Entries Tagged 'What I’ve been doing' ↓

Got home tonight to a very cool sky – I think it’s a big smooth cloud keeping the sky clear for the tiny new moon rather than a nasty big front about to overpower it.

Crikey, the oven certainly is cleaner than it was before – you can actually see through the door to what’s baking and it reflects stuff even!

Happiness is having someone to open the garage door!

Over the last few days on my own I realised all the things the Mister does in our day to day lives. I mean I already knew this but it’s a fairly impressive list and makes me look positively kept!

In his absence I’ve had to:

• Keep warm – the apartment seems really cold without him
• Put rubbish out
• Pay cafe bills
• Make my own breakfast and lunch
• Carry my laptop to work
• Shut the garage door
• Do all the dishes
• Push only those buttons I know on the one remote I’m familiar with
• Use phone alarm cos don’t know how clock works
• Go to the supermarket – I now realise why there’s all the stuff in the papers about groceries being more expensive – have to say I had no idea how much a loaf of bread is now!

However, on the plus side I did get a bit of time to myself, so I:

• Made peanut brownies (he says he doesn’t like them, but we’ll see)
• Cleaned the oven (ashamed to say, first time in the 3+ years we’ve live here and it’s NOT a good idea to leave it that long!)
• Labelled photos in 2 albums
• Cleaned out the filing box
• Washed the pantry shelves

Our alarm clock is set to Classic Hits (eeerrrr, it’s the only station the old radio can pick up …) and this morning just before the weather I heard this very official announcement:

“Hi, I’m Jason Vine, Operations Manager for Classic Hits. Classic Hits wishes to apologies for any offence caused by inappropriate remarks made on the Classic Hits Breakfast Show yesterday by Dave Smart and Camille Guzzwell. Dave and Camille are on leave while an investigation is carried out. Philip [someoneorother] will host the show until further notice.”

What the? What did they say? Obviously I don’t actually listen to anything except the weather in the morning because I can’t remember anything offensive being said. I can’t find anything on the station’s website … very scandalous!

Happy Birthday blog! We’ve been going 4 years now. Just hoping the Mister can figure out how many posts I’ve done – “somewhere between 500 and 1000” is not really precise enough for me!

Some time later … yaaaay he did some uber-geek thing and I’m proud to report that there are 868 posts on my blog! What a rambler!

We now have a panel heater in our hall. Installed ourselves … just so as those of you who gave the Mister grief for getting the guy from Placemakers to cut our door draft strip instead of just buy a hacksaw know!

It’s one of those Econo-heat panels that supposedly pumps out an even temperature at a cost of 5 cents per hour making it the most efficient form of heating. We had it going yesterday evening and I think it’s going to work well.

I do have a couple of criticisms about the buying/installation process (surprise surprise). Firstly the buying. Good informative website, *slightly* difficult finding the retail outlet and when we got there the sales woman wasn’t that knowledgeable. It was one of those open-to-the-public-only-because-we-have-to small showrooms in Ngauranga that sold a few different models of heaters. We pretty much knew everything we needed to know from the literature and working example in the showroom (snaps for that) however when I asked the woman if it was designed to be left on all the time and safe to leave it going when we weren’t home (yes, yes am definitely my father’s daughter) she said “Oh yes. It’s very safe – it’s a good heater because it’s really safe for pets and kids.” Ahhhh, OK. That’s not exactly what I was asking – she looked rather aghast when I re-asked in terms of burning the house down, overheating because it didn’t have a thermostat etc – turns out she didn’t actually know. Sigh. For now we’re going to use a timer.

Then we got it home, opened the box, got out the instructions and were very disappointed that it didn’t contain “4 wall plugs, 4 screws, 4 grommets, 4 screw caps” – it only had half the bits! However upon closer inspection it seemed that they had updated the bits to be 4 all-in-one plastic things acting as the wall plug and grommet and 4 what looked like long plastic nails acting as the screw cap and screw. No instructions for how that whole thing worked – instructions were for the 16-bit method. Arrrggggghhhhh! As someone who spends their life writing help and instructions for how to use a product I was horrified! However we figured it out, drilled monster holes in the wall and hoped like hell that when we pushed the plastic ‘nails’ through the wall plug things that they would spring open and grip on for life. Seemed to work and the heater is solidly on the wall!

Got out the velvet trousers and fur-cuffed shirt and trotted off to see La Boheme at the St James theatre tonight. My god! It was amazing. I’ve studied it during my music degree, heard it loads of times, seen it on video lots and seen it live several times and it was still such an experience. I looked like a raccoon by the end of the first act – trying not to choke while tears were streaming down my face as the main characters fell in love. It was only the second opera I’d dragged the Mister along to and he was frantically patting my arm hoping non-one would hear or see me dabbing away with my bright orange hankie.

Actually it was a great production of it – it’s originally set in the Bohemian Quarter of Paris – 4 poor students pawn-shopping their way through winter in a time when people wore muffs and a night out on Saturday involved dancing a passedoble but this production took on a modern theme in a rather Dunedin-esque flat with a tweed-cushioned couch with a wooden frame, takeout coffee cups and pizza boxes strewn about, a game of Twister and a bong on the bookshelf and an English lit student tapping away on a Mac. The details were amazing!

Have to say the lead tenor Jesus Garcia was a bit of a hunk and met every expectation when that damn death chord at the end that I’d almost forgotten about filled the theatre with torment and loss and he wailed out for his dead love who was the stuff his dreams were made of.

Sob!

Oh and I forgot the smell of moth balls that’s always at the opera as all the oldies get out their best coats!

Got home tonight to what looked like a real fire in the church across the road! Roads were all closed, loads of fireman, one of those expandable ladders up to the roof and actual smoke.

Oh oh! And I’ve just found the story on the front page of stuff.co.nz tonight:

Updated Tues 15/4 … and more on stuff.co.nz they’ve charged a guy for lighting the fire.

One way to put a huge smile on my dial (other than to show me some (non-tacky) orange thing) is to complement my car or my driving or better still – both in the same conversation!  I picked the car up from the dealership after it got a Warrant today and was on the receiving end of the service guy gushing over how great-a condition the car was in 🙂 He said for a car that old (poor old 8-year-old thing now being subjected to 6-month warrants – pah!) the interior was the most pristine he’d seen. No chips in the door handles or gear stick, no scrapes on any of the leather bits, no spilled coffee on the carpet or crumbs in the seats or ragged visors. And it didn’t end there! The exterior is apparently amazing too – no key or jewellery or fingernail scrapes around the door handles, no dented number plates – in fact the *minor* exterior damage was (obviously, he said) caused by the carelessness of others opening their doors and driving their shopping trolleys into it. The tyres are all worn perfectly evenly – sure it’s 4-wheel-drive he said but still, good driving contributes a great deal to that. He said I obviously take very good care of it which is such a joy to see and quite a rare thing. And let me tell you, he is surrounded by some VERY fine cars. So when he asked if he could be first in line to buy it I was stunned! Am definitely not ready to part with it yet and dammit The Mister heard that so shot off faster than I’ve ever seen him move to goggle at the Porsches.  Sigh.

Yaaaay for me!

(Obviously got in a bit of trouble later for not asking how much the guy would buy it for and when and what was the best price we could get on an S5 or RS4 … thankfully I managed to talk The Mister out of thinking Porsche would be next on our list with our urban family about to increase by one when Blenheim Bub arrives … we could never ferry 5 of us and pram and whatnot around … so Rocket gets to stay a while longer yet 🙂 )

Looking good after 2 weeks!