What is making me happy: a new year just begun

Lunch and salad and beer and books

The main thing making me happy is the fact I’m still on holiday. Bliss!

I have been making an effort to be social which has been pretty great - so, Skyping with Bex, coffee with Mum, catching up with lovely Ange and family, and plans to visit my grandad on Saturday. I’m also hoping to see Liz while she is over here from the UK.

The question then is: will I be able to maintain this level of socialness when I am no longer lounging round the house? I’m not unhappy with how social I was last year, but I’d like to do a better job keeping in touch with certain people. Perhaps this should be another New Year’s resolution.

READING: I am blasting through things, and making some mature decisions about putting aside books that I am not interested in finishing (looking squarely at London: A biography).

• I have been reading many Phillippa Gregory books because it’s summer, and thus the best time to read something a little trashy. I finished the Wideacre trilogy which is spectacularly silly. All incest and frocks and mysteriousness and horses in the Sussex countryside.
• Affinity by Sarah Waters, which I am loving. I wanted to read The Paying Guests but I’d need to buy that, and I already had a copy of this lying around that I’ve never read.
• Still trucking with the Portable Dorothy Parker and Middlemarch (but I feel Middlemarch is a bit worthy for summer holidays).

WATCHING:

• The Staircase and all the DVD extras. Mon lent this to me after a very long discussion about Serial, and it’s a pretty amazing series. We watched the whole lot in one evening which meant that we went to bed after midnight, but it was well worth it. I urge you to seek it out.
• Midnight in Paris - pretty silly, tho' I thought the Hemingway characterisation was on point.
• Only Lovers Left Alive - Katherine recommended this to me (it was one of her top movies of 2014). A super stylish movie that features Tilda Swinton as a vampire which is A+++ casting.

FAVOURITE PODCAST EPISODE: It’s a little late (and off-topic?), but the Christmas episode of the Truth was great and I experienced some LOLs while listening.

KNITTING: Making great progress on my Madeline Tosh Featherweight cardigan. I also made a wooden yarn bowl using a second hand fruit bowl and my own ingenuity. More information to follow.

SEWING: I made yet another dress with no waistband (a current passion) and a top I adore out of apple print fabric. Again, more information to follow.

Weekend, sewing, dog-sitting, pizza-making

I'm writing this from my mum's dining room table, with her doglette, Molly, looking up at me like an adorable (albeit slightly fragrant) teddy bear. Did I mention that she's adorable? This is Molly:

I want a Molly dog. Shannon is against small dogs. Boo to him.

My brother Luke and I undertook a big pizza making mission tonight, and made absolutely the most delicious homemade pizza ever: roast chicken, baby spinach, zucchini and bacon. And parmesan and edam cheese.

The other pizza had chili con carne, red pepper and sundried tomatoes on it. Yes, it was pretty weird. But we didn't mind! We're wacky crazy with our pizza choices.

This morning I commuted from Newlands into the city - commuting once in a while is kind of an exciting treat, rather than being a HUGE pain in the butt (five years from Whitby, anyone?). This afternoon Molly dog and I went for a walk and I made the pizza dough. Otherwise, I have just been enjoying the house - it's like being on holiday! I think mostly because Mum's house is always epic levels of clean.

I decided that I was going to have a full-on sewing weekend on the weekend just passed, and I kind of managed it. On Saturday I made a truly great skirt out of a navy woollen crepe; a top using vintage fabric and my own pattern, finally perfected; and I made a second attempt at a 60s tent/A-line dress that I picked up a vintage pattern for via Trade Me. I didn't manage to finish sewing the bias trim on the dress (next weekend's project, hopefully), but I am wearing my skirt and top as we speak.

I believe that I'm much closer to discovering the Zen of Sewing than I ever have been before - it took me until 4.30 in the afternoon on Saturday, after three or four attempts to insert an invisible zip, to finally lose my rag. Check that shit out. I'm like the Dalai Lama of amateur seamstresses.

