Just a short one this week...

We have a house inspection tomorrow (our fourth "six monthly" inspection in a year...), so we have spent a good chunk of this evening cleaning - the oven now gleams (mostly), the windowsills are free of mildew (it's very tough to see how bad they are getting when they are covered with a net curtain all the time), the carpets are vacuumed (though with the brown on brown swirly pattern, it's very difficult to see when they are dirty), and the bathroom is as clean as it is going to get. I wonder what will be picked up as being wrong this time!

We had a great weekend this weekend - we were borrowing a car, so were able to do a massive shop on Saturday, not only at the supermarket, but also going down the road to Petone and buying bulk loads of rice and oil. The rice was great fun - not only did it come in a cloth bag (with a removable plastic inner), which meant that we can reuse it, but it also came with a free spoon. Not, as I had assumed, a scooper or a plastic thing, but a metal dessert spoon (good job we bought two bags - we'll get one each!). It reminded us of the "Shades of Grey" universe created by Jasper Fforde, where everyone has their own spoon that travels with them wherever they go...

On Sunday, the weather wasn't as good as we had hoped, but we still took the car out for a bit of a spin, heading up the coast to Paraparamu, along windy coastal roads, with sharp drops down to the grey and stormy sea below (at some points the waves only just not breaking onto the road itself), stopping off at a chocolate factory (which wasn't as exciting as it looked from the road - the factory part wasn't open, so we could only look through the windows at the silent machinery and purchase from the gift shop (though the manuka honey filled chocolates are delicious)), and then heading back home across country. Along a road which, on the map, looked like it was a reasonable short cut back into the top of Upper Hutt, along the Akatarawa Valley. What the map failed to show was that this was not a particularly wide road (just over a car's width of tarmac, with a slight buffer of gravel on either side). It was also really quite a windy road, with some amazing hair pin bends, and there were enough trees right up against the edge of the road that it was difficult to see if anyone was coming in the other direction (which, due to the aforementioned lack of width to the road, could have made things interesting). Oh, and on one side, there was a very rocky cliff going up, and on the other side, a very deep drop into the valley below... I think that John's knuckles didn't stop being white the whole time! It was particularly nerve-wracking given that we were only borrowing the car, and didn't want to end up with it in an accident, in the middle of nowhere!

We did, however, get to stop half way along at a place called Staglands, which is a nature reserve. They had a cafe which you could get to without having to pay the entry fee (given that the weather wasn't that brilliant, we thought it best to leave exploration of the wildlife park for another day). We had a very nice "Hummingbird" cake, which was a mixture of banana and carrot, with a lovely seeded icing on the top, and my hot chocolate was lovely and rich. The balcony for the cafe backed out onto the reserve, so we were able to look out at the various birds who were feeding from a sugar water mix.

Silvereyes, Blackbirds and Tui were all sharing the food:







There was also a family of peacocks


and this family of ground birds by the car park (I don't know what they are - I will look them up later if I have time)


It was a lovely stop off point, and it was also nice to find that, once we were back on the road, there were only a few more twists and turns before we got back to a road with a white line down the middle and we were out at the top end of Upper Hutt.

Still, the journey, whilst a bit scary at times, has really whetted my appetite for exploring, and I am looking forward to us getting a car of our own so that we can take more trips out and start seeing more of what this country has to offer.

October already!

Wow - I am having trouble accepting that it is October already. Two and a half weeks until Labour Day (hooray - public holiday!), and then the very slippery slope to Christmas.

I had a great time at orchestra on Monday - still playing first oboe until the real first gets back from holiday next week. Our next concert is going to be a Last Night of the Proms one, and we ran through the Sea Shanties this week. Including the "Home Sweet Home" oboe solo, which is one that I absolutely adore from the LNotP. And I got to play it - I was over the moon! I've enjoyed playing the first oboe solos for the last few weeks - I might have to see if the real first oboe wants to share in the next concert...

