August 21st, 2010
Starting to come out the other side of my man flu thankfully – have had to lay pretty low in Blenheim this weekend. However this afternoon I got out for a bit of a slow walk
then sat on the sunny steps at Dean & Steph’s for afternoon tea (got Steph to sit still enough for the once-every-5-years photo!)
while Aidan played with the hose
August 15th, 2010
Made a great pot of minestrone yesterday afternoon – still without a car we’re foraging from the cupboard a bit more than usual and we had all the ingredients for this hearty soup. Recipe also recommended that any seasonal vegetables could be added as well – I used a bit of purple cabbage left-over from coleslaw earlier in the week – it looked rather fluorescent compared to the deep red tomatoey goodness when I first put it in but thankfully retained a somewhat lesser shade of purple in the finished product rather than boiling completely down to white leaving the soup a strange brown colour like I thought it would!
It was really rich and tasty and because I didn’t add any chilli or other spice it didn’t have that sharp often throat-burning taste that minestrone often has when you order it out. And we had left-over soup for lunch today so we’re doing well with our cupboard meals!
August 15th, 2010
Love this photo taken of the 4 of us outside Customs Brew Bar yesterday after a morning sampling coffee just before Bev and Dan got back on the plane home to San Francisco.
(By the way, you’ll have noticed that we’ve switched to larger photos on the blog now – if this presents a problem (display, speed or otherwise) for anyone, please let me know.)
August 14th, 2010
So the drama of switching from Paradise to TelstraClear has been somewhat shifted to Genesis Energy, although entirely at the hand of TelstraClear.
Because TelstraClear stuffed up the lifetime redirect for my Paradise email to my Clear mail box a power bill from Genesis Energy did indeed bounce back to Genesis. Being true to my word, I got back on Twitter and expressed my displeasure at this, directed at TelstraClear. They were most apologetic and made up for me being out of pocket by sending me some vouchers to put towards my TelstraClear bill – nice of them, but I have yet to figure out how to see and pay my Clear email bill because every time I ask them to send me the forms to pay by credit card, they send me direct debit forms …
However, I digress. Back to paying my Genesis bill – also want to pay this with new credit card to get airpoints so was pleased to see how easy it was to find and submit a credit card payment off their site. But. Amount X is due if the bill is paid by 11 August and Amount Y is due if paid after. Clearly I have to pay Amount Y with it being the 14th, in fact the site has big flashing “OVERDUE. PLEASE PAY IMMEDIATELY” all over it. So, click the ‘Pay Now’ button and I’m only offered the choice of paying Amount X. What? I want to pay the full amount and they won’t let me? I paid the smaller Amount X, thinking it would leave the difference on my bill so I could just use ‘Pay Now’ again to pay off the bill. No. ‘Pay Now’ button has gone. I’m dubious that this amount is going to stay on our account as an overdue amount and will not be included in what’s on offer via the ‘Pay Now’ button next month, so I’ve had to pay the little extra bit via online banking.
Boy oh boy I am getting SO frustrated with all this. TelstraClear has been pretty good, the guys manning the Twitter account very patient with me but generally the websites for these big companies SUCK. The Genesis FAQ page is erroring today, the TelstraClear site for adding alisases to my email address keeps looping back to an ‘Account Summary’ page … The other day I gave up on the TelstraClear website and phoned their 0800 number to find out about paying by credit card. The automated voice system said “I can understand most of your commands. Tell me what you want from the following options. You can interrupt me any time.” One of the options offered was ‘Your account’, so I said ‘My account’ (thinking she was addressing me) but she ignored me, so I tried ‘Your account’ … that didn’t work either. So I hung up on her and tried again. This time interrupting – not sure how many times I shouted ‘My account’ before the voice switched to an ad that said you could now pay by credit card by selecting Customer Zone on the website, so I hung up again! GRRRR!
August 13th, 2010
Had 2 sets of friend in town this week requiring 2 dinner parties mid-week. By the end of the week I was glad to take a rest from meat! We had an ‘American’ theme with Sara seeing as we hadn’t seen her in a while and hadn’t given her a New York debrief so had burgers
and Bev brought and cooked some steak to go with the kumara & feta salad that Dan requested for old time’s sake.
It was great to get around the dining room table with them again, and they’ve now all gone back home overseas.
August 10th, 2010
Got summoned with a week’s notice to head up to Rod’s place in Hawke’s Bay with a couple of the guys from our marketing team to meet with Andy, our Advisor to the Board who was visiting from the States. We met him a couple of times while in New York, and being the ex CEO of dell.com he’s rather famous in tech circles and when put together with our CEO and marketing guys, they spoke a whole other language of marketing jargon that I struggled to keep up with at times.
