Happy New Year!

It has been pointed out to me that my blog posts are increasingly infrequent, so by way of recompense here is a blog post that looks back on 2008. If you prefer to skip the words and get straight to the pictures you can! I've done a big update of pictures in my photo gallery. I've also added a couple of videos to my woefully underpopulated podcast - with hopefully more to come now that we have a handy-dandy 'Flip' camcorder.

Ooh where to start. Well, travel has been a big theme this year, and it was early-ish in the year that I was fortunate enough to visit Costa Rica with work. You can see pictures in the picture gallery, and hopefully you will get past my alarmingly rotund figure to taken in some very beautiful scenery. Costa Rica is known for its coffee and wildlife, of which I was able to sample a little of both, and enjoyed them very much. I learnt that coffee beans grow in little red berries and aren't brown until they're cooked. You can tour a coffee plantation in San Jose (and probably other places) and it was really interesting. I also saw a dormant volcano while I was there. The things I didn't get to do (but would definitely go back for) are checking out the apparently gorgeous beaches and animal spotting in the jungle treetops.

I'm afraid to say that my large tummy remained for a while longer and it wasn't until close to my birthday when a large parcel arrived that would help me get rid of it. Being close to the big day, I was very excited and thought my Big Gift had arrived, only to discover with great disappointment (not to mention very vocal disapprobation) that Diana had signed us both up for a ghastly diet called Nutrisystem. It essentially consists of small packets of astronaut food that you are only allowed to eat at set times of the day - with a bit of fruit and veg on the side. To make matters worse, Diana was revolted by the food and refused to eat it after a couple of goes. However I gallantly pressed on with the diet and was surprised to find that it wasn't so bad after you'd got used to it, and most importantly my weight was falling off and staying off. A couple of months later I was 20 pounds lighter!

Meanwhile Diana has been terribly successful with work things, and after flirting with joining a startup for a couple of months, then receiving counter-offers from her current work, she was promoted to a snazzy executive position with a corner office overlooking Times Square. If you're interested enough to find out details I'll leave that to Google - just remember that she keeps the Clark part in her surname for work. Apparently being an 'S' entitles you to all sorts of wonderful privileges such as access to the Executive Chef, the aforementioned corner office, and lately attendance to a special leadership course for female executives. I've christened it the Bossy Women Conference on account of the stories of feisty behaviour I've heard.

For my own part I was doing fine at Marriott but getting rather jaded after being there two years plus and I decided, with the very kind support of Diana, to leave Marriott for a short sabbatical and do some travel. Needless to say it was while I was in Australia that the economy imploded... oops! Part one of the travel was visiting Si, Jo and Lara in Sydney. You can see pics in themy online album, and hopefully it conveys a little of the great time that we had. Spending proper time with each of the Australian Batys was a real treat and Sydney couldn't have been a better place to hang out with them. I'd heard rave reviews from everyone who had been to Sydney and it lived up to them royally - the delightful ferries, the delicious food, the excellent coffee, the attractive harbour, the characterful neighbourhoods... and so on. Best of all I was there for Jo's birthday, featuring a weekend away to the Hunter Valley vineyards, plus Lara's first birthday party, which seemed to be the first day of summer.

Part two of the travels was Diana and I visiting with Viv, Giorgio and their little baby Jasmine. As we were in Melbourne we got to see a good deal of Irv, Sharon and their baby, Christian, too. It was like a London friends reunion - plus babies! Although the highlights included stroking a cute wallaby at an animal sanctuary, creeping up on wild kangaroos and exploring a bit of the coast, our enduring memory will doubtless be how we fell into old habits of indulging in all sorts of gourmet treats - from dim sum to vanilla slice. It was just like old times, and we had a terrific time pigging out and fooling around. Unfortunately I did put back on a few pounds and had to spend November and December working them off...

