Rantings of a Basket Case

Our cat is weird. Seriously.

2012-02-15T16:55:00.000+13:00

So, we knew when we got Checkers that she had a "sensitive" personality. She was tucked away in a "no entry" room at the SPCA, where only households with no other pets and no children were allowed to even think about looking at adopting one of the kittens.

I admit, I had hoped to get a kitten with attitude - a fearless ball of fluff that would love us instantly.

Instead, we wound up with a temperamental Psycho Kitty (Qu'est-ce que cest... I know you have the rest of that humming through your head. I do, all the time, and yes, its the only line of that song I really know!), who has bouts of random racing through the house and tries to climb the walls before whacking her head on the underside of the bed or the arms of the sofa.

A while back, she decided she liked the shower / bath. Only when we weren't in it, mind. And if we caught her in it, she would look all guilty at us, before rushing out of the bath and stopping as if to say "Well, you cant prove you saw anything".

More recently she has started (we assume) trying to drink from the toilet bowl. Which is not a big problem - we flush every time - apart from the fact that something about the way she does it always ends up leaving water on the seat, and we haven't yet managed to catch her at it, which is intensely frustrating.

Thankfully she has only been caught on the dining table or kitchen bench a couple of times, and we haven't caught her making many attempts on it. Even better is that she seems to have stopped trying to remove the wallpaper in the bedroom, and she hasn't been seen climbing the curtains in a while. Every now and then, we do still come home and find a photo frame knocked over on the high bookshelf though - which does mean she is still climbing the lounge curtains at least.

Sigh. At least I can always blame Mark - since he is the one she attached herself to at the SPCA!

20 Questions: January

2012-02-08T09:50:00.001+13:00

So, since I decided the weekly wrap-up just wasnt cutting it anymore (I was getting really bored in other words), I figured a monthly one might be a better option for the year...

So. 20 questions about January.

1.The next thing I want to achieve on my life list is: I already have scheduled 2 current items (A womens triathlon and running Round the Bays), but I want to add in Hosting a cocktail party.

2.What did I achieve from my life list this month? At the start of January, I ticked off Completing a 365 challenge. Nothing else since then though.

3.Congratulations to: My old Outward Bound friend Rebecca, who got married this month

4.This month I am thankful for: The fact that Mark has a good job, and for Mark in general, especially his reminder that until a couple of generations ago, a woman in our level of society would have left work when she was married (if she had ever worked) - it has given me motivation to at least be house-proud while I am job hunting.

5.The big countdown is for: Europe! 3 and a half months to go! Also, Mark turns 30 soon :)

6.In the news drama of the month: The Occupy Wellington and Auckland protestors were finally evicted recently. In Wellington this was an especially good thing because the camp had been taken over by squatters who werent really protesting anything, but were looking for a free place to sleep.

7.Something I will remember from this month is: Getting the new Facebook timeline, and watching everyone else hate it - I love it, the layout is awesome, and I love the extra emphasis put on photos.

8.Biggest challenge in the quarterly goals: Definitely the increased exercise ones. I have not done nearly enough swimming or running this month!

9.Biggest challenge in the annual goals: Finding a job. The market is really tough, and even though I am getting interest, its not turning into many interviews. There doesnt even seem to be much temping going at the moment, which is frustrating!

10.What have I read this month? The Scottish Prisoner by Diana Gabaldon, The Captive Queen by Alison Weir, Eleanor, Queen of England by Alison Weir, The Devils Queen by Jeanne Kalogridis and some of Dracula by Bram Stoker. I'm also currently re-reading The Lost Letters of Aquitaine by Judith Koll Healey.

11.Something I have learnt this month? That patience is not my strong suit, and that if I dont plan to do things, I dont achieve anything. That I start going crazy when I dont have any adult interaction over the course of a work day, and the longer I spend at home at a time, the more almost agorophobic I get.

12.What has been the biggest challenge? Motivating myself to achieve anything. Including some days, simply motivating myself to get out of bed. The 2 days Mark was away for work were exceedingly hard.

13.Something I have bookmarked / shared on facebook This article on stuff highlighted something hilarious, and some friends and I had a good play with it for some NZ roads as well... Christchurch to Kaikoura apparently went via Lewis Pass and Nelson, making a trip that should take about 2 hours last all day. They have fixed this error now, but it certainly was fun to play with while it lasted!

14.If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice for the month, it would be: Plan social events, rather than putting things off in case you get interviews.

15.What exciting thing is coming up next month? I get to do my Triathlon!

16.What do I really want to buy? I have my eye on a lensbaby fisheye lens that I want to get before we go to Europe. As Mark said - shame I dont have a birthday or anniversary before then!

17.What have been the big social events of the month? Nothing, really. We've had dinner at Sam & Michelles and I had morning tea with Marion. But thats it.

18.What events are coming up next month? Our neighbours are getting married, we have invites to a function at Government House, the Chinese New Year festival is on...

19.What is new on my Kindle Wish List? Death Comes to Pemberley, Murder at Mansfield Park, The Book Thief and a Russian culture guide.

20.Favourite photo of the month This was quite hard to choose, as I have taken several quite good photos this month. But my selection is from our trip to the zoo.

Five Years On

2012-02-07T10:51:00.000+13:00

Wow. How has it been 5 years?

5 years ago last week, myself and 13 other people (along with another 50 or so) were arriving on the wharf at Anakiwa, about to be thrown together as a watch and forced to spend close to every second of the next three weeks in each others company.

Talk about a recipe for a tough time.

Add in panic attacks, stressfully hard activities, emotional discussions and having to help each other through, and it becomes epic.

This summer, Mark and I did a road trip around the top half of the South Island, staying at the YHA in Anakiwa for three nights over New Years. Mark hadn't been there before, but I felt a need to do a pilgrimage of sorts - take time to sit quietly again, and walk through the school to reinvoke some memories, to try and re-learn what I had taken away from Outward Bound, in an attempt to shake myself out of the depression that was again knocking on my door.

Visiting Anakiwa at a time when there were no courses operating was a little... odd. It seemed too quiet, the seething life I remember was missing. But it also afforded us the opportunity to wander through the school unhindered, looking in windows, pointing things out to Mark that were relevant. It was amazing how familiar it still was. Almost as if nothing had changed.

What I found most astonishing though was the sense of peace that I felt - the whole area is so quiet and out of the way, and with no cellphone signal and really useless internet, we were locked into our own little world, and that was quite nice thank-you-very-much.

When I got home (since I was unemployed and had the time), I sat down to re-read my journals from OB, expecting to continue re-finding revelations, and to be able to see my thought process change through the course.

Turns out, my journals really just read like I was struggling with challenges that were too hard both mentally and physcially and I was exhausted. There are no grand revelations, no "aha" moments. Well, there is one - the moment I decided not to give up the course, because really, things werent all that bad.

Looking back, I am so intensely glad that I didnt give up. I use that fact as motivation for a lot now - just the other weekend I went tramping and was finding it miserable. I simply couldnt manage the whole tramp, but I made it up a 800m climb simply by reminding myself that "I made it through frickin Outward Bound, I can do this"

And suddenly I understood what was said to me when I interviewed for an office role with OB about 12 months after I came back from the school - that for people who have recently completed a course, the school tends to become the makings of a myth. Some place where you are immesurably changed. And it explained why I felt even worse for a while after I came home from OB, when my watchmates lives went ahead full throttle and were full of achievements while I was still going nowhere.

Because OB doesnt fix everything. It helps you realise who you are and really highlights your weaknesses for you to work on. But you have to be prepared to come home and do that work yourself, otherwise the whole point of the course was lost. I mean, its rediculous to even think that by giving them three weeks of your life, they will fix everything.

And I really dont know why I thought it had, when I was still living with my parents, working in a part time retail job I hated (because I thought it was below me. I obviously did not learn humility at OB - a fault I still have). Yes, I had cleared myself of the depression I had been fighting for 18 months, and I did feel like my life had a purpose again. But I certainly didnt know what it was, or how to go about looking for it!

All that said though, looking back I still think that OB was the single most important thing I did for myself. It got me out of my shell, pushed me beyond myself and showed me how much I can achieve if I just give things a go.

I do know I still have things to work on, and that I am constantly trying to work on. Things like the fact that sometimes things I say come across as complaining of the difficulties. Given there is someone near to me that does this constantly, and I know it bugs me, I am trying to be ever more vigilant to not be overdramatic and negative. I dont know that I will ever manage to stop being cynical entirely though - at least partly because I know that my inner cynic has on several occassions ensured I have not been duped!

Overall, of course, I am still immensely glad that I did the course. Yes, I could have taken that money and gone overseas for an OE, but I wouldnt have survived going on my own, I know that now. After doing OB, yes, I probably could have done a solo OE without too many concerns, but I didnt have the money!

I think the main lessons I took away from it, and still need to remind myself sometimes are that 1. life is hard sometimes, and you just have to suck up and deal with it and 2. having a good support network is essential to leading a full, active life.

Would I do Outward Bound again? You bet, if I had the opportunity. I would love to get fitter again, and go back and really feel like I was achieving things this time, rather than feeling like the person holding the team back. There are things I thought I did ok in at the time, that looking back I want to do better. Apart from the depression being back (which is nowhere near as severe as it was in 2006), I feel that I am in a much better place mentally, so would actually be able to both give more and get more out of the course than I did last time.

And I want to be one of the strong ones in the watch, as a form of penance for all the stress I feel I put my watchmates through. Because you guys were truly awesome.

Q1 2011 Goals Update - January

2012-01-30T17:06:00.000+13:00

So, at the start of the month(ish), I set some new goals, and here is how things are going with all that:

Goal One: Complete a triathlon
ok. So I havent completed this. But I have signed up for the Kapiti Womens Triathlon, doing the half-length course (200m / 6k / 2k) in February. I cant wait!

Goal Two: Make use of the free Couch-to-5km podcast on itunes, and get to the end of it
I made a start! I did the first podcast and actually really quite enjoyed it. Then I had a week off and started again... But I am managing over 3km already, just on week one. I suspect I wont need to do the full "course" to get to 5km in under 30 minutes....

Goal Three: Swim twice a week, every week.
Another goal where I have made a start!
Swimming completed on 16/01

Goal Four: Get my body-fat percentage below 30, and keep it that way for at least a month.
Starting the year at 29.5% was fantastic, so if I can keep this up until mid-February, then I have achieved this goal! (Must drink more water to ensure this stays low)

Goal Five: Apply for at least one job a week until I get one
Work in progress. Applications are going out at the very least every couple of days now, and I have had an interview with an agency and directly with an employer. Its still very much a case of wait and see though.

Goal Six: Sew those blasted cushion covers!
Finally done! Woohoo! Although I admit I made the covers more like pillowcases because I just could not be bothered putting the zips on. Perhaps I should get on to that later sometime.

Goal Seven: Cook one new recipe a week, all quarter.
Not quite perfect, but I am making an effort, at least somewhat!
15/01: Hoisin Chicken Sushi. Interesting... I think we made the rolls a bit large, and the seaweed was very dry, but I have found a solution to that - which is that we should have left the rolls made and uncut in the fridge for a while before we cut them.
25/01: Chicken mince rissoles. Cooked on the BBQ with homemade chips and salad, these were divine.

Goal Eight: Move from the black bars to the silver ones at the gym
17/01 I did an express class with the silver bars. Boy was that hard work. I definitely was not managing the same range of motion as with the black bars. I was also exceedingly glad to be hidden in the back corner of the class when we did the chest track and I had NO weights on my bars!

The 365 Challenge

2012-01-27T14:51:00.003+13:00

In 2011, I started on an adventure - completing a 365 challenge. This means I was aiming to take a photo every single day for an entire year.
It was hard, I certailnly dont deny that, but it was also fantastic, and has become a habit - I have started a 366 in 2012!

So, here is a link to the slideshow of the whole year, and below are some of the highlights:

The year started well, with some good weather on New Years Day, and a lot of excitement, lucky locations and good editing during January.

Febuary came around, and things started to get a bit harder, plus there was the day I cheated and used old photos - when 180 people had died at lunchtime in an earthquake in Christchurch, I just didnt want to take a photo.

By March, I was getting on a roll. This daily photo thing was started to become a habit. Mark and I had a wedding to attend, and a weekend at the beach to enjoy.

A quarter of the way there, and April heralded the Easter break, with an epic tramping trip that nearly broke me, and a lot of life in general that just wasnt very interesting - In fact, the only other interesting thing to happen was my camera upgrade!

May was another nothing month - a couple of weekends at the tramping club ski lodge to prepare it for winter, and a couple of social events filled it out just nicely. I was also doing a photography course, so my weekly homework filled in ideas of things to shoot each day.

In June, I made two trips in to the WW2 tunnels on Wrights Hill, finished up my photography course, got up early to watch the sunrise that heralded the end of the longest night and rounded out the month by going to the Gold Coast with Mark.

Mark and I started July with tickets to the show "Walking with Dinosaurs" in Auckland, which was epic, before spending a weekend in Taupo for my Nans 70th and then adopting our kitten Checkers.

Come August, I was really struggling with motivation for the 365 on a regular basis, and had adamantly decided I was never doing another. The only highlights this month were having snow at home (a very rare occurance) and a weekend at the skifield, where I finally had a ski lesson.

Comparatively, September was busy. It was my birthday, the country was seriously gearing up for the Rugby World Cup, we had an epic hailstorm, the entire RNZN fleet came to visit for a weekend and I had a couple of meetups to go to. But when it came to days when there was nothing on? I was so totally out of ideas...

October saw the arrival (finally, we had only been hearing about it for the last 4 years or so) of the Rugby World Cup. I ignored it as much as I could, but it certainly helped me get some photos!

After what had seemed to be both a really long, and really short year, we hit November, which started with the Melbourne Cup (I didnt win the office sweepstake), which also included a couple of big wind storms and the national elections. I really hit the wall with ideas for photos, which made life hard - but I was also suffering (undiagnosed at the time) from a depression for the first time in 5 years.

Finally, we got to December, and my 365 challenge was nearly over. Mark was thrilled. We started the month with another trip up to Ruapehu and ended it with a holiday in the South Island for Christmas.

So, there you have it - some of my favourite images from my 365 :) Hope you liked it!

About that Life List

2012-01-27T13:47:00.000+13:00

So, as you can see across the top, I have a page that covers my “Life List”. When I wrote it, I had struggled to get to 100 items to list on it. Since I wrote it though, I have regularly thought up new things to add to the list, and the extended list (the rest is on a hidden page so when I look I don’t feel overwhelmed and decide to start none of it!) is now over 200 items long.

Yikes.

That said, I think some of the items will need to be re-worded, as there is no way to check them off the list otherwise… Things like “Fortnightly Date Nights”. I admit, I’m fairly sure I copied that off Patricia’s list of things she wants to achieve in the next 5 years. At the moment though, I am a bit lost for how I would want to re-word this. How long would we have to do it for before I could consider it a habit and cross it off? Would it then need to be added to the list again if we stop doing it? Does this mean it should stay on the list in perpetuity?

The same thing goes for my challenge of “using a new recipe once a week for as long as possible”, although this one I would be more comfortable with making a 6 month or one year challenge, crossing it off and then adding it again later if needed, as I suspect this would be an easier habit to keep up – even if it moved to one new recipe a month in the long term.

“Try a new author a year” I might have to remove entirely and instead create a list of new authors I want to try. I already have (somewhere on the mega list) a specification that I want to read a book by Germaine Greer at some stage. That said of course, there aren’t many authors I currently WANT to start reading, and some of the best books I have read by previously unknown-to-me authors are ones I just randomly picked up at a book store or sale.

On the plus side, about 20 of the 200-something items on the extended list are currently scheduled for completion by the end of 2012. This includes 10 from the international travel section (wicked!), and because we’ll be poor come Christmas, Mark and I have decided we’ll do a camping holiday next summer – pack up the tent, pick a campsite (probably a Top10, we like some luxuries like hot showers and kitchens) and spend 8-10 days in one place. I cant wait. (Related to this, are two in the second 100: Stay in every Top10 in NZ, and stay in 50 DoC campgrounds. I expect these challenges to take most of the rest of my life! So far I am confident of having managed 5 of the 50 Top 10s)

Of course, a big one that I recently finished is my 365 challenge that I started in 2011. It made it on to the Life List because when I wrote it I wasn’t entirely sure I would make it to the end, and I also figured it was worth celebrating once I did.

Comparatively, some challenges are very simple one-offs, like making sushi, doing a cake decorating course and attend a ladies DIY night. I decided to list these sorts of things so that if I am ever bored, I can look at the list and always see something that it should be possible for me to do fairly soon.

At the moment, the only issue I have with my list is that its MY list. Mark has had no interest in having input into it. We have planned to sit down and start writing another list of things WE want to do, as well as things he specifically wants to do that may not involve me.s.

It will be really interesting to see what Mark sees as needing to go on his list and our list, what things I can persuade him to add to his that he hadn’t thought of, and what challenges we decide to work on immediately, or leave for later.

I’m excited by my life list. I am also mildly petrified by it. Meg was talking on apracticalwedding a few weeks ago about her life list, and how it includes big challenges, like where she sees herself working. Mine doesn’t. I have a life list that does not currently include a single career goal or aim. The closest it comes is to photograph someones wedding. Perhaps that’s part of the career problem: I have absolutely no idea what it is I want to do long term, so am unable to plan how I would get there!

But I guess at least I have lots to keep me occupied in the interim, while I decide what work-related challenges to put on my life list!

Unkowingly saying the wrong thing

2012-01-25T17:23:00.000+13:00

This post is one I have had written for several months now, but havent been brave enough to post, until A Practical Wedding had a post recently about the topic...

Sometimes, people just say the completely wrong thing and they don’t even realise the damage they have done.

Because some people, like me, can at times take things deeply on board that end up causing years of hurt and frustration down the line. I don’t do it nearly as often as I used to when I was younger, but certain topics still get me every time.

I have many personal examples of things that may have been said flippantly, but have deeply impacted me in an ongoing way. A lot of the time, the person who made the original statement cant remember doing it and is shocked to understand what I took from a conversation.

For example, Mum couldn’t remember that she had once laughed and told me I didn’t have the patience to be a teacher. This came up in conversation a couple of years ago when I was looking at career options and trying to decide what I wanted to do and whether I should retrain. Mum suggested teaching, and I had to remind her that it was her that had told me as a teenager that teaching was something I shouldn’t consider because I didn’t have the temperament.

The most dramatic example of this from when I was younger that still impacts me now is that I was always told I was smart enough to “just get it”. I definitely agree with more recent studies that have shown that kids who are told they are smart often have issues later on in life with giving up on things they deem too hard, and feeling stupid when they don’t “just get it”. I remember going through several phases where I wondered whether perhaps everyone was undertaking an elaborate hoax to hide from me that actually I was as thick as two planks! I never quite believed this to be the case, but I certainly pondered it on occasion.

More recently and dramatically, the issue has been around having children.
On an extended family holiday when I was in my first year of uni, I remember having a discussion with my Aunt about my “generation” and having kids, and how many of my friends were talking about never having any because we couldn’t afford them. I think she assumed I was putting material wants ahead of having kids and so accused me of being “too selfish” to be a parent, and she didn’t think I should ever have children. She wouldn’t let me explain, but I was being rational! We had all done the maths, and by the time we dealt with student loans, got a mortgage and a car and a reasonable job on the wages that were average for graduates at the time, we were barely going to be living, let alone having enough money spare to pay for a child. There was also political talk at the time of removing the student loan option - meaning we would have to pay off our own education, save for our retirement and pay for any education our kids wanted beyond high school!

Even though I knew my reasoning for that was completely rational, what stayed with me was this idea that I was too selfish to have children. And boy did it stick. Apart from a brief phase where I was deeply involved in a church and had decided that I wanted to be a wife and mother and that would be enough, I became very accustomed to the idea that I was too selfish to have children, so I wouldn’t have any and didn’t want any. This became a completely ingrained part of my thinking.

Then I met Mark and we started talking about our future. He wasn’t pushy, but he HAD always assumed that one day he would have children. So I had to start thinking about it, and we had to start talking about it. Eventually we came to an agreement that perhaps in a couple of years, we would stop trying not to have kids, and if we had them that would be ok, but if we didn’t, that would be fine as well.

And I was getting used to the idea that I might have kids one day, even starting to view the idea in a favourable light.

Then came the fortnight before our wedding.

First there was a debacle with trying to ensure a close family member with a young child could be at our reception. We were accused of being “completely ignorant” of the needs of children and spent the better part of a week trying to placate things while ending up just getting more angry emails in return. I spent a lot of time in tears over the fact that we had tried so hard to make their life easy and ensure they would be there to celebrate, and all we got in return was abuse and accusations of not caring. It was hard. Thankfully others who had similar issues were simpler to deal with.

Compounding this was that same Aunt as 10 years earlier again having another go at me. This time it was after a joking comment I made about how I sort of wished that I had started having kids the same age as my parents did, as I would be half way to being clear of the brats by now rather than looking down the barrel of 20 years more work before getting my life back to any degree. Apparently, if I’m “going to talk about them like that”, then I’m not ready and don’t deserve to have any.

I know now that my Aunt was under a lot of stress at the time (she had generally made life a little unhappy for everyone the week she was down before the wedding, and later apologised for it), but regardless of that, 2 or 3 days before their wedding is not the time to tell someone you don’t think they should have kids. Especially when you are someone that that person respects deeply!

All of this culminated in some serious ruminations for me, and I wound up telling Mark three days into our marriage that I had changed my mind entirely and we were never going to try and have kids. Because, obviously, I would be a bad mother and should never be trusted to have kids. And if I was this age already and not ready to have kids / not a suitable woman to have kids, then it was too late to change and we should give up now.

And you know what? All this actually made me quite depressed. These judgements on my character were also judgements on my ability to have children, and if I wouldn’t have children because I wasn’t suited to it, would that make me a failure as a woman?? For a while, I thought it did. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t really a woman because I didn’t want to have children because I didn’t think I should after people had seemed to tell me that I wasn’t cut out for it.

The numbers of friends getting pregnant, or trying to get pregnant didn’t help. Nor did the “You’ll seeeeeee” type comments when I told people we were thinking about not having kids – “You’ll change your mind” or “You better change your mind soon or it will be too late and you’ll regret it”. The regular comments of “It is the single most fulfilling thing a woman can do with her life” reduced me nearly to tears. To those of us thinking about not having children, that single statement really does say (as much as the people who say it might claim it doesn’t) that any woman who doesn’t have children is not capable of leading a fulfilling life, that a woman without a child is a failure.

In the last two years I have spent time both desperately wishing we were already pregnant and praying that that slipup didn’t mean we were. I have told some friends we are looking at trying next year, and others that we aren’t trying at all. I still don’t know which is fact. Some days I feel almost unbearably clucky, others I feel so glad that I don’t have kids and have flexibility.

And you know what? Its still hard. I still feel depressed about it sometimes. I would love nothing more than to fervently desire procreating with my husband, seeing him be a Dad. He would be a great Dad. But I still don’t trust myself to be a good mother. Friends who have kids tell me that often even they don’t think they are good mothers. I guess there is some hope in that. Mainly though, it seems like I want the moments, rather than needing the child that goes with it - the first ultrasound, seeing Mark cry when he holds his first child (the man who has no emotions, I have to find something that will actually make him cry) - but its not right to have a child just because I worry that I will miss these couple of dozen moments!

Sometimes recently I have even found myself hoping that when I go in to have my endometriosis surgically removed, they tell me after that I have a very low chance of conceiving - so that I can just say it was never meant to happen and start moving on, rather than continually second guessing myself over this. Because this is not an easy decision to make when you are a fairly rational person - I can find no good, rational reason to give up the next 20 years of my life. The "benefits" people speak of are all intangible - the love, the joy. Some people obviously DONT find such things in their children if the shocking rate of child murder in this country is anything to go by!

And you know, I dont know if I would have had all this doubt if not for being told I was too selfish to be a Mother. Perhaps I would have just assumed that that was something I would do - like Mark has always just assumed it was something he would do in his future. Mainly I just wish we knew whether we did want kids or not - because this limbo-like state is the hardest part of all this!

Mixed Spice & Dried Apricot Cookies

2012-01-16T13:50:00.001+13:00

One of Marks favourite cookies...

Ingredients

125g softened (or melted) butter
3/4C white sugar
1t vanilla essence
1 egg
2C standard flour
1t baking powder
2t mixed spice
1/2C chopped dried apricots

Method

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla together until light and fluffy
Add egg, and beat in well
Sift flour, baking powder and mixed spice together and mix in well (this might seem like its not going to work, and will look like there isnt enough wet mixture for quite a while)
Stir in apricots
Form into balls (I use a dessert spoon to size mine) and place on an oven tray. Flatten slightly.
Bake at 190C for about 12 minutes.

Q1 Goals 2012

2012-01-12T08:28:00.000+13:00

Because it was good fun to have some small / short-term goals set for Q4 2011, I have decided to keep this up for a while. And yes, I do still also have the big, year-long goals to cross off!

Again, a good number of these are going to be health and fitness related, and several of them relate back to goal one…

Goal One: Complete a triathlon
I have already earmarked two possible triathlons in the first quarter of the year, the Contact Triwoman (300m / 10km / 3km) on 17 March and the Kapiti Womens Triathlon (400m / 12km / 4km or 200m / 6km / 2km half course) on 19 Feb. This is a goal I have had for several years, and I have decided I need to stop putting it off and just do it. Even if my fitness isn’t as good as I want it to be, at least that would then set me a benchmark to work onwards from if I decide I enjoy it! At the moment, the plan is to do the half length of the Kapiti one rather than kill myself trying to do a full-length one, especially since it’s a sea-swim.

