Nice Music

Listening to: Hauraki

So further to the observation of my girls dancing to Soundgarden, with the public holiday today I had my mp3 player hooked up to the stereo on random all afternoon. It was still going quietly in the background at dinnertime, when I noticed Sophie dancing in her seat to this track:

"Sophie dance?" I asked.
"Music nice daddy!"
She liked the next two tracks offered up as well


This is encouraging :).

Darlings vs Discs

Right now the mini-mes are winning. It's a delicate balance between trying to encourage my children to enjoy our CD and DVD collection, while ensuring the little monsters cherubs don't destroy them in the process. Charlotte has recently developed a fondness for Bohemian Rhapsody, and the other morning I discovered both sisters dancing away happily to this Soundgarden track, which is good. I like.

There have been casualties though, mostly due to the inherent difficulty factor for little fingers getting discs out of their cases, and associated leverage issues.

This Muppet Show DVD looks fine right?

Wrong. . .

It gets worse.

Much, much worse.

Having introduced Charlotte to the first Star Wars over the summer, (Ep IV, we do not talk about that other trilogy that happened)  we thought she was ready for Episode V, and the reveal of reveals contained therein. We even had a camera ready. Then we went to put the DVD in the player, and found this. Can you see the problem?

Luke's response to Vader's daddy revelation seemed appropriate at this point. Not that we could WATCH it.

Witness statements as to who jumped the gun (both adults being out of the room at the time) were inconclusive. . .

Charlotte still hasn't seen The Empire Strikes Back.

I like weather but. . .

. . . I'm glad I live in a place where weather forecasters don't have to tell people to get underground if they don't want to risk their lives.

I like extreme weather, but the ultraviolence of tornadoes scares me as much as it fascinates. And we don't even get big tornadoes here, let alone ones that can play poltergeist with a car park in a matter of seconds.

That's the single most unreal image I've seen from Oklahoma today (that I'm going to comment on at least. As a parent of young children I don't have any words for what happened at the elementary school). There was a little one near Wellington a couple of years ago, and you can still see where it went when you drive by. What took place in Moore is surreal by comparison.

Cool Contrails over Wellington

Having been involved in a couple of in depth discussions about contrails lately, I thought I'd share a couple of cool ones I've photographed over Wellington. The major air-routes where contrailing occurs run to the east and west of Wellington, so trails directly overhead aren't that common.

While heading into town to catch the theme decalled Air New Zealand Boeing 777 flyover for the Hobbit world premier last year (because that's the sort of stuff that happens in my town)-

- I noticed this apparition arising from the west. At first I thought it might be the 777 turning up early at altitude, but then realised it was unlikely to be approaching from that direction, and the four engine trails suggested something else.

It turned out to be a QANTAS 747-438 a few hours into a 12 hour flight from Sydney to Santiago, and laying a spectacular contrail over NZ's capital in the process. Normally this flight crosses NZ much further south; 747s aren't often seen here. Props to my wife for taking these pics with my camera while leaning out of a car window stuck in traffic:

I caught another cool contrailer a couple of years ago. I don't normally bother photographing trails too much, unless they stand out, and this one did. I hadn't seen a trail that fanned out like this one did before, and it turned out to be a USAF C-17 Globemaster III en route from Hawaii to Christchurch to support the Deep Freeze Antarctic operation that is based there.

One thing I figured out from this is that you can identify a C-17 from the shape of the contrail alone, which is kind of a neat if mostly useless trick.

Two!

Laying on the cute two days in a row, but my awesome wee Sophie is two today. This is a typical pose for her :)

Odd couple

Slightly strange superhero/american gothic portrait of my two favourite wierdos at a little airshow we went to last weekend.

Remembering Juliette

Last week was the first anniversary of me finding out my first girlfriend had died. A year since the phone call saying the death notice was in the paper, a year since the funeral. It was the biggest reason I didn't blog much last year. I'd never lost anyone that close to me before and it really knocked me back for a while. I was pondering just what to blog about this, or even to blog about it at all. It's a confusing thing. She was the centre of my world once, but not for that long and it was half a lifetime ago, so why so bothered? What level of grief is appropriate? Is there even such a thing? But then you remember that even if you didn't see them often, you still cared about this person.

