The Monday back at work

 Hi,

A testament to the shock of being back at work is the fact I took no photos yesterday.  Hahahah.  But due to a scratchy throat I worked from home - and sometimes my nose is a bit dribbly. Today (Tuesday) it is much the same.  No better, no worse.  So, at home once more.

It was a cold day in Wellington and at one stage during the day I think we had all 3 heaters on through the house.  Hahahah.

Yesterday Mike and I finished work and headed up the stairs to cook tea.  We ate nachos with home made guacamole.  Yum!

Watched a documentary on Tayla Harris (AFL Womens league player in Melbourne) which was pretty good.  

Then snuggled into bed.  Slept so well compared to the previous night.  Didn't really want to get up at 6.30am (which my body probably thought was more like 4.30am in Queensland).  Had my PT session online with Quentin.  I do hope to get back to the gym next week though.

Another day working from home.  Mike is also here - he thinks he probably just has allergies instead of a cold.  But we're playing it safe as we monitor.

Have an awesome day.

Love,

Angela

The weekend back in Wellington

 Hi,

I am back in Wellington.  Woke up Sunday morning on the Queensland timezone.  Mike got home early from survivor night and brought me brekkie in bed!

Mike has stocked up for me

I washed it down with one of the Lewis Road iced coffees he had stocked up with in our fridge.  I also have a lovely bouquet of flowers on the dining table.  I think he missed me.  :-)

I missed him.

And left me some gorgeous flowers

And all I got him was some awful whiskey

When he got home Sunday morning, he got me brekkie in bed

After brekkie, we opened the SUP board.  It is huge!  Can't wait to give it a go.  Might not happen unless we get a calm winter morning and I can fit into my wetsuit.  Hahahah.

The SUP was delivered so I opened that

Headed out to drop old ski gear for the TTC ski gear sale.  Then did a trailer trip with Sally and Andrew's garden waste and a bit of stuff from our place.

Back home to cook some tea.   After grocery shopping at New World.  I made the mushroom soup my mother had made while I was visiting.  It was good.

Made mushroom soup for Sunday tea

Went to bed and had a fitful sleep.  Turns out I have a bit of a blocked nose and a scratchy throat.  Might just be Wellington.  But I am playing it safe and staying home today.

I will blog about my trip to Aus soon.  I made notes.  Hahahah.  And I didn't do anything terribly touristy - it was basically to visit my parents.  So it should be short and sweet to knock out.

I have read some of Mike's blog entries - and I need to up my game.  He has been keeping it fresh with his funny insights.  I am become boring and routine.  Hahahah.

Have a wonderful day.

Love,

Angela

The Thursday with my pining nearly over

Not long now! Angela is back on Saturday. I can't wait.

I am, er, going away for the weekend on Survivor Night which was locked in months ago. But oh well.

Maybe extreme conditions such as light drizzle will mean we have to cancel.

I made it to the gym in the morning and did deadlifts for the first time in forever. It felt good! Remedial work to do. And Callan took me on a lunchtime run which was also my first run since the half marathon. That felt good too. We talked about how I could get my next time down. Progress work to do!

First run for ages

Sausages on bread with broccoli for dinner. You can't tell me what to do!

There are a pair of kārearea - New Zealand Falcons - hanging about our neighbourhood right now. This morning one came down to visit us. Amazing bird.

I didn't have my phone - but my neighbour took a photo of them on her deck earlier

Then a similar sized kākā came down to check out the excitement. Smudge was on the deck and loving it. Not quite sure why she was having so much fun. She certainly wasn't thinking about taking either bird on! But she was happy to hang out with them. Maybe she was as enthralled as I was.

I did get a photo of the kākā

Now, back to the music videos. Here is a bloke on Twitch called Frank Tedesco, breaking down songs he's never heard before live, and improvising his own version in real time. I wonder what song he will do today?