Tragically, on Sunday I had to abandon the sewing to earn some money. On the plus side I wore my pyjamas the whole time I worked, and the Boy brought me coffee and did all the food shopping.

Alrighty, going to go to bed now because the spare bed at Mum's has an electric blanket and I love a novelty. Also, I was woken up at 5am BAH. An early night is in order.

Fifty-Two Tasks - AND - In which Ginger becomes Running Girl

ello kiddy-winks!

As I write this I have my First Ever pickle on the go: the pickling/preserving being my Task for this week. I'm making a Bread and Butter Pickle from my Nanny's* recipe that my Mum had copied out for me years and years ago and that I found shoved down the back of a drawer. My Nanny made the best pickles and preserves and jams, I kid you not. She passed away when I was fourteen and it's such a shame that I only exhibited an interest in the Womanly Arts when I moved out of home because I could have learnt so much from her! As it is, she taught me how to knit - a skill that I am so so so happy that I have. Also, I like it that she passed that down to me.

Anyways, here is the recipe for you:

Bread and Butter Pickle (Ginger's Nanny's Recipe)

4kg medium sized cucumbers
6 medium onions
2 green peppers
3 cloves of garlic
3 tbsps plain salt
1 litre water (cold)
5 cups sugar
5 cups cider vinegar
2 tbsp mustard seeds
1 1/2 tsps turmeric

Don't peel cucumbers, just slice them finely, and place with finely sliced onions and peppers and garlic cloves in muslin. (NOTE: I didn't actually do this, I just put them in a ceramic bowl). Make a brine with salt and water and soak all vegetables in it in a basin for 3 hours. Drain them well and put in a preserving pan with the remaining ingredients. Heat to boiling, stirring gently to dissolve sugar. Remove garlic. Pour into warmed, dried jars and vacuum seal immediately.

I halved the recipe because I didn't have heaps of cucumbers, also I was a bit freaked out as to how it was going to turn out and I didn't want to overcommit with the ingredients.

 

 

I'd fallen behind a bit last week with my Tasks, so squeezed an extra one in this Saturday: I cleared out the books on my bedside table. I'd initially wanted to sit down and read the lot of them from where I'd left them off,  but after some long discussions with Katherine and with the Boy, I realised it just wasn't going to happen. There is a bunch of books that I still want to read, so I have taken out the incriminating bookmark and placed them back on my bookshelf for another day. I resigned myself to the fact that some of the other books (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Gift) are Never Going to Be Finished, so I have put them in a pile of stuff to take to Arty Bees and sell (or, more likely, swap). I FEEL FREE! We're in between books for Book Club at the moment so I'm sitting down to read one of the books that had been glaring at me, partially read, for over a year: First Catch Your Weka. It's a history of New Zealand through cook books and it's pretty awesome. I wonder why I left off reading it the first time around?

If you follow me on Twitter you already know this but... I have taken up running! When I say running, I mean, that I'm in the early days of this Couch to 5k programme and am running/walking to get my fitness up. I have new shoes and they have really cool bright orange/pink bits on them! The shoe manufacturer calls this colour mango which makes me giggle quite a lot while I am running. Also also, I made myself a little armband to wear my iPod in so I can listen to I, Claudius while I run. I AM the Literary Runner, pounding the streets of Wellington. When I told Mum she informed me that running causes cellulite because all the jiggling makes the fat cells squish into one another. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, PEOPLE.

 

 

*When I say "Nanny" I mean "Nana" or "Grandma". Not like, as in, I had a Mary Poppins type to look after me when I was little.

New glasses, the extended family, and a delicious Steak and Kidney Pie

Hello my darlings!

