Entries Tagged 'What I've been doing' ↓

So I’m receiving increasing pressure to blog which I will hopefully have time for while we’re in the States but in the meantime hope you’ve enjoyed the little rush of them over the last week. I’ve just had no time to sit down and do them when I get home and they’ve been floating around in my head bothering me. It’s weird that I have that feeling that I just have to get everything done before we go – at this rate I’ll have finished all my work before we get there and have none left to do – ridiculous because I’m not stopping work when we get there! Well, except for the first week off.

Anyway, it’s about this time of the night I find myself home at the dining table. Yes working. I often glance up to the traffic coming around from The Terrace and I always notice that many of them go over the double line onto the wrong side of the road. Some not so much, some a lot. Some so much that in the space of an hour there could’ve been some very bad accidents were a car coming the other way at the same time. The corner is pretty sharp, but there is a warning sign that it’s a left-angle bend and most people at this time of the day must be on the evening commute so surely realise how sharp the corner is.

So, in manner of nosy old woman twitching net curtains in a cul de sac, I decided to take 5 minutes to tally up how many cars came around the corner and how many went wide enough to be riding on the double yellow line and see whether any went way over.

The tally from 6.25pm – 6.30pm

• 65 – number of cars that came around that corner in 5 minutes
• 42 – number of cars that tracked a ‘good’ line around the bend
• 20 – cars that were close too or on the double yellow line (I define that as wide)
• 3 – cars that went OVER the yellow line (and a scooter!)

I was rather shocked!

Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but on TV programmes and in movies, whenever someone leaves their job they seem to do so with only one box. A brown or white file box, often with a lid and sometimes with a plant. Seems a bit dubious to me because I seem to have a lot of stuff around and under my desk, not to mention the collection of orange pens and post-it notes.

However, today we packed up our desks in the likely event that due to Xero’s continuing growth spurt new people will need to sit at our desks while we’re gone. After recycling my non-essentials I was very surprised that I have stuffed my 3 years at Xero into ONE box! Includes my collection of orange things, cup, framed pictures, the Xero User Guide when it existed in book form, a ream of orange paper and more!

It now waits in the storeroom with my special orange chair for my return.

So that’s our desks spring-cleaned, and the apartment – have scrubbed pantry, shower (with a toothbrush even!), fridge, balcony pots; emptied, scrutinized and repacked cupboards under stairs, basins and hot water cupboard and we’re now down to eating strange meals to use up bits of random food from freezer, fridge and pantry. And to top off the weekend The Mister went next door to see our neighbour who we don’t see for months (so she probably wouldn’t've noticed we were gone) to tell her about a stranger coming and going from our apartment only to be greeted by a stranger staying there while she was away – looking rather rumpled and disturbed in a bathrobe so he’s quite embarrassed. Dammit. The first time I’ve ever got him to go over to the neighbours and that. Now he’ll never go again. Sigh.

This year I’m doing a project that quite a few people have done – Project 365 – which is to take a photo every day of the year. I don’t really have an artistic goal in mind, not aiming to get better at taking photos or anything like that, it’s just I take quite a lot of photos of random, every day things anyway so I thought I might as well make a conscious effort to take and publish one photo a day.

So, January is over and I have 31 photos for the project so far.

The photos are published on Flickr, in my set called Project 365.

So you’ll have noticed by now that I have got all my photos uploaded to Flickr – well, all photos since May 2009 when I lost access to my original hand-made photo website that lived at orangethings.com for the last 10 or so years.  However, as an archive, I’ve kept the site as it was online at orangethings.com/archive if you want to look at photos as far back as October 2005.

A random sample of my Flickr photos is shown over on the right of my blog and you can click on a photo, or the ‘View all’ link to go to Flickr.

So, for Flickr newbies, some things you might like to know:

• The main ‘home’ page for a Flickr account is referred to as a photostream i.e. the constant stream of photos, and the main stream is sorted from most recent photo uploaded backwards. My photostream is flickr.com/orangegirlnz so you can bookmark that if you like.
• Photos are organised by ‘collections’ (like albums I guess) and within that ’sets’ – in my case my collections are very high level i.e. Family and Travel for now and perhaps 1 or 2 more eventually if I end up with sets that don’t seem to belong, and my sets are generally time-based by months because that’s how we’re all used to me presenting my photos and in travel the sets are by trip.
• Your choices for browsing the photos are by reverse order by just clicking through the photostream, or by a particular set by choosing the set you want (e.g. January 2010) from the right-hand side on the first page of the photostream.
• Once in a set you can choose to view a particular photo by clicking on the little thumbnail version of it, or use the ‘Detail’ link under the title of the set to see them all in a medium size. You can click again into a photo to make it even larger and see information about the photo e.g. date it was taken, tags (or categories) I’ve attached to it. To to leave a comment you have to have a Yahoo account.
• From a large individual photo you can click on the ‘All sizes’ button under the photo title to get a range of other larger sizes, including one good for printing. For best print quality choose ‘Original’ and use the ‘Download original size’ link that displays above the photo.
• You can always return to the first page of the photostream by clicking on the orange graphic or link that says ‘orangegirlnz’.
• From the photostream you can use the options under the title ‘orangegirlnz’s photostream’ to explore the photos by collection, by set or by tag. Tags are quite fun – every photo I’ve uploaded I’ve tagged with a topic like place names, people names, activities, food etc so by choosing a tag you can see all photos belonging to that topic.
• Remember, Flickr is an online service that millions of people use to upload their photos to so in your clicking around you may end up back in the general Flickr site – just get back to my photostream using my link flickr.com/orangegirlnz – the search box on the homepage of flickr.com is to search for photos, not people.