It's a fascinating process (and there are chapters in the description so you can skip around). I think I'll see what other videos he has. Oh wow, he's mixing and looping and doing AMAZING THINGS. He reminds me of the 8-bit drummer. They should do a collaboration!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMgvaDmVrXE

The Wednesday where my pining left me discombobulated

It was a Mike-crazy discombobulated morning. I had plenty of time so I casually made breakfast, drank coffee, and played with the cats. I left it just a little bit tight at the end of the morning (red flag! My endgame always lets me down). As I ran out the door I discovered I didn't have my key. As I frantically searched for it, I heard my bus go past.

I fruitlessly went through my options. And then drove in. With a carload of leftover polystyrene insulation slipping and sliding about in the back. Good crumple zone I guess.

Gorgeous day - you can tell by the smooth curve on the solar chart.
You can also tell that I was still making myself coffee at 8:25am, which is quite late.

Vegetarian stirfry for dinner. With steak.

Fusion.

I was supposed to go running last night but my workmates bullied me into going to the pub instead. I haven't run for two weeks now. I have a certain amount of padding around my middle that wasn't there before.

Now I admit that perhaps you are getting sick of seeing the same Eurovision Swedish power ballad on ever. single. post. So I thought I'd mix it up a little today.

So for something completely different, here is a Swedish man who looks like a truck, smashing out a hard rock song. You may recognise the melody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ2CsLfFL_A

The Tuesday pining with Momo

A work from work day today. Everything went more or less like clockwork this morning. Except I missed my bus because Angela had a parcel delivered and I was faffing about trying to put it inside.

In the evening, Momo pinged me to let me know he was in town, from Scotland, after over two years away. It was so good to catch up with him.

And in an "only in Wellington" story it turns out he's staying 3 doors up from Sally and Andrew.

I invited him around for brunch after Parkrun.

Remember I spent last night going down Eurovision rabbitholes? Well. I must share this piece of Eurovision karma that I found. You could not write this script.

First, here is a young, cocky Cornelia Jakobs getting taken down a peg or two by the judges on Swedish Idol 2008.

Note the judge on the left, in the cap. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q5dnN_fM6E

And here, many years later, is that same judge. Finishing second, at Melodifestivalen 2022. To Cornelia Jakobs. And losing the Sweden Eurovision slot to her. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OWTf8aVUhY

The rest is (recent) history.

Do watch that second video (skip the first 60 sec of buildup if you must) because the reactions are so pure and delightful. It's all in Swedish but that makes it even better.

The Monday pining from home

 My phone has an occasional habit of crashing overnight, and so I missed my 6am alarm. My body also felt like not powering up properly this morning, so I was still in bed when I should have been at the gym.

Oh well. Work from home day.

After a fairly average WFH day I was keen to do some gardening and other chores. But I threw together some stirfry and then lay on my bed and went down YouTube rabbitholes instead. Oh well.

Yummy stirfry. And that's Toby's beer label, isn't it great?

It's been long enough after the Eurovision euphoria to get some perspective and objectivity. So one productive thing I did do, after a week of reflection on all 40 Eurovision songs, is to put together a 'best of' playlist. It brings together the very best tracks not only from Grant Final night but the semifinalists as well. 

Here it is:

I'm listening on continuous loop. Link here.

Yes, it does only have one track.

The weekend pining (and other things)

I knew that if I didn't line up a full weekend, then I would just sit at home and be miserable without Angela's company. So as it turned out I managed to fill in my time and seldom reflect on the crushing sadness of being alone.

Friday night brought the reality of my bright idea of hosting the latest Warren Miller film. It all went well, people clapped and laughed and my cobbled-together prize draw system worked out okay. 

The projectionist was great. He was very, very conscious of time. Everything was timed to the second. When I stood up and said, "ok we have fifteen or twenty minutes' intermission now," he came out of his projection booth and politely let the audience know that the correct figure was seventeen, not twenty minutes.

Win prizes! Stop looking at me!

