Holidays

Another 3 weeks since the last post, & again it has been incredibly busy. Busy in a good way though, with lots of social events. I'm sometimes surprised how much we have going on, considering that we still don't know THAT many people in Wellington!

A few weekends back we had a wine-tasting evening hosted by one of my fellow maths teachers. There ended up being 14 bottles of wine to blind-taste. We were given a list of the vineyard, grape variety, region & year, & had to match each wine up. I did OK, coming in second equal place with 8 correct, 1 behind the winner.
Each weekend Will & I try to do something around the house, & a couple of weekends ago we hung up our dryer. This ended up being bit of a mish! The previous owners had left the bracket up on the wall for us, but it was so close to both the ceiling & the wall that it was a nightmare job! It ended up taking us a couple of hours... We ended up sitting the dryer on a couple of wooden crates left over from the move. We then built it up with wooden blocks so it was pretty much the right height. Then it was a case of pushing it straight back so that it locked into the bracket. It was well worth the effort as it has freed up loads of room in our laundry.

When we bought our house the house-warming gift from the estate agent was a catered dinner party for 6 from Nosh. We had this last Saturday & invited our immediate neighbours on both sides. Nosh delivered the food in a big box on the Saturday morning. All the food was in foil trays ready to heat in the oven, with full instructions of what temperature to heat each thing for, & for how long. It was a lovely meal; roast mushroom herb & pine nut filo with tomato & chilli dip for a starter, sirloin steaks with potato salad, tomato & rocket salad, & grilled peppers & courgettes for the main, & chocolate mud cake with orange creme fraiche for dessert. We have cool young couples living on both sides of us so it was a brilliant night. We drank a disgraceful amount of wine & ended up snowboarding & 10-pin bowling on the wii until 2am!
I have now completed my first term & QMC & have thoroughly enjoyed it. It is full-on though, so I'm going to enjoy my 2-week holiday. We finished on the Wednesday & had staff petanque on the front lawn with wine & nibbles as our end of term social event. We did have to go in on Thursday but it was just department time up to interval, followed by a couple of hours of professional development. The school put on a nice lunch for us, then we were free to leave after lunch.
Friday afternoon Will & I picked my brother & a couple of his mates up from the airport. He is over on a flying visit from Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong a year ago, & that was the last time I had seen him. We had tickets to the Hurricanes/Crusaders game on Friday night.

It was an exciting match, especially for Warren's Hong Kong mate Dennis as it was his first ever rugby game. It looked ominous when the Crusaders went 18-0 up in the first twenty minutes. However the Hurricanes hit back & were leading by 5 with only a few minutes to go. Unfortunately in the last play of the match the Crusaders went over for a try near the corner to tie the match up. Dan Carter had a chance to take victory for his team, but luckily he missed the conversion. It wouldn't be a rugby game without a couple of Dan pics. Luckily for the Hurricanes he had one of his more forgettable games...

On Saturday Will dropped us into town before heading up to his office to do some work. He's pretty snowed under at the moment. We went up the cable car so Dennis could check out the views over the city. I then left the boys to their own devices & met up with my mate Marty who was in town for the Easter weekend. He was hanging out with some of his family at the Te Papa cafe so I met up for coffee & a catch-up. Will met me in town later in the afternoon & we checked out the Briscoes & Rebel Easter sales, picking up a few bits & pieces that we needed. That night we had a BBQ with some of my touch team which was a good night.

Sunday morning we dropped Warren, Jason & Dennis at the airport. They were flying to the South Island for a few days. Will did loads more work & I had a lazy day where I pretty much just curled up under a duvet on the window seat & worked my way through two weekend newspapers! I've been a bit under the weather the last few days with a nasty head cold, so it was nice to just chill out. It's the typical teacher thing of coming down with something as soon as the holidays start... We've got a couple of big fat wood pigeons who are regular visitors to our garden at the moment, gorging themselves on the berries from the cabbage trees
In other garden news... We have just picked the last of our cox orange apples which have been very tasty. Our walnut tree is laden with nuts at the moment & they are starting to fall. We've got a whole lot we are drying out on the windowsill. We also had a big walnut tree in our garden in the UK, but we never actually got any nuts off it as the squirrels would systematically strip the tree, carrying the nuts off one by one to bury for the winter!