Artsy Fartsy

Alright… So Linder Binder covered a great deal of what has happened over the past couple weeks, but not everything. Don’t you go thinking for a second that you’re not going to hear from the other half of the long-standing bloggers from way back when [I’m talking about myself there]. Skinner claimed he was going to write a guest blog during his stint down under, but as you can see – nobody posted whatsoever during the time he was here. So, I guess not. Be that as it may, I’ll try to fill you in on other interesting happenings whilst Brian Fitzgerald Skinner was in our presence (note – he’s always in our hearts and thoughts, but rarely in our location).

Shortly after his arrival… Skinner busted out his new camera and much of the rest of his trip was consumed with utilizing every single feature it possessed, which were quite numerous. Anyway, it got everyone thinking about what their cameras could do and soon everyone was doing time lapse photography, hi-speed action shots, color warping and matching, and timer settings. Needless to say, we’ve got about a thousand pictures ranging from the beautiful to the bizarre and I’ve decided that for the rest of this post I’m just going to post a few pictures that used some sort of nifty feature and give you a brief explanation.


This first one may not look special at all… and alone by itself, it really isn’t. Except for the dermatologist’s tongue about to get bitten off – it’s pretty standard. The fun part comes in when you get to see the sequence because this picture is part of 6 or 7 more that make up a collage of Erin and Brian jumping in the sand. This was when I figured out my hi-speed action setting that takes 10 or so pictures a second and I decided to make them jump up and down to check it out. I think it’d be fun to print out a bunch of those pictures and make them into one of those flip-books that creates a moving picture.



The description for the above picture is two-fold. You’ll notice that the only color that shines through is yellow. Before you ask – Yes, Brian and I are both wearing almost-identical yellow shirts. We bought them together in Melbourne and wore them the rest of the day, but it wasn’t totally on purpose. I had initially bought a reddish-orange one that was an XL but when I tried it on in the bathroom it was far too tight. I attempted to return it and was informed I could only substitute it for something else… so that’s where you get me in the yellow shirt. That’s the first part of the description and the second is that both Erin’s and bSkinny’s cameras have a nifty setting that allows you to pick only one color to show up. It looks really sweet most of the time and especially when you are in Melbourne with fantastic graffiti everywhere. When I write a blog about Melbourne, I’ll include more pics and stories than you can shake a stick at, but for now this will just serve as something to whet your appetite. Two-part description of above picture = complete.

I thought I was going to have a lot more firepower* to use in this blog, but I just remembered Skinner’s camera was the one with all the nifty styles of pics and I don’t have access to them just yet. I’ll let you know once he posts them somewhere so I can get them up on here maybe for your viewing pleasure.

*firepower = stylized pictures

I realize this is a fairly incomplete blog post and I apologize for that, but I’m feeling overwhelmed at the moment trying to come up with a way to bring everything from the past 3 weeks together into a coherent blog. I don’t see it happening so the next two or three blogs will probably be somewhat nonsensical. In the end, however, I expect them to mesh together to form something far greater than the sum of all the parts.

Please be patient with us as we work to give you guys what you love… US!

Jesse “trying to be way too artsy for his own good” Meredith

Test Cricket

On the 5^th of Jan the guys spent the day at the Sydney Cricket Grounds to watch an epic day three of a cricket match between Australia and South Africa. Test cricket is a five day event marathon and on the third day we got to see wickets 4 through 10 of South Africa's first innings plus a couple overs of Australia batting. Highlights of the actual cricket were few and far between as Test Cricket is a pretty slow game with a lot of strategy and not too much excitement. The biggest moment of the day was probably when Australia was fielding a grounder and threw out South Africa as they tried to stretch a single into a double. It was an amazing throw as the fielder turn and threw and nailed the stumps without really looking at where he was throwing. It was pretty amazing. But outside of the actual game there were lots of fun things going on. We talked to a number of other people in the stands and got a lot of insight into the game that we wouldn't have picked up on otherwise. There was an awesome kid Angus

who we really enjoyed hanging out with. He knew everything about cricket and the teams. Taylor volunteered to finish his beer if Angus could name every Aussie on the field. Taylor was impressed but not too pleased when Angus rattled off all 11.

He was a great kid. Also during the lunch break (its awesome that a sport has a break in the middle of the day for lunch) a bunch of little pee wee little league cricketeer teams came out and played a ton of different little games.

Definitely more entertaining than the actual game there were balls flying everywhere and no one knew what was going on. We picked up on the name of a few kids playing near where we were sitting by listening to their parents in the stands cheering. One kid named Scottie we especially enjoyed rooting for. He had no idea how we knew who he was or why we were going crazy every time he did anything. So it was a great day of sun and sports and beer with the guys.

After a long day in the scorching heat we decided to stop by Redleaf Pool on the way home.

Then it was time to rest up for our trip to Melbourne! But Jesse or I will cover that in another post.

New Years

Happy New Years everyone! Ok we are already a few weeks into the ought 9 or whatever we are calling it these days, but since The Rescuers went into a lengthy period of radio silence since ought 8 we have some recapping to do. So New Years was quite the event here in Sydney. As best I can remember we were all up and ready to go for New Years eve by 11am.