I was grateful that Janine called in sick to Parkrun. Without any peer pressure I gratefully slept in and had a lazy Saturday morning. Then it was off to Lower Hutt to do underfloor insulation. Sally and Andrew are prepping their house and one of the jobs was their underfloor insulation. So we put a plan together - complete the Epuni job, see what overs and unders we had once all the insulation was in the joists, then sort out Woburn too and see how much more insulation we needed to buy to fully complete both houses.

With Andrew and I both working, we got Epuni all sorted in three hours flat. Sally came to ferry stuff to and from the basement pit, and she also did a lot of gardening work while we were slotting polystyrene into the joists. Nice!

Look at all that lovely plastic, and that cozy polystyrene.
Can I please never, ever go down there again?

I stayed at Woburn for Burger Wisconsin and wandered home to bed.

Meanwhile, Angela was working hard too. She made up some shelving from Bunnings and tidied up her parents' garage. Good result.

Before (with shelving built and ready)

After. Look at all the spare space!

Sunday (after waking up to one of these vivid dreams where I was trying to move stuff using a lift that never stayed open enough for me to load things into it, and then I ended up sharing the lift with Nik Kershaw. No I don't understand either.) I harvested our chilis. We have a good wee crop, all of them green and probably quite spicy. Straight in the freezer for guacamole and salsa to come throughout the year.

Yum

Then back for more scrabbling around under houses. Sally and Andrew's house this time. We were checking their polystyrene insulation and putting back the bits that had fallen down.

It was in much better nick than we were expecting, which was lucky, because it was tight and dirty down there. We put back the few that had fallen down and didn't try to pack around the nests of pipework.

At the narrowest point I couldn't roll over and since I needed to work on my back I had to crawl around using my lat muscles on my back to propel myself - at least it seemed that way. Then I had trouble getting back - I needed to find a point under the bearers (about 10cm lower than the rest of the floor) that I could get under. The first point - no dice. Now I was disoriented and not too sure where I actually was. Next point - tight but doable? I got most of the way. Had to stop, relax, breathe right out and PUSH. Pop! Now I was good.

It's just like childbirth really.
Andrew plays midwife.

Getting Andrew's makeshift overalls off him

I grabbed a shower and headed home. It was Warren Miller Part 2. But I've been there done that so it should be easy this time - right?

Yeah nah. The projectionist was a little stressed. Full house tonight and they hadn't got a complimentaries list from the promoter so weren't sure how they'd fit them in. The next movie was back-to-back with ours so they were even more worried about timings. I'd forgotten to charge my devices so my phone was bumping along at 10% battery and my laptop was a complete unknown - would I be able to do the draw at all? On top of all that, Civil Defence would be running an emergency alert test right in the middle of the film and all our phones would squawk at once.

I put my confident-in-spite-of-little-knowledge leadership pants on and told them it would all be alright and I'd sort it all out. And it was (even though I didn't, really).

Queues out the door with 10min to go

Hi, I'm Mike and I'm as nervous as I was last time. But here is my game face.

Full house!

Right, it's now Monday morning and time to get stuck into work. I slept in and missed the gym but that means I can work from home which is quite the relief really.

The Thursday where Sally and Andrew intervened because they were concerned with my pining

Another day working from work. Drama all around me like a cyclone on the way to work.

I was up bright and early for my first at-gym session since omicron broke over us like a warm tropical wave of infected phlegm and spit. But alas Quentin the PT was sick today so no gym til tomorrow. My plan B of a cheeky 5k run soon petered out when I felt the gale force winds that were lashing the waterfront this morning. My somewhat sad plan C was to go to work early.

While I was showering and changing my phone rang, It was our cleaners. I could hear the strident alarm in the background - our house alarm was sounding and they couldn't shut it off. We haven't armed it in years so it had clearly malfunctioned and 'failed on'. I told them the PIN, they tried it a couple of times and it didn't help. Oh no. Our poor cats. I told them they couldn't do much about it so to go away again and I'd get someone to look at it - and either fix it or disable it entirely.

