Just a perfect day

Couldn't have asked for a better day off today. Read some more of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell at Starbucks this morning (page 553!) then went for a long overdue walk along the Stanley Park seawall to play with my new digital camera (see above). It turned out to be a beautiful sunny day, so walked as far as Siwash Rock taking pictures of anything I could find. The poor old park is still showing the effects of the storms over the last month or so - lots of seaweed, fallen branks and chunks of the Seawall scattered over the path.
Christmas at Mum and Dad's was great too. Pretty stress free - I managed to get all of my gifts bought and wrapped nearly a week before. We also skipped the stocking stuffer gifts and donated to various charities instead. Lots of nice gifts - fancy smelly stuff from Yves St. Laurent, jPod by Douglas Coupland, slippers, plus a miniature painting by my Dad. Lots of fun having my nephew Jack around too. Caught the skytrain back late afternoon and fought my way down Robson Street where the Boxing Day sales were in full swing. Centipedes of fuzzy-hooded girls with shopping bags outside every store.
In any case, today was the perfect break between the Christmas holidays and going back to work tomorrow (ugh). I'm vegging out with a DVD tonight; The Descent, which looks good and nasty and icky. Not very Christmasy, but it looks like a good distraction.

Though it's been said many times, many ways...

Merry Christmas everyone! Be naughty or nice. Your choice.

Window in the Skies

Through some pretty tricky editing and a whole lotta archive footage, U2 has everyone from Bowie to Sinatra to The Who to The Clash singing their new single 'Window in the Skies'. Very cool. If you look reeeeally closely, you can see members of U2 in some of the audience footage.

I just thought of something...

George Clooney has a new movie out called The Good German.
Matt Damon has a new movie out called The Good Shepard.
Maybe Brad Pitt should come out with a movie about a cop and his dog called The Good German Shepard.

Sorry, bad joke.

Two guys, some spare time, and a lot of patience...

Here's another really cool stopmotion piece created by ... um ... Tony and Paul. For some reason, my favorite part is when Paul jumps out of the sand.

All hail the Duke of Cukes

Congrats to my Dad who has finally sold his greenhouse property and entered the world of retirement. For nearly forty years, Dad has grown cucumbers and tomatoes; first working for my grandfather in England and eventually owning his own business here in BC.
Weird as it sounds, cucumbers and tomatoes have always been around since I was a kid. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve the smell of sawdust, the scratchiness of cucumber plants and pretending that tomato stems were little green spiders. If it wasn't for Dad taking a new job as a greenhouse manager in 1978, we would never have moved from England to Canada. In 1980 or so, I remember my sister and I buying a T-shirt for Dad with the words 'The Duke of Cukes' on it. He was nice enough to actually wear it out in public a couple of times.
Anyway, congratulations on your retirement Dad... you deserve it.

Helmet girl

This past weekend I treated myself to another print by Camilla d'Errico. Cute isn't it? Goes very nicely with the one I bought earlier this year. Further proof that since starting at channel m, I am slowly becoming a young Chinese girl.
I picked it up at You & Whose Army, a very cool art/fashion/design store at 929 Denman Street. I love going in there every now and then to see what's new. Camilla has a number of prints for sale there at a very reasonable $20 each.

Drink, drink and be merry

Went to Back Alley Wineworks yesterday evening to bottle some wine that I was splitting with my sister and her friend Tim. A very good deal - 30 bottles for $110 (works out to about $3.66 a bottle!). Tried a sample and it was not bad at all. Apparently it will reach its prime in about five months, so I'll have to exercise some restraint and try not to drink all 10 bottles by then.
There's something really comforting about coming home after a long rainy winters day and having a glass of wine in the evening. God, I'm becoming pretentious in my old age.
Like the label design?

Mia M.I.A.

(left to right: Mia, me, Brenda, Rong and Joanne)

Here's me last Saturday at the channel m Christmas party with my workplace harem. By the way, this is a picture from the BEGINNING of the evening; in most of the later shots I look like a drunk Mr. Bean. Tequila is just plain evil.
Had a great time (I think) but was sad to say goodbye to Mia. The day before was her last day at channel m, due to convoluted work visa immigration govermental bureaucratic procedures, blah, blah, blah. In short, she has to return to Denmark until everything is sorted out (weeks? months? years?) and is then coming back to Canada. Was very sad to see her go; it's still strange coming in to the office without having our Danish den-mother around. Her little corner of the office seems so dull and quiet now.

Strange days

I haven't really read anything of any substance lately (usually just trashy crime thrillers and mystery novels) so it has been a nice change of pace to sink my teeth into a good substantial book again. I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell last weekend, a book that reviewers have compared to everything from works by Austen to Tolkien to Dickens. Apparently this is Susanna Clarke's first novel, taking her nearly ten years to write. It's set in 1806 during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and begins with Mr. Norrell, a reclusive magician, attempting to bring back the
Spirit of English Magic. It was quite a daunting book to actually start (it's about 1000 pages altogether!) but I'm already pretty engrossed, chipping away at it nearly everyday. It was the perfect book to read in Starbucks last Monday, during a wonderful snowy Vancouver day. Here's a great passage that really stood out that day:

'Snow began to fall; a few flakes at first - then rather more than a few; until a million little flakes were drifting down froma a soft, heavy greenish-grey sky. All the buildings of York became a little fainter, a little greyer in the snow; the people all seemed a little smaller; the cries and shouts, the footsteps and hoofsteps, the creaks of carriages and the slammings of doors were all a little more distant. And all these things became somehow less important until all the world contained was the falling snow...'

Cheval Noir

Cheval Noir is the portfolio site for Aya Kato, a talented 24 year old artist with a beautiful style reminiscent of a Japanese influenced Aubrey Beardsley. In addition to her illustrations, she has also created designs for Tshirts, iPod skins, window displays and a video for Tori Amos.
You can see her work here.