Friday 2 November 2012

comedy and more comedy

At least it hasn't been a month this time...

So Bright Club went smashingly well! At least, that's the phenomenological viewpoint - I don't know if anyone in the audience enjoyed it. I think they did, and I know I had a fantastic time. And now I'm doing two more - once at the Christmas Special, and once for the Surrey postgrad conference.

But if you want to hear something really extra super funny, how's this: I'm now trying to become a web developer. I went and designed what ended up being essentially a website/app sorta thing. And unfortunately, in combination with that, I've bought into the whole idea that a proper build, or even a partial prototype, is better than pure Wizard of Oz. (Translation: making something that works even a little bit is better than totally faking it.) So now I'm trying to learn HTML5, PHP, MySQL, and associated bits of coding loveliness so that I can build my own prototype to test.

This would be on top of the actual writing of the thesis, and the execution and analysis of my first study, and the papers I'm writing or proposing, and the class I'm teaching, and the fabulous performance project I'm doing with Claire.

And loads of other important things, too (you know who you are). (Actually, you might not realise it, but I just ascribed the power of literacy to my cello.)

So if there are any bored web developers out there who know the canvas element like the back of their hands, drop me a line!

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Foggy advances! Bright Club!

Good lord, this once-a-month thing is getting ridiculous! Maybe the phases of the moon are dictating my posts.

Since last month, two things have happened. One is incredibly important, utterly critical for my research and my thesis. The other is totally separate and probably, ultimately, close to irrelevant. But what am I supposed to say?

Big news! Stop press! I've thought a lot about my design, and realised that a few refinements will provide a huge amount of clarity on the intentions and implications of my work, though I suspect much remains to be done!!!!

That one sentence there should be a quick-fire cure for insomnia. Plus, I'm talking about my (current) perceptions of my own work, compared to my (previous) perceptions of that work, and the implications that I'm imagining it might all have to the theory that I've got swimming around (amorphously) in my head. Nothing is concrete. Nothing is confirmed. It could all be a mental fog.

On the other hand, the probably irrelevant thing is so sexy! Big news! Stop press! Day after tomorrow, I'm performing stand-up comedy at Bright Club Guildford! See, it's got a link and everything, though rather scandalously not updated: http://brightclub.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/bright-club-guildford/ And guess who else is on the bill? Jim Al-Khalili! Truly, I am touched by BBC greatness.

Now that's not a cure for insomnia. It's concrete. It's confirmed. There's no mental fog involved, except perhaps mine in trying to get ready for it. Which one would you fixate on?

Thursday 20 September 2012

long live the deadline

Those crossed fingers worked a treat! We had an amazing weekend, made loads of progress, and got even *more* excited about this project, if that was possible.

And it has a name: Recalibrate.

Cool, huh? Stay tuned! Coming relatively soon-ish to a venue of some sort possibly near you!

As soon as I got back from Dent, I threw myself into a paper whose deadline was yesterday. I'm actually pretty pleased with what I came up with, so fingers crossed that the reviewers feel the same.

But here's the thing: I'm part of the Digital World Research Centre, right? I learned BASIC when I was 10. I've built websites. I've been an information architect, working with developers all day. So why, WHY, does all the terrifying and impossible technological crap in the world rain down on my head? When I worked at the new media agency in Shoreditch, the IT guy (who at first certainly thought I was a moron) finally came to see with his own eyes that in my hands, computers do things that they simply should not be able to do. In a bad, bad, bad way.

I could write a few hundred words, easily, just describing the facts of all the terrifying and impossible things that have gone wrong with my computer in the past two weeks, up to and including the complete refusal by Microsoft Word to stay open for more than three seconds without crashing. Bit of a problem, that, when you're trying to submit a paper.

And why is it that the fantabulous Sente, which just about does your dishes while you mind-meld your reference list into the correct format, has decided to put some of my references in this kind of format [1] and others in [2006], when they're the same type of material in the same paper? And why does printing to PDF sometimes split my document and sometimes not, when the only difference between the two is that I changed a typo, from 'Alan' to 'Allan'?

If I had more money than sense, I would buy a brand new computer and set it up from scratch with all new software.

Actually, given the amount of sense I have, the above condition might hold true anyhow...

Friday 7 September 2012

Dent

This will be more like a tweet than a post, but I'm off to Dent for a long weekend of writing and planning and general mayhem with the lovely and talented Claire Morgan. Fingers crossed there will be all kinds of good stuff coming out Sunday night!