However, I was chuffed to be invited and really enjoyed the experience of a business retreat to the boss’s beach house. Had to drive a giant Ford Falcon, automatic, to get up and back, rather a monster to drive for my first time out behind the wheel in 5 months!
Rod & Andy served up a great meal of beef, roast vegetables & salad.
Andy & I rode on the back of Rod’s quad bike to the shop – via the beach!
We spent the morning drinking coffee (from a machine like ours), eating Rod’s banana choc chip muffins and talking strategy.
August 4th, 2010
Last night we went to the second Ignite Wellington event – the first being the night before we left Wellington for New York back in March.
The aim of the evening is to get people enthusiastic about Wellington and about possibilities – people get up on stage and speak for exactly 5 minutes to exactly 20 slides. No matter their profession, their talk can be about that or some experience they’ve had or some random interest they have.
Last night’s event was great, and I rate it better than the first. People spoke about everything from starting their own company to selling real estate on the moon to outdoor graffiti knitting to wallpaper to game design. You can see the full list of speakers on the Ignite Wellington website plus a video of each talk.
In the talk about graffiti knitting there was a slide of the tree cozies and you can see the one I knitted!
I wrote down one thing from each speech – not necessarily something that sums up the presentation, but just something I liked or remembered.
The next Ignite Wellington will be in another 6 months or so, open to anyone to speak or attend so go along for some thought provoking stuff.
August 4th, 2010
Last night before Ignite Wellington we decided to have a quick dinner somewhere we hadn’t been before. Very hard to pass up a chance to go to Capitol and always hard to find somewhere that fits my criteria … deep breath …
Basically a cafe or Italian restaurant.
We were joined by a colleague who we don’t know very well who thankfully was happy to go along with our decision so that the choice of restaurant didn’t become awkward.
The Mister recalled seeing or reading about an Italian restaurant on Blair or Allen streets and we found it: Fratelli. And it was feast night that night – basically a limited, almost set, menu with a choice of a few mains and pizzas. Loads of the choices were something I’d eat!
I went for the semolina gnocchi with broccoli and red onion – man it was devine! The gnocchi was the most delicate thing ever! And the portion size just right. The others had pork tagliatelle and spinach risotto – reports that both were excellent. We’d let them know we only had an hour and the service wasn’t rushed and we had time for bread and mains. Fitting in dessert might’ve been a push but we didn’t want it anyway.
The restaurant was about half full, not bad for a Tuesday night, and I really like the idea of feast night. We’ll definitely be going back.
Fratelli, 15 Blair Street, Wellington
August 2nd, 2010
Was down the Lambton shopping end of town this week so got my morning takeaway from Ripe Coffee to-go – it used to be Zoom back in the days when I was working at ERMA on Waring Taylor Street – a little corner takeaway bar.
It was nice standing in the sun waiting for my coffee and the guy noticed the Ninth Street Espresso pin on my jacket. I was surprised to have to pay $4 for the coffee already (regular flat white) – not sure if they’re getting in early before the GST price rise in October.
The coffee was not great. Considering it was a double shot according to their board it was fairly insipid. And had the flavour I associate with beans that have been kept in a bag for a few months, like Illy, even though I’ve discovered they’re roasted in Lower Hutt, and seem to provide a lot of cafes. A shame, might’ve been a nice sunny alternative.
Ripe Coffee to-go, 149 Featherston Street, Wellington,
August 1st, 2010
Oh what an awful windy rainy day today, but determined to stick to our plan of trying a new cafe, this weekend it was to be Memphis Belle, I put on my gummies and hat and all other winter paraphernalia and we headed out.
A friend of ours was talking about Memphis Belle last weekend, we’d never heard of it, so looked it up and discovered it’s on Dixon Street just down from Cuba Mall in the toilet-end of the Oaks complex and is doing some single origin coffee in different styles (espresso, chemex etc).
The guys were wearing cool-dude hats, one of them a trilby (which we know means good coffee in New York) and they had a cabinet of baking, not all giant chocolate things so it was all looking good on first glance. There wasn’t a free seat in sight but by the time we’d ordered our flat whites and peanut butter cookie a little corner spot in the window freed up.
It was a really cool little place, great atmosphere, very smooth coffee (not beans I know (Flight from Napier) and I probably prefer the sweeter edge of Supreme still) and great baking – the peanut butter cookie brought tears to my eyes because it tasted almost like the ones I had in New York. It was cool sitting in the window watching the rain going every which way outside and people struggling to walk in a straight line.
They seem to have really great hours as well – we were there at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon and there was no loud counting of coins and no giant rolls of gladwrap on the counter or other signals that they were closing soon.
