Sunday, December 26, 2010

SANTA!

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

My dad’s office decorations rock once again:


Meaning

So last night there was a full lunar eclipse of the full moon on the winter solstice for the first time since AD 1638, which must mean something, right? I was quite excited heading home from work last night, because there was no rain and the sky was relatively clear. I planned to wake up at 4am or so to see it.

Then I slept through it, and didn’t remember until walking out to meet my lift in to work at 6:25am, when the moon was shining down on me looking normal again. D’oh! That must mean something too. It’s funny though, NASA says the peak of the eclipse would have been only 10min before I went out. Funny that it wasn’t still partially red.

Here’s a photo from the CBC at any rate:

LunarEclipse

Preparing for home

My packing is nearly complete…

Christmas Packing

Anna!

My friend Anna came to visit me here in San Francisco this past weekend! More UNSW-related good times! I took her and my friend Paul (from UW) up to Yosemite for the weekend:

pv

waterfall_mars

group

Stop-over

After the big wedding, Yael & I stopped over in Singapore to meet up with all the UNSW alumni there. We had a tour of the REC production plant, SERIS, and then had a night on the town courtesy of SERIS. Good times.

LaviKen Wedding: Part 1

I was recently in Surabaya, Indonesia, for the wedding of my friends Ken & Lavinia. Andy & Yael also flew up from Australia, so we had a proper little reunion going on. The wedding was a mix of Indonesian and Western traditions, and was the most massive wedding I’ve ever seen. Check out Boyz II Men:

Lavinia was gorgeous, there were also ice sculptures, Indonesian dancers, dry ice and light show, obscene amounts of roses, amazing food, and of course bagpipes:



Half-time show at Stanford

So Dan & I went to a Stanford football game on the Thanksgiving weekend. Seemed like the thing to do. The game was a bit boring, Stanford blew away the competition, but they half-time show was the most bizarre one I’d ever seen. It was a choreographed story about dinosaurs, and then how they went extinct after a big meteor hit the Earth. In this photo, you will see that a meteor has just run across the field. The marching band and the stegosaurus have died as a result.

Montreal

So although this is “West Coast Adventures”, I kinda travel around a lot. A few weeks back I went to Montreal to visit Melissa Bacon from UNSW soccer, and Lucy was there for her birthday to see a Habs game.

Highlights: Lucy’s sheer excitement over the game - she could not get the smile off her face afterwards, and kept giggling to herself all night.
Mel and I went to the art gallery the next day, and saw Napoleon’s hat from his Russian campaign. Totally did not expect that. I highly recommend checking it out.

And so it begins, again

I’m not doing a very good job at keeping in touch with people via e-mail. At least not as good a job as I’d like. So in efforts to stay in touch with friends in Australia, and Canada, and everywhere else, I’m starting up the blog again. I’ll try and keep it somewhat up to date.

And the blog shall begin with a return to blue hair: