New Zealand: Christchurch to Seattle (Monday, February 22)

Written at the international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport at 5:35 pm (Los Angeles time) on Monday, February 22; and in Seattle after returning home

Today, we went out to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, a wildlife park on the outskirts of Christchurch.  All we really knew was that they had kiwi there.  It turned out that they are a three-part walk-through wildlife park/zoo.  One part for introduced wildlife — freshwater eels, wallabies, ostriches, lemurs, gibbons, capuchin monkeys, assorted birds.  Then a part for New Zealand farm life — chickens, cows, pigs, rabbits, and horses, many of them rare breeds only found in New Zealand.  And the third part was mostly native wildlife (although some introduced, mostly hundreds of years ago) — kiwi, tuatara, possums, ferrets, ducks, etc.

Willowbank has the most successful kiwi breeding program in New Zealand.  They have a nocturnal house, which allows the kiwi to be available for viewing during the day.  (If you can call it “viewing” when it’s very dark in there.  We were able to visually observe two kiwis in the house, though.)

While we were viewing the capuchin monkeys, Mom leaned her cane against the banister and >splash< into the water it fell.  The park staff was able to fish it out and hose it down for her, though.  To keep parity, I proceeded to drop my sunglasses into the eel pond (and recovered them).

We bought souvenirs at their gift shop — I got some paua shell stud earrings, a tocque with a Māori design on it, another Kiwi country CD (this one with older artists, I think), and a book on New Zealand foods (descriptions of foods, essays on New Zealand food producers, and some recipes, mostly for desserts).  We also had lunch there, and as beverage, we had Elderflower Sparkle sodas (one original and one with black currant); got to keep trying those local items!

We then got me to the airport for my return home.  Alas, I got to see absolutely nothing of downtown Christchurch in the process.

I bought a chocolate croissant at the airport with the rest of my New Zealand money, leaving me just a few coins.  I had also forgotten that I hadn’t finished the bottle of Southern Comfort I bought in Auckland, so it got tossed at security, as did the jar of Nutella-knockoff spread (which should have gone into the checked luggage, darn it).

Retracing the steps from 10 days ago, I flew Emirates Air back to Sydney and finished Julie & Julia.  Our plane was a Boeing 777; nothing special about the flight, but an ugly landing.  I swear the plane bounced twice.  Had a 3-hour layover in Sydney.  Pulled out my leftover Australian money and looked around for a small souvenir, something warranting the 6 hours total I spent in the Sydney airport, and bought a shot glass with kangaroo silhouettes on it.  That took just coins, so I have an AUS$10 bill left for some future conversion.

Then it was back on V Australia to Los Angeles.  finished an episode of Heroes I had brought with me (from December, we’re slowly catching up on it), and then watched The Hangover.  Sleep was difficult, and I have no idea how much I caught; probably just 3-4 hours, I think.  After waking up, I watched the recent version of Fame.

In Los Angeles, customs wasn’t too bad; in fact, the wait to get my suitcase was the longest part.  I found a table in the food court at the International Terminal and worked on the trip report, plus sent a few texts and a short phone call to my boyfriend.

I mentioned early in the trip report bringing an episode of Lost with me.  Well, I never got around to watching it until I was back in Los Angeles.  I thought about watching it on the Syndey-to-LA trip, but that would be just a bit too much tempting of fate.  (What, you forgot that the show started with a Syndey-to-Los Angeles plane crash?)

I read Bill Willingham’s Fables novel on the trip, Peter & Max.  A good light read, with a surprising and yet well preceded finale.  Completely in line with the comics, and hopefully with the upcoming television show.

I’ve also been reading the second omnibus volume of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (followers of previous trip reports know I read the previous volume on my trip to Europe last summer; I guess my next overseas trip will have to cover Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, and Michael Tolliver Lives?), having finished Babycakes and almost done with Significant Others.

