Entries from March 2007 ↓

Next project is company colours for the first Xero baby – I was stoked to be able to find such bright wool. Go the odd little knitting shop in Left Bank!

I’ve obviously been a slacker in the social/housework/get decent sleep departments of my life because it just occurred to me that despite constantly working long hours I have still managed to knit and read.

So far this year I have:

Knitted

• almost 2 cabled jackets for the Washington twins

Read

• Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls
  
• Alexander McCall Smith, Kalahari Typing School for Men
  
• Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life
  
• Patricia Cornwell, At Risk (not one of the Kay Scarpetta series)
  
• Maggie Alderson, Cents and Sensibility (glorious chick lit)
  
• Jennifer Cox, Around the World in 80 Dates (more chick lit)

and am now reading

• Julie Powell, Julie & Julia (about a woman called Julie who decides to cook herself through Julia Childs’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking)

Quite staggering really!

My hunch was right! Ghuznee Street *is* being reversed when the second stage of the city by-pass is completed this weekend.

Thanks to my colleague (he who takes arty photos that the Mister aspires to match and he who brings his visiting parents to dinner) I can show what I think the intersection of Ghuznee and Victoria streets will look like from Sunday morning.

(Black is existing flow, orange is new)

I think the Mister and I will camp out with our breakfast on Sunday morning and see how the traffic copes. Everyone arriving by car to the Victoria Street Sunday market will have an interesting time! 

Cheffed up a storm for Father-in-law last night. Because it was his birthday we had to make something with meat and chocolate. I was disappointed in the chocolate thing (I hate chocolate so making anything with it is pretty gross anway) but it was gobbled up amidst â€œyum”s so, shrug, not sure why it looked funny … and I think I overcooked it because the middle was supposed to be runny …. aaanyway …. a variation on the meal we cooked for previous guests:

Rosemary & garlic coated lamb fillet
Sweet pepper & date couscous
Green beans

Soft-centred chocolate puddings

There is one bill I still have to go into town to pay. The car registration. Until now!! Finally a great walk-through experience paying online by credit card. You need to be anal and well prepared like me though because the registration ticket takes a few days to arrive. Yaaaaay Land Transport!

And burgers he got (must’ve been all that manly DIY that gave him a hankering for meat).

New York burgers with Onion Jam

(Not a photo of one of our burgers sadly, it’s one from the fantastic New York cookbook we got on our date to the new Borders on Friday night but I swear, ours looked just like the picture (for once!) Minus the pickles.)

As apartment dwellers, DIY home maintenance is a very rare thing for us, and usually, the types of DIY required are those that can wait until one or other of the Fathers can do it properly. Even if we did know what to do and were really keen to spend our weekends fixing things up, we don’t have a great range of tools in our shoe box.

However, with our first grown-up art purchase of 10 days ago, we got supplies from Mitre 10 and a drill from the Brother and were determined to hang it ourselves.

So, using every absolutely sensible thing my Father ever told me about fixing stuff, plus all the absolutely sensible things I’ve observed him do all my life, we charged the drill, we made ourselves a cuppa and read the instructions for the stud-finder, we tested it out, we found the studs (and checked at least 10 times to make sure the beeeeeeeep wasn’t just a dead rat or a builder’s left behind hammer in the wall), we measured, we measured again, we put our foot on the bit of wood on the bathroom floor (on top of another bit of wood so as to not drill into the tiles), we used the big drill bit to make a little recess for the screw head to sit in to be flush, we screwed a hole for the screw, we made sure the Mister knew how to get straight on behind the drill and lean into it when the screw-once scre-right time came so as to not go on an angle or into the wrong spot on our enormous, perfectly painted wall, we checked the level before screwing in the second screw, we tightened up the screws by hand, we tested the bracket strength, we washed our hands and we hung our beautiful photo.

And we smiled the smiles of hanging to level and centred perfection with the marriage still firmly intact 🙂

I was dragged out of bed in the dark this morning at 6am in response to ‘spider face’ … this being the Mister gone grey, eyes popping in sheer panic because the spider that he suspected was camping a way up in the skylight above the kitchen bench (because of a growing web) had finally come out to sit on the web in plain view. He really does get petrified – how could I not help? (Well, mostly because it meant he couldn’t go into the kitchen and make my lunch and breakfast actually).

Anyway – groggy in my PJs I got up onto the kitchen bench swaying with half-awakeness and looked up into the skylight to see where the spider was. This was a feat in itself because it was still dark outside so black spider, black sky through the glass meant I couldn’t see much plus it’s very difficult to look around a blinding halogen spot light only to be blinded a second time by it’s reflection in the black glass. However, with the panicked Mister trying to hand me the vacuum cleaner and NoMoreSpiders trigger pack at arm’s length without coming into the kitchen  I didn’t have much choice but to persevere. Got the vacuum cleaner precariously balanced on the bench counter and went in for the kill – SUCK – bye bye spider, and bye bye cob web and bye bye anything else that was in the other corners or on any surface of the skylight as frantically instructed by the Mister (“over there over there! Did you get that corner? What about that bit down the side? Is all the web gone?“). Sprayed a dose of NoMoreSpiders into the vacuum hose for good measure.

However, the sneaky bugger of a spider had hidden in a crack and after a minute or so came out again. Oh dear the Mister’s spider face was worse than the first time. So again – SUCK – got it that time! I felt awake enough by this stage to attempt NoMoreSpiders around the skylight however, knowing that spraying up would result in being showered I covered myself with a towel and went for it. It was just awful standing there being rained upon by NoMoreSpiders. I nearly cried. However, anything to save the Mister.

And I mean anything – next up was to prove to him that I had indeed rid our house of the spider. I pulled vacuum cleaner apart and put the dust catcher bit in the sink and sifted through it until I found the dead spider – this is the bit of my job as wife and spider catcher that I don’t like – showing the dead – especially as it’s usually only barely recognisable. So, despite my avid following of forensic shows and books where decomposed bodies are examined and picked through, I gagged and all the while pretended that it was one of those shows as I poked in the dust to show him the mangled body. Another measure of NoMoreSpiders into the dust ball just for good measure and we were finally right.

Late to work by about half an hour but breakfasted, and with lunch in my bag so a worthwhile early-morning job after all. Oh, and I can tell you that for days the Mister will be like a dog friend of ours (once saw a cat on a walk by the river 8 years ago and still goes back there every time to see if it’s still there) and stand at the skylight looking up just to make sure the spider is gone.

P.S. The spider was one of those common tiny little brown ones.

Yesterday 🙂 We’re going on a Borders date tonight.

No this is not my grandpa or anyone else I know but get a load of his huge mutant carrot!

Weighs in at 1.5kg apparently.

Source: story on stuff.co.nz