The third and final part of the travels began by meeting with Mum and Dad in Las Vegas so that I could join them on their road trip through the national parks of Utah. We did stop for a whistle-stop tour of LV, which seems to be turning into a giant shopping mall, then moved swiftly on to Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. The scenery was stunning and the perfect type of experience to share with Mum and Dad. Big highlights for me were our walk up the river in Zion (actually in the river itself - we had special waterproof shoes) and descending down amongst the 'hoodoos' of Bryce Canyon. The pictures are in my online album although it's impossible to capture the scale and ambience - but you'll get the rough idea. That was the end of travels for me, and after a week or so by themselves Mum and Dad joined Diana and I back in DC, during which we had fun and good food celebrating Dad's birthday and did an interesting little trip to Jamestown, site of the first successful British colonisation (nothing to do with the pilgrims and Mayflower, against our expectations) and Yorktown, where independence from the British was secured. One choice detail that I enjoyed discovering was that the French were pivotal in establishing American independence and it wouldn't have happened without them! Puts all that nonsense about 'freedom fries' in a new light!!!

The elections were a really exciting time. Diana and I are both huge supporters of Obama and we spent election night at the BET studios in NYC, and swung through Times Square which was buzzing and packed with revelers. It's exciting and still feels a little incredible that Obama did it. I'm very interested to see how things turn out. Perhaps the tone of DC will change under the new government and the town will shake off the pall of Bush and his cronies. I can see myself liking this town a little more with a progressive government in place.

To finish off 2008 and my sabbatical I decided to make an iPhone game - not the type of thing I would normally be able to do, so upon seeing the opportunity I thought I'd grab it. The game is called SlidePop and I have plans to keep evolving it and adding features during spare moments through 2009. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch check it out and let me know what you think!

Christmas has flown by in a whirlwind of cool games and gadgets and the New Year begins the day after tomorrow. 2009 could be pretty interesting - new work for me, probably somewhere new for us to live, and who knows what else!

PS This is my one-sided view of the year and doesn't include some of the stuff Diana could mention - she'd probably tell a better version of her Bossy Women and mention trips to LA and Atlanta, award shows and celebrity hob-nobbing that I don't know much about, plus tidbits about her nieces - her 'favourite toys' as she calls them :-)

Photos

I'm in Sydney after a long but pleasantly uneventful journey, and yesterday I spent some time with Jo and Lara getting a feel for Sydney. I've put them on my gallery page, which I'll keep updating as I go along:

http://gallery.me.com/gordonbaty

Enjoy! More to come over the next month...

Time for some travel

The last month or so has been very exciting. Diana has lately been promoted and we are looking at moving to New York where her new office is. At the same time I decided that it was not only time to move on from Marriott but also time to do the long-overdue, much talked about trip so see Si and Viv and their respective families in Australia. So the last few weeks have been preparations, mostly for the travel. As it happens, Mum and Dad already had plans to tour the parks of Utah around the time I get back, so rather than flying back from Oz to DC I'll be flying in to Vegas on the same day and joining them for about a week too. Not bad eh!

I've had quite a few people ask for photos from the trip, so I'll post a link shortly. I'll try to get in a couple of blog posts while I'm travelling too. Watch this space!

Fun weather

There's a storm in full swing as I write this - thunder, lightning, pouring rain, the works. Apparently there was torrential rain earlier today while I was at work - I must have seen at least six downed trees on my drive back from work, a couple of traffic lights out of action and two sizable puddles on the road for people to gingerly circumnavigate. Now it's gone from torrential to just thunder storm!

One thing I really enjoy about living in DC is the weather. It's rarely less than extreme. When it's sunny it's blazing hot with cloudless blue skies, then when it rains is pours, often with lightning and storms. Most of the time it seems to swing between these extremes, both of which I quite enjoy!

The only weather that I don't remember seeing at all while I've been here is hail. Strange, you'd think it would feature in the mix of extreme weather patterns.

Costa Rica trip

I just got back yesterday from a work trip to Costa Rica. I'd forgotten exactly where it was, thinking at one point it was an island... but fortunately i remembered (mainly after talking to Si, who did conservation work there a few years ago) that it's in Central America, just a bit further down from Honduras and Guatemala, which I visited a few years ago myself.

