Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

From the sublime to the ridiculous, or from feast to famine, choose whatever phrase you like dear reader, but this past week has been quite different from the previous week. I think the only similarity has been work for Nicky, which has continued to be steady-to-busy. She took half a day off for her annual induction with Corrections, but it was a straight-forward labour and she was back home for lunch. I have had no paid work at all, but seem to have been busy in the office none the less, along with my usual household duties. The weather has gone all bi-polar and is in definite need of some lithium salts. The beginning of the week was a bit questionable, and then the wind hit the fan and from Wednesday night to Thursday we had 30 hours of continues rain, followed by winds of up to 140kph. It was like living in Wellington. Trees and power lines down all over the place, and land slips too, but fortunately non affected us directly, though it me 20 minutes to travel 500m on a bus ...

Well what an exciting week it has been dear reader, though you know I have fairly low standards. Not only have we had the Olympics, days of fun and new experiences, and lovely weather, but this is also the 500th post on this blog. For those of you who have been with us for all those posts, I’m stunned. Nicky had Monday off as TOIL, so we decided to get the bus into town (after a large and leisurely breakfast), have the morning in the art gallery, have a nice lunch in their café, and then do a bit of the coast-to-coast route in the afternoon to work off a couple of the calories. Not long after we arrived in the gallery we heard an announcement about a free guided tour starting in 10 minutes, so we decided to join it as even though we have been to the gallery many times, we haven’t had a guided tour before. Not long after the tour started I had a couple of phone calls, the second one of which was quite long and culminated in me agreeing to go and see the customer in the afternoon. S...

The Olympics have impacted on our daily routines this week. We don’t normally have the tellybox on at breakfast or lunchtime, but have been doing so this week to catch up with events in Rio. The coverage, as one would expect, has been a little partisan, but I have also discovered that the Brits have been doing very well in the velodrome. We have enjoyed much of what we have seen so far. The beginning of the week was chilly, with temperatures of 4º and 5º in the roof to start the day, but it has been dryer. Some showers but no major downpours. Nicky has been busy at work as usual. She had a day of customer service training in town which meant an early start with some of her colleagues as they were car pooling. The course was good but she didn’t really learn anything new. She also worked a long day on Saturday (8.30am to 7pm) at a Family Heritage expo in Mt Roskill. This was busy for most of the day and interesting, especially when things were quiet at the end and she did some r...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been the major theme for the week. Ros very kindly loaned us her copy, so Nicky started reading it on Sunday and finished it in the wee hours of Monday morning. I was less nocturnal in my reading so didn’t finish it until Tuesday afternoon. We have both enjoyed it and enjoyed discussing the plot themes and implications. Both out reserved copies arrived at the library later in the week, through the copy I ordered from the Book Depositary back in February is still on its way to us. Nicky’s working week has been reasonable, with the library steady to busy. I have had a good week with a very long job on Monday which didn’t complete until Thursday, and a couple of other calls as well. We have both had evenings out, Nicky at life group and me at Deep and Meaningful and drinks on Friday. We have had a mixed bag of DVD viewing this week. The WW2 series Home Fires was good, but a film called The Lobster was rubbish, even though the blurb on the box...

It has been a wintery week with cold, wet weather (some of the rain very heavy), but there has been the odd patch of sun now and then. We started the week with Luna, our lovely Suzuki Swift, up at the garage for her annual spa day (service and warrant). Minor adjustment to her fog lights was all she needed for her warrant. Nicky has been fully occupied at the library again, and had a few evenings out with prayer groups and getting her hair done. On Friday morning she went down to New Lynn library for a leaving do, so we met up afterwards and had some soup for lunch together which was good. I have had a quieter week than last week with work, but have done a couple of decent jobs. I was out at Deep and Meaningful one night, and have also spent some of my birthday money on a couple of micro-fibre tops from MacPac which I am pleased with. I have enjoyed watching a three part documentary on DVD called Precision - the measure of all things, about the seven basic units of measure...

I had a surreal experience on Thursday. I caught a bus just after 9am to go to a job on Queen Street. As we were coming into town on Symonds Street, the traffic came to a stand still on the bridge over the motorways. I noticed that the other side of the road was completely empty. Then I spotted a Police motorcyclist. Then another. Ah-ha I thought! After waiting a couple of minutes the motorcade started to appear, Police cars and bikes followed by four or five very old fashioned FBI type black Chrysler SUV’s, then a long black limo with flags, more Police cars and SUV’s, another small limo with flags, then a couple more cars and some buses, probably carrying the “press gaggle”. It must be that American dude I thought. I was tempted to ask the bus driver to let me off for a couple of minutes so that I could stand in the road and berate the Vice President for holding up OUR traffic and check for uranium on his breath, but I thought the Treasury men might give me a prolonged pat-down and ...

There has been a bit more variety to this last week compared to last. The weather has been more changeable, cool to cold temperatures, some rain, some sun, some wind, and some torrential rain, but it is winter time. The week began a little differently as Nicky had a training course to attend on family history at Takapuna library. I didn’t have any work booked so drove us to Takapuna. I dropped Nicky off at the library then had a bit of an explore and wander in Devonport and Bayswater. Sitting in the ferry terminal out of the wind drinking coffee and watching the boats come and go was good. Nicky found her training course very interesting and was very enthused on the way back. These guys were loitering in Bayswater: The schools are on holiday at the moment so the library has been “steady”. Lots of people in and out. Nicky had a good afternoon on Thursday doing a star making workshop with Chardonnay for Matariki. Next week that are moving onto nuclear fission. I have had...