The weather has picked up fantastically now - we've had a few days of glorious sunshine, including the weekend, so I took the opportunity to go out for my first real run since we arrived. In fact, my first real run in over a year - the lead up to moving meant that the running really slacked off. I didn't quite manage to make 5K, (running - overall, I covered just over 7, but that included the walk back home) and I was definitely slower than I had been (I managed 33 minutes before my legs overruled my brain and slowed to a walk), but it was really invigorating, and I'm very much looking forward to the next time I can get out. I am going to have to look at getting some new insoles, though - I have a lot of blisters! My legs are also only just starting to forgive me... Part of my run took me back along the Hutt River, and I managed to see two kingfishers as well as an inquisitive silvereye once I'd started walking. It really is a lovely area to run in - either completely flat or gently undulating, and beautiful scenery to run past.

We may get a chance to explore further afield this coming weekend - we are car-sitting for a friend who is holidaying in Oz - it is going to be lovely to get the chance to have wheels underneath us (particularly for the weekly shop - I am really going to be stocking up on the heavy items!)

I'm also very excited - Richard O'Brien is going to be the narrator for the next NZ tour of Rocky Horror, and we've got ourselves tickets for the Friday night. It's going to make it a really fun few weeks - we start with the orchestra concert, then the following weekend we are seeing the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and then the weekend after that is Rocky. Yays!

Heee!

Well - the hockey prizegiving on Saturday went very well... That's the first cup I've won since primary school, and it even has my name engraved on it! I'm chuffed to bits.

The rest of the week has been interesting - I worked from home for two days due to a severe sore throat and lost voice - it was amazing how much more productive I was when I didn't have to talk to people or answer emails! The illness did mean that once again I didn't get to TKD - I'm feeling very part time at the moment. I'm looking forward to the warmer weather and a possibility of not being ill quite so often, particularly mid week!

Saturday was very busy, cleaning the house, cooking and generally preparing for John to host the Phoenix Sci-Fi PIG social, while I was off gallivanting at the hockey prizegiving. The idea had been for me to come back in time for the end of PIG, but sadly some colossal muck ups by the train company (like not running the hourly rail replacement bus that I was meant to be catching) meant that I got back a little bit (only 60 or so minutes) later than intended...

That in itself meant that Sunday was a little bit quiet, spent mainly on the sofa catching up on webcomics - very relaxing and much needed!

And it's now less than three months till Christmas - yays!

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...)

Back to work...

Well, the week off disappeared with frightening speed. I got a lot accomplished - all of my seeds planted out, either in pots or directly into the ground. I have a feeling that the green fuzz showing above the soil in the corner of the greenhouse is more likely to be weeds than my bok choy, but I can live in hope! Unfortunately, they all look the same at seedling level, so I'll have to wait for them to get a bit bigger before deciding whether to uproot or not. Pics may come next week when there may be something more to show than bare soil! I also managed to relax a lot - it was so nice to get the chance to completely switch off.

We did a huge walk on Saturday going round car yards in Lower Hutt - we hadn't meant to walk as far as we did, but ended up going for about 2 hours. We just got back to the front door when it started raining - perfect timing! We then had a friend round for an evening of board gaming - which ended up going till gone 2 in the morning! Then up early for the weekly Skype call home - I'm actually really pleased that I got up, as the Daffodil Express steamed past just after 9 am - it's a once a year event, with a steam train taking passengers from Wellington to Carterton for their annual daffodil festival. Tickets are a bit pricey ($70 / person return), but not bad for a 2 hour train trip. May be something to think about for future years!

Of course, back to work with a bump - I definitely chose the right week to have off, as I came back to a plethora of group emails about the Christchurch earthquake - it sounds like it was absolutely manic for the whole week. Part of me is a little sad that I missed out on it all, but I'm not *that* upset! I'm now looking forward to our next public holiday, which is Labour Day at the end of October. Then the downhill slope to Christmas!

We've also had a teeny splurge - we've picked ourselves up a nice second hand PC. It's not even close to top spec, but it was very cheap (and obviously, now kept out of landfill for a few more years), and will do for John to be able to scan and edit his drawings, for us to be able to access our terabyte drive (for some reason, when plugged into the Linux netbooks, we could read it, but not write to it), a number of the DVDs which friends have sent us over the last few months (most of which the Linux system decided didn't exist), and for me to be able to play my Windows based PC games.

