arvestbird’s writing talent has been recognised with the inclusion of one of her essays in Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2015, which had its Christchurch launch last night. She invited me along to the launch, where she and a few of the other included writers read teasingly short excerpts from their essays. It…
o I went and bought fabric for the Birds in Flight quilt yesterday. Just the background fabric, because I’ve decided to use a “scrappy” style for the actual birds (where you use a mixture of similarly coloured fabrics to make up the shape, rather than just one fabric), and I’ve got more than enough in…
As predicted, the kids stayed up until the very early hours playing computer games – they tell me it was “only” until 1 am, but I woke up a couple of times in the night and could still hear them, so I suspect it was actually much later. Which meant they didn’t get up until…
We went out geocaching again this morning (Lytteltonwitch is trying to meet a milestone for the total number of caches she’s found), but thankfully it wasn’t quite so hot today, especially as we ended up clambering around over rocks and hills again, climbing down from the top of the rocks above the Clock for one…
I’d forgotten just how hot it can get down here. Such a hot day today – a high of 33 according to the Metservice (and they usually underestimate the temperature by a few degrees, because their recording station is near the river), and even now, at 7 pm, it’s over 31. And it’s been slightly…
ytteltonwitch came over today, and we went to investigate a charity shop she’d found that had the bookcrossing holy grail: three books for a dollar. They had a really good selection, too, so I ended up investing $10 in stocking up with potential themed releases (I was punished for such extravagance when the pile fell…
s part of some assistance we’re giving to a research project in another department, a colleague and I have spent the past few days building a bibliography of earthquake research. After scraping all the usual academic databases, we turned to Google Scholar, which often picks up papers that the other databases don’t, particularly newly-published material…
The two main programming languages we use at work to build helpful little tools to speed up the tedious jobs are Javascript and Python. I’ve been making reasonably good progress at learning Javascript, but the Python stuff I’ve been leaving to Lucy-Jane, who is a much more skilled programmer than me. On Friday afternoon, she…
hat I’d intended today was to spend a few hours in a relaxing game of Minecraft with the nephews. What it turned into was a frustrating afternoon struggling to get the server to play nice. Still, it was a lot of fun for the first hour or so, until the server crashed… Nephew #1 had…
I don’t think I’ve shown you the latest additions to my wall(s) of art. This guy Mum found for me on Trademe: (Despite appearances, it really is hanging straight – it’s just that I had to stand at a bit of an odd angle to get the photo without too many reflections in the glass…