We went downtown and visited some bars and reflected on this last year. Taylor had to go to work so we walked him over to his hotel on the water right across from the opera house. Once there someone (I think Jesse) had the bright idea to jump in the water right outside the hotel. Somehow this felt like a great idea so the three of us stripped down to our undies and took a little dip in the water by the docks. This was all pretty disconcerting to everyone in the hotel's restaurant except for Taylor. Other employees figured out pretty quickly that we were friend's of Taylor as we were doing everything we could to embarrass him. Other employees showed concern by telling Taylor that it was not safe at all for us to be swimming because of all the oil in the harbor. Taylor's response: “I don't think they care”. Someone else told Taylor that there was risk of being attacked by sharks. Taylor's response: “Ok, be reasonable.” Eventually a manager asked Taylor to come out to ask us to go jump in the water somewhere else besides right in front of their restaurant. So T came out and said hi and took a couple pictures with us (I wish I had one of those pics but you will have to look to Skins or Jessem or Emay or someone else for those.) After that we hit up a few more bars and generally partied around Sydney til around sunset. Later that night we all made our way down to Duff Reserve, a tiny little green park right on the edge of the water pretty close to where we live in Rose Bay. From that point you can see much of the harbor including the bridge. Some fireworks went off at 9 (for families and kids who can't stay up to midnight) and we all ooed and ahhed from there. Unfortunately Duff Reserve isn't much of a secret and the tiny area had 50 some odd people packed in pretty tightly. Everyone trying to find space for their own little picnic and viewing area. After the 9 oclock show, Skinner, Amit, and I

decided we didn't want to spend the rest of the night packed like sardines here so we left to go find adventures downtown. After a quick little taxi ride downtown we wandered into the Botanical Gardens and talked to random people. There was a nice frenchman there giving us shots of vodka I believe. He thoroughly enjoyed providing the shots by pouring them into the cap of the handle and we thoroughly enjoyed the shots. But we didn't have much of a view point of the bridge from there so we continued walking. Eventually we found ourselves at the rocks more or less under the bridge. The fireworks

were amazing from the vantage point but it took just about forever to get back home. One crazy new years.

Blue Mountains and Australian Open

Welcome back! Ok you didn't go anywhere. It was us that left. We apologize. We had a lot going on the last few weeks. But no excuses. We are going to have to work really hard to get you up to date but I think we are up to the challenge. Lets see where we left you and we will go from there.

Ok it looks like we fell off right before new years right when skinner showed up. Brian Skinner showed up a couple days before New Years and left a couple days ago. For those of you who don't know who BS is, he played volleyball with Jesse and I at Stanford and is now working for a software company in Palo Alto. He demanded adventures and mayhem and activities galore out of us so that's what we gave him. A couple days after New Years, Chandra Morris or Rodeo as we like to call her flew in to visit us for a whole month! Rodeo is friends with Jesse and Erin from their summer in Arizona. So once those two showed up, it all pretty much went downhill from there. I am going to talk about the last couple days first because I remember those the best and then backtrack as best I can from there. Here are the last couple days of activities out in Oz.

Blue Mountains

On the 13^th of 2009 I had a full day off work so Chandra and I (everyone else had to work) made a little day trip out to the Blue Mountains for some hiking. We were up by 7:30 to get out to the Blue Mountains by around 11. We hiked for about 5 hours and covered 10-15 kilometers. It was a perfect day for a hike. Blue skies all day but not sweltering (the next day when we went to the Australian Open and it was unbelievably hot). We started at the Three Sisters

and Echo Point and hiked along the Prince Henry Cliff Walk. There were almost too many gorgeous lookouts along the way.

Eventually we had to pass over many of the views or we wouldn't get back to civilization before nightfall. We got out to the Leura Cascades and took a little dip in the water.

From there we went down into the Leura Forest. To get from the Cascades to the Forest we descended down hundreds and hundreds of stairs. Once we got to the bottom it was very rainforesty and beautiful.

After that we hiked through more regular forest and ended our hike going up the Giant Stairway, 900 steps of calf killing work. We felt it was a little generous to call it a stairway. It felt more like a ladder it was so steep. Exhausted after 5 hours of wanderings, we grabbed some Subway (only restaurant still open at 6pm in the tiny little town) and a bottle of wine. We hopped back on the train and had a great 2 hour ride home with our wine.

To cap off the day we took a taxi home from the Edgecliff train station where we found $50 on the back seat of the cab. All in all it was a pretty great day.

Australian Open

On the 14^th of 2009 we went to the Olympic Park in Sydney to watch some excellent tennis. Like I said before, it was sooooo hot outside. We sat in the shade for most of the day and have no idea how the players managed to go on out in the sun all day.

We got to see Djokovic dismantle his opponent in straight sets and then we watched a very excellent match between Lleyton Hewitt and Jano Tiperavich. Jano is Serbian and Lleyton is Australian. There was a huge Serbian contingent in the arena to watch Djokovic and they all hung around to see Tiperavich so the atmosphere got a bit hostile when the Australia v Serbia match got pretty close. The Serbian crowd was small but rowdy and the Aussies were more numerous and got pretty upset when Hewitt was losing early. At one point the Serbs started shouting “Look at the scoreboard”. Some old lady yelled in response “Look at your country!”. So it was a pretty entertaining match all around. Hewitt went down 5 games to 3 in the first set and came back to win 7-5. He went on to win the second set as well to the delight of the crowd. It felt like the Serbian crowd really only cared about seeing Djokovic win so they left happy too. It was the first time I have ever been to a real professional tennis match and I enjoyed it a lot even though I was falling asleep at times from being still exhausted from the day before in the Blue Mountains. All the rules about being quiet during points and not being allowed to walk around during games. I didn't realize tennis was so civilized. I didn't really care for it too much. I think the players could focus and perform just as well even with the crowd cheering during the point. But what do I know.

Anyways thats it for the last couple days. Hopefully in the next week or two I can go back and recap our adventures for new years and the first couple weeks of 2009. It's good to be back!