Did you have a good - nay, LOVELY long weekend? I did. I rushed most of the time but managed to get some serious luxuriating in on Monday morning. Also on Monday, I made the black cotton lycra skirt that I intended to make before I began the Six Items or Less Challenge. As promised (in an effort to make myself feel better about my flakiness), I swapped out the woollen place-holder skirt for the Lycra one, but I had  tweaked the pattern so much when I made it with the cotton Lycra so it wasn't as much of a fair swap as I'd earlier imagined. On the other hand - NEVER MIND. This is my arbitrarily imposed challenge and I can do what I like! (I can do what I like in my own house!)

And other than that, SIOL had been going really well. I've become very fond of having a kind of uniform, and having hardly any clothing to choose from saved my neck on Sunday when I only had fifteen minutes to get ready for a family lunch at Shannon's Dad's house. If I had had to make a decision there would have been no way that I could get dressed so quickly - however, because I had only two things left that were clean I just grabbed and ran.

The topic of arbitrarily imposed challenges brings me to - the delicious Steak and Kidney Pie that I made on Saturday night. It was my last week's challenge (from the list of Fifty-Two) to make something delicious with kidneys or liver but the week seemed to hurtle past and it was Saturday before I'd had a chance to do it - 24 hours after the self imposed end of the challenge! I still count it though, because I'm like that. Did I mention how delicious the pie was? It was AMAZING. I am fully planning to make it again, because there were too many people around to fully gorge myself.

The recipe was a mash up of the Edmonds cook book recipe and a recipe for Steak and Kidney Pudding in a book called (imaginatively) Beef, so I feel totally entitled to share the love around.

crazy delicious steak and kidney pudding that will make your skirt fly up


Filling:
800g - 1kg steak and kidney (which I bought combined, from the butcher)
2 tbsps oil
2 onions
4 sticks of celery
1 tbsp plain flour
1 cup stock
400g can tinned tomatoes
bunch parsley
3 stalky twiggy bits of sage (our plant looked really sad so I just grabbed whatever I could)
salt
pepper
Soooo... heat up the oil in the pan and quickly cook the steak and kidney so it's sealed on the outside. Remove the meaty bits with a slotted spoon, throw in the onions and celery, and cook the lot until the onions are clear. Stir in the flour and cook for 30 seconds (I'm timing you). Gradually add the stock, stirring constantly, and bring the pan to a boil. Return your meaty bits to their happy home. Add the can of tomatoes and the herbs. Cover the pan and simmer for an hour (probably longer - closer to two?) until the meat is cooked. It's best to try a bit of steak in order to make absolutely sure that the meat is cooked through. Badly cooked cheap cuts suck the most. Also, you'll want to check the seasonings at this point, so it's imperative you try it, really. Then try it again because it's too delicious for words.

Pastry (adapted from a basic lard pastry recipe):
200g butter, at room temperature
400g self-raising flour (or 400g plain flour with three tsps of baking powder)
1 pinch salt
180ml cold water
Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the water and mix to a dough, then rest for 20 minutes.

Assembling (the business end of the pie):
Roll out the pastry 1cm thick, and line a 30cm pie plate. Carefully scoop out the meaty bits from the filling and put the meat and vegetables into the bottom of the pie case (you might want to fish out the bits of sage stalk though). Carefully spoon over 1/4 - 1/3 cup of the liquid the filling was cooked in. Roll out the pastry lid until about 2cm thick and put over the top of the pie; pinch the edges of the base and the lid together. Make a wee hole to let the steam out and brush the top with a mixture of an egg yolk and a tablespoon of water. Bake in the oven until the pastry is golden (about 40 minutes). You'll probably want to let it set for a bit before you cut in.

Serve in enormous delicious slabs with the reheated cooking liquid. Amaze and astound your friends and family.

 

Which brings me to: the topic of my extended family, as they were the people who were eating my pie! My Uncle Terry and Aunt Sue came over from the UK to visit my cousin Michael who now lives in Auckland, and they all came down to Wellington to visit us (the NZ branch of the fams). This was the first time I'd seen them since I was tiny. Dad and my littlest brother Luke joined us for dinner, and then Michael went out to Bea and Chap's goodbye party with Shannon and Jo and me. Apparently he fell off the bed the next morning due to hungoverness. Lightweight? Or having two tiny children?

