Bugs, Boys & Boobs

What a day. Since I have the girls for the weekend I thought I would take the Saturday to go down to Victoria for the day, visit some old friends and perhaps take the girls to a couple of sights. turned out fabulous and everybody had a great time.

Bugs

First order of the day was the bug museum. Got halfway down to Victoria, called Linda to meet up at the Bug museum. Met up there and WOW. turns out that my youngest is scared of nothing. I stared in awe and she has more creepy crawly things crawling all over her than you can shake a stick at. The older, a little more cautious and preferring to watch from the other side of glass. Great fun and we loved the gift shop with all the salt and vinegar grasshoppers.

Then we all went off to Lunch (Love the Old Spaghetti Factory), and split off. The girls and I went to Miniature World (not bad, but certainly didn't stand up to Tarantulas and scorpions).

Boys

I mentioned that we were off to see a very old friend of mine (friends since 16) who has a couple of boys. It was at this point that a slightly exasperated Casey looks as me and asks why all of my friends with kids have only boys. At which point I thought about it and realized that she was absolutely right. Then she decided that since they have boys, they must have done it wrong. (Here you can imagine me falling to the ground on Government street in hysterics).

Boobs

After the getting it wrong comment, we stop for some ice cream and are having a little sit down to enjoy it when there is the gentle tinkle of a bike bell. we turn to see the road filled with people riding their bikes in the buff. hundreds of hairy, gear changing testicles and breasts swinging like pendulums in the chilly wind and sleeting rain. Casey cocks her head to one side as we watch them go by, and in possibly the most dead-pan way I have ever heard asks "Daddy, why are all those people riding their bikes naked?" (really trying not to drop to the ground laughing again ... don't want them to take offence and start chasing me. That would be ... odd)

The rest of the day was spent hanging out and catching up at Jake's. What a fabulous time and an amazing way to end the day. We got home around 9 o'clock and tucking the girls to bed, Casey looks at me and thanks me for having such a great day.

By the way Shell ... I found Greebo ...

He is two weeks old, grey, currently named "Trouble" and we will have him in 10 weeks when he is ready to leave the nest. :)

Carefull what you wish for

Damn I am excited!!! So I am in the gantry, doing a little end of the year tidy as I am up to my eyeballs in research/course development/workshop building that if I look up another freaking reference my brain will gush out of my ears. That and the house hang/patch needs desperate tending to. But this is all beside the point. Mike comes to me and says that there is a lady here who went through the program ages ago who is interested in doing a bit of directing for us. I think, sure, no problem.

We start talking, she talks of a couple of fringe-style shows she's done. Cool, we say, then what else were you doing. Then she very casually mentions that she has been an art director/choreographer for Cirque du Soliel for ten years. so suddenly I am all over the idea of getting her in to work with the students. Taking her through the theatre and talking to her about some possible shows and staging, she is immediately looking up at rigging points and throwing ideas out about nets, ropes, silks, trapeze, clown, etc. All the while I am showing an exceptional amount of restraint, and desperately keeping myself from leaping up and down in the air and scaring her off.

Now, that all said, I have been extremely fortunate in the world of training and had opportunities galore which I am very thankfull for. There is however, one area that I feel I need to explore further, and that is in clown work. (not 'creepy guy blowing up balloon' clown, but real clown work, the kind whose tradition dates back almost 2,000 years, through roman mime, Del 'Arte, and Europe) With this lady working with Cirque (whose clowns have reached a legendary status), I ask if she knows anyone she would recommend to do some training with. she says of course and we exchange emails and now I am bouncing off the walls (almost literally) and exploding with possibilities for the students, for myself and for all kinds of show possibilities.

Damn I love this stuff.

Days I Love my job

The truth is that I thank my lucky stars most days for landing me where I am. Some days however shine out like stars that are just a little closer to home. Today was one of those days, due to a couple of moments in class.

Teaching an intro to acting class to a group of people, most of whom had never done anything like this before, was a little scary. I usually find that I am more comfortable around those with a cursory knowledge. Today however, people who were terrified of even standing in front of other people, wrote their own monologues, rehearsed them, learned them and performed them onstage. It was beautiful. It may not have been brilliant, but it was the world to them to see them recognize what they had accomplished.

Then giving them just a little bit of direction and watching the words they wrote and the characters they created come to life was an amazing feeling. They go on with their day and their lives don't change drastically, but perhaps there is a sense of ... ability, that wasn't there before.

I love moments like that.

Human luggage

So here's a scenario that everyone knows. Standing near the chute at the airport watching each piece of luggage come down waiting for yours. Cries of "Theirs mine" surrounding you and everyone bustling for a better position.