The work trip was a get-together for our international ecommerce people, who are spread across the globe in regional offices, and a chance for everyone to meet face-to-face and catch up on what we're up to. That mostly meant holing up in a snazzy Marriott for long presentations but fortunately there was still time to sample the local food and get out into the wild a couple of times. The hotel itself is a wonder of modern tourism - it's beautifully architected in the style of a traditional hacienda (and feels quite genuine), with a couple of restaurants and bars built around a courtyard and pool. There's a cafe, gift shop and travel agent, so you have everything on your doorstep if you don't want to emerge from the haven of the hotel. It seems that Costa Rica is very prepared for tourists and although dollars aren't the local currency it's hard to find a place where they're not accepted. Everyone will entertain a little amateur Spanish conversation but it's mostly unnecessary as their English is very good. I personally found the all-encompassing hotel a little stifling, but for the majority of people coming to Costa Rica I think it's a great option.

Costa Rica doesn't have really famous sights that you'd recognise, but the appeal is more in the flora and fauna, plus I think the beaches. There are a couple of volcanoes - I managed a visit to one and you can see my pics of the crater in my photo feed, and the country has a history of coffee growing that they're very proud of. We went on a tour of the Cafe Britt coffee plantation which was informative and enjoyable, and we heard about how Costa Rican coffee is the best because they don't cut corners or compromise the quality the way other countries do. I did bring some coffee home because it tasted great when we were there... let's see if it tastes as good out of my coffee machine!

Costa Rica is apparently very eco-friendly, with something like 90% of it's electricity generated from hydro and wind. It seems that the country has a general principal of living healthy and looking after nature, which they call Pura Vida, and you can probably figure out the translation. I didn't get to go on a cloud forest trip (maybe next time - I'm pretty sure Diana and I will be back for a proper vacation now that I've had a taster), but it seems that a major appeal is the options for exploring the tree tops and the interesting plants and creatures you find there. They have a great deal of colourful butterflies, birds and flowers. I saw quite a few just in the environs of the hotel, which makes me think what you'll see in the cloud forests must be pretty special.

I should mention the food was generally of a high standard too. Even the time I only had Burger King to choose from at the airport, they had rice and beans with sour cream and tortillas - yum! We also went out to a peruvian restaurant one evening, which had very tasty food. On the menu was a section called 'Chifa' which turned out to be Chinese food - even in Central America they like chow fun! Our people from Hong Kong were very tickled by it. I really enjoyed the local food though. I never got tired of plantains either.

Overall it's two thumbs up for Costa Rica. I hope I'll be back for more of a look around.

Big photo gallery update

I've done a revamp of the photo galleries and added a new feed (hopefully this one will work better than when I tried before) for recent photos that I've taken. Now that I've got an iPhone I'm snapping all the time!

The main albums are in the same place - link on the right of this page.

The feed of my recent photos is here: PHOTO FEED

PS Diana says I have write a blog about how wonderful she is - watch this space while I gain inspiration

New courtyard at Portrait Gallery

The recently re-opened Portrait/Modern Art Gallery was a big hit with me - a curious building with varied modern and original spaces, plus some really good exhibitions. There has been construction going on since it opened and I was delighted to discover the other day that the construction has finished - and the result is nothing less than a courtyard in the style of the British Museum's, done again by Norman Foster!

It was Martin Luther King day (a public holiday) on Monday, and I took the opportunity to visit it, dragging along Diana and Sami, Kati and Tori who were spending the day with us. The building is a rectangle, with the courtyard in the middle, also a rectangle, so it's not guite the same shape as the British Museum's. The roof is glass on an undulating frame, and not only makes for a very bright, airy ambience but also casts an attractive pattern on the walls. The walls were evidently exterior walls and have been kept as they were, and with the trees and bushes there is a sense of being outdoors. There are quite a few tables and a cafe, but most appealing for me (and Sami) were the smooth white marble walls that encompassed the trees and bushes. I'm not sure if theyd planned anything with the acoustics but the courtyard is generally peaceful and although there's a light hubbub of talking it seems calm and quiet. The only part that I felt didn't entirely work were some water features that were very thin patches of running water. Probably very clever pieces of construction, but mostly they looked like puddles as if the roof had leaked.

Anyway here's a few pics so you can see for yourself, plus a couple from our brunch at Busboys and Poets, our regular haunt.