The new glasses that I have been 100x excited about have finally arrived. I am wearing my favourites right now but I'm also getting that weird thing you get from new prescriptions where you a bit ill as your eyes adjust. Also, when I'm walking around my legs feel all long and stretchy which is a bit weird, and when I rode my bike home I felt like the tallest bicycle rider in the world. WOOOOOOOOO.

Here are the glasses, in all their many splendoured glory. And no, I can't keep my mouth shut. Why do you ask?

Wednesday List: Ways I know I’m getting older

this cartoon is by the always lovely Beatrice at Master of Arts

• I’ve started checking the weather forecast obsessively. It’s now one of my favourite pages in the newspaper and I was very pleased at the new Metservice site redesign that has allowed me to see the weather ten days into the future.

• Finding Dilbert cartoons funny. Two years ago I would read them and be distinctly unamused. Nowadays, after I’ve read the weather page I flick straight to the Dilbert cartoon. One of my favourite morning routines.

• Last weekend I was in bed before 11pm on Friday and Saturday night and I was extraordinarily pleased with this turn of events.

• Learning tolerance and acceptance towards some things (family members’ quirks, long waits for buses and trains) and then feeling deep deep intolerance for others (other people’s loud music on school nights, puddles on the bathroom floor, a sink full of dirty water). I’m sure the categories of tolerance/intolerance have swapped over.

• Acknowledging when something makes me feel crap, and making a decision to accept it and move on rather than bitching about it until I make myself feel like a terrible person.

• Witnessing my first full scale fashion style revival. The 80s revival thing was quirky and nostalgic in a childhood kind of a way but this more recent 90s revival is very spooky and way too close to home. I refuse to see a repeat of “The Year of the Slip Dress”. It was unflattering on me in 1995 and I doubt that it’s going to look much better 15 years later. ALSO I saw a band called Dear Times Waste at Camp and I was suddenly back in 1996, lying on my teenage bed in my teenage bedroom, complaining that no one understood me, writing angsty poetry and thinking about the Drew Barrymore movie with all the butterflies.

Stuff and the Christmas Party and a nice, generous panic

It’s my last day of work before Christmas and I’m rather short of things to do – I’m reading my way through the various things in my reader and twiddling my thumbs and fantasising about all the things I can do this weekend and next week. Mostly I am fantasising about tidying my room and embarking on the Great Summer Declutter, which I imagine will enable me to lie around and luxuriate in a big room of emptiness. These are strictly imaginings though, as my room is not big, and no matter how much stuff I get rid of I will still have MOUNTAINS OF STUFF. I think I’ve rather stopped loving all my bits and pieces and become mostly overwhelmed by all of it. When I was living in Australia, I came back to New Zealand on a month’s holiday and saw Dad’s new house for the first time. In the second bedroom he had stacked what felt like hundreds of enormous plastic boxes full of paper (the ones with lids that clip on and wheels on the bottom) and I imagined them all collapsing on him one day and Dad being crushed and suffocated by all of his STUFF. And this is how I’ve begun to feel about my own stuff – in fact, I’m thinking about it now and beginning to give myself an anxiety attack (the stuff is crushing me!). Maybe I’ll just hire a dumpster and empty everything I own into it and when I move to the Boy’s house I can just take my bed and bicycle and skates and sewing machine and overlocker and my collection of Crown Lynn Tam O’Shanter crockery and my nanny’s tea cups and my books and – [insert stuff-based panic attack here]. In other news, today I had a Toastie and peanut butter toastie, which is pretty much the most awesome thing in the world. Katherine documented the whole thing from ingredients to delicious consumption so more information shall be forthcoming. In other other news we had our staff party last night and it was pretty average. There was no real food, only nibbles, so I was forced to make friends with the wait staff in order to secure enough nibbly bits to constitute my dinner. Then I ate a hell of a lot of White Christmas and felt a little ill, although that could have been all the cheap méthode champenoise. And what’s the deal with White Christmas anyway? I don’t even think it tastes good; I’m just strangely compelled whenever I see its vegetable-shortening-self glistening with glace cherries, and I go into a kind of childhood sugar-based excitement and stuff my face. This one time when I was a kid, I was at this family thing one of the boys who was there thought it would be funny to drop a piece of White Christmas into the open mouth of his sleeping brother. Sleeping brother choked on the White Christmas and didn’t think this was funny at all and we all had to go home early because he was crying. Christmas is awesome. Nostalgia is awesome. Last day of work is awesome. White Christmas and cheap méthode champenoise are less awesome.

