Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Rugby, rugby, rugby rug.. [#23]

This will be my last posting until I travel to Britain for my brother's wedding next month. It's going to be a weird feeling. I'll be going home after a year and a half of trying to make my life here in New Zealand and it looks set to be a busy three week holiday (I am planning on coming back to NZ afterwards though - my boss would be a bit surprised if I chose to stay!). But, yes, in some ways I'm not looking forward to going home to Britain - (I guess even saying 'home' makes me wonder where that actually is). I know it will be quite emotional for me and maybe even for the odd friend or family member too. Well - maybe.

One good thing about leaving NZ for a bit is that hopefully I'll be spared some of the wall-to-wall coverage of rugby related tedium. I'm not a huge fan, don't mind the game actually but when every programme/advert/label/third word is affected by the question of how well the All Blacks will do in the World Cup I'm starting to go slightly mad. I made the mistake of wearing my England rugby shirt through town the other day and for someone like me who hates being the centre of attention, it was as foolish as pole-vaulting a prickly hedge using just a stick of rhubarb while wearing a pair of speedos. Suddenly I was either Captain Popular or Public Enemy Number One.
Please God, let the All Blacks win - just to shut everyone up!


I'm currently into painting on driftwood. - This is Dead Fish.
(ie - washed up on the beach).

Anyway, what have I been up to? Not much really. It's winter and that's that.
I did some house-sitting last week. (There's now 7 of us living in our house so it was great to get away and have some of my own space for a bit). I looked after Shadow, a two year old Labradoodle (Labrador / Poodle cross - yes, I thought the same thing too!). He's a good lad and it was enjoyable living there - not least because in my cosy bedroom was an upright piano and a lovely old violin. It was missing an E string so I replaced it and every day I enjoyed downloading PDF sheet music and catching up with some long-overdue practice.
But at the weekend I popped home because Ella - one of my house-mates was having a birthday party. And a party's a party.


A friend of Ella is a DJ so he brought along his kit and set up in the kitchen worktop.
The house was throbbing!


Left to right: Some bloke, Shaun (housemate), Ella (housemate and birthday girl),
Sarah (friend of Ella - and any red-blooded bloke on the planet).


I'm busy on Wednesdays as I've just started Ceroc dancing. I'd finished cricket at the end of the summer and was looking for some other activity to be involved in so when I heard about it I gave it a go and now I've been a few times and despite never having even seen it before I started, I'm now becoming less and less incompetent. The tricky thing for blokes is that we have to lead. I recommend it actually. I must say it is a bit strange though - the normal procedure in my experience in night clubs or wherever is to ask a girl to dance and she says 'no'. At Ceroc however, they actually say 'yes' - how extraordinary is that?
I've even booked myself into the huge Ceroc event in October - workshops, displays from people who can actually dance and the highlight of the weekend - the grand Masquerade Ball! I shall report back on this exciting event in my life.

This last couple of weeks has been quite busy at work. Well, since there's only two of us who work full time it's always busy, but we've had some interesting projects through recently and we've had some mass media exposure. One of our authors was on the front page of the Dominion Post newspaper a couple of weeks ago for her book, next week another one of our authors is on TV1's 'Close Up' programme (prime time evening viewing) and a book I illustrated was the feature on Breakfast TV last week! (Click the link if you'd like to view the clip).
(I don't get royalties on the book sales though!)

This evening I've been interrupted from writing my blog by a cosmic event happening even as I type. No, the confluence of Mars with Alpha Centuri hasn't caused a disruptive plasma surge that interrupted my viewing of The Simpsons this evening. There was infact a Lunar Eclipse.
Here's my Photoshop visual of my observations:



Other stuff:
Music I'm listening to at the moment includes:

The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side by The Magnetic Fields
All My Little Words by The Magnetic Fields
Hurt by Johnny Cash
Miserere mei by Allegri Gregorio
Last Train to Lhasa by Banco de Gaia
All of it excellent - download it and see what you think. Maybe I'll add recommendations next time if you like them :)

posted by col @ 9:00 pm 1 comments