So, I’ve got onto a bit of a roll with the uploading and organising of our photos and managed to get our photos from in the city of San Francisco sorted. We didn’t take many in town. We were there three nights, which was two full days and one day we went to the Napa Valley and the next we went to Yosemite. So, we didn’t spend much time in town itself. Anyways, we got a few good shots in!
Same deal as the other set. Click the first link to go through to a slideshow (recommended), or if you’re lazy (or not really that interested in captions and the like) watch the slideshow below.
We’ve managed to cram a lot in during our stay in New York. Since the last update we have done so much more and the days tend to slip into one another. I have trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone four days ago, so I’m going to drop down here a few notes on the main things we’ve been up to.
First and foremost, Kylie has done a lot of shopping while we’ve been here. My mum heads back from to Brisbane today, taking with her quite a bit of our shopping (thanks mum!) which includes an unknown (to me) number of pairs of Kylies shoes and quite a few new business shirts that I have bought and a whole bunch of other stuff. We’ve certainly done our bit to try and kick start the US economy. I might try and get Kylie to do a summary of her purchases when we’re back in Brisbane. No point in doing it on the road, the “kill” count rises too quickly….
Saturday 29 November
Saturday we all went our seperate ways for the day. Mum did the hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the Uptown areas, Kylie went and did some shopping and Jackson and I went to the Intrepid Air & Space Museum.
The Air & Space Museum only recently re-opened after being shut for renovations for a while. The Museum sits on board a retired US Air Craft Carrier which is moored in the River just at the end of the street we’re staying in! (One heck of a yard ornament to have in your street!) What a great facility and museum this is. Jackson and I were both enthralled for the three and a bit hours we walked the decks of this massive ship. We got some photos, but I’ve been having trouble uploading them through this internet connection, hopefully the next place is kinder to me, because we’ve got some great shots to share.
A visit to the museum starts off with a movie about the career of the ship. It’s mainly focused, of course, on the tragic aspect of the lose of life which happens during war. Halfway through I thought I’d made a “dad” mistake taking Jackson in, but he hasnt had any nightmares since and though he asked once after the movie about why’d those people get killed, he was fine with the movie. We were sitting next to a (I presumed from the way he was talking to Jackson before the movie) retired British Naval guy and during the movie he started crying through the movie – the emotions which come back visiting a place like that must be a terrible thing to manage.
The main “exhibits” of the museum are the planes which sit on the deck of the carrier. There must have been 20 different planes and choppers from different Navy’s / Army’s around the world. Jackson loved it and would run from plane to plane and then ask me to read the words on the sign for each plane (some of those Russian designers have VERY difficult names).
You also get to walk through the hanger of the carrier and in the hanger is a kids museum area where they can get their hands on all sorts of cool stuff, including sitting in the cockpit of a M*A*S*H style chopper, a plane simulator where you try to land a plane on the deck of a carrier, there’s a scoreboard which counts the number of “Jap” planes and ships the carrier took down and some models which show the carrier in its different incarnations.
Another exhibit is the Concord, which sits on the pier next to the Intreipd. The Concord is dwarfed by the Intrepid. I was looking forward to looking inside the Concorde, which you could do, but they had all the seats enclosed in a plastic bubble and the cockpit was blocked off, so all you got to do was walk down the aisle. Which was pretty boooring, even to me.
By the time we got back from there we met up with Kylie and went down to the Union Square area for a look around. We had lunch at a burger joint and walked around and looked through the stores. Paragon Sports was the main shop we visited and we got some stuff for the ski part of our trip – cool new goggles!
That night Jackson and I went to a cirque de soleil show and Kylie and Mum went to see the Musical Wicked. They liked Wicked better than Mumma Mia. Jackson thoroughly enjoyed the Cirque show, particularly the acrobatics of the show including a great trampoline act and during the finale huge fans sent a deluge of paper snowflakes out over the audience. This was pretty cool.
