Eggstraordinary

 It has been another week of wet and windy weather, tempered with a some periods of blue sky and sunshine. It has also felt like quite a busy week because of having three evenings out. The first was to church for a meeting of the candidates for our electorate (we have a General Election in a couple of weeks). This was hosted by the Budgeting Advisory Service. The representative for ACT didn’t turn up (no loss from our perspective) but the four who did were asked a range of questions. Some were “quick fire” ones to test their local knowledge, and some were more policy related requiring longer answers. The lady from the Green Party was reasonably competent but obviously didn’t expect to reach parliament and was primarily canvassing for the party vote (we get a party vote and a candidate vote for those of you not familiar with our MMP system). The chap from NZ First was utterly hopeless and unable to answer many of the questions, including the policy ones because apparently NZ First don’t have policies on how to help the working poor. Carl Bates (National) spoke reasonably well but I have encountered him a number of times in the last few weeks and just can’t warm to him. Steph Lewis (Labour) acquitted herself well and seems to be a hard worker. It was a useful evening even thought it largely only confirmed our suspicions.

Our other two outings were quiz nights: our regular one at Stella*r where we came 5th with 100 points, and a church fund raiser where we won. John and Danny from our regular quiz team joined Nicky and I, and we joined with Sue and Yvonne. Two very different styles of quizzing.

Sue had been over for lunch on Monday and spent the afternoon with us. We introduced her to Mah Jong, which she had previously played on-line, rather differently. Sue and Nicky went for an amble while I had a snooze. Nicky and I did The Listener crossword before dinner.

Lee and Frances came to us for home group leaders training on Tuesday afternoon to watch a Small Group Leaders video with Nicky. It went well, and I made tiny cheesecakes (a small savoury cracker with Philadelphia cheese and lemon curd) to go with a pot of tea at the end.

Nicky has been continuing with Ari’s quillow while I worked on a jigsaw which we finished on Wednesday. Thursday was little different as we had a planned power outage for 6 hours in the middle of the day. Unlike Wednesday, which was dull and cold and required the heat pump to be on much of the day, Thursday has some sunshine which kept the house toasty. The Aramoho Library had power but Nicky had no borrowers.

On Friday I did some actual on-site Mac work. Unfortunately it was very frustrating as the new Mac which they had purchased would not connect to their wifi network using their wifi extender, only the main router. This is located a good distance from where they will use the Mac and so the signal is very weak and network speed very slow. A phone call to their broadband provider elicited the information that they can have a new extender, but they won’t have one in stock at the local shop for a week. The best part of the job for me was using the bus to get to and from town. Also on Friday Nicky attended the Museum fashion talk which was again interesting with a 1920’s lace tea dress.

The weekend has been drier, and lovely and sunny as I write this, but with boisterous winds. The wind was sufficiently strong to force cancellation of both our sailings. It was quite calm first thing yesterday morning, but by the time we had the boat rigged, fuelled and cleaned, it was getting breezy. By the time we had finished our coffee break the wind was much stronger and the water was very choppy so the sailing was cancelled. This morning was similar other than the wind got up sooner so we didn’t even rig the boat before deciding not to sail.

I called into the supermarket on my way home yesterday to get milk, eggs and bread. The cheapest box of a dozen eggs I could find was $9!!! (They were about $4.25 when we first moved here less than three years ago). Most of them were in the $10-$15 range. That puts the individual price of some eggs higher than the price of individual avocados. This is all because of the change in regulations which bans battery farming. The animal rights campaigners will reap what they have sown when they become fixed income pensioners. However, on walking through the door when I got home I was greeted with aroma of lemon and raisin scones so all was well with my world. I possibly ate a scone too many, but we won’t go into that.

The rain on Wednesday looked good on the Kowhai in the front garden:

Take care, Rick and Nicky.