A Big Easter Weekend of Pottering Around - Good Friday

So, Good Friday began with Fail, as (of course) all the supermarkets are closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So, food shopping was not achieved.

However, I did ok with getting some baking in: we had no bread and so my first act was to remedy the situation and make my own - a bit denser than I'd like. While I was making it there was a lot of standing around and gas-bagging with the New Flatmate. And drinking lots of coffee.

 

I then made soup for lunch. The soup is tomato and pumpkin and chilli, and I've made the picture very very small because all pictures of soup look like pictures of vomit. Unless one is a particularly gifted food photographer with a great camera, which I am not.

Did my laundry and hung it on the line. I suspect that my laundry is actually breeding in the basket, because I did an insane amount of washing and the basket is still near overflowing. Grrr. Ongoing weekend job, it appears.

While I was in the laundry shed I strung up an undies-line for winter, which was an added achievement for the day! Huzzah.

Rode my bike to the dairy to get ingredients for Red Velvet Cake. However the dairy have didn't buttermilk. I decided to make chocolate cup cakes instead and then realised (when I got home) that I no longer have muffin pans to support the cakes while they are baking.  So my cakes were a little spread about and oddly shaped... rather nice lavender icing though. Mmm. Icing. Oh, and sprinkles of course. And I got to use the icing bag, which is always great fun.

[You can better see the weird shapes in the picture below. Please admire how much the cakes really question the idea of what is "round" and whether it's really compulsory for cupcakes to be "round". I love to shake things up, challenge the status quo, ask the hard questions. I'm hard core like that.]

Then I caught the bus to Newlands for the first time. This was an Adventure! When I arrived, mum had cut her own finger with a pair of scissors while she was collecting rosemary from the garden - as in, she cut very firmly through the woody rosemary stem and straight through her own finger. Michelle was there fixing aforementioned finger which was pissing blood. Then we drank red wine and had roast chickeny bits for dinner and ate cake and watched trashy TV. I stayed the night.

End of first day of pottery weekend - how did I go? My list was

• Clothes washing ACHIEVE! - or at least, I didn't say that I had to do all the washing. So, ongoing achieve.
• Vacuum the bedroom FAIL. I completely forgot about this.
• Food Shopping: I will ride my bike to Chaffers Park New World SEMI-ACHIEVE - I rode my bike to the dairy to get ingredients, and I did a bit of food shopping. On second thoughts, I think it's perhaps more of a SEMI-FAIL.
• Make hot cross buns FAIL. And I can't be arsed now, so this can go in the "Crazy Wacky Ideas" pile.
• Make cake, possibly red velvet cake ACHIEVE. I made cupcakes. And in a more general baking sense, I also made bread. And in a more general cooking sense, I made soup.

Conclusion: MUST TRY HARDER.

