Home Sweet Home
So I got home a bit after 4pm on Friday (traffic in Adelaide at 3:30pm on a Friday afternoon sucks badly). Was good to be home. However, after this afternoon with three kids plus one of Erin’s friends racing about the house like loonies I was beginning to miss my nice quiet hotel room. I have been sleeping a lot since I got back, but pretty much all at night, which is not a bad thing. As I noted the flights seemed much better synched with the time zones coming back and I don’t seem to be having nearly as much trouble adjusting back, although we’ll see how I go when I go back to work.
While I was gone Ashwyn seems to have finally learned the rules for soccer practice (we have been taking him to Grasshopper Soccer as a way to improve his motor skills a bit and wear him out slightly). For a little while he would basically just do whatever he felt like. Now he seems to have worked out there are things you do and don’t do and this applies to him, not just everyone else. These are, apparently, the rules for soccer:
1. No putting the hands on the ball
2. No grabbing people
3. Listen with our ears
4. No pulling the willy
And finally a few remaining photos from Canada below the cut (or there would be if I could get it to work in Live Writer - which is what editing is for I guess).
This is the art gallery - or at least part of it. Inside this glass tower is basically hollow and there is a swanky cafe at the bottom. Unfortunately (but perhaps not surprisingly) photos were not allowed inside the art gallery. Besides the Van Gogh exhibition I had a wander through the contemporary exhibition and the colonial Canadian art. They also had an installation of The Clock by Christian Marclay. I’ve seen that advertised here (in the lifts at work funnily enough) and somehow I’d gotten the impression it was some kind of clockwork mechanism. However it is actually a video artwork comprised of 24 hours of segments from film and TV shows that show clocks or make references to the time for each minute of the 24 hours. I watched from 11:25am to 12:00pm. It’s strangely fascinating. But clockwork would have been cooler.
This giant spider is a sculpture outside the museum, which apparently I could only photograph while standing behind a wall and a van. Actually the van belonged to some people who were cleaning the statue so if I had taken the picture from the other side of the wall it would have been a picture of some workmen steam cleaning a giant spider. Which is totally different.
From behind the same wall - a church with shiny steeples.
Yet another view of the parliament buildings, this time from outside the art gallery.
A lovely dress worn by the wife of the governor of Canada in 1900 (one Lady Minto). The photo doesn’t do it justice, but it was inside a glass case, which made it a bit tricky, and also I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to be taking photos in this museum.
And finally, you know that old saw about the soldier being saved by the bible in his shirt pocket, well it really happened to a Canadian soldier in the First World War, and here is the bible, complete with bullet hole. The text in red at the bottom is what his wife wrote in it when she gave it to him.