Segue: the government has now deemed it unsafe for two people to travel down a waterslide at the same time. This means that parents taking their kids down are no longer allowed. the local aquatic centre has lept over this hurdle by taking away any age restrictions to the waterslides. Now instead of dangerously holding on to your child as you ride down an inescapable tube of rushing water, you get to send them down on their own so they learn the values of fending for themselves against an uncontrollable onslaught of water carrying them head first/feet first/head first/feet first down a bright red plastic enclosure into a riptide waiting for them at the bottom.

Back to the luggage analogy. Now picture a bunch of parents bustling at the bottom of a group of waterslides as their little ones are scrambling for who goes next at the top. Cries of "There's mine!" has a definite ring of relief as parents see their kids being spit out of the mouth of the waterslide like a particularly foul tasting morsel.

I started laughing as it struck me that we were waiting with bated breath for our human luggage.

How to render your dad speechless

Reality needs a soundtrack. That way I would be able to anticipate moments of terror before they happen. If tonight was a movie it would have looked something like this

Scene - Int - Dusk

Sounds of bathroom splashing, general family household noises in the background. Jordan a slightly precocious 4 yr old girl is having a bath and talking to her dad, who is a little tired from a warm day, but generally the mood is pleasant.

JORDAN
Can you condition my hair tonight?

DADDY

Sure thing sweet

JORDAN

Will this make my hair soft?

DADDY

It will be very pretty, and a lot easier to brush

A mildly sinister and foreboding note would happen at this point. Daddy is brushing her hair and finishing up her hair. Jordan reaches up and feels her hair and lays down in the tub.

DADDY

What do you think? Softer?

JORDAN

Yes. Look, I'm a naked fashion girl.

(pause, dad is speechless and eventually he leaves the room trying not to laugh)

Daddy is looking at a 4 yr old who is turning in to a fully grown girl WAY too fast. In his mind she grows older and older faster than he can catch up with her. He is speechless, comes into the living room to tell his wife what she just said. The wife simply laughs at him as well.

Someone help me when this one turns into a teenager. She is fabulous and wonderful as they both (my girls) are. But the anticipation of this one between the years 2016 - 2023 is enough to scare the bejeebers out of me.

On the upside, I also love it when she comes up with things that make me laugh as much as they did tonight.

The day I was waiting for

There is a list. It seems small and unassuming at first. "that won't take too long" you think as you peruse the little things on this list. It is the list of things that need doing on the house. Then, as you start to complete the jobs on the list, it grows like the hallway in Poltergeist, where the light at the end of the tunnel is a train moving quickly away from you as you scramble to catch up.

Then, every now and then, you have the opportunity to not look at the list. Not work on the house. These days are usually when one of the bigger jobs are finished. Then, if the gods are truly happy with and wish to reward you for being such a good boy, they let the sun shine while you kick back and have a beer on the new deck that you have been working on. Long story short. it is done, finished and HUGE. Already I am watching as the benches are being used as tanning tables, kids are running around the place and Shell and I are having a quiet game of crib in the sunshine. There are few perfect moments, but this is definitely one of them.

I was asked the other day what I thought of the Universe and how it works and where we go when we die etc. and it reminded me of something.

There is a theory that I started coming up with when I was about 12 years old and have been developing since. I have never read any books on it, nor indeed have I seen anything that agrees with it, but to me it just makes sense in a really simple way. There is a rhythm to everything in the universe: molecules are vibrating, hearts are pumping, and the Universe as a whole has a pulse that takes billions of years to go through. So I believe that everything in the Universe is a part of the same rhythm, a beat that connects everything to everything else, it is balanced and instantly recognizable when we feel it. When someone is 'out of sync' thats where the confusion starts to happen. They feel lost and struggle to find some meaning in their lives, panic, go faster and faster, visit a guru to go slower and slower. All for the sole purpose of finding a rhythm inside that connects them to the rest of the Universe. I feel that the further out of sync someone becomes, the worse their lives get and they might become violent or some such.

Very often people will spend lifetimes working on finding the rhythm that best suits and connects them. At the end of our lives, I don't feel that our spirit as a whole reincarnates into another body, but rather that when we die we shed the excess elements that have thrown us out of sync, and the stronger rhythm that embodies us will move into another as their heart and body develops.

For Gavin

Tick SToP
An abrupt absence
from loving wife and childs.
Touching hearts of all those
watching the storm from the inside.
Pacing places in the soles of
shoes and minds.
Questions racing behind the eyes
that see your face.
What were you going to do
tomorrow.

secrecy is dead

I am all for the extra security measures taken by credit cards, websites etc, all in the name of keeping your credit your own rather than letting it be taken by any number of freaks. But sometimes it can go too far....

I had a tiny window of opportunity to grab my wifes birthday present. She didn't know, and it was literally the only moment available. so with child on shoulders, I head into Future shop to grab something that I have had my eye on for a good while now. Pick it up thinking that i am being fabulously discreet. Pick up the other child, some dinner and I head home. All good right? Wrong.

