Lion Dance

The middle toe on my right foot is frozen again, this time it was from watching the Chinese Lion Dance at the reopening of the Sew Hoi building. I had already been there once this morning for a Tai Chi session. After four weeks instruction, assuming I could recall the moves I now have at least 5 different ways to defend myself from slow motion attackers. More to the point I have a series of moves assigned as homework which like all homework gets chewed by my imaginary dog.



The dancing lions ate cabbage so it doesn’t seem unreasonable for a dog to have a taste for homework?

What happened to the weekend.....

I think I may have finally recovered from last weekend. For want of something better to do I took up the offer of joining pete’s team for the V48hr film competition www.48hours.co.nz/2008/. Starting friday night we had 48hours to write, film and edit a short film. I was invited to help with the writing and story ideas.

7pm Friday we get word that our story must include the following elements - a brush, a character called Kerry Post who is a perfectionist and our genre was Mystery. All teams have the same elements but the genre varies - probably to make it more interesting for the judges who have to watch all 600 films at the end of the day.

After some brainstorming and a very democratic voting process the story outline was chosen - a murder mystery. With my extensive training from watching a combination of CSI and Midsommer Murders I was happy to spend the rest of the night working in the story team.

Sleep deprivation means timelines for the weekend are a bit hazy, some time around 3am Saturday morning I went home to sleep, at about 8 am Saturday I returned to mission control to help out and see wider reaction to the story draft. Over the course of the day we filmed and I spent a lot of time writing and re-writing dialogue. Somehow our house and garden became a film set and the words Action! and Cut! were repeated numerous times. In the thick of it all the guy from Telecom turned up to fix our broadband.

While I managed to stay out of the limelight, Pete took a starring role, he played a detective. Late on Saturday night Pete and I made it home for some food and a couple of hours sleep. By 3am we were back at work setting up a re-shoot.

As Sunday progressed tiredness and technical problems made the team dynamics really interesting. Tired, passionate people under huge time pressures are not always fun to be around. Once the key story elements had been saved from the editing I retired to the background, resurfacing 20 minutes before the deadline for the final dash across town to hand in our tape.

For the next week our final film is under wraps - a condition of the competition. As soon as it comes out on general release (aka YOUTUBE) I’ll post a link.

Expanding my presence on the web

An idea that came as a glancing blow and now its too late. I have joined up to all manner of things. If you know where to look today you can find me in a fair few places.

For most this is my first appearance. Since I’ve only just arrived there is still some work to do, profiles and the like to set up. I’ll get around to it, right after I get around to unpacking my real things at home.

Overnight I reconnected with old friends and found a new window to ones I already speak to. I have learnt that Facebook is hungry for my time and attention, it consumed half a day before I regained controls of myself. I don’t quite know what I have done as my profile is still bare and I haven’t even written on a wall. I don’t know what to say and I wonder about who may be watching.

Some friends are glad to finally see me there, it will, no doubt relieve them of guilt from not contacting me directly, and likewise my guilt is also lifted. What interests me most is the ex-friend(s) who through mutual acquaintance feel it is suddenly reasonable to request a statement of our friendship. Yes, I know them but back in the real world debts remain unpaid and trust still broken. When they have had so long and so many means of repairing our friendship but done nothing what makes them think facebook is the way to begin? They have requested to add me to their network of friends, another chalk mark for them but their invites only remind me of what has been lost.

just testing some stuff

testing testing....

And again....

Last Wednesday we moved again. Not such a dramatic shift as last time, this time we have just gathered up most of our belongings and moved them to the house next door. To add a bit of fun to the occasion we actually swapped house with our neighbor (who doubles as our landlord). Mostly it worked out, my mattress made the trip between the houses a couple of times as over keen helpers got confused about who owned it.

I had to take a back seat for the whole affair as I am nursing an injured foot and have been for almost 8 weeks (My excuse for not blogging). The cause of my pain remains a mystery, a stress fracture is the most likely cause but unlike a normal fracture these stress ones hide from X-rays so detection is by the much more exciting sounding bone scan.

This involves an injection of what I was assured was a tiny amount of radioactive tracer and then a series of scans by an impressive looking machine about 3 hours later. The end result should be a fuzzy picture of the bones in my foot with extra fuzziness at any broken parts. The extra fuzziness is actually showing healing which feels to me like a more positive picture than the traditional X-ray.

A call from the doctor’s surgery summoning me for an appointment this week means the results are in. I can hardly wait as I still hold the naive belief that once we know what’s wrong with my foot there will be some treatment to fix it. That is, something other than resting which is getting a little dull.

However today is not a day for lamenting, once again it’s my birthday, with all the fuss last week it took me by surprise, I thought I had another week before having to face up to being a little bit older without gaining any wisdom. I’ve had the bonus of collecting mail from 3 letterboxes, old house, new house and the PO Box we have in town. So far my card/present count is even with Pete who has another week before his birthday. Come on people, late cards still count in this competition - email me and I’ll send you my address!