Games and a new toy

he Gwilks invited me round for lunch with some friends of theirs (who included Gaby, who I remembered from the Chick Flicks group), followed (of course) by board games.  We spent a very enjoyable afternoon playing a wide assortment of games, most of which I’d never encountered before.  I won once, came absolutely last once,…

(Re) Openings

here aren’t a huge number of bright sides to living in a seriously damaged city, but one of them definitely is the excitement of seeing repaired buildings and brand new buildings opened.  Harvestbird and I got to see three today, all within the space of a couple of hours. First was Cunningham House, the Victorian…

Nokay

arvestbird taught me a new word at lunch today, “Nokay”.  It was invented by one of the mini-Harvestbirds, and apparently it means “No, I’m not going to do what you want me to, but I’m going to be really sweet and polite about it so you don’t realise I’m actually being defiant”.   Harvestbird reports that…

Birthdays and bad TV

y birthday party baking went really well – the bread dough rose and baked up beautifully, the cake and eclairs were suitably chocolatey and decadent (even if I did slightly mess up the icing on the eclairs by getting a little bit too experimental and forgetting that adding orange zest to give it an interesting…

Continuing randomness

eleasing all those books at the weekend gave me quite a few catches.  As well as the one I got on the day, I’ve had three more (three new members, too): 101 Cataclysms by Rachael Hale The Master Cat by David Garnett Time for Paws by Barbara Maguire Not bad going!  And looking in my…

Busy bottling

ad sent me a text a few days ago, saying friends of his were coming up to Christchurch, so he’d given them some apricots to drop off to me.  Cool, thought I, there might be enough to bottle some of them – I love bottled apricots, and the tinned ones from the supermarket just aren’t…

Photos from the weekend

I didn’t have time to post these the other night, but here’s a few photos from the afternoon at Little River.  Pretty much the essence of summer: I would be incredibly jealous of their house, which is a lovely wee cottage in the classic NZ early settlers style, but then I remember how far they…

Monday tomorrow

here did the time go?  Suddenly two weeks have raced past and my holiday is over 🙁  I haven’t achieved half of what I’d intended to (of course), but I have had a lovely break, got a few things done, and spent some pleasant times with friends, and really, what more can you ask from…

They've got to be joking

o Sideshow Bob is now Sir Bob, apparently for services to “looking good on TV”. It certainly can’t be for services to Christchurch – he and his council did nearly as much damage to this city as the earthquakes themselves.  But of course it’s very much in the government’s interests to keep up the pretence…

So many choices!

I had a few friends around for a pot-luck dinner on Friday night.  Not everyone I’d invited could make it – some were out of town, or had other plans, or cancelled because of illness (or in one case just forgot – I got a very apologetic email the next morning), but the few of…