Goal Two: Make use of the free Couch-to-5km podcast on itunes, and get to the end of it
A nine-week challenge to be able to run 5km? Should have started a good while ago to get the best out of it before Februarys triathlon, that’s for sure! In any case, I only have to run 3km in March (even if that is at the end of a swim and cycle).

Goal Three: Swim twice a week, every week.
I cant keep putting this off. Starting the year with no job should make this easier, as I can head in to Thorndon Summer pool during the day, but away from lunchtimes. I know I can easily do 300m already, but the triathlon swim will be a sea swim, which is quite different. At the moment, this goal is only for definite keeping-up until I have done the triathlon, as there is a serious lack of pool lane space in Wellington if you have to fit it around working hours.

Goal Four: Get my body-fat percentage below 30, and keep it that way for at least a month.
At my last weigh in for 2011, I was just over this – but for health reasons I want to get this down a bit more and hold it there. Ideally, I would also like to get down to 80kg before we go to Europe, but if I can only achieve this goal, then I will still be happy.

Goal Five: Apply for at least one job a week until I get one
Speaks for itself really. Ideally, we would both like me to get a permanent job of some description. The closer we get to going to Europe, the more unlikely this is, but I still have to try!

Goal Six: Sew those blasted cushion covers!
Yes, I know I have now had the inners and cushions hanging around the house for about 4 months. And yes, I know that it only takes about 20 minutes a cushion to throw them together. I just need to get motivated and actually do it!

Goal Seven: Cook one new recipe a week, all quarter.
I have dozens and dozens of recipes all over the place at home. Most of them I have never cooked. I need to start stepping out of my comfort zone with cooking and start trying something new on a regular basis. We did a week in November where we ate 5 different new meals, and it was wonderful.

Goal Eight: Move from the black bars to the silver ones at the gym
In Pump class, I have always used the lighter (about 2kg) black bars during class. There are a very limited number of these, and I really want to move off them and on to the heavier (about 6kg) silver bars, especially since I have been doing pump for over 2 years now! (even if I did have about 6 months off last year with injuries)

So, there you go. My short-term goals for the first quarter! Look out for my update posts at the end of each month to see how I am going with them.

The Big European Adventure

2012-01-10T14:31:00.002+13:00

Mark and I have been talking for ages about going to Europe together – since not long after Mark last came home from Europe when we had been together just a few months.

Then came the release of the 2012 tour brochures and early bird deals – including Flight Centre hosting their travel expo the weekend of our wedding anniversary, with awesome deals on flights and discounts on tours. Thankfully we had a rough itinerary in mind before we went to the expo, as we came out having paid deposits on flights and a single tour!

Now things are getting exciting, as we have booked a second tour (since it fitted and took in lots of places we wanted to go with plenty of two night stops), paid for flights and started looking at attractions.

So our current plan is to leave in mid-May and return at the very end of June. Its 42 days away and we will get to visit LOTS of places: Zurich, Edinburgh, London, Bath, Paris, Swiss Alps, Avignon, Barcelona, Nice, Florence, Venice, Pisa, Rome, Berlin, St Petersburg, Novgorod, Moscow, Amsterdam and Hong Kong (on the way home). The only places we are spending less than two nights in are Zurich, Bath and Pisa (a day visit each) and Avignon and Novgorod (one night each).

So far we have booked:

*Almost all our flights. We are flying Swiss mainly, outbound Wellington-Auckland-Bangkok-Zurich-Edinburgh, return Amsterdam-Zurich-Hong Kong (2 night stopover)-Auckland-Wellington. We have also booked flights out of Moscow at the end of our tour and just have to sort getting from Rome to St Petersburg, probably via Berlin.

*TopDeck Vodka and Caviar tour. 8 days / 7 nights in Russia! This was actually the first thing we decided we were definitely doing, and we planned the entirety of the rest of our travel around it. Mainly this is because its somewhere Mark hasn’t been before, so its what got him interested in going back to Europe because he was being very blasé about going at all and was keen to cancel our plans. We have also booked our flight out of Russia, but are still sorting getting IN to Russia, as we have to determine where we are going after Rome so we know where we are travelling from.

*TopDeck Classic Europe tour. 15 days / 14 nights from Paris to Rome. Well, the tour officially starts in London, but we are meeting it in Paris so we can have three nights there and a day and a half before the tour arrives. We are also planning to stay on in Rome, as the tour only includes one night in Rome. We were originally planning to do Paris to Rome on our own, but figured we would do this as a way to meet new people and to fill in the holiday space nicely.

A couple of weekends ago we went shopping and bought our first travel-specific items – some microfiber towels and a pair of quick-dry shorts for Mark. (We also bought new boardshorts for both of us, and Mark bought the new sandals he has been talking about for two years) Our next step is to start sorting out getting Mark his new passport, and arranging visas! Its all very exciting.

Q4 2011 Goals Update 3

2012-01-09T16:35:00.000+13:00

A tiny bit late, I know, but here is how my Q4 goals went:

At the start of October I set some new goals, and having completed two check-ins, I thought it was time for a final wrap up.

Goal One: Run regularly enough that 5km is an achievable distance 3 or more times a week.
This never went anywhere. At all. On the plus side, I have at least gotten back into the gym, and a tramping trip late in December proved that my fitness is not all that bad. Fighting off a depression hasn’t helped, as getting up in the morning has become a tougher and tougher fight as the last 2 months have progressed. I intend to add this to next years Q1 goals though, and intend to start on New Years day with a run at Anakiwa, in memory of my time at Outward Bound.

Goal Two: This year, I would love to get down to 83kg in time for Christmas again.
Close, very close, then not quite as close… I finished the year on 83.3kg, which is respectable I think.

Goal Three: Start swimming at least once a week, by New Years be able to swim 1km without stopping.
um. Yeah, I don’t have anything to say except oops. The weather just has not been nice enough to take advantage of Thorndon Outdoor Pool, and we are too far from Johnsonville or Karori to make it an easy, quick trip for a swim. (Plus Khandallah pool is too cold!). If I am going to have any chance in completing the triathlon I am aiming for in March, I NEED to swim more often. No more excuses!

Goal Four: Ride my bike once every other week at a bare minimum. Start using it more often.
This is another one to add to the list for Q1 2012. Perhaps while I am unemployed, I can use it to take me to the train when I need to go in to town during the day, because the bus doesn’t run as often. But Mark and I really need to sit down and write a list of short day rides we want to do, and then start putting in some effort to crossing them off. The problem we are finding at the moment is that there are always many other things we could be doing instead.

Goal Five: Eat two serves of fruit a day habitually (including on weekends)
This has fallen off a bit in the last few weeks, because I am simply not eating as much in general. However, I am more often picking fruit over junkfood, and actually enjoying eating fruit – I’ve stopped having to persuade myself that I like fruit, I now look at it and go YUM straight off!

Goal Six(b): Apply for one job a week until I have something.
I’ve had two interviews recently, but then stopped applying in the week before Christmas because there wasn’t a lot going. I’ll start up again in the New Year.

Goal Seven: Get a better understanding of where our money is going, and try to reduce it
We are doing quite well on this, reducing costs everywhere except travel! There are still areas where we could reduce our costs further, and in the New Year we are looking forward to starting to eat some of our own produce, which will further cut costs. We are also planning to return to cooking to a menu – we did this for the week before Christmas, and if we hadn’t needed worm and flea treatments for Checkers, would have had a grocery bill of about $50 for the week.

Goal Eight: Sew the cushion covers for the new cushions
Meh. Yes, we really need these on the sofa, but they can wait until we get back from holiday and I’ll do them while Mark is at work.

Goal Nine: weed the vegetable patch again, and get things planted in it!
The vege patch is looking awesome. Our peas are growing by leaps and bounds, the beetroot have flourished after being transplanted and are growing well, we thinned the carrots before Christmas, and also ate our first strawberry (while discovering heaps of others that had rotted rather than ripening). Our tomato plants are huge and we have to constantly cut them back. Its all actually getting very exciting!

So there you have it. Some success, some still needing to be worked on... Onwards to 2012 main and short-term goals!

2011 in Review

2012-01-05T10:56:00.000+13:00

As per every year, here is 2011 in 38 questions:

1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?
Hmmm… Its been an interesting year in that regard. I tore a hamstring, I got acupuncture. Our Christmas Holiday will involve staying in 2 places I’ve only ever passed through, and one I have never been before, as well as visiting Farewell Spit.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Some of them at least! I managed to get back down to my wedding weight (but no lower) and complete a 365 photo challenge. However I got nowhere near giving up fizz. I have signed up for two triathlons in February and March, have to get a new job in the new year, and would have exercised more if I hadn’t had so many major injuries!

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Again, like last year, I had a good number of friends have babies or get pregnant. Nicola had her second in October.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Not close, but an old friend from my Christchurch days finally gave up his fight in late November.

5. What countries did you visit?
Australia again – this time we went to the Gold Coast in June. Was a great time, even with some average weather on occasion. Unfortunately we wound up being there during their school holidays. Oops.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
A permanent job that I enjoy would be great. A year free of major injuries would be fantastic too

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Not really any big dates this year. Although, my whole year was sort of defined by the hamstring injury I sustained in late April and the shoulder injury from the snow in August.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Persuading Mark that paying for flights to Europe was indeed a good idea. He had been trying to persuade me that we should focus on the mortgage, so when I found something that got him excited about travel again, I was stoked.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Well, I only actually achieved one of my 6 goals for the year. I think my failure to curb my junkfood habit was also a biggie.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Last year I was sick. This year I was injured. I put a grade two tear in my hamstring in April and then gave myself a bursitis in my shoulder in August.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Tickets to Europe!! And two tours with Top Deck to go with it. OMG I cant wait!

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
All those people who risked their lives trying to save others in Februarys quake in Christchurch. Talk about epic.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
My boss at work was a bit of a bully. Frustratingly, its not something I realised until I was literally just about to leave, and she got to me – I was struggling with the worst depression I have had since 2006 just before Christmas. Talk about bah humbug!

14. Where did most of your money go?
On the house. Lately, a lot has also gone on travel.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Some of these do seem a little repetitive – travel, being home owners, having Jared come to visit. All ranked pretty high.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
“Don’t Stop me now” by Queen. I came across it on my ipod mid-year and fell back in love with it. This was helped by discovering an “interperative dance” from a UK TV show.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) Happier or sadder?
Given that at the end of last year I was ecstatic, and at the end of this year I’ve spent some time fighting off a depression – sadder.
b) Thinner or fatter?
About the same. Any year not gaining weight is a good year!
c) Richer or poorer?
Both – we still have a sizeable mortgage, and an expensive trip to Europe planned, but I had fulltime work for the entire year, so that’s made things a little easier.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Household chores during the week – so that we could have had more weekends where we had nothing that “needed” to be done, and so could have relaxed / gone bike riding etc more often.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Hurting myself! I could seriously have done with a LOT more prep for this Triathlon I am doing in March.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
We are off south this year to visit Marks family, and then heading off for 8 nights around the upper south island.

21. Did you fall in love in 2010?
Checkers stole my heart. Sometimes. When she wasn’t being a total Daddys girl and running scared of me!

22. What was your favourite TV programme?
Downton Abbey, The Borgias, Embarrassing Bodies, 24 Hours in A&E.

23. Do you dislike anyone now that you didn't dislike this time last year?
I’ve unfriended a few people. But I wouldn’t say I’ve started disliking anyone. I haven’t even fallen out of like with any celebrities!

24. What was the best book you read?
‘How to be a Woman’ by Caitlin Moran. Was a bookclub read with APW, and it was awesome. Well worth forking out on the kindle.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Very late in the year discovery, but the British TV comedy series "Fast & Loose" interperative dance section

26. What did you want and get?
A trip to the Gold Coast, tickets to Europe

27. What did you want and not get?
A payrise. A permanent job.

28. What was your favourite film of this year?
I loved the Kings Speech. Gorgeous, simple, epic. And of course, there was the final in the Harry Potter series.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 29. Mark took me to Cobar in Eastbourne for dinner because it was the weekend of a major rugby world cup match in Wellington. On the Sunday we went to my parents place for dinner.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Not having a depression at the end of it!

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
Buy cheap at the end of the season, classics that fit well, and slightly unusual pieces where it doesn’t matter if they aren’t “in season” anymore.

32. What kept you sane?
Exercise, when I was allowed it.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Kate Middleton. God I loved her dress.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Well, it was election year this year. I got exceedingly frustrated at the nastiness I saw from and among my friends on Facebook in relation to this.

35. Who did you miss?
Jared and Alexis. I never see them anywhere near often enough.

36. Who was the best new person you met?
I’ve really only met new people through tramping club this year, and haven’t actually added any of them to my Facebook friends list… lol. It was awesome working with Murieann and Toni at work. Will miss them in 2012.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
Feminism does NOT equal man hater. We all need to reclaim its meaning:
“I understand why women… reject the word ‘feminism’. It ended up being invoked in so many bafflingly inappropriate contexts that… you’d presume it was some spectacularly unappealing combination of misandry, misery and hypocrisy, which stood for ugly clothes, constant anger, and… no fucking”
“The purpose of feminism isn’t to make a particular type of woman. The idea that there are inherently wrong and inherently right ‘types’ of women is what has screwed feminism for so long”
“What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be”

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
Come on
And lay it down
I've always been with you
Here and now
Give all that's within you
Be my savior
And I'll be your downfall
- Downfall, Matchbox 20.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday December 18, 2011

2011-12-20T20:24:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Congratulations to Belinda on her graduation! It feels like I’ve been waiting forever to say that.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Mark and I joined 5 others from Tramping Club on a very last-minute attempt to get to Paua Hut for the weekend. We got to the river just after lunchtime on Saturday to discover it was dark brown and very fast moving, even if it wasn’t up very high. So instead we wandered up to the new Turere Hut, which was exceedingly fancy. Its also kinda rude that its only $10 a bunk (although you have to book in batches of 8), for a hut with gas, pots pans and plates provided, when you would pay $15 to stay at a hut with running water normally. In any case, Mark and I are definitely planning to go back there sometime next year for a weekend.

3. Social: Other than the tramping trip, Mark had his work do on Friday, I had a work lunch on Friday and we had dessert with my parents on Saturday night. A fairly quiet week, all things considered!

4. Online: Check out the girl who doodles in math class. Awesome.

5. Funny / Random: Karl made his third or fourth attempt to get to Paua hut on the weekend, and yet again didn’t make it. Bugger! I guess that’s the issue with the hut being on the other side of the river.

6. Personal Thought: Two interviews in two days is hard work. On the plus side, I’m not likely to need any more interviews until sometime next month now.

7. Coming Events: Christmas! The end of my current contract, and then a holiday. A slightly scary one, in that I don’t know when it will end…

8. This Time Last Year: I was starting my current job, on what was meant to be about a 6 week contract. Mark and I were desperately trying to get finishing touches done in our new house in preparation for hosting Christmas (including buying outdoor furniture – definitely recommend doing that MUCH earlier than mid December), and life was pretty awesome all around. If I could go back, I would warn myself to be much more careful about office politics, and to get out earlier rather than hang around out of a sense of obligation. That, and save more, spend less while you have the income!

9. In Other News: I’m off to get my ritual 6-monthly haircut on Monday, and I cant wait. 2 hours off work, a lot of pampering and I get to feel glamorous for at least a day!

10. Photo:
Turere Lodge, the new hut we visited on Saturday

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday December 11, 2011

2011-12-14T21:09:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Congratulations to Dani for making it to 21! You gave us a few scares along the way, but we are all so proud of you. Thanks also for hiring me to be your photographer for the evening. It was a massive privilege, and a lot of fun!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: The weather here was incredible over the weekend. Almost too hot! Shame I was unwell on Saturday with a really bad attack of endo, so spent a large part of the afternoon curled up on the bed, asleep (best painkiller I have found yet)

3. Social: Dinner with Jim, Sean and Deb on Wednesday night before a photo walk, then Dani’s 21st on Saturday, followed up with dinner at Richard and Kelly’s on Sunday. Talk about a busy week!

4. Online: OMG. Fast and Loose started screening here on Wednesday night. The interpretive Dance section is hilarious - we had to go and find some more... And here is my favourite song of the year, in interperative dance:

5. Funny / Random: Going from worried I was going to be unemployed for ages to a recruitment agency ringing every couple of hours wanting more info from me and putting me forward for a role that starts on January 4th. I now have two interviews this week coming, which is awesome, and such a boost.

6. Personal Thought: The damned black dog has returned, for the first time in five years. I’m working really hard on trying to stay as positive as possible, but things are getting me down (or wound up) far more easily than they should, and I am constantly fatigued and lacking in motivation. Hopefully the Christmas break will help me wind down and refresh for the new year, otherwise its going to be time to look into some counselling to get this sorted before we go to Europe.

7. Coming Events: My team at work are having an end of year lunch this Friday, we may be away tramping this weekend, and then next week I finish up here before we go away for our Christmas holiday. 3 weeks to go and it’s the end of the year!

8. This Time Last Year: I was unemployed and really enjoying it, because I had a house to unpack and set up. Although, at the same time I was a bit flustered by the enormity of the task and the fact Mark was working full time, so I was largely doing it on my own! If I could go back, I would have got more extensively into the garden than we did, so that we didn’t have to do it all over again this year.

9. In Other News: I have the new Facebook timeline thingy, and I really quite like it. Then again, I am a visual person, rather than a text person, so I love the emphasis it gives to photos! Its also quite fun going back to see things I used to do back when I first joined – and to stalk friends. But I suspect it will only be something we do for the next little while, as once you have seen someones old stuff once, there isn’t a lot of point in looking at it over again.

10. Photo: A shot from the Santa Run on Wednesday

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday December 4, 2011

2011-12-05T20:54:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Thanks to our awesome travel agent Tania at Flight Centre on the Terrace for all her hard work and laughs. She has certainly made booking our holiday much more entertaining, and we really do appreciate not having to do all the work of finding affordable flights in and out of Russia ourselves!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Congratulations to Amanda and Megan, who both completed the Goat mountain run in excellent times, both coming in under 4 hours for the 22km trail run, which puts them in the top 100 of the women who competed. It was really neat to see them back at the lodge Saturday night after their run and see how stoked they were at completing it. The weather was perfect for them too – fairly cool with a good breeze and occasional sunshine.

3. Social: Weekends at the lodge are always excellent social events. This weekend was no exception. It was great to be there and feel welcomed and like I belonged there – as I have had some times in recent months where I felt that because I wasn’t part of the clique who were there together, I shouldn’t have been there at all.

4. Online: Check out the awesome local online deal advent calendar that has been released this year!

5. Funny / Random: Doing a tour of state highway 1 petrol stations on our way home from the lodge, trying to find one that could pump up the van tyre to 70psi (most stations could only do 60psi). We think we may have found one in Foxton, but we had given up stopping by then.

6. Personal Thought: Job hunting sucks. That is all.

7. Coming Events: Dani’s 21st this weekend, at least one photowalk before Christmas, possibly a BBQ at our place to celebrate one year of it being our place, and then its Christmas, and our awesome holiday around the south island

8. This Time Last Year: We were hectically in the throes of moving house. It seems a little scary to realise we have actually been there for a whole year now, and aren’t looking to move for a fair while yet. Still need to persuade the owner of the neighbouring unit to sell it to us though! If I could go back, I would not bother with tomatoes, and would have planted more veges in the garden straight away rather than waiting a year.

9. In Other News: I have finally been given my notice to finish work. The boss called me in to her office on Friday morning to tell me that I am not coming back after the Christmas break, but at the very least I will still be an employee through until all the public holidays are done, which is a bonus. I was a little bit shocked at the timing, as we hadn’t heard anything about a replacement arriving for a while and I admit I was hoping to stay here until February when there would be a better chance of finding work!

10. Photo:

Mark and I the other week, celebrating just over one year married

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday November 27, 2011

2011-11-30T19:16:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: To John Key and the National Party – Congratulations on the massive election win, and best of luck for the next 3 years. I hope its better for them than the last 3 years (what with one disaster after another).

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: The big outdoors related news at the moment has been the weather! On Monday we had wind gusts of 150km/hr recorded in the hills above the city It cleared that afternoon, but came back with a vengeance Wednesday lunchtime and then bad weather also came through on Thursday morning! Nasty

3. Social: Kelly, Richard and Jo came over for Thanksgiving Dinner on Thursday, which was awesome.

4. Online: Thanks to my friend Dave for the link to this awesome clip – the work involved in it must have been immense!

5. Funny / Random: Checked my email Wednesday morning to find one from Sharon – president of our tramping club – asking if Mark and I would be interested in attending a garden party at Government House on Waitangi Day, being held to celebrate local sports and recreation clubs. Apparently our club got three invitations, and Mark and I got two of them. Still not sure how we got chosen, I think they wanted to put a younger face on the club?? Sharon is also trying to work on getting us onto the committee next year I think…

6. Personal Thought: Man I wish elections could be moved to every four years. I have been so sick of hearing about them lately and am glad its over for another three years. Interestingly, all the comments about the election I have seen from friends on Facebook that have been pushing one party or the other are from Labor supporters, who basically demand that everyone MUST agree with them, because if you don’t, then you are a self-centered jerk. On the plus side, I know now for certain what the politics of at least a dozen more of my friends are!

7. Coming Events: Weekend at the lodge, 4 weeks till Christmas. 5 weeks till the end of my first 365 challenge!

8. This Time Last Year: We were home from honeymoon, Mark was back at work, I was unemployed and we were busy sorting paperwork, finding new tenants for our lease, unpacking from honeymoon and packing to move into our first home. I was really glad that my boss had not demanded I return to work after the honeymoon to work out the last few days of my contract as I was more than busy enough as it was!

9. In Other News: The election is over, some results are surprising (Winston Peters for one), and some are exactly as expected. I have a few friends who have expressed disgust at the fact that apparently only 65% of people enrolled to vote bothered… Including one staunch Labour supporter, who did some funky maths that showed that more people didn’t vote than voted National – only to have it pointed out to her that twice as many people didn’t vote as voted Labour.

10. Photo:

The storm blowing through at home on Wednesday

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday November 20, 2011

2011-11-21T21:00:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Congrats to Richard and Kelly who are pregnant, which is a big surprise for them but they are stoked because they were anticipating having issues.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Does the Home and Garden show count as cultural? I think so! Well, we headed there on Sunday, walking all the way from home to the stadium (took about 45 minutes). It was quite useful, we’ve got a few people coming to give us quotes on some stuff for the house, and entered some awesome competitions.

3. Social: Dinner out on Friday night with Ed and Mike was great, we all went to Plum on Cuba Mall. Talk about divine. I had the fish of the day and it was beautiful. I left Mark in town with the boys while I came home at a decent hour – mainly because I was wearing my skinny-day jeans and they were getting a little uncomfortable, since I only just fit in them!

4. Online:I couldnt agree more with this post about Travel being a priviledge, not a right - exactly how I feel about next year, its a massive opportunity

5. Funny / Random: Meeting up with an online friend in a real life setting – someone I know from a discussion board and facebook group was working at the home show on the weekend, and so I made sure to stop and say hi. It was a little awkward, but good.

6. Personal Thought: Its funny how sometimes, because things have happened gradually, you don’t put two and two together to realise what is causing an issue. For me, I have changed a medication I have been on for years, and all of a sudden my weight is dropping without me putting in much effort (must start putting in some effort and see where it gets me). I know that an advised side effect of the meds is weight gain, but it was a gradual increase, so I always blamed it on other factors. Since I peaked again 8 weeks ago, I have lost 3kg and am well and truly on track for hitting my target weight for Christmas, if not almost making it to my original 2011 goal weight!

7. Coming Events: A weekend at the club lodge, Carols by Candlelight, a year in our own home celebration and Christmas are all within the next 5 weeks. Really must get started on Christmas shopping!

8. This Time Last Year: On the Friday we travelled home from honeymoon, the same day as the Pike River Mine explosion. Its interesting, because this seemed to hit a LOT of people really hard, but we both felt like we missed the breaking news moment (even though we read about it while waiting in the Koru Lounge at Melbourne airport about the same time as the 6pm news back home). The rest of that week had been mainly spent around Port Arthur and Hobart, both of which were incredible. If I could go back, I would make sure I went to MONA (http://mona.net.au/), which we didn’t hear about till we got home but sounds awesome.

9. In Other News: Tuesday afternoon I had my first rejection letter of the current round of job hunting. It kinda hurt – especially when they said I didn’t get it because I was lacking in demonstrable strong administration experience. When I asked what they meant, they called and said that actually I was a strong applicant, but the places they had had all been filled by people with extensive PA experience – out of over 200 applicants, they took about 25 to interview. If only the email had said something more like that…

10. Photo:
Wellington from the edge of Wadestown on Wednesday night

Q4 Goals Update

2011-11-15T18:33:00.000+13:00

This time last month I set some new goals, and I figured since they are things I wanted to achieve by the end of the year, I should maintain some accountability over them. So, here is how I am doing.
Yes, I wrote this last week, so some things have changed again...

Goal One: Run regularly enough that 5km is an achievable distance 3 or more times a week.
So far, this one has gone all of nowhere. I got all excited at this, and got up at 6.30am on a Monday to start walking as a prelude to the Couch to 5km challenge, but it made me really tired, then we had bad weather, then I had a cold. I started walking again this morning, up at 6.30am on a Monday for a walk around the block. Its something.

So, Goal Two: This year, I would love to get down to 83kg in time for Christmas again.
An exceedingly slow process. I have at least held steady all month, gradually losing 100g here and 200g there, and I hit 84.9kg on Friday, which was exciting. It feels like a watershed moment – especially when I kept it off over our anniversary weekend and was the same weight this morning. 7 weeks, 2kg to go. I do hold out some small hope that I can do this.

