Catching up!

I'm aware that it's getting later and later in the week when I finally manage to get a post up - I'm having to juggle quite a few nights out, and when I have an evening off, it is usually difficult to get my brain together to get my thoughts down on screen. (I write plenty of blog posts on the train in my head that are gone by the time I get into Wellington!)

So apologies for the delay this week - I've got Thursday off from hockey as I've just finished a two day training course, and decided that I couldn't get in later than I normally would on a Thursday, with a dead brain, eat, get changed and get out in under an hour!

It has been another busy week - the hockey match on Sunday was late (7pm on the other side of Wellington), which meant that I missed Dr Who (booo!) We didn't play particularly well, either, which was very disappointing, and we lost 1-0. This means that we have to win all of our remaining games in order to have a chance of getting to the finals (tricky, but not impossible; I am a bit sad that I am going to be missing the semi-finals, though - it clashes with the orchestra Shostakovich 5 weekend)

We started rehearsing the Shostakovich this week - we are preparing for a weekend long workshop with tutors from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra - I'm very excited about it (and only a trifle miffed that it means that I can't go to Au Contraire, the NZ national Sci-Fi convention. John has opted to go to Au Contraire instead...). It is an interesting piece of music, and ranges from very difficult chromatics and jumps to some lovely, much easier and more tonal, sections, often within a few bars of each other.

Tuesday we had the Upper Hutt Sci-Fi film night, and this time we watched a film which John had had recommended to him, called "Man from Earth" by Jerome Bixby. It was an amazing piece. Almost the whole play is set in one room, and it is essentially the same 8 actors talking, for 87 minutes. The premise is very simple - a university professor has resigned unexpectedly, and his colleagues (all scientists/professors with different backgrounds) show up to throw him a goodbye party. When they press him for a reason as to why he is leaving, he tells them that he is actually a Cro-Magnon man who has lived for 14,000 years and who has to keep moving to stop people realising that he doesn't age. The rest of the story is his friends reactions to his revelations, both professionally and emotionally. It is a really simple premise, but the execution of it is just absolutely beautiful. I would really recommend it to anyone - it brings Sci-Fi away from special effects and big budgets, and pulls it back to the cerebral (some of the light hearted parts of the film felt a lot like some of the Sci-Fi chats that we had, particularly at university - throwing an idea into the air and seeing where it would land).

I had another TKD session this week - I've actually managed to have two in a row now! Last week's was very intense, and the instructor was away, and the assistant instructor took the class instead. He has a very different style to the instructor - I did a lot more press-ups last week! This week's session was very focused on form - we spent half the lesson practising circular blocks. I still have a long way to go just to pull myself back to the standard that I was at in November - I have fallen into some very bad habits :-(

I've even managed to do a bit of knitting this week - at this rate, my cardigan will be finished by midsummer!