand, it's a pleasant surprise when dour bank managers suddenly pull funny faces at your baby.

That said, have you noticed how, for every stranger you meet who is smitten with your baby, there is also someone who appears repelled by him? Mainly young women, from my experience, and sometimes a certain type of older lady. It ranges from disapproval and mild distaste to outright dislike. They see me with JOOB and glare like I'm a personal insult to them, some traitor to an unspecified cause, some slutty collaborator with the enemy.

It's not like JOOB is even screaming or being a nuisance to them. They just don't seem to like the idea of babies. Sometimes they actually recoil at the sight of him.

Hey," sisters"! It's not contagious, you know. Motherhood isn't like the avian flu. You don't see a baby and suddenly fall pregnant (although there're people out there who probably wish that were so). And since we're smack in the middle of a baby boom, one imagines those disapproving ladies and horrified party girls are going to be wearing pinched expressions for a long time. Not very flattering!

I'm not going to wax forth any of that nonsense about feeling more complete as a woman or fulfilling my genetic destiny blah. Being a mum is hard work, and a lot of fun, and bloody exhausting. Someday, as has been observed, I'll find I'm not JOOB's mum anymore and maybe I'll also find I miss it, but until then, this is the way it is and how it's going to be.

Now, maybe some sleep..?

Found Poem

Horney Lava Lamp

Is this what androids dream of when they run out of sheep?

Hot Cross

Seen on the 5th January. I have to wonder how long before we start seeing them BEFORE Christmas.

Personal Loser of the Week

In my teens and tweens I was a mad naval aviation nut. I had all sorts of ridiculous statistics and information memorised and I was a regular attendee down at the Freo wharf whenever a US carrier battle group came in for R&R. Unlike the crowds of hookers I was there to see the hardware and not the software (crew). As a result I had pilots and RIO's (Radar Intercept Officers) as my personal heroes. One in particular, Randy 'Duke' Cunningham stood out.

Duke was the first US naval pilot during the Vietnam war to become an ace (one of only two during the entire conflict). He is alleged to have shot down the mysterious (and perhaps mythical) Colonel Toon, a hotshot North Vietnamese pilot. He was one of the early TOPGUN grads and also served as a TOPGUN instructor. This guy was good. A distinguished military career with loads of awards to prove it.

That's where I kinda lost track of him. I grew up, got over my obsession with shiny things that kill people (well, almost) and moved on. So did Duke. He went into politics. That's where he seems to have become a loser.

Item 1: In the mid-nineties he bitched about Clinton appointing 'soft on crime' judges and about getting tough on drug dealers and peddlers of destruction upon children. Four months later his son was arrested for transporting 180kg of MJ. Of course at his son's hearing Duke begged the judge for leniency.

Item 2: In late 2005 Duke stepped down from his position in Congress after pleading guilty to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, and wire fraud to the tune of a couple of million.

As a result, Randall Harold "Duke" Cunningham is my personal loser of the week. Not because he's currently serving an eight year sentence but because he forgot what it means to be the best of the best.

The Return of the Zombie MilkCow!

Babies are a time sink.

Not only that, but they completely and utterly take over your life.

And worse, they completely re-wire your brain. Becoming a mother, I've just realised, means it is now impossible to think about yourself. Baby is now your whole world and all your outlook.

You go shopping for clothes for yourself, and end up buying some darling little hat/shirt/socks for the baby. And you don't even notice!

You know how people make NY resolutions about giving up smoking and reading more literature? Heh. Mine are to make time for frivolities such as meals and showers. As to books... all the books I've read recently tend to be in primary colours, are waterproof or made of thick cardboard, and have cheerful titles like: Turtle & Friends! Jumping Frog! My First Colours Board Book!

I love my JOOB, but seriously, I can't wait for the little blighter to grow up so I can think and act rationally again. If I squint, I can just make out what my old life used to look like, way over there, waving to me from a great distance...

Close Relations

On our way from Freo to Lesmurdie yesterday we decided to take a journey down memory lane and visit the house where I spent the first nine months of life. It took us a while to find it - I'd only been there once before as an adult and that was twenty years ago.

As I was driving through the back-streets of Beaconsfield it occurred to me that during my childhood both my mother's and father's families all lived within easy walking distance of one another. That's a combined total of eight siblings, two sets of grandparents plus Mum and Dad. All living within a five kilometre diameter. That just seems so weird today. My generation tended to move as far from their relatives as they could while still living in the Perth metro area. TP and her cousins took it a step further and moved to different continents.

We've already begun preparing JOOB for life on Mars.

HNY Grin

JOOB welcomes in the New Year with a grin.

HNY Meanderings

Well, the grandparents have returned to their equatorial home, the shops are about to return to regular trading hours and we're about to return to work on our latest job: editing 22 hours of high-definition video down to a 48 minute (a television hour - the rest is ads) documentary. Oh boy!

But before we begin what we really need is a vacation from the vacation. We've spent more time driving and watching JOOB play with his new toys (the grandparents literally brought a suitcase full for him) in the grandparents' hotel room than we have at home. Apart from the occasional breakfast we've been eating out - mostly at small Asian restaurants in the CBD and Northbridge. I don't think I ate a vegetable between 24th December and yesterday. I feel ill. Why doesn't anyone include vegetables (apart from the tokenistic greenish leaf) in their meals anymore? BTW avoid Oleh Oleh in Hay Street. The service is shit and so is the food - they claim to have the best beef rendang in Perth but it's the worst I've tasted by a long way.

We slept through NYE celebrations but rose early to take JOOB down to Cott beach for his first real swim in the ocean. We took him previous a few weeks ago but he wasn't impressed and complained. This time he laughed and giggled at the waves splashing him in the face and was having a great time until he got cold. After the swim we had breakfast at Tropicanas before heading down to the Freo markets to pick up some vegetables. Then we got the crazy idea of heading up to Lesmurdie Falls.

From age 9 months until I was 8 I used to live near The Falls. One of the few photographs I have from this time was taken on one of the bridges that crosses the creek the feeds The Falls. It's me, and my mother (and our dog). The bridge is long gone but we used its replacement to recreate the pic (minus the dog) with TP and JOOB. Great family moment.

Anyway, Happy New Year. All the best for 2007 and beyond.