Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

It has been a quiet, simple, and routine week. The weather has got colder, and wetter, but I have still been able to get the washing dry outside without difficulty. We now have a heater on in the bedroom in the morning so that Nicky can get dressed in the warmth, but when the sun comes out it still warms the open-plan living area nicely. Nicky and the library have been very busy again this week. She was also at prison prayer group on Monday evening and serving desserts at church on Wednesday evening for the Alpha course participants. I have had a reasonable amount of work, which has taken me to Remuera, Devonport, the CBD, Northcote, and just down the road. After struggling through the first 300+ pages I finally finished The Luminaries this week. I can’t work out if it was a simple story told in an overcomplicated manner, or a complex story badly told, but I wasn’t overly impressed. There again, it won the Booker Prize so what did I expect! I have also finally sold three old Ma...

The highlight of this week has to be Saturday at the Writers Festival, so that is where I will start, but there have been other good bits too. The day dawned a little cloudy, but that didn’t dampen our spirits or chill our breakfast boiled eggs and toast. Our first appointment was at an Oxfam morning tea being hosted by Faye who Nicky worked with in New Lynn. Wendy, also of New Lynn library, and Shirley, a friend of Faye’s, also joined us along with Faye’s husband Ivan. We had tea and coffee and a lovely range of home made gluten free goodies, and a good chat. We left for home to pick up Nicky’s hearing aids and have some fruit before heading into town and the Civic car park. Nicky had been given a free ticket from work to see Camilla Lackberg talking about her Scandinavian crime novels at 2.30, so while she went off to that I got into a free session discussing the difference from the writers perspective of books and film. To oversimplify, books are stories told with words by peo...

It has been a week of gradual improvement. It started wet and has finished with a glorious sunny weekend. It also started with Nicky being signed off from work with high blood pressure, but when she went back to see the nurse on Wednesday it had come down so she was back to work on Thursday. She has run out of sick leave so took the time off as annual leave, so on Tuesday we went to one of the Icebreaker outlet stores at the airport. Nicky wanted to buy me an orange top (for my birthday) which I had taken a liking to in the Queens Street store. We left with a slightly different orange top, and a pair of shorts and a top for Nicky (the top is in storage for her birthday). Her two days at work were very busy so she was looking forward to the weekend. Just to add a bit more fun to the week, when she popped into the library on Wednesday to tell them she would be back at work on Thursday, while she was standing talking, someone put a box down behind her which she then fell over, straining a...

Our week has been dominated by sad news close to home. On Wednesday morning, Barrie, our next door neighbour, landlord and husband to Dawn, died. He had been very ill with cancer for the last few months and was admitted to the Mercy Hospice on Monday. He is out of pain but will not be out of our memories. Ros’s mum Jean had a stroke during the week and is giving quite a lot of cause for concern at the moment. In addition, Jancis returned to the UK with the sad knowledge that NZ immigration won’t issue her with a Permanent Resident’s permit. She called in to say good bye on Monday evening. We won’t be seeing her happy smiling face again until she next returns in December. Nicky hasn’t been sleeping well so took Friday off as holiday. We went out to Te Henga and O’Neills for a walk in the afternoon. Then on Saturday we dropped the mower into Stella on our way to Parakai to have a wallow in the hot pools for the afternoon. We fancied a change of scenery and it did us good. Tod...

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 (...