More Ultima GT

Weekend out

I took two days off last week and we took the ferry across to Macau and spent three and a half days in the pool, and the rest on the black volcanic beach between where we were staying and this . How is the sea hey? Brown mud - literally - a super-silty thing. I love the colours from a picture point of view, though of course would personally prefer to swim in something blue and crystal-clear. There's a lot of reflected light off dark wet surfaces though, so you have to get more perpendicular to it to get an idea of how dark the sand really is - which you can see from the pic of Aiden drawing in the sand - so marry that to a caramel brown sea and a blue sky with white clouds and it really is a great tapestry to be walking around in. In the pic of Aiden's cool dude pose you can see nothing in the sky because I had to meter on his face to get any detail there - otherwise just an outline. The small pic below is a much much nicer one the truth be told, but it lacked the look for the t-shirt I'm afraid. Ev is at the super-dangerous water phase at the moment - which is good and bad. Good, because I think he's close to learning how to swim, bad because some part of me thinks he thinks he can already; so you've really got to keep an eye on him at all time. He's such a scream; terribly earnest and focused on what he's doing. He has a pair of those eye-socket-sucking goggles, but with the goggle part a circle inside a wide open shark mouth - so you have these two sharks on either side of his face with big toothy mouths around each eye - which he really likes, because Ev likes big and loud with lots of teeth. If you ask him what his favourite animal is he'll tell (this is hard to describe - would have taken a picture - but my lens bombed out and appears to be full of mould from all the humidity - and likely not enough use. At some point I will have the unpleasant surprise of finding out what it's going to cost to have it fixed - if it can be - hold thumbs).

Two months of intensity

I look at the last post date and wonder where my life is going - just amazing that two and a half months (!!!) can blast past like that. It's been a pretty seismic time though - I think I'm getting some sort of traction, if not a grip (and certainly not on top of) this job - hopefully fast enough - or it will be gone. Alongside this, and it really does feel alongside it, I've been to Sydney and Melbourne for the first time - I've met Zara and Arie your littlest cuzzies - and they were fantastic (wonderful, funny, engaging - Ari's big pasttime is laughing; if he's not sure what to do, he just chuckles - an anti-grumpy personality - and Zara's shiny and complicated, speedy mind, whispy little reed of a ruby-child, and for me, beyond what I'd imagined I might feel, and devine; a life moment) - I've seen Simone for the first time in 11 years - which is beyond belief - and that's over a quarter of my life - so a lot of change, inevitably - and Geordie, such a lovely, groovy human being - I've been to Singapore again, and went to a friend's house on the edge of a rain forest -with little green-grey monkeys swinging along the edge of the jungle wall - literally a wall. I've fallen along the way with regard to photos - really leading a two dimensional life, and wanting to, meaning to zap the shutter - but not getting it together. Your little brothers are bursting with summer life. Swine flu closed Aiden's school three weeks early - something that Aiden seems not to mind. He lost his first tooth, which came so fast that I had to check on the internet to see if this was meant to be happening - or parental dental neglect (fortunately the former) and he was terribly pleased about this (and not swallowing it). So I got the two of them together for a missing tooth pic - a peek, and a show, with Ev getting bored and distracted between the one and the other. We got a pool - Hong Kong style, which means temporary, small enough to fit, big enough to enjoy, and with fake mosaics (and, I might add, a filter). You'll be surprised how much water fits into this thing - it took a good five hours to fill, even with a little help from the skies. But the beach remains the fave, so we headed off this morning to a more-than-ususal misnamed Big Wave Bay, - it was 30 something degrees by 9.00am, but a crystal day, and the jungle-like vegetation just heaving with life. Also the tide was right out, which really helps when there are lots of people who think hitting the beach might be the way to go on a public holiday of significant beauty. Ev's clicked onto the joys of boogie boarding, having wanted nothing to do with it for the first two and a half years of his life. The red board on the right is his, being borrowed by Aiden (man it's amazing how difficult two little guys can find sharing something ... but Aidens board's cover came undone from the polystyrene filling, and the glue I tried to stick it with last night was hungry glue - made short work of chowing big holes in the front - so we had to endure this for today, and will move speedily towards resolving the situation.