When I dug the book out, I discovered a picture from when I worked at Frame Technology, over 15 years ago, which must be when I last (first) read the books.  I only recognized about half the people, it’s been so long.  I’ll have to put that pic up on Facebook.  (Which also serves to remind me that my Facebook contacts are people I currently know and those from high school.  I need to look up folks from college, grad school, and when I lived in the Bay Area.  For all that it’s great for having some form of contact with people I’m otherwise lost on the wayside, there are huge chunks of my life not yet connected there.)

I’m feeling quite ready to be home.  On Sunday, I found myself almost snapping at Mom at one point, due to one of her personal speaking quirk (explaining things way too much).  My neck is hurting, mostly because of working on the netbook in the car, bending my head down.  My $50 pair of headphones broke at the airport; I compressed them too hard when putting them in my bag and a plastic tab broke off, so one earpiece doesn’t stay on the bridge when they are stored.  (Still usable, just annoying to store and fish out again, becoming a jumble of cables.)  And on the plane, the waist button came off on my shorts; just a tiny thing, but still, one more thing.

Which brings me current.  Now to watch another episode of Desperate Housewives and call the trip good.

As with the trip to Europe, I’m several days behind in posting these updates, but I’ll just plod through them during the coming week, one or two a day (rather than churning them all out at once).  I’ll need to go back and do some second drafts on some pages, too.  And once they all get posted, I’ll revisit each page to correct place names and add a myriad of links.  And some day, I’ll edit together the photos and videos and get them posted to Flickr and YouTube, and then I’ll revamp the entire thing into its own set of web pages on my site, rather than a series of blog posts.

(Of course, I haven’t done the pics/video or web pages steps with either the OutGames or Dublin trip reports just yet.  Sigh.)

My boyfriend is picking me up at the airport.  I haven’t had sex with him in two weeks.  What do you think will happen tonight?  (Yeah, probably collapse into bed and sleep.)

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Updated on May 14, 2010

Updated on June 15, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.

Movie Review — Zombieland

I am so bored with zombie movies (and comics, and…).  The creatures are so one note — “Brains!” — that the entire genre comes off that way.  Most of the variations seem to be just a tweaking of the details: zombie super-heroes (maybe even zombie super-heroes in space), zombies in a shopping mall, zombies at the North Pole.

(Wait, that was vampires at the North Pole, wasn’t it?  Brains, blood, who can keep them straight?  Not Anne Rice, for sure.)

Which should make it no surprise that somebody did a “funny zombies” movie.  The surprise is that Shaun of the Dead didn’t bore me.

Huh?  I’m writing about Zombieland?  Oh, the American funny zombie movie.  Right.

Okay, while Shaun of the Dead is shot through (and it keeps shambling forward, hah!) with British humor, Zombieland is thoroughly embedded in two standard aspects of American film: teen angst and guns.

Thoughts:

• There are certainly plot holes big enough for a zombie to poke its head through, as encapsulated here.
• Wonder how many of the zombie survival rules can be mapped to the Ferengi Rules of Acqusition?
• The movie characters and sets interacting with the titles: a grand tradition used abundantly by Heroes and going back to… beats me.  Johnny Dangerously used it in 1984.

Ultimately, though, only one thing was needed for me to approve of this film, and that’s Woody Harrelson’s character’s dislike of coconut — “I hate coconut.  Not the flavor, but the consistency.”  Amen.

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Updated on March 9, 2010
 

What Were They Thinking? — Tea? Really?

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

In 2009, Starbucks had these banners in their windows, advertising for their Tazo Tea Infusions (whatever those are; the pics on that website don’t show anything frothy).

I’ve never seen tea with a frothy head on it.

I can’t say what the one in front is, but the one in back… well, I only know two liquids that color with a frothy head on them.  And Starbucks isn’t licensed to sell beer.
 

Crap crap crap (resolved)

Finally got all my old posts reposted yesterday, along with 50-odd new posts since then, including the full trip report from New Zealand (starts here; I still need to add links and fix spelling errors throughout it).  Did an editing pass on all the old posts, too, to correct errors and and updates.