Tuesday 4 September 2012

no time like the present

As in, no time. I have no time to be writing this blog post. Why? Because I decided I wanted to write another paper. This clearly indicates that I am rampagingly insane.

It also indicates that I'm on the verge of swooping through my entire 2nd year of my PhD on the same surge that I started with two years ago. Everyone who's done a PhD says that halfway through, you're guaranteed to lose the will to live as the long, hard slog approaches its solstice - the longest time yet endured, coupled with the longest time yet to go. Instead, I'm all fired up to do another chunk of writing! That's on top of nailing down my design, preparing for my first study, putting together the class I'm co-teaching this fall, and co-creating a performance.

I guess it also means I'm ambitious. I've always preferred to think of myself as utterly uninterested in ambition, or in competition, for that matter. I still stay away from competition whenever possible - nobody needs to see me get red of tooth and claw, least of all me - but I suppose I have to admit that I'd like to be taken seriously and play with the big boys, and girls, in the big pond, with the big fish, and all those things that have got People Of A Certain Age humming a certain Peter Gabriel tune right now.

Come on, sing it with me! I'll be a big noise, with all the big boys, so many... papers... I will publish...

So why am I blogging about this? First of all, because I needed to take a break. Second, I wanted Peter to get a little spike in his downloads today. Third, I wonder if I'm the only one who's in month #24 of a full-time PhD and still giddily happy about it, even if a bit stressed out. Anyone else?


Wednesday 8 August 2012

the funding body has a birthday!

The Funding Body (a.k.a. my husband) and I have just returned from slightly over two weeks of positively GLORIOUS cycling through Normandy and a wee smidgen of Brittany. Wow! Wow wow wow.

We've been through Brittany a couple of times before and absolutely loved it, but for a number of reasons - well, actually, just two, finances and stress levels - we decided to do the cheapest and easiest holiday we could think of, which was to schlep the bikes onto the train to Portsmouth (no changes) and thence the ferry to Cherbourg. We felt a bit like we might be letting ourselves down by not making the extra effort to get to the south of France, or farther afield, or even the western reaches of Brittany that we haven't seen yet. Were we ever deluded!

Normandy was fantastic - great cycling, great food, super friendly people. And it offered a good lesson in semantics: just because Normandy is less hilly than Brittany, we should not have somehow concluded that it was not hilly. To say that Normandy is not hilly is utterly and wildly incorrect. Just getting out of Cherbourg is enough to wake up the ol' quads, and we saw a number of crags, gorges, and waterfalls on our many trips up into the sky in our granny gears.

Better yet, I actually managed to shut my brain *off*. Who would have thought it possible? It took a few days - I did try to check my email at one campsite that offered an hour's free wifi - but thankfully, the university webmail kept keeling over and I never did more than skim the headlines. And that was it! Every time I started to think about thinking about my project, I made myself change the subject.

One thing it made both of us realise is how much time I spend talking about this project. What would we talk about, if not about my PhD? Turns out the answer was: not necessarily very much at all. Instead of frantic, intense conversations about design and theory, we had a series of lovely, lightweight, wafting little chats amongst long stretches of companionable wheel-turning.

I suspect that there might actually be life beyond this degree...

...and more to the point, there might actually be a more sensible way of conducting my life while I'm getting it. I made a start yesterday, unsubscribing to loads of mailing lists that are interesting, yes, but not particularly critical to this stage of my project. Then I stopped work in time for yoga, and didn't reopen my email until morning. And now I'm blogging for a bit instead of wishing I had the time to blog for a bit. And soon, I'll be baking a cake for The Funding Body's birthday celebration tonight.

If I can manage the article revisions due Monday by Monday, I'll consider it a success in progress!

Saturday 7 July 2012

chromatic play

'Invigilating' is one of those fantastic British terms, like 'knackered' or 'headmistress' or 'moggie'. It implies keeping a vigil, which, actually, is pretty much what it means. Better than the American equivalent, 'proctoring', which conjures images of a much less pleasant nature.

Yesterday, tomorrow, and a week from Monday I'm invigilating an examination of sorts. Not anything you as a spectator will be tested on, but rather an art exhibition. My job is to keep an eye on the artworks, try to prevent small children from destroying them, that sort of thing. (I've already failed on that front - a teeny wee Finn raced over and yanked a bit off before his mother could translate my yell not to touch the artwork.)

