Instead of blogging (and Facebooking, and faffing round with my camera and re-synching my iPod) I really should be making a Greek salad, as that’s what I’m supposed to be bringing to our friends Ethel and Harold’s First Wedding Anniversary/Ethel’s 43rd birthday barbecue tonight, and as Greek salads taste all that much better when you’ve left the ingredients to mingle a little while and get to know each other as soon as I finish this I will be straight off to the kitchen to slice and dice feta, cucumber and tomatoes. Promise.

It’s been a gloriously hot weekend (and it’s a long one too; Northland has tagged itself onto Auckland Anniversary Day tomorrow) – particularly yesterday, when temperatures on our verandah thermometer doodad peaked at 35C, which is way, way too hot for me. Yes, my strawberry blonde, freckly, Scottish/English/Irish genes panic at anything over 28C, and I go running for the coolest spot in the house – either that or into the pool, smothered in twenty layers of SPF45.

This also means the vegetable gardens need loads of watering in the evenings. The corn (now taller than me!) and the tomatoes don’t seem to mind the heat too much, but the lettuces and beans go all limp and pathetic if they’re not dosed, the poor loves.

In other important news, the Other Harf has finally made a decision about paid employment: he’s going into business on his own, doing accounts and book-keeping for small businesses, sports groups, clubs; anyone who replies to his ad really. It’s taken a wee bit of a prod from me to get him to make this decision, but if it does work out it means he can work mostly from home, and be there for Miss 9.4 and her afterschool social whirl of netball, swimming and Brownies (and Guides come March, when she officially turns nine and a half).

It also means he can potter about with doing the housework (this part I really like), his bits of wood, his landscaping and writing of letters of complaint to greedy, immoral telecommunications companies about their lack of customer service and gratuitous overcharging.

Today my lunchbreak was about dresses for weddings. Dresses to wear to weddings, to be precise, as opposed to wedding dresses.

The wedding in question is to be held on the 27th of February in the backyard of a bach at Cooks Beach (which is here).

It’s my cousin Stu’s second wedding (those of you with memories like elephants may remember me talking about him before – he and his now ex-wife couldn’t agree on where was home – he wanted it to be here in New Zealand, she wanted it to be there in England, they couldn’t agree so they got divorced) and it differs in many ways from his first, which the Other Harf and I also attended as we just happened to be living in the UK at the time.

How different? Well, It’s going to be hot, summer, in New Zealand, with more than four members of his family attending (last estimate: 30 members).

So the dress. I went into boutiques manned by bony, over-coiffured, overtanned middle-aged women half my size (there’s a few of these boutiques in Whangarei, for some unknown reason) – I found some beautiful, gorgeous dresses, but oh! How they had lovely prices to match! *puts dress back on rack*

I went to Farmers (zilch!).

I went to Himalayan Trading Post (all out of my size, should of nabbed that lovely black and white dress when I saw it).

I went in Wild Poppies, a cute and reasonably reasonable dress shop in the Strand Arcade. Tried on several dresses, most of which flattered some parts of my body and exposed others in a tragically unsuitable way for a 40 year old “woman”. Of course, as I usually do when trying on dresses I managed to get into them no problem at all but it was an all-out, sweaty, swearing contortion act to get the frickin’ things off (it’s those “Kiwi girl” shoulders versus relatively narrow underbust ratio that gets me everytime).

Then I just happened to nip into a shop on the way back to work, fed up, frustrated and a tiny bit sweaty. It’s a shop I don’t normally go to. I browsed, I meandered, I picked dresses up and hummed and hah’d.

And there it was. Perfect. Pretty, cool, summery, flattering, feminine, wedding-y.

But most importantly? Half price on sale!

Bingo!