Jackson’s video:
This started out as a short note, ended up being longer than I thought, so I’ll wrap it up there. more to come.
the year has started off with a real bang…. Lots going on in the Chambers household!
A few of the things which have been happening;
* Jackson started pre-prep. Pre-prep is like kindy. He’s going to a community kindy which is close to Kylie’s mum and dad’s house and near to the school we will book him into. He’s loving it – he’s really enjoying getting to play with kids all his own age and interacting with kids again, after not going to child care for about 10 weeks while we had our holiday and pre-prep was closed. He has a new mate, Jack, they play in the home corner and “fix” things.
* We’ve decided to go on another trip back to the USA. We’ve been bitten by the bug and have planned out our trip, which will be at the end of the year. We’re going to San Francisco, New York, Orlando, cruising the Caribbean, Telluride for skiing and Christmas and Hawaii to thaw out. We’re looking forward to it already…. (only 273 days to go!)
* We bought a cross trainer, which is in the living room. It’s to help us get fit, but also to get ready for skiing! We’re getting into the swing of using it and I don’t hate it as much as I did after the first couple of days…. It’s definitely helping.
* I “mc’d” the recent TQ Awards for Excellence, at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Ctr. I shared the duties with Dallas Free, which was fun. The awards were held at a breakfast ceremony and it was a good morning. Some of my great mates won awards, including Sarah from my team for Most Outstanding Staff Member (the award I won last year) – way to go Sarah!!, Steve McRoberts (my boss) for Excellence in Leadership, Al Bendall won the award which receives nominations from industry, Megan Thompson for excellence in International and Monica Groenert for Excellence in Management. All very worthy winners! Obviously professionally the last year has not been all that crash hot for me – I went from most outstanding staff member to not even getting a nomination .
* We bought ourselves a new David Bromley, which hangs nicely in the “compound”. I’ll get some pictures and post them. It’s a great pic and I’m sure we’ll be collecting a few more along the way.
* We only got one number in each of our systems eights we put in for last nights mega lotto…. back to work Monday & the art business has to wait – again….
That’s the big things…. of course, it’s 645am Sunday morning and I haven’t had my cuppa coffee yet. I’ll post more as it comes to me!
hello and happy new year. Hopefully your new years resolutions are still intact and you’re invigorated for a fantastic 2008. It’s been pretty quite on the blog’s western front, life goes on and things happen… like Christmas and work.
I hope you had a great Christmas. We did. We had family come visit at our house, we had Nicole and Harrison come stay with us and about a dozen or so people here on Christmas day. We had a nice “buffet” lunch of roast turkey, “big al’s” ham and roast pork and salads and we spent the day relaxing, playing with new toys and swimming some too. After telling the people we met in the USA how hot it was going to be here in Brisbane at Christmas…. it was very nice to have to “endure” temperatures in the mid 20′s! Harrison and Jackson cleaned up on the present front, with Jackson also sharing a Nintendo Wii with me as a present. Jackson likes the Wii nearly as much as I do and we play tennis and guitar hero mostly. Kylie and I didnt do present for each other, we were well and truly spoilt on our holiday, we figured we didnt need presents…. though I did buy Kylie a nice pair of (wait for it) powerboards, with individual on / off switches which should help reduce our electricity bill…
As a birthday present for me…. I got spoilt. We bought ourselves a new painting – which hangs in the “compound” room at the front of the house. The artist is David Bromley and it is in his female portrait style. It’s pretty big, taking up most of one wall. We bought it from a gallery at Highfields, just outside of Toowoomba. David and Fay run the gallery and were nice enough to deliver the painting and help hang it! It looks beautiful and it should also turn into a nice investment piece, with his works doing well. Have a look at it: in our picture gallery
We got all our pictures from our holiday sorted. FINALLY! There was a lot and it took much longer than I thought it would. We also put “some” in to get printed. 650 odd photos… heavens only knows what we’ll do with them – but! they’re printed….
