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

Before the drama on Sunday afternoon became the news, I was planning on posting on the film we matched Saturday night. Black Sheep, a film that could only be made in NZ. And I am surprised it hadn’t been made yet. What is it? Well, it is your standard zombie-apocalypse, except with sheep.

Hordes of flesh-eating, genetically modified, zombie sheep. It was hilarious. You might be able to find it in your video store, as it did get a world-wide release. It does have gore, of the classic spurting bad-zombie film variety. I am also amused that it was shot entirely in the Wellington region. “Miles from nowhere” is actually Terawhiti station behind Makara, about a 20 minute drive from downtown. And we are pretty sure that the house they sheltered in was the same as Peter Jackson used in Bad Taste. But of course, there are only so many houses back in Makara.

So, if you are looking for a uniquely NZ film, add Black Sheep to the queue.

Luck arrived this week in the form of free tickets. Tam won two at work, and then our friend Michail provided two more free comp-tickets he had scored through his work (a transport company that among other things moves around sets for opera companies).

So Saturday afternoon we were off to the radio Tarana-sponsored Bollywood Dance competition, as part of the Diwali (festival of lights) celebrations. That afternoon was 3 hours of dancing from the intermediate and advanced groups. We were entertained b y quality dance routines to seriously adrenaline-pumping Bollywood music (left my ears ringing for an hour afterwards). The hall was large (TSB areana), and quite full. I think we had most of the south-asian community of Wellington in there with us. We disagreed with the judges over the first place and runner up in the advanced section. Having watched (and participated in) plenty of dance performances in the last 6 years, I have strong opinions on the matter now, and the runner-up’s were robbed. They had a high and consistent skill level, a kick-ass choreography, and most importanly- they could all perform.

I also had to respect the group from Upper Hutt college. That group was mainly kiwis, where most of the troups were exclusively south-asian in descent. And when asked about their preparations for the show, they admitted they only took one week for everything- choreography, costumes and practice. I hope they keep at it, as given a bit more time and experience they could be quite good.

After a quick dinner (Indian food, of course!), it was off to the Opera. Turandot, the last opera of Puccini. Executions, insane oriental potentates, a suicide, all you could ever want from the opera. The stage directiion was wacky, with only one person in period costume, but it worked for me. Ping, Pang, and Pong in their color-ccoded fur-trimmed “pimp jackets” were a hoot. The mug-shots of all the people executed (a list that gets added to during the performance) was also very nice.

So after all that culture on Saturday, what do we do Sunday? Clip alpaca toenails. But that was a worthy job, and entertaining in its own right. We also took more photos for the coming web page. Today is a beautiful fine and sunny day, the first in about a month. Hopefully that warm weather will get the grass growing, we have the moisture, now we need the sun.

Welcome to the new blog site! I’ve found a new host (WebBase), installed new, functional blog software (WordPress), and moved all of the old posts, photos and comments over from the old site. Go me ! I’m the man !

Eventually, I’ll find a functional theme (the graphics and layout and stuff) that I like, and maybe some time after that I’ll get into PHP and make my own theme, but until then we’re stuck with this sort of boring default. Hey, at least it *works*.

BONUS: if you’re one of the poor schmucks that got caught up in the spam filters at the old place, and haven’t been able to comment, you should be good to go here. It might give you a message “waiting for moderation” or some such the first time you comment, but once Stephen and I tick the box to let you through, you shouldn’t have any troubles with it.

Wheee !

I went to the opera. Does that make me cultured ? Our friend Michail works for a shipping company, & when his company gets hired to pack and move opera sets around the country, they get comp tickets (they also get comp tix for the rugby occasionally, but strangely enough the truckies don’t fight so fiercely over the opera tickets). So we went to see “Lucia di Lammermoor” last night (yes, that would be a 19th C Italian opera based on Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermuir). I did not wear the $5 silver mink stole that I got at the recycling shop by the southern landfill, although it did cross my mind. I *did*, however, pause in Arty Bee’s while I was waiting for the rest of our party, so I ended up going to the opera toting a tacky plastic shopping back of books. Ah, well.

The St. James is all Baroque inside; every square foot of the auditorium is junked up with carved vines & scrollwork, with Green Men and cherubs and karyatid columns between the boxes. Michail and I reckon that it’s nice to have a lot of stuff to look at and talk about while you’re waiting for the show to start — much nicer than sleek modern venues. People are always fun to look at, too, of course. From the blue-haired old ladies who *did* decide to wear their minks to Goth girls in brightly colored J-Pop dreds. Stephen and I saw the Chinese Acrobats at the St. James a couple years ago, and I am still vaguely appalled that you can buy ice cream at the intermission and take it to your seat.

The opera was properly bloody and tragic, and although individual scenes sometimes seemed to last for days (“Would you two please finish saying goodbye, already ?”), the opera as a whole went remarkably quick. I don’t know much from opera, but the Russian chick playing Lucia was pretty freakin’ impressive. Bonus: not only could she sing really well, she was actually a decent actor as well, AND she’s young and pretty — she actually looked like she *could* be someone’s little sister (er, someone’s tragically mad little sister, in a knee-length poet/night-shirt with one sleeve dipped in blood. The blue gown with the mysteriously water-stained hem was nice, but the disheveled murderess look is pretty memorable). Unfortunately, the guy playing her lover Edgardo was a bit of a goob. He chewed the scenery and kept doing these unattractive things with his face, and I spent a good portion of the scenes he was in sort of mentally holding my thumb over him and imagining someone more charismatic. The manipulative brother was good, and it was fun seeing one of my co-workers from Waiata as one of his retainers. For some reason I really liked the woman who played the maid/nurse. She only had, like, twelve lines to sing, but she was in a lot of the scenes as sort of set dressing, and she told a good bit of the story with just her own body language.

The set was great, and it combined with the lighting really well to get across “moody Scotland”, with something of a hint of rainy urban WWII, if you can picture that at all. Michail informs me that it took two trucks to haul *just* the something-like-a-hundred red stag racks they had decorating the Ravenswood manor hall. The costuming was good, too. Frock coats for Africa. Edgardo totally did not deserve that duster he had on (and didn’t know how to wear it anyway, to judge by the way he kept fiddling with the collar and batting the skirts around). Don’t ask me how you sing opera in a corset — presumably that problem was solved a hundred years ago.

Interestingly, I remember during the scene where Lucia goes birko (as you do in an opera) thinking that all the soprano frills and doo-dads (Wikipedia informs me the technical term is “coloratura”) reminded me of the opera piece in Fifth Element. Apparently it *was* the opera piece in Fifth Element. So it’s not that all opera sounds alike, so much as it’s that the *same* opera sounds alike. Wikipedia says “the mad scene” from Lucia was also used in the first episode of Gankutsuou, so when we re-watch that, I’ll have to listen for it. And for those of you who, like me, have childhood memories of the book (and Chuck Jones cartoon) “A Cricket in Times Square”, it’s supposedly the tenor part to the “Lucia Sextet” that Chester is chirping at the end, when he stops traffic in the Square. I don’t own the book anymore, and I haven’t seen the cartoon since rocks were soft, so I can’t verify that.

Anyway, Stephen’s in Dunedin, and I went to the opera. Woo !

PS: Michail, if you guys want to see Turandot in October, count me in !

So what have I been doing while Stephen is swanning around the East Coast ?

Er, playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, mostly. After playing a bunch of games at Alan’s B-day party, I gave in to temptaion and bought a used X-Box off TradeMe. The PS2 is great for RPGs, which is what I mostly play, but Stephen and I really like playing games *together*, and there’s only so many times you can replay Neverwinter Nights before the entertainment value palls. (Yes, I know, KotOR is *also* an RPG, but Stephen’s away, remember ?) So the X-Box came with a bunch of games, plus Kerry has loaned us some of theirs, plus now I can actually look at the cheap used games in EB or Gamesman, because I have something to play them on. I anticipate getting nothing useful done this winter. :^)

The long holiday weekend was spent at the first ever Darton Collegium — a “collegium” being an SCA event comprised mostly of classes. I learned all kinds of cool things about Medieval leatherworking techniques, what sorts of modernly-available thread is most appropriate for handsewing various types of garments, etc. I missed the bookbinding class, but I suspect it will be reprised. There were people from some of the other local Medievalist groups there, too, so it was good to meet them and share perspectives.

This past weekend, Kerry and I grabbed some alpaca fleece and went up to a felting workshop at Dianne’s place up in Judgeford. Man, felting is hard work ! Definitely need to arrange some kind of mechanical aid for this kind of thing. We made “cria covers” — although they might be better suited to pillow covers or something. We learned why it’s important to card or comb the fleece first, or be very assiduous about pulling apart the staples: anything that still thinks it’s part of a lock will bind back into the lock when you felt, making little loops and warts on the finished surface. So our pieces came out a bit goofy-looking. But we had fun & got to chat with alpaca people (okay, well *I* had fun and chatted to alpaca people — I’m not sure what Kerry got out of it, apart from maybe sore shoulders…). It was a good day for it, too — sunny and not too cold.

In place of our usual Friday-night gaming slot we’ve been playing other games. We played a four-board game of Robo Rally, and not only did we *finish* at a reasonable time, I actually *won*. I don’t think *either* of those two things has happened before… And Geoff took away our little robot figures and painted them for us. Thanks, Geoff !