So, Goal Three: Start swimming at least once a week, by New Years be able to swim 1km without stopping.
Swimming hasn’t really gotten underway yet either – with the bursitis I developed in August after a fall on ice, my rotational movement has been painful and limited. I have been to the pool recently – after my daywalk with tramping club the other weekend, I took myself down to Thorndon Pool for a soak and lazy couple of lengths before dinner to try and relax all my sore muscles.
Now that I have had my cortisone treatment, that is no longer holding me back and its time to start trying myself out again.

Goal Four: Ride my bike once every other week at a bare minimum. Start using it more often to go to the shop for “just one or two things”. Consider riding to the railway station and catching the train to and from work.
We start this this weekend – Mark and I are off with tramping club to do the Rimutaka Incline on our bikes, and hopefully this will motivate me to make more of an effort. Riding to the station is a good start – I don’t have the downhill confidence to ride all the way to work, or the uphill stamina to get home. Given we have just bought flights to Europe, we are going to be tightening the belts with regards to money, so the bus does have an advantage in that I can get off early on the way home and save 90c on each commute home – that’s $30 between now and when my contract ends, which is nearly a weeks travel. As for the groceries, we are working on shopping to a grocery list, so chances of needing to pick up just a couple of things at the supermarket are slim.

Goal Five: Eat two serves of fruit a day habitually (including on weekends)
I feel like I am making progress on this. I cant quite claim that fruit is habitual yet, but I do enjoy it more and I am making a more definite effort to eat more of it. I have actually managed to get to the point where I will often pick fruit over chocolate, which I think is a bigger achievement. This is easy at this time of year though – the variety of fruit available is massive!

Goal Six: Get my CV updated and ready for job applications.
(Goal Six(b): Apply for one job a week until I have something.)
My CV has been updated, and I have applied for 3 external roles since this goal was set, which is nearly one a week. I held off on applications between the interview and finding out about having the job, as if I had been offered it, I would have stayed, even if only until we went to Europe next year. I also have about 6 other jobs saved in various places for application – including two urgent applications for roles starting within the month.

Goal Seven: Get a better understanding of where our money is going, and try to reduce it
Given we did a challenge earlier this year where we tried to live as much as possible within my income, somehow we still don’t seem to have managed to long-term reduce our spending. When we look at each category that we break things down into, none of it seems excessive. But, we are going to try (between now and Christmas at the very least, if not longer) to live on just Marks income – anything I earn is savings for Europe. Now that we have booked, this should be much easier mentally, as there is definitely a trip coming.

Goal Eight: Sew the cushion covers for the new cushions
For something that was meant to be my “add something simple so I can definitely cross it off early” goal, this STILL hasn’t happened, much to my shame. Perhaps this weekend if the weather isn’t that great.

Goal Nine: weed the vegetable patch again, and get things planted in it!
DONE! Yay! We currently have planted out: Carrots, peas, beans, broccoli, beetroot, tomatoes, chilli, potatoes and strawberries. Sometime soon we are going to plant out the mint and sage, and possibly some capsicum. Most of the direct plants have sprouted now, which is exciting, and the tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and beetroot are all looking healthy from having been transplanted into their final spots. Now to pot some mesclun seeds so we have salad later in the summer, and give the weeds another quick attack so they don’t strangle things and we are all set!

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday November 13, 2011

2011-11-14T20:49:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Thanks to Dave, Dave, Snaiet and Mark for helping make my first club Mountain Bike trip a success. The day was cruisy, chilled and a lot of fun!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Mark and I spent our Sunday out with tramping club doing the Rimutaka Rail Trail. Last time we did it we only went up to summit and back (and so totally didn’t realise that the awesome summit tunnel was literally RIGHT there). This time we went all the way over and down to Cross Creek, then got a shuttle back to the start. We had just the right weather – overcast all the way up with a cool breeze, then the sun came out a bit more once we were down the other side and waiting for the shuttle. We have decided that once is enough for going down the Wairarapa side, with its 1 in 15 gradient. We both much preferred the 1 in 30 to 1 in 45 gradient of the Wellington side for the descent, so we will head back and do that again some time this summer.

3. Social: We got to meet Ethan on Saturday. Well, sort of. He was being a bit grizzly and cluster feeding, so I got a quick hold and that was about it! But for a long boy he seems very small! I guess Liam was already 6 or 8 weeks old by the time we met him, so I haven’t really met such a young baby in a long time!

4. Online: Yes, this is a bit self-pat-on-the-back-ish, but since its that time, here is a link to my Flickr photoset from our Honeymoon

5. Funny / Random: Work at the moment… Its kinda quiet, things are up to date, I’ve completed the extra work I was given, and since I only have 6 weeks work left there is no point in learning anything new to do. So I am spending a lot of time writing blog posts. I think I have about 8 in reserve at the moment, including some old ones. Now to get on with writing a wedding graduate post for apracticalwedding…

6. Personal Thought: Freshly waxed legs are u.g.l.y. OMG. I haven’t had my legs waxed since the week before the wedding(ish). The new house has a bath AND better water pressure, so I have been shaving because its actually possible without driving myself nuts in the attempt (or using up ALL the hot water), so I had completely forgotten the sick rash-like look my legs get the day they are waxed. Damned glad I was wearing pants that day, that’s for sure!

7. Coming Events: Home and Garden show this weekend, Lodge weekend at the start of December, Dani’s 21st party and then all of a sudden it will be Christmas!

8. This Time Last Year: We were on honeymoon still and LOVING it. One week married, having a blast in Tasmania, we had done a couple of daywalks, visited an awesome set of limestone caves and kayaked in Freycinet National Park, with Port Arthur and Hobart still to look forward to. I think by this stage Mark and I were both fairly well in love with Tasmania. If I could go back and change one thing for this week, I would have made sure we went to Cataract Gorge in Launceston in the evening when we arrived, because its lit up at night, and we are so gutted we missed it.

9. In Other News: I’ve managed to lose weight two weeks running, which is awesome. Now heres hoping it can continue. Perhaps 83kg by Christmas is do-able after all!

10. Photo:
This time last year in Port Arthur

Oops, I missed it! Honeymoon: Day 8. Tasmania, Australia

2011-11-14T20:26:00.002+13:00

So, it took me a really long time to realise, but I missed reporting on one of THE biggest days of our honeymoon! Yep, we have been married now for a year and I’m finally sharing the last of our honeymoon report! (Its ok, I first wrote this post back in July and then kept forgetting to get around to sharing it!)

Monday 15 November 2010
Richmond - Port Arthur

The weather looked ominous as we left Richmond. It was so bad that we didn’t even bother to stop and look at the old bridge in any detail as we had planned the day before. It was only a short drive (again, everything is in Tasmania!) and we were in Port Arthur early enough to park in one of the low parking levels.

Because we had pre-booked tickets that didn’t include an audio tour, we got to join a fast moving queue where we showed our tickets and collected visitor guides and passes on an interpretive walk and sailing over around the islands in the bay. We had arrived 5 minutes before the next walking tour was due to start, and our boat trip was scheduled for about an hour and a half later.

The walking tour was well worth the 40 minutes spent in the group. We didn’t travel very far, but the guide was exceedingly knowledgeable, and it was a brilliant introduction to the site. I highly recommend confirming before you arrive what time these walking tours are leaving, and trying to arrive at a suitable time to walk straight into one.

The weather was cold and grey, which definitely added an ominous tone to the site. The café where the Massacre occurred was an additionally sad and solemn location. The separate prison felt threatening too. We loved the steps in the old hospital, where the original ones have been worn away and there are new metal ones over the top.

After a good day of exploring we decided it was time to go and warm up again in our hotel before dinner – also because we knew that if we booked into the restaurant before a certain time, we would get a discount! The hotel was nothing flash, but the restaurant had a stunning view, and there was a private gate to get on to the site, which we made use of just before dark when we walked back into the site for our pre-booked ghost tour.

Definitely do this, definitely pre-book, and if you can, do the latest available tour. Awesome. Really, I dont want to say too much about it! Hilarious, scary, freak-out, seeing places that were ominous in daylight in the dark with hurrican lamps. The stories might just be stories, but we had people on our tour who had experienced ghosts, which made things even more dramatic! Walking back through the site to get back to the hotel was a bit nerve-wracking though, even given the fact we hadn’t seen anything! It’s a very dark site at night.

In fact, if I could recommend only ONE thing from our entire honeymoon as a must-do for anyone visiting Tasmania? A ghost tour at Port Arthur would be it. Great fun.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday November 6, 2011

2011-11-07T21:45:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: To us, for our first wedding anniversary. We’ve survived a year – bought a house, been overseas twice and I’ve changed jobs in that time. Now on to the next challenge – finalising our plans for Europe, especially since we booked flights on the weekend.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: We had some interesting weather in the last week or so – after moving the tomatoes into the carport so they didn’t get broken by the wind, we haven’t been able to move them back yet as we keep getting severe wind warnings! Out at the beach for the weekend Saturday started with strong northerlies, which switched to bitterly cold gale force southerlies after lunch. Thankfully they calmed right down so we could still let off a few fireworks!

3. Social: NOTHING, and its been fantastic! Was a bit disappointed though that so many people seemed to forget our wedding anniversary until they were reminded. Only one member of the bridal party, one aunt, Marks Mum and my parents remembered under their own steam… After all the dozens of “congratulations on your first wedding anniversary” messages I have doled out over the last year and a bit! I don’t think either of our brothers remembered at all, even though Marks was in the bridal party.

4. Online: Thanks Patricia for this one – very interesting! When did the colours for baby genders become a big thing?

5. Funny / Random: Starting my lunchbreak on Monday with a quick exchange of small talk with Dr Michael Cullen (former finance minister). Turns out he had spent his weekend water-blasting his house and also wished we had all had Monday off to enjoy the good weather!

6. Personal Thought: Sometimes its just sad to make a lot of effort in keeping up a friendship / keeping in touch with people, to have them not return the favour. But then, I keep forgetting to keep my expectations low so they cant be dashed – you would think with all my experience at that it would be second nature. /pityparty!

7. Coming Events: Christmas. Wow. Its getting soon! And the end of my contract here – I cant wait. Well. I still need the money, so finishing up here with nothing else to go to makes me nervous, but I am definitely looking forward to the change.

8. This Time Last Year: Mark and I were newlyweds. The wedding was a success, we had had a great day! Sunday went from hectic to chilled with the departure of the out-of-town family and the finishing of the venue cleaning. If I could go back, I would change how I wore my veil, go to Wiltons Bush for our photos (instead of the very blustery railway station), and I would make sure we didn’t sign in to Facebook for our entire honeymoon – We still wish we hadn’t seen the comments made by some of Marks family about how miserable a time they had had in Wellington!

9. In Other News: Oops. We had booked in with STA Travel to attend a Europe information evening. Stupidly, they didn’t email Mark a reminder until about 3pm the day of the session, which he didn’t get because it went to his personal email until he was at home, 10 minutes before the session was due to start. Frustratingly, Flight Centre had theirs on the same night! Thankfully, we were able to come home early from our anniversary weekend away, and attend the expo, where we got a really good deal on flights, and a discount off our TopDeck tour of Russia.

10. Photo:

Happy First Anniversary Darling

Starting again, again

2011-11-03T21:09:00.000+13:00

At the start of the year, I set myself a lofty goal of getting down to below my pre-wedding weight and hitting 80kg again (last seen about 6 months after I got home from Outward Bound in 2007). It should have been fairly achievable – maintain or increase my exercise, keep eating ok and just do little push periods every now and then to boost the weight loss before settling into another maintenance phase.

9 months later and I was almost at the point of writing this year off as a complete disaster in the weight-loss stakes. I wasn’t overly concerned with the gradual gain in weight to start with, as it was a slow process, only really building to anything when I was sick or injured. I figured it was still under control and I just needed to give myself a kick in the pants for everything to be ok.

In about July I admitted things weren’t working for me, and joined Weight Watchers (again). I was now just on 3kg heavier than I had been at the start of the year. Not a huge amount, but it was certainly going to make getting down to 80kg for Christmas difficult, so I adjusted my goal and instead aimed for getting back to what I had been at the start of the year, with 80kg becoming my target weight for our trip to Europe in May / June.

Unlike last years time on WW, which started with a hiss and a roar, 600-900g a week for the first 6 weeks, dropping to 300g a week after that, this time started slowly – a maximum of 300g a week. That was ok. I was only 1kg heavier than I had been when I had last given up properly doing WW, so I expected the weight loss would be slower and harder this time around. Things fluctuated a bit, but it only took 4 weeks to lose 1.2kg, so I was pretty stoked.

Then came a bombshell I wasn’t expecting. The very next week I gained back EVERY SINGLE GRAM I had lost over the previous 4 weeks. How the hell? I had followed WW carefully, tracked every single thing that went into my mouth, done plenty of exercise and GAINED weight. So I started the fight again, and managed to lose 1.1kg this time before inching my way higher over a couple of weeks (which included my birthday, so I had a pass for that week at least).

Suddenly I was hit again. Another 1.2kg gained, which actually made me HEAVIER than when I had joined WW. Sure, I was injured, so on reduced exercise, but I was still not eating all my weekly allowance, which according to “The Plan” meant that I should by rights be losing weight. Perhaps it was water? Nope. My fancy scales made me feel even “better” by telling me my body water was down and my body fat was up.

I was stumped, frustrated and upset. What a waste of time, energy, stress and money. What was the point? So I gave up for a week. And lost 300g. A small loss is better than nothing right, even though I’ve still got 400g to go to get back to my WW start weight?? Wrong.

I tried to cheer myself up by doing my measurements – surely they wouldn’t have changed much. Wrong again. Since last doing measurements some time in mid-August, I have put on almost all the cm’s I had lost since I started WW in January last year. Talk about devastating. Over 18 months work ruined by good intentions and a weight loss plan that obviously isn’t working for me. Poor Mark didn’t quite know how to handle how upset I was as he helped me take my measurements.

It all leaves me wondering what the HELL is going on. Given than most people agree that weight loss / management is 80% food and 20% exercise, and I’m fairly confident I am eating about the same as I have for the better part of two years with just slightly less than average exercise, I just don’t know.

Part of me wonders whether perhaps it’s the new Pro-points system that’s not working for me. I know with the old system I had X (I think about 24) points a day, and whatever I earned as exercise points was my additional allowance. Getting in under my daily points was a fantastically motivating challenge for me, I loved finding little treats that were 1 point. Having to “save” points out of my daily allowance for weekend plans was tough at the start, but I learnt instead to moderate my weekends. At the end of a week, including my exercise I would often have 40+ points “spare”. I weighed in at the end of the day every week and was still losing weight.
Under the new system, I get 32PP a day, and a weekly allowance of 49 extra, plus any exercise! Where previously I had to eat 60% of my daily points minimum, on this plan the rule is that you shouldn’t eat less than 29PP a day – 90% of your daily allocation. Given the increase in PP value that a LOT of my old favourite foods have shown (potato, kumara, rice, pasta – all those startchy goodness foods!), the increased points make sense. The allowance makes some sense in that you cant carry points across to another day to use.

The problem for me lies in the fact that I have been told that I should be able to eat EVERY SINGLE POINT in my weekly plan and STILL lose weight. Really? Eat a whole extra day and a half worth of food every week, plus any exercise points I’ve earned (lets round that up to two days) and lose weight?? Sure, I have friends who are managing to do this, but it just doesn’t want to work for me.

I think I’m going to have to try and get out of the mindset that I’m “allowed” those extra points, because it really does appear that I cant justify using really any of those extra points if I want to actually lose weight. Which is actually kind of depressing, and is a diet rather than a lifestyle because of the points allocated to startchy carbs meaning that treat food of any description doesn’t really fit in a days points!

For example, one day: Breakfast (bowl Just Right Muesli, glass of milk, banana) = 8 points. Lunch (leftover mince/pasta bake) = 8 points. Dinner (Corned Beef , Mashed potato, other vegetables) = 8 points. That leaves 8 points for snacks and non-water drinks, which is the equivalent of a can of coke / mug of milo with no milk, a 100g pottle of yoghurt and 10 rice crackers. All I can say is thank GOODNESS fruit is free of points now, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to squeeze any in to my points allocation.
I’ve had to give up old staples as well – my long-term favourite of ½ can baked beans on 2 slices of multigrain bread used to be a 4 point lunch. Now its double that. So many of my favourite filler foods have doubled in points, and my daily allowance has only increased by 8 points! Things are surprising numbers of points sometimes too – we had pasta for dinner one night, a meal that in the old system would have been about 12 points (half my day), was over 20 points.

So, there are two key next steps I think to get me going again. 1. Change weigh-in days away from Monday. First thing Monday morning is a very unforgiving time if I have had any sort of fun over the weekend, and puts me in a bad mood all week – its setting myself up to fail. I also don’t think I drink enough water on the weekends, which may be part of the problem. 2. Shift to using gained exercise points BEFORE weekly allowance. Given the exercise points are in the same place as they used to be, I think this will work better for me as I’ll look there to see what I have left for a week. The aim now is to never drop to zero available exercise points, and never need to use my weekly allowance.

And now, we wait. And I try to eat as normally as possible and start doing more exercise (since I’ve been sick the first week of the above change!). I give it till Christmas. If I haven’t hit 83kg by Christmas then its time to try something different – perhaps see a nutritionist / talk to the GP / try the HFG weight-loss plan instead for a while / win enough on lotto to persuade Mark to let me do Outward Bound again.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday October 30, 2011

2011-11-02T20:44:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Thanks to the punters who came along and made the day awesome on Sundays tramping club Day Walk. If it hadn’t been for them, I would never have made it all the way from one end of the Northern Walkway to the other – I would have given up at the turnoff for home!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Thorndon Summer Pool is open again! Yay! And I have had my first swim there of the season – even if it was just a 15 minute “soak” – very slowly kicking my way through about three lengths in the recreation section of the pool – to try and ease sore muscles on Sunday afternoon. Am definitely making plans to start heading there regularly! Also, there was an awesome parade this week for the All Blacks after they won the world cup. So many people!

3. Social: Apart from a catch up with Jared, Alicia and Alexis, its been a quiet week. And this week coming is promising to be quiet as well – a coffee with Michelle is the only thing on my agenda at the moment.

4. Online: Halloween Fright Fest on STFU Parents. Brilliant, and disturbing, and hilarious. And it does tell me that most of my friends with kids really arent all that bad. Yet.

5. Funny / Random: Not really funny, more frustrating… We’ve had a few days lately, with the wind in a certain direction (and that seems to cause it perhaps), where the airconditioning at the office has quietly whistled like a volunteer fire brigade call siren. Its not loud, but its constantly there, as if the siren was going off a couple of km away. No-one else seems to notice it, so I wonder if my desk is just right at the “sweet spot” for the sound.

6. Personal Thought: After bouncing off 85kg and shooting back up a few weeks back, I am finally back losing weight – not much, but some each week the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, it seems as if the only reason I have lost in the last 2 weeks is because I had days where (for various reasons) I basically didn’t eat. Not so healthy. Fingers crossed I can break the 85kg barrier soon, otherwise I might have to give up.

7. Coming Events: This weekend is our wedding anniversary! So we are heading out to the beach house for the weekend to escape and relax. I admit to hoping that the weather here is awful on Saturday, so the city fireworks are delayed until Sunday night for us.

8. This Time Last Year: Our offer on the house was in its final stages – we were just waiting for it to go unconditional. Life was hectic, people were arriving for the wedding, stuff needed to be done, I was out of work and everything was actually kinda awesome. If I could go back, I would change two key things: I wouldn’t go with Mark to collect his parents from the airport (as then I would have missed the drama phonecall about someone elses accommodation not being up to scratch), and we would have gone to Uncle Changs for our “rehersal” dinner, rather than the Kelburn Village Pub.

9. In Other News: Job interview was on Friday. I actually have no idea how it went. I know I managed to stay fairly positive, but I don’t think I managed to sell myself very well, and apparently the other applicant has similar skills and experience, so it might be a tough call. As much as I don’t particularly want to be unemployed when we are trying to plan a trip to Europe and house renovations, I’m also definitely not desperate to keep the job.

10. Photo:
From the All Blacks celebration parade: The Webb Ellis Trophy

A year!!!!!

2011-10-29T20:07:00.000+13:00

Wow.

This time next week, Mark and I will have been married a year!

Even better - We are on apracticalwedding's November anniversaries list today :)

Go check out all our date buddies...

Random 10: Week Ending Monday October 24, 2011

2011-10-25T19:54:00.001+13:00

This week I’ve shifted the week end to Monday because Monday was a public holiday and therefore part of the weekend, which was awesome. Wish we had more of these!

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: To Nicola and Tom on the arrival of Quinn, as well as Marion and Hadyn on the arrival of Ethan.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Finally, after 24 years, the All Blacks have won a second Rugby World Cup tournament. How is it that we can hold every other piece of silverware available to us, but this has been the bogeyman for so long!?! And at that, we are darned lucky to have held on to that win, thank goodness for strong defence and Stephen Donald.

3. Social: Jared and Alexis arrived in town on Saturday afternoon, so we spent a good chunk of time catching up with them and celebrating Alexis’ 3rd birthday with her. Stacey was also over from Melbourne for the weekend, and it was absolutely awesome to spend 2 hours nattering over brunch on Sunday with her.

4. Online: My favourite recipe website - I've even treated myself to a subscription to their monthly magazine to keep myself motivated to try new recipes regularly!

5. Funny / Random: Kinda funny to look back on, not so much at the time… We have been trying to use some new recipes lately, including things we wouldn’t normally have. Monday night was a Frittata. Talk about fail. It took 45 minutes to put together, then leaked out of the pan we were intending to cook it in, and then just would NOT cook. We wound up giving up on it and heading to the local takeaway for dinner instead, leaving the frittata in the oven while it cooled. Took it out of the oven at about 10pm and it was perfectly done. Oh well, that’s tonights dinner now instead!

6. Personal Thought: Mentally preparing myself for the possibility of being unemployed again soon. To be brutally honest, I don’t rate my chances of being made permanent, and even if I was offered the role, I don’t know that I would want to take it – this isn’t something I can see myself doing for an extended period of time. Mark is keen for me to take the role if offered, if only so we can afford to go to Europe next year, and so I don’t spend time unemployed. Personally, I’m actually keen to try temping again, and try to get into a PA / Team Admin / Official Correspondence role when I do go permanent again. To that end, I’m starting to get my CV out there again, and apply for work. Perhaps if I am offered my current role permanently, I might stay on on a contract basis instead…

7. Coming Events: Less than 2 weeks until our first wedding anniversary! Holy WOW that’s gone quickly! Also having to deal with the restructure at work that they are hoping to finalise this week (including having to interview for a job I’m not sure I want). Christmas is 9 weeks away – time to start shopping I think…

8. This Time Last Year: After an awesome lodge-based Day walk, and Simply Ceroc at Labour Weekend, I was down to one week left in my contracting job (one year on and the job situation could end up being almost the same), my hens do was upon us, we were sorting out building inspections and other paperwork to buy the house and everything was getting very exciting. That last week before the wedding is a blur, I really don’t remember any of it now, I only know we survived and made it out the other end. And that’s ok, because I remembered the key rule: Be present on the day, the rest is insignificant.

9. In Other News: Labour weekend was a bit of a write-off. By the time we slept in a bit on Saturday, did some work in the garden and then watched average weather arrive… Sunday the weather was worse, but we managed to get in some socialising at least, and then I was unwell on Monday (and not from a hangover, although god I wish it had been, but I was sober driver Saturday night), so all we managed to do was stain the outdoor table and do the groceries. At least we felt like we had had a weekend though, so that’s a win, even if only a small one!

10. Photo: This is one of a dozen signs around the city showing off whats on over the next couple of days

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday October 16, 2011

2011-10-18T18:51:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Congratulations AND good luck to our boys in black. The All Blacks managed to win their semi-final against Australia on Sunday night, so are now off to the final of the RWC. Should be an awesome game.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: I finally found time to watch the first season of Downton Abbey (although I think I might have deleted an episode by accident somewhere along the way as I’m sure I saw a part of an episode when it was actually on, but didn’t watch it over the weekend), and it definitely WAS as good as the critics said. Cant wait for season two, which starts this week!

3. Social: Had an awesome time at Abby’s baby shower on Sunday. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time! Other than that it was an exceedingly quiet week – especially since I was sick all weekend (head cold / sinus infection) and Mark was away.

4. Online: The bloggess is totally my favourite blogger, ever. Scroll down to the first lol-cat inspired image and try to tell me you aren’t laughing!

5. Funny / Random: Managing to lose 2kg in 24 hours while home sick on the weekend… I guess that’s what happens when all you do is sleep for an entire day! On Friday my head weighed a tonne, and my big achievement was getting out of bed at lunchtime for an hour. On Saturday, I was still dizzy, so the big achievement was being off the sofa for about 35 minutes at a time…

6. Personal Thought: Managing to lose 2kg in 24 hours while home sick on the weekend… I guess that’s what happens when all you do is sleep for an entire day! On Friday my head weighed a tonne, and my big achievement was getting out of bed at lunchtime for an hour. On Saturday, I was still dizzy, so the big achievement was being off the sofa for about 35 minutes at a time…

7. Coming Events: Labour weekend this weekend! Jared and Alexis will be down from Auckland for the week, and Stacey is over from Melbourne for the weekend, should be wicked. Next week I finally have a specialist appointment I’ve been waiting for since February, yay. Then after that we’ve got a weekend of daywalks, our wedding anniversary, a mountainbiking trip and the anniversary of moving in to our house – and then all of a sudden it will be Christmas. Yikes! Only 10 weeks to go…

8. This Time Last Year: Mark and I were discussing whether we should buy or keep renting (We had seen what would become our new home and were in the process of organising reports and finance while still debating if it would be worth it) and which was better financially, I was having meltdowns in the work toilets over stupid things and I was getting excited about going to Simply Ceroc for Labour weekend.

