Farewell walk for the Morris tour

The Morris dancer, and with them, most of the walking party are starting on a tour today. So we used yesterdays nice weather to do a walk at Makara and a dinner at the Jewells.

The first part of the walk leads up to the gun emplacements on Makara Hill, with a stunning view over to the South island.



The second part leads along the beach, back to Makara.


Everyone from the walk, stayed on for dinner at the Jewells, due to the fact that everyone brought some sort of food along, we had plenty. Ian, a Morris dancer from Aussie, brought dragon snaps, basically dried fruit and nuts, soaked in Brandy, set on fire. Everybody tries now to get the burning pieces out of the fire, blow them out and eat them. The Brandy burns at a low temperature, therefore it's not too hot, if you don't by accident grab a nut, that "really" is on fire.

On all my photos it's Jen who tries to grab something out of the fire. Whether that's due to her fascination for fire or Brandy soaked things, I dunno!

A rainy Boxing Day

The Jewells at the Firth's brunch.
Today, on Boxing day, the Morris dancer met at the cable car for their annual dance. Unfortunately it was pretty overcast, so most watching people left after it started raining.

Overcast Wellington.


Morris dancer at the top of the cablecar.
After it started raining, the dancer moved indoors.

It really looked promising in the morning but gradually got worse.

Impressions from the rainy garden.

A walk in the gardens and a game in Newtown Park

This Sunday, due to the fact, that the majority of people are doing the same walk, we did last week, we decided to go for a stroll in the gardens.


Andy, having his head in the "Viewing and Listening Device", and Dyk and Sam watching a Tui.

The Game in Newtown Park, Wellington United vs. Waitakere, not a particularly good game for Wellington, they lost 5:1. Very different atmo to the phoenix games, but very enjoyable.


Newtown Park

Neon

It's raining today, so my plans, to get a haircut, literally drowned.
I felt a bit arty today, so I decided to give a couple of Neon pictures a try.
Basically it's me running around with a torch in front of my camera, with a really long shutter time (even though I couldn't set the time, so it's just a fireworks setting, that has a long shutter time...), and that's what it looks like:


First try in the lounge, quite Dark, I think the second try looks better...


Second try, looks like something floating around the hallway, unfortunately I'm not fast enough to go into a room and out again...

Summer is here

It's really getting summer now, temperatures are rising and the activities are more like you'd expect from summer, even tough fake snow and Christmas-fairy-lights give a different impression...
I've been working on my uni application the last weeks, so I didn't post a lot. I'm still working on it, but I felt that I was neglecting my blog a bit, after I got a mail saying that 115 people visited so far. At least 15 of those visitors didn't see any changes since their last visit...
So here are a couple of photos, from the last weeks.

The Eastbourne walk.


As Dyk covered in his blog, we did a fairly exhausting, but well visited walk over to Eastbourne, and visited the Firth kittens afterwards. I'm not a big kitten fan, but Dyk and the girls were quite attracted by the fury things.

These two shots are from the Morris dinner at a Indian restaurant, really good food, even though some were complaining that it's quite spicy.


The Oriental Bay Duathlon.
On Saturday morning, Noreen did her Duathlon, 3.5km run and 400m swim (as far as I remember). She did really well. I didn't take any photos, but made a movie, here a couple of stills from the movie.

Jen explaining the coverage of the event, with cameras all over the track, and the start of the race.

Noreen and Jane in action.


Noreen in the pool and only one of 2 portions of chips, plus a few coffees and cakes afterwards.



This is the movie, it's about 23Mb big, and exact 10min long (a web version, the original is slightly longer), I recommend it only for highspeed connection, but you can always try!
The Smith creek walk.



A walk, which only 4 of us did. Up and down a ridge to Smiths Creek, for a sit down at the river and a couple of Dyk's really awesome sandwiches. After that pretty straight uphill back on the other side of the ridge. We did underestimated the walk a bit and were all a bit shattered afterwards, but it was quite rewarding and interesting.

Apart from that I did quite a bit of working for RA the last weeks, but they've got a Christmas break now, so I'm finished with playing waiter at least until January. I really enjoyed working there, even looked alright in their uniform...