In the meantime, I’ve created stubs for abut a dozen more posts to come, and I have a bunch of images of bad ads and the like to put up.  Once those are all caught up (hah!), I’ll start back in on the oldest “Bouncing Off the Walls” posts.
 

Caught You! — Comma Overload

“Caught You!” identifies places where people don't quite do the full job with their marketing materials and ads: major typos, Photoshop flubs, etc.

Some people complain when a comma is left out, and either confuses or outright changes the meaning of what is written.  Then there are those places where commas are sprinkled in like coarse ground pepper.

This is from a plastic bag.  It’s a bit hard to read, but it says:

WARNING: To avoid danger.of suffocation, keep
this plastic bag away from babies and children
Do not use this bag in cribs,beds,carriages
and, play-pens.

 

Movie Review — Up

Up was one of the films I watched on the long (13.5 hours!) flight from Los Angeles to Sydney in mid-February.

When it came out last summer, I was on the fence about seeing Up in the theater.  Just being computer animated isn’t enough to make me want to see it; there have been some really crappy films coming out that are computer animated.  (And being in 3D is already feeling like just a gimmick intended to suck an extra $5-10 out of my pocket.)  It’s from Pixar, so I expected a certain level of acceptable quality, but as an animated film, it holds the expectation of being aimed at kids.

Ultimately, as ticket prices have gone up, my desire to see films in the theater has gone down. Unless it’s a special effects films, I don’t bother.  Sorry, but a rom-com is going to work just as well on the home screen, and an animated film won’t have screaming kids in the audience when I watch it at home.  So ultimately, Up couldn’t overcome those issues and I didn’t see it in the theater.

(I did see Coraline in 3D last year, and non-3D versions of Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, Brüno, 2012, and a couple other films.)

(Okay, I just broke something in my head, imagining Brüno in 3D.)

Thoughts:

• Due to the computer animated nature of the film, I had to compare it to Avatar.  And Avatar comes out wanting.  Even in this film, primarily aimed at kids, there are layers and twists to the plot that Avatar can’t even approach.
• I find myself increasingly irritated at the character designs they use for some of these computer animated films.  This wasn’t as bad as, say, Hoodwinked!, but I really prefer the classic Disney style where the characters look like stylized humans rather than carved putty.
• The “pull the floating house” stunt would have been more effective if I hadn’t already seen it done in Fables.  (But the idea would probably have been in the works before the Fables story came out, so a neat idea is still a neat idea.)
• Doug’s “squirrel” obsession gave me no end of delight last Labor Day weekend (before I even saw the film), when my boyfriend kept seeing Yard Sale signs and would break off conversation in the same way.  In fiction, there is sometimes much truth.
• The house being isolated among the newer construction echoes an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, “No Parking Hare” (although that one took it to even more extreme places than floating the house away, if that’s possible).

The character of Russell, however, really brought the movie home for me.  I’m not sure they intended for him to be read this way, but to me, Russell was emblematic of the problems I remember with the Boy Scouts when I was a teenager.  Russell comes from a family where his father is largely absent, and he has glommed onto the Scouting program as the major focus in his life.  In theory, this is good, but in practice, he has acquired a huge collection of badges which are supposed to represent achievements but which really represent not much more than a list of boxes checked off, until he is down to only a single box remaining.  For all the things he has allegedly done to get these badges, he doesn’t seem to have really learned a whole lot, or rather, he has learned a whole lot but with no way to bring it into a cohesive whole, he has not retained much of it.  Russell is after his “Helping the Elderly” badge, but only to fill a hole on his sash, but because he understands why he should do this.

