June 2008 Archives

Sunday afternoon and once again, it's dreary, cold and wet. It is a fallacy that the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain; obviously every drop falls mainly on Northland, New Zealand. I went for a stroll this morning (between torrential downpours) and lost one of my gumboots in a puddle big enough to launch the Titanic in, and there are large lakes appearing on our lawn that I am half expecting the local duck population to land in.

Despite this inclement weather Bruvinlaw has got stuck into dismantling the rear part of the stockyards where their house/barn is going to be built. The plans are a tick in a box away from being signed off by the council, so finally, finally they can get on with building. It's been such a palaver, with the plans going back and forth for what seems the most trivial reasons but! there is light at the end of the tunnel at last. All going to schedule they'll be moved in by Christmas and this big old house will be quiet again.

Apart from sloshing about in my gumboots I've also been spring cleaning my PC at the wrong time of the year. I'm not sure how many programs I removed, but I'm ashamed to say there was some absolute rubbish on the list, some of which I hadn't accessed for years. Oh, shame on me. I'm crossing my fingers that after I've run a disk cleanup then a defrag to squash the disk space together neatly it's going to be one happy, shiny, sparkly PC and most importantly a faster one too.

Yippee!

This morning when I checked my mobile I had a text message dated yesterday lunchtime from our neighbour Rachel, who lives half a kilometre down the road from us.

Hey fiona hws it goin up there. Um little Max is dwn hr trying to hump the pig again. Hes a keen little guy haha

Keen is right; this must be at least the tenth time he's done this. Poor wee Snuffles (Rachel's pig is a young kune-kune, like this one - bless her cottons!) - she'll be traumatised for life!

I can only hope that Fox Terrier is going to own up to his parental responsibilties.

It's a damp, mild Sunday afternoon, and for the past couple of hours I've been choosing and trying to scan old and not-so-old family photos into my PC for my Gallery project. It's a project that's one of those ongoing projects, which I do admit to procrastinating about for quite some time now, but now the hallway is no longer a retro shade of pale rose pink (it's now an inoffensive shade called Spanish Cream, perfect as a background shade) and I have a printer more than capable of producing decent prints, a large selection of frames and finally, enough photographic paper it was time to stop the procrastinating once and for all.

That's where it got tricky. My PC (which is now five years old and should be applying for its pension) started to freeze as I toggled between screens, and finally after three attempts to save down a newly scanned photo, it crashed, aaaaarrrrrgggghh!

So, what do I do? I know - and I'm the guilty party here - that it's full to the brim with load of unused programs - there's three lots of digital camera software loaded up, not to mention a great deal of freeware and a dodgy copy of Photoshop 7 - but I've transferred the bulk of my photos on a MyBook, so surely it's not a memory problem. I've tempted to get it restored somehow, i.e, take it right back to basics and start from scratch but then I wonder, is it a memory problem after all?

Or do I just retire it to Miss 7.9's room to play her CD-roms on, and reassign my lovely new laptop for full-time duty?

But then, it's no longer a lap-top, is it?

There's been a bit of debate over at our neighbours' place (you know - that rather large desert island on our left) about the scourge of binge drinking, news of which has reached our shores, home of some of the most dedicated binge drinking on the planet.

It would seem that Aussie's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is introducing some policies aimed particularly at reducing the high rate of binge drinking in teenagers - i.e. putting taxes on alcopops.

Queue the segment on 60 Minutes (as well as our token New Zealand piece, we also get segments from the Australian and US version) on how outrageous the teenaged drinking is - cut to scene: a uni-student party in a flat in Kickatinalong, Sydney. Instead of necking Bacardi Breezers, the little buggers are downing cask wine and straight rum! All in order to get completely and utterly plastered! Oh my goodness!

Yes, it was all a bit de-ja-vu - high school parties (at an even earlier age than the kids in the 60 Minutes report) for me consisted of a $2.50 bottle of (very sweet, sparkling) Marque Vue drunk in a lady-like fashion straight out of the bottle, Mark Samuels comatose in the neighbour's carefully landscaped front garden, or failing that the nearest gutter after consuming his standard ration of three bottles of Purple Death (a rather nasty concotion made with pickled eels eyes sieved through the crotches of moudly old Jockey y-fronts found in the bottoms of Sally Army charity bins, and infamous in the part of Auckland I spent my teens in) and of course not forgetting that time Toni-Marie Alderton vomited all over her new. much-boasted-about white pixie boots after swigging down half a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Not to mention the host of misdemeanours, unfortunate episodes and extremely embarrassing incidents that happened to myself and my close friends - all interspersed with some bloody good fun.

Who is to blame for teenagers getting themselves totally plastered every weekend, now in 2008 and back then in 1986? Are parents? Is it politicians and their policies? Is it the media? Is it the retailers, trying to make an easy buck?

Or is it just teenagers experimenting; pushing boundaries, finding out what is good and what is bad, learning their own lessons?

Did you binge drink as a teenager? What lessons did you learn? And how did it affect the way you deal with alcohol now?

So, Miss 7.9 and I were lolling in bed on Saturday morning looking through an old photo album of mine.

"Mummy, who's that?" she asked, pointing to a photo of my cousin Hamish (then aged @11 years old) taken at my 21st.

"That's Hamish - you know Hamish, Bree's Daddy," I replied.

