Washing a house, Winter Fair

Saturday morning I dealt with the tail end of this stage of the Mysterious Chunky Family thing, which involved me dressing the living areas and washing down the walls inside a house, and Shannon and my brother Tom washing down the walls on the outside of the same house and giving the gutters a scrub, becoming completely saturated in the process.

Grumpiness reigned, and there was much snappishness amongst the three of us. I've reached saturation for this project, spending all weekend slaving over the house as well as all week working, and I'm pretty sure that this is the same for the Boys too. This Saturday I was determined that I would only do a what was on my list of "Last minute sprucing" things. However, I kept finding more work for myself, culminating in the final and depressing decision that in order to sell the house I needed to paint all the walls and tear out the existing bathroom. Disheartening much?

At 2pm we went home so that we could spruce ourselves before meeting up with some of Shannon's friends who were coming out to Petone from town for the Petone Winter Carnival and to watch a rugby test.

The carnival was everything you've ever dreamed of in a suburban beach-front winter carnival i.e. hot chips and a giant fairground ride, and people setting fire to wooden sculptures on the beach half an hour after the scheduled burn-time (we suspected not enough firefighter supervision - or matches). It was, indeed "A wee bit shit". But in an awesomely, comforting, know-what-to-expect kind of way.