This is me and Juliette about a million nineteen years ago. We dated for 9 months between summers in 1994, when we were both 17 turning 18. I was a first year, and she was in her last year of high school. I wasn't her first, and very much a naif - she taught me a lot about how to be in a relationship. Somebody had to, since I was clueless on the topic. Both being stroppy teenagers, we partied well (I've been told we appeared virtually inseperable at times), and occasionally fought well too. Lots of good times, a few forgettable ones, and a few that will forever stay between me and her to protect the innocent guilty.

We didn't end well, and were on each others shitlists for a while, but stayed in the same circles and eventually realised that we actually could still be friends. After a few years we were pretty much reconciled (and ironically being a bit more mature much better suited to being in an actual relationship, had the prior history not been there). Eventually though as the 90's drew to a close we went separate ways, and lost touch a little bit. We caught up on the odd occasion, but after around 2003 I lost touch with her completely until a couple of years ago. The last time I saw her was about a year before she died (at a barbecue notable for the attendance of not only all of my exes but my wife. Since they are all nice people, my world didn't implode). My wife being the wonderful soul she is, left us alone to fill in the gaps. The deal fate gave her in the form of bipolar disorder was a particularly shitty one, and the intervening years unkind. It saddens me still to think of all the talents she had (she was good at a lot of things), and potential and happiness she wasn't able to realise. After a lot of struggle though, things seemed to be looking up for her. We parted well that night, at peace with each other, and made plans to try and see each other a bit more often, but busy lives got in the way and suddenly there could be no more catchups ever. 

It occurred to me that when an ex dies, and you are still living in the same place as you were when you were dating, it's a bit like breaking up with them all over again. You look around and remember, this is where we did this, that is where we did that, like no time has passed at all. I thought about what I could write about, what stories to relate, but then realised that the things that most reminded me of her were songs. Music was one of the things we bonded over and nearly two decades later the associations are still strong, so that is the eulogy I'm choosing. They might not be particularly great or funny memories, but they're mine.

The song she hated because she thought love should be a 24/7 thing : Friday I’m In Love

The song that reminds me a lot of that time, of being old enough to date, but still young enough to be restricted, particularly when it comes to having to catch buses to get around if the parents you are still living with won't lend you a car: Dancing in the moonlight

The song that we discussed a lot, and just seemed to capture a lot of moments, including a discussion at a party with somebody or other's cousin, who was the lead singer with a deep voice of an improbably named band called Thrusthusband (a name they wrote in Greek), and just how the deep voice in the song worked: Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

The song she requested for me one night when we were playing dedication tag on Kix FM: Tunnel of Love. They didn't have it, so played Imagine instead, which isn't one of my faves (to put it politely). I still have the tape of the announcer's explanation somewhere.
 

The song I got played for her: Nights In White Satin. She loved The Moody Blues.

The song that at 2:20 reminds me of a single perfect moment at the 1994 Sacred Heart school ball : Hey Now (Girls Just Want To Have Fun)

The song she got bouncing up and down excited about in the car one Friday night on the way to her hockey game because she picked the “very late” lyric before it came up on her first listen: Round Here. It’s one of my favourite memories of her. I still remember the exact stretch of road we were on.

The two songs we bought a matching pair of cassingles together: Mr Jones and Streets Of Philadelphia.

The song from that year's Pink Floyd album, that we sat with nothing to say just staring out the window from her parents lounge one rainy day: Marooned. She gave me a Pink Floyd T-Shirt for my birthday, which still fits.

The song that always reminds me of a particular Friday night party in March 1994 and going to watch her play high school cricket the next day, and whose “time to say goodbye now” lyric particularly resonated after her death: Tear in your hand.

The album she introduced me to, via an arabian pirate copy she got when her family lived in Syria: Wish You Were Here

The song I first heard on a Vic Uni pub crawl we both went on, on a jukebox in the old St George Hotel bar, despite neither of us being Vic students, or of a legal age to drink: Disarm. The opening to this song from the same album is beautiful and always reminds me of those times. That album was everywhere then.

The song from an album that was at every party we went to then, and would remind me of her in the period after we split: Sitting Inside My Head.

The song I played at her the night we broke up. Yeah, subtle: Crazy Love Part II.

Two songs that for whatever reasons, helped me deal with things last year: Diamond Jigsaw and Scribble. When driving alone in the car at night for a couple of weeks I would just play them over and over.

We both loved Supertramp. I remember her favourite song of theirs was School, but they carried her coffin out of the church to Take The Long Way Home. It's a favourite of mine but I haven't felt the urge to listen to it since.