Goose!

Saw this mama in a tree planter at a local mall. I wonder what made her nest there of all places?

And we're 4 months away from moving into our condo! It looks practically finished from the outside, although some balcony railings haven't been put in yet, so they've been fenced off with yellow rails.

Also, looking in from the outside we could tell that much of the interiors were still being worked on. We're going to select appliances on Monday!

Happy birthday, Jamie Johnson blog

20% of the readers of this blog has a birthday today and her name is Jamie Johnson! Happy birthday, Jamie! Although I've never met you, I feel like I know you. (And I think if you, Allison, and Hannah ever got together in the same room one day, the craziness would explode my head.)

So, long time no post. We'd been meaning to! We took pictures and stuff but just never took that final step of adding them to our blog. Why am I admitting this? Why even bring this up? Let's just move on.

Over Easter, Allison and I drove down to Charlottesville, VA to visit her Aunt Linda:

Waterless urinal at a rest stop in Somerset, PA. Think about that for a second: WATER. LESS.

For sale at the tractor supply store in Charlottesville: baby chicks!

... and ducklings! The sign said "For agricultural purposes only."

They're cuter when you can hear them cheeping. :)

Aunt Linda lives on a mountain and regularly has deer in her backyard. We've seen them a few times on past visits. They're becoming quite a herd!

(Sorry, I'm still not used to turning my phone sideways to film. Stupid black bars.)

We were in Charlottesville for four days. On the last day, when we stopped for gas on our way out of Charlottesville, Allison spotted this vehicle nearby:

We considered getting out and doing something crazy in front of the Google Street View camera, but before we could go embarrass ourselves, we realized that the camera probably wasn't on. Oh well.

Condo update:

Five months until we move into our new place! This picture is about a month old so I imagine more of the frontage is done now, but our unit is at the top of the bottom tier (6th floor). Counting down the days!

Chameleon Popcorn Muncher

This is Allison's impression of a popcornivore chameleon:

Snow Day

The biggest snow storm in five years started in Toronto at around 7:00 p.m. last night, carried on right through the day today, and only stopped coming down at 9:30 p.m. tonight. It's headed to Quebec, New England, and the Atlantic now. People had snow days all over the place, including us. By dinner time, Subway and the grocery store near our house had already closed at least three hours early. And since people have been sharing their photos and videos on Facebook all day, here's ours. :)

It's a little hard to tell how much snow there is here but look at where it comes up to relative to the doors and tires. Allison and I had to shovel that!! *flex*

Hazel

This is my rabbit, Hazel. She's a Holland mini lop-ear, although I don't know mini compared to what, because she's pretty big.

Hazel's named after the main character in one of my favorite books, "Watership Down". When we come down to work, she's our Hazel-Rah and the recycling box is her throne. :)

Hazel is five and a half years old, which in human years amounts to about 55 yrs, I guess. She used to bite when startled, so everyone was scared of her, but she's gotten much better now. A couple of months ago, she stopped eating, so Allison and I took her to the vet, where she was found to have a large abscess on the left side of her jaw. The vet put her under and plucked out a loose molar that was sitting on top of the abscess and pop, out came three more teeth and a large pulpy chunk of her jaw. There is now a big gap between the front of her jaw and its left hinge, the part that connects to the rest of her skull so that she can chew properly. She can still eat though -- which I think is amazing -- although the lower part of her jaw is now all wobbly and can't exert much strength anymore. Allison and I have to feed her a goopy mixture of fiber and probiotic bacteria culture every night to supplement her pellets because she no longer eats hay.

You'd think that she'd be in pain and feeling miserable all day, but not so! Ever since the procedure, Allison and I have kept her in our office, letting her hop around loose, stuffing herself into corners, and ripping up pieces of scrap paper. In the photo, you can see one such piece -- a receipt from Subway -- sitting on the floor. A few minutes after we'd taken this picture, she climbed out of the recycling box, hopped straight over to the receipt, and shredded it enthusiastically like it was a redacted CIA file from "Zero Dark Thirty". 

She used to spend most of her time in a big cage in the living room. Ever since we've given her free reign of this room, however, she's become more playful, more affectionate, and more... rabbit-like. She likes to lick Allison's pants whenever Allison sits on the floor with her and will often sit under my chair doing nothing for an hour at a time.

Unique

A company in Hawaii is licensing our artwork to make into iPhone and iPad cases. They sent us samples and Allison grabbed this one (because she is one of the few here who uses iPhone 4). This image is called "Bath Time" (painted by Kei) and is currently the only one in existence! Woo uniqueness! :)

Click!

Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

If you took this thing with you into a time machine and showed it to people 200 years ago, they would either worship you as their king or burn you for witchcraft, haha.

Fan Expo

Last weekend, we worked the Canadian nerd prom: Fan Expo.

Fan Expo is the biggest pop culture, gaming, comic book, and independent pop art event in Canada. When we first started the studio, Fan Expo was still struggling with whether to call itself Toronto Comic Con or Toronto Fan Expo.

(There was another smaller convention in the city at the time that was battling with Fan Expo for the name of "Toronto Comic Con", but through some morally shifty practices, Fan Expo eventually won, that other con is now defunct, and after all that trouble, Fan Expo abandoned the "Toronto Comic Con" name a couple of years later because it was too restrictive against what they wanted to expand into, which was pop culture beyond comics. Wow, what a sentence!)

Fan Expo built itself into the Canadian version of the San Diego Comic-Con (which, incidentally, didn't let the word "Comic" in its name hold it back from its grander aspirations), drawing over 80,000 fans last year. This year, the show took up the entire South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Center, and still they had to stop people at the door on Friday and Saturday because the building was at capacity. So, I guess it's fair to say that this year's show topped last year's; I wouldn't be surprised if they announced a final tally of over 100,000 attendees this year.

Allison and I were excited to go this year because Fan Expo had broken through to the next tier of celebrity guests. The last time we went, they featured stars who were essentially now off significant TV: Summer Glau from "Firefly", James Marsters from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", William Shatner who played Captain Kirk. They had Stan Lee the last time we went, but I wouldn't include Stan because he was the biggest name there and definitely not a lower tier celebrity.

This year, they had Darrell and Shane from "The Walking Dead" and J.J., Reid, and Garcia from "Criminal Minds", which are two shows that Allison and I follow so we were excited to see them in person. (They also had Julie Benz who played Rita in "Dexter", which we watch, but I wasn't as pumped for her because I couldn't stand Rita's character, and plus she's a season removed from being on the show anyway; and Gillian Anderson who played Agent Scully in "The X Files", which I used to watch, but she's now MANY years removed from the A- or even the B-list, sadly.)

But at the con, I discovered something that was even more exciting to me than seeing the stars of my favorite TV shows:

"I'm gonna wreck it!"

So there's this animated feature coming out in November from Disney called "Wreck-It Ralph". It's about a long-time bad guy named Wreck-It Ralph from a videogame called "Fix-It Felix" (a Donkey Kong-esque game), who longs to be the good guy. So he busts out of his game and sneaks into another, newer game to become the hero. This photo is of an old style arcade console of "Fix-It Felix". (You can see the standing posters for the movie on either side, leaning against the cabinet.)

Did I mention that "Fix-It Felix" is not a real game? So Disney had this game created as part of its marketing campaign AND IT WORKS! It takes quarters and everything!

When I saw this machine, I had a Jamie Johnson moment: "ASDLKFJ THAT'S SO COOL!"

All of us in the studio are very excited about this movie. It seems like Disney's acquisition of Pixar has paid off: the creativity at Pixar has started leaching over to Disney already.

The sad thing about this film is that we'd worked on a similar movie for Dreamworks last year, which, last I checked, was still in pre-production. With "Ralph" coming out, it's extremely unlikely that anything will come of our movie now. Oh well.

For three and a half days, Allison and I worked our tables, selling prints, handing out business cards (if anyone wants any, just email or Facebook me or Allison with your mailing address and we'll send you some, they're really cute and have our artwork on them :). Standing up all that time was more physically taxing than you'd think.

Luckily, we recently got one of these:

The Queen sitting in her massage throne.

 

 ASDLKFJ SO COOL. :)

Update Gumbo

Why "gumbo"? Why not "stew" or "soup" or even "random update salad"? Simple answer: I like the sound of the word "gumbo"; just saying the word gives me an idea of what  gumbo is, even without ever having experienced it firsthand, which I think is a rare and magical aspect of language. Gumbo sounds yummy, another word that I think actually sounds like it means what it means, know what I mean? :)

So, a lot has happened since our last update. And that's partly the problem, isn't it? One big thing happens and you don't write about it. Then something else big happens and you realize that in order to write about the second thing, you should write about the first thing, and that seems like a big task so you put it off. Then a third thing happens and everything just piles up and nothing gets written down. Hence, the gumbo: just throw everything into a pot together and stir, and hopefully it tastes all right.

