The week in review

Another flat out busy week between work and school assignments. I've been designing and making a website from scratch (lovingly hand-coded) with eleven separate pages which has basically taken up all of my spare computer time. The good news is that I only have one more page left to make, and then I can get on to doing the JavaScript - oh ho, what fun THAT shall be. JavaScript is a frightful concept for me, I must say, but it's just a matter or acquainting myself with it proper like, I think.

State housing, Naenae, Lower Hutt, photographed by John Dobree Pascoe, 30 October, 1944 via Timeframes

Last night I went out with people from the Television Archives (where I used to work - a good two years ago, so I feel safe in naming it). Most of the people that I worked with have left, but the two people still remaining were able to tell us a little bit about the closing down the television studios at Avalon. I always think that facility is such a sad little waste - the equipment and studios are all there, and it's too far away from the TV making centre of Auckland, or even from Wellington itself. So much purpose-built potential going to waste.

There is something about going out to the bleak depths of Taita and finding this amazing early '70s facility that really highlights the kind of optimism that existed in New Zealand at the time. I like to imagine all these people moving out to the state houses out there in the 1950s with their faces shiny and well scrubbed, cooking enormous lumps of sheep and eating huge slices of butter, and just knowing that they lived in The Best Country On Earth. And now it's so bleak and forgotten, overgrown verges and the periodic crumbling concrete wall.

Related to the Kiwi Good Life: I've been on a New Zealand classic baking and cooking buzz lately - replacing my previous obsessions with American baking, which is good but so sweet. Too sweet, one might say. This week I made a delicious date loaf, Anzac biscuit, a bacon and egg pie and a roasted vege pasta recipe from the kitchen of the über-Kiwi Simon and Alison Holst, bless their cotton socks. I count this as a Kiwi classic because it's so awesomely the kind of bastardisation of "International Dishes" that can be found in the Edmonds - it reminds me of this lamb curry that Tom used to make that was both delicious and completely inauthentic.

In saying that, I'm quite keen to try this recipe for muesli bars (American no doubt, due to the use of molasses and the reference to granola).

The knitting has pretty much been at a standstill. I am still only cuff deep into my lace knit offering mitts in black, but because I wanted to do a little bit of brainless knitting I picked up the blanket I've been working on forever and knitted a few more squares, and now I am only one peggy square away from finishing! Amazing! I've been working on this blanket since forever - it's very *ahem* eclectic, made as it is from four different knitted and crochet blankets that I picked up in various op shops, and with the remaining gaps and holes filled in with my own crocheted and knitted squares. It's HUGE, well big enough to go over a queen sized bed, enormously colourful and super homey and warm. I have big plans to crochet right around the edges of the blanket to unify the whole lot, but CAN YOU IMAGINE how long that is likely to take? Good lord!

Still working my way through the Virginia Woolf bio, which is rather hard going (have I already mentioned that a hundred times?) I bought a Ngaio Marsh omnibus and it's hard to convince myself to read something worthy when I have Inspector Alleyn on my bedside table, and he's dying to make some snide remarks about middle-class elderly spinsters. However, I am determined to finish Virginia because, after all, Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?


And on that fully predictable note, I will go out and have a beer with my Boy.