9. In Other News: I’ve been avoiding mentioning it, but theres been an awful cargo freighter disaster up in the Bay of Plenty – somehow a ship wound up on a reef and has been dropping oil and containers into the ocean for about two weeks. Hopefully the next weather system ends up being not as bad as threatened so they can get on with serious salvaging, now that things are working.

10. Photo: Its been a really average week for my photos, so this is one from the archives... This time in 2008 I spent the night on Somes Island with tramping club, and snapped this:

Isnt she gorgeous?

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday October 9, 2011

2011-10-14T19:38:00.000+13:00

Sorry - very late on this, been a busy week!

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: This category seems to revolve around babies a LOT it seems… Congratulations to Michelle and Sam who have announced they are pregnant (we have been waiting for that announcement since about March!), and good luck to both Nicola who is now overdue to have her baby, and Marion who is (hopefully) in her last week before due date.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: Sport is the big to-do around here still. Mark and I watched four games of rugby over the weekend (ok, I admit, we only watched the Ireland-Wales game in the ad breaks of the news), but the weather was nice on Sunday so I purposely avoided turning on the TV for Bathurst (Holden 1-2-3, nice!). Thank goodness the All Blacks managed to beat the Pumas on Sunday night – it looked a near thing for a LOT of the game.

3. Social: Loving last-minute catch ups. Friday afternoon Mark got a text from Mike inviting us to join him and several others for Friday night Jazz at Mojo Bond, which we decided sounded like a good idea – usually those texts come once we are already home! Then on Sunday, the weather was nice, so we threw an invite on Facebook that anyone who wanted to come and have a BBQ and watch the rugby at ours was most welcome – we wound up with 4 visitors, which was a good number for our little place.

4. Online: I love the Omnivore blog on stuff – even more with this awesome post about how to fix kitchen stuff-ups!

5. Funny / Random: Marks face when I told him at just before 11pm on Sunday night that I was planning on getting up at 6.30am to go for a walk and would like him to go with me… Hilarious! The walk is part of the plan to start running in time to do a 3.2km morning run comfortably when we are at Anakiwa in January.

6. Personal Thought: Weekends are too short, by about half. By the time you have had a sleep in, you’ve lost half a day! Then there is laundry, cleaning, gardening, groceries, trying to get out and have a social life. All of a sudden its time to go back to work again. Thankfully now that we are coming in to summer, it is still light when we get home, so we can do laundry and gardening after work – if we have the energy! I cant wait for Labour weekend – THREE days off. Brilliant.

7. Coming Events: Mark is away tramping this weekend, and I’m off to a baby shower. Then next weekend its Alexis’ THIRD birthday (wow, already!?!) and a day off on Monday for the fun of it. Then suddenly it’s the end of October and the year will be nearly over. Yikes.

8. This Time Last Year: Money was everything. I was just over two weeks away from finishing work (history never repeats apparently...) , we were frantically sorting out basic honeymoon arrangements, our travel agent was being nothing short of a pain in the rear end (wouldn’t recommend them to anyone), Mum and Dad had suddenly realised that one of their big jobs for the wedding was sorting bridal party transport and were freaking out at the cost!

9. In Other News: Our restructure has been confirmed, and the new Job Descriptions are out. I don’t have anywhere near the required experience to apply for ANY of the roles, so looks like I’ll be moving on once things are finalised. Fingers crossed if I am let go I don’t spend too long being unemployed!

10. Photo: We have an ice-skating rink in Wellington at the moment. It looks really neat

Setting some new goals

2011-10-06T12:12:00.000+13:00

Well, the fourth quarter of this calendar year is about to start, and since I didn’t really evaluate my 2011 goals mid-year, I figured it was about time I did it now!

Recently we finalised what is almost the last of our accommodation for our summer holiday. We are spending 3 nights at the YHA in Anakiwa, just down the road from the Outward Bound school. The other night this got me thinking. Actually it almost got me yearning to run, which is odd, because I hated running while I was at OB and haven’t done any since. But for some odd reason, while I am at OB, I want to get up in the mornings and do the 3.2km run route. Yes. While I am on holiday, I want to get up and run.
To achieve this, I’m going to have to start soon, because at the moment I don’t run at all. In fact, I barely manage walking sometimes. I’ve printed out the couch to 5km programme, and reckon if I can follow that over the next 3 months then I should be able to start my New Years Day with a 3.2km run that doesn’t overly bother me.
On the plus side, this is also going to help immensely with my aim to do the womens triathlon in March 2012. On the down side, its likely going to mean getting up at 6.30am to go for a run 3 mornings a week. Good thing daylight savings has already kicked in! A side note: This is not intended to replace gym workouts, but rather to supplement them, especially with my shoulder injury!

So, Goal One: Run regularly enough that 5km is an achievable distance 3 or more times a week.
(Goal One (B): Do the 3.2km course at Outward Bound all three mornings I am there – at least roughly. Beat my best time (20mins) at least once)

My second goal is related to the above. The day before the wedding, I weighed in at 82.2kg. Awesome. I hadn’t been that light since sometime between getting home from Outward Bound and meeting Mark. The week before Christmas, I weighed in at 83.4kg. I’m currently vacillating between 85.2 and 86.2kg, which is the level I plateaued at last year. Unfortunately I don’t have the same stress this year driving me to exercise, but I have some, and with Goals 1 & 3 added on top of my current exercise regime, along with making an effort to always have fruit with me so I don’t want chocolate along with limiting myself to a can size if I want fizzy drink, I think I might have a good chance of getting there. (yeah, I think the start-of-year goal of giving up fizzy drink is entirely out the window now!)

So, Goal Two: This year, I would love to get down to 83kg in time for Christmas again.
(Goal Two(B): Get down to 80kg in time for our trip to Europe in May / June next year)

Next out of the blocks is another health / fitness related goal, again to do with the triathlon coming up in March. When I lived in Christchurch and couldn’t afford a gym membership, I started swimming at least once a week just to get in some exercise. I loved it. Over the course of a winter, I managed to get up to doing about 1.5km at a time in about 45 minutes and largely without stopping. Then I moved home and gave up. I don’t quite know why – it was just a habit that got too hard to keep up I think.
This summer, if I stay working where I am, I’m only 10 minutes walk from an excellent outdoor pool, and I still have a substantial number of pre-paid swims on cards I have floating around. Of course, hopefully my shoulder injury keeps getting better and I get my rotation back soon, otherwise this might not get off the ground very well, but it will still be worth trying, even if I have to breaststroke most of the lengths!

So, Goal Three: Start swimming at least once a week, by New Years be able to swim 1km without stopping

When we moved to Karori and had the space to store them, we bought a mountain bike for me, so that Mark and I could go for bike rides together. It was great that summer, we were out most weekends. Then Mark went on an on-call roster 1 week in every 4. Between that, the weather, tramping trips, wedding planning, moving house and setting it up etc, the bike went away in the shed in about May last year and I think I’ve ridden it about 4 times since then. Oops. Not so good, and not a great investment.
I’m certainly not making any plans to start riding to work on a regular basis or anything, I just think it would be good to stop making excuses for not riding the bike and start actually doing it. We have vague plans to take the bikes with us at Christmas, they probably wouldn’t get large amounts of use, but they could be helpful given the number of small towns we are staying in for whipping down to the shops, the beach or generally exploring.

So, Goal Four: Ride my bike once every other week at a bare minimum. Start using it more often to go to the shop for “just one or two things”. Consider riding to the railway station and catching the train to and from work.

So far, its been a lot of exercise-related goals. Looks like its going to be a busy three months on that front. So I guess I should ensure I fuel myself well! I’ve already started this, and am loving the fact that Weight Watchers now gives you fruit for free. That bowl of strawberries with a little scoop of icecream that last summer cost about 10 points? This year, down to about 4. Fantastic, and what an encouragement to eat fruit – its full of nutrients, even if it is also a little high in sugar. The awesome thing about my current job is I am also right by a small supermarket, so I can pop across the road and get fresh fruit that suits my appetite each work day.

To balance that out, Goal Five: Eat two serves of fruit a day habitually (including on weekends)

Over the next month, my team at work are being restructured. My contract is being terminated at some stage, and my role is being made permanent. This doesn’t mean I’ll apply for the role I am in, or that I will get it if I do. Its time to start getting prepared for the possibility of being thrust out into the job market again – at least this time I have plenty of warning, and chances are if I don’t apply for / get the role I’ll be kept on for a couple of months to tide the team over. To be honest though, this is a role I fell into at the time because I was here and it was offered. And over the last couple of months I’ve come to realise that perhaps its not what I want to do long term.

To make the transition smooth, Goal Six: Get my CV updated and ready for job applications.
(Goal Six(b): Apply for one job a week until I have something.)

The big excitement on my radar at the moment (and the thorn in Marks side) is our planned trip to Europe next year. We were talking the other night about it, and Mark tried to say it was more about the money than the fact he had been to all these places at least once before, but then he admitted that if he hadn’t been before he might feel differently about it. He’s not a fan of being in debt at all, especially when the debt is costing him money, so the fact we are planning on spending $20k+ on a holiday when that could reduce the term of our mortgage instead freaks him out.
But we agreed when we bought the house – it was within the set range that meant we didn’t have to skip our big European holiday, provided we made sure we didn’t get pregnant. To be honest, with that agreement in place, I’m almost surprised he hasn’t sabotaged my birth control, as having kids is on his agenda of things to do in the next couple of years anyway.
Mark already keeps a substantial pair of spreadsheets that detail every bank-involved transaction we make, so we have a fair idea of what we spend our money on. The problem is that when you look at each category each month, its not a lot, but it seems to add up to a lot. We are living much closer to the limits of our joint income than Mark is comfortable with (then again, with a mortgage to worry about, I don’t think we could find a point that he IS comfortable with!)

Anyway, to make Mark more comfortable with the idea of this trip to Europe, I present Goal Seven: Get a better understanding of where our money is going, and try to reduce it (the first – and likely only – team goal I have this quarter)

A couple of weeks ago, Kelly took me shopping for some craft stuff so she could start a small project for us (since she is far more crafty than I am!), and while I was at Spotlight, I bought a couple of larger cushion inners, along with fabric and zips to cover them with – our poor little blue ones not only half hide on the sofas, but they are so beaten up you need two of them to be comfortable. I figure I should hurry up and do something with the fabric and inners, especially since it only takes half an hour or less to make a couple of cushions.

A nice simple one next then, Goal Eight: Sew the cushion covers for the new cushions

When we moved into the house, the previous owners had established a small vege garden. It had lettuce and cabbage (which grew like crazy) and silverbeet (which we didn’t like), a few broccoli and cauliflower (which the caterpillars really liked). Over the first couple of months we were in the house, we ate / pulled out everything from the garden, tried planting some new bits, had them attacked by caterpillars and then gave up. Since about May, all we have managed to do is weed the darned thing every now and then.
But at the moment, we have lots growing in small planters around the house – chilli, broccoli and mint on the kitchen windowsill, tomato in the study (away from the cat) and on the windowsill, strawberries in one planter, beetroot, onion, garlic and parsley in another planter, as well as two pots of potatoes.
The beetroot, chilli, broccoli and the peas and carrot seeds all need to be planted out soon, and I cant wait for the weather to warm up enough to move the tomatoes outside. Thankfully its work that should only take a weekend or two to get going, and should cost us only a little bit of product (like some windshields for the tomatoes) and a good chunk of time – oh well, we aren’t away for Labour weekend this year!

So, Goal Nine: weed the vegetable patch again, and get things planted in it!

And you know what? I really do think that’s more than enough for now… I would also like to perhaps achieve a couple of things on my life list this quarter – since some of them we will have a chance of doing while on holiday this Christmas – but I think seven hard work goals, and two simple “just get the blasted thing done” goals are enough! Would have loved to round it off to 10, but as it is I think I might struggle with this lot.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday October 2, 2011

2011-10-04T20:21:00.000+13:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck: Thanks to Mark, Colin and Nathaniel for making this weekends daywalk so much fun. We had a great time – 3 courses of good food, great conversation, visiting three huts (well, I got to two, and had seen them both before), fancy dress fun. Cant wait to do it again next year with more people!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural: So the Warriors didn’t win the NRL Grand Final this year, which is a shame, but the All Blacks have at least made it through to the playoffs for the Rugby World Cup. Disappointingly, the Australians also made it – we had all harboured hope that their loss to the Irish may have ended up booting them out of the tournament entirely, but no such luck.

3. Social: A weekend at the lodge - albeit a rather quiet and unsociable one – was a great antidote to how quiet life has been lately. Yes, we were all really tired and so everyone went to bed early, but in general it was good!

4. Online: The campaign for Real Monopoly Thanks to a commenter on Moatas Blog about Monopoly. Could certainly make the game far more interesting! (see comment 50 for an interesting game to try and find or recreate – Art Auction) and also note the awesome reference to Pass the Pigs (I remember that!)

5. Funny / Random: The circular debate about whether I should apply for my current job since it is being advertised as permanent. Most people seem to think I should completely ignore the fact that I meet none of the essential requirements in the Job Description and go for it. I’m not high in confidence about whether it would work though, and I don’t think I would get it permanently just on the virtue of being the only applicant… More likely would be that I would be kept on until they could find someone permanent.

6. Personal Thought: What is it with a weekend away tramping that leads to SO MUCH laundry??? Seriously, you would think we hadnt done any laundry in a week. Oh, wait. Perhaps we hadnt. Sometimes I hate being an adult and having to look after myself!

7. Coming Events: Labour weekend = long weekend at the end of the month and I cant wait! Then not long after that its our Wedding Anniversary :)

8. This Time Last Year: Writing our wedding ceremony, sorting out the last of our guest list and trying not to stress out about the wedding, mainly! Two years ago Heidi was being diagnosed with Cancer (which has been in remission then flared up again, and caused no end of issues since) and I tried Snowboarding for the first time. I also didn’t blog nearly as regularly, so I really cant wait till Facebook brings out its new history feature and I can see what I was actually up to back then!

9. In Other News: Most of the RNZ Navy was berthed in Wellington over the weekend, which was a very rare occurance and quite awesome to see. They had a parade through town and a church service, both of which I had to miss because I was away tramping.

10. Photo
As part of the "Festival of Carnival" that is on around town while the RWC is on, they are running a nightly light show on a selection of buildings around the waterfront - this is how they look

random 10: Week Ending Sunday September 26, 2011

2011-09-27T20:37:00.000+13:00

I decided it was time to add another category! Still a Random 10, but over the next few weeks I'll add a couple more new categories and rotate them around depending on whats happened in the week

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Best of luck to Marion, Nicola and Abby who are all getting darned close to the arrival of their new babies. Especially to Abby who is having a hard time of it at the moment.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Congratulations to the All Blacks for comprehensively beating France, but more so to the Warriors for making it into the Grand Final for the NFL for the first time since 2002. Great effort boys!

3. This time last year - We had just returned from Nicola and Toms wedding, and I was in that high-stress period leading up to our wedding. 6 weeks and counting. If I could go back, I would tell myself to be more blunt with the dressmaker, and to listen to Mums suggestion that perhaps the veil doesn’t work with the dress. I would also pre-warn myself to expect drama in regards to baby-sitting arrangements at the reception, but to not bother with responding as that would only make matters worse. Yes, I know. Fat lot of use telling a nearly bride-to-be not to stress out about wedding details!

4. Online - Here is a recipe I am dead keen to try - will have to shop for the ingredients this weekend!

5. Funny / Random - Making plans to spend Friday evening in the fan zone and stay to watch the game, then giving up less than an hour befor kickoff because there just wasnt enough happening and there werent enough people to stay warm, then walking with all the people heading to the game back to the railway station

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I really have to say, its incredibly liberating to have a diagnosis of what is wrong with my shoulder. After 6 weeks of ongoing discomfort and limitations in both strength and range of motion, we can now get on with a definite treatment plan. I’m a little nervous, as the first step will be some quite strong anti-inflammatries, which apparently can have all sorts of nasty side effects, but I really hope they work because the long-view alternative is a cortisone injection which friends who have had tell me is intensely painful.

7. Coming Events - Off to the club ski lodge this weekend to do some daywalking. My trip is a gourmet lunch at Waihohonu Hut. Should be fun! Awesomely, I have also had people contact me requesting to go on the trip lists for my next two trips – a photography daywalk from the lodge in December and the Southern Crossing (one to cross off my Life List) in January.

8. Resolutions Update - Nearly 9 months down, and the only resolution I have had any luck with has been the 365 challenge. That said, I have managed to stop gaining weight at least – my weight has been stable within a range of about 1.2kg over the last 9 weeks or so – and the triathlon goal was always going to be more of a get prepared for the ones very early next year, and my PT is starting on working with me to get ready for one in March, which will be tough when I cant rotate my shoulder fully in freestyle. Giving up fizzy drink will probably move into a challenge for next year. I have reduced my intake, but am a way away from giving it up entirely. Getting a new, permanent job may also go on the back burner. I’m trying to decide if I want permanent work at all at the moment, and that goal was written when I was only meant to have another 3 months work or less in my current location.

9. In Other News - It was a big weekend for Checkers this weekend – she was firmly introduced to her new cat door, and then actually used it happily herself. She was also left home alone for a night for the first time (she attacked the newly re-potted and on the floor tomatoes which are now living in the study until we can cover the dirt better), and it was worming and fleaing time. We managed the flea treatment without her having to even really notice, but wound up dropping her worming tablet into her biscuit tray because we couldn’t hold her still long enough to get it down her throat. She has now taken most of it, which we reckon will do this time.

10. Photo-
Friday night by the harbour after exploring the Fan Zone

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday September 18, 2011

2011-09-20T19:57:00.001+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Happy Birthday to ME!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Massive hail storm hit Wellington on Tuesday afternoon. I had been preparing to go out for lunch at 12.30, and there were massive black clouds visible to the south. The co-workers all said it was ok as it was a northerly, so it wouldn’t rain. Wrong. It started raining while I was out, and then started thunder and lightening, then massive amounts of hail in the half hour after I got back. Very impressive.

3. Social - Maintaining the generally quiet lifestyle at the moment. My big event was a group photowalk on Sunday to the old Fever Hospital, which was neat, but not really overly sociable!

4. Online - Check out the awesome photos of this fire that happened on Thursday afternoon right in town. Glad to know that the house was already vacant, but I still feel sorry for the neighbours and the smoke damage they will have to put up with.

5. Funny / Random - The mood swings around the office lately. I think the boss has a lot of stress at the moment, and she certainly isn’t as fun as she used to be unless you are doing exactly as she wants of you and aren’t daring to mention any issues or problems. I’m trying really hard to keep my head down and stay out of the way, but its not always working.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I had an exceedingly quiet birthday this year. Last year we threw a party at our flat and had a few friends over for it, which was awesome, and the break from wedding-planning stress I needed. This year? I didn’t need that break, that something different. Having a really nice dinner for two on the Saturday and then a meal with my parents on Sunday was perfect. That said, however, roll on next year when we are planning to have a massive party for my birthday. If it goes off the way we want it to it will be wicked.

7. Coming Events - Lodge weekend at the start of October, Nicola and Marion are both due to have their babies within the next month (Nicola anytime now I gather, Marion in about 3 weeks), Rugby World Cup is starting to get exciting.

8. Resolutions Update - I’ve given myself a pass this week on the weight-loss scheme. It was my birthday, so if I put on a little weight, so be it. Photography has been going fairly well, again, finally. I’ve reached the end of the slightly frustrating 50/50 challenge I started on 01 August (50 days of a photo a day taken on a 50mm lens), which is great, one less thing to think about!

9. In Other News - The desk move has finally happened and every day I am at my new desk I am less happy with it. I’ve had headaches from the noisy aircon vent above me, when the lifts are running my desk vibrates, its as far away as you can get from the windows and facing down the length of the floor rather than towards a window at all.

10. Photo-
Mark and I on the harbour edge just before dinner on Saturday night

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday September 11, 2011

2011-09-15T20:14:00.001+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Good luck to my friend Crystal who is due to have her first baby anytime now - she has hit 39 weeks and is hanging out for the baby to arrive.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Yay the All Blacks for beating Tonga (was inevitable), RWC fever is alive and well throughout NZ, which is neat. The Welsh were robbed in their loss to South Africa.

3. Social - Life continues to be very quiet. The flu and the weather haven’t helped. Its my birthday next weekend and the only thing we are doing is going to dinner together on the Saturday night.

4. Online - Of course, Monday 12th our time is Sunday 9-11, 10 years since the world trade centre, so check out this commentary by a kiwi living in Boston about how he found the day. (yes, I held over this weeks post for that)

5. Funny / Random - Checkers seems to have become very much a daddys girl. She chooses his lap more often, will let him pat her whenever he walks past (whereas she will run away from me) and even lets him pick her up! I can manage to have her on my lap on a rare basis, and she’ll let me pat her then or if she is on the bed, but that’s it. The other day she sat on the back of the sofa until Marks lap was free (he had been using the laptop). I feel so rejected.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I am so immensely glad that I took up the free flu jab offer this winter. I cant imagine how badly off I would have been over the last couple of weeks if I had had a full flu, rather than just the fatigue / headache / nausea / exhaustion / joint pain portion of it!

7. Coming Events - My birthday this coming weekend! Mark and I are going to go out for a nice dinner somewhere to celebrate. Also starting this weekend is the Wellington Botanic Garden Spring Festival, which has a LOT of stuff on and should be awesome.

8. Resolutions Update - Photos still happening (just, I’m having more and more episodes where all I want to do is give up), being reasonably good with my eating, but have had another week of pretty much no exercise with the remnants of the flu that’s hanging around. I’m feeling much better, so will be in to the exercise with gusto next week (I hope)

9. In Other News - The big desk move at work didn’t happen this week like it was meant to, unfortunately that is only putting off the inevitable.

10. Photo-
Te Papa by night

300 posts and counting

2011-09-12T18:59:00.001+12:00

I have to admit that when I started this blog way back in October 2005, I never seriously expected it to last this long.
Its been an interesting nearly 6 years. Life has changed dramatically.
I've spent time living in Christchurch, then moved home to Wellington.
I've lived in 3 shared flats, 2 flats with just Mark, spent two spells at home with Mum and Dad and then bought our first home.
I've been single, possibly dating, broken hearted and now exceedingly happily married.
I have finally done some travelling - Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania, Gold Coast, Rotorua, Auckland - and we have plans for Europe next year.
I have studied some more - distance study with Otago University, a semester at Victoria University and a semester with the Open Polytechnic. I still havent finished my second degree, nor decided what I want to do with my life!
I've been made redundant twice, spent time in retail, worked in a tiny office, been a contractor and loved it, been an employee and hated it.
I completed an Outward Bound course. I am adamant that I would not be who I am today if I hadnt.

The world has changed too.
Facebook appeared in my life while I was working at the timber company in 2007. I remember being so excited at getting to 50 friends, and adding everyone I knew and could lay my hands on. I even used it to ask Mark out both for "coffee" (read: Hot Chocolate since neither of us drink coffee) and a month or so later to ask him to go steady.
Christchurch was hit by a series of devastating earthquakes, which have destroyed a city I admit I never liked, but which certainly didnt deserve all that.
We are now (finally) 10 years from the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001. They have finally caught and killed Osama Bin Laden.

Sometimes I wish I could go back and re-write some of my negative old posts, or delete them, but I refuse to delete what is effectively my diary. Yes, I was miserable and cynical a lot when I started this blog, but I wont apologise for it. I was 23, underemployed, single and living back with my parents. Life was not a bed of roses.
If I could go back and talk to my past self I would tell them to keep my chin up, life does get better. And stop being SO afraid of just taking that step and getting on with it.

I hope you have enjoyed my blog over the last 6 years (or less if you have joined recently. I dont advise reading back too far if thats the case), and I hope you continue to enjoy it for however long I manage to keep it going!

Space Enough and Time

2011-09-10T13:21:00.000+12:00

OK, So I wrote this last weekend and forgot to post it, but its still relevant musings!

Mark is away to the mountain without me this weekend, only because I have tickets to the World of Wearable Arts show for Saturday. Honestly, I’m really looking forward to him being away on a weekend. It feels like it has been a while since I had a weekend to myself. Last time Mark was away was when he went to Twizel for 4 days with work – but that was weekdays, so by the time I got up, went to work, went to the gym, got home, had dinner and tidied up, I didn’t really feel like I had any time to myself.

Yes, Mark does a lot of on-call type work where I am left to my own devices at home for hours at a time, and he has his “boys club” that meets once a month for an entire evening, but those days a different.

When Mark is doing work changes at home, I tip-toe around so that he can concentrate. When he is in the office on the weekends, I’m often left without a car, and so tend to feel a little resentfully stuck. The nights he is out with friends are a good break, but I end up staying up late because I know that he is likely to end up walking in the door about 10 minutes after I go to bed, whatever time that is, and I also find myself doing nothing, just waiting for him to be home again.

When I know Mark isn’t going to be home, I actually feel more relaxed about him not being there. I know I can sit for 4 hours straight sorting my music folder (a job still only 2/3 completed, and I refuse to restart i-tunes before I get it done since I have up to 5 copies of some songs) and not annoy him because he wants to use the computer (since we only have one at the moment). I can spend a whole pile of time sorting and editing photos. I can just chill out and read a book for as long as I like.

