First beach trip of the year

And welcome to yet another New Year. They come round with predictable regularity don’t they.

Our New Years Eve was quite busy with laundry and shopping to start the day. We both had plans for working in the kitchen to make contributions for our evening out. I had first session in the kitchen making 12 individual topless Christmas Pies with flaky freezer pastry. While Nicky took over the kitchen to make red onion, feta, beetroot and spinach pin wheels, I set up Steve and Ros’s new computers.

After a light tea Nicky and I headed into town to friends of mine for a New Years party which concluded with watching the Sky Tower fireworks from their apartment balcony (great view). As ever, James and Wendy were excellent hosts and it was an enjoyable evening.

With having a busy day and late night on the 31st, we had a slow start to January 1st. We had a good crop of calendars this year so it took us awhile to work out where to put each of them, but we rose to the challenge. We also fancied a trip to the beach, even though the weather wasn’t quite as good as it could have been. We made a picnic lunch and headed off to Beachlands, a part of eastern Auckland that we have never been to before. It was a little grey and there was moisture in the air when we got there, but we found a sheltered bench were we ate our lunch and enjoyed our view of the sea and Rangitoto.

We had a post-lunch wander to work off the calories we had just consumed and decided to drive down the coast to the Duder Regional Park. For much of the the journey the road was only separated from the beach by a few feet of grass, but this was quite hard to see as it looked like the whole of South Auckland was parked bumper to bumper for about 10kms. When we got to Duder the car park there was also full so we decided to have a gentle meander home through Clevedon. This turned out to be quite a pleasant wee town with a famous (to Nicky) shop called Acorns. Obviously we had to stop and take a look.

When we got home we had tea while watching the first episode of the first series of Who Wants to be a Millionaire hosted by Jeremy Clarkson. We also watched Pearl Harbour (which was a mistake) and Nicky did the ironing. 

Wednesday the 2nd was a public holiday here, so we had another very gentle start and a long chat with my sister Gill in England on FaceTime, followed by a gentle day pottering at home. Nicky made some more Christmas cakes and started to feel unwell.

She didn’t improve overnight so zipped up to the Doctors first thing Thursday morning, was signed off work for two days and given a course of antibiotics. We needed to do some shopping and Nicky decided to buy some jigsaws while they were on offer. Two of them we have now done and enjoyed both. I was in town in the evening for my first Deep & Meaningful discussion of the year.

The weather has improved each day as the week as progressed, but Friday was very windy. I went up to The Block in the afternoon to have a drink with Paul and Jason as they were closing at 5pm (because of the time of year).

Nicky didn’t have a good night but went off to work on Saturday morning, and had a much better day than she expected and came home feeling that she had done the right thing. I did laundry, ironing and the jigsaw, and we spent the evening tellyboxing.

Today has again been a lovely summers day, so while Nicky was at church I went to Karekare. After lunch we took down the Christmas decorations. Nicky has really enjoyed have a real tree again. It has now gone for recycling.

We start 2019 with more uncertainty that we have faced in a long time, and we are both keenly aware of it, but what comes will come and we will muddle on through as we usually do.

Take care, Rick