And in a sense, you might feel like you're being examined, because if you enter the room I'm likely to swoop upon you with a questionnaire, asking you to fill it out front and back. You won't be graded on it, of course - but the artist and her research collaborators will be. If the public likes it, the funders will be happy with the artist and the research team, and everyone will be happy. If the public doesn't like it... well, so far, it's a success, so no need to worry about that.

Still, though. I'm 'invigilating'! Keeping a vigil with five interactive light sculptures in the keep of an umpteenth century castle. If you're around, come have a look!

Thursday 28 June 2012

the definition of insanity

Somehow I have it in my head that because I love people, and I love ideas, and I love meeting lots of people and talking about lots of ideas, that conferences are wonderful. And they are! Particularly well run ones, stocked with fantastically interesting folks (shout out to DIS2012).

But...

But I'm knackered. Shattered. In the words of my homeland, mega-zonked. And every return to my actual work - you know, the quiet stuff that happens when you sit still and type - is returning from a place of more ideas and less practice at how to wrangle them.

I guess when your supervisors actually threaten to tie you to your chair, you know it's time to get back to work making some sort of sense out of it all.

Thankfully, I've got an ocean liner chock full of ideas from these forays into the wider world. Lots to think about regarding design research and the whole first-principles purpose of what it is I'm doing, thanks to the doctoral consortium folks and the closing keynote at DIS in particular. Lots to think about regarding the distinctive nature and contribution of live experience, thanks to the workshop at CHI. Lots to think about when it comes to the potential for human connection through digital storytelling in any number of forms, thanks to DS7.

And in a way even more to think about with the lovely and talented Claire Morgan, with whom I am hard at work on a performance collaboration. We're doing an autobiographical performance two-hander with digital media, and I could not be more excited about it. Watch this space... and hopefully an actual, physical performance space sometime perhaps in the autumn or winter.

Tuesday 12 June 2012

Cardiff via Newcastle

I continue my whirlwind conference tour with DS7 (or is it properly ds7? Neither bell hooks nor danah boyd provided a keynote, but you never know). Last Thursday I was on the very first train to Cardiff through Reading, and much to my surprise I stayed awake for every minute of the trip. Much less to my surprise, I stayed awake and fascinated for every minute of DS7. Keynotes and breakouts were compelling, and I couldn't have been happier to see the people I recognised, even if they were almost uniformly run off their feet. And such fascinating new (to me) people! The digital storytelling conferences feel like they could never compare, with their more or less single track and dozens of participants, with CHI and its snazzily branded, eleven-tracked, three- or four-thousand-strong cohort... yet there I was in Cardiff, reeling in the connections and ideas and overlaps, wishing I had weeks to pick the brains of the people I encountered.

One day after I left Cardiff, with its many participants from Aberystwyth, I was hoping that they were all home and dry. Three days after I left Cardiff, on my way to Newcastle, I was hoping that the people back where I live were all home and dry! I would be first in line to complain about the frigid and soggy weather in the UK these past few weeks - I bought a new fleece and a new umbrella today - except I'm pretty sure I still have a home, with possessions intact, and not everyone here can say the same. With droughts like these, who needs enemies?

The (potentially) tantalising bit of this post is that I've had about eighteen design ideas since the last time I posted. Yes, I thought that I my design was locked and loaded as of last February. I wasn't lying. I wasn't looking to do anything new. And yet... such are the ways of the PhD. The joyous news is, my brain is engaged, and I'm coming up with fun new ideas! The bad news is, I'm at or over halfway through this project, and my brain is still engaged in coming up with new ideas! Somebody put me out of my misery, please!

The even more (potentially) tantalising bit of this post is that I'm writing it from smack in the middle of DIS2012 in Newcastle. The conference proper starts in less than 8 hours, but the workshops have been going on for two days already, and the Culture Lab folks might need significant interventions of mental health assistance and/or strong alcohol by the time Pervasive draws to a close... cheers, dudes!

Thursday 24 May 2012

wowza

Now *that* was, indeed, some serious fun. CHI2012 in Austin, Texas, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars.

