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Low tech

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I’m in Port Vincent for New Year’s. It’s a great place to be. On New Year’s Day there is a Gala Day, with street markets, lots of really shitty but tasty food, a big bouncy castle for the kidlets and really really bad entertainment played over an ancient PA.

It’s brilliant.

We’re staying with friends who live on the main street. Which is nice.

Anyway, around this time of year, what with all the colour and summerness of the place, I like to whack a colour film in my Holga and set out to take that quintessential summer photo.

I took the kids to the beach this morning: my two and our friends’ son. He saw the Holga and wanted to know if it was a real camera. My eldest explained to him that it was a Toy Camera that took real photos.

The boy was trying to look at the back of it. I could tell why.

“Doesn’t it have a screen?” he asked.

“A screen?” I said. “It doesn’t even have batteries.”

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Posted in Bairn, Ma vie, Photography, Travels | 1 Comment »

Choosing baby names (.com)

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

I have two daughters. They were born 2.5 years apart and the birth of my second roughly coincided with when gmail was starting up by invitation only and giving email addresses to blogger users.

I thought, being the forward thinking type, it would be a good idea to sign my girls up right then. Sure, neither of them could read or write but this was probably their only shot of getting their firstname.lastname@ combination. Generations of kids below us will be consigned to a world of email addresses that will need to have their year of birth or arbitrary characters appended to their first.last base.

Signing them up at birth (theirs, gmail’s) was the least I could do to give them a sense of ownership over their own names.

With little miss L, I was able to secure her first.last combination. With little miss M though, her first.last was taken, so I signed her up twice. So when she’s a bit older she’ll have the choice of first.middle or first.m.last. Thing is, her middle name is way cooler than her first name, so I’m glad I’ve given her the option. I missed out on her first.last combination because, I’m sure, of my wife’s insistence on giving her the most popular first name going at the time. But let’s not go there.

I was mentioning this to a colleague this morning and he suggested that couples having kids now might actually want to consider going so far as finding out which gmail combinations are still available before committing to a name for their kids.

Wish I’d thought of that four years ago.

Posted in Bairn, Idea v. Reality, Internet | No Comments »

53

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

I was at the local brickbuster last weekend looking for something for the kids to watch. I had Little Miss L with me, who was turning her nose up at pretty much everything they had there as they were either old rubbish, good stuff that she’s seen before, or new rubbish, including the Bratz movies (though I was turning my nose up at those. Slutz, I call them. And yeah, it’s amazing how suddenly conservative you get when there’s a five-year-old girl involved).

The one thing we did seem to settle on was Herbie Goes Bananas. Strange choice for a 5yo girl, I thought but I was a bit of a Herbie fan when I was around 10, so I thought if nothing else, I might get a giggle out of it.

Anyway, it was a hit. They both loved it and have watched it again every day this last week (it’s due back today). There’s a good bit of info floating around on it but the standouts are that they used 26 prop Herbies in the making of it, and there’s one scene where a prop Herbie is thrown overboard from a ship. And word has it, is still there. The IMDB says that the prop Herbies were auctioned off after filming for as little as US$25 but in the film a couple of them get beaten up pretty badly (that bullfight was savage) so they were probably lucky to get that much.

So yesterday, C went to Brickbuster again with Little Miss L and came back with not only The Love Bug but also Herbie Fully Loaded, so Herbieville here at the mo.

Little Miss M is in her second viewing of HFL right now. The good parts are the original Love Bug soundtrack and Lindsay Lohan’s winning smile. The not so good is the stupid eyelids they put on the VW and the electric, sparky fx. Still, they probably had to do something with all those CG artists employed by the studio.

The highlight of HFL though, is when Matt Dillon looks under the hood (or the boot, in this case) to have a go at sabotaging the engine, and you know that cute little bug is gonna squirt oil in his face, it’s just a matter of when, and then maybe you think he might not do it because it’s an old gag and this is a new movie, the dramatic irony is intense, but then HE DOES IT!!

Comedy gold.

And in yesterday’s paper I was checking out the prices of old veedubs.

Posted in Bairn, Film | No Comments »

Pigfish

Friday, May 30th, 2008

We all went to the Markets tonight and were buying meat from the butcher.

Little Miss M saw the chevapchichis (I have no idea how to spell that) and said “Look at the salami fish fingers!”

They’re so cute when they’re three.

Posted in Adelaide, Bairn, Food | No Comments »

You know you’re a parent when…

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Sunday night, watching TV with C. Richard Roxborough’s girlfriend has just arrived from London. They’re having a conversation.

C: What have I seen her in?

Me: Playschool.

C: Yeah, that’s it.

