Orange is not a colour, it's a state of mind

Los Angeles is a big sprawling place. We’ve never stopped here before and thought we would this time. The climate sure is intoxicating, even though they’re coming out of winter (judging by the winter clothes the locals are wearing) it’s still quite temperate and still has a landscape of blue sky and palm trees. We’re staying in a fantastic hotel on Santa Monica beach – here’s the view from our window.

Getting anywhere is a mission. We met our New York ‘land lady’ for lunch yesterday in Beverly Hills and she was absolutely horrified that we went there on the bus. I told her we were only in town for 3 days and she responded in the best New York accent ‘SO?!’ I guess you’re supposed to hire a car. She said everyone drives, and everywhere is 20 minutes by car. For us, everything is an hour by bus! It seems to be the transport system for crazy people from those who rant at you for no reason, ranting at themselves and shouting at pamphlet ads to removing their suit to reveal a Superman outfit underneath!

Quick list of stuff we’ve done:

• Walked along Santa Monica beach & explored promenade shops
• Gone by bus up to West Hollywood to meet Rick & Julia on the night they were also in town – walked the Hollywood Walk of Fame looking at all the stars and batting away dressed-up movie characters wanting to charge you to have a picture with them (on your own camera) and people flapping tour brochures.
• Gone by bus up to Beverly Hills to meet Sandy for lunch. She was lovely! Pure New Yorker, brought out to LA for work (ex film producer! and we watched her actor son in an episode of the TV show Numb3rs last night!) who told us lovely stories about the LA psyche and her life. It was such a great thing to do and she totally trusts us to live in her apartment. While we were at lunch The Mister was asked for ID – she said he should feel very chuffed about that – everyone here is cut and injected to look younger (and actually looks the same, which everyone does!) so he’s feeling all springy and youthful now!
• Wandered along Rodeo Drive – was a bit disappointing, not sure why, I think they whole glossy big shops with doormen thing is a bit overwhelming if you just want to have a poke around. It’s like even when out for a stroll you have to prove you can afford to be there.
• Went down to the Santa Monica pier and The Mister played some arcade games (some old shoot ‘em up game he hadn’t played since he was a teenager), got a strip of photobooth photos (your booth is so much classier and QUICKER @freezingkiwis), saw lots of random stalls with merchandise that could involve you: your face in a photo with the ferris wheel behind, your name on a grain of rice, you as a small clay sculpture, your future as predicted by the tarot cards. We went back after dinner and rode the ferris wheel – yes ME on a ferris wheel. It wasn’t until we had our tickets and were almost at the front of the line that The Mister told me he’d never been on one before! It wasn’t so bad
• Had some bad BAD coffee – been here 3 days and only had 3 cups. And the first was only half the bucket of searing hot milk I was presented with. The latte they serve at breakfast on the veranda of our hotel (such a cool place to have breakfast) is drinkable if you leave it to rest for 15 minutes!
• Gone by TWO buses up to Universal Studios in the sometimes torrential rain – not sure what I expected but it wasn’t really what I expected. Expensive day at a theme park although the 2 tours we did were pretty good although designed for mass reproduction – studio tour and special effects stage. Had a bit of my first cinnabon – it had some kind of gooey icing on it and I don’t think there was any real cinnamon present, was some kind of reddish cinnamon paste. Oh, well, I was excited to do it!

Santa Monica was very cool. Would visit there again.

So The Mister was in a jam (ha ha!) earlier this week – challenged by the partner of a guy we work with that HER jam is better than his raspberry jam. It started out as a harmless try-the-jam-at-home-on-your-toast kind of challenge but escalated into so much more – Al Brown of the very well know Logan Brown restaurant in Wellington waded in with support for the challenger, famous judges were lined up, Old Bank Arcade where it was held was jam-packed (ha ha), announcement of the event and write-up afterwards were in the paper and apparently the NZ Gardener magazine has put up their hand to sponsor it next year – WOW!

It was a great little get together – a really fun non-work, community thing to do left everyone in good spirits, even the loser, The Mister

I’ve put 2 posts about the event on the Xero blog: Xero jam session and Jamtastic!

So I’m receiving increasing pressure to blog which I will hopefully have time for while we’re in the States but in the meantime hope you’ve enjoyed the little rush of them over the last week. I’ve just had no time to sit down and do them when I get home and they’ve been floating around in my head bothering me. It’s weird that I have that feeling that I just have to get everything done before we go – at this rate I’ll have finished all my work before we get there and have none left to do – ridiculous because I’m not stopping work when we get there! Well, except for the first week off.