And you know what? I love the time apart so much, but it definitely makes me appreciate Mark more when he comes home. The best part about this weekend is just that – it’s a weekend. A perfect length of time to spend apart from each other, and something we are well used to. Until this year, it has not been uncommon for us to both go tramping the same weekend, but to different locations. Or even to go tramping for the weekend while the other stays home. This year has only been different because neither of us have done much tramping – I’ve been out with injury, but I have no idea why Mark hasn’t been out more often without me.

I’m a firm believer that small amounts of time apart are good for relationships. Each person in the partnership should be able to keep themselves occupied without the other for a weekend and not go crazy. Inter-dependence is good, co-dependence is bad. I like to have Mark around, but I don’t need him there 24/7, making my decisions for me.

The hardest part of him being away is cooking for one person - I find it hard to motivate myself to cook anything beyond instant noodles, which I guess is at least partly because I havent been in a situation where I've been cooking only for myself since 2004, and in those days I was so poor I would cook a dinner that could feed 4, and have the leftovers for the rest of the week.

Anyway, weekends apart are great, I can get heaps done, and still chill out, not having to worry about what Mark wants to do right now.

Smile Like You Mean It

2011-09-06T21:40:00.002+12:00

The last couple of days I have seriously failed at the whole “pretending to be happy” thing at work. We are about to be relocated within our floor, and the desk I am being moved to really sucks. Unfortunately, (and at least in part because I’ve been so tired with this flu) I haven’t been able to just ignore it and get on with my work, and the feeling negative about that has impacted how I feel about work in general. I was already starting to tire of some aspects of the work, and so was vaguely considering my options in regards to finding a new job in time to settle into it before we go to Europe next year, but haven’t been ready to make any moves on that yet, as at least this job is comfortable, if not involving much challenge 99% of the time.

It would seem that I’m not one of those people who can pretend everything is perfect when its really not. You would have thought that with all the practice I have had of that, I would have learnt this lesson – feeling miserable at work is one thing, letting others know you aren’t happy only makes things worse. Its something I can look back and see at the bus company, and my time at the Timber Company in particular (and those were exacerbated by being isolated in the last little while in the office)

Perhaps its just me. Maybe I’m not someone who can be happy for an extended period of time in a normal job. Perhaps I just still haven’t found the right job for me – I have tended to take whatever is put in front of me at the time that I need work. The problem is that I don’t know what it is I really want to do with my life, which makes it hard to decide what to do about it! I cant be the only person who isn’t entirely happy with their work-related lot, but I don’t know too many other people who seem to be afflicted like this, needing to change jobs every 8-12 months just to keep getting new challenges and keep things interesting!

I have tried to tell myself that work is just like that, and we cant all expect to be happy in our work all the time, and I should be grateful to even have a job in the current environment. And to a small degree, this has worked. I don’t hate my job, I just don’t find it that interesting at the moment (which given how quiet we are on a regular basis now isn’t overly surprising). This is a huge step from the bus company (where I was thrilled to be being made redundant as I was miserable, but too scared to leap without another job to go to, but unable to sneak out for interviews since I was the receptionist), so I may not be doing as badly as I was.

A couple of months ago in our team meeting, our manager was talking about career development, and how we should talk to her if we wanted to look into moving to something else within the business. Which is all well and good, but considering I had only been in my current position for 5 months at the time, and was only just at the point of working independently, I don’t know that she would be that thrilled at the idea of me admitting I wanted to move onto something else, even though I only took this position because I was running out of the other work I was doing and it saved me looking for an outside role!

On the plus side of all this is the fact that the team has been told that we will start a restructure within a month. Having some experience with watching these go on around me and to me, I know for a fact that just because you are a position that is being made permanent, does not mean you are going to get that role. This makes it the optimum time to start really looking at what else is out there, as regardless of the outcome, my current contract will not be running through until the end of May next year anymore. And if I have a better idea of what is out there, then I am in a better position to decide with confidence whether I want to apply for my current role when it is made permanent – although that of course is working on an assumption that it will be a permanent full-time role, which isn’t assured either (and I wouldn’t be overly surprised to find that since we want another person in the team, it becomes two heavy part time roles of about 30 hours a week).

Timing wise, this restructure is fortuitous for me as well, since it means if I don’t end up with a role at the end of it, I have time to find one again before it gets too close to our planned trip to Europe in April / May / June. The longer I wait and the closer we get to under 6 months from departure, the less likely I’ll find permanent work.

Of course, finding permanent work is only a concern if Mark gets his way and we start trying to get pregnant late next year. Its still unlikely – he certainly has not managed to sway me from being rather anti about the whole idea (of course, having been called “completely ignorant” of children a week out from the wedding didn’t help his cause) – but it is something we have to take into consideration. If I’m contracting or temping, then I’m not eligible for the maternity pay provisions in legislation, nor does a role have to be held open for me to return to.

With a mortgage to deal with and a trip to Europe on the cards, I can only afford to be temping until we decide to try and get pregnant. We cant afford the mortgage, the holiday and a pending new arrival on Marks wages and my temping income. Well, we probably could, but things would be uncomfortably tight. Much better to work fulltime at least until we have been to Europe, and then we don’t have to worry about it!

In a way, I do feel lucky. I can have this debate with myself. If things really got bad, I can temp and we can still afford to live (and go to Europe). Money isn’t tight in our household, and there is plenty of temping available, so long as I make myself willing to do whatever gets offered (last year I spent a week each filing and creating, printing, folding and stuffing a mail merge). I know a lot of people aren’t this lucky – even amongst my friends and family, many of whom would simply not be able to take the risk of not taking a permanent job offer in favour of going temping. Whereas I loved temping last year. In fact, I’m starting to feel like I have been in my current role for far too long after last years maximum 2 months in a role at a time!

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday September 4, 2011

2011-09-05T21:24:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Thanks to the Napier ladies and Mum for taking me along with them again to the World of Wearable Art show. It was a good night, there were some great costumes, and even though our seats had seriously restricted views, they were quite well placed compared to previous years.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - It is finally here. The Rugby World Cup kicks off this weekend in Auckland with the All Blacks playing Tonga. The fantastic thing about this is that it means its only 7 weeks till its all over. I do hope we win, if only so as to avoid the national mourning that will be inflicted if we lose.

3. Social - Another nothing week. With this flu-like virus I have had, making it through the day at work has been an achievement. Going out at all has been well and truly off the cards. I did meet up with Sean on Thursday for a wander on the waterfront to take some photos in the evening sunshine.

4. Online - Trying to decide on something to do for our first wedding anniversary, and I came across this awesome company, who do guided tours out of Kaikoura... Shame we dont have the leave available, and there is no way I could persuade Mark to justify the cost!

5. Funny / Random - How many of my friends went to WOW on the weekend, and all commented on how they needed to go again so they could try harder to ignore the choreographed dancers and watch the costumes instead… I missed huge chunks of the costumes because I was so distracted. Kinda defeats the purpose of going to the show…

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I’m not a fan of the location of my new desk at work. We move at the end of the week, and my desk is all but in the main walkway down the centre of the floor, about 10 steps from the kitchen, and in a location where I cant talk to anyone without getting up from my desk. So I’m going to be constantly distracted by people, fighting off hunger half the day from the smell of food, and yet completely isolated at the same time. I’m also going to have to think of some things I can do on the computer that will waste time, but that don’t involve the internet – they have to look like I’m doing normal work – to fill in down time when we aren’t busy, as the boss can walk past my desk without me realising she was anywhere around.

7. Coming Events - My birthday! And then a couple of weeks later we are off to the club lodge again, this time for a tramping trip – I’m leading a daywalk to Waihohonu Hut, planning to do a formal lunch once there. Should be entertaining.

8. Resolutions Update - Managing to lose some weight by sheer force of will this week – we had morning teas on Tuesday and Wednesday to farewell staff / impress the CFO, and were eating the leftovers all the way through to Friday afternoon (and then threw the rest out). I’ve been vaguely unmotivated by my photography this week, and have contemplated giving up the 365, but with under 120 days left to go to the end, it would seem a bit ridiculous, and then I would just have to start over next year.

9. In Other News - Happy Fathers Day to my Dad. Thanks for everything you have done for Jared and I over the years.

10. Photo-
I know I have used this in a past random 10, but in light of the fact that all the damage in this photo was caused by the Earthquake of a year ago, I thought it was a good choice for this week as well

Updated, and about time too!

2011-09-04T11:38:00.000+12:00

Some of you may have noticed AGES ago that I added some pages across the top of the blog - including two for my "Life List" (one to-do and one done), but that these lists were highly disappointing when you clicked through to them.

Well, I have spent some time this week updating these lists!

My To-Do list now has 100 items on it, broken down (very unevenly) into 10 categories. The aim is to keep the list at 100 items as much as possible, so that I always have something I can look at planning to do.

The Done list doesnt have nearly as many items on it, but is broken down into the same categories. Chances are I have missed things along the way, so I will add those as I go along. I decided not to consecutive number this list, just to make life easier (the only reason the other one is, is so you dont have to add up the sections to prove its 100 items!)

So, now on to achieving some things on the list :) I cant wait for my birthday so I can add something else to my Done list (thats not on the to-do list) when I open my present.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday August 28, 2011

2011-08-30T18:29:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - To friend and fellow blogger P, who is pregnant, but not telling many people publically yet (so I’m not linking to her blog either). I know you read this P, so massive congrats and best of luck to you and your husband as you take this exciting and challenging next step.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Saturday was productive in the garden again. We have built up a surround for the vege patch – a windbreak and support for the bird netting to hopefully keep the cats out of it. We have also bird netted the strawberries, potatoes and herbs. While at Mitre 10 on the weekend we also picked up our first tomato plants of the season, along with some chilli, which are all on the kitchen windowsill, along with planted seeds for capsicum and broccoli until they have germinated and can be moved to the vege patch – which needs to be weeded again. We should have a better vegetable season this year as we have been able to start much earlier, so things should be sturdier when the butterflies start arriving. I’m hoping for a bumper tomato crop – will be buying a couple of plants every couple of weeks through until Labour weekend, when its time to start moving them outside.

3. Social -I had to miss Emilys 21st on Saturday because Mark was sick, and I wasn’t feeling the greatest. Turns out to have been a good thing in the end, but I’m so totally gutted at the same time.

4. Online - The CBD Red-Zone cordon is slowly starting to move in to the Christchurch CBD. Hopefully its going to be well reduced by the time we go down there for Christmas.

5. Funny / Random - My whole week this week has been a bit random. There appears to have been some sort of exhaustion flu-like virus doing the rounds lately, and I seem to have had a minor dose of it. Either that or I battled through more than I should have… Anyway. Friday at work I was barely able to stay upright. Thankfully it was quiet, so I managed to get away with spending a lot of time reading my book. Saturday was no better, and when Mark went to take off my strapping tape Saturday evening, a combination of those factors combined to leave me lying on the bathroom floor as a way of not blacking out or throwing up. Entertaining, and a little freaky for both of us.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I’m getting excited about my birthday now. For quite a while I’ve been wanting a particular item, only available online from the US, and was going to buy it a few weeks ago when the exchange rate started getting really high. Instead, I persuaded Mark to buy it “for me” on the weekend as my birthday present. Excellent! Saves him having to think of something to buy me, and I still get something I really want.

7. Coming Events - Off this weekend to the World of Wearable Arts show with Mum and Aunty Lisa. I suspect this will be the last year I bother going, as I don’t have the anticipation I have had previously. After that its my birthday really soon!

8. Resolutions Update - I’ve struggled this week. Exercise has been insignificant and I’ve been exhausted (some kind of virus). Photography for the week only JUST happened, and I got the whole week behind, which sucks. After a massive gain last week, I appeared to still be going up, so not at all sure what was going on there.

9. In Other News - Tour dates and prices are starting to be confirmed for Europe next year, and the Travel Agents are starting to talk about early bird fares to Europe! Not too long and we’ll be booking ourselves our big holiday!!! Now to try and persuade Mark to make it 8 weeks instead of 5…

10. Photo-
This time last year - Glow in the Dark minigolf (Since i shot nothing interesting this week!)

Auckland Bashing

2011-08-25T22:37:00.000+12:00

One of New Zealands favourite pastimes is to bitch about Auckland and Aucklanders, and I’ve joined in on the odd occasion – mainly in relation to the Auckland-centric news focus at times. I have clear memories of watching a news item about a cat stuck up a tree in Auckland, when there had been a massive accident that had caused hours of delays for commuters in Wellington on the same day.

But some of the recent Auckland bashing has actually had me annoyed. Cantabrians have always seemed to think they are superior to everyone (they really are as bad as Aucklanders, and if we moved the news head offices down there it would be as bad as it has been, but with a different city slant), and lately, its been almost bullying.

Back in late June Auckland had a small earthquake. I admit, I thought the headlines on the next mornings paper were hilarious (“The night the earth moved”), but the Facebook pages that appeared over the next few days lambasting Aucklanders for talking about it because Christchurch people wouldn’t even feel it were in poor taste I thought. Earthquakes are rare as hens teeth in Auckland – they have one that can be felt about every 3-4 years. Christchurch at the moment is lucky to get through a week without a 4.0 plus. Sure, again, some of the reactions were a bit OTT, but feeling an earthquake is a fairly scary experience for anyone, regardless of its size, if they don’t usually feel them.

Last week, Auckland had snow falling in its CBD. It was the first time this had happened in over 80 years. What did some Cantabrian do? They set up a Facebook page denigrating the people getting excited over the Auckland snow because its “nothing compared to Christchurch”. (Dear Auckland, your snow is pathetic, sincerely Christchurch) Seriously? Christchurch gets snow almost every year (and in fact has had 10-20cm of settled snow across the city twice this winter). Auckland never gets snow. This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime event for Aucklanders. I think they have every right to get excited. Just like we have in Wellington when we started getting snow on Sunday afternoon.

I just don’t get it. The whole rest of New Zealand have been so super supportive of Christchurch through all their crap over the last year (we are under three weeks away from the anniversary of the first quake), and in return they think they can belittle the rest of the country… Every time somewhere in the country gets an earthquake (even a fairly substantial one), Cantabrians flood the geonet Facebook feed, laughing at people for even daring to mention that they felt it. These are the same people who will pop up and say “ohh, that was a goodie” for every 2.5M quake that hits down there!

Several of my workmates are tempted to create a page telling Christchurch to get over their superiority complex about the snow – if they want real snow they should visit the USA or Canada (or any similar Northern Hemisphere location) and stop their bitching. And that if they want to see real earthquake damage, perhaps they should go visit Haiti. Or perhaps for want of decent aftershocks they should go to north-eastern Japan.

I guess part of it is the whole standard human, slightly narcissitic attitude of “whatever is happening to me is worse than is happening to anyone else”, and a need to make yourself feel better about your own situation. Perhaps it’s a coping mechanism for Cantabrians who really do feel hard done by, or who think they need to keep calling attention to themselves so we don’t forget them. And yes, the news media are giving less coverage to Christchurch than they used to – but really, nothing new is happening down there, so that’s not news.

Re-do, Review

2011-08-24T18:57:00.000+12:00

Was browsing some old blog posts from 2006, and came across this, thought it was about time I updated it, something slightly different to my usual Random 10 and thats about it that this has been lately...

So (X) indicates that this is something I have done sometime in my life...

(X) Smoked a cigarette. (Its probably how I got Glandular fever in first year from sharing them. Cant even stand the smell of them anymore and am SO glad that bars are smokefree now)
(X) Drank so much you threw up (Over a bloke no less, how stupid is that??!)
( ) Crashed a friend's car (but crashed my own)(and my Dads)(And the work van)
( ) Stolen a car
(X) Been in love (Been even more in love, been head over heels happily in love)
(X) Been dumped. (Sort of - I was given the "I just want to see where this goes and am not ready for a committed relationship" back about 2006. Its my only time being the dumpee)
(X ) Shoplifted (when I was younger I used to steal the lollies at the pick n mix at Kmart)
(X) Been laid off/fired (Made redundant twice in three years, and work is about to start a restructure again)
(X) Quit your job (only once in anger)
(X) Been in a fist fight (But not since high school)
( ) Snuck out of your parent's house (why sneak? Just tell them that you are going out!)
(X) Had feelings for someone who didn't have them back
( ) Gone on a blind date
(X) Skipped school
( ) Seen someone die
( ) Been to the States
() Had sex on a beach
(X) Been on a plane. (I've been a pilot on a plane too. That was really fun!)
(X) Been lost.( Christchurch does that to you)
(X) Been on the opposite side of the country.( There is no opposite “side” from Wellington, but I’ve been almost all the way to both ends, does that count?)
(X) Regretted a friendship (But not in a very long time. I have seriously awesome friends at the moment. I reckon thats something that comes with age)
(X) Swam in the ocean
(X) Felt like dying. (Several times from food poisoning or period pain)
( ) Been arrested
(X) Cried yourself to sleep (frustration does that more often than anything else nowadays, trying ti figure out where I want my life to go)
(X ) Played cops and robbers (with real uniform too!)
() Recently coloured with crayons
(X) Sang karaoke
(X) Paid for a meal with only coins. (Admittedly, it was only at McD’s)
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't (story of my life)
(X) Made prank phone calls
(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose (I also admit to laughing so hard I pissed my pants - and coughed so hard I dd the same -, and have recently had several occassions where I have laughed so hard I cried)
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
(X) Danced in the rain
(X) Written a letter to Santa Claus
( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe
() Watched the sun rise with someone you care about
(X) Blown bubbles
(X) Made a bonfire on the beach
( ) Crashed a party
(X) Gone roller-skating (and I really sucked at it!)
(X) Gone Ice-skating (See above)

Mother's name? Marie
What is your favourite drink?At the moment, Cider
Tattoos? None yet.
Body Piercing? Only my ears. I had let them close over, but then Mark bought me home really nice earrings from Europe, so I had to get them done again
How much do you love your job? I dont hate it most days. Thats not a bad thing. I am starting to look for the next challenge though.
Birthplace: Masterton, NZ. I try to deny, but theres really no point.
Favourite vacation spot? The tramping club ski lodge at Whakapapa skifield
Have you ever skied? Yes! Just this weekend been, and I sucked.
Ever steal any traffic signs? No, but I watched for the cops while a flatmate did.
Ever been in a car accident? Yes. Caused one too - only a nose to tail at least.
Favourite pudding? Apple Crumble and ice cream.
Favourite Number? Whats the point?
Favourite movie? Harry Potter - any one of the eight will do
Favourite holiday(s): Anything overseas
Favourite food? Anything Mum makes (mainly because then it means I havent had to cook)
Favourite day of the week? Any day I don’t have to be at work
Favourite TV show(s)? Sea Patrol, NCIS
Favourite smell? Roasting meat
What do you do to relax? Watch movie, read book, sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
Message to your friends reading this? Drink more beer.
How do you see yourself in 10 years? Still married, travelling the world as much as possible (2006 Answer: Earning enough money to have a house. Possibly married with a couple of kids, but probably not.)
What do you do when you are bored? Eat. Its a really bad habit and I really need to break it.
What do you enjoy receiving? Mail – real or electronic. Phone calls from friends. (hint, hint)

Feel the fear (and fall over freaking out)

2011-08-23T19:46:00.000+12:00

This weekend, motivated by Meg at A Practical Wedding ticking the trapeze off her life list, I took my first tentative steps into learning to ski. Well, I say my first, but that’s technically a lie.

Back in high school, I did PE as one of my options for 6th and 7th form. Generally I loved it, and when it was decided that our 6th form field trip would be a ski trip to Temple Basin in Arthurs Pass, I was ecstatic. It was a misery of a trip. Just over 3 hours on the ferry, then all day on the bus, then a walk in the growing gloom for over an hour up the track to the skifield (would have been so much easier to do it at Ruapehu, don’t know why we had to go all the way down there).

Then there was no snow. Yep. In their infinite wisdom, our teachers had scheduled an assessable field trip to learn to ski in mid October in Arthurs Pass. We spent our entire first day sitting watching it rain over the learners slopes outside our lodge before it eventually started snowing that evening. For some reason (I think because they still needed to do the assessments or create something else), the teachers decided that because there was snow 45 minutes walk away in Downhill Basin, we would go around there each day, basing ourselves out of the shelter there and doing lessons.

Looking at the trail map now, it appears that they have done some work in the area and there is now a (very small) beginners run at the bottom of the basin, but to get to it, you have to walk the path of an advanced run… Anyway, downhill basin suits its name. It’s a fantastic bowl, great for downhill, and with next to no run out if you get to the bottom of it and aren’t in control.

I was a little bit nervous, and the “instruction” we received did not help. I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember spending most of every day tucked up in front of the fire in the shelter at the bottom of the hill because I just couldn’t do it. When I did try, and failed, I was offered no assistance, and instead was simply laughed at (especially when my skis were stuck to my boots as I faceplanted while trying to negotiate the nut-cracker tow rope).

At the end of the week, I was awarded a prize of “person most likely to never set foot on skis again”. Which everyone (of course) thought was hilarious. I was mortified, and it stuck. For all the above reasons, I actually think that the “lessons” I experienced actually put me backwards in the learning to ski stakes

Fast forward a number of years and I met Mark. Mark was taught how to ski about two years before I met him by a friend who was training to become an instructor. He had been through something similarly off-putting on an intermediate school trip to the snow where they were given an hours lesson and then left to their own devices, whether they had grasped the basics or not.

Since we started dating, Mark has tried multiple times to persuade me to give skiing another go. He even went as far as suggesting that I try snowboarding instead if I was so adamant that I would never ski again, with the enticement that once I had some confidence, he would do a beginners class himself so we would be at similar levels to spend some time on the slopes together. So I gave boarding a go, found it exhausting and couldn’t walk for the better part of a week after (and was immensely glad I could take a bottom bunk that night).

And so I gave up again. Snowboarding was too painful, difficult and mentally draining, and I could garuntee that if I tried it again, I would embarrass myself intensely on skis. In the meantime, even my parents had given skiing a first go (they had never been able to afford it when we were younger) and really enjoyed it, even making substantial progress over a weekend.

Stubbornly, I held my position. I was not going to put myself through that embarrassment again. Even if it meant that forever more, Mark was restricted to going away alone, or taking me with him and going to Whakapapa so that I could relax in the lodge. (I hated being stuck in the café at Turoa the day after my boarding lesson, watching the bags and worrying each time I went to the toilet that something would be stolen)

This weekend I cracked.

Saturday was a stunning blue-sky day on the mountain, just a light breeze, plenty of snow. I had a cruisy morning, hanging out in the lodge, reading my book. Then I went for a bit of a walk, got caught at the top of a steep-ish ridge surrounded by icy patches, and found myself sitting on a rock, frustrated that here I was, on a skifield on the best day you could ask for, going for a short little walk on my own while everyone else was out having a great time skiing. I felt overwhelmed by my fears, frustrated and upset by the way they were holding me hostage.

So I caved in to the bullying and agreed to go and do a skiing lesson, with the promise that if I really did hate it, I would never have to try it again.

Mark dropped me off at the top of the chairlift into Happy Valley and disappeared up the mountain. I got to the bottom and with the depth of my freak-out actually started crying when I discovered that I needed my drivers licence as ID to hire gear, which I didn’t have. I had no intention of leaving Happy Valley until I had done my lesson – I’d sucked my courage into a small ball and I was there. If I left I would never go back. Thankfully they accepted my eftpos card as ID and I didn’t have to wait for Mark to come and rescue me.

Suddenly there was no going back. My feet were in ski boots, I had a set of skis in my hand and I was waiting for my lesson to start.

There were 11 of us in the class, including 3 who spoke very little English, two couples and three of us who had been “abandoned” by our better halves to have a lesson while the men were up the mountain enjoying themselves. The instruction was excellent. Jas took us through things quickly, but without a feeling of being rushed. Every time he moved on to a new step, we were welcome to stay back at the steps we had been at previously, so long as we listened to his instruction.

Turns out that when someone is ready to catch you as you go down the hill, sliding is actually not that scary after all. I was told that I had good technique, but needed to work on ensuring both legs worked together (as this was the reason I only just progressed to stopping myself, and didn’t get on to turns in a two hour lesson), and also working on my confidence by sticking to slopes that were as flat as possible for a while.

The bulk of the class skied their way down the hill to end the lesson, from where we had been learning down to the chairlift, while the last of us either stayed where we were or wandered back to the café. I went and met Mark for lunch (and the lunch at the bistro was distinctly average, but there is nothing better anywhere on the mountain, and I didn’t want to go all the way back to the lodge because chances were I wouldn’t leave again), before we then went back down Happy Valley to a flat spot for me to have more practice. I managed two more runs, and a long slow stop-start slide across the valley to the other side before deciding I had well and truly had enough, so we went down to the chairlift rather than walk all the way up valley, returned my gear and escaped the valley.

To round off the afternoon, I rode the Centennial and Waterfall Express chairs up to Knoll Ridge and went for a hot chocolate while Mark skied off into the distance, before riding the chairs back down the mountain and wandering back into the lodge about 3pm, very tired and slightly windburnt.

So, will I do it again? Probably. But Mark and I don’t have another trip planned for this season, and next season we are going to be just home from Europe, so its unlikely we will do more than one weekend in the entire season. Of course, regardless of how soon I do it, I’ll be back in beginners – the next step class requires that you can turn before you can enrol into it! Marks plan is to do a weekend followed by a week (or half week), so I can have a second beginners lesson on a Sunday afternoon when almost no-one else wants one, and then consolidate that work during the week.

