Good Karma

Some of you had heard that we had all our luggage stolen from us when we were coming home from a holiday trip from Toronto. Good karma must have been in the ether because I'm happy to report that a lot of the stuff has been found and will be making its way down to us over the next couple of months.

We had gone to Toronto over the holiday break to visit family. On our last day, we went to eat at the Keg restaurant near the airport before our flight. We had left our luggage in the back of my brother's car - a VW Golf with a hatchback. There were signs in the parking lot and in the restaurant to "watch your laptop since thefts have been reported". My spider sense was tingling so I went to my brother's car to get my laptop. My laptop bag also had all our passports and $200 in cash.

An hour later, we went back to Gary's car and the rear window was busted and all the luggage was missing. Jade was upset since they stole "Tiger" - a stuffed toy that she has been sleeping with for years. We felt a little shell shocked about the incident but Eve and I showed a lot of strength about the ordeal. It's just stuff we said. The bright side was that we could get back home to California and I didn't lose my (company) laptop. It also made the plane trip easier without luggage to check. Jade was sad but she was quite brave about the incident. She showed a lot of strength and understanding. People do bad things but most of the time people are good.

We were resigned that we were never going to see our stuff again and had started the process to replace all our goods. We started talking to the insurance company to discuss the settlement.

On Friday, I got a garbled voice mail from the Renaissance Hotel near the Toronto airport that they had found our luggage. I called them back over the weekend and they had found all 5 bags in the ravine behind their property. They went to recover as much of our stuff as they could and try to dry it out. I had arranged for Gary to recover our stuff and bring it back to his place for inventory and he sent us pictures.

The good news is that a lot of stuff like a dental night guard, prescription glasses and especially Tiger has been recovered. However, my iPod, portable speakers, other electronic gear and Eve's North Face jacket is missing. Also, all of our clothes and luggage have been left in a Toronto ravine for 2 weeks and have exposed to rain, snow and a wind storm. Gary mentioned that the bags are pretty trashed and the clothes smell like piss or mold. The books may be ruined.

All things being equal, we are really fortunate that our luggage has been recovered. A big shout out to Joelle and the staff at the Toronto Renaissance hotel. Joelle was the one who noticed the bags and took the initiative to recover our goods. I gave her details about the theft and they will review the night vision surveillance tapes around the time the crime took place. They are going to look for a car, license plates or suspects and hand it over to the police. There is a special place in hell for people who steal from little girls and make them cry.

Tiger is making his way back to California. I'm sure he will have an interesting story to tell.

Stop Motion Animation

Happy belated New Year! One of my resolutions is not to promise that I'll blog more. There are a lot of stuff I could write about but I choose to be lazy instead.

Anyway, we spent much of the holiday break in Toronto. We visited the Ontario Science Center where we played with stop motion animation in a hands on lab. Jade was really interested in animation and she wanted to do more. I promised her that we could it when we got back to California. When we got back home I looked for a few packages for the Mac and the best one I found was iStopMotion. It's really simple to use (even a 5 year old can use it) and it produces great results. The product has many tiers including a home, prosumer and professional versions. The home version is about $50 and has all the features you need to create stop motion animation. I imported the clips into iMovie for editing and adding the soundtrack.

I experimented with the set up using a crappy Logitech web cam since I didn't have a FireWire cable for my DV camera. Once I figured out how all the pieces fit together, I set up a table top animation studio in the living room. I showed Jade the basics of using the software and let her go. The film above was done mostly by Jade with a little help from me. Jade and I worked on the two characters at the beach but Jade did the other clips herself. Sound track by Buckethead.