So, in semi-chronological order:

In May, Allison got her Permanent Resident status. We had to hop across the border into New York, and then immediately turn around and re-enter Canada so that Canadian Immigration could record her official "entry" into Canada and rubber-stamp her new immigrant status. While we were at the border, we witnessed a couple in a jam-packed minivan get searched by customs officials. Six weeks later, Allison received her official Permanent Resident card in the mail (like an green card in the US), which was followed by registering for a new driver's license (so she can get car insurance), social insurance card (so she can work), and a health card (so that she can take advantage of our vaunted "free" health care).

At the end of June, we drove Allison's car down to Virginia to visit Aunt Linda and Uncle Chip. It was the first time I met any of Allison's cousins, namely Brent, who is an independent used car dealer. Allison's family is quite good-looking, it made me jealous, haha. I hope those beauty genes get passed on to our future kids. Brent bought Allison's car off her and we flew back home on American Airlines.

July was a stifling, hot blur of days, much like what the entire east coast got. For a few weeks, we had temperatures averaging over 100F with humidity, and little rain. The grass all withered and turned to straw, and the windows remained sealed tight with the air conditioning on full blast. Ugh.

End of July and early August, we watched the Olympics and kept track of the medal count for Team USA and Team Canada. This year, Team Canada had an "Own the Podium" campaign, which involved... I don't know, a lot of wishing on stars, I guess. I hadn't heard anything about extra funding for our Olympic athletes for the last four years and now suddenly, we wanted to "own the podium"? At the expense of whom? Anyway, it became clear later on that "owning the podium" meant a target of finishing in the top 12 in medal count. Top 12? How is that "owning" anything? Top 12 (i.e. shooting for #10 or 11) is more like "subletting the podium" or "product placement on the podium", which by the way, we didn't even accomplish. Canada finished 13th in medal count, with most of our medals being bronze. Canada: #1 at finishing #3. But hey, at least we have a high dollar and free health care, I guess. :P

Today, we picked up Allison's new car, which we leased with the money that she got for her old car. It's a black 2012 Honda Civic coupe, kitted with the same features as her old Civic. Allison didn't drive my car, but she likes driving this car.

Barefoot.

"If you were from the south, you'd understand," she said.

Yeah, if. As of now though, I don't really get it, haha.

Our lives revolve around what feels like a small number of things:

1) Work: Allison is in charge of production and distribution. She's been making prints almost non-stop for art shows since March. It all peaks in July and August (for San Diego Comic-Con and Fan Expo in Toronto). In addition to that, we picked up a new movie project with Sony last week, which will keep us busy into October.

2) Guinea pigs: News flash -- the guinea pigs are still cute. Allison has taken to calling Peanut, "Bawse Pig" for no real reason other than it sounds cute and funny at the same time.

3) Videogames: This is the most convenient downtime escape that we have. Allison is still playing World of Warcraft, while I've jumped around from game to game. First I was on Tera, then Diablo 3, then Batman: Arkham City, then Civilization V, and now I'm replaying Skyrim. And unless you actually play one of these games, this paragraph is probably of little interest to you, haha.

4) TV: This is exclusive to Allison. She has been watching a lot of "Legend of Korra", "Adventure Time", and more recently, "My Little Pony". Strangely enough, she was introduced to "My Little Pony" by our summer intern, who is a 22 year old "brony" (male "My Little Pony" fan, of which there are apparently many). Allison likes the show but remains skeptical about why it would attract male viewers in their 20's.

For me, I've been trying to maximize my time by listening to certain audiobooks while I'm unwinding with a computer game or whatever. I've recently finished listening to "Extraordinary Leadership" by Robin Sharma and "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. It sounds completely cheesy, but I personally feel like the advice from these books helped change my perception of people and how the world works.

So that's the last four months in a nutshell. Not the most graceful of dismounts, but hey, this blog is Canadian so excellence is hoped for but not expected. At best, this update gumbo can contend for a bronze medal with its disconnected, mixed metaphors. :)

Our New Home!

Woohoo! Only 2 years left to go! :P

Lotion Commotion

I think this is pretty self-explanatory:



And what do you think of daddy's whining, Peanut? Not much, clearly.


("Peanut's my name and chillin's my game.")

It's the Little Things...

In Hong Kong, Allison said the place was like Chinatown in Toronto, writ large.