Week off...

Half way through the week off - I had intended to blog sooner than this - sorry!

Our chocolate session on our anniversary was good fun - 45 mins of questions around the Butler's Chocolate brand, and how we thought it could be improved, then fifteen minutes or so of trying out different types of their block chocolate (sadly, none of their truffles, which would have been gorgeous!), and we got paid for the privilege! Some of the money went straight away on to a lovely anniversary curry - a great way of celebrating three years of marriage.

The rest of the week was amazingly busy at work as I tried to make sure that everything was in order for taking a week off. Fortunately I left with most things complete, and I'm reasonably confident of coming back to not too large a pile of paperwork on Monday!

Then, Saturday, we woke up to the news that the Canterbury region, and Christchurch, had suffered a huge earthquake. Whilst quakes are reasonably common in NZ, this one is the strongest one since the Napier quake in 1931. Fortunately, whereas in 1931, over 250 people died, this week, only three people were seriously injured, and (as far as I am aware - I can't see any reports) none of those were fatally. We were able to check on our friends who live down in the Christchurch area, and, though they have structural damage to their buildings, they were unhurt. The damage that has been done is huge, and it is going to take a long time to pick up the pieces, but things could have been far, far worse. We were very lucky that the quake hit overnight (4.30 in the morning), which meant that there weren't large numbers of people around to be hit by debris, or being inside buildings when they collapsed.

There's an interesting video from the GNS showing the now visible fault line:



It's going to take a long time to clear up the mess, and my heart goes out to all of those who have been affected.

The rest of this week, so far, has been pretty quiet - I'm enjoying not being in work, and have taken the time to potter in the greenhouse.

As the broccoli had started to flower


and Spring has definitely arrived (we have seen both Monarch and Red Admiral butterflies this weekend), John and I hiked over to our local garden centre and I went shopping... We came back with: a lemon tree (bought with birthday vouchers from friends), onion sets, bok choy seeds, tomato seeds and peanut seeds (the latter two being "patio kits" which included the pots to put them in). Plus compost to fill my pots up for potting up my feijoa, olive and chilli bush, and to plant out chilli, capsicum and luffa seeds.

So now, the broccoli is all gone (I made soup with the last of it this afternoon), I have planted in rows the spinach seedlings which seeded themselves from last Easter's batch, most of the onions are in the ground, the various other seeds are in pots, and I just have the bok choy to go! Now I have to remain patient and not want to keep on checking them to see whether I have any patches of green above the surface. And, I suspect, my fight with the oxalis will start again now that the broccoli isn't spread all over the soil...

John and I also took a trip up to the car yards of Upper Hutt. Now that I have finally transferred our money out of our UK bank account (the exchange rate wasn't amazing, but it was the best it had been since Easter, and the interest rate over here is far better!), we are going to get some wheels underneath us. Tuesday was just a recce trip, to get an idea of prices (we had been offered a car up in Palmerston North for $5,000, but that's quite a way to go on public transport just to see a car - we wouldn't have any idea of whether we liked it until we took it for a test drive); and there are a number within our price range. We aren't going to rush into it, having been badly stung before, we'd rather be a bit more cautious and make sure we are happy before we buy (and will definitely be taking any warranty that is offered!)

An amazing weekend

Yet another very busy week; sadly, not out as much as I had hoped, as I suffered a recurrence of the allergic reaction (with now no idea of what could have caused it - I had avoided all the things which I had believed to be the triggers before...) - fortunately, this time, I recognised what was happening much sooner, and was able to get enough antihistamines inside of me to stop me turning into a Star Trek extra again (it would have been good timing, with the National NZ SF Convention this weekend...!) Sadly, though, it meant that I couldn't go to TKD - I didn't want to scare the children!

Fortunately, as I'd been able to "quiet" the reaction, I was able to head to hockey on Thursday, which was very important, as, despite my doom and gloom in my last post, we did actually make it through to the semi-finals, on goal difference. (a very good ego boos as a goalie!) We had a really good practice, with a good turnout, which was excellent for team morale. Sadly, the semi finals were our last match, as we got knocked out 2-1. But give that we were one stage further along than we had originally thought, and we were without a number of key players (including yours truly...), we did very well!