We’ll see. I didn’t hate it this time, that’s for sure.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday August 21, 2011

2011-08-22T21:53:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Thanks to Colin for giving Mark and I a ride up the mountain and back for the weekend. Made it a far more entertaining ride, and saved us from having to find a motel in Levin on Sunday night because we were both shattered and unsafe to drive.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - A gorgeous blue sky day both weekend days up the mountain. The boys milked it for all it was worth – not coming back until the lifts closed. I think everyone will be a little worse for wear today with sunburn, windburn and the after effects of dehydration induced heat exhaustion. Seriously I just could not get enough fluids into me while I was out.

3. Social - Nothing, and its been fantastic. Our weekend at the lodge was vaguely sociable, although it felt at times like a bit of an old-boys network, and we didn’t really fit in.

4. Online - Definitely, totally check out the Bloggess. Hilarious. Search out her Giant Metal Chicken if you want to laugh so hard you cry.

5. Funny / Random - The way people seem to assume that “oh that’s cute” = Clucky. SO not. For example, I can happily see that Dad running the little kid around on top of his skis as cute. This does not mean I am hankering for my own kids. Children are by nature cute when they belong to other people and aren’t screaming. When they are doing something like learning to ski, they exude joy and fun, and it is really a joy to watch. But I also have a good idea of what those parents go through in other times that aren’t so happy and wonderful, so no, this weekend was not enough to persuade me that we should immediately jump on the baby-making bandwagon.
My mother has been showing off her granny-lust though… We left Checkers with Mum and Dad for the weekend, and since I think Mum has started despairing of me relenting and having kids, I think she has transferred all that angst into love for the cat. They even went shopping for a present for her while we were away for the weekend. Oh dear.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - For the first time since high school, I tried skiing. It wasn’t as bad as I remember, but my confidence was not high, and so if I decide to give it another go again in the future, I’ll still be in beginners lessons – I managed to successfully stop once in a two hour class, while everyone else moved on to turns. But considering my skiing history, this is a great achievement. Skiing has been a personal demon and one of my greatest fears since that high school experience. (I had a very poor sense of balance, and we had beginners lessons on the advanced downhill slopes because there was no snow on the learners part of the field. Some others thrived on the challenge, for me it was just too much). I don’t know that I will ever get the hang of it though. It would require getting over two of my biggest fears: Sliding / being unable to control a slide, and falling / hurting myself. I had a similar issue with the learn to snowboard lesson I had a couple of years ago – I was fine if the instructor was there to catch me, and as soon as he wasn’t, I lost all confidence in myself. At the moment, we have no more plans to go to the mountain this season, and next season we wont be able to afford to (having just come home from Europe and all), so that’s another two years before I would likely give it another go. Chances of remembering any of it? Slim to none I reckon!

7. Coming Events - Its my birthday again soon. Undecided about whether I’ll do anything, since Mark and I are busy planning a big party next year (which reminds me, must arrange to get started on making bookings for that).

8. Resolutions Update - I’d rather not talk about it, ok? Let just say that I’m really hoping it’s the dehydration of the weekend that’s caused that blip… Worst part is that I have a tendency to give up when things just don’t work out for me. And I’m seriously tempted by that idea at the moment.

9. In Other News -I've decided I'm defintiely going to try and find a new job. The restructure at work is due to start soon, and even if my job is fairly stable, I figure I may as well start hunting for something new, interesting and with better pay now.

10. Photo-
Saturday evening Sunset at the Club Lodge

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday August 14, 2011

2011-08-15T15:45:00.001+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Good luck to everyone in NZ for the next few days with the nasty weather its going to bring. Heres hoping we dont have too many power cuts from people trying to all run their heaters and stuff at the same time.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural -The only thing going on Outdoors around the country this week is SNOW it seems - even we have had some on Sunday afternoon (a good couple of cms settled, and we are only 100m above sea level, so this is really unusual), with more predicted all week. Might even get a couple of snow days out of it!

3. Social - A birthday party on the weekend and that was about it this week. Dinner at Mum and Dads this week coming before we go away for the weekend.

4. Online - Sadly thought provoking reading on Americas war on the poor. Not a war on poverty at all, really.

5. Funny / Random - Taking Checkers to the vet. She didnt mind going in the cage, didnt like being outside, shut up in the car then started crying in the vets clinic like we were abusing her, before cuddling up to Alistair, her new vet. We get to start letting her outside soon, but perhaps we'll wait till the snow has cleared somewhat.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I spoke too soon about it being a mild winter when I wrote last weeks random 10 it seems... But then, the odd polar blast, with a couple of days that are coldest on record does not a cold winter make.

7. Coming Events - Lodge ski weekend this weekend, assuming the weather clears enough for us to get there!

8. Resolutions Update - Doing OK actually. Did next to no exercise all week - Mark was away and work was nuts, so I was shattered - but still managed to lose weight, which is good. Photography is going well still, so thats great.

9. In Other News - Snow for us now means work is required on our roof to properly repair a random fix someone tried on it before we bought the house. Bugger. Not cheap! (but at least we dont have to replace the whole roof, which is good)

10. Photo-
Sunday evenings snow

Ho-Hum, Ho-Hum

2011-08-13T16:18:00.000+12:00

This week I’ve not been a fan of my work. My team here used to be three people. Then one left to be a caregiver to his ageing mother, and it came down to just two of us.

Most of the time, this isn’t a big problem. Sure we would love to have someone extra (even part-time) who could take some tasks off us to ease the workload (especially over the next couple of months as one day a week is going to become particularly busy from now until November), but a lot of the rest of the time life ticks on comfortably.

Sure, I’ve been having a few days where I have felt rather bored – now that I have learnt most of the job, it has started seeming rather repetitive at times. With a team of good workmates around me, the boring work has never yet become a major issue. Its also not as boring as the work at the bus company was, that at least here I have a wider variety of stuff and it usually keeps me busy for closer to 30 hours a week (at the bus company I was often only “busy” for about 12 hours a week!).

This week has been different. Mark has been away for work. That’s not the problem. We don’t talk on the phone much during the day anyway – I have enough trouble getting him to talk in the evening, I don’t want to waste that conversation during the day! – and I actually sleep quite well when I have the bed to myself.

The problem has been that the other person in my team (who is also “team leader” for a wider group of us) was away three out of five days this week, and may as well not have been here for the other two for the work she managed to get done. Its becoming a bit of a running joke in the team, and quite the topic of conversation, but no-one has broached it with her (or when they have, she has said “Of course” she is busy, without being willing to expand on that).

The thing is that it is starting to get me down. The additional workload and stress is exhausting me and if she had missed work on Wednesday I would have given very serious consideration to handing in my notice – regardless of the fact we have a mortgage and a trip to Europe planned for next year.

Getting to the point of thinking this has started me wondering – should I take the advice I have been giving to my friends of late…? A few of them are going to start trying to get pregnant in the next 6 months or so, and some have said they are dead keen to get out of their jobs and find new ones because their current ones make them miserable, but are worried about getting Paid Parental Leave. Given that you can start a new job pregnant, and provided bubs doesn’t arrive too early, still get PPL (you have to have worked there for 6 months to be eligible), I’ve been telling them that they should move on to a new job sooner rather than later. Especially since they might not get pregnant straight away – how would they feel if it took them two years to get pregnant and they were stuck in that mindset of “I cant leave because I need the maternity pay” all that time?

You could apply the same logic to our trip to Europe and my current situation. If I stay here, and manage to get a permanent job when we get restructured (highly likely if I want it), then Europe isn’t a problem. My boss already knows we are planning to go, and is likely to look kindly on that in negotiations for me to stay. A new job might not have that surety, but short of booking the holiday before I get a new job offer and simply telling them I’m going, I don’t know how else to push the point and still land a new job.

The closer we get to Europe, the less likely I am to find a new job willing to take me on when I want 5 weeks leave in the not-distant future. But I haven’t decided if I am unhappy enough here to bother trying to find a new job… And we are also currently talking about me reducing to part time work when we get home from Europe so I can try some business courses / perhaps get my photography up and running as a business.

To be honest, I’m really hoping that this will settle down next week and I will feel more positive. I can afford to sit on this for about another two weeks before making any hard and fast decisions, so hopefully my “team leader” stops taking so many days off work (‘I’ve got a stomach bug / a migraine’, ‘one of the kids / the dog is sick’ etc ) and our boss can find someone new soon to start helping out. I’m certainly not desperately unhappy like I was at the bus company, so I’m hoping that its just stress this week that has me down, frustrated and contemplating my escape.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday August 7, 2011

2011-08-09T22:13:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Best of luck to Marion and Nicola who are both now well into their final trimesters, preparing to take time off work for the arrival of their little boys. Hope it goes really well for you both.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Congratulations to the All Blacks for winning the Bledisloe cup off the Wallabies. Great game, well, the highlights were awesome at least!

3. Social - A very quiet week just been (only thing I did was dinner with Sean, Jim, Deb and Kath on Saturday at Jims), and another quiet week coming up – Mark is off to Twizel for work from Tuesday through to Friday.

4. Online - An interesting (possibly conspiracy theory, but no less interesting for that – sometimes they are the best reading!) breakdown of the USA’s “tea Party” movement – where it came from and what they are actually all about

5. Funny / Random - Apparently this is winter. We are having blue sky sunshine days on a regular basis at the moment, and its really been overall quite mild, with just a few nasty spells for the last 8 weeks. Cant complain though!

6. Personal Thought / Musing -Thank God for good friends. You should all make sure you tell them this regularly, I've had two friends berieved by suicide in the last 10 days and they are gutted, completely unable to see what would have caused their outwardly happy friends to see no positives in the future.

7. Coming Events - Ski weekend 19th, Checkers has her first vet visit (and we get to be shocked at the cost) this weekend. Suddenly we are down to just under 3 months till our first wedding anniversary (where HAS the time gone?).

8. Resolutions Update - Had a not-too-bad week all up. Nearly failed my 365 challenge by not remembering to take a photo until I was already in bed, and managed to eat fairly healthy and get some good exercise, so I cant complain. Feeling generally good about it all now, just

9. In Other News - We had a really awesome weather front come through on Sunday afternoon. Mark and I headed out to Bunnings to get some stuff for the garden, with a plan to stop in at Woolworths on the way home. As we were leaving home, the weather report was on the radio and it said that there would be showers in the afternoon, some heavy. It was a glorious sunny day, so we were a little doubtful. Fast forward to about 4pm and we were to be found rushing madly to get the last bits of gardening done for the day (planting some herbs and strawberries), and tidied, and the laundry in before those massive black clouds coming over us started hammering us. We made it – just!

10. Photo-
Taken down on the South Coast on Saturday night on my way to dinner at Jims

Recipe of the week

2011-08-09T17:35:00.000+12:00

Chicken and Vegetable Soup (serves 4-6)

This is a really scrummy and can be very chunky soup depending on how you make it! Great for winter to warm you up when not well - fiddle with the spices as needed!

Ingredients

3 cloves garlic
1 onion
2 teaspoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1 litre chicken stock
2 skinless chicken breasts
1 potato
1 kumara
1 carrot
1 cup broccoli, chopped
1 cup chopped spinach
1/2 cup small pasta such as macaroni or orzo
1 tablespoon basil pesto (Optional)

Method

Chop the onion and garlic and cut the carrot, potato and kumara into 2cm dice.

Gently fry the onion and garlic for a few minutes until soft. Add the carrot, potato and kumara and fry for 10 minutes or so. Add the stock and pepper and bring to the boil. Add the chicken breasts to the pot and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the chicken is cooked.

Remove the chicken from the pot and leave to cool for a few minutes. Add the broccoli, pasta and spinach to the pot and bring back to the boil. Shred the chicken breasts and add the meat back into the pot. Cook until the pasta is done and the broccoli is tender but still has its green colour.

Remove from the heat, add the pesto and stir through. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with crusty bread.

Check it out

2011-08-04T18:59:00.000+12:00

My friend Patricia has started a new blog in the last couple of months... And she is looking for some people to make her feel more loved (I'd like some too - comments are wonderful of course!)

Check her out at Being Buchanan

Book Review

2011-08-02T21:09:00.000+12:00

Kitty by Deborah Challinor
350 pages

Its been a very long time since I have picked up a book that I have not wanted to put down. This is a book I have looked at in the bookstores multiple times and debated whether I wanted to buy it. I managed to pick it up for $2 at the Downtown Community Ministry book fair this weekend, and after starting it Sunday morning (I think), I finished it in my lunch break Monday.

Katherine (Kitty) Carlisle is the lead character in this book. She is a head-strong, wilful young adult in a conservative 1830’s British community. After being involved in some not-so-minor for the times scandal, she is bundled off to Paihia with her increasingly odd Uncle and his perfectly obedient wife, her Aunt to work in the mission school with the native children.

Far from being potentially boring, Kitty manages to be a very interesting character, and all the supplementary characters are also well drawn. There is Wai, a princess of the local tribe, Simon, a missionary with a secret who is seen as a potential spouse for Kitty by her meddling Aunt Sarah.

Things start turning a bit bizarre, especially around Uncle George, but Kitty and her new-found friends are written like a breath of fresh air. There is enough detail to be thorough, and little enough to not bog the story down. Scenes like the girls swimming in the local watering hole naked and Aunt Sarahs shocked response are apt descriptions of the social mores of the time.

Eventually, things get out of hand, and we find Wai and Kitty on a ship to Sydney, where things are not nearly as scandalous as the books blurb suggests. Life continues to be dramatic, and our heroine (almost annoyingly) continues to land on her feet through every circumstance thrown at her, at least in part due to her generous benefactor.

The book suddenly hits a sad note and with only 20 or so pages left till the end, the reader is left wondering how all the strings will be resolved happily without feeling too abbreviated compared to the rest of the book. All I can say is its very sudden, and there is no promise of a happily ever after, and you will be left wondering until the very last page how this is going to pan out for Kitty.

The ending did leave me wondering a bit about what happened longer term to some of the key characters, but I am also glad that the author didn’t feel the need to tidy up every lose end, as that would have been a slow and monotonous part to the book that would likely have ruined it.

Freshly written, pleasant to read, sucks you in without being overly emotional (You just really want to know how Kitty will get herself out of this one) and just a bit cheesy sometimes. A pretty good read all around.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday July 31, 2011

2011-08-02T21:07:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Thanks to Anna and Abby for an awesome lunch and chat on Saturday. The Parade Café in its new location in the old Tugboat works really well – much more spacious than previous. A hint: Definitely don’t sit on the gangway. It moves far more than the boat itself does!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Come Wednesday this week you really would never have known that we had had such miserable weather on Sunday and Monday. I got in a few good lunchtime walks this week, a great escape from the office.

3. Social - A wonderfully quiet week really. With the really awful weather on Monday it was hard just getting to and from work, going out was not on the agenda! We were on the door at Tramping Club this week, which was great for getting to know a few names of people we see around all the time, then Barbara came over for a chat and scrabble on Sunday afternoon while Mark was doing some work, before Hadyn, Marion and Morgan joined us for dinner.

4. Online - Turns out that Sunday / Monday this week included Wellingtons coldest day since records began in about 1940 – no wonder I was so cold on Sunday night! Most of my friends had snow in their various parts of the city (Upper Hutt, Newlands, Karori for example), while I was stuck at work with a less-than-efficient air conditioning system. We could see the snow on the hills behind Wainuiomata during the day, which had fallen overnight – that was kinda neat, and I am hanging out for doing a day walk up to the snow in the Tararuas, hopefully some hangs around till this weekend so we can!

5. Funny / Random - I went to the supermarket on Saturday to pick up a chocolate bar and drink while walking from the waterfront to the railway station via Willis Street, and spotted a stand full of new models of pantyhose. Wicked. Some of them were very different – fleece-feel 200 denier, and 80-denier boot-hose, that have a sock in the bottom to keep your feet warm. I love winter. I just wish I had seen all these weeks ago rather than struggled through the first weeks of winter in thin old hose!

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I feel so much more positive at the moment than I have in a while. I blame having a kitten. Its hard to be sad for long when you have that much entertainment at the end of a string! Add in a wonderful, positive lunch with the girls and some successful clothes shopping and I so totally feel like I am back on the wagon and ready to face life with all I have. Anyway, onwards with the plans for our trip to Europe and house renovations. Much more exciting

7. Coming Events - Tossing up about going up to the Wairarapa with Tramping Club this weekend to go to Mt Bruce. The weather doesn’t look that flash hot for Sunday, so we might do a daywalk on Saturday instead and then I’ll go to dinner with my photography friends to discuss a possible roadie to the Far North.

8. Resolutions Update - To try and get myself more motivated to take decent photos for my 365 challenge again, I have got together with Sean, Gerard and Nicole to do a “50 days with 50mm” challenge – taking a photo every day with a 50mm lens. Its also a good way to get Sean and Nicole to actually pick up their cameras again, as they haven’t used them much lately.
I’ve also started doing more gym classes again – am loving being able to handle a low-impact version of combat class, and the new CX30 (30 minutes of core workout) is fantastic. Must try and get back into Pump again soon as well to really get the fitness / fat burning amped up. I’ve also discovered that my work has a weekly yoga class available, so I’m going to give that a go – its something I’ve been meaning to do for ages!

9. In Other News - Clothes shopping success! I love Stax. Especially when they have a big sale on. Its my favourite place to go a couple of times a year and buy two or three slightly unusual, completely feminine pieces that fit really well. Some of my absolute favourite (and most positively commented on) clothes are from Stax. This weekend I got a new pencil skirt with some flirty ruffles in the back plus two funky tops all at 1/3 retail. Score! I felt inspired by watching Trinny & Suzanne on TV on Friday night, I admit…

10. Photo-
I've made it to the end of July on my 365 challenge - so here is my proof of success for the month!

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday July 24, 2011

2011-07-25T18:10:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Good luck to all the people who have heavy snowfall warnings for their areas at the moment… Looks like its going to be quite cold for quite a number of days. They are even still saying we could get snow in Wellington!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Southland have won the Ranfurly Shield back off Canterbury. Awesome. I was totally gutted for them when they lost it at the very end of last season.

3. Social - Had a quiet week, which was lovely. Only big thing was going to Harry Potter 7 and then dinner with both sets of parents on Monday night. Was that really only this week? Seems much longer ago than that!

4. Online - At this time of year, Weather Warnings are important to keep track on, especially if you are heading out and abot

5. Funny / Random - Sitting at home on Sunday night, the weather had been awful all day, and I’m wrapped up in a thermal, fleece, slippers and blanket on the sofa, drinking green tea while Mark is sitting on the other sofa in a t-shirt, drinking orange juice. I just could not get warm, even hovering over the stove while making soup and bread rolls for dinner didn’t warm me up enough to carry through to the end of the evening! We definitely need to do some work on reinsulating the house this summer in preparation for next winter, and that big window in the lounge WILL be double glazed by this time next year!

6. Personal Thought / Musing -Boredom is so totally the biggest risk to my attempt to lose weight. When nothing is happening at work, I eat. I get told off if I spend too much time away from my desk or on the internet (and really, the nets kinda boring anyway when you consider the sites I limit myself to at work because they are completely safe). And I cant really pick up too much other stuff off other people, because when we are busy I don’t have time to do any of it, and also a lot of their stuff I cant do on my login for security reasons (I can set up vendors, therefore I cant enter invoices for payment). My desk is tidy (although it could do with a clean now), my filing is largely up to date and I am now stuck sitting at my desk, waiting for emails or phonecalls asking me to do stuff.

7. Coming Events - Couch warming / games afternoon this weekend, and then Mark is looking to be away with work for most of next week.

8. Resolutions Update -I’ve started losing weight again! Ok, so 300g is not much, but considering I was relaxed about it and didn’t push myself too hard this week, that’s a good effort I reckon. I’m still not sure about this pro-points thing with weight watchers – if I ate all the points I was allowed to during the week, there is no way I would lose weight! I had all my exercise points and ¾ of my weekly points left on Sunday and had still only dropped 300g… I’m also worried for myself that I know that there are these “extra” points available – I suspect I will likely end up using a fair number of them some weeks simply because they are there… I also set myself a separate challenge recently, of trying to take at least 10,000 steps 4 days a week or more (gym classes / workouts are not included in the count). I managed 3 days this week, plus one that made it to 9,000, so I’m happy enough with that and will definitely keep the challenge up (although that gets harder with this nasty weather as being outside is the last thing I want to do!)

9. In Other News - Our kitten is starting to settle down. We managed to get her to just sleep from about 1am till about 5am this morning, which was an achievement, as we had previously had nights of being woken every hour or more regularly! I got some lovely cuddles yesterday afternoon on the sofa.

10. Photo-
This is what large parts of the country look like at the moment! (This is an old photo from snow in Christchurch, September 2005)

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday July 17, 2011

2011-07-20T18:29:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - To Nat, who has announced she is pregnant, best of luck doll - I hope it goes really well for you!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - The Wallabies lost a rugby test to Samoa. Wicked.

3. Social - A quiet week for the most part, we spent a lot of time around the house sorting stuff in preparation for getting the kitten and having Marks parents visit for the weekend. They wound up coming for lunch on Saturday and then dinner (with my parents as well) on Sunday. Friday night we went out for drinks with friends, but that was still a fairly quiet night, home about 9.30pm. This week coming we are off to see the final Harry Potter movie and then nothing for the rest of the week. Bliss!

4. Online - I got an email on Sunday night telling me about Outward Bounds new scholarships for people affected by the Christchurch earthquakes - they are running several special courses next month. If you know someone who fits their criteria, suggest they apply. You really do have nothing to lose except old baggage!

5. Funny / Random - Seeing a cop pull over a cyclist who ran a red light. Awesome piece of perfect timing that one – should happen more often, as some of the cyclists around here think the road rules don’t apply to them.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I am so thankful that I broke some of my usual routine on Friday. When I went to the gym, I couldn’t be bothered digging my wallet out of my bag while I was running late for a PT session, so I put my rings in my shoe instead of my wallet. When I left the gym, I was rushing to get to Leuven to meet Leonie for a drink, so I put my rings back on instead of digging out my wallet – usually my hands are too swollen to get my rings back on after a workout.
All this became very good when I discovered Saturday morning that I had lost my wallet on the way home from Mojo. Thankfully the wallet was handed in to the bus company minus only its cash (about $80). Phew!

7. Coming Events - Harry Potter 7b Monday night, we’re busy planning a weekend up the mountain at the ski lodge in August with Jared and Alexis, as well as Ed. We’ve also now been engaged for two years. Not celebrating it though…

8. Resolutions Update - I bought new scales on Sunday morning so now I can weigh in at home first thing in the morning, which is more accurate. I’m also planning to definitely re-join weight watchers this month because the weight is slowly creeping up and I don’t think I’m being self-accountable enough at the moment. Exercise-wise, I really need to get my a-into-g now that my hamstring is healed, as Mark is still talking about us doing the Rail Trail between Christmas and New Years.

9. In Other News - We have a kitten! On Saturday morning Mark and I went to the local SPCA and came home with Myrtle (their name for her), a black-tortoiseshell tabby. She is gorgeous, although also a bit timid. We think we’ll call her Checkers (spelling to be confirmed) for various reasons, including that her personality is as all over the place as a game of checkers!

10. Photo -
Our kitty

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday July 10, 2011

2011-07-12T18:00:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck -Thanks to all the family members who were in Taupo for the weekend for making it surprisingly pleasant – I had been nervous about so many of us in one house, but it all went really smoothly, although I think Mark is probably nearly as tired as I am after running around with the little kids all weekend! I have to say that it was hilarious having two different Uncle Marks around when talking to two different under 5’s (my cousin is 4, so Dad was Uncle Mark, while my niece is nearly 3, so Mark was Uncle Mark). Definitely caused some confusion!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Unfortunately NZs Silver Ferns lost to Australia in the final of the Netball World Cup in Singapore. But that’s ok, they are still Commonwealth Gold medallists. Given that the top six teams in the world champs were also at Delhi, it really is about the same competition. And we lost by one after beating Australia by one at the games. Shows how evenly matched the teams are! (oh, and Go the Queensland Reds – Super 15 champions for 2011)

3. Social -Apart from the weekend with my family, I also caught up with Emily for lunch, which was awesome, and we went to dinner with Sam, Michelle, Nick and Penzy, which was a great evening with lots of dessert!

4. Online - An interesting post from Meg at apracticalwedding.com about how your spouse does NOT need to know everything thats going on in your head, and being able to be autonimous and keep small secrets is actually not a bad thing. Basically, she puts it much better than I ever could.

5. Funny / Random -Our random lesson this week was in chocolate bars. On our way home from Taupo, we stopped in Waiouru for a chocolate bar each (and a toilet stop). I bought a Moro bar, and Mark bought a Moro Gold. Turns out the Gold has twice the saturated fat in the same size bar. Wow. I would never have picked that.

6. Personal Thought / Musing -Being sort-of unwell is really quite exhausting. I’m not sick enough to stay home from work, but I’m not 100% awake and with it while I am at work. I reckon I could do with about an hours nap each lunchtime. Having spent the weekend running around with the little kids didn’t help renew my energy levels either!

7. Coming Events -Marks parents are in town this weekend, so things will be busy, and we are planning to go and buy a kitten from the SPCA this weekend as well. Add to that needing to spend some time sorting out stuff for the vege patch and its going to be full on! After that we have a few quieter weekends coming up, and Mark is hanging out for August when he gets to go up to the mountain for a couple of weekends.

8. Resolutions Update -I’ve been crook all week with a cold, so exercise and cooking have been minimal while I have been trying to rest instead. Diet-wise it was a tough weekend, with lots of driving and 4 meals out in 48 hours. Mark and I tried to minimise how bad this was by sharing meals where possible, so I don’t think we did too badly, and we didn’t snack much. My photography has largely been an after thought since we got home from holiday as I am really tired and just cant be bothered, but I am nearly 200 days in to this darned challenge and I am not giving up now!

