Today was a catch-up day, doing laundry, tidying up a bit. After my morning walk where I saw a very colorful house, I made myself a cooked breakfast for the first time in a while, and enjoyed sitting in the warm conservatory/dining room at Mary’s house reading while the wind howled outside. I’ve been reading a book of New Zealand novellas. So far I’ve read pieces by Maurice Shadbolt, Ronald Hugh Morrison, Keri Hulme and Janet Frame (I especially liked her novella Snowman, Snowman, which was a snowman’s perspective of a working class neighborhood in London). I remember watching a movie about Janet Frame’s life called An Angel At My Table, I think it may have been one of the first movies that Jane Campion directed.
Later in the day when the sun came out, I took a bath in their outdoor bathtub. It was delightful to lay in the warm water in the clawfoot bathtub and watch the trees above sway in the win. On one of the trips I did with a women’s hiking group, we went around the Banks Peninsula near Christchurch. One of the places we stayed had a couple of outdoor clawfoot bathtubs, though those were a bit more primitive as you had to build a fire underneath them to heat up the water. With Mary’s bathtub all I had to do was connect up the hoses to the hot and cold water and then turn on the taps. Heaven!
I took a different route over to Annemarie‘s place and found more walkways, some that passed gorgeous gardens. We went out to dinner at a local Mediterranean restaurant that has delicious pizza (and tiramisu!). After dinner, Annemarie took me over to a local playground that I recently been updated (it now has a flying fox, apparently this is very common in New Zealand parks now). There were some neat murals done by kids at the local schools. Since it was close to 8 PM there weren’t any kids at the park, but there was a group of adults having a barbecue and a few others under the trees practicing on slack lines.
After dinner we watched an episode of Taskmaster. Oh, that show makes me laugh, the tasks they come up with are just hilarious! My favorite one from this episode was when each comedian had a large box with their picture on it covering their head, and they had to use their hands to feel different objects that represented movie titles and guess the names of the movies. Some of them were extremely skilled at figuring them out, I had a hard time with some of the titles and I could see what the objects were! It feels so good to laugh at silly things like that.
Annemarie has been acting as a mother to me, reminding me that the sun is much stronger here so I need to reapply sunscreen two hours, making sure I’m walking on the left side when we’re in a busy place, it’s very sweet.