Jackson is doing great in his swimming. He doesnt mind, in fact he loves, putting his head under the water now and looks forward to Friday’s for swimming with Nannie and he loves swimming with us on the weekend. He’s off to his new child card centre on the 29th of January, which he is looking forward to and he talks about the “new kids” quite a bit.
All’s well here and we’re looking forward to 2008 and the adventures it brings us.
Please drop us a line and make sure to catch up. I plan on posting her regularly and send out an email towards the end / start of the month to say hi and with some links to the postings we make here, or bookmark the site / subscribe to the RSS feed and drop in regularly.
This posting was started early Saturday morning…. I am a tad weary and hoping that the headache I feel starting in the back of my head goes away. Last night Kylie and I had Christmas parties and Jackson stayed with my mum and dad (thanks!!).
First thing’s first. Photos from our LA stay are up and live on the information superhighway. You can find them by clicking on this hyperlink, right here: LA photos. Remember – click on the big arrows at he bottom of the screen to move through the pics, there are about 60 pics of LA there.
The highlights of the LA pics…
Santa Monica is beautiful! The Halloween spider. The Roto Rooter van (childishly amusing). Pumpkin head shots. Jacko meets dora, spongebob, jaws and the simpsons.
Remember, please post comments on the pics here. We’re getting lonely!
Yesterday was a big day for me (chris), I had a flight up to Hervey Bay for a work meeting with Whale Watching operators about their campaign site. It was a flying visit as I left Brisbane at 8 and got in at 9′ish and left the meeting at 11 for a 12 flight and back in Brisbane by 1. I didn’t get to see anything much, but Hervey Bay has changed a lot since I was last there and I think we’ll head up to Fraser Island / see the whales next season. The meeting went well and then I was back to Brissie for the TQ Christmas party last night.
Kylie had a big day too. Two Christmas parties in one day.
The TQ party was good. I don’t have any stories from Kylie’s party, so if the Energex folk could kindly post all the great stories about Kylie’s behaviour here, I would well and truly appreciate it. I was a saint, of course. I would like to thank Tige for encouraging the crazy woman from the party next door to talk to us all night and be very persistent in trying to get one of the drinks “vouchers” we had to get our free TQ drinks…. Well done Michael S, TQ’s new CEO (Chief Environmental Officer) for being the one who sat between me and her and took the brunt of the nagging. Marcus T for suggesting the Jager bombs, looking forward to some more of those this week as we farewell him and he goes to the minister’s office. There was a big crowd for the night, which was great and very little shop was spoken.
This weekend is a big one, we’re off to an exhibition of Charles Blackman art this morning at a gallery in Paddington. This is their website, though it has nothing of the exhibition, it was in the Courier Mail a couple of weeks ago: www.joelfineart.com. I’ll post a bit of an update on this afterwards.
Kylie, Jacko and I are going cruising to look at the christmas lights tonight and tomorrow we’re off to the Cox’s for a bbq lunch and sometime this week we really must put up our christmas tree!
I also wanted to put a link to the Warhol Exhibition in here. Warhol on Queensland Holidays The Warhol exhibition is in town and showing at the GOMA, which is a fantastic setting for an awesome show. I was fortunate enough to hon knob with dignitaries at the opening a couple of weeks ago and the exhibition is great. I will definitely be going back as I didnt get to see all of it and I need to pick up some of the great merchandise they have. You should go and the only place to see this in Oz is Brisbane…
enjoy the photo’s! next up New York, so when they get posted ne sure to have a cuppa nice warm coffee with you, as there is about 300 NYC photos…. (I PROMISE not to post them all)
This morning we headed in to town to the Gallery of Modern Art (link), to look at the Howard Arkley exhibition. It’s a great exhibition, with an absolute stack of works and we had a great morning out. The gallery provides a little something to keep the kids occupied, in an activity sheet which the kids need to find the pieces in the exhibition and see whether they can match up things from the activity sheet with the pieces. Very clever!
