Flying Fox!

There was a flying fox a short walk from my brother's house, where we were staying. How cool is that?

The first few times we gave Dom a shorter ride, running along holding him like so:

Then we finally were inspired to bravery by my sister and her 2 year-old, and I went on with Dom. He loved it.

I did too. I was a little scared the first time - in fact I find a lot of kids' playgrounds intimidating in one way or another - but as soon as I was off the platform it was all kinds of fun!

Botanical Gardens

This is one of a set of new busts on plinths outside the Arts Centre in Christchurch. Mostly blokes, it does include Margaret Mahy (complete with skull and crossbones earings) and a couple of other women. Dom's favourite was this dude with glasses, which were great for grabbing.

Inside the Bot Gs, swinging Dominic up into the air.

This sculpture in a fountain was awesome! Pull the handle and water squirts out from two different places, making parts of the sculpture rotate. Dom loved it.

He also likes the smell of roses, though he had little time to stop on his tour of the gardens :-)

Returned from holiday!

We are back in Kapiti after a fantastic trip south to Christchurch. We had an action packed 6 days with family and despite eating ridiculous quantities of sugary treats, delicious Chinese food, BBQ and pizza I am less than 2kgs heavier than when we left :-) That will take two weeks of hard work to shift but, all things considered, it could have been much worse! Running around parks, playing on the flying fox and going for lots of walks certainly seems to have helped.

Central Wellington from a plane. Dom didn't like the delay we had on the tarmac waiting for baggage to be loaded onto the plane. He was perfectly happy for the first 15 minutes of sitting in the plane not moving, but it started to get a little old after that. Once we took off he found the experience quite exciting :-)

Christchurch Botanical Gardens has a cool fountain, with sinister-looking water-squirting fish.

Next to the fountain was the much more exciting feature of a mother duck and 4 or 5 ducklings.

They were very calm and tame, quite happy to mooch about swimming or looking for food as we walked past.

Lots more photos to come!

Gingerbread

 

Scheduled post - Matt Predicts

It is Christmas Eve as I write this, but I'm setting it to publish on the 28th. Thus, predictions:

- The Xmas bbq was delicious, but there was too much food. I ate until my tummy hurt. It was worth it.

- 3 boys whose total age is under 9 can make a lot of noise, and a lot of mess.

- It's lovely to see family and catch up.

- I have taken in excess of 1,000 photos already in the last 5 days.

- I got sunburnt. On the back of my neck.

- In China a giant, irradiated moth attacked a nuclear power station, trying to suck out its irradiated goodness. The moth was defeated by the combined forces of a giant lizard and a robot. On-the-spot witnesses are now trying to compile a narrative structure from cell-phone footage, to be released in cinemas next month.

Matador blog

I have started up a blog for Matador Games - on the off chance anyone wants to contact us and offer us huge sums of money for the designs for Dig, Mob and Cow :-)

It's here: http://matadorcardgames.blogspot.com/

Merry Chirstmas

To one and all. And Merry Chistrmas, Merry Cihrstasm and My Racer's Mirths, March Misers Try, March Retry Miss and Charms Tyre Rims.

Debbie and I are looking forward to spending time with family and not being responsible for much of anything except our own (and Dom's) happiness :-)

Li'l lake

Moar amnimals!

Zoo photos!

The highly photogenic otters

Sun bear out in the sun

The log was getting a good gnawing

One of Dom's favourite animals - a very friendly wooden hippo!

Holiday fun

Zoo = visited 256 photos = taken Update soon :-)

Going to the zoo, zoo, zoo!

 

Fake tilt shift

Is a photo manipulation technique which can produce some very cool looking pictures. Basically it uses blur (and a bit of contrast/colour adjustment) to make pictures look like they're of models, rather than real scenes:


(From a photo by Jenni)

It's something I'm keen to play with some more :-)

A totally nautical day!

For the end-of-year festivities my department had a nautical dress-up theme. Some people came wearing life jackets. Others wore flippers, inflatable water-wings or tubes, goggles or wetsuits. I dressed as a pirate.



We also tried out Dom's $20 pirate outfit from Kmart. It's a size 3 so it's still a bit big for him. It's gonna be pretty sweet when it fits :-)