Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

I was reminded of this lovely phrase, which for me for some reason has nautical overtones, when watching Endeavour on Saturday night. It was used by a librarian to two of his staff when Morse wanted the Bodeian closed quickly. I like these sort of phrases which are short, quirky, and carry a weight of meaning. On a side note, we are enjoying Endeavour, as you might imagine, and are pleased that the production, plot and story telling qualities that made Morse and Lewis so watchable are being continued in Endeavour. Anyway dear reader, onto our week, the last full week of April. It has been a three day week for us, with Monday (Easter Monday) and Friday (ANZAC day) being public holidays. Claire also had Tuesday off - lawyer’s day apparently, though when I was talking to one of my customers on Wednesday who is a lawyer I discovered they used to take a whole week off! Easter Monday started cloudy but had brightened up by the time Nicky was cooking us a cracking breakfast of scrambled...

Work-wise the four working days of this week have been uneventful. Things progress for Nicky getting used to BHB library, and I have had some Mac work on three of the days. Nicky has had a couple of evenings out at prayer groups on Monday and Wednesday, and I have had a couple more tutorial sessions with Jancis. The weather however, has been eventful this week, with the forecasts suggesting that getting the washing dry would be problematic, but it turned out OK until Thursday. A tropical storm system arrived overnight, with much greater consequences than the last one, though we didn’t suffer any flooding or damage. While driving to work on Thursday morning I drove through a large puddle and about a mile later Lilly died. The tow truck arrived very promptly and the garage couldn’t find anything wrong later in the afternoon, so I guess some water just got somewhere it shouldn’t. I got to my two jobs on the buses, and in the sun, ironically. Easter Friday was the first day of our lo...

Our most exciting event this week has been my niece, Rachel, visiting us. She lives and works in Wanaka and we hadn’t seen her since she last visited us in December 2012. It was only a short visit, but very enjoyable none the less. I collected Rachel from the airport at lunchtime on Friday, but she had not been fed on the flight so we walked up to the sushi bar where she bought us lunch. She is playing ice hockey again (she was in a team at University) but doesn’t have any kit, so we went to a shop in Avondale which she has used over the internet. She was able to get almost fully kitted out with all the protective gear and a stick with the help of an excellent sales assistant, who both knew the product and the stock, and was able to ship Rachel’s purchases to her so that Jetstar didn’t charge enormous fees for them on the return flight. We were there about an hour so by the time we were home again and had consumed a restorative pot of tea, it was time for me to start cooking diner (...

Into April now, Easter and hot cross bunnies fast approaching, and I am still marvelling at the high pressure systems that are bringing us such lovely weather (on the whole). Somebody, other than the Solomon Islands and Chile must be suffering. It hasn’t been wall-to-wall sunshine - we had some fog on Tuesday morning and it rained during Thursday night. Nicky has now finished her fourth week at BHB Library and is getting more into the routine. She was very pleased to make a Harry Potter connection unexpectedly with a couple of the staff this week, so she took all her American copies of the HP book’s in to show them. On Monday night she had prison prayer group, and house group on Wednesday night, when Jancis joined her. I have seen quite a bit of Jancis this week in order to help her get her accounts ready for a meeting she has coming up. I have also done my end of year accounts (my most profitable year so far, but I’m only operating at about 30% of what I need to do to support us...