So to finish of the year the wind dropped, The  Mister cooked steak (not often cooked at our place and he said it was the best steak he’d had in a long time), the clouds moved along and we sat out on the balcony on top of Wellington for dinner as the birds came to roost in the trees below. Happy times.

Twitter made Christmas interesting this year – loads of people spending time with family but still all on Twitter airing their lack of enjoyment of family tensions to their online friends and followers. And from all over the world so we all had a kind of international Christmas! Glad to say no tensions in our day – a few repeated conversations and kids being chided – but that’s pretty normal stuff. It was also truly special to spend some time in our own home on Christmas Day with friends and their family from overseas that we’d never met.

We started out at the beach house with a mountain of gifts for the kids

Happy niece #1 – got to see the mysterious beados that’d we’d searched long and hard for – they were at hit and the gift that Amy chose to play with straight away!

Home at lunchtime to start preparing for guests, with a quick sandwich lunch under the tree & some gifts from Mother & Father as we didn’t get to see them this Christmas

Enjoyed receiving photos from Father, documenting their very sunny Bay of Plenty Christmas Day – here he is in their vegetable garden (something they now have since retiring!) picking peas for Christmas dinner

Here’s Ryan who we just met that day (Sara’s brother) being put to work in the kitchen already

Lovely happy Christmas dinner with the urban family and actually we didn’t provide much of the food in the end – our guests came laden and it was wonderful! I can’t stop staring at this photo – to me it’s a perfect picture and we really did spend the afternoon and evening eating and smiling (our fridge is bulging with left-overs)

Happy niece #2 – then right on cue at bedtime I received a picture text from my sister of Georgia in her Christmas pjs – she loves them, she (& everyone) was really impressed that I’d sewn them and they fit!

And thanks to my Secret Santa for excellent gifts – Patricia Cornwell novel, Williams & Sonoma voucher (to spend in America yipeeeee!) & Obama paper dolls

Also got this completely unexpected and fabulous luggage tag for our travels from Lucy (probably a more polite thing than I’d say so useful to have it written on a tag!)

Christmas 2009 was great.

Man, it’s been a real Susie-Homemaker weekend! Today after going into the office all morning I spent the afternoon baking and ‘gardening’!

Made the first batch of Christmas mince pies for this year. I didn’t make fruit mince earlier in October as I have 2 jars left from last year – I got Mother to sniff it when they were here in October to make sure it was still OK and her verdict was good … mind you the amount of brandy I ‘whoops’ when measuring (Christmas baking or tiramisu!) is probably enough to ferment anything!

Then out into the increasing wind on the balcony to plant this year’s basil. Good stiff breeze to blow away any nasties in the potting mix though.

However since planting it about 3 hours ago I’ve watched out the window in horror as Wellington delivered stronger and stronger wind (gusting up to 74km/hr according to wunderground.com) battering around the poor tiny plants! Oh well, they’ve got to get used to it!!

What a big Saturday! We knew it would be and planned for it to be. It was our Christmas shopping day – chilled the champagne for wrapping later, wrote out the list in order of where in town we had to go and set off early. I also had a very lofty goal of making shorty PJ’s as requested by my niece for Christmas. Hmm, all that in one day? And me sew a whole outfit, not just shorten some jeans or run up a pair of PJ pants for myself? We’ll see.

It was pretty cool walking down Cuba Street – loads of people out and about and enjoying coffee in the sun.

List ticked off, home to make the PJ’s. I’d cut out the material on Friday night after work – thankful for yoga at this point – I could be Gollum!

The Mister was a bit snap-happy with the camera – I don’t think he could quite believe that I could sew what I’d shown him in the picture, so I’m posting the whole afternoon/evening’s-worth of photos I’m afraid!

Ironing the teeny tiny fiddly neck hem.

Sewing like I drive apparently – heavy on the pedal! What!?

Time for the champagne and present-wrapping tradition with a Christmas movie (’Home Alone’ if you must know Jif!), except I hand-gathered the ruffles while The Mister wrapped.

And at the end of the night we were both completely amazed that after all these years, I can still sew, that I’d done it all in a day and they looked really great! God I hope she likes them. And that they fit!!

I’m still here. Just so much going on …

• So much help to write
• Have to give my first ever presentation at the stock exchange this week
• Have got a new role
• Still training 2 new staff, lost my original Oompa Loompa to another team
• Got a new phone
• Had to entertain parents for a weekend
• Housework and ironing is piling up
• and Christmas is only 6 weeks away

Anyway, here’s a picture of the pussy cat at the Brown Sugar in Otaki that we stopped in to visit on our way to Palmerston North last week when The Mister got called up there to give a presentation.

So it’s been 6 months without or with low salt and am gradually, well actually sometimes head first, getting it back into my diet.

What I’ve missed:

• pizza
• potato chips (haven’t actually had any yet)
• (close your eyes Steph) pancetta fat
• mashed potatoes with salt on them
• parmesan cheese
• Won’t say peanut butter, as the low salt organic stuff we found is pretty good

So the good news is I don’t have anything nasty lurking in my head (physically that is!) but there’s probably too much stress and anxiety rattling around in there. Amazing how emotional ‘conditions’ can manifest themselves so physically. Might have to make some big changes next year … as I type this I know I won’t!