i used my work volunteer day to help with the giant poppy art thing in the Auckland domain.
the morning was spent carrying and placing and uplifting and replacing hundreds, possibly thousands of heavy metal discs. there are 59,000 in all in the poppy to represent the number of New Zealand soldiers killed or maimed in the first world war
we were exhausted by the time the art was complete at 12 o’clock having had nothing to eat or drink all morning
my poppy blew off at one point and it stayed there the rest of the day
we popped by after our quick lunch to say good bye to the organiser only to find they had a run of angry people as the 12 o’clock finish hadn’t been advertised well enough and people still wanted to write on a metal disc. but they couldn’t as the art work was ‘complete’.
the organiser said “oh excellent, you are from Spark, you’ll be used to dealing with angry members of the public’. nice to know i work for a company with a reputation (i don’t think that’s what she actually meant but it made me chuckle)
this chap is the artist. he placed the last disc. a time lapse video of the creation of the poppy will be played at the ANZAC ceremony in Gallipoli tomorrow.
esther and kezia were in a big musical ANZAC thing this morning at school. kezia was singing and esther tromboning
jane did millions of school preparations
and Noey had proper lessons at school and we taught her how to cut a sausage at dinner time this evening
some nice interpretations of ‘less we forget’ below. there were some great drawings of horses, and at least one talked about soldiers severing their country.
i got to the Domain at 7.30am to avoid the traffic (only partially successful) to take some pictures of the ‘field of crosses’ as the sun came up (also only partially successful due to the sun already being up)
here’s jane’s new top
