27 December 2008

Meanderings

We've had beautiful weather for the last few days, apart from this morning which was a bit drizzly - we'd planned to go to the Saturday Riverbank Market today but when it started to rain a bit more persistently we abandoned that idea and took small daughter to Te Papa instead. We wanted to see the Colossal Squid which they dredged up from the sea depths and preserved over the past year. It was about 4m long, smaller than I expected: when I hear the word "colossal" I think about the size of a blue whale, but as hubby pointed out, blue whales eat squid so it wouldn't be quite that size! It has shrunk by about 30% during the preserving process, apparently, but it is still very impressive, and compared to a regular squid, it really is colossal!

We also had a wander along Chaffers Park and Marina, which has been developed a bit since I was last there (and now has a Movenpick Icecream place, which was good!).

Christmas Eve and Day were both good and bad. We'd planned to go to Wellington Cathedral for Christmas Eve, but had told small daughter that she had to go to sleep and that we would wake her in time for church. By 9.30pm she was still not asleep... and we had to get her up at about 9.45pm if we were going to go, so we abandoned that idea altogether. Christmas Day was a bit scratchy as she had woken several times in the night (whether from excitement or from the cold she had, I don't know) and hubby and I were both tired. However, she seemed to like her presents and after a great lunch she had a big sleep (and so did we!) so everyone was much fresher in the afternoon!

Lunch was a traditional Kiwi one: lettuce salad, cold ham, prawns fried in garlic, and brandy baskets with raspberries and strawberries to finish. I made my "famous-in-NZ" homemade icecream as part of the dessert - I only make it about 2-3 times a year, once at Christmas and for birthdays. This time it was almost a disaster: our hand eggbeater died on me partway through beating the eggwhites and this thing requires mega-beating - we managed to cobble together enough beating to make it but it was slightly less fluffy than usual (but still tasted great). We braved the Boxing Day sales to go and acquire a proper electric hand beater - our big kitchen whizz doesn't deal well with eggwhites and egg yolks as there's only two of each in the icecream and there isn't enough liquid to engage the whizz blades. I might make another batch just to play with my new beater!

We went to the outlaws for tea on Christmas night, and yesterday pottered around in the morning and visited my parents in the afternoon on the way to the park to play with small daughter's new kite.

Hubby and I have given each other "Blokus" for Christmas - a fiendishly addictive board game that is really strategic and requires a lot of thinking - it's brilliant for two, three, or four players so we'll be inviting a few friends over to play soon! We got introduced to it at the snow weekend for Playcentre - one of the other couples brought it and we loved it, so we waited until it came on sale.

Anyway, that's about it for now.

Pachyderm

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