A Big Easter Weekend of Pottering Around - the Thursday night list

So, I have a Big Weekend sans Boy-type (who I will miss dreadfully, of course). And I have about a million billion things that I both need and want to do. I was going to write a list anyway, but I've decided that I'm going to make it a Blog Project. Weeeeeeeeeee

 

Friday is going to be the least exciting day *le sigh*

• Time to finally do all the bits of washing I've been threatening to do for weeks and weeks and weeks. Not exciting, but certainly necessary.
• Vacuum the bedroom. *yawn yawn yawn*
• Food Shopping: I will ride my bike to Chaffers Park New World, because I like the waterfront
• I would also like to make hot cross buns - the Edmonds scandal has piqued my interest and I'm feeling the Urge.
• I'm having a ridiculous dinner with my mum, I'm in charge of making a ridiculous dessert. I think I need to make a cake with icing. Maybe a red velvet cake but without the random cream cheese icing which I'm just not that keen on.

Saturday I hope the library is open

• I'm going to ride my bicycle down to and along the water front, I shall listen to Edith Piaf while riding in the sun and waving to the happy people.
• Then I shall have a coffee
• Then I shall go to the library and get out the entire BBC series of Pride and Prejudice. Hah! Any other suggestions for ridiculous girly long weekend watching?
• Then I shall come home and bake some chocolate cup cakes. And ice them with lavender coloured icing. I think that rose flavouring would be good too.
• And then I shall knit something ridiculous and watch episodes of Pride and Prejudice until my eyes pop out of my head.
• Dinner would be good too. I should make something elaborate. Some kind of roast perchance?

Sunday

• God I hope I don't have to do last night's dishes.
• So, I shall definitely lie in bed this morning with LOTS of coffee and toast and read and read and read.
• Sewing! I will make a black pinafore dress
• When I get angry and frustrated with the sewing I shall glue all the bits and pieces that I have been procrastinating about gluing.
• Then forcing one of the Flatmates to cook or eating leftovers and reading some more or watching more movies

At the moment I'm undecided on Monday. We shall see what we shall see. I suspect gardening will be involved.

Bumper Arohanui

Things I am loving...

I haven't done this for ages, and I do rather like it a lot. Have you had a chance to make your own list yet? Honestly, it's so much FUN. And Happiness often ensues...

• Being back at Derby training. Despite the fact that I'm still working towards full strength and my frustration at my own physical limitations, it's really fantastic to be skating with the League again.
  
• My brother is back from Overseas. I saw him tonight, and it was very nice to see him. Can't wait to hang out when we're both well rested!
• Hugging a happy Dad.
• Long weekend... Wellington Anniversary tomorrow. So not only have I had the chance to complete some pressing Important Things (i.e. Stuff for Derby and vacuuming my thread-strewn room) but I've managed to fit in an exceptionally lazy day too. Excellent.
• Walking in the sun, and listening to the Ruby Suns, and seeing a small boy in a striped scarf chasing pigeons.
• Phone calls from the Boy in Auckland. I love hearing his voice.
• Dinner and trashy movies with Nat: having Nat around after so many years is simply heavenly. I adore my girlfriends.
• Rose-tinted lampshades and rose-scented incense and my Tibetan salt lamp. Its like living inside the huge peony of my dreams.
• Blog comments from strangers that I feel as though I know from seeing on TV more than once.
• Photos of my little cousin Zoe grinning toothily in an oversized Santa hat.
• Anticipation: things in the post, the Mysterious Indian Parcel, First Bout on 28th March, the Great Far North Trip.

What I Have Eaten

Last night was the Great Mother-Boy Meet Up. In an effort to assuage my nervousness I got ridiculous on the cooking front - nothing would do but cooking something Huge and New. Thus I made a Moroccan roast chicken with cous cous salad and a spinach salad. It was *awesome* if I do say so myself. I used this recipe for Roasted Organic Chicken with Moroccan Spices, and this recipe for the spice mix ras el-hanout... it comes via the ever fabulous Peta Mathias, and is the cheaty New Zealand based version (i.e. it leaves out the orris root and belladonna. Neither of which are in especially large supply in Wellington).