9. In Other News -We have a new lounge suite arriving next week! I cant wait to finally get rid of the awful, saggy and uncomfortable futon we have at the moment. Shame its not arriving this week so we have plenty of seating for Sunday nights dinner with both sets of parents… We bought it from Hunter Furniture, a NZ owned company and its made in Christchurch, so we are doing our bit for a Canterbury retailer hit by the earthquakes down there. We got a great deal on it, and it should be a very comfortable sofa for a good 10 years. Only took us 12 months of looking to find something, and we decided on it almost as soon as we sat down on it.

10. Photo -
Another one from our holiday as I havent shot anything even remotely interesting this week!

Random 10: Fortnight Ending Sunday July 3, 2011

2011-07-06T22:15:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Good luck to Michelle for what we are all hoping will be her last exam for becoming a Patent Lawyer. Its been a tough few years getting through these exams, that’s for sure.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural -Snow is finally falling on the skifields. Lots of it is on the forecast for this week. Might be a decent ski season after all!

3. Social - This week coming we have dinner at Sam & Michelle's with Nick & his girlfriend, then away with my family for Nans 70th birthday in Taupo for the weekend. Should be entertaining – so long as I can stay well long enough to survive it all!

4. Online -A big oops from the head of the Employers and Manufacturers Association... Suggesting women are paid less because they are less productive / take more sick leave due to menstrual problems. We might EARN less because we take sick leave over and above whats allowed, but we shouldnt be being PAID less on an hourly basis in case we do it!

5. Funny / Random -The Friday night we were in Auckland, there was a 2.9M earthquake right by Kelly Tarltons (where we had been earlier in the day) and apparently a whole pile of people freaked out. We didn’t feel it – were in the process of leaving Vector arena with about 10,000 others at the time! But the headline article on Saturday mornings NZ Herald was “The night the earth moved”. Hilarious. So we survived the “Big” Auckland quake of July 2011.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - Winter holidays are great – until you have to come back home to the reality of cold winter! We had to borrow extra blankets in Auckland, and we have the flannelette sheets on the bed at home now. Definitely thinking we need to do some work on re-insulating over the summer to make sure the house is even warmer next winter. At the moment its not too bad, but it’s a bit cold at times still, and our only heating is a pair of oil-fin heaters… I’m hanging out for getting a couple of panel heaters installed, but we need an electrician to come visit before we can install them as we don’t have power points in the right places!

7. Coming Events - Nans 70th, a visit from Marks parents, arrival of our new lounge suite (!), shopping for a new kitten (!)

8. Resolutions Update - No new meals this last fortnight – too busy getting sorted and being away on holiday. I didn’t even really try any interesting food while we were away! Exercise was mainly walking while on holiday (over 9 days I did an average of 14,000 steps a day, not bad!), and I now have a cold, so its very light when I do any. Weight loss has again stalled – I’m back where I started 6 weeks ago, heres hoping its just the cold.

9. In Other News - Our holiday was awesome. I took far too many photos, and now have many hours work ahead of me to try and edit a couple dozen for Facebook, and a few different ones for Flickr. We did Dreamworld, Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, MovieWorld and (once back in Auckland) Walking with Dinosaurs. Our little pad in Surfers was just right – comfortable and clean, close enough yet away from the noise. Our treat night in Brisbane was wonderful. Best nights sleep I had all holiday. Our three nights in Auckland were hell – overlooking a bar that pumped music till 2am. Oh the joy. But we managed to catch up with Jared and Alexis, which was wonderful, and we had dinner with Ange and Greg (?), which was fun, so it all kinda balanced out. I now have a cold.

10. Photo -
Two photos today, since its been two weeks since I posted this.
One is from the start of the longest night (yay for winter solstice proper being past!)

And the other is from our recent holiday - this is the closing moments of Walking with Dinosaurs

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday June 19, 2011

2011-06-20T18:50:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck -To Gen and Trevor on the arrival of Kaitlyn. Cant wait to come visit and meet her!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - The weather has finally turned cold and winter like. Good news for the skifields is that its starting to snow – even though its not much and theres no base yet, at least its snow! Hope some of the fields should open soon… (Mainly so I can send Mark away for a weekends skiing and have the house and bed to myself for a couple of nights! Its really odd to have him home this much…)

3. Social -The Kings & Queens themed dinner on Saturday for winter Solstice went well – the food was divine (and there was far too much), Roast Lamb, Shanks, Chicken, Turkey, vegetables… Wow. And it was great to spend time with Hadyn & Marion as well as getting to know Putri and Peter better.

4. Online - A friend linked to this article on facebook the other day, and I read it and had to agree with her – Dads who are more involved in their kids lives are great, and everyone has some friends who are Dads who need to read it and realise just how stressed their wives / partners are because they aren’t stepping up to the plate and really being there beyond a paycheck. One of my male friends took exception to the tone of the article (he read it as being “look at all these chicks I could have scored by being a good Dad), but I think his suggestions are no less valid – any Dad who can say he makes a good fist of 5 of the suggestions is doing darned well, and if they are making an effort to do several of the others then they are an excellent Dad. I admit, I worry for one friend in particular who is getting very stressed because “Dad” seems to think that he does enough work by going to work, and her work is raising the kids, 24/7. Everyone needs a break every now and then!

5. Funny / Random -A week out from holiday and as usual we have next to nothing planned… We have our flights, accommodation and a rental car booked but that’s it! (and the rental car is because Mark spent hours checking prices and timetables for the train from the airport to Surfers, and it would take much longer and cost half a weeks rental one way). Other than that? We have a couple of ideas, and we’ll see from there – same with Auckland for our three days when we get back. For a couple who are in to details, we seem to do this a lot with holidays: “Lets go there, and decide what we are doing while there once we get there!”

6. Personal Thought / Musing - Maintaining weight-loss motivation is hard. I have a distinct tendency to sabotage myself mentally – I just don’t think I’m worth it a lot of the time. Its really sad to find that I don’t think my own health and well-being is worth the effort of exercising more and eating better. The frustration I have in trying to find nice clothes that fit and don’t cost the earth doesn’t help – normal stores just don’t carry tops that are flattering on me (skirts and pants are no problem, I have far too many of those in my wardrobe already), and the stores that do stock nice clothes that would probably fit me well are so expensive I cant bring myself to try anything on for the sheer price of it!

7. Coming Events -Well, this weekend coming we head to the Gold Coast for a week (so you wont hear from me for a while), then theres Taupo, and then visitors from out of town, possibly a weekend up the mountain and its suddenly the end of July and it will have been two years since we got engaged… Yikes time flies!

8. Resolutions Update - We cooked something new last week and it was scrummy. Although one of Marks workmates didn’t like the smell of it reheated! Our plan now is that the week after we get home from holiday we will sit down with some of the recipe books we have, pick out a few new recipes each and start cooking one a week. The photography challenge is still going well, and the physio has cleared me to start trying out more exercise as I feel comfortable, which is exciting!

9. In Other News -Air travel is returning to normal around NZ, touch wood. All the airports are open, and as far as I can tell, all the airlines are flying. This bodes well for our Saturday morning flight to Auckland and Saturday afternoon flight to Brisbane. I cant wait!

10. Photo -
I wandered up to the top of the cable car to watch the moon come up the other night, and got this awesome shot!

Week Four: We are so not managing to make this

2011-06-19T17:09:00.000+12:00

So, last week I received a comment that mentioned that when you are on one income, you dont have this magical "other account" for things to be paid for out of, and thats a fair call.
But Mark and I are doing this for fun, and we DO have this other account - for very specific parts of our expenses, as specified the week before we started this challenge. Even if we didn't use that, we also have a very substantial savings buffer - currently sitting somewhere between half his annual income and the entirety of mine, so were we to drop to just my income suddenly (unlikely, even if Mark were grievously injured and couldnt work, there would be ACC and income protection cover to help us out), we would still be OK for a while - but we certainly wouldnt be replacing our car, or our lounge windows in a hurry!
Doctors visits / physios / prescriptions (with a few exclusions) can be claimed back on my work health insurance - hence why they dont show in our budget. Things for our trip to the Gold Coast next week are also not being included, as the tickets were bought months ago before we decided to start this challenge.

If we had not had surety of Marks income, we wouldnt have taken out a mortgage, and would instead still be renting. Our weekly rent was slightly more expensive than our fortnightly mortgage payment for our fixed term portions, but we also would not have also had $800 worth of revolving credit interest charges and rates to pay in one week, which would have meant that we would never have overspent in any week (mentioned exclusions notwithstanding) so far on this challenge.

This week we have also sat down and calculated how we would be doing if we were living on just Marks income - and if we added in every cent we have spent (barring the new windows, as they should have been here months ago and therefore paid back then), we have spent roughly all of his income plus well less than one week of mine. When you consider that this includes two years membership fees for Marks club, a tramping trip for both of us, having my wedding dress drycleaned (finally) and a new lens for my camera, I think we have done quite well - because living on just his income is going to be our lot for a while if we have kids.

So, this week we have had a little more entertainment, both needed cash out, had dinner out together (at the Oaks Satay Noodle House), and bought 20 meals worth of meat...
The breakdown:
Food: $139
Dinner Out: $23.60
Bus Fare: $50
Costumes for fancy dress dinner: $18.00
Cash Out: $140

Outside budget this week was membership fees (once a year cost), Me to the physio and Mark to the Dr and Pharmacy. Our fancy dress dinner was paid for a couple of weeks before we started the challenge. We are, however, another $70 ahead of where we were this time last week, which is a bonus. Slow but steady progress is being made. If we hadnt had the rates, we would have overspent by only $145 over four weeks (yes, I know this is excluding lots of things!)

We finish this up on Friday this week, as we are off to Australia and Auckland for a holiday on Saturday, and have decided not to try and figure in our spending while away on holiday! That said, we have already decided that we are going to continue working on this and trying to figure out ways to bring our spending further down in the future - so this theme will continue on next month, when we have the fun challenge of a family weekend in Taupo, a ski weekend and a visit from my in-laws to contend with... Chances of surviving all that one my income?? Nil.

Recipe of the week

2011-06-15T20:43:00.000+12:00

Moroccan-style Chicken and Pumpkin Stew (serves 4-6)

Pumpkin is SO cheap at the moment, and here is a super tasty way to use up a large amount of pumpkin in a single meal. The pumpkin becomes the stew thickener as it cooks and disintegrates, and you still get lovely chunks of it if you chop it into different sized pieces. Tastes just as good the next day as leftovers!

Ingredients
•    Spray olive oil
•    1 onion, finely diced
•    1 clove garlic, crushed
•    1/2t chilli flakes
•    2t smoked paprika
•    1t ground cumin
•    1t ground coriander
•    1t cinnamon
•    100g per person chicken breast or thigh, cut into small pieces
•    1 granny smith apple (can be replaced with ~1T sugar)
•    2C (more or less) peeled and cubed pumpkin
•    1.5C chicken or vegetable stock
•    Juice of ½ lemon or lime
•    Other vegetables as desired (Carrot, green beans etc)

Method
•    Heat the olive oil in a large non-stick pan. Over a medium heat, cook onions and garlic until onions are soft but not brown.
•    Add the spices (and a little more oil), stir to combine and cook another couple of minutes
•    Add the chicken, turn in the spices, then add apple, pumpkin and stock.
•    Bring to the boil
•    Reduce heat and simmer, covered for 20 minutes.
•    Remove lid, add other vegetables and simmer for a further 10 minutes or until sauce has reduced and thickened.
•    Squeeze in juice
•    Serve over couscous or rice.

Alternatives
•    Mix spices (including garlic) in liquid olive oil and use to coat chicken as marinade. Skewer (with or without pumpkin), cook on BBQ and serve with a side of hummus, salad and rice (like an iskender).
•    Swap out some pumpkin for kumara.
•    Slow cook it – cook on low for 6-8 hours. Reduce stock to an amount that covers the meat and pumpkin plus a little. Add other vegetables about 45 minutes before serving.
•    Change the chicken for any other kind of meat – just make sure you change the stock as well!

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday June 12, 2011

2011-06-14T21:14:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - To the ever-hilarious Prince Phillip, who turned 90 this week! Some of his mutterings are nothing short of hilarious. Wonder if the Queen will send him an official card for his 100th birthday??

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural -There is this massive ash cloud from a South American volcano kinda floating above NZ at the moment. Apparently its making awesome colours at sunrise and sunset – I haven’t seen any yet. Its not impacting the weather, its still clear and not too cold. (the skifields are not happy), but I’m really hoping it clears up rather than gets worse when we have a flight to catch next weekend to start our holiday! (I’d rather not be able to get home, lol)

3. Social - My photography class had a field trip on Saturday, and then on Sunday my photography friends were off to Wrights Hill for a couple of hours. I am all photo’d out, but it was great to see people on Sunday who I hadn’t seen in a couple of months.

4. Online - Photos from the photography meetup I went to at Wrights Hill on the weekend

5. Funny / Random - Being down two staff at work (out of 5) and not noticing an increase in workload. I almost don’t want the one who is actually coming back to do so! What I am meant to do with all the free time I’ll get when she takes her work back??

6. Personal Thought / Musing -I hate clothes shopping with a passion. I have been trying for six months to update my work wardrobe, get some office-suitable new tops. Do you think I can find anything that looks halfway decent?? Everything at the moment makes me look fatter than I really am (which, I admit, is a little bit fat). Or worse, it makes my chest look small and my belly look pregnant! Mark has life easy when it comes to shopping for work clothes - he sees something he likes, tries it on and buys it. We have never gone shopping for new work shirts for him and come away empty handed, and he now has over three weeks worth of shirts in the wardrobe!

7. Coming Events - Mid-Winter solstice dinner this weekend, off to the Gold Coast next weekend. Wicked! Then off to Taupo after that for a weekend with family before Marks parents come up from Christchurch for a weekend after that.

8. Resolutions Update -Sod the lot is about how I feel right now. I weighed in on Friday and was another 1/2kg down on Tuesdays weigh in, but come the end of the weekend I just don’t care. Meals are boring as anything at the moment while we use up whats in the fridge and cupboards since we are going away at the end of next week (so I really need to get on with that whole new recipes thing).

9. In Other News - The winter blues are getting to me. I am finding it so hard to get up in the mornings and I have so little energy all day at the moment. Spring cannot come soon enough! On the plus side, at least the shortest day is next week, so the days will start to get longer – More daylight hours = happier me in general.

10. Photo -
The Chateau Tongariro, taken a few weeks back, and finally edited!

Week three: Going nowhere fast

2011-06-13T21:08:00.000+12:00

For a week when we felt like we spent nothing, we came out only $50 ahead - worse than the first week on this challenge!

We bought next to no groceries (although Mark splashed out $20 for a dozen beers to take away to a mates bach on Saturday), and we only needed one set of weekly "sanity" cash, and only one bus card needed topping up.

That said, we did need to put petrol in the car, which was over $100, and really did make a lot of difference!

We are definitely noticing differences in our general spending habits - what used to last us one week is now lasting closer to two.

Outside of budget this week was the remainder of the windows payment (about $1800), a physio appointment for me and an Osteopath appointment (total $53), and a new camera lens for me (yes, I know. I should count it, but its such unusual spending that I'm going to not, and claim it as an early birthday present for September).

In Budget:
Food: $76.20
Petrol: $112.50
Mitre 10: $72.00
Cash Out: $80.00
Bus Card: $50.00

Sum total $615 including mortgage payments - not bad on an "income" of $660.00 a week

This week coming is looking good - although we will need to buy meat because we are basically completely out come Sunday, and then next week we are away on holiday from the Saturday, so the week will terminate early (Friday evening) so that I can write it up before we go away.

We are thinking that the rates bill that came in last week might be moved to "out of income" expenditure, as we have a much higher chance of making it back to a zero balance if we remove it! We are also confident that we will seriously consider starting over again once we are back from holiday and settled at home - perhaps for August. That said however, its then Ski season, and I KNOW Mark has plans for a couple of weekends up the mountain!

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday June 6, 2011

2011-06-08T18:40:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck -Adrian and Sandra are pregnant again – this time with TWINS! Congratulations and good luck with those!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - On Saturday the weather was nice, so we spent the day in the garden – finally pulling all the weeds out of the vege patch (although the rain on Sunday means they are sprouting again), transplanting the rhubarb into a sunnier spot, planting a new potato, mowing the lawns. It was fantastic to get so much done without feeling exhausted from rushing to fit it in on the weekend.

3. Social -A busy long weekend in the end! Dinner and drinks till after 1am at Mikes on Saturday, then a beer tasting for a couple of hours with Hadyn and Marion on Sunday…

4. Online - Facebook in the news with more privacy concerns... Surprised? No?

5. Funny / Random -Lounge Suites. OMG. Who would have imagined it would be SO difficult to find a decent sofa?? Our futon is falling apart something wicked (and has been for a while), so we have determined that it is time to replace it. Everything on TradeMe looks awful – saggy, dirty, uncomfortable, falling apart – so we have given that up. But everywhere else we have been, the sofas come as suites that are HUGE! (or singles that are heinously expensive and ugly as sin) We only have a small house, it cant be that hard to make a decent, comfortable 2 plus 2.5 seater suite, can it??

6. Personal Thought / Musing - Our coming holiday in the Gold Coast just cannot come soon enough for both Mark and I. Work is hectic and stressful for us both and we are seriously running low on energy. Yay for a week and a bit of theme parks, sleep ins and (best of all) no work!

7. Coming Events -Mark is away this Saturday night, so I’m thinking about heading off to a dance party / competition with ceroc – depending how my leg is holding up… Then its only a couple more weeks till our trip to the Gold Coast and Auckland, which is immediately followed by a weekend in Taupo for Nans 70th and Marks parents coming to visit. Our next “free” weekend is the end of July – yikes!

8. Resolutions Update - I’m starting to enjoy working out again now that my leg isn’t constantly in pain – I even managed to do a 2min25 500m row on Friday (a vast improvement on the 3min+ one I did a week earlier), and jogged on the treadmill for a minute, which is something I don’t like doing, but the physio wants me to. Photography is still going well, I’ve only come close to giving up a couple of times so far, but I am finding that the daily challenge is sucking up time I would spend on editing good photos from trips in aid of taking what is really an average photo just so I don’t miss one.

9. In Other News - About this time last month, a new recycling scheme was put in place in our lovely city. Shame the local council are nearly completely inept. Our unit was assessed as “not suitable for a bin”. I don’t have a problem with that – we wouldn’t have space to keep one, I love not having to drag the bin back up the drive at the end of the day, and its one less bin to end up in the middle of the road on a windy day (or to have to go hunting for somewhere down the road, I don’t know what the council would plan to do for people who lose their bins to the weather gods). What I do have a problem with is that the bags that we should have received to use instead of the bags have still not been delivered! We have emailed the council several times (since I refuse to sit on hold for more than a couple of minutes at a time). Our neighbours did manage to get through, and got their bags delivered within a couple of days. Thankfully Mary took pity on us and gifted us a bag so we could do our recycling today – its already been 4 weeks since we could last put out general recycling (and we have ONE wine bottle for the glass recycling next week), and it would have been SIX weeks if she hadn’t…

10. Photo -
From my weeks photography class homework: Active / Emotional Lighting

Week Two: Starting the fight out of debt

2011-06-06T20:39:00.000+12:00

This week was always going to be tough.
Not only was it the start and end of the month (Mortgage payments, gym membership etc), but it was also rates day for the quarter.

So at the end of the week, we had overspent by $643.92 (nearly a whole weeks wages), and thats excluding the things we had specified as NOT coming out of my wages - a physio session for me, one new work top, some finishing touches work on the windows ($153.72 worth).

That said, we have returned to our usual arrangement of grocery shopping on a Sunday rather than a Monday, so there are two weeks worth of groceries in this weeks calculation. Interestingly, even buying a bottle of wine to take out for dinner on Saturday night at a friends place didnt put us over $200 for the two weeks! Awesome. But we are very definitely sticking to a shopping list now, and will likely need to meat shop next week, which is fairly expensive.

We both also needed cash this week, and Mark had to top up his bus card.

From here all we can do is continue to take care not to waste money on stupid purchases. Realistically, we are doing fairly well - its just bad timing! We are fully confident that by the end of this month we should be at least down to only about $100 over total over 5 weeks.

So, our spending:
Food: $198.06
Bus Fare: $50.00
Gym Membership: $95.85
Other expenditure: $160.00

And, as already mentioned, our end of week balance is -$643.92 once we take rates and mortgage payments into account. Ouch. Power bill should hopefully come through this week coming - it should have been in this week been... Goodness only knows what they are up to as its a direct debit!

We also have no big expenses (apart from the power bill) scheduled for this week, so thats a big bonus!

Marriage thought for the day

2011-06-04T12:39:00.000+12:00

"Marriage is not a feeling, nor a piece of paper. It is an act, a project, a commitment, a celebration, a struggle, a state of mind, an obligation, a shared piece of work."

from the comments on this blog post: http://apracticalwedding.com/2010/06/sex-marriage-a-bisexual-perspective/#ixzz1OGNhYs4U

The post itself is also well worth reading. :)

Week One Roundup

2011-05-30T20:37:00.001+12:00

A surprisingly easy week I have to say. I don’t think I really noticed any restrictions this week.

But then, we had things easy to a degree. We had plenty of meat in the freezer, and a reasonably well-stocked pantry, so groceries were under $40 at the start of the week. We were also only cooking for 3 nights on those groceries as we were away for the weekend and had dinner at my parents place one night.

We did “shop” 3 times in the week, and spent a total of about $100 (which was our budget), but that included our share of the group food for the weekend and a bottle of wine to enjoy with dinner on Saturday night. It also included takeaways for dinner in Bulls on Friday night, where we chose fish n chips over kebabs to halve the price.

Each time we shopped we shopped to a list, and stuck to it. Monday night groceries saw us with a list of about 10 items, Friday night in Levin we had a list of 6 things that cost nearly as much again!

I hit the end of the week with about $10 left out of my personal spending money, which is not a bad effort, considering I often fritter away $80+ a week normally without realising what I have spent it on. Its especially good when you consider that I bought several household grocery items with that personal spending money this week – like when we ran out of sandwich meat mid-week.

Our phone / internet bill came due this week too, and was paid all in one – we have counted as coming out of just this weeks budget. Our power bill is due next week or the week after. Being the end of month, our revolving credit debit interest will be charged in the next week or so as well, and its end of quarter, so our rates bill is due this week too. The calculations for this week coming show that even without doing any grocery shopping we are over budget by $160 (and thats carrying across this weeks credit), and Mark needs to top up his snapper. Oh well. Hopefully we can balance that out by the end of the challenge!

We didn’t have a lot come through in the “outside of budget” category for the week. Enough to cancel out any leftover money (and then a little) – the fees for our weekend trip to the tramping club lodge (a trip we had signed up for a few weeks back), and one session of physio for my sore knee – a total of $171.

So: we spent
Phone / Net    $95.07
Food    $100.61
Bus Fare               $50
Other Expenditure $60
Total                 $305.68

Leaving us a credit balance of $134.91 after adding the mortgage in. Not bad.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday May 29, 2011

2011-05-30T20:18:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - Happy Birthday to my little brother, Jared for Tuesday. Love you heaps bro. Also thanks to all the people I was away at the mountain with on the weekend, it was a fantastic trip, considering the official trip had been cancelled!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural -We had a great variety of weather at the lodge on the weekend. On Friday it was misty and cool with a light wind. Saturday dawned cloudy and generally yuck, and developed into a really miserable day – constant rain, sometimes heavy, icy-cold gale force winds – although it apparently wasn’t that bad down the mountain. Overnight it snowed, and we woke on Sunday to beautiful sunshine and a dusting of powdery snow, although the wind was still bitingly cold when you were out in it. Thank goodness the sun melted the snow so it didn’t ice over on the road like the patch that was sheltered from the sun by our van did.

3. Social - A casual weekend at the lodge is great. Being the only person there for 6 hours while everyone else goes for a daywalk and then stops at the chateau pub, and its pissing with icy rain outside, not so much. Lesson learnt. Don’t bother going for lodge weekends when you cant do the daywalks.

4. Online - I am still shocked by the fact that people have called this woman a Nark because she wants people to speak up when they see children being abused. Personally, I’m joining her facebook group. I support what she is trying to say.

5. Funny / Random - Through his work, Mark is participating in a step-wise challenge, so he is wearing a pedometer every day. He also got one for me. This is interesting sometimes… For example, on Sunday we went for a walk together. At the end of it, (an hour and a half up and down hill), his pedometer said about 4,500 steps, while mine only counted about 1,700! By the time we got home through 5 hours in the van though, mine had overtaken his again…

6. Personal Thought / Musing - I have to agree with my friend Edwards most recent blog post. Switching off is fantastic and essential in todays technology-overloaded environment. I love going away tramping, or to the beach, or up the mountain because these activities give me an excuse to not tap in to technology. Yes, the skifield has full 3G access, but that doesn’t mean I need to have my phone on me. More commonly its left in the bunkroom all day and checked when I am in there. The beach house doesn’t have Vodafone signal at all, and Mark and I both enjoy that (apart from when he is on call for a long weekend, because then we cant go out there and would like to).

7. Coming Events - Long weekend full of sleep-ins (thanks Queen Liz for the fact we get an extra day off for your “birthday”), then its only about 3 weeks till our next overseas adventure on the Gold Coast!

8. Resolutions Update - This weeks new recipe was a chocolate self-saucing pudding from the Edmonds recipe book. It was really yummy, and not rich, which was great (although the fact I didn’t have any brown sugar to use on the topping may have influenced that). I tried to exercise on Thursday, but had a comedy of misadventures, culminating in the discovery that all my gym gear was really wet. Back on the band wagon this week though!

