Watching paint dry.

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Reading through my notes for this week (yes Dear Reader, I make notes everyday - how else could I recall the plethora of scintillating and exciting things that we get up to?) they can be summarised as “quiet and sunny”.

Most of the work that I have done has been remote support, with just one bus trip to the CBD on Wednesday morning. I have finally finished digitising the mountain of audiobooks which Nicky had from the library. A portion of them are now on her iPad, the rest are ready to go.

Nicky’s week has included her usual three attendances at church, an evening at life group, having a blood test and regular visit to the GP and an ear wax removal procedure at Dilworth Hearing. She was in town on Thursday for the ukulele concert and sing along, and has also been on daisy and weed mulching maintenance. Unfortunately the chives were pretending to be weeds for the afternoon so we don’t have many left now. It’s their own fault. Thursday evening she went over to Greenlane for prison prayer group, and then yesterday was BHB Quilters Circle, which went very well (and I got loads of pikelets!).

We have had some lovely sunny weather this week, so many cups of tea and coffee and lunches on The Rattigan when it hasn’t been too windy. We are currently using The Barlow Recliners on The Rattigan much more than our outdoor table and chairs because it is very easy just to pop them out for a few minutes, or in Nicky’s case, a dozen chapters or so. Now that she is a professional retiree she has stopped using hours and minutes to measure time, and has converted to the easier-to-manage pages-chapters-books approach. It seems to be going well but upstaged the other retirees at the Doctors by NOT turning up in her PJ’s. She’ll get there.

While Nicky was at church this morning, experiencing a very unusual service, I went out to Karekare. I had a good walk, enjoyed my flask of coffee and pikelets, but didn’t go into the sea due to their being a dozen or so dead jellyfish at the waters edge. I assumed there would be many more waiting in the sea to get their stingy tentacles onto my rippling muscles. Gosh, isn’t autocorrect brilliant sometimes! This afternoon Nicky Scrabbled at Stella’s and the evening has been devoted to the tellybox.

Last night, Saturday, we had a very refreshing TV experience, seeing for the first time the “Portrait Artist of the Year” competition. I gathered from the commentary that this isn’t the first series, and I don’t know if its been on here before and we didn’t spot it, or if this is the first showing, but we really enjoyed it. The quality of the work presented by the competitors was very high, especially as all of the sitters did things that I have not been allowed to do in the same situation (ie: move), so we look forward to the rest of the series.

Take care, Rick

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