On Saturday I was at Whipper Snapper - the Peter/Bex Birthday extravaganza. I have many photos! And will blog the lot more fully later... but suffice to say I spent the whole day pigging out on fairy bread and cup cakes and fresh fruit. The meal culminated with the hugest amount of Fish and Chips I think I've ever seen in one place. Ten scoops of chips apparently. Yum! Fish and chips and beer = summer.

Summer, salad, picnics, beach, HOORAY. Bring on the summer! Now I am going to cook some sausages.
♥ sausages ♥

Luke's Quote for the Day

From my Dad, October 8 2007.

Just came across this and had to share it again

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, 30 October 2002 10:27 AM
Subject: Luke's quote for the day

"Sometimes my heart loves all of us"

My little bro is fab. So is my Dad.

In which Sarah takes the day off work because she can

And because she has lots of annoying grown up errand type things to do. At the moment I'm waiting at home to sign a contract for the washing machine hireage. *Yawns*. I need to read some trust documents. I'm seeing a lawyer around lunch time, so sign aforementioned trust documents.

I can't get over how much like the weekend it feels. Yesterday was amazing awesome - breakfast and coffee in bed; sitting in the sun talking shit, listening to music and drinking endless pots of coffee with Henry and Mark and Callum and Isabelle and Julia and Bella; walking home in the sunshine; having Tom and Mum and Luke over for tea; dinner with Dad and Tom; a bottle of wine with Shannon... and everyone in fabulous good moods, and I feel like stretching my hands up to the sky and sighing filled with Vitamin D and deliciously satisfied.

Today I might bake a cake.

I had this dream last night

that I moved back into my first flat in Aro Valley - Adams Terrace. It was a rather decrepit old place, and if it's not condemned now, I'd be surprised. So in my dream Josh, my old Fuel workmate, was moving out and I offered to take over the lease, only remembering after I moved in how dark it could be. But I didn't panic! I merely rearranged the kitchen, so that it magically became three times the size it was previously. I also bought his BBQ from him (he was moving overseas), and it was only twelve dollars. Bargain! Bella and Jude and another girl moved in and it was happy happy times as we redecorated the house. I had a great bedroom too, much nicer than any of the bedrooms that had actually been in the Adams Terrace flat. It was a very hippy place, lots of crystals and bits of beads hanging in all the windows. I woke up suddenly and panicked: not recognising the bedroom I was in, I thought that I had actually moved back to Adams Tce and I was very very upset. Then, as I calmed down, I realised I was actually at Mum's house in the spare bedroom. Thank god.

The Very Next Day...

So, finally girded my loins and took the tiger by the tail, bull by the horns and bit the bullet. Feeling a gut wrenching nostalgia when looking at smoked almonds, Dolly Parton records, a suspicious looking stray hair, Cake For Breakfast Dishes of friday, the bag of miscellaneous Boy Stuff I have neatly prepared and left at the front door. Feeling strong and proud and relieved when talking to Mum, Bella, Bex and Nat. Again, there is someone sitting on my chest most of the time. But I know from experience that all this will pass, given enough time.

Last night, drank most of two bottles of wine and took a lot of herbal tranquillisers. I felt relieved by my lack of emotion/nerve endings if not entirely lucid and sober... And New Years this evening, hopefully easy enough to take on the same detachment, Henry's should be FAB and I want desperately to be in the present, enjoying it, and not wallowing in nostalgia and madly romanticising.

So, New Years Resolutions:

• Be gloriously and proudly Mansfield-esque independent, staunchly partner-less.
• Buying THINGS not STUFF (ie, practical application rather than the purely decorative).
• Budget seriously, pay back debts and holiday fabulously, preferably in Europe, with Liz and Charly.
• Learn to drive.
• Timetable writing evenings and stick to it.

Dinner at Dad's

This being a picture of my little brother with a spoon balanced on his nose. Fab. Hilarious. Somewhat bizarre.

Christmas Slideshow... For some reason I only took shitty photos, but Go Figure

Post Christmas my muscles turn to jelly...

