s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

I have found one of the Holy Grails ! (You didn’t know there was more than one ? Silly you.)

I have found the Wellington analog of the much-missed Philadelphia Center City TLA — which is to say: a video rental place with a decent selection of anime, HKC and Sci-Fi (movies *and* TV shows), not to mention Playstation games and a “Festival” section that blots out the sun.

Now all I need is a TV.

This totally makes up for not being able to find — despite checking three very likely places — one of those hanging canvas shelf things for the closet.

Hoody-hoo !

— 2.5 days to Snog Week !

So, I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Sweden. Lots of fun. Tiring, as the working days were 10-12 hours long, but full of fun stuff. Lots of meetings where they tried to suck info out of our (Pascale and me) brains. Yummy brains! I also gave 2-4 hours of presentations per day, so by the end my voice was quite raw. Trying to fight off some Swedish cold is not helping either. (I wonder if this “mild cold” with be like a death plague to all the poor people of America and New Zealand who will soon be exposed.)

Biacore offered me a job, working full time as a technical writer! Woo! I already have my first project sitting in my bag, though I said I would not start working until around September 15th to give myself some much needed rest and acclimation time. Now we just need a house with either DSL or a cable modem, as I will need the connection for work. But we probably would have wanted such a place anyway, as Tamara likes her internet to be high speed.

Had much fun with my coworkers, the best was Wednesday night when about 14 of us got together for an August tradition, crayfish and bread. The crayfish are boiled with dill, and served cold. The only other food is bread, well, plus a liberal helping of schnaps. Or vodka, depending on your taste. The Swedes have lots of drinking songs, which they all know. Not a tradition we have in the states. Pascale sang us a few French drinking songs, as Andrei treated us to a Russian one. By far the most amusing moment was when Helena and Greta started singing a song in Swedish that I suddenly recognized… “nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll eat some worms!” Not a song you expect to hear in Swedish!

Now for 2 days of recuperation before the massive 36 hours plane trip from hell. Philadelphia to Chicago to Los Angelas to AUckland to Wellington. Woo!

Oh, I totally forgot to mention ! Apparently Hossam and Serena *do* usually perform a piece together — it’s their encore at the end of the show. Only apparently the Kiwi audience was a far more restrained bunch than they are used to (although they were actually quite raucous for Kiwis, apparently), and because we were merely standing and clapping and occasionally whistling — instead of screaming and howling and stomping the floor until the plaster came down — we didn’t get the encore. I know I and several poeple I spoke to were quite disappointed to not see her dance to his drumming live.

We *did* get to see it at the dance workshop, though ! And here’s the other cool thing about it: it’s completely improvised. He just bangs away and she interprets it as it’s happening — neatly illustrating all the stuff he was trying to teach us about patterns and cues and stuff. Very, very cool. Plus, since it was at the workshop, it was much more casual. She was just in her unitard and belt, and he could have fun and try to fake her out and stuff. And as an additional treat, we got to see her dance the solo he wrote for her on Sabla Tolo. W00t!

— 3 days to Snog Week !!!!