Family, art, & books
Saw Mum & stepfather briefly on Thursday – they were on their way up to the top of the North Island to SF’s brother’s birthday party, so left the car here rather than at the airport (we’re so close to the airport that it’s generally cheaper to get a taxi than to pay the airport parking fees).
I had planned yesterday to go to the Art Gallery, to see the Ron Mueck exhibition, which I’d realised last week is closing this weekend. Unfortunately, most of Christchurch had the same realisation, and when I got to the gallery I found the queue for tickets stretching across the foyer and out across the courtyard, so I decided not to bother. It wasn’t so much the queueing that put me off, but the thought of how crowded the exhibition would be – trying to catch glimpses of the artworks among the crowds.
Instead, I wandered through the rest of the gallery, which they’ve rearranged lately, organising the artwork by themes rather than by period. It’s kind of an interesting approach, I suppose, but it somehow left me with the impression of the gallery being a bit emptier than usual – there seemed to be much fewer works than I remembered (I know at least a couple of my favourite pieces weren’t there, presumably having been cycled back into storage).
Anyway, it wasn’t a totally wasted trip into town, because I dropped into Coffee Club to restock the OBCZ (which was looking pretty empty after me not going in for a month or so), and while I was there overheard a woman at a nearby table mentioning bookcrossing to her friend, having just seen the sign on the shelf. I introduced myself, and it turned out she was a geocaching friend of lytteltonwitch’s, who’d been introduced to bookcrossing by her, but not been brave enough to release any books yet. She really liked the idea of the OBCZ as a safer place to release books.
She’s since caught the book she picked up from the shelf (Three Gothic Novels), and has joined as lizzybear76. Oh, and we worked out we’d actually met before – somewhere up in the Port Hills when lytteltonwitch and I were out on a bookcrossing expedition and ran into her (and her husband, IIRC?) on a geocaching expedition.