Spastic Power Outlet.

Black Friday… finished. Surprisingly, the deals weren’t super crazy good… a couple but it was less busy and less of a steal then I was expecting. Went to Target, got a couple clothes and . Ryan got an Xbox with 6 games however, he’s got it hooked up to our hotel room tv. Our power outlet is acting a little wonky

Had In N Out burger for lunch… and was not disappointed. It helps that everything is fresh. It was crazy busy too! But I love the simplicity of the menu.. either hamburger, cheeseburger or double cheese burger. I got a hamburger animal style… however… I’m not too sure what it means.

After lunch, dropped our stuff off in our room and decided to do one of the most touristy things possible… we took a tour of the star’s homes. Of course most of them had big hedges in the front, but when you pay 65 million dollars for a house I would expect that to be the case. It was a very mediocre tour, but oh well. We took it from one of the people hawking tours on Hollywood Blvd… their booth was right outside Hooters. We stopped on Rodeo Dr. for a bit with our tour and outside the Tiffany’s there was one of those tin drum bands playing Christmas carols. It was really nice, and seemed like the perfect California Christmas thing. That and decorated palm trees.

Somehow after that we managed to go into more shops. Where I got the my best purchase of the day… a pair of Black suede Guess boots, regular 170 for 65. I’m very proud of that purchase…. and the boots are perfect. I quickly snatched up the boots and refused to put them down. It was the last pair in my side and there was no way I was giving them up. I think the salespeople were amused by utter refusal to let them out of my sight,

I have now deemed my shopping done. And I feel satisfied.

We had California Pizza Kitchen for supper. I had Jamaican Jerk chicken and Ryan had the pesto chicken one. About halfway through we switched pizzas. We each thought the others pizza was better.

Once we got back to the hotel Ryan realized that he accidentally left his camera at the restaurant. Luckily it’s fairly close to the hotel so we zipped back to get it and came back.

Tonight we play Xbox and watch Disney movies. There’s supposed to be thunderstorms sometime tonight but hopefully it clears up before tomorrow. Tomorrow is Universal Studios day. Yah rides and studio tours! Sometimes it’s nice to have a super touristy holiday.

It’s California Time! Entry 1. Thanksgiving.

Hollywood! Now say that all musically and stuff….

In California right now. We got here yesterday at one o clock approx. Plane ride was a bit bumpy but not too bad. Our Captain’s name was Bob and somehow that amused me. Took a shuttle to our hotel, and it’s actually quite decent. The pool is a decent size as are our rooms.

We’re two blocks down form Hollywood Blvd. Therefore, the boy and I wandered around Hollywood Blvd a bit yesterday and looked at the stars prints at the Chinese Mann theatre. Meryl Streep has large hands and tiny feet. However, I have the same size feet and hands as Frank Sinatra. He was a tiny man apparently. And Johnny Depp.. well he’s got big hands and big feet.

Apparently the Kodak Theatre is attached to a shopping mall and I have no idea how I didn’t know that. Somehow, it’s changed my perception of the Oscars… seems much less glamorous now. The CNN Heroes award show was there last night hosted by Anderson Cooper. Didn’t see him though as we were there earlier in the day.

We wandered around for a bit and hunted down a tiny purse so I don’t have to carry my big bag round. Eventually found one, but everywhere was advertising Black Friday sales. Which, I will be in attendance at a few today. Good thing we’ve been working on checking in derby. Mwa haha….

Apparently on Thanksgiving a lot of places close… imagine that. Including In N Out Burger and California Pizza Kitchen, both of which I am hoping to have while here. So did Johnny Rockets instead. Had a chili dog and fries. Ryan had the Route 66 burger which is mushroom and swiss. Today, I hope to try In N Out… animal style. Didn’t end up having Thanksgiving dinner somewhere here. But that’s okay.

Came back to the hotel, tried to decide on a movie to see. The movie theatres here look fantastic… one of them even has a live show before it! We’re going tonight to one of them… just need to decide which one.

Anyways… must get ready and go out! It’s sunny and warm here. It’s lovely.

Back for Just Under a Week and Already Off Again… Shortly.

I’m off to Los Angeles next week for a small bit! 5 days to be exact. The boyfriend and I are going just because we can. He’s normally not around since it’s curling season, as he films it, but he has a short span of time next week so we’re going on a wee adventure. There will be amusement parks involved and various cheesy touristy things. BUT…. it will be fun and really… fun is the essential ingredient to so many things.

My travel adventures are stacking up nicely this year. There’s something just so satisfying to seeing your passport start to fill up with stamps from various places.

In Conclusion…

Back home now. I suppose technically I’ve been home since Tuesday night, I’m summarizing today.

Pros: Dublin was absolutely fantastic. Great shopping, consistent weather, nice clean hostel and several great experiences with include three tiered seafood platter, the drunken Irish boys etc and so forth. Excellent conference, definitely would like to go again.

