Leap Year Tomorrow

Tomorrow is leap year day. I'm not sure if that's what it is officially called, but it's the day we add to the year to make up for the fact that a solar year is actually a little less than 365.25. So we have to adjust it a bit every so often. And tomorrow's the day we do it.

I hope you weren't born on a leap year, but it might be kind of cool in a way.

Dave

Larry Norman Dies at 60

One of my all time favorite artists passed away last Sunday, Larry Norman. I started listening to his music in the 70's, and have been listening and collecting his music for many years now.

I'm not sure how this is hitting me yet. I'll have to mull this over quite a while before I have something interesting and insightful to say, so for now, I'll just defer to the news. There's a pretty good article that Kelly's got on her blog. Just click on Kel's Blog up there to the right.

Dave

I don' know. Where do you wanna eat?

I went to lunch with my friend Brian. He's from Cape Town, South Africa. We had the usual "I don' know, where do you wanna' eat?" back and forth conversation for a while until he said,"I know a place. But I don't know how to describe it. Let's just go and you tell me how to describe it."

So we went down by Framestore on Noel Street, to a place called "Bodean's". They had tin signs on the wall with pigs and cows on them and long tall tables with tall stools at them. There was a long queue to order and we stood talking for a while. Then I realized that I would need to order soon and grabbed a menu off the counter.

It was a BBQ place! They had pulled pork sandwiches, ribs and barbeque chicken, cole slaw and the works. I told Brian what kind of place it was and he said they only call the thing you cook on a barbeque, not the whole place. So I explained that it's not just what's on the menu, but it's practically a whole culture down in the southern U.S.

My "Soho Special" was pretty good, but it needed a bunch of BBQ sauce to make it so. But the main effect of the whole place was to make me homesick for Lucille's in Torrance. It was quite fun to get to tell Brian all about the place that he took me to.

Oh, and as we were sitting there eating, I looked up and saw Jacob and Dan with a couple of other guys from Framestore at another table eating. I was quite surprised at this and decided that though they said they were my friends, they couldn't really be, since they had not told me about this fun American style BBQ place before. (Just kidding.)

I'll probably be back there again before I head back to the states.

Dave

Indiana Jones

This looks like it could be fun...

Plus I wanted to see if I could embed this on my blog. How cool is that?

Dave

Noisy Americans

Last Saturday we took a trip to Greenwich to see what was there. It's not far from Peckham/Nunhead, so we took the 177 bus. It's one of those fun double decker buses.

On the way, Kelly was sitting near the front with the two little ones. The older two were standing with me towards the middle of the bus where there is some open space for push-chairs (strollers) and shopping trolleys. We had both of our push-chairs with us.

Our little darlings (as my mum calls them) have some little dolls that they like to play with. Usually that involves them talking baby-talk for them. And they were doing that this day on the bus. As they were getting more and more into it, and having more and more fun, they were getting louder and louder.

I looked over at my oldest and said, in a joking way,"Noisy Americans". I didn't use an accent, but with only two words, one might not be certain if there is an accent to be heard. One nice old lady sitting right by me looked up and said,"I was just saying that to my friend here." And then she realized that I was probably their father, guarding the push-chair, joking with my daughter, and she got quite embarrassed, and said,"Oh, sorry." 

I forgave her and just smiled.

Dave

The Last Leg

I have about 7 weeks left in this adventure and I'm feeling a bit conflicted.

On one hand, I have lots of work to do and I'm very busy all the time. I'm really enjoying the work and being in London. I feel pretty comfortable getting around, which is a big shift from when I started this.

Today, I got to the train station and the computer that runs the electronic sign was down, so the sign only showed the time, not which trains were coming next. But I knew that any train that stopped and was going north would take me to London Bridge, so I just waited for a couple of minutes and hoped on. Sure enough, I made it to London Bridge with no trouble.

When I got downstairs to the Underground, though, the train that was standing at the platform was packed and clearly not going anywhere soon. Then an announcement came that there was a power supply failure and that the Jubilee line was suspended. The cool thing was that I knew how to hop over to the Northern Line, switch to the Central Line, and get myself to work. Amazingly, I was still arrived early! I don't think I could have done that 5 months ago without a lot of head-scratching and asking for a lot of help.

At work, I'm down to the "let's get this done and make a movie" part of the project. This is the part where all the research should be done, all the ideas tried and sifted through, and now it's just down to execution. I still have some researching and methods to try, so I hope to get that out of the way quickly, but in all, I'm pretty close. And we're getting lots of pretty pictures out, which is fun. 

BTW, there's a new trailer out that played during the Super Bowl. My shot didn't make it into this cut, but there's about 8 frames of the werewolf and hag from Aslan's How, which is kind of cool.

But on the other hand, I'm starting to really look forward to going home and getting back to my "real" life. I really feel as if I'm in another world like Narnia, and it's almost time for me to go through the magic door back to my world. And I also feel like Peter, knowing that it's ok. It's not really homesickness, because I don't feel that disconnected from California. But there's a longing for the familiar and comfortable.

Anyway, that's how I'm feeling at this point. I guess I'm mostly sharing this with myself; so that in a year or so, I can look back at this and remember what I was feeling at the time.

Dave