No, no, erase that ancient quasi-Texas, quasi-California TV show reference. The Super 8 in Austin did, indeed, have a perfectly lovely swimming pool that Connie and I made use of exactly once, within five minutes of arrival. Strangely, the long pants, compression socks, wool oversocks and wool sweater that were so very comfy on the plane were a bit oppressive in the 90-something degree heat. Aaaah. We would have taken more advantage of the pool later in the week, but it was sometimes rainy, and always packed full of other things to be doing.

The workshop on 'Liveness' intimidated me a bit at the outset, because we were set the task of documenting the liveness of a performance event on video and then, in small groups, editing the footage into a statement on liveness. Now, having come off of a year of reading Peggy Phelan and then seeing her - live - giving a lecture at Queen Mary just a few weeks ago, I wasn't sure how comfortable I was accepting the premise of taping liveness to begin with. For all intents and purposes, I'm more of an Auslander girl myself, but you can't get away from the idea that there is *something* going on in a live, co-present encounter - something that Fischer-Lichte gets up and runs with, much to my glee - that can't be captured in a video. But what was I going to do? Tell them their task was ontologically impossible and stomp off in a huff?

Thankfully, the two people in my small group seemed to share my reservations to at least some extent, and neither of them had a particular axe to grind, so we muddled through a variety of ideas to come up with our statement. It was essentially a collage of missed connections, failed jokes, and the other contenders for a spectator's attention in a venue full of competition, both human and mediated. (And beer.) It seems a bit weak, maybe, to argue that liveness is all about the spectator's option to spectate something else - the bartender or the hot guy across the room instead of the performer who's paid to entertain you - but it holds onto a sense of agency, and of potential.

It also allowed us to focus on the energy created among audience members and performer that utterly dominated the performance encounter. In this case, the energy was overwhelmingly negative. It came from the poor comedian, who came on after a smokin' band had trained the audience to drink and shout loudly to the friends they hadn't seen since the last CHI. Poorly introduced and poorly prepared to catch the attention of a couple hundred people who decidedly did not want their attention caught, he ended up ranting to those of us listening to him about the rudeness of the many who were not. A movie wouldn't have cared. An entertainer with a more professional manner might have turned the energy around. But this guy? I felt like I'd ruined his life - and I was one of the ones listening politely!

Let's see - this takes us up to Saturday night before the official Monday start of the full conference. A complete report would clearly take all night to write and still leave out the best bits.

The best bits were the people, for sure. The Mobile Life crew, the Culture Lab freaks, my thesis-doppelganger at Queen Mary, the Digital Arts folks, the Liveness workshop peeps, the Portuguese game guy, the student volunteer who seemed to be in eight places at once, the Swedish guy who was actually Romanian (and I still swear he must have been having a laugh), David and his rental car, and of course my best puppy Connie... it was seriously one of those weeks when all you can do is be happy you're alive.

Not to skip over the fact that there was some wicked cool stuff on display, and some fantastic ideas, of course! But even the talks and papers took shape in my mind through the conversations I had about them. It was an amazing shift from solitary reading and worrying, which is my default mode for 51 weeks of the year.

Next stop Paris!!!

Thursday 3 May 2012

Friday 27 April 2012

Thursday 26 April 2012

knocking on wood

This past week has had two raisons d'etre, or rather I've had two raisons d'etre this past week: writing up and nailing down my design, which is now locked and loaded! The second is setting a world's record for the most mixed metaphors. Oh, and preparing for my confirmation viva.

If you're saying to yourself, 'Is that like a transfer meeting?', the answer is probably, 'Yes'. Same if you want to call it an upgrade conference, or any combination of those or similar terms.

If you're saying to yourself, 'What the hell is she going on about now?', the answer is this: between starting a PhD and getting called Doctor, there is one and only one milestone. At this milestone, you can get told to carry on with your studies, or you can get told to eff off. In that case, your university will no longer support your attempt to get your degree and will yoink your registration.

My confirmation viva is tomorrow morning. Hopefully I've got my mixed metaphors and dire descriptions (and asinine assonances) out of my system, leaving room for all sorts of brilliant and sensible ideas to come tumbling out of my mouth. Or maybe it will just provide the opportunity for my examiner to enjoy the sound of the echo between my ears. Either way, if you're reading this in 2015 and this is the last post, you can guess what happened.

Friday 20 April 2012

More Scandal!

OK, this past month has been ridiculous. You know - or if you don't, let me tell you - how everyone, but EVERYONE, who has done a PhD will tell you that the second year is one hideous slog full of pain? Well, they do. The first year is apparently full of happy bunnies and fluffy clouds, and the third year is full of steroidal grit and determination, while the second year is full of self-loathing, lack of drive, and enough angst to make your fifteen-year-old self green with envy. At least that's what they say.

