Entries Tagged 'Random thoughts' ↓

We were out to dinner on Saturday night in Blenheim and when we got home we saw the end of Saturday night’s U-Choose Top 40 and this week it was boy/girl bands. It was pretty painful sitting through about 12 music videos (hey I was knitting, it just happened to be on in the background) but it was pretty scary just how many I could sing along to! Our friends were impressed! It’s crazy how all the bands are the same yet there are so many of them that have been successful in their own rights. As far as the boy bands go:

• usually 4 or 5 boys
• they’re all very moody looking
• there’s always one very young looking one and one who’s a bit different (whether it be hair, skin or eye colour)
• they all look like they’re miming when they’re singing
• videos have an obligatory white outfit and a scene in a tunnel (usually with blue walls or blue lighting) and a scene at an airport or with a plane in the background

[While I was ‘researching’ this post I had to visit a few boy band sites to find some images – yikes – and was subjected to sound bytes blasting out of my Mac … hmmmm, have yet to learn a) where the volume knob is and b) how to quickly shut a TAB ONLY in the browser without shutting everything that’s open because if you just switch to another tab the song keeps on going!]

Anyway, here’s the top 10 as voted by New Zealand viewers on Saturday night … *NSync the winner on the night:

1. Bye bye bye –  *NSync
2. Flying without wings – Westlife
3. I want it that way- Backstreet boys
4. Wake me up before you go go – Wham!
5. All the small things – Blink 182
6. Stop – Spice Girls
7. Step by step – New kids on the block
8. Blame it on the boogie – Jackson 5
9. Keep on moving – Five
10. Mmmbop – Hanson

You’re humming or singing one of them now aren’t you? … 😉

Just cruised around a few blogs of people I know (boys) and in their lists of the blogs they read regularly there are none by girls! Mind you they’re fairly geeky bloggers and I guess there are still far more boy geeks than girl geeks. Plus girls have categories on their blogs like “pussy cats” and “woollen things” – hmmm, serious stuff that inspires …

In an effort to see some daylight and not work too hard for a while I have gone out with a friend the last 2 lunchtimes in a row. Haven’t done that since I was about 22 in my first job! Anyway, noticed a few things:

• There are a lot of people on the street and a lot of women in shoe shops.
  
• There’s quite a few people around Wellington at the moment that shout. I mean just random people on their own shouting at the world – saw 2 of them today alone.
  
• House of G have just released their range of t-shirts with designs printed on them by top NZ fashion designers in order to raise money for breast cancer research. Strange thing is, while I was standing in the store waiting for my friend, half a dozen women came in asking for large sizes – 18’s, 20’s and the like. The t-shirts don’t go up to that size. It struck me that these women were all a bit older and had started to (no diplomatic way of saying this) ‘spread’ and they and their friends and mothers could well be right in the market for these t-shirts as they are more likely to be women who have suffered breast cancer and therefore want to do all they can to stop it happening to others. T-shirts to fit flat-chested teen body shapes are just not in demand in this case – not sure who thought up the size range. I felt pretty sad for these women – I know just what it’s like to have your mind set on something to buy and when you can’t find it it’s just so disappointing.

Crikey! It’s 8pm and it’s 27 degrees outside! So muggy and so un-Wellington!!

Just leapt up from watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to rush outside onto the lawn and look up at the huge Bay of Plenty sky to see the International Space Station that was due to ‘fly’ over New Zealand between 8.59 and 9.05 tonight. And we saw it! Very exciting. Well, if you get excited by a slightly bigger than normal looking star whizzing across the sky. I do. Here’s actually what was flying by:

Apparently it orbits the earth 15 times a day and is 340km up. Wonder if the guys on it get travel sick?

Last night – 6.8 – that’s pretty big. Mum phoned to check we were alright as it was felt up and down the east side of NZ. They’re not that far from Gisborne and reported it was the worst they’ve felt in years and almost comparable to the Edgecumbe earthquake in 1987 – I was in Rotorua at the time and it was pretty bad.

Gisborne was pretty shaken up last night – this picture from stuff.co.nz:

It got me thinking about what I remember from the Edgecumbe quake. I was at high school.

