On Friday I caught up with Andrew in the morning and then Jo C for lunch at The Lab. Good to see her - it has been ages. They are all well. I hope we get to see them soon - especially as they have travel plans to visit SA. I want to see those pics!
Iced latte at Mojo with Andrew
Smudge and Moxley are touching - sort of
Lunch at The Lab with Jo
After work, Mike got home and we ordered pizza from Hell as Sarah and Ryan came over. We chatted to them and ate our way through a mountain of pizza.
Off to bed and up lazily the next morning. I did get brekkie in bed - ta Mike.
Brekkie in bed
Moxley winking at me under the duvet
Smudge claims her spot
Off to Epuni by midday to get undercoat on all the interior windows and some of the exterior ones too. Where needed. We got hungry so Mike went off to get supplies from Mitre10 and some food. Mmmm.
Iced latte at Epuni
Sanding
A coat on the big window
Back to Sally and Andrew's place afrter we'd finished the undercoat. Takes a while to dry that stuff. Watched a movie with them and got some food delivered. :-) Thirteen Lives - about the Thai football team of young boys stuck in the cave due to heavy monsoonal rains.
Home to bed. And up for a rinse and repeat. We went to Maccas for brekkie. But my iced latte came with sugar. So much sugar. I couldn't drink it. Why doesn't their menu say: Sweet iced latte - and then I'd know to customise it and remove the sugar. Yuck!
Maccas iced latte - 2/10 - why did they add sugar?
Ready for top coat
We got top coat on all the windows. And a second top coat on the sun room windows. Yay! Home to get ready to visit Christine and John in their place in Island Bay.
Mike's Tim Tam slam
Well, hello there!
What a lovely apartment/townhouse they live in! I would totally live there. We had a great meal - however Christine either doesn't remember or didn't know I am vegetarian. I may have had my first chicken meal for 6 years last night. I didn't want to say anything. And as Mike said, that chicken had already been fed and watered and died for that meal. And it was delicious. I am a vegetarian for sustainable reasons, after all. Meat tastes great to me. Although it is certainly no longer anything I really miss.
It was so good to chat to Christine and meet John. She is doing well - as many of my readers will be keen to know (and by readers, I mean my mother mainly!).
We stayed there for ages - but eventually I was starting to get sleepy. We headed home - and I am so keen to see her again soon. I reckon Kara would enjoy her company. Must sort that out.
At home - got ready for bed. Slept well - I can finally sleep on my right hand side for a short while. Yay for getting better. It is nowhere near as sore as it was.
Woke with a scratchy throat and a slightly runny nose. RAT was negative. Let me keep an eye on that.
I read the very sad news this morning that Mike's Aunty Claire has passed away - Sunday morning. She was almost 96. She was always so gracious and welcoming, whenever we met up. All the memories become precious.
It's been a terrible year for Ruapehu, what with everything between no
international ski staff, fewer lifts running, lockdowns and distancing, car
parking woes, and dismal snowfalls. I thought that this would be the first
winter since I was 12 years old that I got zero snow days in. But lucky for
me, there was a work snow weekend that I said yes to. I'm so glad I did.
Friday night saw us off promptly at 4pm and straight into a particularly bad
Pukerau Bay traffic crawl. But strangely once we were past that we sped along
with no holdups whatsoever and made Taihape for dinner, 3/4 of the way there -
that's a first for me. We ate at Le Cafe Telephonique which was very pleasantly surprising (The
Brown Sugar Cafe
sets the Taihape bar pretty high). $20 for a very good chicken burger with
heaps of tender yummy chicken meat crammed into it. We all got interesting
sauces and condiments with our chips too, not just the standard ketchup or
aoli. Will return! Hopefully the new roads coming on stream let us make
Taihape every friday night.
Le Cafe Telephonique
Soon enough we were through Ohakune and into Ratehi. For the last drive I
could see the unique headlights of a WRX behind me and sure enough Ben and I
were driving in convoy.
The house was very strange with an odd layout, weird extra cavities built in,
and an incredibly eclectic set of artwork on every wall. Including a
spooky clown, watching every move in one of the bedrooms.
