Entries Tagged 'Out and about' ↓

Well, actually red pandas from the Himalayas  but they were orange pandas to me and you can see why!

Had a day off work today and decided to do something very different from sitting in an office or home in front of a computer so a mid-week trip to the zoo was in order. We got to feed and pet the orange pandas as part of Wellington Zoo’s Encounter programme – they do the pandas, giraffes, cheetahs and big cats.

4 people at a time were allowed into the enclosure with the zoo keeper and we visited with 2 sets of panda pairs. They ate fruit out of our hands or fingers and put their paws up on our knees when we were sitting on logs in their enclosure.

One of the pandas was so eager that when The Mister was the 1st one to sit down it leapt right up onto his knee like a cat!

It was such a great time – the 4 pandas definitely all had personalities of their own and it’s just so hard to explain how insanely cute they were. They had warm little feet and the older ones were coarse to pat, a bit like an old dog’s fur, and the younger ones were quite soft and cat-like. Beneath their orange fur they had a thick downy layer almost like possum fur. Their little faces were just so adorable.

When they’d filled up on fruit they went back into the trees and fell asleep almost immediately!

Loads more photos on Flickr.

There’s a sign up at Fuel today – 15 years they’ve been making coffee! And I’ve been drinking it from one or other of their cafes, holes-in-the wall or carts for 13 of those years. I reckon on average I’ve had a Fuel cup in my hand every day for the last 13 years. So great they’re still around – a real Wellington institution.

The Mister walked through Midland Park the other day and grumbled that it had been cordoned off for ages for a revamp but it didn’t look any different. Hmm, I was there today and it has new seats! With pigeon-poo covers to protect you from the birds in the trees above. Eeuuuuw they’re going to look pretty grubby soon from roosting birds.

Remember a while back when Supreme opened their revamped Woodward Street store I went down and took a bunch of photos and commented on the little ‘exhibition’ space in the brick wall? Well the minute I saw that space I knew what I wanted to take to put there one day – and that day came last week when our Supreme Friend tweeted that he was looking for something new to put in the space.

I rushed down there with the treasure that I knew I wanted to display – just on loan – my New York prism!

Oh how easily the little Vespa model was cast aside so I could ‘install’ my treasure. We discussed all sorts of lighting and signage options but for now, one of my orange cards serves as the art credit. Feel very famous!

Awwww the happy couple have made it to 5 years married 🙂 The 10.20 coffee tradition took us to Gotham for breakfast and we had bagels.

Here we are 5 years ago, newly wed in New York.

I’m not really a sticker person. Or an ornament person. Or newspaper, foreign food, party, bike, risk, phone, boat, music, candy … errr, I digress … aaaaaanyway … when we said bye to the guys at Saturdays Surf, Josh gave me a bunch of their stickers. Which I loved, but had no idea what to do with. I thought for a fleeting second that I might put one on my white MacBook … but really secretly wanted to stick them up around Wellington and take photos of them to send back to the Saturdays guys. But it seems that our poles and bins and signs are sticker-free so either people don’t think to go around defacing with stickers (find that hard to believe given the defacing graffiti that’s all over the city at the moment) or the council removes them pretty quickly. I guess the latter is likely, which probably means it’s illegal – ‘defacing public property’ or some such.

But being the rebel that I am (*cough*) I’m braving the world of trouble that awaits and stuck a sticker today! I probably shouldn’t be bragging about it on my blog and posting a photo of it, but I love the photo!

I know the sticker isn’t going to last long but it was worth it for the face-cracking smile it gave me (which was in response to seeing the sticker and remembering the pole outside Saturdays in Crosby Street and not that I’d just been very naughty and probably broken the law … honest)!

Got out onto a beach on the Kapiti coast yesterday – not in celebration of summer coming or anything (it’s not really yet) just to breathe some fresh air. It was chilly and nice to be in a big wide space for a while … although one guy was there sitting on a log with his laptop so we didn’t completely escape things we normally see every day!

I tried to get an arty shot of Kapiti from ground-ish level for Project 365

But when The Mister drew in the sand

I liked the look of this as today’s photo and memory … awwwww 🙂

Oh, the Kapiti photos were cool. And very blue.

The photo I took for Project 365 today (number 300 it turns out!) was of a small bunch of flowers stuck in a park bench on Lambton Quay … one of those hand-picked bunches with a bit of tinfoil around the end, probably stuffed with a wet tissue like kids often do. It wasn’t exactly abandoned but you had to wonder about it’s story. Was it an unwanted/embarrassing gift that someone stuffed between the slats after putting their bag on the bench and ratting through it for something hoping no-one would notice the disguised opportunity to ‘nicely’ ditch the flowers; was it an attempt along the same lines as the Outdoor Knitters to beautify the city on a sunny morning; or perhaps a social experiment by someone to see who noticed it there and stopped to take a photo … ?

Went on a big 1 hr 45 min walk up and over The Terrace and around the waterfront this morning – town was pretty quiet and despite the huge hill at the start that took our breath away it was great to walk some streets we hadn’t in a while. Even in the drizzle!

Came around a different way to the office this morning and noticed that the motorbike parking space opposite work is chocka! I’d heard Father-in-law say this a year or so ago when he was scootering to work in the neighbourhood but at the start of the work day the corner was a-buzz like bees around a clematis as the bikes rode up and down and backwards with little jerks on the throttle to mount the curb so the rider could jam it into whatever space was left. Earlier bikes parked higgledypiggledy weren’t  helping! And it was all very well when a bike was maneuvered into a spot but then it was time for some strange body contortions for the rider to extract himself from the tightly packed jumble of bikes – kind of like those scenes where museum burglars dance and bend over a laced laser security system.

And to top it all off, the parking warden was circling – I couldn’t help wonder if there was an upper limit on the number of bikes that could fit in that space, and that he was counting, or that the poor bugger who was last to squeeze his bike in with part of a mud-guard hanging over the yellow line was going to get a ticket!