• I was in a biology class, rows of 2-by-2 old style desks – those wooden ones with lift up lids and a hole where the ink pot used to go.
  
• We all hid under the desks – back then there was no triangle-of-life confusion. It was just get under something!
  
• The fences around the tennis court outside our class room were warping like crazy!
  
• Our wobbly old biology teacher just stood there swaying (as was her natural state) wondering what all the screaming was about.
  
• The water in the axolotl tank at the back of the class room was sloshing out over the sides, and I was petrified of those walking carnivorous fish, so I confess, it was me that started the scream fest!
  
• We had to evacuate the school.
  
• I couldn’t ring my parents who lived 1.5 hours away because all the phones were down.
  
• The pictures in the newspaper and on TV of cracks in the land around Edgecumbe where the fault line had opened up were really alarming.
  
• I saw on the TV news that the 2 main bridges into Whakatane (where I needed to go through to get home to mum and dad) were cracked or fallen off the river bank so were impassable and I couldn’t get home for 3 or 4 days.  Amazingly enough a bridge out in the sticks, made of sticks and tied together with twine built way back when was the only one unharmed. It just creaked and swayed but didn’t break.
  
• Cars that were angle-parked outside the shops in Edgecumbe were bumped up onto the footpath and into shop windows.
  
• I made a scrap book. I must dig it out!

I found this old archive of pictures on the local radio station website. I remember seeing all of these at the time! Yikes 80’s fashion was bad.

Nice car … one day maybe … It was parked outside our house a couple of days ago but unfortunately it was not the salesman we know from Team European bringing us one to test drive!

Again, I marvel at how teenagers these days keep their trousers up. We’ve got one working in our office at the moment and he is literally sitting in his boxer shorts directly on our office furniture! Following on from the photo I took of a random fella at Fuel, here’s the derriere of the lad currently in our office …

Central Wellington has been very disrupted the last 2 afternoons in a row by 2 long power outages. No-one seems to know why. I listened intently to the news this morning and in local news they did say something (I improvise):

Wellington CBD had its second major power outage yesterday afternoon following on from one on Monday afternoon. Many shops and offices were forced to close and send staff home. Someoneorother from NZ Girl on Customhouse Quay said that they lost thousands of dollars in revenue over the two days. “We had to close our shop and send our staff home when it became apparent the power was going to be off for a few hours. We rely on a lot of foot traffic around lunchtime and after work and because the surrounding offices and shops shut there was just no-one around”.” –end

HUH? What kind of news story is that? WHY where there outages? WHAT caused them? ARE there going to be anymore? WHEN will we feel confident that things are back to normal? WHERE is the spokesperson from the power company?

I did see this piece on stuff.co.nz this morning which kind of explains it but it was really just a summary of who was affected and how long it took to get the power back on.

She said the two power cuts occurred during an upgrade of Vector’s Wellington network but were not caused by the same thing. They were the result of different cable faults at different locations.

Why is there a trend these days for sausages and chicken drumsticks to come in packs of 5? It’s not that we now have an extra to feed that I’ve noticed this, it’s been bothering me for a while and I have been trying to figure out the rationale behind it.

• Is the typical NZ family decreasing from 2.4 kids to 1 kid – meaning 2 sausies each for Mum & Dad and 1 for the kid?
• Are the supermarkets (especially the city ones we go to) recognising a trend for couples to not have children and so they are catering for a Mr & Mrs-sized family only? And are they not decreasing the pack size to 2 sausies each because they also recognise that the childless family probably work crazy hours (including the Mrs so she’s never home to cook) so eat out lots with the ‘cafes and nightlife at their doorstep’ therefore not getting a decent-home-cooked-meal very often so the man about the house needs 3 sausies?
• It doesn’t seem to be a weight thing – the packs of 5 seems to vary anywhere between 680g and 900g so it’s not as though they are 500, 750 or 1kg packs.
• Perhaps its a tray-sized thing … maybe hormones and water filling mean that all you can fit on those little black polystyrene meat trays is 5 sausages or 5 drumsticks.

Having said all that, I upended the entire chicken bit of the fridge in New World this morning until I found a pack of 6 for our family – 2 each. Thanks!