Other that the Arkley exhibition, they also have a great installation, which is done by a German artist. Jackson thought this was good too.
links to the highlights: * arkley exhibition – link * katharina grosse installation – link * education ministers exhibition – link
We took some photos, you can see them in the following slide show; jackson doing impersonation of someone in a jetstar ad, some photos of us with each other – jackson took the photo of kylie and i (!!) and a photo sneakily shot on my phone (you shouldnt take photos in the exhibition, apparently….
not much on the horizon for this weekend. the savings for the us holiday continues, so we won’t get up to anything too dramatic.
We’ll go and see Kazu. Kazu and his family arrive to stay with Kylie’s mum and dad this weekend. Kazu stayed with Kylie’s family when he came here from Japan on an exchange program when he was younger. They are here for a week or so, which I am sure Jackson will love as he will have another play friend in Kazu’s little girl. Whilst here they are going to go to tangalooma resort and off to a horse riding place.
We’re off to montezuma’s for dinner on saturday night.
There’s a couple of nice Charles Blackman’s on ebay at the moment. Both are from the big Nadine Amadio auction which was held recently. Apparently, Nadine Amadio, who is a close friend of Charles Blackman and his biographer moved to Cairns and wanted to sell up all the stuff she would not take to Cairns with her. It was a major sale, with over 100 pieces of Blackman’s work going under the hammer. Would have been a nice sale to go to. I have bought an autographed catologue page from that sale, which hangs in my office at TQ. The two pieces on ebay are nice works. One is an original work and the other is a unique looking litho which I have not seen before. Not sure how I will convince Kylie to buy either with our impending holiday – but I will give it a shot!
I have started to get together a group for the NFL game I will be going to in NY. So far Grady, Ian, Robert and myself are going. I’m hoping to get quite a few of the guys I’ve met over the years who live in the USA to come over to NYC and meet up for the game.
Workwise (for chris) lots has been happening lately. The digital team has been very busy with a whole stack of activities. queensland holidays has changed a lot in the past few weeks – including a change to the navigation on the site, which now includes a whole stack of travel tools, if you haven’t looked at the site in a while you should do so now. Court and the ATDW team are in the midst of reviewing all the activities of last year and looking ahead to the next subscription period, as well as continuing to seek out operators who we have not approached. The digital marketing team will be joined, on the 20th, by Fabian who will take up the role of the Web Projects Coordinator. Sally moves to Melbourne, but will still be with the team in her editor position and telecommute. Em is off to become a mummy, as of next Friday – good luck Em! and…. we’re going to start the second round of our auction activities this weekend, have a look at our campaign site to see the 4 nights for the price of three offers available and our “Ultimate Queensland’ auction site
This weekend we’ll not be up to too much, but last night I (chris) went out to the Normanby for a few drinks and dinner with some of the digital marketing team, this morning we’re off to the post office to lodge Jackson’s passport application, tonight we’re off to dinner at citron at west end (thanks Sue Walsh!) and tomorrow morning (8am!!) we’re off to the taxman to see whether we can get some of our hard earned back off “Little Johnnie“
There’s a Robert Dickerson exhibition on at the Philip Bacon Galleries at the moment, it finishes up next weekend. We might nip over to that and start to teach Jacko the finer points of art we’ll never be able to afford Here’s a link to some of the work which will be on display: Robert Dickerson exhibition
The other big thing (for chris) this weekend is the start of the next Where Else But Queensland campaign. The campaign is a partnership of Tourism Queensland, Accor Hotels and Virgin Blue. The campaign includes fantastic deals on Virgin Blue flights and Accor hotel packages, as well as a new toy the digital team have been working on Queensland Holidays’ Ultimate Auctions. This nifty thing currently features Virgin Blue flights and Accor holiday packages, which can be bid on from as low as $1! Where Else But Queensland campaign site
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