Personally, I've been enjoying my second year every bit as much as my first, and boy howdy did I love my first year! True, I've been feeling more pressured as the time to completion shortens and my reading list continues to mushroom, but I'm also enjoying the sensation of actually knowing a tiny, tiny bit about something. I love sinking my teeth into the theory and starting to get the feedback that I'm engaging at a respectable level. So really, it's all come out in the wash, with no second year sag.

I did, however, run into a few weeks of utter inanity just recently. It was one of those cases where everything that could go wrong, did, all at once, both personally and 'professionally' (for lack of a better word, since they're still not paying me to do any of the things I'm doing). I expected a bit of a mental slump after I handed in my (massive) confirmation document on 8 March, but then I've had to wait seven weeks for the viva. (I'm still waiting - one week to go.)

And in that protracted slumpy bit, I have truly slumped. Plus some parts of my life have been pushing down on my shoulders, willing me deeper down. One tiny example: I got hit in the ribs with a glass bottle, which proceeded to shatter everywhere, as I rode my bike down the road. Yeah. Nothing like a hate-fuelled brush with death to make you feel like the captain of your own ship, huh?

 I had tried to will myself out of this funk by planning an Easter cycle camping holiday with husband and friends - but as soon as we got out of range of hearth, home, and train station, I came down with the flu. It takes a stronger woman than I to will herself into a good mood while cycling in the damp and cold with a fever. Still, it could have been worse - we found a hotel, and the aforementioned husband and friends were gracious enough to check us all in (leaving our soggy tent from the night before to fester downstairs with the bikes).

 But NOW, now, I have willed myself out of this funk for good! (At least this incarnation of it.) I've met some fantastic people lately, including the uber-talented Claire Morgan, whom I went to see in her show Editor. We're planning a collaboration, so look out! Then yesterday I met more fantastic folks at the Journeys Across Media conference at the University of Reading, where I gave my very first proper conference paper. What a day! And I'm leaving for CHI in two weeks! And I got into the DIS doctoral consortium! And I'm going to DS7 in June! And I'm going to a workshop on autobiographical storytelling in, like, ten hours! And I'm doing an installation at the Transform@work symposium in May!

So the next time I whinge, please whack me upside the head with a large fish.

Monday 12 March 2012

Scandal!

The scandal is that it's been a month since I posted! That's what happens when you get a vast load of comments back all in one big lump, with a deadline looming. In this case, the comments were on 80 pages or so of the document with which I am hoping to confirm my status as PhD candidate. No pressure, huh? I nearly popped a gasket, but I got it done after two and a half weeks of 12- to 19-hour days. Cross your fingers that it actually works, and they don't tell me to *scarper* off.

And now I'm back to the blogosphere with a vengeance, as I'm this week's blogger for viehebdomadaires. Come check it out!

Sunday 12 February 2012

Mobile Life

You know it's a good sign when you don't write about a trip you're taking until after you've taken it. The week of the 30th was an intense few days of representing my project at Surrey's postgrad conference, mixed with getting ready for my visit to the Mobile Life centre in Kista, just north of Stockholm. And then the really intense bit began.

Thursday morning the 2nd, I was up at 4:30 to get the plane to Stockholm and went straight from Arlanda to Mobile Life, where I was whisked to lunch (Thursday ärtsoppa och pannakakor med sylt och grädde, yum!) and then to a public seminar that was like a pre-viva. From there no rest for the wicked, off immediately to Västerås for a larp (live action role playing) convention, where I immersed myself in a Mobile Life game test and Nordic larp culture for the weekend.

Then I had the week at Mobile Life, where I gave a talk on Monday and otherwise chatted with people, raided their library, drank their coffee, and tried to make myself as useful as I could in return.

Some observations:
* Nordic larp is freakishly intense and utterly fascinating, not least because of the mix of people who get so passionately involved. It's not your straight-up D&D/SCA contingent, but neither is it a straight-up artsy theatre contingent, or even a mix of the two. To my untutored eye, this means that it's more about the content of what they're doing than the self-conscious promotion of a group image. In other words, unless you happen to be dressed as a medieval warrior at that moment, there's no obvious marker as to whether you're into post-apocalyptic scenarios or small-scale family dramas about incest, fantasy towns populated by dragons or fantastic rooms filled four inches deep with flour. In fact, maybe you do all of the above. Wow.