9. In Other News - We arrived in Johnsonville last night to see large numbers of police racing through town. So much for a quiet suburb. They all congregated at the police station, turns out some looser had been chasing some teenagers down his street with an air rifle. No surprise the cops turned out in force. He’s lucky he wasn’t shot.

10. Photo -
Something on my desk at work

Disaster! Averted

2011-05-26T18:23:00.000+12:00

Yesterday on the way home I put $50 on my bus card. Its our traditional amount - just under two weeks worth of travel and a nice round amount.
This morning I could not find my card ANYWHERE.
Bugger!
Mark paid me on to the bus this morning and I paid cash coming home because I had no other option.
Thankfully, we found the card this evening - it had come out of my jacket pocket stuck to the back of my wallet when we went to tramping club last night and was in the car.
Phew!

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday May 22, 2011

2011-05-24T22:00:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck -Congratulations and Good Luck to Abby & Josh who have announced they are pregnant – not twins though!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Coming in to winter, and we have had a run of surprisingly good weather! Also, yay for it now being less than a month till the shortest day – hopefully my energy levels will start increasing again as the days get longer!

3. Social -We spent the weekend at the club lodge doing the start of season maintenance – cleaning everything, bringing in the bulk food etc. It was actually a great time, mostly (apart from it getting a bit rowdy with people talking over themselves, but that wasn’t helped by me being tired) and we are off to the lodge again this weekend, just because we can, with a different group of people from club, after the club trip we were meant to be taking was cancelled due to lack of interest. (yet we have 11 of us heading up there for the weekend). Should be good :)

4. Online -A very very cute white kiwi was recently born at Mt Bruce. Check out the video on stuff.

5. Funny / Random -When we were at the lodge at Easter, I thought the storeroom looked exceedingly barren. Then we got up there to do the food drop and maintenance, and all the food had been pulled out of the storeroom – and it was a LOT! The “leftovers” from last season took up two of the three tables in the dining room, which seats 32 comfortably.

6. Personal Thought / Musing -A group of us had a discussion over dinner in Bulls on Friday night about the fact that Mark and I are spending some time living on my income, and got into the ways that we each save money on food was a big part of that – considering I know that everyone in that group is on a good income, it was interesting that we all constantly maintain a vigilance about saving money on our food, and making it go further. Its not as if any of us have experienced the hard times of the great depression. But at the same time, if you look at it, it is the way we all make sure we can still live comfortably – practical food choices can make a huge difference to your budget!

7. Coming Events -A weekend at the lodge, a trip to Australia, my Nans 70th birthday.

8. Resolutions Update -Mark and I are both wearing pedometers most days at the moment because Marks work is doing a walking challenge. Its definitely motivating us to get moving. As for working out at the gym, its been very off-and-on for the last few weeks with trips away, the sore leg etc. I’m still managing to take a photo every day, although I almost forgot on Friday – thank goodness I took a photo of the last, lonely piece of cake at morning tea or I wouldn’t have had one!

9. In Other News -We have started our one-income challenge, and its already generating a lot of comment on my facebook page! Stay tuned for more about how that goes and what we find most challenging.

10. Photo -
I finally got around to doing some smoke photography, and am now definitely looking forward to doing some more!

Tightening the belt

2011-05-23T21:41:00.000+12:00

(Apologies if this is a bit all over the place. It’s a hard post to make logical!)
So, Mark and I have set ourselves a challenge of trying to live as much as possible on just my income for the next 5 weeks. And now that we have sat down and figured out our budget, we can already see we are unlikely to make it.

After paying the mortgage, we will have $360 a week to pay for everything else. Here is a rough breakdown of what expenses we anticipate:
Groceries: $100 / week
Internet: $95 / month
Gym Membership: $22 / week
Power $120 / month
Petrol: $100 / month (about one tank)
Bus Fares: $32 each / week
These broken down into weekly spends comes to $260. That leaves $100 a week for other spending – personal sanity money, other expenses etc.

Our list of things that are being paid for out of Marks income includes the following: A couple of new work tops for me (which I have needed for the last 6 months), a new pair of shoes each (Marks sneakers, my work shoes), Insurances (house, car, contents, life), WoF / Registration / Repairs and servicing for the car, Tramping trips, the balance due for our new windows, Rates. All up, these add about another $2400 to the next 5 weeks ($1500 of that being new windows).

But, once that time is up, the continuing costs of that group drop to about $100 a week (working on the assumption that new clothing will start to come out of the weekly sanity money). That’s the rest of our “sanity” money taken away though if we want to live wholly within my income. Which we don’t, so that’s ok – this really is more about finding out where we are wasting money and what our lifestyle will be like with no income.

Looking forward, if we were to have kids, the extra costs involved in raising kids (and the fact that with Marks income being SO close to the current upper limit for Working for Families payments with one child, and actually crossing it regularly if he continues to do as much overtime as he does) would probably mean that we would be living a similar lifestyle because much of the extra money he earns over mine would be sucked up. Ouch. Talk about an incentive to keep working – I like my lifestyle!

So it begins. The big attempt to live on 1/3 of our available income. I have serious doubts about how close we can get – but I’ll be happy if our base expenditure (excluding the above listed things) comes to less than $100 a week over on average.

The way this will work for reporting purposes is that each Monday we will start fresh. Our spreadsheet will show my income, less the fixed portion of our mortgage. Then, as bills are paid, and money is spent, it will be deducted from that income – so I am not taking an “average” amount a week off for power, phone, interest on the revolving credit etc. These will be accurately recorded when they happen – adds an extra challenge in that we have to be able to look at this weeks income and save some of it over to next week.

I don’t doubt that within the first couple of weeks we will spend some time in serious “overdraft”, because of the timings of bills. Hopefully we can pay it back by the time we finish and end up in credit at the end of 5 weeks (or at least a minimum amount of “debt”.

I’ll be reporting each week how our last week went, and what challenges we faced. How badly overdrawn we are (or not, for at least the first week I hope), how empty the fridge seems, and what treats we had to give up.

On that note, we shopped last weekend and were away this weekend just been, so we have plenty of meat (did a bulk meat shop), but no milk and bread. We have quite a few canned foods, lots of flour and other baking goods as we stocked up over the last couple of weeks before we decided to do this. We have decided that it is not worth getting rid of any of this to make it more challenging, as this will be challenging enough, and if we were to suddenly lose income, we would likely have enough notice to stock up on basics in advance. At the moment, we only really need fresh goods and some cleaning products. So, we are lucky in that regard, as we might be able to save a bit on groceries for the first couple of weeks.

Another way we will make the record keeping easier is that if either of us get cash out, we will only record the cash withdrawal – and not bother trying to track where that money goes to start with.

Anyway – Let the fun begin!

Budgetary Restraints

2011-05-18T22:11:00.001+12:00

This week Campbell Live have done a series within their episodes of people living on certain specified amounts of money that are less than they are used to. Its all in a leadup to tomorrows government budget announcement – trying to show just how hard people on low incomes are struggling at the moment.

One example was a family of 4 trying to live on a single income of $50,000. Given that the two boys in the family were both obviously in school, I don’t understand why a second income of some description wouldn’t be attempted, but that’s beside the point.

The family struggled. They were used to doing things that cost money, and eating more extravagant food – they didn’t have a store of cheap menus or activities that they could draw on. They were nearly out of food and had about $40 left to last them three days, and the car needed petrol as well. Fair enough that it’s a struggle to maintain a family (especially with growing kids) on a single “average” income. These guys did obviously put in a serious effort.

The next day, the show featured a woman living for a week on just her Superannuation payments. She currently works part time as well as drawing down on her super, so usually has an extra $200+ a week in the hand to play with.

Well. This story annoyed me. First she complained because she had used 2/3 of her petrol allocation for the week on getting to and from work in the city – plus the parking! So she changed her work hours to enable her to use her SuperGold Card and get free travel. Knowing what she was doing for the week, she should really have done that from the start I think.

Then she moaned about being unable to afford her “little luxuries” like a nice glass of wine, or nicer cuts of meat. To top it all off, she then told us that she was heading to Auckland for work for two days, and only had about $60 left to last her out the rest of the week – “That’s only about $25 for dinner each night, which barely covers food, let alone incidentals like a nice glass of wine”. WTF.

She was travelling for work, her breakfast and lunch were provided, and she couldn’t see how she could have dinner for less than $30 a night. Oh to live a life of such privilege! When I posted about this comment on Facebook last night, all of my friends were equally as appalled, and many had multiple suggestions for places to eat (assuming she was staying at a hotel and therefore couldn’t cook) that would cost about $10 a meal – allowing plenty for a glass of wine to go with it.

Anyway.

Mark and I have decided after watching this that we are going to try and live on just my income from now until we go to Australia at the end of next month – about 5 weeks. We have certain things that are already outside that scope, (any car repairs / registration / insurance etc, the rest of the replacement cost of the windows, additional bookings for our trip, the couple of tramping trips we have scheduled, a decent haircut for me at the end of the challenge etc) and these will be more clearly defined and specified before Monday when we start. We are working on the theory that day-to-day living should be able to be contained within my income, which is substantially the smaller of the two, and almost all of Marks income should be able to be saved.

Thankfully we still actually HAVE Marks income – so really this is an acid test for what would happen if one of us were out of work for a while, and a GREAT opportunity to save a fair whack of money into our mortgage payments / European holiday fund (Given that we are both likely to need to take up to 3 weeks unpaid leave to go to Europe doesn’t help the budget!)

Having done a rough calculation, even with being fairly penny pinching, we probably wont quite make it – initial calculations suggest we will be over budget by about $10 a week. Considering that’s taking our rough current spend on basics + mortgage and reducing our income by about 60% for 5 weeks, I reckon that’s pretty good. Especially when you consider that chances are we would be more likely to need to live on just Marks income in the future as his work is busy and he is in demand, while I am temping and subject to more of the vagiaries of fate.

So, for the next 5 weeks I’m going to be regularly blogging about how our financial experiment is going, what we have found challenging, and the ballpark figures of what we have been spending against what we allowed ourselves. The fixed cost of the mortgage will be taken out of my income before I detail any financial values – meaning that where I specify that we have, say $300 a week to cover x, y and z, that is my income less the mortgage.

You never know, we might actually find that living on a small budget isn’t that bad – and it would certainly help pay the mortgage down faster!

Six Months and Honesty

2011-05-16T20:44:00.001+12:00

This was meant to be posted on Friday 06/05/2011, but Blogger had issues and then I got busy and forgot... And I'm not going back to edit it again!

Today marks six months since the wedding. In that time we’ve had a two week holiday in Australia, bought our first home and debated what renovations it needs, hosted Christmas and booked our next holiday. I have started a new job, had my contract extended and been told to hang around for next years new jobs round. Mark has had his first birthday as a married man, and it was a nice night with just the two of us, a lovely dinner, marble cake and a bottle of good wine.

We have had some minor health issues, mainly mine, of the kind that leave you wondering whether you need to take a pregnancy test or whether this is the new normal (thankfully neither). We have discussed if or when we will have kids.

We have had playfights, and a couple of real fights – but nothing substantial. Our “real” fights are more like disagreements. One of us will get huffy and maybe storm off, and within a couple of hours all is forgotten. Alternatively, the one who is not being stressed out by how something is not working will take over to complete the task and the stress is broken. We work well as a team. Mark sometimes makes me "angry" because I cant stay angry at him. He'll annoy me or momentarily neglect me, and then give me that smile or make me laugh and I just cant stay angry. Sometimes this annoys me... Sometimes I love it.

In fact, our first six months have been remarkable for being really unremarkable. Life has continued plodding along as always. We’ve had periods of time when we haven’t had a weekend to ourselves for what seems like forever, and we’ve had times when we have nothing on and feel like real homebodies.

We have continued to socialise with our friends, and have tried (with varying degrees of success) to maintain our habit of hosting people for dinner once a month. We DID have successful housewarming and New Years parties at least.

We have started doing some basic redecorating. The man comes next week to replace the windows in both bedrooms. We've started thinking about where things would hang well, rather than what can go on the existing hooks that the previous owners left behind. We finally have prints of wedding photos on the walls. We're debating buying a new lounge suite.

Mark has given up on dancing. Now that the wedding is out of the way he feels he has fulfilled that obligation. I want us to start going again, simply as something sociable and fun, but I dont feel the need massively, so havent bothered to push the matter. Perhaps its time to try a new style, as Mark doesn’t feel confident to go back to the level we were at in Ceroc, but also doesn’t want to drop a level either.

I have come to love my wedding, and finally harbour only two regrets: the way I wore my veil (especially now I have taken it off the comb it was on and realised it looks beautiful with my dress when its only a single layer thick) – but I get to remedy that on Sunday when I do a trash-the-dress type photoshoot – and not having had the photographers stay longer – although that one is nowhere near as important anymore, since we don’t look at our wedding photos regularly anymore anyway!

More importantly, I love my marriage. As with all marriages, it needs constant care and attention to ensure it doesn’t stagnate, but this is a joy rather than a chore. I love treating my husband to nice meals because I can. I love having only joint bank accounts and sitting down together to set financial goals on a regular basis. I especially love knowing that we have enough money that I don’t have to worry about whether its just about payday and is there any money in our account. (Although, that said - as a way of saving lots of money to pay for our trip to Europe next year without having to delay repayments on the mortgage we have decided to have a go at spending some time living on just my income for day to day expenses)

That said, I don’t want anyone to think that life is perfect. We still both get grumpy at each other, we still regularly disagree over household chores. I still get annoyed at Mark for always making it my decision as to what we are doing for dinner, for the weekend, to fill in some spare time. He gets frustrated at me for being melodramatic, he hates when I’m sick because he feels useless and he gets seriously exasperated when I get emotional over a book or movie (and then I get angry at him).

I’ve put on weight. For a while it was just the weight I had lost in the 10 days before the wedding, but now its creeping closer to what I weighed before I started trying to get healthier early last year. Exercise has been out the window a bit because of all the upheaval, and the less I exercise, the more I crave sweet foods. Then the heavier I get, the more I emotionally eat. Once I can get my exercise sorted out again things should start to improve in that regard.

But overall? Life is pretty good. Many of our friends are having kids, so we get to be the Non-family Auntie and Uncle to some of them, which we are excited about. We're off to Aussie this year and Europe next year. And we are still madly in love.

I call that a win. Heres to us.

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday May 15, 2011

2011-05-16T18:43:00.001+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good luck - I’m waiting with baited breath to find out if one of my friends is having twins – she is getting her scan done sometime this week and OMG I want to know!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Sunday saw some miserable weather in the morning – a nice thunderstorm to wake us up at 6am, and again at 8am. So we stayed in bed late until the weather cleared up a bit.

3. Social - Jims party was awesome. This weekend we are off to the lodge for the weekend, and it will be a great chance to get away from town for a couple of days.

4. Online - I’ve set up a Facebook Page for my photography – now trying to drum up some business and make some money! Also, see photos from last weekends Bride Parade here… (I'm the one in the silver dress)

5. Funny / Random - Being both one of the youngest people at Jims birthday AND one of the people that has known him the longest – and in terms of % of my life, I think only any younger siblings would win…

6. Personal Thought / Musing - Thank goodness for good friends. Friday night was just the balm both Mark and I needed. We’ve both had a couple of hard and long (and exhausting) weeks at work lately (Mark more so than me), and being able to go to drinks on Friday with Ed, Mike, Bronwyn and Paul and just talk shit and chill out was fantastic. It definitely made the weekend better for both of us, so thanks guys!

7. Coming Events - Next major event is our trip to the Gold Coast and Auckland at the end of June. Yay! I cant wait to head away.

8. Resolutions Update - Working out somewhat. Still need to get around to joining weight watchers again – but I’m too busy to do that sort of tracking at the moment…

9. In Other News - A colleague has offered Mark and I free kittens! Yay! They aren’t vaccinated or desexed, so I have to research that before we say yes or no – to compare the cost with getting one already vaccinated, desexed and chipped from the SPCA. Also, Mark only wants one, workmate wants both to go to the same place…

10. Photo -
Jim & I went for a wander on Wednesday evening to take some photos of the city at Dusk. Here is one of my favourites

Short Stories

2011-05-10T21:34:00.000+12:00

Over at my Tramping Specific Blog, I have a nice long, detailed account of my Easter tramp.

For those of you not interested in the details, here is the entire 3,600 words summed up in exactly 500 words (A good little challenge for myself!)

For Easter I went tramping. It was a longer tramp than I usually do, and I haven’t done a lot of tramping in the last 12 months – what with a wedding and husband working an on-call roster getting in the way. Day one reminded me again of why I decided last Easter to give up tramping entirely – it was miserable. There was a cold breeze, the terrain was far more challenging than it had looked on the map (every stream was in a deep gully) and we moved with exquisite slowness.

Arriving at a dark, poorly laid out, exceedingly hot and nearly full hut was a bitter blow to my exhausted brain. Day one had had me in tears on two occasions, simply from exhaustion. A too spicy dinner wasn’t enough to make me feel better and I went to bed dreading getting up the next morning.

An early bed time had meant phased sleep – woken on a regular basis by someone who tossed and turned all night, needing to get up for the bathroom at 11pm, and again at 3am, being wide awake when the sun rose over the Kaimanawa Ranges and shone straight into my eyes. We headed off fairly early, hoping that our length of day would be more like what DoC suggested, which would give us time to rest before dinner at our next hut.

Day two was slow again, but at least it was warm and I was in a much better mood. I had moved from “I am never doing this ever again and want out of here now” to “I’m never doing anything longer than overnight, and never coming back here”. My bad knee started playing up, and my good knee went out in sympathy because it could. We crossed a massive river valley, and endured some awful boardwalk – sometimes it was better to not use it at all!

Arriving at the hut early afternoon and finding that it was not only bathed in sunshine and sheltered, but that it also had a view was fantastic. This is what tramping is about. A divine dinner and dessert was followed by time stargazing on the deck. Sunset and sunrise were both worth seeing (and sunrise was at a respectable time).

Day three I was still slow, but I was moving. We had 5 bridges between us and the roadend, and we marked time between the bridges. Our driver walked in from the road end to meet us, took most of the group with her on a side trip to another hut and left Crème eggs in the van. Back to the lodge for showers, we then hit the local hotpools for the afternoon before returning to a roast chicken dinner.

Traffic home on Monday was a nightmare. Slow wasn’t the half of it – leaving Whakapapa at 11.30, arriving home at 6pm with a half hour stop in Bulls…

I was glad to have Tuesday off to have some peace and space! (and do laundry)

Random 10: Fortnight Ending Sunday May 8, 2011

2011-05-10T20:36:00.000+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck -Thanks heaps to Isaac and Amber of Perspectives Photography, for an awesome Sunday spent getting completely glammed up and going to awesome locations to get some smoking hot photos taken with a whole bunch of friends. I am desperately hanging out to see our results!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural -I’m on forced leave from tramping longer than short day walks for the next few weeks because I have a small tear in the distal end of my Biceps Femoris muscle. Straightening my leg is beyond me at the moment. The physio has basically said that I’m not allowed to do any tramping until she says I can. I am, however, allowed to walk, cycle and do pump classes (but bodyweight only on squats and lunges) provided I don’t get pain.

3. Social - Bride Parade Sunday. Talk about the social event of my year so far. 10 ladies, 3 photographers, 3 locations. 10 bridal gowns (we all wore our own), high fashion looks. We had coffee at the Bach café in Owhiro Bay while we did individual shots and then dinner at Monsoon Poon. A 13 hour day, well worth the hangover effect on Monday at work!

4. Online - Fashion from the Royal Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (Prince William of Wales and Catherine Middleton). How Did Beatrice and Eugenie get it so wrong??

5. Funny / Random - Arrived for hair and makeup on Sunday and not only was one of the artists a girl I went to intermediate school with. And I know I recognised my artist, but we couldn’t place how we knew each other. Frustrating!

6. Personal Thought / Musing - It is incredible how disabling a leg injury is. I feel like such a cripple – walking is hard, getting up from my desk requires serious thought, I cant just whip across the road, up the stairs, down the stairs… And yet I need to keep up the motivation to keep exercising, especially since I am in an incredibly sedentary job – there is a high risk of my injury causing the muscle to shorten if I don’t keep it moving as much as possible. This could be a physically frustrating winter. And yes, I know I’m much better off than many other people, but its just so annoying!

7. Coming Events -Jims 50th this weekend, then Lodge winter season set up working party the weekend after that, followed by a tramping weekend at the lodge the weekend after that! Then there is Queens birthday weekend and we have NOTHING planned. OMG I cant wait. Oh. But Mark is likely to be on call, so going away wont happen…

8. In other news -Mark survived a week in Christchurch, and I survived a week without him. Unusually, I slept really well while he was away. But I also didn’t eat well, which was bad.

9. Resolutions update -Apart from photography, I haven’t really looked at my others in a while. I did use a slightly different recipe for cooking my lamb shanks for dinner on Friday night, but no other new recipes, and exercise hasn’t been high on the agenda for most of the last 3 weeks – I’ve done some tramping and seen my PT once. On the plus side, my weight is holding steady, but I still plan to join weight watchers

10. Photo of the week -
From the bride parade on the weekend - the girls getting set up for a group shot

Apologies

2011-05-03T19:43:00.002+12:00

Sorry I havent done a Random 10 this week, but I also dont think I am going to get around to it...
I just really dont have anything interesting to say!
Later :)

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday April 24, 2011

2011-04-26T20:03:00.001+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck - Thanks to all the guys on the weekends tramp, especially to Tim for coming back and collecting my pack off me a couple of times on Saturday, which was a really tough day for me.

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - Tramping was definitely tough this weekend. There was a lot of snow still hanging around from last weekend in drifts, but at least the weather was nice until we got back to the lodge on Sunday night, which was a total blessing. Waking up on Monday morning to heavy morning, and knowing we could stay inside until it was time to leave was fantastic!

3. Social -Nothing!!! Woohoo!! Well, apart from tramping, which was tough. I was really glad to get home and get away from being in a big group by the end of Monday. That said, I dont like the fact Mark is away this week.

4. Online -The Auckland girls have done their 2011 Bride Parade, and now its only 2 weeks till our Wellington one! Cant wait to get some awesome photos like these...

5. Funny / Random -the jokes coming out of our van on Monday on our very slow drive home from the mountain. Anyone would think we were really drunk or something...

6. Personal Thought / Musing -I'd forgotten how hard it is to lead large groups over extended periods. Last Easter, the group had fantastic dynamics and worked together really really well. This year? There were a few annoying personalities. I was worn down and snappy by the time we got home, thats for sure. I think the fact we had to drive home rather than being on the ferry (and therefore were stuck together for more hours at the end) made it tough too.

7. Coming Events - My next photography course starts in a couple of weeks. I cant wait! Oh, and its the royal wedding this Friday night... Might have to record it and watch on Saturday, since Mark gets home Friday night.

8. In other news - One of my friends has announced she might be having twins. Cant wait to know for sure!

9. Resolutions update - Not focussing on anything to do with this this week - Easter tramp had me too busy! But that said, we used a new recipe for a tramping dinner - a thai green curry that wound up being FAR too spicy!

10. Photo of the week -
From Mangaehuehu Hut on our tramp this weekend

Random 10: Week Ending Sunday April 17, 2011

2011-04-21T09:18:00.001+12:00

1. Congratulations / Thanks / Good Luck - Good luck all around to the baby swarm – from Christmas last year to Christmas this year I think I count about 15 babies among my friends. Nuts! I didn’t even manage to escape the rush of weddings before the rush of babies arrived! Joyfully, many of them are first kids – so we’re starting to get a few “you’ll be next” calls… Thanks, but I’m still on birth control, so its unlikely!

2. Sport / Outdoors / Cultural - A cold snap pushed its way up the country in a hurry over Sunday night / Monday. Snow has been predicted for many areas – our first good fall of the season.I doubt any of it will hang around for the weekend though.

3. Social - Other than lunch with Jim one day this week, it has been very quiet – a good lead up to next weekends tramping trip!

4. Online - Another of my favourite blogs is "ending" on stuff.co.nz. Gutting. Have a good time in Rarotonga, Anne! (Ok, so technically she isnt actually ending her blog, but I suspect she wont really have a lot to say once she has settled in to Raro - I mean, theres not a lot there!

5. Funny / Random - Waiting at the airport for Mum and Dad on Monday night, I had just climbed back into the car after taking some photos of Mt Vic from the airport lookout, when Mark and I saw a meteor or shooting star (or something along those lines) fly across the runway and then spark and die. Very cool.

6. Personal Thought / Musing - Thankyou to Nigel Latta for his reminder in this weeks show that Life is not meant to be easy. It’s a lesson I wish I had been able to learn years ago, but things back then were just too hard, and I didn’t have the coping mechanisms. Now? Now I understand that things get tough, and yes I’ll moan and gripe about them, but they certainly don’t affect me as badly, or for as long as they used to. Can only be a good thing, right? I’m also working on being more positive in general – taking a leaf from my friend Jo’s book. She had a tough pregnancy, but she kept her humour about it, and most of us never really found out just how hard things were.

7. Coming Events - Tramping for Easter and that’s about it at the moment. My next photography course starts next month, which is exciting.

8. In other news - My contract at work is being extended by 12 months, which is fantastic, and I am picking up a whole pile of new work for while one of the ladies here is away for 6 weeks. My only concern is what on earth I will do to fill my time when that’s all over and done with.

9. Resolutions update - Turns out the weight is staying manageable, which is a plus, and I’m starting to pick up exercise again now that my back is better. I cant wait till next week when I can start going to Tuesday night combat classes again though!

10. Photo of the week -
Shot while waiting for Mum and Dad to get home on Monday night