Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

She’s off!. As I write Nicky has been in the air around half an hour. Next stop Los Angeles. It is almost 20 years since Nicky has travelled and I have been home alone. Last time was when Nicky and Claire departed for New Zealand in October 1998. The last time Nicky traversed the globe on her own was when when she returned to the UK after coming to NZ for her mother’s 90th with Felicity. We have both been a little apprehensive all week with the prospect of the trip. My major concern is that I won’t be by her side to help if she has any problems with her travel plans, and I think the administration of the journey has been uppermost in Nicky’s mind. She has had a different week at work, as the library closed yesterday for two weeks for refurbishment. She has spent a great deal of time on the phone calling borrowers and encouraging them to call in and collect the books that they had requested before the library closed. Other than that, the library hasn’t been to busy this week. I

While Nicky began the week on the road to recovery and returned to work on Tuesday, I was still on the down hill side hitting the trough on Tuesday. I felt bad enough late Monday to postpone the work I had booked for Tuesday. I was very pleased that I had done so when I did do the job on Wednesday as it turned out to be more complicated than I had hoped. Still, we have both improved during the week and are approaching our more normal levels of health and well-being. Nicky had her regular eye clinic appointment on Monday, and has had a relatively quiet week at work. I have had more work on this week which has been good, just a bit of an unfortunate coincidence that this should happen while I’m under the weather. I didn’t linger for the socialising after my Deep & Meaningful meeting this week as I still felt in need of an early night in bed. The weather has been largely sunshine and showers, but during the dryer periods there seems to be a hint of spring. This looks set to c

What with England being beaten by Croatia and Belgium (again) and Nicky being sent home from work on Wednesday due to her cold (which I now have - it was free!), it has not been our most exuberant week. We had a quiet, showery Monday, with Nicky doing lots of sewing. Her cough was quite bad and getting worse on Tuesday and Wednesday. We moved a planned doctors appointment (for renewal of some her regular drugs) forward to Thursday and Dr. Vather signed her off for the rest of the week, which has turned out to be a good idea. As Tuesday and Wednesday progressed the showers diminished, and Thursday was a lovely sunny day. I haven’t had much Mac work but I did a modelling session on Wednesday evening and a Consumer Research interview in town on Friday morning. We enjoyed watching a gentle film called The Chinese Takeaway which I had recorded last week. With us both being unwell we have had a quiet weekend of reading and telly. I have really enjoyed Belinda Bauer’s book Snap -

We have got through to the semi-finals, and by this time next week we will know whether or not we have made it to the final!!!! The level of excitement here about the World Cup and England’s success could at best be described as minimal. The only person I have encountered who wanted to talk about the tournament was my barber, a lovely Chinese lady called Jo, who runs the Baroness Barber up the road ($10 for a numbered cut, or seniors). I got the impression that she was very pleased to finally have a customer willing to exchange thoughts and reactions on the matches so far. She cut my hair too. The staff at the library are quite amused by Nicky’s enthusiasm at England’s success. Unfortunately the England v Sweden game wasn’t shown on free TV this morning, but we got to see highlights later. The England v Columbia game was on live, starting at 6am, so I was up to watch that on Wednesday, and we also saw the Denmark v Croatia match at the same time on Monday. Nicky later went up into

It has been a week for staying warm and enjoying the football (World Cup for those of you not in the 2.5 billion world-wide who are following it). We started Monday as usual with a late breakfast. I did some shopping, Nicky popped over to see Kanchan, and we made great progress with the jigsaw, eventually finishing it. We had our last Love Languages session in the evening. My working week has been very quiet again, and Nicky’s has not been too busy because of the weather. Long periods of rain, morning fog and low single digit temperatures in the mornings have encouraged many to stay home. Some afternoons towards the end of the week have been lovely and sunny which has helped with the laundry for me. We had dinner out at Musashi (a Japanese restaurant in New Lynn) on Wednesday with Nicky’s life group. The restaurant was a little chilly, but other than that we had a really good evening. The food was excellent, the service great and the staff were very good to deal with.