* The people at Mobile Life work damn hard, but once you get them chatting, they overflow with interesting ideas, experiences, and opinions. I am so grateful for every chat!

* Annika Waern has a real talent for absorbing my ramblings about my project and extracting exactly those elements that her area of expertise could shed light on. I'm amazed how she cut through the wooly bits with some really solid advice. I couldn't have asked for anything better right now that I'm trying to solidify my designs - and more importantly, to solidify what the heck those designs are for.

* The Swedish Internet of Things Day... I have to admit that the technical bits went over my head, but Kia Höök's comments about performing with technology made me feel like I'm on the right track, and Oskar Juhlin's observations about the transition from professional to amateur might just be the key to one of my main arguments.

This post probably sounds like the delirious gushings of a fangirl, so I will balance it out with some negative comments about my week in Sweden.

Here they are:
* The chicken wraps at the (free) lunch on Thursday were too small for a non-Swedish appetite.

* The (free) food at the larp convention was located a ten-minute walk through the bitter cold.

* There is no third complaint. That's as bad as it got - the freebies weren't delivered to me by unicorn in my own heated palace. Yep, that about sums it up.

Monday 23 January 2012

mind mapping software

When I embarked on this wack-job adventure of a PhD, one of the very first things I did was to begin populating a fancy shnazzy mind mapping program with every idea that crossed my mind, every article I thought I should read, every writer I thought I should know, every conference I heard of - a vast amount of stuff. Then about the second thing I did was to pay for an upgrade so that I could attach every bell and whistle known to man to these nuggets of future mental goodness.

And it was fantastic! I was sprawling out all over, investigating dozens of leads in new areas. I needed something to remind me that this was the person who wrote that, and referenced this guy's famous concept of that thing. With just my brain to rely on, I'd have felt hopelessly adrift.

But then, several months back, my project started to gel. I started confidently setting some ideas aside, and confidently knowing what I needed to know about some of the others. Trawling through my mind map became less necessary, and I became less reliant on my habit of putting everything into it.

But... now that I don't use it much anymore, I'm finding myself in a bit of a quandary. I've got thoughts and notes to myself written here, there, and everywhere. I'm not trying to claim that every fragment that escapes into digital form is a flash of brilliance, but some of them, when I run across them by accident weeks later, actually seem to make sense. I don't want to lose them, but I'm not at a point where I can turn them all into fully fledged parts of my official text.

I'm thinking of starting a new mind map just for these thoughts. But how to link them together? How to categorise? How to make sure they don't get lost, like all the other stuff I worked so hard to capture and is languishing untouched on my hard drive?

Gee, you'd almost think there was something about the performativity of personal digital media in my thesis...

Wednesday 18 January 2012

it lasted a fortnight

I love that word. Fortnight. A big, strong night, with fourteen little blips of daylight peeking through. I had it in my head from learning French as a child that a fortnight was actually fifteen days. It's a picky, archaic little misunderstanding for an American, like misspelling some Middle English term for 'bucket'. Here, though, it can mess up your calendar completely!

My point is, I made a vow after the Christmas break to take it easier, relax, not get so worked up about things, say no to non-critical commitments that would cause me to go beyond a reasonable level of effort. The fact that the end of Christmas break coincides with New Year's means that it was, in effect, a New Year's resolution. And as of yesterday, it has keeled over. My January has gone from busy to crazy to absolutely unmanageable. The thing is, it's all such cool stuff! Workshops and conferences and symposia chock full of brilliant people doing amazing things. And I can play too, if I do the work of four people at once.

So my fortnight of sanity is over. The only silver lining is that it was actually fifteen days, my French-inspired misunderstanding of fortnight. I'm hoping to reinstate the sanity soon. Sanity II: The Return of a Restful Night's Sleep will hopefully be playing in high definition 3D Dolby surround, any day now.

Tuesday 3 January 2012

another year

The holidays have consisted of two batches of cookies, one batch of coffee cake, lots of long-cooking, decadent, savoury meals, and lots of sitting around on my butt. I have, indeed, far exceeded my own expectations for chilling out and enjoying myself.

Now the question is, how do I get back to the project without letting it overrun my entire life?

Maybe I don't...

I hereby declare that today is officially a design day. Woot!