Cons: Guinness is not so tasty, teens running up and down the hall at 2 in the morning when I need to get up early for my flight, small pillows, biggest one though really was how short the trip was.

I have a very small selection of my photos on my Flickr . It’s only 15, but I have a few more that I can show interested parties at later dates

Back to LHR

Last day of the conference. Lectures all day is pretty tiring… I like to get up and move around lots.

Morning lectures were pretty dull… except for this one illustrator who does children’s books. His name was Oliver Jeffers and he was quite good. We watched a short based on his novel called ‘Lost and Found’. It was quite cute and about a boy and penguin.

Afternoon was pretty good. The presentation by Chip Kidd was absolutely hilarious. He’s a book cover designer from New York and he dressed in the most fantastic way possible. Plus I nearly passed out from laughing so hard. It was grand! The last one was by a special effects company called the Mill and their stuff is absolutely fantastic. It was the perfect end of the conference.

Had supper which was Malaysian Chinese and deep fried bananas for me for dessert. Just organizing for flight and such tomorrow and debating if Sara’s bag is too heavy still. We’re pretty sure it’s fine though.

I wonder what would happen if I stayed in the UK… I could live like a vagabound! They won’t notice… for a bit. Sara however is excited to go home but she is weird that way.

I’m Saving my Hatred For Time Travelling Hitler

Day 2 of the conference. Today was actually excellent for speakers. They were all very good… except the headliner… Sir Peter Blake.

It was alot of Illustrators, and there was a couple really funny presentations. Massimo Vignelli is a graphic designer who has been around since the 50′s. His wife and him are basically pioneers of the industry. Anyways, his presentation had to be one of the best I have seen. He was funny, informative and you could tell he was really passionate about his stuff. He had great quips, including one about his bellbottoms in one of the pictures form the 70′s. Funny thing was Sara and I had been sitting next to him and his wife for the whole conference and didn’t know who they were. I thought that was pretty neat.

The second hilarious one was David Shrigley. He had the driest and therefore most hilarious sense of humour. His stuff was definitely not drawn well and he even said so, but the quotes he ha dunde rthem and his presentation had me laughing for quite sometime. I may have to find out more about him.

Afterwards Sara and I had a very pub like dinner. Sara had fish & chips and I had Irish Stew. The bartender was very tall and looked like Sabretooth from Xmen. And we watched Rugby on the telly in the pub. Wales vs. New Zealand and New Zealand won. My brother would’ve enjoyed it but alas he didn’t watch it.

Afterwards we went to the Social, which was the official party for the conference. I was hoping to do a bit of networking but couldn’t see anyone from the conference. We ended up at Dublin Comedy night, which was quite funny… though we didn’t get some of the jokes. Grabbed some ice cream treats, just because we could and back to the hostel.

Last day of the conference tomorrow and then back to merry old England Monday.

P.S. The title is in reference to one of the things the host of Comedy night said. Also, apparently the Irish comedians like Canadians because we actually get their jokes.

Offset Day 1

Today we started conference. And will be at conference for next couple days. Therefore, I am forewarning there will no or tiny blog entries as it’s exciting for designers, but not so much everyone else.

So.. conference was a bit long for presentations but there was a couple cool things. However, the social aspect is lacking.. there was really no networking time and the breaks were too short for the amount of time we were sitting. Again, most were pretty good and there’s an illustrator who I actually might look in to getting prints of his. It just needs a bit of fine tuning. But we’ll see how it goes over the next couple days…. crossing fingers.

Three Tiered Seafood Platter

Slept in again, but not for as nearly as long. Sara was feeling better so we were ready to get a nice chunk of stuff done.

Went to SuperMacs for lunch today. SuperMacs is a fast food place that looks suspiciously similar to McDonald’s and is one store down from a McDonald’s. The fries are thicker and shorter, and the double cheeseburger reminds me of the ones you get while at an arena or something. Wasn’t too bad, I did enjoy the thicker fries. They had a dessert that seemed interesting… muffin and ice cream. It’s not weird to combine the two… since muffin is pretty cake like but I wondered why no one else had tried it before. It seems like a natural partnership…almost.

Did the Hop On and Hop Off our today of Dublin. It covers all the sites, so we saw Trinity College, St. Stephen’s Green, the Guiness Brewery, Phoenix Park and a crack deal. Yes sirree… a crack deal on O’Connell. Just a group of people chilling behind a newspaper stand and they just started snorting it up right there. Anyways, we continued on our merry way on the boss and continued to see all the sites. And surprisingly, Sara and I had already seen a good chunk of them but it was still very nice to sit and listen to the history and information about things.