Taiwan, on the other hand, was more different to her. It was all in the little things:



Whereas we might have dandelions or purple loosestrife growing in the neglected ditches alongside roads or barren dirt around vacant lots, in Taiwan, they have... banana trees. O.O



Lay's potato chips. You can see the translated flavor on the bag, "Original". The Chinese translation above it is much more descriptive. It says, "American classic original flavor". In Taiwan, just being American is a selling point. :)



No selling points needed here. :)

Allison said what's interesting is that, even if the bottles were completely unlabeled, she'd still know what it was. How's that for global marketing?

Not Your Average Motel

There's really no suitable translation in English for the type of hotel we stayed at in Taiwan. It was part motel, part hotel, part Las Vegas sensory overload.

It was motel-ish in the sense that every room includes a garage for you to park your car. The door to the room is inside the garage much in the same way many houses have garage entrances.

It was hotel-ish in the sense that the rooms are not cramped and cheap the way we might image motels to be.

And it was Vegas-ish in the sense that... well, check it out for yourself:



This was our room as seen looking left-center from the front door. Neon track lighting in the floor and ceiling and there in the right of the picture, a hot tub built right into the bathroom floor. You can see a TV in the wall at around knee-height.

If you look carefully, there's a black rectangle in the wall behind the curtain behind the big TV. That's the door into a private sauna.



This is the living area and bar. In terms of orientation, this is to the right of the first picture. (The chair in the very left of this picture with my -- *ahem* -- pants on it is at the very right of the top picture.)



And here's the vanity, which was to the right of the hot tub. In the right of this picture is the door to the washroom in which there's yet another TV.

I'd estimate the total size of the room to be about 1,000 sq. ft. Total TV count: 3.

Viva Las Vegas, baby! :)

Zookeeping 101

Our trip to Taiwan was primarily to visit my family. I'm the oldest son of the oldest son, so when my folks heard that I'd gotten married, they were all anxious to meet our new "Kate Middleton", so to speak, haha.

On our second day in Taiwan, my uncle took us to visit a friend of his who owns half a small town. She lives on a gated property with a menagerie of various birds and small animals. In addition to those in the video, she also has a Japanese crested rooster and his hens, a couple of ducks that live on her koi pond, and two large parrots, a blue one and a white one. The white one can say "Hello," and "How are you?" while the blue one says, "Good morning," and "Good night,"... in Japanese. I tried to get a video of them but wound up with just 5 minutes of them eating crackers. (And of course, as soon as I put the camera away, they both started yakking up a storm. Figures.)

Final Scenes from Hong Kong

This is Lan Kwai Fong, the ex-patriot center of Hong Kong.



Most of the restaurants and bars in this area have American, British, or Australian themes and cater mainly to foreigners (or, on weekends, locals who are looking to hook up with a foreigner :P).

We unwittingly wandered into LKF during their Carnival street event. I thought this was totally random; Carnival occurs in February, not sure why they chose November for Carnival. Maybe they just wanted an excuse to throw a party and someone happened to pick Carnival out of a hat. *shrug*

Allison said that she didn't feel like Hong Kong was a different country. "It's like just one enormous Chinatown, really. Not much different from Toronto."

Well, here are a couple of things we don't have in Toronto:



Cell phone service in the subway (which I wish we had).



McDonald's delivery (which I'm glad we don't).

Anyway, that's it for Hong Kong! Next up: Taiwan!

Lamma Island

The territory of Hong Kong is split up into a few parts with Mainland China at its northern border. Coming south out of China, you would enter the New Territories (which have been "new" for decades now), then Kowloon, which ends at the harbor. South across the harbor is Hong Kong Island.

In the sea around Hong Kong Island are the Outlying Islands, of which there are several larger ones such as Lantau Island (where the international airport and Hong Kong Disneyland is), Cheung Chau, and Lamma Island where people live and commute to Hong Kong and Kowloon.

We took a 30-minute ferry ride to Lamma Island on the Sunday of our Hong Kong trip. As of Saturday, the forecast called for rain but lo and behold, the weatherman was wrong; it was blazing sunshine all day.



Lamma Island is a kind of seaside resort town, except without the resorts. There are beaches, quaint townhomes, narrow streets lined with shops, people on bikes, and restaurants by the seashore.

Oh, and there's a power plant on the far side of the island away from town, you might have noticed that in the above picture.



This is a small temple near the beginning of our hiking route across the island. I'm not sure what religion this is; I know it's not Buddhist or Taoist. The picture on the wall looks kind of like a space alien so maybe it's Scientologist.



