Labour Weekend

Adrian and I had rather a good weekend.

On Saturday we were very productive. In the morning I cleaned the bathrooms. You might think this is a boring thing to talk about... but I don't clean the bathrooms as much as I should. Like... once every six months. I know, I know, it's gross. But I just don't like cleaning and evidently neither does Adrian. The bath just got embarrassingly grimey though so I really had to do something about it. Eww I'm quite gross now. BUT! Now it's nice and shiney and clean. I will endeavour to do it more often and then it won't get so bad. After that I caught up on my crappy American TV.

Adrian was working on the last bits of his thesis meanwhile. I helped with references and proof-reading which was a couple of hours that Adrian then didn't have to do. And now it's 99% finished! Adrian has done all he can, and now we are waiting on the last couple of chapters to come back, which should have few or no changes to incorporate. Then will come submission, marking, making recommended changes (or not?), publication. Done!

On Saturday Adrian installed his Civilisation V game on his computer, which was waiting until the thesis was done. He was quite excited about that, had been waiting for a while!

So Sunday was Adrian's first day of freedom, you know when you don't feel guilty because you should be doing work. It was awesome! We went to Te Papa in the morning to see the Lens on the World exhibition. It was absolutely amazing and I am always pleasantly fascinated when I go to photo exhibitions like that.

In the afternoon I went to see my elderly friend Charles and took him for a ride in our car. I took him to Eastbourne then over the new Dowse interchange up to Kelson. He hadn't seen these places for freakin ages, like he hadn't seen Kelson since it actually became a suburb, back in the 60s or 70s. It was neat taking him for a drive, and the weather was kind to us. He got to meet Adrian which he was pretty chuffed about, and also met Bean whom Charles remarked was a 'gorgeous creature' while giving him pats.

On Sunday evening I played indoor soccer again. Our opponent didn't turn up so we won by default but we had a 'fun' game while we were there instead. Turns out our 'fun' game opponent team was 2 grades ahead of us! But it was pretty good actually - they only beat us 10-6 so I was impressed by our team's work. 

At some point we also went for breakfast at Celcius on Hutt Rd [for those of you who've noticed - yes, that is not the correct spelling of Celsius as in degrees Celsius]. It was absolutely amazing. Yum yum yum. Excellent coffee, and my muesli was so good that I haven't even asked Adrian what his poached eggs were like.

Also I don't know if you remember that we have a pet orb web spider, Doris, who lives on the bricks outside our front door. I have become so accustomed to her that I have to stop myself when I feel the need to give her a tickle, remembering that she is a spider and will hurt me. At some point on the weekend (I don't know when) we came home in the evening and Doris was spinning her web. It was AMAZING to watch. Kind of like watching whales breaching in the wild... by that I mean you are absolutely spellbound at the time but then describe it to anyone else and it just sounds rather dull. Anyway you see how they do it on the nature programmes (or more recently in our case, on Invisible Worlds with Richard Hammond, who explained that the thread comes out of the spider and then gets 'spun' by its spinnerettes to make it stronger), but watching it in real life felt very special. She has a web like in this repeated hyperlinked picture, and one section of it had been broken so she was redoing it. We were mesmerised.

Yesterday we enjoyed an indulgent double-income-nothing-else-to-do day... clothes shopping. Also we went to a gorgeous dinner at our friends Anna and Luke's house: roast chicken with bacon and butter gravy (yum!), roast potatoes and kumara and salads. Then chocolate dessert cake. Delightful.