Afterwards we got off near Trinity College, and wandered about. Finished shopping and went for dinner at the Blarney Inn. Sara and I were feeling like seafood, so we decided to get the seafood platter that the restaurant had. Our waiter guy laughed and said the cook’s going to love that. Apparently it would take alot of work to cook. He called to the kitchen and put me on the phone where I apologized for being such a hassle and thanked her for doing that up. The bartender and the waiter were having a good laugh the whole time, and truthfully, it was quite funny. When it was finished, it turned out our seafood platter was a three tiered seafood tower with oysters (raw and baked), mussels, crab claws, shrimp, crab salad and smoked salmon on it. We had no idea how huge it actually was… it was a little intimidating. But we managed to get through the whole things, I ate probably about 70% of the stuff on there… and there was only two pieces of smoked salmon and 3 raw oysters by the time we were finished. It was a good thing we were walking back to our hostel, as I was completely stuffed. I think my seafood craving has been culled for awhile after that… and I feel a bit proud I finished that much. The staff at the restaurant were hilarious, so it was an excellent time.

Did a bit more wandering before heading back. Organized all our stuff and picked up alarm clocks from the 2 euro store. Our conference starts tomorrow so the next few days will be filled with interesting talks and presentations.

Here We Go A-Wandering

Today was another quiet day. Sara woke up feeling a bit poorly, so after grabbing some pumpkin soup from the nearby deli, I abandoned her to wander the city.

I decided to peruse the Temple Bar district. It’s kind of the artsy area here and has alot of really neat little shops. They also have the Irish National Film Archive and the National Photograph Archive there and a couple tiny little galleries. I didn’t go into the Film archive though… since I think you had to actually have something to look up. It looked a bit like a library but it certainly seemed really cool from what I saw of it.

After that, I decided to wander into a few more shopping places. Every single place is filled with sequins everywhere. I’m so sick of seeing sequins and I really hope that trend doesn’t migrate to Canada. Who wears a silver sequined blazer really?

I headed back to the room to see how Sara was doing. She felt well enough to go out, so off we went after getting her some tablets from an Eric Bana lookalike pharmacist. Back to the shops, and more shopping rather than the window shopping I was doing earlier. I am now a proud owner of a Swatch watch. It feels great to actually be able to tell the time.

Supper was up next, and we attempted to find a restaurant my guide mentioned. It felt like a seafood kind of day. Off to the docks. My guide has good advice but unfortunately it’s not very explicit in directions. And so…we wandered. As we were looking around we passed by a grocery store and I swore I saw a Tim Horton’s there. I did a double take and low and behold… it was an actual Tim Horton’s! It was so random, I started gesturing wildly to Sara and pointing… and holy crap. They had the doughnuts and everything. There was a security guard near the door who was looking at us like we were insane… but it was so unexpected we thought it was a mirage at first. We didn’t stop but may go there at some point just to say we went to Tim Horton’s in Dublin.

By this point we were ready to take the first restaurant we came across… ironically enough the first restaurant we came across was the one we were looking for originally. Turns out it was a street down from where we originally started looking. I had crab risotto and garlic prawn skewers and baby potatoes. Sara had prawn torpedoes and roasted lamb loin. Our dessert… creme brulee with vanilla bean ice cream and a strawberry sauce. Very delicious… and I’m sorry for torturing you Mom with description of this… as I know it’s your favourite.

And then back to the hostel. Grabbed two big bottles of water. I fell asleep for a bit when we got back, but woke up to get some water and decided to get my blog done. That’s where we stand… now it’s back to bed and in the morning we have our last touring day before the conference we originally came here for starts. Hopefully that entails the Hop On Hop Off Tour.

Lazy Autumn Day

Yesterday was a pretty chill day here. We slept in til noon thirty and just ended up doing a lot of meandering around the Antique District. There a was a bunch of really neat graffiti that we took pictures of. We did a bit of window shopping there too. There was a ton of really cool stuff but super expensive of course. However it was still fun to look at.

Afterwards, we grabbed a cup of tea and did a bit more browsing in the shopping district. There’s a ton of really great shops and I found a few more pieces of clothes I wanted. However, none in my size. Oh well.

Sara and I came to the conclusion that it would be nice to see a play while here. We headed over to a theatre nearby and grabbed a couple of tickets for Tales of Ballycumber. We had a bit of time before for a bite to eat so we ended up going to a place called Eddie Rocket’s, which is basically Johnny Rocket’s just in Ireland. I think it’s a bit of Franchise or something. Sara had chicken tenders and I had a foot long hot dog, and we both had oreo milkshakes. It was kind of fun to have American food in Ireland.

The play itself had fantastic set design and great acting but the script itself was utterly terrible. It had far too many loose ends that were never resolved and it almost seemed to be trying too hard to be deep. It was about an old man whose younger friend committed suicide. Beyond that… there’s no way to summarize it because it went off on so many tangents. I felt very unsatisfied after.

We then headed back to the hostel watched Love Actually and played with my DS. It was good fun. It’s so nice to not have a schedule of things to do… much less stressful and we still end up getting aot done.