The day the Earth moved

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We have had a pretty good week. Nicky has been busy at work without being utterly stressed. I have had Mac work on four of the five working days, though three of the jobs were only small ones. The weather has been mixed, with some rain and some sun, some warm bits and some chilly bits, but it has settled for the weekend and today has been more like summer than spring, even though summer doesn't officially start for another two months.

We started watching The Story of England on Monday, which first caught our interest with being filmed in Kibworth, a village south of Leicester where I had a number of customers. Even though quite a lot of the history isn't new to us, seeing it through the history of once place looks interesting, so we will see how it develops.

On Wednesday we had the first national earthquake practice, at 9.26am. We all had to drop, duck and hold, ie: get under a sturdy table to protect yourself from falling things. Even though I was at home alone, and there were no warning sirens (disappointed with that), I got under our dinning room table (a very sturdy ex-Nottingham University 6'x4' library table) at the appointed time. I discovered this may be fine for kiddies (we have seen lots of demonstrations on the news) but for somebody might height there is not a lot of room under the table - I could with a hard hat to wear.

Later in the morning I took the bus into town for my appointment at the immigration office. My application for citizenship has now been duly submitted, but it wasn't without a hiccup. My place of birth as stated on my passport (Sheffield) does not appear anywhere on my birth certificate (Hackenthorp, Ekington and Chesterfield being the places mentioned on the certificate). So, after a bit of discussion about the geography of England things proceeded, and we shall see what happens.

Yesterday started off with Nicky cooking us a wonderful breakfast - stacked pancakes. For those who have not experienced this concept, try it sometime, layered as follows: pancake - bacon - pancake - banana and maple syrup - pancake. Nicky also had apricot jam and thick cream on the top of hers (no comment). After this feast we popped up to the optician's to pick up her new glasses, and then spent the rest of the day with laundry, baking and much reading about. In the evening Nicky started reading JK Rowlings new book, The Casual Vacancy, and we headed of to Parakai for a wallow in the hot pools. On our return we put all the clocks forward an hour and commenced daylight saving (even though it was dark at the time). We are now 12 hours ahead of the UK.

Today we have done the reminder of the laundry, and while it was drying we went to the Maritime Museum. Auckland Heritage Fortnight has started this weekend, and for this weekend only the Spirit of New Zealand, a fully functional tall ship, was in dock for visiting. Unfortunately, when we got to the museum we discovered that a problem had developed yesterday and the ship had gone off to be repaired! Oh well. We had a wander round the museum instead as with being Auckland residents we can get in for free, and found a sunny sport with a good view for have our picnic lunch. On our return we tried out our new garden furniture (it worked very well) so that Nicky could Scrabble in the sunshine.




On a side note, car number plates here have a plastic surround, usually advertising the car dealer where the vehicle was purchased. Alternatives ones can be purchased such as "I'd rather be fishing", but I saw a new one this week: "Anything with Tyres or Testicles is Trouble". I assume it was a woman driver.

Take care,
Rick

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