... as all the tension oozes out of my body, via my extremities.

Fab: over for another year, two days of EXTREME family action. My rather sweet mother has unloaded her fridge into mine, I'm the only person at my place as the flatties are away at various parents' in various provincial cities. And then I fed the five hundred yesterday - all the Male Types of the Family, sans Josh given his current address in Scotland. Very pleasant tho', wasn't stressed at all (not very Me-like). More food moved into the fridge. I may be eating salad and cold meat for The Rest of the Week.

I love Nat Rad during summer, especially Matinee Idol which is a five hour joke, I think. Listened to a Sarah Vaughn concert yesterday afternoon which was rather pleasant, while preparing salads of various complexity and mis-reading icing recipes. I have a Nat Rad tee-shirt now and I think I look rather spunky in my Groupie Gear, am planning to stand about in front of Radio New Zealand House and give intense looks to those radio types I recognise. Hm, so mostly Kim Hill, the Boy, Johnny and the terribly vain German girl.

If only I recognised Sean Plunket also. Apparently he is Big.

Pre work - Nat Lib Blog

At the National Library - really an experiment whereby I post the first pictures from my new camera - downloading was an experiment in itself.

So, this is my Mum and me at her place for dinner. I'm not sure what she's telling me but it was bound to be fascinating, intelligent and witty.

These are a bunch of photos from Victoria's barbeque...

Kate, left, wearing my sunglasses.

Hamish, below, wearing a beautiful piece of pounamu and clearly talking about breasts.....

And something shocking and horrifying happening between Victoria and Katie.

 

 

 

 

Some time later... post Lunch, back in the Nat Lib, reading texts about farming in Northland and feeling less apprehensive and anxious than I have over the last few days... calming tea/good energy at lunchtime from Boy. Bought Jessica something beautiful as a wedding present, quite pleased with myself there.

Amazing sense of dislocation; reading these texts and the optimism of mid 20th century New Zealand. While the Average Kiwi was raping and pillaging the soil, setting up environmental and cultural disasters, the Press sent out relentlessly (government encouraged) Positive Pro-Development spin - Add THIS newly developed chemical fertiliser to your soil! Reclaim mudflats for agriculture! Plant exotic forests! I just read a history text which mentioned the nineteenth century  introduction of European weeds like dock and Scotch thistle: No words.

I am wearing my sunglasses indoors

Not because it is particularly bright inside (although there is a little sun) but because this morning my regular glasses fell apart in my hands and I'm waiting for the Araldite to set on them. This is the second time I've ended up in this kind of situation - the first time my glasses snapped in half over the bridge though, and they were completely useless. I'm quite proud of my handiness though with the glue... fixed some earrings and a brooch too while I had it mixed. Today I have POTTERED. Delightfully so... can't remember the last time I had a pottering sort of a day. I've wandered up and down Cuba St a couple of times and had a couple of coffees at Midnight. I've read a little, written a little, done a little research on my Future. Getting hungry for lunch. Bex is coming over soon. Yesterday Mum gave me a set of towels and a set of champagne bowls. Michelle gave me a huge bottle of gin and thirty frozen croissants. Tom gave me his old stereo thing. It has a tape player so I can listen to all of my old mix tapes. Cool.

Monday night and the feeling's alright

I changed site today! It was a beautiful sunny day and I was basically outside... I went for a walk and had coffee with my mama and with my daddy (separately of course). I ate too much junk food and then had a picnic with Emma on the beach and the sandflies ate my legs and I'm still bleeding. But it was worth it! Now I am eating a bag of liquorice and am worrying a little about how my gut is going to react. BUT it's Monday night and the feeling's alright and it's almost Christmas which is going to be good this year... especially if the weather holds and we can sit out in the sun and drink beer and eat salad and roast vegetables and corned beef and Christmas cake with brandy custard. And especially especially if Emma gets a real Christmas tree for our apartment and we can maybe decorate it with fairies and tinsel and biscuits.