Jett and I had a boys day out on the weekend. Jett had it in his mind, for some unknown reason, that he wanted to go to the Art Gallery. I think he heard Ashton telling her story about how she set off the alarms when she touched a painting and the guards came running. Jett would have still been in the pram at the stage so it’s understandable he had no memory of it. He was talking about it all week and was excited to go.

But first thing to do after making the trip up in the train was to have lunch. We weren’t going to have the normal McDonalds or Subway during this cultural excursion. No sir. This special event required special food, and the most special food Jett knew about was to be found going round and round in circles on little plates. We were headed for a Sushi bar!

We’d walked past this place a couple times, and Jett had seen the plates moving by themselves and, without being able to actually see the mechanism, imagined that the plates were being taken around the track behind a little train. All he wanted to do was visit the place that had the Sushi Train.

So, Sushi it was. We were seated and Jett was mesmerised by all the little plates rattling by. The plates were different colours and cost different amounts of money. I told him to mostly eat yellow and red, and try to leave the orange and brown as they were $10-$12 per plate for two little bits of Sushi. Sure enough, the first plate he took was brown. I could feel my wallet trying to scamper away and hide. But after that we stuck the the lower price cuisine which was simply delicious. I’m surprised at how adventurous Jett was, eating from many different plates. We had the freshest of fresh sushi, taking a plate that we had seen the chef prepare no more than 5 seconds earlier and place down in front of us. It was great!

Then we spent about an hour at the Art Gallery of WA. They had a paid exhibition of 15th to 17th century “treasures”, mostly tapestries and clothing and whatnot which I convinced Jett wasn’t really worth spending money or time looking at. We were here just for the paintings and sculptures. I tried to ask him what he saw in some pieces, what he thought the artist was trying to “say”, why he thought the painting was done this way or that. He had quite an imagination and came up with some good answers.

One thing we both took away though was how “dumb” some art is. There was one display of four completely black panels. Nothing else. Four black panels in a row. We couldn’t for the life of us work out why this was considered good enough or important enough to hang in an art gallery. The one below at least had a gold border, but it was still just a black panel with a thin gold border.

There was some spiel about the artist, and how the painting was exposing inner turmoil and struggle and blah blah blah. Neither of us could understand what he was getting at, even with Jetts hyperactive imagination.

So we played a bit of Junior Pictionary the other night, and a fun time was had by all. Ashton and Jett thought it’d be fun to play kids vs adults, a challenge we were all too willing to accept. I was quite proud of my “wand” attempt:

Ashton managed to guess “chicken” from a drawing by Jett:

It was going alright for Suzanne’s drawings, until this picture. I had to remind her that “Ice Cubes” don’t necessarily sink to the bottom of the glass:

Jett somehow managed to guess “Tattoo” from a plain square box drawn by Ashton, but I think he might have been looking at my picture instead.

The first round was a close one but the adults won it by a slim margin. There were howls of how unfair it was to allow “Stamp Collection” when the clue was clearly “Stamp Collecting”. So in the second round the adults decided to forgo allowing the little indiscretions we’d witnessed from the kids in the first round. No more Mr Nice Guy for us; no more looking at the other team, we’d claim winners instead of allowing “draws” if the call was close, and the guess had to exactly match the clue. This was all much to Ashton’s dismay when she guessed “Sun” from one of Jett’s pictures, but it was disallowed. The clue on the card was very clear that she was supposed to guess “The Sun” and not just “Sun”.

Junior Pictionary is a great game for young ‘uns to develop their imagination and artistic talent, and should be part of every family games collection!

If you think it might look familiar, find out why after the cut

The image above was taken this year in 2006 in Sonoma Valley, California. The image below was taken in 1996 by photographer Charles O’Rear, and included in countless Windows XP desktops.

Find out more here.

We had Ashton’s 9th birthday party last night with a bunch of her friends coming around. The theme was “make overs” where they did their makeup and hair. There was lots of games and dancing and general shenanigans.

Ashton’s first attempt at doing her own makeup made her look like The Joker

It’s Book Week at school, and the kids have to dress up as a book character.  Jett has gone for the more traditional Jedi, but we put a little more thought and effort into Ashton’s costume.

I saw this on a $10 t-shirt. How many can you name?

The fallout of Borders bookstores falling into financial ruin in the States seems to be the downfall of a beloved bookstore from my childhood. Angus and Robertson were operating in Murray Street back before it became a pedestrian mall. In my early adventures travelling into the city to catch movies and explore, I’d more often than not end the day at Angus and Robertson flicking through reference books or the Sci-Fi section. I actually won a door prize for being the 100th person to pick up some particular book on display at the front of the store. Some guy with a microphone jumped out from behind a door and scared the shit out of me, yelling at me. I didn’t understand anything he said besides “The book is yours to keep!”. So I grabbed that book and ran as fast as I could out of there as if he was one of these “strangers” I’d been hearing so much about. After I ran a couple blocks I was able to process what he was saying. I’d won a book! It was called Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space and was the start of a small collection in that series.

Well, I can’t say times have changed much since then. Through my teens and into adulthood I’d often find myself at Angus and Robertson flicking through reference books and Science Fiction novels. The only thing that changed was the location. Angus was now across the street from their original location next to Old Mr Mitchum and his Corner Shop into a new flash multilevel premises.

But a couple weeks ago I saw they’d shut their doors and a little bit of me died inside. Salt was rubbed into the wound upon seeing the notice hung in their door: