Category: Uncategorized

 

well, today i’ve been at a conference for the design industry.  it’s funny going to someone else’s industry’s conference, but it’s what jane kindly gave me for my birthday.  and it’s been excellent.

i still got my usual bus in to town (if i go in any later i don’t get a park at the park and ride), so i started the day with a slap up breakfast and a read of the paper.  nice.

then it was over to join the rest of the 2,000 people in the auditorium to listen to listen to 6 fantastic speakers.  there was someone from Pixar there to talk about how they make their animations from concept to completion, and there were a couple of english designers (one who works with sound, the other with light), someone who does typography for books and magazines and things, an internal designers (of business buildings and outdoor spaces) and an international fashion designer.  and it’s compared by Te Radar who makes me laugh.

then, at 7pm i wandered down town in the rain to join the subtle mob

this consisted of a few 100 people following instructions played to them from their MP3 players.  We had all previously downloaded the track and pressed play at 7pm.  people were meant to be in couples and there were two different sets of instructions.  the idea was it was like watching a play where the actors were the other people doing their instructions.  normally it’s meant to be quite subtle and you just blend in, but because there were so many people it didn’t really work like that !

it was good to be part of, even though i was just on my own.

 

here are some real pilots congregating outside the flight centre.  if i’d been using my other camera this would have been a great photo !

 

when i got home kezia very excitedly showed me her Reading Award for doing some excellent work on her hangi diorama. 

she was very pleased !

and they both had good days at school and swimming.

jane’s car key snapped off in the car door which was a bit unfortunately.  they seem to go for old fashioned keys on cars here – i heard it was because of all the trips to the beach during which is the same reason all their money is waterproof.  but i’m not sure.  they might just be old fashioned.

anyway, it happened as she parked up outside a cafe to meet a chum from school.  so thankfully her friend drove her back home so jane could pick up the spare to drive the car back.  she also managed to extract the remaining key bit from the lock at home with tweezers, so the only cost is getting a replacement key cut.

i felt pretty ill last night so had an early night and i was still feeling a bit ill this morning.  on a normal day i might have phoned in sick, but this was no ordinary day !  So, i took a few stomach tablets and headed out the door. 

First exciting thing was being driven in to town by a friend (jane runs with his wife) so he could take me for breakfast in town.  he sells life insurance (!) and was due to give me a quote so we made a morning of it. 

he’d phoned me earlier in the week a bit concerned that my blood pressure readings were very high – i was 180/78 so my premiums were going to be massive (if i lived long enough to sign the forms).  it didn’t seem right, so i was going to get retested this morning.  but in the end i didn’t have to as apparently when they looked carefully at the writing they realised it was 130/78 which was almost exactly what it was a year ago when we had our emigration medicals.  phew.  They also let me off the blowy down the pipe test as i made a mess of that due to technique !

we both had a greasy fry up for breakfast whilst talking about health and life insurance !

then after work i headed down to a place called Shed 10 which took a while to find. in the end i found Shed 1 and followed the shed entrances until i reach 10.  there’s an exhibition on at the moment about product design which is great.  you can read about it here.   the lady above is Katrin Sonnleitner and is one of the artists. she gave us a tour of the exhibition.  it was all free (including drinks and nibbles when we arrived) and it was great. 

that finished at 7ish which was just the right time to walk across to the centre of town where our neighbour warren was at a computer society meeting, so i could get a lift back home again !

what an excellent day

jane had a day off, having fun with her chums. coffee, laughing, more coffee, that kind of things.  and the girls had a good day too.  hoorah

tomorrow i’m having the day off for the day 1 of my two day birthday present.  excellent.

Not sure what this is folks.

Today Dave went to work, so did I and the girls went to school. Kezia has her piano lesson at school on a Wednesday afternoon. I was free at that time today and she was keen for me to come and watch, so I turned up to find out that her lesson had just finished, as someone earlier in the day had been absent so the teacher had shunted all the lessons forward. Grrrr. However, the teacher said that Kezia was getting on really well and would have finished book one faster than any of her pupils had ever done before. So that’s good to know and a nice boost for Kezia, who has also been told she is in the Yr4 extension writing group. Sorry, proud mother moment.

Not much else to report. We went to the library after school and tomorrow I have the day off!! Hoorah.

It’s Jane btw

i left work half an hour early this evening so i could be back in time to go to our church small group festive midwinter (bit late) family meal. it was a ‘bring a plate’ meal, which means you turn up with some food and share it all about.

so we put our christmas hats on, cooked a pizza and went round to layne and lorraine’s house (having picked debbie and laura up on the way).  we knocked on their door and sang ‘we wish you a merry christmas’ until lorraine came out and informed us layne had just gone down with a stomach bug and could the meal be relocated !  so we all headed to our house (which was a mess, so needed a speedy tidy up).

but we had a really great time.  much laughing was done by young and old.  it was the first time we’d properly met Eugine’s wife and family (he’s wearing the red t-shirt and his wife and kids are in the background.  we talked about internationalness as eugine and thomas (bottom left) have both lived in various countries and travelled to many more.  so we chatted about the Philippines, Singapore, Paris and Germany whilst eating philippine, malaysian, italian and wherever chips and salad are from, food.

by the way, the second picture is of our old food processor which broke because the plastic switch fell apart.  it’s a moulinex and i managed to find a place in northampton called belstar electrics which sells spare parts and accessories for appliances . To be honest it was a bit of a long shot whether i’d ordered the right part, but i had.  i placed the order sunday evening new zealand time and the part had arrived by the next saturday morning and slotted in to place perfectly.  a fully mended appliance for just five pounds and ninety pence including postage ! 

i was so excited i emailed them a misspelled thank you note which they put on their website here   So next time something breaks in your house (washing machine, coffee grinder, blender jug lid etc) check there first !   Just in case you are interested, we got this

 

phew, what a lot of words today.  good night.

i finally finished working on the piece of work i was doing last week at work. only to discover it was no longer needed which was a bit of a shame !  Apparently i’d convinced the person last week that they didn’t need it when i gave them a high level summary of what it was going to say after i’d done my initial investigation.  oh well.

i met buzz for lunch and that was good.  much chatting was done whilst eating kebabs.  i’ve only eaten two kebabs in my whole life and both of them were in the presence of buzz.

signs have appeared all over town encouraging people to vote for various candidates in the Auckland super-city elections.  someone’s put up some nice flowery ones too here.  they get my vote.  i’ll tell you more about super-city as we get closer to the time.

i don’t think this is an official kiwi cop car.  but you never know.

This evening i went for a fitness stomp round the neighbourhood with warren which was jolly good for fitness and more chatting.

the girls had a good day at school with esther having her school orchestra and kezia using her blue pen thanks to her pen licence.  jane says she has nothing to report – sorry about that.  i think she went for coffee with some lovely friends from church but more than that i can’t tell you.

you should email jane and ask how’s she’s getting on – she likes getting email from the old world  🙂

see ya

bass playing for me today at church which was a 2-service spectacular.  whilst i was at the second service jane took the girls to the village tennis courts.

then we went out geocaching which was jolly good.  there was one which had a rather funky hidey container …   Hope you notice we are wearing our gumboots.

esther played two games of flippa ball today as she stood in for one of the other school teams.  She won both matches and was player of the day for her usual team.

here’s a camouflaged leaf.  and Esther also built this cake which we consumed with thick custard.  good.

 

onwards we go

i took the girls to their orchestra practice this morning which involved sitting in the car reading the paper and listening to the wireless.  well, at least that’s what it involved for me.

we then regrouped back at home and decided that given the watery weather we should go to the nautical maritime museum in town.

esther suggested we went by bus, so we did.  and that meant we could have our lunch at a food court down town. it’s more expensive to go in to town by bus than to drive and park which always erks me, but it was very convenient so no worries there.

 

anyway, the maritime museum is free for auckland residents, and is really rather good. (that sounded terribly british didn’t it).  it’s like the place in henley if you know that, only about three times the size (probably).  It also has some very cool boats like the one above (apply named for choppy waters?) and the one below which won some race once.

it’s a great mixture of historical boatingness and modern boatie stuff.

after the museum we went to a cafe for spirulinas

and then this evening we watched Madagascar 2.  and now it’s now (it so often is i find).  best to bed as i’m up early for music playing in the morrow.

see yas

it’s felt a long week.  a weak week you might say, but we made it to friday.

i finally completed all the data stuff i was doing at work and that got dispatched to the regulator this afternoon.

jane had a tough class at school today but had a nice time at her tupperware party.  she went with the wife of the chaplain at the school she teaches at so that was good for meeting a different crowd of people. 

jane said there were plenty of poms there by the sounds of it.  we’re poms ourselves of course but we’ve tended not to hang out with other brits, so it’s quite funny being around a group of brits.  anyway …

we seem to be in a nice pattern at work of going out for lunch on fridays, so simon, sasha and i went to a local brewery.  we’d decided to go there ages ago, but the appalling weather encouraged us to seek warmth. 

i had a teeny weeny half of beer which was soon absorbed thanks to the sausage and mash and walk down and up a hill to get back to the office

here’s a cyclist in a tutu

then this evening the girls had their swimming lesson.  And esther spent the day here doing rope courses and problem solving exercises in the car park (!) as part of her student leadershipness and was supervised by kids from the senior high school.

the weather is quite rubbish at the moment.  here are some pictures from the newspaper of nearby Tamaki Drive (just in town near Kelly Tarlton’s fish place) showing the wetness.  it’s going to be another rainy day tomorrow, even promising 3 metre waves on the normally calm east coast.  exciting !

we’re doing much better than Mount Hutt which is not too far from Christchurch where we were on holiday last month.  news story of trapped skiers due to high winds and avalanches here

good news today for the girls – kezia got her pen licence ! that means she can now use a blue biro in class rather than pencil.  only three people in her class have managed this accolade and the other two are boys.

i have band practice this evening. i was the oldest in the band by about 10 years and felt it !  oh well

busy day at work for me which was good.  it turns out our department will be sitting on the same floor as the executives and the ceo from november.  i guess they’ll have priority for the window seats. oh well.

here are some plants i saw on the way home this evening. they were a couple of cactuseses and some other types of plants ‘free to a good home’.  that’s how things roll round here.

it was right chilly again last night with another frost this morning, but it was 18 degrees driving back from band practice this evening.  it’s crazy i tell ya.

my office is on a road called karangahape road, which is easy to say of course, so it’s shortened to k-road by most people.  It’s one of those bohemiam places which is a mixture of 2 hour red light district, funky clothes shops, strange pubs and clubs and plenty of bargainous cafes/restaurants .  There’s always something interesting going on.  I’ll miss it in a strange way when we move to our new building in a few week’s time.

Anyway, hidden around and about are a few really interesting art galleries

i popped in to one today which had an exhibition of up and coming artists.  i’d read about this installation which had loads of origami roses hanging from the ceiling, each containing some paint or beads or something coloured.  you were meant to pull one off its hanging to add to the creation, but i didn’t want to get paint on me so took a photo or two for you instead.

i also spotted this light pattern through the stairs on the way out which was nice

and since the tiger escaped everyone’s started carry lion-taming chairs around with them.  just in case.  [i made that up]

anyway, i think jane and the girls had a good day.  we were going to watch telly tonight but life got too busy so we didn’t.  oh well.

very chilly this morning again thanks to the cloudless sky = frozen car window screens. i see there’s big rains due for the weekend so at least it’ll be a bit warmer.  see ya