Mostly photo post...

Another busy week has just whizzed by. Exciting developments in the greenhouse - I now have three tomato seedlings and a whole load of Pak Choy and basil. Still waiting to see how much of the spinach will survive, though!

Life has been as busy as ever - even with getting my Thursdays and Sundays back, there doesn't seem to be enough time to do everything! We took advantage of having a free Sunday to get in some extra shopping - as well as a little bit more supermarket shopping (it's all very well being green and walking to and from the shops, but it does limit what you can carry home, and how many special offers you can grab in one go!), I had an impulse buy of a new mobile phone - my old one has got to the point where the battery won't last two days, which gets very expensive in electricity in recharging! So, given that one of the electrical shops had a sale on, I am now the owner of a "Hot Pink" (read "80's leotard lycra pink") Nokia. I'm very pleased with it - it isn't a flash "does everything including making the coffee" phone, but it makes phone calls and sends and receives texts, and even has a little radio and MP3 player. And, of course, with the colour, I am never going to misplace it!

We had a great board gaming night on Saturday - the group seems to be getting bigger and bigger every month! Of course, some of my satisfaction did come from winning two out of the three games we played, and one of those was very comprehensively. The Upper Hutt Sci-Fi movie night on Tuesday was Clash of the Titans (the new one). I have to say that I'm glad that I didn't see it in the cinema - I'd have resented paying for it - but as a film to watch with friends, and take the mick out of, it was really good fun. The dialogue was pure cheese, the characters mainly two dimensional (very few of the characters were even named on screen), but it was pure escapism (and still nowhere near as bad as Alexander!)

We had our second rehearsal for the "Last night of the proms" concert - very interesting for me, as neither other oboe was there (co-inciding holidays), and it transpires that in one of the pieces, there are a large chunk of oboe and cor-anglais solos (the cor being cued on the oboe part so that it can be played) - whilst the music itself wasn't too tricky to sight read, the trouble was working out when I'd get a chance to breathe!

The weather has been a bit up and down over the last week or so - we have a day of bright blue skies and sunshine, and then, as with last night, the temperature will suddenly drop - there was snow on the hills around Wellington overnight (it all looked very pretty from a distance, but probably not so nice for my colleague who got stuck on a closed road!). But not as bad as they had "down south" over the weekend - the snow was so heavy that it actually brought down the roof of the Southland Stadium (scroll through the pics for some spectacular shots). Fortunately none of the people inside were hurt when it came down.

So - to prove that Spring really is here - here are some shots of the flowers in the garden:








Here's my mini-hedgerow of trees...


and the bare soil interspersed with little bits of green in the greenhouse - it's actually greener than that now, with seedlings starting to poke their heads through the earth.


And this has amused me for the last few weeks, and I finally managed to get a nice day when I remembered to take the camera out with me - bearing in mind that you can tell the height of the tree by comparing it to the lamp-post next to it, I think that this rather successfully knocks the traditional student cone-on-a-statue trick into a very large cocked hat! (you may need to click on the pic to see the detail...)