Turns out that while I was out, Visa calls home to inquire about some "questionable purchases", specifically one at future shop. At which point my wife tells the little visa man on the phone that that was probably her birthday present. ... There is a pause ... then there is an "oh my god" quietly mumbled from some cubicle in New York, quickly followed by "i'm really sorry".

So needless to say she is very exited to see what I got for her at future shop.... nuts.

Job Posting

Title: personal assistant

details: light housekeeping, some cooking, nanny duties, organizing, driving the kids, picking up the kids, painting, drywall, framing, plumbing, massage therapy, hypnotherapy, psychic advising, fencing, gardening, mowing the lawn, roofing, tiling, decking, furniture moving, grocery shopping, dog walking, picking up the dog poop, garbage detail, dish washing, carpentry, masonry, welding, electrical, entertaining the children and getting them to stop trying to mutilate each other, office clerk, book-keeping, hairdressing. manicurist, dog grooming, reading stories, laundry, all while my wife and I check in from somewhere in barbados. Additional duties may be added without warning or indeed without actually telling you until it is too late.

Note: this is a volunteer position and will be extremely rewarding once you see how blissfully happy I become.

Woyzeck

Slightly different approach to this show and one that I would like to continue working on. After workshopping with the cast, we continued to have less and less on stage. The less we had, the more we were able to say and the easier we were able to say it. Some of the particular elements of this show were as follows:

1) all furniture and setting was created by the actors, as you can see in this first photo of Marie coddling her young child and sitting in her room. those actors who were not in the scene wore grey cloaks which covered their entire body and so became pieces of the set. With this the set was able to come alive, adding to Woyzeck's paranoia, walls could move and chairs, trees, beds and boulders were formed instantly where needed.

2) the only actual piece of furniture onstage was a television set. this was to allow us to make the 'showman' or 'ringleader' (depending on what translation you use) into a budget childrens television show. it became apparent that the showman was describing so much of the essence of the play that he needed to be separated from the rest of the action. Turning him into a childrens TV show served a couple of purposes. Firstly, since no one left the stage at any point, it gave us something to do with Marie's baby prop. Plunking it down in front of the TV became a fairly harsh statement in itself, but when the showman started in on his rants, it became completely disturbing. Second, it threw the showman out of context which forced people to change their point of view of him and what he was saying... ie: a character can say what they want to another character or the audience and most people won't pay any attention, but say it to a child and everyone gets their guard up. including myself.

All in all, this was a fun one to work on and I am glad I got it out of my system. I may come back to it sometime, and when I do i would like to spend more time developing the characters and exploring them more. This is an incredibly thick script with and astounding amount to discover. I appreciate the work that the actors did and think we came an incredibly long way given the time we had. So thank you to all of you if you are reading this.

How much does fear cost?

Just a dollar a day. and if your lucky enough to get a free paper delivered to your door, then the paranoic suspicion of absolutely everyone around you won't cost you a penny. Lucky you.

Someone please tell me where the logic is in giving some idiot who kills 32 people as much attention as this. as far as I can see there can only be a couple of results to this mass promotion: 1) people become more and more afraid to go out their own door without actually realizing it, slowly they start to look at everyone around them as a potential killer until we end up with very strained dinner conversation indeed as we suspect that all our guests are packing.
2) some idiot out there is going to think that 32 is now the number to beat.

I don't blame the media for the problems of the world. Just for making sure that the problems of the world are so deeply ingrained into our psyche that we have to fight to see anything else in the world.

For Grandad

For Grandad


Can I see you?
Your life flashing before my eyes,
Through vacant, aged pupils.
Wide, old eyes revealing a dreamy 6-year old
Staring up at the stars.
Have all your dreams and hopes led you to this hospital bed.
Can all your life’s work and achievements be stopped
By a misplaced drop of blood
And bring us to this.
My third hand memory of your time on this earth,
Your frightened eyes scrambling to communicate
Into mine.
I want to see.
To look at the water and see the ocean.
I will remember
And my experience of you will look longingly into my grandchild’s eyes.

beacon of *^^**&@#$@ zen

There is a sacred place in my house. One of blissful tranquility where all troubles, stresses and concerns flow away from you in waves. our toilet ... :). Children screaming while trying everything in their vast imaginations to get each other in trouble. Work/chores/whatever is waiting to leap on you like coffee on a white shirt. But here, oh here, there is nothing but the gentle white noise of the fan taking away the offensive odors, a small selection of books to while away the time, and more than anything ... a moment of utter peace. but then comes the knocking ... oh the dreaded knocking that will break into your tranquility like a battering ram on the little pigs house of straw.

(I will recapture this peace. this is my) "I'll be right there." (..peace. I am ...) "I said I'll just be a minute!" (..zen. nothing but warm ocean waves soothing my .. ) "ALL RIGHT ALREADY!!!" (..my last *%$#^%##* nErVe!!)