I was a late ring-in and the 'sleepout' was nowhere to be seen blundering
around in the dark. But I didn't try very hard because truth be told, I like
my sleeping bag and there was a perfectly good piece of carpet in the corner
of the oddly shaped dining room that I made my own. I think my workmates
thought this was quite weird, but just like the porch of a tramping hut, I
slept better there than I do at home.
Saturday dawned to clag, drizzle and low expectations. For the first time in
about five years I actually tried fitting my snow chains, just in case. The
instructions are all in Japanese but there is this handy and hilarious
video tutorial
on youtube. It was easier than it looks - and the three pictures amongst all
the japanese text are actually enough to get them on and off. They're way
easier than regular chains.
But our quick 30min drive to Whakapapa was uneventful and easy. Car park
system worked seamlessly with zero delay and no need for chains. It was gently
snowing when we arrived and we piled out of the car and on to our various
tasks - renting gear, getting lessons, down to Happy Valley or up the gondola.
I'd chosen skis for this weekend; I figured snow would be sparse,
terrain would be limited so I'd be riding T-bars, hopping over rocks, walking
around and over obstacles and negotiating traffic on lower cat tracks. It
wasn't nearly that bad but I think between the T bars, the interminable
traversing and the sparseness of lower mountain off-cat-track trails, I'd made
the right call.
Valley T was open so that's where we headed initially. Initially iwith Carlos
and Ben, later Liam came down. He really hated T-bars on his board! I rode
with him a bit, apart from one '80% success' ride we both did pretty well.
Carlos looking at the not-bad-at-all conditions
Near the end of the day I heard someone call 'Mike!' and there were none other
than Anita and Tim from our Nepal trip. It was great catching up with them and
fun skiing with them too. We did a few runs together from top of Knoll Ridge
T, all the way to the bottom. This seemed to be the run of the mountain with
the conditions as they were.
Anita and Tim
The day was really good, coming from low expectations. There's been just
enough snow to freshen up the whole mountain, and just as it was getting
slushy and wet around 2pm, we got a short snow shower blow through that nicely
crisped everything up. Having said that, I didn't find a single black run that
was open and/or easy to get to. I could have hiked further out west and picked
up some runs out there, and true the Pinnacles with their ice and frozen-in
ruts were accessible from Valley T, but conditions didn't inspire me to
try.
The mountain wasn't too crowded so even wading down Rockgarden and Tennants
Valley wasn't too bad. Though I picked up collateral damage; a bent pole where
I planted straight through the skiff of snow and jammed it between two rocks
(I was wondering what was going to give but eventually the pole did after it
bent itself into the right shape to release!).
Yeah, that was a good day
After a really, really good day it was back to Raetihi to freshen up. We were
hoping for a local dinner burt pickings were slim. The
Raetihi Cossie Club
could have been the go but that was about it, all the other cafes were closing
up or already closed. We decided to keep going back to Ohakune.
Demand was reduced but so was supply; it was not straightforward to find
somewhere open and with space. Eventually we ended up at
The Mountain Rocks
bar, a trusty favourite on the main street. Covid complications meant that the
owner had to do a lot of rearranging to get us seated and still socially
distanced but he did a great job at sorting it. After a few minutes propped at
some bar tables a dining table came free and we were ordering and eating.
Lots of meat. Not bad.
This bar does the tried and true thing of furnishing the walls with art for
sale. It was eclectic and mostly a bit kitsch I thought. Including a painting
of a cow. We talked about that cow a lot. And drank beers. And talked about
the cow. By the end of the night we had all decided that she was beautiful,
and when Michal pointed out that we only needed $15 each to buy her - the deal
was done.
We left with a cow painting. And a 'prenup' for it. (It will live at work, and
the last person still working there gets to keep it when they leave).
Sunday dawned with me, and everyone else, stiff and sore and tired. Some
of us were hitting the slopes again, others checking out the sights and making
a leisurely trip home. We cleaned up and packed up and headed off.
It was a slower start to the day and I shed all the layers I could! Yesterday
I'd been far too hot, the trouble is that my ski jacket is also my handbag
with all my essentials in all its pockets.
Not as good a day today. The light was flat to whited out, and the snow was
initially icy and seemed to go straight to slushy without that nice spring
corn conditions in the middle. I rode Knoll Ridge to bottom 2-3 times.