I haven’t been doing much with the week-nights (apart from A&S and KotOR), mostly because I’m still (yes STILL) getting over the Dunedin Death-Grip. After a couple of false starts where I’d think I was doing better and go to dance class or something, and then fall over for the next two days, I’ve been deliberately taking it very easy. I *think* I’m now over the hump, and am just dealing with the lingering cough. I haven’t had to take a day off work in a couple weeks now, I’ve been going back out for walks at lunchtime, and this week I’ve gone back to getting up at the usual time. I’m now horribly out of shape, though, which is annoying, and missing dancing is a bugger. Oh well, it beats gallstones, right ? Meanwhile, Stephen, convinced that my ability to feed myself properly has atrophied since I’ve been living with him, carefully stuffed the fridge with leftovers for me to eat while he’s away. Hee. I’ve mastered the one-match fire, too, so I’ve been keeping cosy.

The alpacas are fine. (Metservice keeps pushing back the days when the bad weather is supposed to finally get us, so while it’s been chilly, it hasn’t been *bitter*, or too wet or windy.) I’m sure the cats think I am *slack*, though, as I’ve occasionally let the food bowls get empty before remembering to refill them. On the other hand, I think *they’re* pretty slack, too — we had *two* mice in the the house Saturday, and Kerry and I had to catch both of them. *tsk*

Only a few more days to go til Stephen gets back !

So we’re still enjoying summer weather here — it’s been summery for a couple of weeks at a stretch, now, and we’re about to the point where we could use some rain again.

We do do things besides all the alpaca things we post about, never fear. Stephen has re-written yet another set of gaming rules for his club, in addition to running our regular Friday night Ars Magica game — which has been going almost a year now ! We had a nice time chatting with Zoo people at MJ’s party & have a standing invite from the bird guy to hit him up for a tour the next time we’re at the Zoo. We went to the Manukau Medieval Market (now in Levin!), where Stephen enjoyed some of the SCA fighting he missed at Canterbury Faire (plus he got to ham for the crowd of punters), and I gave a wadge of money to this lovely Afghani woman in exchange for some new jewelry that I adore (ferret shock, I tell you).

Today we went to the Cuba Street Carnival, where I resisted mightily the urge to give Sara more money and instead did my best to hook her up with Traysi, who’s opening a new bellydance boutique upstairs from Indeja, and then had yum char (dim sum) for the second time this month, with about 25 other people.

I finally finished building my new computer. I gave up trying to restore all of my old settings and just did a clean install. We lost some of the software we didn’t have disks for, but now have a couple hundred more gigs of hard rive to play with. We hooked the new machine up to the TV so we can play DVDs that won’t play on the regular player. We’ve been dragging friends over to watch the new Dr. WHO, Torchwood, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes. Okay, not “dragging” so much as announcing “Geoff just got the next three eps of Heroes, you free tonight ?” and arranging the furniture to make room.

One of the women from my waiata group at Council invited me to a four-week newcomers/recruiting thing for the chorus she sings with. They do, get this, barbershop. Fifty women singing dominant sevenths through their noses. They’re a weird, wacky bunch, and though I’m not sure I’ll stick with it after the intro seminar, I’m enjoying the heck out of it in the meantime. I sing bass, apparently.

Got lots of projects on tap, including getting the conservatory fixed. Stephen’s been dealing to all of the young gorse that’s come up, encouraged by the went start to summer. I’ve got sewing to do, and I need to sand the drawers on the gorgeous Chinese chests I bought, oh, months and months ago now. I’m glad we’ve got a holiday coming up.

This is hilarious: Some of my best friends are American.

Work safe, but note that the sound is a bit quiet.

Those of you who have known me for years know that I don’t buy many tech toys. At the Home&garden show a few weeks back I made an exception and purchased a Cent-o-meter. It is very cool, and very useful.

There are two units, a sensor/wireless transmisser that you clip over the power cable coming into your fuse box, and a digital display you can take around the house. The digital display will show how much power you are consuming in kW, cents per hour, and kg of CO2 per hour! Pretty nifty. When you consider a cent an hour of drain is about $90 over an entire year, it is worthwhile tracking down all the trickle-loads in the house.

In NZ this is made easier as the power outlets have switrches so you can turn the outlet off, even if things are plugged in. I discovered that the washing machine, turned off, draws 10 Watts. Likeise the hub and inkjet printer in my office. Turning off those two at the wall is already $40 a year in savings!

Once I am done playing with it I will loan it out to friends to they too can see where their power is going, and how to find some savings.

Last night we went to our second World of Wearable Art show. It was as fantastic as lastt year. We paid a bit more to get closer seats, which was totally worth it so we had a better view of the costumes. It was like they heard our unsubmitted comments from last year, and kept the various peices on stage for much longer.