Posted in Bairn, Media | No Comments »

Ball sports and insects

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Little Miss M said “there’s tennis”.
I asked where
She said in the mud.
I said “In the mud?”
“Yeah, there’s tennis in the mud. I can hear them.”
I think she meant crickets

Posted in Bairn | No Comments »

Dress-ups

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

The slightly more significant other had a date to meet an old friend for brunch today. They had dinner last night and the old friend wanted to meet the little misses. C had picked clothes for both of them but Little Miss L, in one of her many bouts of stubbornness and feisty independence wasn’t having any of it. She pulled out a skirt and top that she wanted to wear. C is rather stubborn too, so there was a stalemate. I tried to broker a deal, with C conceding to the L-favoured top as long as the white shorts (not the denim skirt) went with it.

I put this to Little Miss L, explaining the concept of compromise. But she still saw that she was being dictated to, so even meeting half-way was still an infringement on her liberty and was therefore inherently unfair. (Articulate little thing, she is.)

So when diplomacy fails, C did what any parent would do under the circs: she bribed her to wear the originally picked-out outfit. There may have been the promise of chocolate or unfeasibly large lollipops in the offing; I don’t know the details. And the C-picked outfit went on and all was right with the world.

Then C walked in on me as I was doing up my shoes…

“You’re not wearing that, are you?”

Posted in Bairn, Ma vie | 3 Comments »

Just say No to Bindeez

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Little Miss L just had a birthday. She turned five. We bought her (and when I say ‘we’, I mean my wife and her mum went into Big W four months ago and put about $1ooo worth of stuff on lay-by) some of those ridiculous things called Bindeez.

For a start, they wouldn’t have been my choice. Having experienced the fallout of buying her presents with as many as 20 or 30 small parts, you learn pretty quickly that small parts don’t stay together for very long. Pretty soon you’re finding small dolls’ shoes, mini plastic bananas, dolls’ house plates, cups and bottles, toy money, flash cards, tic-tac-toe pieces, My Little Pony combs and assorted bits of train track all over the house. Last week she got into the trivial pursuit box, so we’re still finding bits of yellow pie under the couch.

Why then, oh why would we want to go out and buy her a toy that openly boasts on the box that it contains 800 small, fiddly, and yes… round pieces, 600 of which would invariably end up under the fridge. I somehow knew from the outset that it was a bad idea. This was a week ago.

Today, this (from which I will hereunder quote):

The New South Wales and ACT governments have banned a popular toy called Bindeez – because the colourful beads release a compound closely resembling the illegal drug GHB when they are swallowed.
…

NSW Fair Trading Minister Linda Burney has announced an immediate product recall pending further testing.

“We will advise parents as more information comes along but if you have Bindeez in your home, please remove them from anywhere where children can actually get to them, play with them and use them,” she said.

Miss L had a party on the weekend. She scored two smaller boxes of the things.

With any luck we’ll get a refund. Though I’m thinking I could make more by selling them to the crackheads down West Terrace this Saturday night.

Actually, do you think I could get my mother-in-law arrested for being a pusher?

Posted in Adelaide, Bairn, Consumer goods, Featured | No Comments »

Upside-down

Friday, October 26th, 2007

The Umbilical Brothers have a kids’ TV show called The Upside Down Show. I’ve never really been big fans of the UBs, who as far as I could tell made a living out of making squelching noises into a microphone, but for kids TV, they’re excellent.

They have this thing at the start of every show where they use an imaginary remote control to start or stop the action. They then hand it through the TV, to the viewers.

My daughters have just had an argument over who gets to hold the remote.

Posted in Bairn, Media | No Comments »

someone.else@gmail.com

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

One of the first things I did when Gmail was released to bloggers, was to sign up my kids. Sure, they can’t read yet but I figure one day they’ll probably learn and will want to email their friends. So instead of them having usernames like littlemissl8382938576298 and little.miss.m09847au, I thought I’d get in early and stake a claim to their names while the going was good.

I have a Gmail address which is firstname.lastname@ and I have an evil twin: someone with the same name as me who obviously thought they got dibs on the good email address, when they didn’t. I get library notices when his books are about to be overdue. Last week I even logged on and renewed his travel guide to Spain (me… sorry, he and some friends are going on holiday to Ibiza. In fact, we may even be there now). I’d hate to have to pay the late fee.

Now it turns out one of the girls has an evil twin also. I had an email for her a few weeks ago from a friend of hers, talking about moving out of home and starting college. She’s from the US, and I figure must be 18 or so and starting uni in September. When I got this email, from Stephanie, her friend, I wrote back and let her know she had the wrong address. Now an email has come from her dad to her and her brother. It’s one of those “you’ve made your mother and I so proud” letters. We’ve all had those.

I’m a little concerned though that this other father of little miss L, who is so proud and making such an effort to connect with his little girl, doesn’t know her email address.

Of greater concern is the fact that he wrote the email in Comic Sans. What is it with Dads?

Posted in Bairn, Internet | 3 Comments »

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