Today is your lucky day

I have had a wonderful run of good luck lately – almost unbelievably so. With each exciting turn of events, I feel both delighted and grateful. Life is, indeed, good.

Imagine my surprise one morning this week when I received a txt message announcing the best news of all. It arrived at 6:07 am and was all in capital letters, so I knew it must be important. Rather than paraphrase my good news, I thought I’d share it all word for word:

CONGRATE:YOUR MOBILE NUMBER HAS WON 500,000 GBP CRICKET MOBILE AWARD 2012. TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE SEND UR EMAIL &  NAME TO JOHN BY EMAIL: iccmobawas@hotmail.com

Gosh, what a clever little mobile phone I have! I had no idea my phone even played cricket, let alone was good enough to receive such a grandiose award. What do they say about dark horses (or old red mobile phones)?

Have you been as fortunate as me recently? Or are you still sitting ready and waiting with your bank details for when your Nigerian scam email arrives?

Cat burglar

When our cat was still a kitten, she had a cute but unfortunate aversion to her cat flap. As we tried to teach her that this hole in the wall was her ticket to come and go as she pleased, she would hold on the wall with all four paws and resist her head being poked against a flap that her body was supposed to crawl through. She also needed to get used to wearing a collar, as a magnet was required to activate the flap - something she was also less than impressed about and spent hours frantically trying to chew through. After meowing miserably outside the door for several days, we decided to make it easier for her and leave the flap unlocked so she didn't have to worry about lining up the magnet. Yes, I know; we are pushovers.

As she grew, we noticed just how much she was eating each day. To be precise, she seemed to be eating copious amounts at night, yet loudly proclaimed her hunger each morning. Given that she usually spends most of the night asleep on one of us, we had our suspicions that we were instead feeding a neighbourhood cat. This was confirmed one evening while watching television with our pussy cat spread out on my partner's lap, yet we  clearly heard her food being eaten loudly in the kitchen. A quick chase and the offending feline shot out the cat flap, but stopped to rudely peer through the back door window at us in protest at having their snack interrupted. So, unfortunately it was back to wearing a collar for our little princess. We also monitored just how much food we were giving her each day and left her with just a handful of pellets at night. Thankfully, she eventually conquered the magnetic cat flap and stopped chewing on her collar, meaning that her food was her own again. Until recently.

Last night, I had a case of the midnight munchies. After trying to distract myself for an hour or so, I finally succumbed at around 12:30 am. I quietly crept out of bed and into the lounge to discover our cat fast asleep on the couch ... and then I heard the cat flap unmistakably slamming shut! A small quantity of cat pellets remaining confirms that we now have a more sophisticated cat burglar who can open a magnetic flap either by stealth or using some other mysterious feline superpower. I am equally shocked, annnoyed and impressed!

Apart from a very expensive cat flap activated by our cat's microchip, what other strategies are there to prevent the cat burglar from striking again? We're reluctant to remove all her food each night (as we are sure she will loudly inform us of her hunger in the wee small hours), but neither are we happy to be hosting regular midnight feasts.

High tea at Soi

Apparently high tea has its origins as a 19th century working class meal where lunch leftovers were used up as a mid-afternoon snack. This type of afternoon tea is a far cry from what has become synonymous with high tea as we know it today, which immediately conjures up delightfully dainty and civilised images.

The beautiful setting of Soi Restaurant by Evans Bay wharf is offering high tea on weekends. A friend and I thought we'd be ladies today and have the 'champagne' high tea, which was served with a glass of Grandin Méthode Traditionelle Brut. With neither of us being tea drinkers, we forewent the selection of 11 teas on offer in favour of coffee (which cost extra). Our table was right next to the floor to ceiling windows and we spent a leisurely couple of hours watching watched the boats go by while enjoying about a dozen tiny treats. The food was average but the view is spectacular!

High tea at Soi

The savoury layer included salmon and chicken club sandwiches, mushroom and salmon mini-savouries, and plain and date scones with cream and berry compote. Moving on to the top, sweet layer, we enjoyed chocolate and strawberry lamingtons with cream, a crème brûlée tart, mini chocolate pavlova and gluten free chocolate cake. Thankfully we also got to pack up over leftovers in doggy boxes to enjoy at home later.

High tea at Soi is a lovely way to spend a winter's afternoon with friends.

Navigation - Joy Cowley

Great news: I've found where my reading mojo has been hiding! After a long period of endless distractions and limited concentration, I've rediscovered my love of reading and am thrilled to have actually finished a book!

Of course, I shouldn't be surprised that my first successful reattempt at reading came from the pen of New Zealand's most prolific children's author, Joy Cowley. Navigation (2010) is a delightful collection of memoirs from Joy's life and we get to know this amazing woman through what she does best: story telling. Warm, welcoming and humorous, we learn about Joy's childhood growing up in Foxton (when she herself struggled to learn to read), her journey through motherhood and the colourful life experiences that led to some of New Zealand's finest children's books and generations of readers. She shares with us anecdotes about how Greedy Cat came to exist as well as other characters such as Mrs Wishy-Washy. It's no wonder that children all over the world have fallen in love with reading and story telling because of Joy's writing.

Joy also has plenty to offer adult readers and her reflections on life are often quite philosophical. I particularly loved this passage about growth:

"Growth means movement, rupture, division, leaving something behind to come to a new place of development, and that is usually accompanied by some kind of discomfort. Whatever our close view of such transitions, when we look back at them from a distance, we see that they were exactly right." p 78

Now that my mojo has returned, I look forward to gleefully attacking the pile of books that has accumulated by my bed this year and, perhaps even more excitedly, becoming attached to my new toy.

What are you reading at the moment?

Preparing for The Big One

Arriving home from dinner last night, I looked up and saw a beautiful full moon in a partially cloudy sky. The air was cool and calm. "Earthquake weather," I thought to myself. The phenomenon known as earthquake weather is nothing more than folklore; earthquakes occur in all kinds of weather, as Cantabrians experiencing quakes almost continuously for the past two years will be able to tell you. It's just that a windless night is particularly noticeable in Wellington.

We did have an earthquake last night - a big one. A magnitude 7.0 quake is huge, even though this one was 230 km deep and 170 km north of Wellington. It certainly was the biggest earthquake I have ever felt and went for a long time, and that's saying something considering that I grew up in Wellington waiting for The Big One that is apparently more than 100 years overdue. I went to school on a faultline which means that my first instinct at a rattle is to dive under a desk or head for the nearest door frame. Memories of earthquakes during school exams 20 years ago instantly came flooding back and my Facebook timeline was quickly filled with similar stories from school mates. Not to mention Twitter going for it!

Today is a good time to reflect on how things went last night. Geonet was struggling to keep up as everyone raced to the check out the drums and recent quakes sections. Our internet was temporarily down but all other services kept working. Still, I was tempted to go to bed dressed and ready for action in case there were further quakes and did a mental check of our survival kit. We are certainly better prepared than we were during our powerless evening last August. We have bought a first aid kid in a backpack and have smaller first aid kits in our cars along with a number of shake torches scattered within reach. We have plenty of 3 litre water bottles filled and stored along with our sleeping bags and medical supplies. We need to do a better job of assembling batteries to charge phones and power radios etc. We'll hopefully be fine so long as we can stay at home after a major earthquake but still need to sort out getaway kits. There was a little aftershock that we also felt, but otherwise everything was ok. Still, you never know if this was the precusor to something bigger or the actual event itself.

Have you got your emergency and getaway kits sorted? How prepared would you be in a disaster?

Gum paste decorations

Last night, a friend and I attended Ice Nice Baby with the lovely Tanya Hugyecz from Decorada. This was a practical workshop where we got to try out making gum paste decorations amid the beautiful setting of the Small Acorns store. A glass of wine on arrival and a goodie bag at the end, along with decorated cupcakes to take home and eat, made it a very civilised and creative way to spend a winter's evening.

I've done a little bit of cupcake decorating before, attended a few workshops and accumulated far too many decorating tools in proportion to those that I have used more than once. The reality of time pressures has seen me become quite good at piping chocolate filigree decorations, as they are quick and easy to add to the top of a decorated cupcake at the last minute. Despite the best of intentions to have sessions where I sit and make a collection of gum paste decorations in advance for later use, they rarely happen. Last night was a great opportunity to practise some of the skills I had previously learned while inspiring me to sort through my arsenal of equipment and give decoration making another go. I'm determined to perfect the art of making gum paste roses!

Tanya's iced decorations

Thank you to Amanda and the team at Small Acorns for hosting a delightful evening. We're already looking forward to the next one!