What is Wow, you ask? Well you can check out http://www.worldofwearableart.com/

The show can be descibed as 2.5 hour modern/avante garde dance show mixed in with a parade of mind-blowing art-fashion peices. Many of the sections are themed, so the opening “Pacifica” bit was to the pounding music of Oceanea while dacers did a haka-like dance, and garments made of feathers, flax, paua and other native/natural products were on display.

And for the Bizzare Bra section they had a couple of the performers from the Heavenly Burlesque show providing entertainment. Not that the chorus-line of men and women in over the top bra-art doing a huge dance number wasn’t entertainment enough! Massive overstimulation, with way to much to look at.

Like Cirque to Soleil on acid mixed in with a fashion show.

And this year there were some books on sale that provided good pictures of pieces from this and previous years. The program was a disappointment again, due to the lack of photos of this years entrants.

It is very cool that Wellington has such a one-of-a-kind show. WoW is becoming more international, 54 or the entrants were form overseas this year. There is some talk about trying to take it on the road, which could be cool if they could figure a way to move all those costumes safely.

I took a half day off for my Birthday, and Stephen and I went to the Lord of the Rings Exhibition at Te Papa. Very cool. Why oh why don’t they publish a book with good photos of all the costumes and props and stuff ? Did you know they not only built costumes and props in different scales (for the shots with hobbits), they actually used fabrics with the *weaves* in different scales. So the herringbone pattern in Frodo’s vest is the proper size, no matter whether it’s Elijah Wood or Kiran Shah in any given scene. Oi.

Naturally, we had to get our photos taken on the forced perspective wagon bench:

Had a *ridiculous* amount of trouble finding a place for lunch. Flying Burrito Brothers isn’t open for lunch, Kopi *closed* (when the heck did that happen ? They had the best roti in town, dammit), Masi (which I had a coupon for) turned out to be a little lunch cafe with a limited menu of boring paninis. Roti Chenai (Tamil/Northern Indian) saved us, and it’s one of my favorite places to eat lunch anyway, so.

In critter news, Jake is afraid of the ceiling fan. We’re wondering if he had a run-in with one of the local hawks while he was out rabbiting.

An interesting little note: If you want to be comforting to an alpaca (or horse, or presumably other herbavore), you’re meant to speak in a low voice, right ? High pitched noises mean agitation or alarm. Dogs, on the other hand, are the other way around — low sounds equate to growls, and you use high pitched noises to express approval. Takes a bit of thinking to get it the right way round. Likewise, I’ve caught myself using “LEAVE IT!!” on the cats, although usually we hiss at them to get them to stop whatever they’re doing.

Jacqui dropped Prince off Friday evening, back from his sojourn at Kylie’s place, and there’s definitely a difference. I think some of it is Prince, and some of it is just that we’ve got a better idea what we’re doing now. Slow Top, interestingly enough, is the bravest of the cats. As long as Prince doesn’t get too close, he’ll just sit there, or will walk around past him. Prince will very carefully ignore him. Quick, surreptitious little glances, and then pointedly looking in another direction. Works outside, too. The others will take a little more work, but it’s a start. Azami seems to be second bravest — I had forgotten until recently that she originally came from a house with a dog.

Got to watch a little switch flip in Prince’s brain. I’d gotten him a rawhide bone (one of the solid ones, not the kind with the knots on the end). We had guessed that at the kennel he was originally from, he might have had to fight for his food to some extent. He’s gotten better about not inhaling his kibble, and he’s never shown any aggression when I mucked with his bowl while he was eating (some of them do), but this is the first time we’d given him a “bone”. He tucked into it immediately, but I didn’t want him chewing at it on the sheepskin, in case he chewed up some of the wool. When I cautiously poked at the bone, he immediately tried to protect it — no aggression, mind you, not even a growl — he just tried to cover it with his head. I nattered at him soothingly, left him to start chewing again for a few seconds, then poked at it again. He tried to cover it again, then suddenly lifted his head and let me take it. I moved it off the sheepskin and gave it to him again. He took it readily enough, but when I got up to leave him alone with it, he dropped it and came over to me for pats instead. I don’t know if he decided he doesn’t actually want it after all, or if he just realized he doesn’t need to protect it from anyone. Either way, it was interesting to see.

In other news, the collars from Irene’s Pet Ware arrived (thanks again, Irene!!). Here Prince models his “royal” purple one, which, being custom made, fits him absolutely perfectly, I must say:

And for those holiday parties:

Oh, the audience for this little fashion shoot was a bit dubious about the whole affair:

The alpacas are appropriately wary of Prince. And Prince is appropriately wary of Oak, who has ac ouple of times rushed up, stopped, sniffed, and sprung away.