When I was a teen, I was a member of Cashmere, Washington’s “Gold Troop 1”, said to be the oldest Boy Scout troop west of the Mississippi.  A classmate of mine was the scoutmaster’s son.  Randy achieved Eagle Scout at like age 15, quickly followed by the various Palm awards and whatever else could be had there.  I only got to Life Scout rank (one below Eagle), dropping out when I was 16 or 17.  Now, I’m not saying that Randy was like I’m describing Russell, and I’m certainly not saying that he had an easy ride as the Scoutmaster’s son (although I think it would be safe to claim that he did have more ready access than most kids did to resources which enabled him to achieve those awards).  I’m just saying that I see in Russell some of what drove me away from Scouting all those years ago, but which other kids thrive on, and I wonder what that thriving gets them, in the long run.

(Incidentally, I had the top GPA in my high school class, and Randy was second.  The thrust for achievement is by no means limited to Scouting badges.  And my boyfriend was also a Life Scout who dropped before hitting Eagle, like me, and our friend Kent is yet another such former-Life Scout.  Odd.)
 

New Zealand 2010: Wellington to Christchurch (Sunday, February 21)

Written at the International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport at 5:15 pm (Los Angeles time) on Monday, February 22

Sunday was our other big travel day.  We got up at 6:30 am (yawn!) to catch the Interislander sea ferry to Picton on the South Island.  This was a huge ferry, I would guess 5-6 times the size of the ones on Puget Sound.  (I’ve been on a sea ferry before, on a European tour bus in May 1980, from London to The Hague.  Don’t remember anything about it.)

We had breakfast on board.  I had the “full breakfast”, with middle bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs (light on the egg, I think, since they were very pale), grilled tomatoes, and toast.  Among the packages of butter and jam were ones of Vegemite.  Yes, I took one.  Yes, I opened it and put a finger in to taste it.  Yes, I put the rest on toast.  Yes, I survived the experience.

Frankly, it’s overrated.  If you think it’s fabulous, it’s not.  If you think it’s the foulest thing ever, it’s not that, either.  It tastes of yeast and salt and not much else.  I doubt I’ll ever have it again.  (My mother, on the other hand, is not a brave soul when it comes to some foods, although she is fine with others.  This was on her “No way” list.  Even though she’s never tried it, I couldn’t get her to even dab a bit on her finger and taste it.  Chicken.)

I sacked out for half of the 3-hour trip.  When we got back to the car, there had been major amounts of sea spray over the bow, and our car was all but encrusted with rime.  Window fluid got most of the front window cleared.

I drove us about 45 minutes, to Seddon, where we stopped at the SuperValue market for food.  I got a (beef) curry pie and a 1.5 liter bottle of L&P (Lemon & Paeroa, originally a lemon-flavored spring water from the town of Paeroa, but now a Coca-Cola product).  I wanted a smaller bottle, but the 1.5 liter was half the price of the chilled 600 ml bottle.

Mom drove to Kaikoura, and then I took over again.  After an hour or so, when we stopped in another tiny town (Spye, maybe?), a guy pulled up the space next to me and began reading me the riot act about being a lousy driver — holding back traffic (are you actually doing that when you’re travelling the speed limit?), not pulling aside when there was a passing lane, and veering over the center line and almost causing an accident.  (This last I’ll cop to.  Driving curvy mountain roads when you’re tired is a bad idea, and I was way tired.)  Of course, his whole spiel would have made me more contrite if, in his haste to jump out and read my beads, he had managed to put his car in park rather than reverse, having to jump back in to prevent it rolling into traffic, and he then moved it back forward with the door wide open and almost ran it into our car.  Frankly, I think he was mostly pissed about having had to drive through graveled construction areas in his Bentley behind someone else, getting pelted with small rocks.

We found our hotel in Christchurch (Bealey’s Hotel) without effort, and ate at the Speight’s Ale House at the hotel.  (I had a black cherry cream cheese-stuffed chicken breast.)  We decided not to go sightseeing that night.

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Updated on March 11, 2010

Updated on June 8, 2010

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-zealand-2010-wellington-to.html

Updated on June 9, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.