On one run I came across a knot of people in an inconvenient spot on a fast
bit of the cat track... and discovered that they were treating an unconscious
snowboarder! He was found unconscious and by himself, he must have caught an
edge on the fastest bit where you need to hold speed to get up the uphill just
past it. By this time he was awake and an ED nurse was sorting him out. So no
chance to practice my first aid skills (thank goodness). I headed off and
found a snow patroller to get help send down to him.
By 2:30pm I called it. I was back to Valley T in whiteout, ice and slush
and it just wasn't fun anymore. On my way down for the last time I
managed to pre-release hitting the mogully sloppy mashed spud snow on Tennants
Valley. Not surprising, they're very old skis so I've got the DINs set quite
loose since who knows how the springs are now. Still, an embarrassing
place to fall over because you suddenly discover you're on a monoski.
That was our weekend! It was a tough drive home I found, my windscreen was
filthy and my ineffectual washer spray and old wipers couldn't clean it so lots
of glare to contend with when it got dark. First job the next day was to scrub
down the windscreen inside and out and try to fix the washer jets.
Well, that was a great weekend. With the tribulations of 2020 that was my only
two snow days for the whole season - and my low expectations were vastly
exceeded. Another bonus was, between the days I did and the buddy pass
discounts I gave away, I paid off my seasons pass in that weekend alone which
made me pretty happy and convinced me to buy a 2021 pass after all. Roll on
2021 with no pandemic, some foreign staff to run the place, more snow and a
nice Ohakune lodge to stay in.
On 29th July, Shona and Sharon's birthday, I had planned to chat with Shona on Yahoo Chat. Unfortunately, although I now know she was logged on when I got there, it wasn't for another half an hour that I found her. I said one sentence (along the lines of 'Have you been logged on long?') and she replied (roughly 'What do you mean?') and disappeared. I later found out she had an appointment elsewhere. But I was cross I hadn't figured out how to find her sooner. Still, we will find a better way to chat and catch up again. I then tried ringing them both to wish them a happy birthday, but had no luck in that department either.
So, Mike and I pottered around until early afternoon, then headed up the A40 to Balsall Common near Birmingham. I had seen an article in NZ News UK that said this art gallery was displaying pictures from a Dunedin artist until the end of July. As this was our only free weekend, I snapped it up and said we had to visit the exhibition. Well, it had finished by the time we got there, but the pictures were still in the gallery (just not all on display anymore). So the owner fished them out and placed them around.
We had a good old chat with the owner. He had a friend bring back a picture from Dunedin by Lindsay Crooks and had decied to see if Lindsay Crooks would have an exhibition in his gallery. He must have agreed, as the pictures we were seeing was the result of that exchange. The exhibition was all on one theme - beach culture. And we ended up buying a pastel of Lawyers Head, and an oil of the hot salt water pool. In a years time, we have to get the oil varnished (this process probably has a technical term, but I don't know it. When the art gallery owner was saying we needed to do this, he said we could varnish it ourselves. I was pleased to see Mike cringe at the thought too. I had visions of the Mr Bean movie - where, if you've seen it, Mr Bean accidentally wipes the face off Whistler's Mother (a famous American painting) and he paints it back on with a paint-by-numbers set of something. There was no way I was going to wipe anything over any artwork.
So, we have made a note in our diaries to take the painting back at the end of July 2001 to get done professionally. And we will also get a new frame at the same time. The current frame was a freebie for the exhibition. Mike has seen a blue-ish frame he wants to get for it as the most striking thing about the picture is the brilliant blues of a Dunedin summer day (just as I remember the bright days down at the hot salt water pool when I was younger. I especially remember the blue sea in the old pool, over the wall. The kelp would move when the waves broke over the old crumbling concrete walls, the wavetops brilliant white against the deep blue pool. I remember seeing little octopuses in there once. This is where I learned how to snorkel - Moana pool didn't allow snorkelling, but the Salt Water Pool did. Much better place to learn than St Clair surf beach! Snorkelling and surf did not go well together.). The pastel of Lawyers Head is very nice, and hanging in our hallway now. It has brilliant greens in it and a different feel.