Lamma Island is not very urbanized so lots of homes have vegetable gardens in the back, and some of these gardens have fruit trees. Mainly, we just saw bananas and papaya; trees that are mainly tall but not very wide. One house had a lime tree, but we passed it before I had the notion to take pictures of everything. :(



And this is a pink flower tree that Allison liked. Although on closer inspection, we found that the pink "petals" were really leaves and the little white puffs in the middle were the actual flowers. Deceptive!

Teppanyaki

I think it's interesting how many cultures, over the centuries of civilization, have developed some sort of heat-a-metal-surface-and-cook-food-on-it style of cuisine. The Mongolians have it, so do the Koreans. And of course, the entire state of Florida is about cooking food on a metal grill over a fire, pretty much.

Allison and I had teppanyaki with my old college friends who are now based in Hong Kong (of which there are surprisingly many), and other former colleagues from back when I used to write ads there.

Teppanyaki is the Japanese version of cooking on a hot metal surface. "Teppanyaki" literally translates to "metal plate cuisine". I think they should have called it "kasainitsuiteyaki", which, according to Google Translator, should mean "on fire cuisine" because, really, setting the food on fire is the best part!



Now my nomination of best party trick of all time (avert your eyes if you're squeamish about freaks of nature):

When we scratch ourselves, the spot we scratched often goes pale (because the body detects trauma and closes off capillaries near the skin surface to reduce bleeding), and then pink or red again (because the body realizes it hasn't suffered an injury and re-opens capillaries and gets blood flowing again).

My friend, Kent, takes this to the next level. Now, I don't know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with histamine hypersensitivity. In any case, when you scratch him, not only does his skin go pale and then back to pink again, it... well, it puffs up like this:



This was the first time Allison saw this and she was both horrified AND fascinated.

And that's why Kent used to get all the girls in school. Weirdo. :P

Ocean Park

It was 90% my idea to go to Ocean Park. Allison has had the Charleston Aquarium for most of her life and she thinks dolphin shows are inhumane, so another park dedicated to sealife didn't interest her.

"But Allison," I said, "Ocean Park has pandas!"

She brightened. "Really?" Scowl. "What do pandas have to do with the ocean?"

"Uh... well, they're from the mountains of China... which is a country... with shorelines... uh, on the ocean."

She blinked at me, then shrugged. "Okay, sure. I love pandas."



And as promised, here are some more pictures of An An in mid-pace, and Jia Jia in mid-sleep.


An An pacing back and forth, back and forth.


Jia Jia taking an afternoon nap.

Coming out of the panda building, Allison proclaimed, "It was worth $40 just to see the pandas!"

... but we went to check out the fish anyway. :P


I found Nemo!


Cuttlefish. I'd seen these at the market near our hotel. Cool creatures but not worth $40 at current market prices.


Japanese spider crabs. These had leg spans of 3 to 4 ft. but spider crabs can grow up to 12 ft. in leg span.



So as you can see from this blog post, we made it! :)

Victoria Peak

Our first full day in Hong Kong, Allison and I went to Victoria Peak because... well, that's what tourists do. :)

We rode the Peak Tram, which is really steep, read the posters about the history of the Peak and how the British colonists made it into what it is today, had Haagen Dazs and took a few pictures.



I took this picture through the glass barrier that surrounded the observation deck. As you can tell, I'm terrified of heights.



Here's Allison against the Hong Kong skyline. Ah, so beautiful. And the skyline ain't bad either. :P

And of course, for something like this, we need a longwinded video:

Hong Kong Day 1

Allison and I have embarked on a great adventure to Asia consisting of 16 days in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

This building near our hotel in Hong Kong is under renovation. One uniquely Hong Kong aspect to this engineering is the type of scaffolding that they use.

Look closely:



Every time Allison and I passed by construction sites, we marveled at the lattice-work of bamboo scaffolding that reached up ten or twenty storeys, lashed solidly together with thousands of plastic ties:




What freaks me out is the idea that, as the scaffolding extends upwards outside these 20-storey buildings, someone has to lash more bamboo poles at the top! Just the thought of it gives me shivers!

Closer to the ground, around the corner from our hotel is this street market. This vendor is selling live seafood.



You can see crabs, shrimp, halibut, and snails in this picture. Being raised far from any ocean, sealife has always fascinated me. Allison keeps having to drag me away from this market, haha.