Anyway, it’s about this time of the night I find myself home at the dining table. Yes working. I often glance up to the traffic coming around from The Terrace and I always notice that many of them go over the double line onto the wrong side of the road. Some not so much, some a lot. Some so much that in the space of an hour there could’ve been some very bad accidents were a car coming the other way at the same time. The corner is pretty sharp, but there is a warning sign that it’s a left-angle bend and most people at this time of the day must be on the evening commute so surely realise how sharp the corner is.

So, in manner of nosy old woman twitching net curtains in a cul de sac, I decided to take 5 minutes to tally up how many cars came around the corner and how many went wide enough to be riding on the double yellow line and see whether any went way over.

The tally from 6.25pm – 6.30pm

• 65 – number of cars that came around that corner in 5 minutes
• 42 – number of cars that tracked a ‘good’ line around the bend
• 20 – cars that were close too or on the double yellow line (I define that as wide)
• 3 – cars that went OVER the yellow line (and a scooter!)

I was rather shocked!

Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but on TV programmes and in movies, whenever someone leaves their job they seem to do so with only one box. A brown or white file box, often with a lid and sometimes with a plant. Seems a bit dubious to me because I seem to have a lot of stuff around and under my desk, not to mention the collection of orange pens and post-it notes.

However, today we packed up our desks in the likely event that due to Xero’s continuing growth spurt new people will need to sit at our desks while we’re gone. After recycling my non-essentials I was very surprised that I have stuffed my 3 years at Xero into ONE box! Includes my collection of orange things, cup, framed pictures, the Xero User Guide when it existed in book form, a ream of orange paper and more!

It now waits in the storeroom with my special orange chair for my return.

So that’s our desks spring-cleaned, and the apartment – have scrubbed pantry, shower (with a toothbrush even!), fridge, balcony pots; emptied, scrutinized and repacked cupboards under stairs, basins and hot water cupboard and we’re now down to eating strange meals to use up bits of random food from freezer, fridge and pantry. And to top off the weekend The Mister went next door to see our neighbour who we don’t see for months (so she probably wouldn’t've noticed we were gone) to tell her about a stranger coming and going from our apartment only to be greeted by a stranger staying there while she was away – looking rather rumpled and disturbed in a bathrobe so he’s quite embarrassed. Dammit. The first time I’ve ever got him to go over to the neighbours and that. Now he’ll never go again. Sigh.

Had a wonderful wonderful evening on Mt Vic last night with Sara, Lucy & Jif to say farewell and toast to new adventures. Quite a perfect spot really, overlooking the airport. Poor old Jif is being left behind but the rest of us were getting high on bubbles and pizza and looking ahead to our new lives in Sydney (for them starting today and lasting forEVER) and ours in New York, shorter, but starting next week!

We’ll miss you guys!

Attended my first ever Webstock conference at the Wellington Town Hall last week. It’s a collection of internet celebs & cool dudes talking about things they’ve done and places they think internet and our lives online are going to go. About 20 of us from Xero attended the 2-day conference – all decked out in our Xero gear (which didn’t go unnoticed!)

Half of us went on to the ONYAs Awards (as in ‘Good On Ya’) on Friday night to recognise stars in the online world. Xero picked up 3 of the 4 awards we were nominated for which was great and The Mister had to go up to accept one of them. I did a quick write up with some photos and a video of an amazing digital light-show that used the Town Hall pipe organ as its centre piece on the Xero blog.

Following are some notes I took during the 2 days so you can stop reading now if you want to, no more pictures, just notes to self really!

Continue reading →

Had a lovely afternoon playing Top Models at the beach with a proper photographer taking family photos this weekend – everyone was together for Pen’s birthday and our gift to her was some family photos seeing as it’s not often these days that we’re all together, kids and all. Here’s one of my favourites and you can see more on Flickr.

The boys also recreated a scene with the 3 of them wearing matching yellow t-shirts with their names on them when they were (as best we can work out) 10, 8 & 3 which was hilarious and went down well. Trying to get Craig to wear his t-shirt into work but he’s not keen, apparently yellow is not his colour!

Happy Birthday Pen! xo

Not so often we have a cooking failure and it’s pretty demoralising when it’s for a dinner party! Sigh. Guess the hand held beater is just not good enough. There’s no time, and no saving it

Great to have the in-laws visit the parents in Awakeri over the summer break – sounds like a good time was had by all with great views, ice-creams and stories.

Someone pointed a camera at me at work the other day and now I see it’s turned up on their Flickr photostream.

Yes, still very orange