• walking, walking, walking in my lunch-breaks.
• but not being at all impressed with the sh**te selection I loaded onto my iPod last time I synched it.
• not drinking – alcohol that it is. Can’t afford it, it’s not good for me and I need to lose weight, seriously. Seriously!
• teaching two newbies how that Facebook thingyme works – my friend Shelley and my newest recruit, Mum!
• watching Avatar. At two hours and forty two minutes, this was a significant chunk of this week. Loved it, only wish Whangarei stretched to a 3D-capable cinema.
• spending the voucher I got for being nominated for “Employee of the Month” – point and laugh at my teacher’s petness if you must, but 50 bucks to blow at The Warehouse is not to be sniffed at in these stretched economic times.
• digging holes for the new hebes and rosemary I bought with said $50 voucher.
• moaning about the sore back and sore shoulder and sore knee that resulted from all the digging of the holes.
• realising that some people thrive on pettiness, bitchiness and just being unkind behind other people’s backs, but there ain’t a single thing you can do about it.
• enjoying the company of our neighbours at Clyde and Vanessa’s 30th birthday do last night. We are lucky to have such cool people living close by – even though some of them are slightly crazy with the cool.
• wondering if I have enough money for that gorgeous black and white halter-neck cotton dress (to wear at cousin Stu’s wedding next month) I saw in the window of Himalayan Trading Post…
• swimming in our pool, despite it being so bloody freezing (the south-west wind has been lurking all week) it numbed my outer extremeties in milliseconds
• and finally, making home-made pizza for tonight’s dinner. Mine’s cooking as I type this: salami and pepperoni on one half; smoked salmon on the other, dotted with blue cheese, sliced tomato and red onion and covered generously with mozzarella and parmasen. Oh, yeah! 

It’s been a humid, windy, sometimes wet and mostly overcast January so far, just to make up for the cracker of a December we had.
Not that we’re complaining; rainwater is so much more preferable than the alkanliny-tasting bore water, which in turn is better than having to buy a tank-load.
Me, I feel sorry for all those poor sods camping when the rain turns up. Drip, drip, drip on the roof, soggy sleeping bags, no sunshine to accompany you on the beach. Wot fun!

Ruby shows Freckles who’s da boss, not….

“Hello? What’s this? Who does this animal think it is? Doesn’t it realise how scary I am? And what’s with those funny sharp things on top of its head? My teeth are much sharper!”

“Hey you! Furry animal! Back off with those funny sharp things! I’m the top dog round here!”

“The cheek of it. Sitting there all relaxed and not bothered, like I’m not even scary.”

“I’ve got to show it who’s boss. Get right in its face, growling and barking, give it a good biting….mmmmm…”

“If I just squeeze through here, I can really give it a proper scaring with my ferocious bark and very sharp pointy teeth! Perfect!”

“Ehh…ehhh…errrhnn…ummmphh…”

“Gulp…it’s coming closer! Hey! Back off furry animal! You don’t know who you’re dealing with here!”

“Yes! One sniff of my savage breath and it will run for the hills!”

(Freckles) “What a very silly furry animal this is, very silly indeed.”

These days, I normally go to bed early during the week and read, partly due to the fact that for the life of me I can’t get stuck into any telly shows at the moment (I’m hooked on Glee and Mad Men but Friday and Sunday nights don’t count) and partly due to the fact that I’m heading in the general direction of being an old fart.

And while it’s light out at 8.30ish, I leave the curtains open to watch the sunset.

On Tuesday, I watched the sky turn speckled and purple and mauve and pink and apricot so beautifully that I decided that I really needed to get out of bed, get dressed (jandals and the OH’s dressing gown, mmmm, stylish) and go and get my camera.

I’m really pleased that I did.

var so = new SWFObject(“http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf”, “PictoBrowser”, “561″, “650″, “8″, “#EEEEEE”); so.addVariable(“source”, “sets”); so.addVariable(“names”, “The colour at the end of the driveway”); so.addVariable(“userName”, “KiwifruitFi”); so.addVariable(“userId”, “95975011@N00″); so.addVariable(“ids”, “72157623207172240″); so.addVariable(“titles”, “on”); so.addVariable(“displayNotes”, “on”); so.addVariable(“thumbAutoHide”, “off”); so.addVariable(“imageSize”, “medium”); so.addVariable(“vAlign”, “mid”); so.addVariable(“vertOffset”, “0″); so.addVariable(“colorHexVar”, “EEEEEE”); so.addVariable(“initialScale”, “off”); so.addVariable(“bgAlpha”, “90″); so.write(“PictoBrowser100114210055″);

I picked these babies after work today: the very first offerings from our new vegetable garden! They are sweet and crispy, and my in-house chef will be serving them up with a little bit of melted butter and lemon juice alongside the main course this evening. Well, that’s what I’m *hoping*, probably not what I’m actually going to get…
The whole vegetable patch has gone nutso in the past two days – we’ve had a good dumping of rain which has perked everything up, including the levels in the tanks and the pool, but it’s still pretty damn dry here in Northland.
How’s it where you are? Are you frying or freezing?