Half an hour later they rang back.

They were at another client's house, who happened to also be called Mike, and they'd run the wrong Mike.

I got through my work day, and then Sally suggested dinner in town with her and Andrew. Yay! Off to Bin44 we all went for yummy steak. We solved all the problems of the world, from the health system to our elderly parents to what to do with their underfloor insulation.

So tonight I am hosting the Warren Miller Ski Movie on behalf of Wellington Snowlovers, a meetup group I run. This is because I had to look into Facebook for something for the first time in months, and discovered that they'd found my Facebook group and asked for someone to host.

There were many responses to that. No response at all would have been fine. "Good luck in your search for a host" would have been encouraging. "Hi, I've DMed you about this" was NOT NECESSARY.

In my delicate pining mental state I neglected to say NO.

So anyway, if you fancy seeing an awesome snow movie at the Brooklyn Penthouse, tonight or Sunday afternoon, come along and heckle me. Buy your tickets here.

So after my Eurovision post yesterday I got an overwhelming* response, almost entirely positive but with several comments made** along the lines of - sure, Cornelia sounds great singing to a highly produced backing track and a hand picked audience with the juggernaut of the Swedish popular music machine finessing every note and every frame, but is she really any good? Really?

*Me. It was me. Responding to myself.
**In the internal monologue inside my brain

Well to address this burning question, here is Cornelia singing her song in a Swedish snow field with nothing but a man on a keyboard filling in the rest of the melody, and it's so lofi that she has to clap at the start so they can synch the audio. AND SHE STILL SOUNDS GOOSE-BUMPS AMAZING.

The Wednesday with a dinner out to briefly distract me from pining

 Another working from work day today. It just seems unnatural. 

Moxley has been tampering with this box of kibble

We had a work dinner out at Monsoon Poon, a tried and true restaurant that never disappoints. I was at the 'old timers' end of the table and learned lots of gossip about people who had left the company years before. 

When I got home, I discovered that the Bunnings delivery Angela was expecting at Perigian Springs was actually a Torpedo7 delivering a kayak and a SUP to our front door. She and her mum got to watch me through the doorbell, manhandling them both to somewhere safer than our front porch. 

We now have a SUP in a box taking up, well, all of our bedroom

But enough of this. I know you really want to know, what are my thoughts on Eurovision 2022 now that it's been a couple of days to digest and reflect?

On the night Cornelia Jakobs from Sweden was good but not great. She didn't have a good night and her choreography just didn't work on the enormous Turin stage. Fourth place was about right for her. But on the official Eurovision 2022 Spotify playlist after a few listens, her song SLAPS. Head and shoulders best.

Here is her 'live tape', prerecorded for if she caught Covid and couldn't perform on the night. Peak Eurovision in 2022. You're welcome.

The Tuesday pining at work

I went to work today! For the first time in ages. Well, I think I'd been in once or twice in the last week or two but now that Angela is in Australia and I've completed my half marathon - it's time to pretend there's no covid anymore.

Still keeping my mask on on the bus though.

Catch #11. The mice keep coming back to this trap!

I harvested some chilis! Roanne says this plant has very mild chilis so into the stir fry they go

Roanne's mild is not my mild

Official marathon photos are up.
I look a bit tired.

The Monday pining by myself

After all the excitement of the weekend it was down to a work-from-home day by myself. 

The cats were delighted to see me. Moxley has been being limpet cat and following me around and sitting on my lap at every opportunity.

I feel great after my run. I can tell I've done something when I walk up my stairs, but that's about it. Bring on Queenstown in November!

Coming up to feeding time...

... I feel like I'm being watched

Catch #10, Angela spying on me through our smart doorbell

Tuesday morning sees me going into work and interacting with actual human beings. Let's try not to catch Covid, shall we? Looking forward to Yoshi Sushi for lunch though.

