Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
My wife is from Japan and the japanese word for carrot is ninjin. She’ll ask me at times what my ninjin is which refers to the image of a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of it’s nose as a motivation to keep it moving forward… In the context of how my wife uses it ‘what’s your ninjin’ could be translated into what are you excited about in life at the moment. Are you pursuing a goal? Are you working towards the realization of some project? Is there a new skill that you’re working on? Are you excited about a trip that’s coming up? It could be anything really, but it’s an interesting notion about what it is that leads me through my day.
At the moment my ninjins are a mixed bag of things. I’m working on a new show that I’ll be debuting at the Pacific National Exhibition in August and working on some of the technical issues as they relate to some of the props I’m hoping to use. Then comes the challenges involved with making sure the resources are around to cover the costs of said props while keeping in balance the financial realities that are demanded by responsibilities like being a home owner, husband, father. Then comes the balance of time between the pursuit of new ideas and the work on the new show balanced with the need to stay on top of the administrative and other work required to keep the current stuff going and money coming in…
I was out for a dose of inspiration and creative thinking with my friends David Duchemin and Shawn Farquhar again yesterday. We got together a few weeks ago and I enjoy the conversation and lunch so much I asked if they’d like to do it again. So we hooked up again and it was great! We gabbed for a few hours non-stop, I came home feeling refreshed and revitalized about attacking my crop of carrots with new vim and vigor! Hopefully the conversation had a similar effect for David and Shawn. We’re all very successful at what we do, and what we do is quite different from each other but there’s just something great about getting together and exchanging ideas, listening to stories and getting fired up and inspired to continue to work hard at what you do from other creative minds.
Came home and decided to work a bit more on the prototype for the cannon I’m going to use to launch William T. Wiener from – the Hotdog equivalent to the human cannon ball. The ‘Ketchup Cannon‘ is the working title for this device at the moment and after preliminary launches yesterday in the rain it was time to take a slightly more measured approach to the launch chamber’s length as well as the appropriate pressure to use when launching said ‘Flying Frankfurter.’
OK… I’ve got to be totally honest… It’s hard to write a line like that last one and keep a straight face… Man oh man do I love that I get to do stuff like this for a living and that I can legitimately claim that today’s ninjin was all about the ‘Ketchup Cannon.’ Hello! I love my life!