"But Hamish is a grownup...?" Miss 7.9 murmured, looking confused.

"Yes, but that was taken a long time ago. At Mummy's 21st birthday." 

"Oh...did they have colour photos then?"

...is the business. If only I can can get the hang of this fingertip mousepad thing. It's only taken me twenty flippin' minutes to publish this post.

After Monday's TLC extravaganza I've continued rewarding myself during the rest of the week because, as they say in those L'Oreal ads, I'm Worth It.

Tuesday it was a girls' night out to the movies with twelve work colleagues to see Sex in the City, diverting through a local bar for Cosmopolitans and pizza and antipasto on the way. I decided I am quite fond of Cosmopolitans and that just one was nowhere near enough. Mmmmm...

As for the movie I give it 9 chocolate fishes out of 10. I laughed, I cried - I loved it - yep, it certainly dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's for this Sex in the City fan, but even my manager, who'd never seen a single episode in her life thoroughly enjoyed it: "That Samantha, she's a card!"

Wednesday it was off to Flight Centre to pick up my ticket to Sydney! Today - in five weeks time - I will be on the plane winging my way across the ditch to see the lovely Deeleea for a weekend of  photo ops galore, Eggs Benedict and girl-geekness. Yippee!

And yesterday, after much hand-wringing and lurking in electrical appliance stores for the past fortnight, I finally bought myself a laptop - a lovely little Compaq Presario intended for blogging on the verandah, or more importantly as this time of the year, in the lounge in front of the fire. Oh yeah.

Needless to say I will not be rewarding myself again for decades to come.

Speaking of rewarding, this weekend it's just the Kiwifruit Clan at home as Lil'Sis and family are away down in Auckland, so I have plans for spoiling both the OH and Miss 7.9 with brekkie in bed, hand picked DVDs, favourite meals and most importantly just us time.

'Cos They're Worth It too.

Miss 7.9 made a wan appearance at the breakfast table this morning, wearing a woebegone expression and her favourite fluffy green crochet scarf wrapped round her neck.
"I don't feel very well" she mumbled, toying idly with her Weetbix.
"Sore throat? Sore head? Sore tummy? Allergic to school?" I ticked the usual maladies off on my fingers
"No-o-ooooh. I'm not allergic to school; I've got a really, really, sore tummy" she replied, rubbing her belly and sighing dramatically.
The Other Harf and I were instantly suspicious - the reason being is that there's been an epidemic of hypochondria in the house lately, with Niece T laid up in bed for three whole days with a variety of ailments ranging from a blister on her finger to an aching head through to tummy gas and finally and most spectacularly "growing pains" - symptoms which instantly disappeared on the evening of Day 3 when she learned that her sister and cousin were having homemade pizza for dinner.

There was no homemade pizza, and Niece T was set back to bed for the rest of the evening for telling porkies.

As these symptoms often make a sudden appearance at bedtimes the tale of The Boy who Cried Wolf has been recounted to my niece several times but with little effect and from now on it would take a decapitated limb for the grown-up's in the household to really believe Niece T when she announces that she doesn't feel very well.

So I subtly reminded Miss 7.9 of how her cousin tends to overdramatise any sign of illness and how lying about things like that can get a little girl into trouble but she assured me her sick tummy was really, really true.

Off into bed she was piled. Bruvinlaw (who at home all day, rostered on Nephew T duty) was drafted in to supervise, and Miss 7.9 was informed that a) two bottles of water were to be consumed over the rest of the day b) she was to rest to at least 10am - with her bedside lamp off so no reading allowed and c) once she was allowed up there was no running round inside or outside, no Playstation or playing on the PC and last but not least d) no biscuits or chippies or icecream or anything remotely yummy.

As the rules were dictated to Miss 7.9's face grew even more woebegone. Ah yes, plainly this wasn't the day off school she has been anticipating.

The Other Harf and I tucked her in and kissed her forehead, telling her to obey all the rules and that we would be checking in with her uncle at lunchtime to make sure she did so.

As we walked up the hallway heading for the door, a little voice piped up from the bedroom.

"Mummy? Daddy? I'm feeling all better now!"

The restorative powers of a 7 year-old are a blimin' miracle, I tell you.

*P.S. Miss 7.9 wasn't allowed to go to school but as predicted when the lunchtime phonecall was made to Nurse Bruvinlaw, the patient had made a complete recovery. Funny that.

Oooh, I completely forget to mention in my last missive that we went and saw Cats on Sunday afternoon. It was staged by the local amateur theatre group, but according to those in the know it rated right up there with a professional performance.

All I can say from my limited experience of attending live musicals (I fell asleep in Miss Saigon but managed to stay fully awake through and even enjoy Mama Mia, Blood Brothers and Chicago, so that makes four I've seen before this one) is that it was very, very good, particularly the costumes, even though it did take a slight adjustment in mindset to get over the fact that there were grown ups on stage wearing fake-fur ears, tie-dyed tights and stick on tails, pretending to be cats.


And now my taste for musicals has been whetted, I'm definitely keen to take a weekend jaunt down to Auckland, round up a few long-lost mates and check out Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

So, have you seen many musicals? What's your favourite? Or would you rather (as Bruvinlaw deftly puts it) have hot, blunt toothpicks shoved under your fingernails?

*Yes, it is actually "Memory", not "Memories" - a nice bit of smarty-pants trivia to bring up at your next dinner party.