Mike's weekend with running and Eurovision

 I'll start - I'm feeling sore but very happy with my 21k Personal Best* of 2 hours 15 minutes and 20 seconds.

The placings don't look so good, but I don't care. I beat all those people on the couch.

*OK it may not be a PB but I'm not really sure. I'll look up my past times if I can find them, and post them at the bottom.

Janine was aiming for 7 hours and smashed that. Benchmark for Queenstown in November.

We were on the road bright and early after I dropped Angela off at the airport for her Brisbane flight. Not too an eventful trip. Traffic was ... fun ... including dodging a fishtailing trailer. But we made it to Napier in good time for lunch.

We checked out the view from Bluff hill, with panoramic views of the logging port and a small fuel terminal. And apparently Mt Ruapehu, buried in the haze behind the Kawekas. Then checked into our cute little cabins, a short wander from town.

A tiny house each

We filled in the afternoon by going to, not just the Napier aquarium, but the New Zealand National Aquarium. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but it was pretty good actually, with a Kiwi enclosure, enormous turtles, and Little Blue Penguins. Four stars would aquare again.

I'm SURE I've been here before.
Maybe somewhere else with penguins and feeding?

Glass roof - but WITH A TRAVELATOR. Fancy.
No need for strenuous walking here!

Yup they've got one of these too

This is art. To create awareness of the dangers of pollution and overuse of fossil fuels, school children have tied 12 km of nylon rope into shapes with thousands of plastic zip ties.
Yeah, I don't get it either.

After a hearty and filling 18" pizza from Vinci's just down the road, it was time for an early night. I set my alarm for 5:15am.

And we finished it all up

My half marathon bus left earlier than Janine's marathon bus, so I was out of the house and on my way without her. A quick walk down the hill led me straight to a highly efficient bus system and I was soon at the start line.

Gorgeous sunrise on the way to the bus

Before shot (anxious)

During shot 

After shot (exhausted - but happy. Honest. Can't you see the joy in my face?)

9 out of 10 nutritionists recommend a greasy kebab after a half marathon

The finish area was much better set up this year - they'd moved all the food and drink stalls to the field with the band and that made everything so much less congested. I got food and liquid into me and slowly came right.

GO JANINE!

I'm so photogenic that I made the marathon facebook page

I spent some time watching the marathon runners finish, inspiring stuff. Then Janine crossed the line over an hour faster than she was talking about. GOOD WORK JANINE. 

After Janine had recovered we bussed back to Napier and wandered back to our cabins. We were tired and not hungry, so we veged out to terrible reality TV on Bravo ("Botched - after my breast surgery they put my nipples back on too high") and ate cheese and crackers before crashing very early.

Sunday was EUROVISION and I was up early banging on Janine's door since she had the TV in her room.

IT'S HAPPENING

And much earlier in Sunshine Coast

Toast and Ugg Boots

The songs all seemed much more pared down and less over the top this year, although the Scandinavians didn't disappoint. Ukraine won with a good song and the UK actually entered something that wasn't terrible this year, and got 2nd!

Angela got captions which made it just that much better

We wandered up to Ahuriri, where the marathon started from, for a coffee at the Thirsty Whale before hitting the road. The weather got steadily worse and the drive was tedious but we were home in good time.

Monday morning and I don't feel too bad! Time to get stuck into my day. One day working from home then back into the office for me.

Looks gorgeous there

Happy cats here

PS: here are my half marathon times. OK so I smashed it in March 2021. That's my time to beat, though it's an unofficial 'fun run'.

Round the bays 21 Feb 2021 -- 2:16:02

Round the vines 20 Mar 2021 -- 2:10:09

Hawkes Bay 15 May 2021 -- 2:24:13

Kāpiti 14 Nov 2021 -- 2:18:42

Hawkes Bay 14 May 2022 -- 2:15:20