Last Saturday I went bowling with some friends, moving on to Rochester where we bought baked goods and sweets from an old fashioned candy store, and finally onto Wai-sun’s house (whose party it was). We played on her dancemat for a while and watched Spaced in the evening, which was utterly weird, mainly because I happened to find some ‘tribbles’ in her video cupboard. These little balls colourful fluff apparently originate from Star Trek, multiplying as they feed. We designated the fat tribble ‘the mothership’ and the other tribbles that squeaked as the messengers. What followed cannot really be described, but, simply put, we had a great time trying to keep the tribbles away from the claws of Chris ^_^.

Wednesday was the evening meal, where we had a surprise party lined up for Wai-sun at the Exchange. The food wasn’t great, but Simon’s red and blue mutant fish napkin creation helped liven things up! Plenty of photos were taken, including some interesting low angle shots of the fish and some weird lighting effects due to camera shake.

Thursday was ‘Sakura 2004’, in which we sang ‘Ichiri-tte’ (the Japanese grammar song Kushida-sensei taught us) whilst performing a comedy sketch with a giant banana ^_^. We also sang ‘Sakura Sakura’ as we did this time last year to say farewell to the visiting Japanese students. The most interesting parts were, of course, ‘behind the scenes’ where we attempted to create another 4-man base human pyramid like the one we did last year. Some small kid crammed himself into a locker just…because, and the giant inflatable banana was put to good use ^_^.

Friday was another Medway Youth Parliament committee meeting on the environment and the regeneration of Medway. We are hoping to organise a conference to get young people’s views across to aid the development of this project. I’m particularly fond of trying to promote ‘German bins’ (which can be found *here*) with multiple sections for recycling. While I’m on the issue, my design & technology project the is re-design and innovation of the humble kitchen bin to enable users to put both recycled waste and refuse in the same unit. I will post some pictures as soon as I upload them (but don’t look for them for a little while yet).

Thinking about that, I could also upload my last design project, which was a coffee table commemorating the Japanese-American designer Isamu Noguchi, an intriguing garden and product designer (he did an interesting coffee table and the ‘Akari’ paper lamps). You can take a look at some of his sculptures *here*, or, for a short biography with a few pictures of his most famous works, go *here*.

“Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.” (Isamu Noguchi)

Right, that’s about it for now. I have nothing planned for Valentine’s Day, not that I care much. I think it’s all too commericialised, and I think that couples should show how much they love each other at random, meaningful points in time, rather than a set date. It makes it so much more special if your afficionado comes home with a bunch of flowers after you’ve had a hard day than having to wait for a recognised date to do so. Hmmm, mine is but an idealist view though. I suppose after a while romantic gestures like that would become less of an issue because the couple will have ‘settled in’, if I can put it that way.

Okay, and one more thing, I finally bought my own webspace and domain name. So, providing I got the bid first, I should have my own space to really push to get my website up onto. Just waiting for that confirmation email…