I wasn't at the hockey match because it was the weekend of the orchestra workshop. The weeks of preparation for Shostakovich 5 were all aiming towards three very intensive days of playing and socialising with musicians from all over the country.

We started on the Friday night, and I had the immensely satisfying experience of walking across Wellington's Central Business District (about 20 mins) to the pub that I'd 'nominated' for my supper (by virtue of having a 20% off voucher) without having to do more than a cursory glance at a map at the beginning of the route. This may not sound like a big deal, but for anyone who has seen me go into a shop and then turn the wrong way when I come out, it is a fairly fundamental feat of navigation. And I only needed to check the map for getting from dinner to the school where we were playing at the final stages. It is such a great feeling, knowing that the city is starting to 'click' - I'm nowhere near 100%, even in the small CBD, particularly when people navigate me by shop names, but I am getting there.

The first evening was a play through of the whole symphony - whilst our orchestra has been rehearsing in preparation, for a number of the musicians, this was their first chance to see the music, so it was a sight reading rehearsal for a lot of them.

Saturday was rehearsing in earnest - after an initial play through, we split off into our instrumental sections, and had a morning's tuition from musicians from the NZ Symphony Orchestra. This was a fantastic experience - just to be able to chat with someone who plays the oboe for a living, get hints and tips from her, and to learn that even professional players struggle with some of the nastier passages, was worth the workshop fee! We then merged the oboe and bassoon groups into a double reed workshop, and in the final sectional session, we merged all of the woodwind section. This let us build up the woodwind parts of the whole symphony, and really gave me an in depth understanding of the music before we rejoined the rest of the orchestra for a final play through of the day. And the difference between the morning and afternoon "Tutti" rehearsal was astounding - it was difficult to believe that just one day would make that much difference to the sound we were making. It felt like we were 'concert ready' at that point, and the rest of the rehearsals would just be icing on the cake.

The evening was spent with a social event; a quiz, food, and lots of laughter - really good fun.

Sunday was another intensive morning and half afternoon of rehearsals as a full orchestra, ready for playing the finished work to friends and family mid-afternoon. The final concert went really well, after a slightly shaky start (we had a few counting issues, probably a result of a weekend of intense concentration!). The music just flowed so well, and, even as a performer, it took my breath away. The third movement, the Largo, is believed by some to be a requiem for those who died under Stalin's regime, and the mournful theme which recurs throughout (starting off in one of the most haunting oboe solos - next time we play this, I want to have a go!!) really brought that idea home to me. The ending of the movement, where the theme is picked up by the harps and the celeste, actually brought tears to my eyes!

Overall, the whole experience was mind blowing - extremely exhausting, but such an incredible learning curve, and such fun! I can't wait for next year...

After the concert, I headed back into Wellington, as John, who had elected to go to the Science Fiction convention instead, had let me know that a group of them were planning to go out for a curry for supper, and did I want to join them? Not being one to turn down an invitation like that, I met up with them all at the convention hotel, and we had a great meal at the Balti House, which served up one of the best peshawari naan breads I have ever eaten! After the meal, I snuck in to the final two events at the convention, the presentation of the Sir Julius (thank you John...) Vogel awards (the NZ Sci-Fi and Fantasy awards), which was great fun (and we knew four of the winners), and the closing ceremony.

This week is already shaping up to be busy - work is as manic as ever, John and I have a wonderful way of celebrating our third wedding anniversary on Wednesday; we have managed to wangle our way onto a chocolate testing survey at our local Butler's - we have an hour and a half to do taste testing and give our opinions, *and* we get paid for it! No hockey on Thursday, but I'm out on Friday at a colleague's leaving do.

Then, gloriously, I have a week off - with Spring already here (there is yellow pollen along the edges of the pavements, the daffodils have been out since the weekend, and a large number of bushes have flowered already), I want to have a good go at the greenhouse and get seeds in. I probably won't do broccoli again this year; whilst it has been lovely to be able to eat fresh broccoli most weeks, the plant does take up rather a lot of space in the greenhouse! I think I will be buying my seeds based on the plants not trying to take over when my back is turned!